20. Shaun Of The Dead-(2004). Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's first big screen team up after their classic British television comedy, Spaced. This is their homage to Zombie movies. I love Edgar's Wright's visual style and his and Simon Pegg's writing is just flat out hilarious. It's the story of a shiftless guy who really has no motivation to make anything of himself and just walks through life being content in his rut (in essence a "zombie" himself). His girlfriend breaks up with him after tiring of his lack of doing anything with his life. He goes out drinking with his best friend, Ed (played by Nick Frost, also from Spaced, and every other Wright/Pegg collaboration since) trying to get over his depression. Before he goes to bed/passes out, he decides to really start changing his life around and win back his girlfriend. Unfortunately the next morning when he wakes up, the world has been taken over by zombies. However, even after a walk to the grocery store, oblivious to all the carnage that is all around him, he doesn't notice until Ed notices a girl in the garden, that they initially believe is just drunk. Quickly they find out, she is, in fact, NOT so drunk as much as she is dead. As it ends up turning out, the zombie apocalypse ends up being the very thing that gives his life purpose. Very, very funny movie, one of my all-time favorites. All three of the movies that Edgar Wright, Pegg and Frost have been hilarious, and if you can catch Spaced, it's great too, but this is my favorite collaboration..
19. WALL-E (2008)- Pixar's movies are all amazingly well written movies filled with awe-inspiring animation. WALL-E is probably my favorite out of all the ones released in this 12 year span, although Ratatouille is a VERY close second. The fact that a good portion of WALL-E has no dialogue, is a testament of how well of storytellers the folks at Pixar actually are. The movie is a love story between two robots. One is the last functioning robot given the task of cleaning up Earth after years of human abuse of it have forced them off of the planet to live in a Space Station. And another robot named EVE who is dropped off on Earth looking for signs of life. She comes across WALL-E and they end up falling in love..
WALL-E was part of a groups of robots sent to clean up the Earth so humans could finally return home. But the planet was so bad that the government shut down the program and decommissioned all the robots, aside from WALL-E, who every time he has a mechanical issue, he just fixes himself from parts from all the other decommissioned robots and keeps just doing his job. He has a pretty happy life living off the little scraps of trash that he's kept and taken to where he stays at night and powers down . Using an Ipod and Magnifier to watch Hello Dolly as if it's a television. It's fun catching all the little trinkets that Pixar have put in the background of WALL-E's "home". I'm a sucker for a love story (don't tell anyone) and I have to admit, robots or no, I got choked up in parts of this. And don't even get me started at the beginning of their movie UP. Amazing special effects/animation. Pixar is just a brilliant studio filled with amazing talent, and even as a 43 year old man with no children, I will pretty much see anything they do and don't feel ashamed one bit.
18. Safe House-(2012) A fast paced action movie starring Denzel Washington.
Denzel plays a former CIA agent turned criminal, who after a turn of events in South Africa has to turn himself into the American Consulate to escape people trying to kill him for receiving sensitive files from an MI-6 operative. He is transported to a Safe House populated solely by a newly promoted CIA agent (Ryan Reynolds), dying to do ANYTHING to escape the boredom that this uneventful location presents day after day. His wish to have something exciting to do will pretty much start from about the moment he meets Denzel. Once a group attacks the safe house to kill Denzel the movie does not let up. Denzel and Reynolds have a great chemistry together and this movie was very good at not letting up with the action until the very end. This was a tough choice for me between this and Deja Vu, another Denzel movie. That movie also had a time travel element that I am almost always a sucker for. I ended up picking this one in the end, I think mainly because the action is pretty much a constant, but it's a hard choice. My suggestion is to watch them both as a double feature. =)
17. Gran Torino-(2008) Clint Eastwood masterpiece about a Walt Kowalski, a racist, Korean war veteran, who's wife has recently passed away. He spends most days drinking beer on his porch lamenting how his neighborhood, formerly filled with blue collar, middle-class white people, is now populated by a poor Asian community and now filled with gangs. He feels no connection to his family and feels as if they are just waiting for him to die to get his possessions. He also has lung cancer and is seen coughing up blood and tells no one. His next door neighbors are a Hmong family who have a son who coerced into attempting to steal Walt's prize possession, his Gran Torino. Walt catches him, and the boy's family, as a penance, talk Walt into making him work off the debt he owes him for shaming his family. Walt originally objects profusely and verbally mistreats him (along with everyone else in the movie, pretty much) but eventually becomes friends with him and the whole family by the end. He becomes very protective of the kid and his sister against the street gang that perpetrates some horrific violence against the family.
This is an excellent movie. Clint Eastwood has always been one of my favorite actors growing up, and he has turned out to be a hell of a director over the years, just getting better and better. I cannot believe the Academy Awards completely snubbed this film when it was out.
16. Stranger Than Fiction-(2006) Starring Will Ferrell, Maggie Glyllenhaal, and Emma Thompson is a part comedy, part drama and part fantasy. Ferrell stars at Harold Crick-a by the book(no pun intended) auditor for the IRS who has a daily routine that he never breaks. Suddenly he wakes one day and hears a female voice (Emma Thompson) narrating his life and events in his head. That day, on his way home, Harold's watch stops working and he resets it using the time given by a bystander; then the narrator says, "little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death". Panicked, he tries to find out if he's going crazy, a psychiatrist tells him it could be schizophrenia, but also says if someone actually IS narrating, maybe he should go see a literary expert. The literary professor (played by Dustin Hoffman) tells him, if he IS, in fact, in a story, that he needs to find out if it's a "tragedy" or a "comedy"
Harold meets Glyllenhaal's character, Ana Pascal, through his job, as he is supposed to audit her small business. He insults her inadvertently and is kicked out of her shop. However, they do eventually begin to fall for each other. Meanwhile, Harold hears the narrator's voice in an old interview playing on the TV in the literary professor's office. The professor tells Harold, the narrator is actually Karen Eiffel (Thompson) who apparently only writes stories where the main character dies a tragic death. I won't spoil the rest of the movie, but it's a very creative, sad story, very smart.
I really liked the chemistry between Ferrell and Glyllenhaal. Ferrell is not everyone's cup of tea, I realize that, but I really thought he did a great job playing a dramatic role and not being as "abrasive" as his detractors always fault him for. I highly recommend this for even non-fans of Will Ferrell.
There you go, the next five. Tune in tomorrow for #15-11!
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