15. Taken-(2008)- Action thriller starring Liam Neeson as a retired CIA operative whose daughter is kidnapped by Albanian sex traffickers while on vacation with her friend in Paris. Neeson, hears his daughter being kidnapped while on the phone with her. He immediately tells her to hide under the bed, and as soon as she's capture to leave the phone on and shout out every detail she can about the kidnappers. In a great scene,the kidnapper finds the phone on the floor and hears Liam Neeson on the other end telling him if he lets her go, he will not follow him. If not, he will hunt him down and kill him. The kidnapper tells him, "Good luck" and hangs up. Needless to say for the rest of the movie, you see Liam Neeson kick all forms of ass trying to save his daughter. I've always liked Liam Neeson, ever since I'd seen him as Patrick's Swayze's hillbilly(?!?!?!) cousin in 1989's Next of Kin, and as the title character in Sam Raimi's, Darkman. He does a great job here as a frantic father desperately trying to find his daughter before she's taken out of the country by some slimeball and never seen again. I will tell you two bits of advice, although the theatrical version was pretty violent for PG-13, search out the unrated version; it changes one major scene especially, and I think it's the superior version. Secondly, they made a sequel to this in 2012, avoid it at all costs, it is bad, bad, bad inferior piece of crap.
14. Watchmen-(2009) Based on the 1987 comic by perennially annoyed comicbook icon, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen was a comic that I was a huge fan of growing up and I still pull out my old copy and read it every few years. The story is about "forcibly retired" superheroes that takes place in an alternate universe in the year 1985, where Nixon is still president after the United States win the Vietnam War. The superheroes have been ordered decommissioned in 1977. One former hero, The Comedian, who still works for the government, is murdered at the beginning of the movie. Another hero, Rorschach, who is still operating on his own as a vigilante after the superheroes have been banned, initially thinks the Watchmen, the former superhero group that The Comedian and Rorschach were members of, are being targeted for termination. So he tries to enlist the help of former members of the Watchmen to find out who murdered The Comedian. They end up finding a more diabolical plot is at hand.
The story is very complicated and clever one. Director Zack Snyder (300, Man of Steel) does a great job of faithfully recreating the comic, aside from the ending which really pissed off a lot of fans of the comic. I didn't find it that bad at all and I really enjoyed a lot of the scenes in the rest of the movie faithfully recreated visually from the comics. Jackie Earle Haley was great as Rorschach also.
There are several versions of this, I believe the Watchmen Ultimate Cut is the one you should seek out.
13. Memento-(2000) Christopher Nolan's film about a man with a condition where he can't create any new memories after an attack where his wife was killed and he was hit in the head. Using notes, polaroid pictures and tattoos he keeps information to help solve the mystery of his wife's murder. The movie shows the story from two different timelines. Color footage is the story told in reverse and the Black and white footage is the story told in chronological order. The beginning of the film starts with the ending of the story, and when the movie ends, you see both stories connect. This movie blew me away when I saw it. This was really an ingenious script, adapted from a story written by Christopher's brother Jonathan.
Guy Pearce is really great in this film and the ending I did not see coming, and it changes your perception of the entire movie, making you want to see it all over again. It's funny, I just realized that Christopher Nolan has directed 3 of the movies in this list. (the other two are coming in another installment) I think he's a very talented director and writer, along with his brother who he's written a lot of his scripts with. Jonathan also created the show, Person of Interest, which in my opinion is the best show on network TV the 3 years its been on. I will pretty much see anything these two work on, with their track record.
12. ARGO (2012) The 2012 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, directed and starring Ben Affleck, is a great movie, detailing the escape of six U.S. diplomats from Iran during the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis by CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck). They are being hidden by the Canadian Embassy after the U.S. Embassy is taken over and over 50 Americans are taken hostage after the Shah of Iran is given asylum by Jimmy Carter during the Iranian revolution.
Mendez is at a loss to figure out a way to get them out of Iran safely until he comes up with the idea to portray the 6 as members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a film, a space epic in the vein of a B-movie version of Star Wars called, ARGO. So he has to come up with identities, jobs, a screenplay and details like Argo merchandise to fool the Iranians, so they are allowed to leave.
The movie has been criticized for how accurate some of the details are. My response is, it's not a documentary, it's a dramatization. I loved this movie and I was VERY happy it won last year, over Zero Dark Thirty, which I didn't care for. (already mentioned in one of my other reviews). Great performances by Affleck, Alan Arkin and John Goodman, who play a Hollywood producer and Makeup artist to help Affleck with his ruse, so the movie, ARGO, seems believable to the Iranians.
11. The Lord of the Rings Series (2001-2003)- (I realize this is a bit of a cheat and are actually 3 movies, but there's no way to take them as one single movie so I chose to include all of them. My list, my rules =) ) Peter Jackson's epic trilogy of J.R.R Tolkien's literary masterpiece. The fact that these movies, thought by many for YEARS to be unfilmable, were made simultaneously in New Zealand, and that they ended up being as great as they were is amazing to me to this day, 11 years after the last movie.
Peter Jackson did an amazing job with these 3 movies. The sets, special effects and all the acting was just phenomenal. Viggo Mortensen was a personal favorite, Ian McKellen also, but for me, Sean Astin, stole the movie in my opinion. Andy Serkis as Gollum was also an amazing performance of acting AND CGI. Absolutely groundbreaking.
With WETA Workshop doing the special effects. I think that Industrial Light and Magic, may have some serious competition. I cannot praise the work done on this film enough. It is just mind blowing to me how 3 movies could be filmed at the same time, have to be edited, released, then reedited to release the directors cuts each year on DVD before the next installment came out. My ADHD brain would have exploded. Overall the entire production lasted 8 years. I would have been insane by the end I think. I commend Peter Jackson's vision and talent, it's a hell of an achievement.
The last film, Return of the King, won all 11 Academy Awards it was nominated for, and I believe it deserved every one of them. If not for that movie alone, just for the overall achievement in cinema that all three of those movies are. They will last forever.
Ok There you go, those are my picks for #15-11. Stay tuned for #10-6 coming soon.
