The Borders and Frontiers of Music Itself

September 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Some days I get the felicitous pleasure of correcting an idiot who thinks they like all music.  Have you met this guy?  When I ask what you listen to, I don’t mind noncommital answers like “a lot of stuff.”  Feel free to tell me that classical, country, rock, and rap are all fine by you.  Just don’t be ignorant enough to say that you enjoy everything.

Such headlong claims are propelled by one of two fallacious oversights.  Linguistic philosophy teaches us that operational definitions are prerequisite to coherent discussion.  In small words, we need to decide what we mean by “like” before we can talk about whether you “like” all music.  Muddled by your intuition, with no such leading clarification to guide you, it is tempting to overapply the word and convince yourself that you truly do “like” everything.  But these technicalities aren’t so interesting.

Allow me to walk you down the other troubled path.  Our lodestar will be the core question: When you say you like all music, what counts as music?

Don’t limit yourself to what’s familiar.  Realize that the word “everything” suggests far more than “everything I’ve ever heard.”  Maybe, when you said you like everything, what you meant is that you have yet to come across music that doesn’t work for you.  In that case we have a simple miscommunication and I won’t hold it against you.

Maybe you can’t name a genre without at least a few representatives in your last.fm “Most Played.”  So you like some rap songs, some pop songs, and so on, but not all rap songs and all pop songs.  If you fit that description, my apologies to you as well.

The people I’m challenging are those who  say something bolder: that they like (or expect to like) every last bit of music, even what they haven’t heard. They believe all music will, as if by definition or natural mandate, have enjoyable, appreciable elements.  For their schooling, we endeavor to answer (I repeat): what counts as music?

We’ll start with a simple parallel.  What counts as singing?  Easy, right?  All those words coming out of the frontman’s mouth!  But what if they aren’t words?  I doubt there are many who would deny that The Dissociatives are singing on the track Lifting the Veil from the Braille, which features only whistles and ahhhs.  What about the pitchshifted pornogrind stylings of Cock and Ball Torture?  Check out the track Enema Bulldozer and tell me if you think that guy is singing.  Come to think of it, do Cake songs like The Distance actually feature singing, or is that something else?

Even the liberal-minded individual might not know how to classify the vocal performance of Georgia Brown.  This Brazilian world-record-holder has been lauded for “singing” in the so-called whistle register, using a poorly understood physical mechanism a step beyond falsetto.

Still with me?  Nothing contentious yet?  Let’s go up a level.  Let’s build a box for songs and put all songs inside the box and anything that isn’t a song outside.  Oh – you’re alright with microsongs, aren’t you?  Because some people struggle with or deny “pieces” like the 1.316-second You Suffer by Napalm Death.  How about Green Carnation’s recent prog metal opus Light of Day, Day of Darkness?  The band declined to subdivide the 60-minute track into movements, but there are clear demarcations between passages.  Is that one song, or several songs presented wrong?

Again, terminology can get in the way here.  Everybody knows the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies from the Nutcracker, but is it a song?  It is one of several “scenes” from a single multi-part composition that spans an entire ballet.  Labels are tricky, but I want to avoid focusing on them.

To the heart of it, then.  People like you and I aren’t bothered by the foregoing ambiguities (as some unwitting fools are) because people like you and I are born with a mental knife for separating the fog.  Well, if you can handle what comes next, you’ve got a leg up on me and every historian of music in academia.  Polaris is still asking: what counts as music?

Exhibit A: the absence of a (discernible) beat.  When someone says they “like everything,” my go-to response is Panasonic Youth by The Dillinger Escape Plan.  Screaming and harsh licks pervade this hardcore ditty, but what’s more jarring is the deafeningly technical mathematic organization of rhythm.  No casual listener has an ounce of hope of tapping their toe successfully to the precise, plotted shifting of the time signature.  Can you digest music without a pulse?

Exhibit B: spoken word tracks.  Is the first track of Family Man, a classic Black Flag record, a song?  Exhibit C: noise.  Did avant-garde Japanese noise rockers Hantarash ever make a “song” in their career?  Arguably a generalization of this is Exhibit D: ambience.  If you stick your head out your front door, do you hear a song?

