TOP TEN TOPICS: MOVIES!

Every time I make a top ten movie list, I give the warning that this list fluctuates. There are so many great movies, it's often hard to decide which ones are at the top. If you compare my lists to others, they will not match perfectly, but there will be a few constants.

1. The Empire Strikes Back - I get yelled at a lot for this one because Star Wars: A New Hope was the first and therefore has to be the greatest...which is the worst argument ever. For one thing, "first" pretty often also equates to unrefined, which the first movie definitely was. Many of the decisions George Lucas made with that movie were made with the expectations that it wouldn't get a sequel. He very much didn't know where things were going to end up because Star Wars was an untested property, Fox wasn't enthusiastic about it and strongly considered canceling it, and Lucas had just never done anything this big before. With Empire, he had a more experienced director in the chair, and while the story was still ever-evolving, it was being made with a production that was in a much more comfortable and confident position. The result was probably the best movie ever made.

2. Terminator 2: Judgement Day - The stars were in perfect alignment when this movie was made. The first Terminator was one of James Cameron's early movies and he didn't even have the budget to get film permits. In T2, Cameron was at the height of his career, having made Aliens and The Abyss and he was willing to take massive risks with experimental technology. What resulted was a legendary film and the best he's ever made, bar none.

3. Blade Runner - When the director and the main star can't even agree on what the movie was about, you know there's a mind f**k in store. The performances in this movie stand out more than anything else. Rutger Hauer gave a performance that is seared into your brain. When Daryll Hannah meets J. S. Sebastian and runs from him at first, she runs into a van and breaks the window--that's a random van that somebody just parked there--and in the process, she broke her arm, and didn't tell the director and kept filming. Remember that watching that scene. Daryll Hannah broke her arm and powered through it to get that take.

4. The Last Unicorn - "Awe! That's a little girl's movie!" No, the f**k it is not. That movie is nightmare fuel and it's one of the best animated movies ever made. It manages to very nicely stay true to the book, cutting out only a single whole scene and truncating the dialogue to a degree. The art direction is fantastic and the music is phenomenal.

5. Ghost in the Shell - It's a bit similar to Blade Runner, it's even a police drama, but it approaches the idea of cybernetics and robotics from a very different angle, with the protagonist being so heavily augmented that she's troubled by the notion she might not even really exist anymore. The only thing that really bothers me is that the movie doesn't dive into that existential crisis as much as it could have, but at the same time, when you watch this police officer doing her job, realizing that she's moving forward questioning her own value and existence really changes the way you see this movie.

6. Wonder Woman - This one's a little bit of a throwaway, but I had to put it somewhere. The final act squanders the story that was built up of this supernatural goddess who sees humans as innocent creatures forced into war and violence by the malevolent will of an unseen other and then eventually comes to realize that humanity never needed the malevolence of another. You can almost hear the corporate executive whining to the director about the story being too deep and that a bad guy needs to be responsible for everything. That said, the first two acts are filmmaking at its finest, and the third act manages to not entirely throw away what was built up.

7. Mulan - "DISHONOR! Take this down! Dishonor on you! Dishonor on your family! Dishonor on your cow!" This is the first Disney movie I can recall that actually breaks the Disney formula. Instead of the female being a love interest or a goal for the hero, she is instead, the hero and it worked amazingly. Mulan was also an interesting problem for Disney. When they launched their Princess Collection in 2003, Mulan was the most popular character, but she wasn't a princess. Disney had to change the rules of what makes a Disney Princess in order to put Mulan in the lineup or risk the franchise flopping. This resulted in several princesses, including Tinkerbell, getting removed from the franchise. This movie also has an amazing scene of character development--in You'll Bring Honor to us All--as without even words, we see that Mulan believes in justice, giving the doll back to the girl, in the time she went into the salon and from the time she left, she had time to think of the best checkers move showing her analytical mind, and replacing the spit curl showing individuality. I don't know when it happened, but Mulan eventually became my favorite Disney movie, even over Aladdin or The Lion King.

8. Alita: Battle Angel - Base on the 1993 OVA, which in turn was based on the manga by Yukito Kishiro, this is probably the first live-action movie based on manga and anime that gets it right. The movie makes a few strange decisions, increasing Desty Nova's role and presence that I'm worried will hurt future films if there are any, but it doesn't harm this one a bit. The message is very straight forward, that regardless of society and the world around us and regardless of circumstance, only we can really decide who we are. Self-actualization plays a very strong role in this movie as Alita's unwillingness to follow rules is about more than just rebellion; it's about figuring who she's supposed to be and what's right for her. Even better is the movie isn't afraid to follow through and show us that she was wrong; not in the journey or her beliefs, but in what she thought was right for her.

9. The Matrix - It should have been long clear that cyberpunk will dominate my list. It's a very effects, martial arts, and jargonistic philosophy heavy film series. I won't deny that it's biggest driver is effects, but the second movie kind of slows down and falls into a generic story that shows us that if effects were all there was, the first film wouldn't have been nearly as good as it was. Mystery was the biggest driver of this film, and making us wait for Neo to become the hero he was built up to be was the right choice.

10. Metropolis - Which should be the last one? I considered The Fifth Element, Road Warrior, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and a few others, but I went with a cyberpunk movie so old, it predates the word "cyberpunk" by about 40 years. This is sci-fi in its purest form. An heroic everyman, a mad scientist and his diabolical creation, the robot, a monumental city of the future, and a society on the brink of collapse. It's sci-fi at its most basic and it is sci-fi at its best. And at the time, it was absolutely groundbreaking.

Notable alternates:
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: I just came back to edit this only to find that I didn't want any of the movies above to leave my top ten, so Star Trek II has to be down here, mores the pity. This was the lowest budget Star Trek, made after the box-office failure of The Motion Picture. Paramount Studios decided to reject Gene Rodenberry's script and went with Harvey Bennett's writer, Nicholas Meyer. The result was a movie that Gene hated but the rest of us love. True Trekkies would realize that the idea of Starfleet as a military ran directly counter to Gene's idea of Starfleet as an exploration organization and violated Gene's first law for Star Trek: humans are enlightened in the future. This seems fairly egregious to Trekkies until you realize that whereever Gene had creative control, the story was pretty bland and cringe worthy. Look at the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example. It wasn't until the writing staff had control and were free to ignore Gene's ramblings that TNG became the show we love.