The best of Mike Leigh: Naked

1. Naked
2. Life is Sweet
3. Meantime
5. Topsy Turvy
6. Secrets and Lies
7. Happy Go Lucky
8. Vera Drake
9. High Hopes
It's weird that I should go for Naked when Leigh is so good at ensembles. Maybe that's what makes David Thewliss's performance feel so utterly forsaken. Meantime is an underated gem with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as wanabee skinheads. Secrets and Lies has slipped in my estimation, like a lot of masterpieces, but Topsy Turvy remains a genuine revelation. Leigh should do more period dramas. He's just the dose of vinegar the genre needs.

The best of Martin Scorsese: Mean Streets

1. Mean Streets
2. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
3. Goodfellas
4. Taxi Driver
5. Kundun
6. Raging Bull
7. After Hours
8. The Age of Innocence
His career almost looks varied from here! Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore feels like something from alternative universe, one where he didn't so married to the mob; I wish he'd make more pictures about women. The rest speak for themselves. I haven't dared go back to Kundun in case it isn't the movie I remember it to be. It doesn't matter — it was perfect when I saw it. The only one I had a hard time placing was Taxi Driver. It belongs on its own — a list of one.

The best of Steven Spielberg: Jaws

1. Jaws
2. Close Encounters
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
4. E.T.
5. Schindler's List
6. Saving Private Ryan
7. Catch Me if You Can
8. Empire of the Sun
9. Minority Report
10. Amistad
My metric here is lawlessness. It doesn't sound revolutionary but see what it does to Schindler's List for the clunkiness of its final reel, or Saving Private Ryan for its saggy belly. I wish I could have found a higher place for Catch Me if You Can — as close to perfection as Spielberg has come recently — but it faced, uh, a little competition. Just look at that opening quartet. Does any living director even come close?

The best of the Coen brothers: Fargo

There's nothing like the internet for coming across something you violently disagree with. I just stumbled on the following apostasy at Ropeofsilicon. It's a list of Coen brothers movies, in order of preference:—
1. O Brother Where Art Thou
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Raising Arizona
4. The Man Who Wasn't There
5. Millers Crossing
6. No Country for Old Men
7. Hudsucker Proxy
8. Barton Fink
9. Fargo
10. Blood Simple
Have they not eyes, ears? I sense a distinct case of diharditis. The list is big on what you might call signature works: the ones so covered with cute Coen Brothers add-on features you don't notice there's nothing at their centre: Brother, Lebowski, Fink. Please. The Coens run a plot as tight as a snare drum — their woozier jam sessions need no encouraging. The Who Wasn't There should be nowhere within 100 yards of this list let alone at number 4. Here's how it should run.
1. Fargo
2. Miller's Crossing
3. Raising Arizona
4. Blood Simple
5. No Country for Old Men
6. O Brother Where Art Thou?
7. Barton Fink
8. The Big Lebowksi
9. The Hudsucker Proxy
10. There is no number 10.

When did war become a national hobby?

'Last week, Capehart's Editorial Page published an attack-Iran Op-Ed from two former Senators (one from each party) who have spent the last year advocating a detailed plan for blockading, attacking, bombing and invading that country' — Glenn Greenwald

"Tragically, a young Afghan girl was killed in late June by a box of information leaflets falling from a British military plane over Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, in a case that the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense said it was investigating earlier this morning (Reuters, AP). The box failed to break open mid-air as planned and struck the girl, who later died of her injuries (BBC). Michael Evans details the case and writes that this is believed to be the first time a civilian has been killed by a box of information leaflets" Times of London

As the drumbeat starts up again for war against Iran, the thing I find missing from the debate is any sense that war is a festering sump hole of irreversible, bloody, Godless ghastliness for everybody concerned. Somehow, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a situation where it's considered normal to be involved in at least one war at any one time, maybe even two, and — why not? — three. That's a strange position, to say the least, not least because America does not feel like a country at war right now. It feels like a country happily minding its own business. War has become a kind of dimly-registered national hobby, like a sport nobody quite wants to watch.

Should Roman Polanski go to jail?

A reader has asked me what I think of the Roman Polanski case. To be honest, I was hoping nobody would ask, if only because I am in two minds, which is never pleasant. Also, I'm not a judge or legal expert and find it a lot easier to say whether I prefer Chinatown to Rosemary's Baby (I do) or which made me laugh harder Bitter Moon or Frantic (Bitter Moon, by a long mile). But the man himself. Yikes. On the one hand, I am extremely repulsed by the people rallying around Polanski at the moment, celebs and filmmakers of various stripes, all waving the 'he's a genius' defence, which strikes me as wholly obnoxious. It's almost worth putting him in prison just to put paid to such nonsense. He's a film director. That's his job. He should no more be allowed to get away with molesting minors than a plumber or a real estate salesman should. What happens if the quality of his films dips? Do we throw him in the slammer then? Or how about a sentence of five years, say, for the dancing scene in Bitter Moon, and then let him out again?

On the other hand, judgement is never pretty. Last night a prosecutor on the Chris Matthews Show seemed to be gunning for him as political sport. There was zero allowance made for the peculiarities of his case, which is not so excuse him because of his fame, but to point out that because of the distorting lense of his celebrity on a judge's decision-making, he has already fled a country he once called his home. The shape of his life has been permanently altered. The idea that he might be uprooted a second time, this time from his wife and two children, and imprisoned in America, for a crime committed 30 years ago, for which he has been forgiven, and which he has never repeated, seems excessive — not wrong, but not wholly just either.

Having read around the blogs a bit, I like David Thomson's comment best: "This is a case that the parents of children should decide." There are more innocents in this story now. If a bank-robber broke down in court and pleaded, "please don't separate me from my family," the judge might be tempted to reply, "Well you should have thought of that before." In this case, that reply is not possible.

One of my favorite things

I don't know why but I've been thinking a lot about Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder a lot recently. I have a weakness for melancholy sweet-savage horror movies about men who dream they are part of the human race only to one day wake up. The Sixth Sense hit exactly the same sweet spot but it is Lyne's movie that has stayed with me, from Tim Robbin's gentle, baffled performance to the Francis Bacon frights which flash up out of nowhere to Elizabeth Pena's terrific "fuck you" moment to Danny Aiello's angelic chiropracter. I can't figure out how it manages to be both so heartbreaking and so horrific, but suspect the two play off and sharpen one another: the horrific stuff loosening you up for the longing, the transcendence all the greater for being mired in such horror. Its quite a movie which moves its audience towards such nape-of-the-neck surrender.