You should be familiar with John Cage, the bogeyman of western musical tradition.  If you’re not, Google him.  From a long career of questioning where people set their borders – with music on this side and chaff on the other – his best known heirloom to mankind is 4’33″.  Cage presents 4’33″ as a song in three movements.  There just don’t happen to be any notes.  He calls it “aleatoric” and emphasizes that the song is what each person hears while it is being played; thus, 4’33″ is different for each listener and upon each new listening.

Fewer students become familiar with Cage’s sequel to 4’33″, known as 0’00″.  If the former was a bastard of a piece, the latter is its mongrel son.  Free from notes, tempi, and (sometimes) even sound altogether, 0’00″ consists of this instruction: “Perform a disciplined action.”  Its first live performance – unsurprisingly, by Cage himself – consisted of the writing down of that instruction.

If you consider 0’00″ to be music and claim to “like all music,” you must have a bone through your head, because this taste of the extreme provides a hint that there is an unfathomable amount of space left to be explored in music.  To claim appreciation of the entire infinite domain would show an arrogant lack of skepticism of what might arise from it in years to come.

If you think 0’00″ is a fine piece but not “music” per se, then you’ve placed it beyond your border.  We can all set our borders how we please.  But once you say that Aerosmith writes music and John Cage writes something else, you’ve admitted that a line exists.  So where is it?

Yeah, I don’t know either.  I’ve been introduced to some wacky streams of sound in my time.  I tried to refer in this article only to songs accessible through an easy Google or YouTube search to help you probe your borders.  If you need me to suggest more outliers, just ask.

Gerrymander music however you like.  Put up a fence around it.  Leave it open to the wilderness.  But whatever you do, don’t look me in the eye and tell me you like “everything.”  You’d be lying to both of us.

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Coldplay and the downfall of humanity

August 28, 2009 By 1 Comment

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Coldplay has me concerned for the future of mankind.

It’s not that I hate the band. In fact, I quite like a lot of their music. What worries me is the way the world views Coldplay: It’s as if they’re big-time British rockers and the sound of the generation, the same way Oasis was in the 1990s and U2 was in the 1980s.

If that’s true, humanity has a lot less to look forward to than I’d like to believe. Coldplay is dreary, whiny rock with a spacey ambiance and a solemn quietude. They’re a band with niche sound, not a sweeping melodic power to steal the imagination of a generation.

I’ve had several friends talk about Coldplay shows with a reverence that seems like it should be reserved for bigger, better bands. I like Clocks and all, but does it really have the tremendous impact that a song like, say, Sunday Bloody Sunday does? No, it doesn’t. Not by a long shot.

At least the 1990s had some attitude. The kids from my generation may have been as pathetic as kids today, but at least we wanted to be tough and credible. “I was looking for some action / but all I found were cigarettes and alcohol” sang Oasis in one of the generation-defining numbers off of a generation-defining album. It has a stomp that Coldplay is terrified to even approach.

Compare that to: “Confusion never stops / closing walls and ticking clocks.” When I imagine someone singing Clocks, he’s crying in his bed. He’s sad because he doesn’t know why he’s crying in his bed, but he knows he needs to. When I imagine someone singing Cigarettes and Alcohol, he’s beating up the person singing Clocks.

I’m not saying I want a generation of thugs, but I do want a generation with some confidence. I want a generation that knows what rock and roll is. When you hold up Coldplay as the great British arena rock band of the era, it’s depressing to anyone who knows what a band like that should really sound like.

What especially bothers me is that Coldplay kept the same gray sound for three albums in a row, except the second and third of those had less energy than the first one did; The Professor has a more intricate, developed sound but it lacks the spark that Yellow had. It’s as if detached complacency and vague worrying are the band’s major themes.

Of course, there’s always that fourth album, Viva La Vida. Everybody loves Viva La Vida because Coldplay finally made an album with the slightest buoyancy to it. Please: this is what X&Y or A Rush of Blood to the Head should have sounded like. The world handed Coldplay the arena rock throne, no questions asked, but Chris Martin still wept into his pillow for two more albums.

