jk's Cinema Tarotica
by J. Karlin

The Ten Best Movies Ever Made
(according to how I feel about it this week)

The top ten are:

read jk's review of The Godfather

The backstory is just as interesting as the movie, with Orson Welles pitted against publishing giant (and Tanya's grandfather) William Randolph Hearst. The story of a man's inability to cope with the loss of his simple but happy childhood is also a story about America's vanishing sense of innocence as it stood poised to become the Charles Foster Kane of the entire world. As we all now robotically mutter rosebud—or more properly Xanadu—trying to cope with the fact our imperial designs have made a mockery of old worn-out principles, it's worth looking at this Welles rear-view prophecy, which eventually comes true for all of us.

America's Odyssey, with four standard-issue archetypes (in fact, an archetype for four standard-issue archetypes), the good girl from Kansas who dreamed of life beyond rainbows but now just wants to go home, a straw-stuffed man with more wits than the credentials he lacks could ever provide him, a man of tin who is far better off without a heart but wants one anyway, and a lion who is so cowardly his own tergiversate tail terrifies him. This unlikely lot take on ultimate evil and, along with a little dog who is smarter and braver than all of them put together, learn that being willing to die for your friends still counts as great work in this world.

The chickens of violence, America's real national symbol, had been coming home to roost since 1963 and Arthur Penn decided to show people what guns and blood were really all about in the one place that had so far been safe from anything like real violence—the movies. Bonnie and Clyde's casual blending of hayseed humor and gushing blood was a deadon reading of the psychopathology ripping the country (and the world) apart at that moment in time. The last scene is still disturbing, and one should think about what it seemed like to audiences in 1967, who had never seen anything like it (at least not in a movie). While Penn's technique of presenting violence was copied endlessly, and contributed to the lust for ultraviolence which now drenches our movies, few have ever again matched his stylistic accomplishments with violence in this film.

One of the most perfect movies ever made, a story of a young man's realization that a life in plastics simply isn't what he's interested in. However, as he comes to learn, plastic is almost the only consistent quality he can depend upon in modern life, from the coldhearted bitch who seduces him, to his idiot parents who just hope if they give him enough things and activities he'll snap out of it and take his warm-fuzzy place in the matrix. If they made this today, Ben would certainly end up shooting everybody, probably even the girl and himself, but 1967 was the summer of love so, even though he's a stalker, Ben shoots mostly from the heart.

Slim Pickens riding a bucking hydrogen bomb—yep that's my kind of movie. Stanley Kubrick got REALLY famous with 2001-A Space Odyssey, but he's never been better mirroring the collective insanity of humanity than in this Cold-War docudrama. Of course, I realize a lot of people think this movie is supposed to be satirical and funny, but that's just nonsense. We actually had and still have masters and fearless leaders just as fucking insane as the lunatics in this movie. When Kubrick found out that Pentagon generals had seen Dr. Strangelove and wanted to meet with him, he thought they were going to have him killed or put away or something, but in fact the military merely wanted to congratulate him on making a great patriotic training film.

Travis Bickle just wants things to be OK, for himself, for the young prostitute he meets, for the dirty streets of New York which so badly needed to be washed clean. If only he could have waited for Rudy Giuliani to hire him into the NYPD, then he could have shot all the scumbags he wanted without any problems, and with plenty of backup. But poor Travis was twenty years too early so he had to Giuliani or Bickle the criminals all by himself. Certainly the cops were no help, they don't even show up till the end, except for the secret service who ineptly try and detain Travis just because he tries to assassinate some candidate for President—jeez!!—talk about having a stick up your ass about RULES and shit. Anyway, this great bloody backdrop for jazz and dark wet streets IS talking to YOU, punk.

This sad story of a baby kidnapped by outer-space aliens and taken far away from its home to become a storm-trooper in the alien army is such a tear-jerker you'd better have the kleenex handy. The evil aliens torment the rapidly growing victim with all kind of weapons and scare tactics, but he demonstrates remarkable survival skills and soon starts fighting back...what?...really...so you mean it's NOT about that at all, huh? Funny how two people can see the same movie and not necessarily the same story, huh? Anyway, this Giger-monster could gobble up the Terminator without even breaking a sweat—of acid. And why do they get mad at the robot! I'm still collating that one.

Perhaps the most accurate (and frightening) prophecy ever put on film, this look into a near and very dimly-lit future, with television sets as the torches of the new dark ages, and network news shows transformed into mere entertainment programming for the bored and easily-manipulated masses, predicts with brilliant sarcasm the intellectually castrated condition of network television today. The people who made the Fox network everything it is obviously used this movie as their bible. Whereas in 1976 people laughed at the idea of a network news anchor trying to boost ratings by threatening to kill himself on the air, with Brokaw-Jennings-Rather turning into human mummies (they passed the zombie stage years ago) right before our eyes, can the suggestion (or even the order) be that far from the minds of network executives? Nobody just retires from the Mafia, the CIA, or the network news.

Bogart, the Hustons, even Tim Holt!—AND gold! This story of a trio of losers who make one last stab at success by going to look for gold is the purest Wheel of Fortune (the Tarotic version) on film, for the trouble REALLY starts for them when they actually find the gold and realize they're going to be rich. Money is of course life's great enabler, and one is reminded of the irony about cocaine, that its great benefit is supposed to be the power to intensify one's personality, to which Bill Cosby once jokingly asked, "But what if you're an asshole?" Precisely, and since most people are assholes the last thing in the world they need (or WE need for them to have) is the power to actually do something about it. This story reminds us that gold corrupts not just a person's love for his fellow man, which is always pretty much just a convenience anyway, but even his love for himself. That's why so many Oprah shows are devoted to helping the rich (and particularly Oprah) to feel good about being such awful people. Of course Fred C. Dobbs would have shot Dr. Phil just for trying to save him from his demons—who knows, he might have been trying to get his gold!

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