Viva La Vida is far from a bad album, but it’s beyond overhyped. The album is not a great leap forward. It’s still Coldplay. The dreary, spacey sound has entered a bit back into the atmosphere, but it’s still too gray.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate Coldplay, not by a long shot. In fact, I’d even say I love a few of their songs. I’d be happy to see them live. But I accept them for what they are: A decent band with a unique sound that becomes tiresome fast.

They’re not the sound of the decade. At least I hope they’re not. If so, in about twelve years, a bunch of patsies who don’t know what British rock really sounds like are going to be having kids and entering the workforce. That’s like the first sign of the apocalypse according to the Book of Revelation, or something.

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Jupiter Sunrise, Band X, and the Wooden Beam in Your Eye

August 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

Pop rock is a huge umbrella. Elton John, Something Corporate, Kelly Clarkson, Fall Out Boy, and Jason Mraz all play pop rock. It’s pop music (melody-driven music with catchy hooks that prominently features vocals and follows expectable structures) with rock instrumentation (a lead guitarist/keyboardist and his sidekick rhythm guitarist/keyboardist riding over a bass guitar under the direction of a drummer). Pop rock is a perfectly good term that, while it truly isn’t the largest branch of music, encompasses a vast share of today’s radio playlists. By contrast, terms such as “alternative”, “emo”, and “indie” have been applied willy-nilly to anyone and everyone and thus stretched beyond utility.

Jupiter Sunrise plays pop rock. I gave the explanation above so that you could understand two things from such a simple classification — because a good description of any band will include labeling them with one or several genres, and it’s important to know what to do with that information. When I say Jupiter Sunrise plays pop rock, you should first recognize that they will probably sound “just like Band X” to you. They have elements in common with every other pop rock band. Odds are they’ve got 90% in common with at least one other band, if not bunches.

But this band’s name is Jupiter Sunrise, and copyright lawyers tell me that proves that this band is unique. So the second thing to realize is that they don’t play the same songs as Band X. Their songs might fit perfectly on an album by Band X and vice versa. But the bands have different members and different songs. Even having 90% in common means being 10% unique.

Without question, the most important lesson ever driven through my head was that people use music differently. Some people use music for energy while they jog, some people need a beat to bump ‘n grind to, and I study best when I’ve got the post-metal stylings of Pelican keeping me company.

In conversation, these preferences of use are often expressed as judgments of quality. Someone who never plays sports might say that Remember the Name by Fort Minor is “a bad song.” A teenage sophomore who drives her father’s mustang to high school in Orange County might say that “country is crap.” This is a misrepresentation below the level of consciousness. The truth is that the way someone uses music guides the parts of music they pay attention to.

Hip-hop does not stereotypically focus on building original melodies out of notes. (Not to say that it doesn’t happen; but notice that one common recourse is the use of sampled melodies to complement original content.) What if you like adding your voice to soaring soprano choruses on long road trips, not bobbing your body to the rhythm of a spoken beat?  Dismissing the genre as something short of real music is naive at best.  Recognizing that the strength of the genre lies in elements you instinctively ignore gives you insight into why anybody ever tunes in to that station.

So if the 10% that is unique about Jupiter Sunrise is the 10% that you are most aware of as you listen – because it is the 10% most relevant to a way in which you use music – then you will find them much more unique. If your personal focus lies elsewhere, then they might sound to you 100% like Band X, because the differences are not of a kind that naturally registers with you as you listen.

This same rule applies, of course, to whichever friend of yours (or whichever professional critic) is describing the band to you. This is the most crucial bias of which you must be aware, both in the speaker and in yourself. This puts things into perspective and explains how all of a band’s fans can seem so stupid and wrong when you hear the music for yourself.

It is the purpose of a review, or casual explanation, to draw up comparisons and contrasts and thus examine the whole of a band. But the most interesting part tends to be that unique 10%, so a lot of words are spent identifying something that a large number of people will autonomously overlook.

That is today’s lesson. Now, quickly, I present: Jupiter Sunrise – Under a Killer Blue Sky (or Heavy Things).

Mark Houlihan and Ben Karis each wrote about half of the songs on this album and each guy sings his own songs, giving Jupiter Sunrise a split personality. Mark has low songs with a gleam of hope and writes personal lyrics:

I went up to John St. Park and there I met an old lady feeding ducks. The back of her hand had been bleeding and she didn’t even know it. She told me I’d be more handsome if I smiled. So we talked about the weather, she told me about her family and she said I should meet her granddaughter, and I smiled.

Ben has happy songs with a twist of wistful and writes stories:

We’re wondering what you’re thinking, Arthur Nix. ‘Cause ever since you rode your bike into that car and were quickly whisked away by ambulance, you’ve been so pensive and quiet. Did your arm heal faster than your heart did, Arthur?

Each has his own distinct, but pop-rock-certified, vocal style. Jupiter Sunrise’s forte is in giving each verse and chorus a different feel through instrumentation and arrangement while the vocals show little variance within each song. Typically, not just the volume but the rhythm, style, or number of instruments playing will be dynamic during a verse, and the next verse will be a novel variation on the same organic idea. There’s plenty of instrumental play in intros and interludes as well. Oh, and it’s worth noting that this is a guitar band – keyboards make a minor appearance on each of two tracks and are otherwise absent.

Jupiter Sunrise laid low for years after UKBS, their only true album to date. Recently they’ve popped up for a few live shows. A Twitter acount christened in April 2009 and occasional new songs on their myspace stand as signs of new progress. However, the lineup listed on their website has two different categories for “current members” and “members who played on Under a Killer Blue Sky.” So it’s possible that they are an entirely different band now than they were five years ago when UKBS was made.

Who knows, maybe they’ll sound the same. Their currently defunct website once told me that all four band members were vegan, so maybe change is good.

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Grant’s Top 10 Movies

August 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

Legendary musician and producer Brian Eno once said, “Every review should have, below the name of the critic, their 10 current favorite works in the medium.  That way you have some chance of seeing their prejudices.”  Well said, sir.  To that end, I proffer my ten favorite movies, not currently but all-time.  I present this list with the conditions that I know there are countless intriguing movies I have not seen—particularly any made before the last decade—and that my tastes continue to shift.

1) Mystic River

Joy Division set to cinema—the most ferociously intense, haunting movie I’ve ever seen.  Mystic River speaks, above all, to the different ways people cope with grief (just as JD did).  The characters in this movie try everything possible to lead productive lives that have been wrecked by tragedy, and though some succeed more than others, they all tell us something about what it means to be human.  As a murder mystery is investigated, questions, desires, and regrets that have lain dormant between three old friends are unearthed.

Clint Eastwood imparts a brooding, plaintive feel upon the action, understanding how atmosphere can enhance, but not overpower a story, and he culls exceptional work from his actors.  Tim Robbins’s command of a wide and rapidly shifting range of emotions is nothing short of stunning, and the incomparable Sean Penn triumphs even all of his other performances.  Yet it’s Kevin Bacon who speaks the film’s truest and most heartbreaking lines, in a late scene with Penn that might be the most emotive scene I’ve ever seen in a movie.  The best art speaks universally and personally at the same time, and in Mystic River, everything feels connected to my life, no matter what’s going on in it at the time.

2) Closer

Closer uses four spectacularly dysfunctional relationships to make profound statements about more reasonable and, hopefully, more common ones.  Asking questions most movies don’t want to touch, it makes articulate observations of the relationships among its four characters applicable to our everyday lives.  The actors and script each evince their extraordinary skill by quietly showing us that, behind the characters’ betrayals and brutal words lie a vast expanse of pain and hurt—even if they don’t want to admit they’re feeling those things.

Closer has a reputation for being depressing, but since everyone gets what he or she deserves, I see it more as a warning than a suicide pill.  It’s not really about the loneliness that touches everyone in it.  It’s about how much people who have been hurt in the past are willing to risk again, how much a failure to resist sexual attraction taints one’s character, and whether any relationship can succeed without significant flaws.

3) Good Will Hunting

An unfailingly sincere movie, and thus one that is quite easy for the sarcastic and ironic to mock.  Yet the sincerity in this movie carries along with it some implosive drama.  Matt Damon and Robin Williams give career-best performances as, respectively, a math genius whose life is going nowhere yet is frequently on edge, and the worn-down therapist who helps him connect with what’s important.  The riveting final third of the film, featuring sparkling scenes between these two as well as the other side characters, is everything it should be: provocative, intelligent, assertive, well-acted, and always very real.

4) Saving Private Ryan

The reputation of Steven Spielberg’s epic, set during World War II, precedes it, but the hype is all worth it.  The famous opening 20 minutes of war footage will leave you wishing your heart rate would subside even while your eyes are spellbound to the screen—it’s unimaginable, chaotic, and easy to follow all at once—but the movie truly becomes great with the way it handles the rest of its story with such humanity.  As eight men, led by Tom Hanks’s John Miller, search for one missing soldier, writer Robert Rodat imbues a philosophical tone upon the material, raising questions about fighting that are not easily answered.  Finding Ryan isn’t the point; the point is what Miller’s men think about it, what Miller does while executing the mission, and what Ryan says when told he can return home.

5) Children of Men

Lead actor Clive Owen has an affinity for playing characters who derive strength from destruction occurring around them (Closer, Croupier), but here it is the rest of the world that has fallen apart while he ultimately finds a measure of decency and redemption.  Showing us what would happen in a world with no children, the explosive Children of Men uses mature filmmaking to study the human condition.  In the jaw-dropping final ten minutes, as hope intermingles with despair and Owen looks towards the future, the film achieves an emotional resonance few can in their entire running time.

All the touches from the hand of director Alfonso Cuaron, who also co-wrote the screenplay, have a revelatory effect.  Even when you don’t think he’s doing something, he is.  Sean Penn himself said the movie “is arguably as well-directed a picture as there’s ever been.”  I can’t give it any higher praise than that.

6) Garden State

A quirky, unconventionally smart film written and directed by star Zach Braff, Garden State captures 21st century ennui perfectly.  Braff plays Andrew, an emotionally blank, marginally successful actor who’s drawn home for the first time in 9 years with the news of his mother’s death.  There, he meets old friends who aren’t much more productive with their lives yet still enjoy it—something he’s forgotten about—and one special new one, played by Natalie Portman.

Culling strong performances from Portman and Peter Sarsgaard, Braff constructs an often hilarious and always touching portrait of 20something loneliness.  The film has tiny flaws, but Braff deserves praise for his underlying message that being able to feel something is better than avoiding pain.  As he tells his father, “We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let’s just allow ourselves to be whatever it is that we are…and that’ll be better.”

7) A Beautiful Mind

What’s more important in life, truth or beauty?  That question forms the heart of A Beautiful Mind, the story of the life of brilliant and troubled mathematician John Nash.  The film explores the head, heart, and psyche of its character with an excellent script given even more depth by Russell Crowe’s superb lead performance.  The film is both taut and comprehensive, avoiding becoming another rote biopic that merely sketches biographic details by letting us into Nash’s world and that of his closest friends.

8) Cast Away

Like Children of Men, Cast Away takes a simple but devastating hook and uses that, and its symbolic main character, to make profound and poignant statements about human nature and the world at large.  After being marooned by a plane crash, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) faces a deserted island and little chance of ever seeing the real world and his fiancée Kelly again.  The film speaks to the ability of the human spirit to motivation itself to action even when all seems hopeless, but it is defined by its final act, after Chuck returns home to see how life has changed for everyone else while he was away.

His scene with Helen Hunt at her house is about as sad as movies can be, and he’s left to wonder whether it was even worth it to get off the island.  There is no Hollywood ending here, no reassuring words from anyone that life will all go back to normal now, no triumphant return to Kelly; but the final frames perfectly articulate, without words, the present status of the life of someone who wants desperately to find a reason to keep living.

9) American Beauty

With a pitch-perfect tone of quiet desperation, American Beauty lulls you into respect and then shocks you into moments of startling recognition.  An unbelievably consistent film, it accelerates to climactic scenes you simply can’t take your eyes off, no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

Everyone in the film, inhabiting the worst aspects of the “American dream” gone very wrong, is fighting for a way out of the straitjacket flung onto them, by their family, friends, or society.  Some succeed, some don’t, and their efforts are all put together with a masterful economy of dialogue, timing, and scene construction.  Kevin Spacey’s performance lives inside of it, but everyone, from the other actors (notably Chris Cooper) to first-time director Sam Mendes and first-time writer Alan Ball to cinematographer Conrad Hall, makes a contribution that you won’t soon forget.

10) Million Dollar Baby

This 2004 Best Picture winner demonstrates precisely the power that a great movie can have—emotionally, psychologically, visually, and viscerally.  It introduces three richly developed characters—a boxing trainer, an aspiring fighter, and a former star—given rich and human performances by the actors, and it ties it all together with a stellar script.  This is the rare film that doesn’t want to be sarcastic or glib and is unashamedly emotional—and that’s before it reaches its apex.  Loses points only because it’s not quite so re-watchable and some of these others.

What’s so remarkable is how strong it is for its first two-thirds, before taking a right-turn and morphing, seamlessly, into something entirely different for the final act.  Million Dollar Baby lingers on the minds of viewers long after it’s over because of the way these three people’s lives interact that deeply affect all of them, for better or worse, and make it impossible for them to declare their previously dead-end lives meaningless.

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Dan’s Top 10 Movies

August 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

As an introduction to the site and our tastes in movies, we decided we would each share our current top ten favorite movies along with brief explanations about why we love them. This list is subject to change, of course, but here’s how my top ten currently stands.


1. Rudy

People scoff when I say that Rudy is my favorite movie of all time. The terms “Notre Dame fanboy” and “sentimental hogwash” are thrown around a lot. But what can I say to this? Am I expected to use logic to convince my soul not to love what it so earnestly does? Rudy, like many of the unexpected picks in my top 10, is no masterpiece in the traditional sense of technical craft or stylistic form.

The way Rudy is a masterpiece is in how strongly it strikes a personal chord. That’s something that varies from person to person, so I do not expect each one of you to call Rudy a masterpiece the way I do. Art is subjective, after all. But Rudy’s rags to riches story echoes tremendous inspiration in me. The sets are beautiful, the acting is spot-on, and the movie has a deep-seated humanity. Achieving dreams against expectations is a theme that will always be relevant.


2. The Shawshank Redemption

Like Rudy, my second favorite movie of all time is a parable about hope. Aside from a warden who at times is nagging and silly, every part of this movie is perfection in my eyes. It brings us just low enough to feel how strongly the odds are against Andy Dufresne, and then all of the harrowing set-up pays off in one of the most soaring finales in film history. Morgan Freeman is first-rate as the voice of the film, Tim Robbins is appropriately difficult to read as Andy Dufresne, and the film-making gels into a hugely satisfying experience.

I could go through this film scene by scene and point out details I love. This movie has moment after moment of pure power. Even the ending, which turned off critics because of how little ambiguity it leaves, is earned by this excellent film.

3. Back to the Future
Number three on my list doubles as one of the greatest comedies of all time and one of the most exciting sci-films of all time. If there is a more enjoyable two hours in film, I do not know of it. The most important element in this film — like many comedies — is the chemistry of the leads, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. The two are hilarious and play off each other so well.

The movie’s tongue-in-cheek reverence to the 1980s also helps make Back to the Future a great movie. Instead of trying to modernize the movie and focus on making a timeless and visually advanced film — something that, ironically, would have dated the movie much more quickly — the movie sticks to depicting the flamboyance of the 1980s: skateboards, tacky vests, hair metal, and all. Even more than the edge-of-your-seat thrill and the gut-busting script, it’s this focused style that I revere in this film.

4. The Dark Knight
Too soon? Maybe. But I swore to myself that I would be honest in this list and share the movies I love the most. Though it’s barely a year old, The Dark Knight is a movie I love more than nearly any other. It’s a sprawling, exciting movie that’s part comic book, part crime saga, part character study, part smash-bang blockbuster, and all adventure.

What I love most about The Dark Knight is how it takes the struggles that comic books internalize — not just good vs. evil, but order vs. chaos — and turns them into a beautiful script; one that brims with wit and energy, but also cuts deep into some of the powerful themes that the Burton-Schumacher Batman movies could only allude to.

5. That Thing You Do!

Sometimes it’s nice when a movie sets itself a low bar, as pejorative as that sounds. Then the movie can leap over that bar with ease and style. That Thing You Do! would be an example of such a movie; it doesn’t entrench itself into complicated drama, and it keeps the comedy light and whip-smart. It’s a rags-to-riches story, but both the rags and the riches are subdued. The polished final cut is flawless, unless you consider it a flaw to lack ambition.

If it sounds like I’m selling short a movie that’s one of my favorites ever, let me clarify: I absolutely adore That Thing You Do! The characters are very human, the script has an inviting warmth, and the actors all play the type of people you feel like you actually could have met in the early 1960′s. It never feels like the movie is “trying” to do anything: it just does it, and sucks you in completely.

The soul of the movie — and what sets it apart from “endearing” to “pure, classic entertainment” — is the music. The original soundtrack is marvelous pop music and it accurately emulates the sound of the time. It makes That Thing You Do! a joyous film experience every time.


6. Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark

I believe that Raiders of the Lost Ark not only reinvented the action-adventure movie but perfected it. The tone is never too gritty to suck the energy and joy out of the movie, but the action delivers the goods. It is creative, unadulterated excellence that sets up a few iconic characters and a plethora of classic moments. I can’t watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and walk away feeling anything besides complete satisfaction. Indy’s first adventure is funny, exciting, enthralling, a incredible delight that would never be topped in the series, and rarely out of the series.

7. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

The two greatest trilogy movies, which happen to be from the two greatest trilogies (though we’ll see if Toy Story joins their company in 2010) are back-to-back in my top ten. The Empire Strikes Back feels a bit like a transition movie, as it ends with a cliff-hanger and lacks an over-arching conflict and resolution.  Still, it’s easily the best Star Wars movie. It’s not as hokey as A New Hope nor as silly as Return of the Jedi.

The reason The Empire Strikes Back shines is because it puts the characters, not the plot, front and center. Each important relationship of the movie is brought in new, surprising directions. It’s fascinating seeing the characters knocked down again and again, and watching how they get back up each time. The movie avoids black and white this time around, as characters face complicated decisions and challenging revelations. Of course, the sensational set pieces and best-ever casting don’t hurt.

8. Jurassic Park

JP, as my friends and I call it, has incredible suspense and visuals that still look good a decade and a half later. In fact, I think they’ll always look good: The dinosaurs are designed not just to look lifelike but to be towering and awe-inspiring.

The characters’ struggles provide a relevant warning against breaching too far with technology, but I never find myself too wrapped up in the themes of Jurassic Park. I just like going along for the ride. The heart of the movie is in its dynamic visual sequences.

Who can forget the first time the glass of water started vibrating and the T-rex stormed the Jeeps? How many things can you think of more terrifying and exhilerating than velociraptors… that can open a door! Watching this movie with the lights off and the sound turned up is one of the best movie-watching experiences I know of.

9. Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Man oh man, do I get a lot of crap for loving this movie. I know I have a slight tendency to overrate movies I’ve seen recently (see #4), but as far as I’m concerned, this movie could have been released in 1947 instead of 2007. Its release date does not prevent it from being, straight up, the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen it nearly ten times, more than any other movie released in the past decade, so it’s not just infatuation.

Not only is the movie absolutely hilarious — maybe two or three gags fall flat, which is still a hall of fame batting average considering just how many jokes are here — but it’s pretty good as a movie, too. It’s heartfelt. It knows what breakups feel like.

Perhaps the reason it feels genuine is because it is. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is semi-autobiographical for writer and star Jason Segel who was dumped while he was nude, who dated a big time star in a cheesy TV show for several years, who loves Muppets, and who dreamed of writing a Dracula puppet musical for the longest time.

10. The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects was at one point several spots higher on this list, but I can’t shy away from the fact that this mystery is one that leads nowhere. It’s a little bit frustrating that so much is left ambiguous; and yet, that’s also one reason I love it. The first time you watch it, you’re left stammering “Wait… what?”

But if you want to talk about an exquisitely crafted whodunit (rather, who-is-it), this is your winner. Its dizzying twists and turns can distract you from the sheer beauty of this movie. The score is first-rate and the neo-noir cinematography is haunting. The last five minutes of this movie are perhaps my five favorite minutes in the history of cinema. They say so much and so little.

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