You Can Stop Asking What My Favorite Films Are: Here They Are, A — Z (or 0).

A bi-weekly essay about favorite films starting with A on Jan. 1, 2017 and ending with Z on Jan. 1, 2018.

I’ve always evaded the question, “What’s your favorite film?” My stated reasons can be broken down to a.) Polite, i.e. there are too many to name; b.) Impolite, i.e. trust me, you haven’t seen it and I don’t feel describing it; c.) Philosophical, because b.) is often the case, naming a favorite film will shut the conversation down, not open it up. So I evade that question and talk about what I like about films in general terms.

Well, no more.

Rather than just list some favorite titles, I’ll be writing a series of articles about my favorite films, 27 articles precisely — once every two weeks — throughout the year covering titles from A to Z (and one for all those numerically titled films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or “300”), starting with A on Jan. 1, B on Jan. 15, and so on until Dec. 31, 2017.

The films I write about here are dear to me for very particular reasons. This list will not be exhaustive or authoritative. For some readers it will not be even be diverse. And because I love film so much more than I sometimes like it — because the power of the medium can enslave our hearts and minds as much as it can open them to new things — my reasons will not always be rational, sensible, universal or even helpful. But I hope that just discussing my favorite films, and perhaps hearing why some other film is one of yours, we might start a conversation worth having.

So, on this New Years Day let’s start with a film that culminates in the first minutes of a New Year…

A.) THE APARTMENT

1960, United Artists, B&W, Produced and Directed by Billy Wilder from an original screenplay by I.A.L. Diamond and Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacClaine, Fred MacMurray and Jack Kruschen

I can’t think of a film I love more to start the New Year than this one, when one of New York City’s loneliest émigrés finally finds something original to say; and though what he says is itself a cliché, we don’t doubt that it comes from the bottom of his hopeful heart.

In the middle of the film, CC “Bud” Baxter finds himself in the worst fix of his shabby little life, on Christmas Eve no less. He’s not unlike George Bailey a generation before, but there isn’t any time for reflection on all the things life has given him. Fran has OD’d in his apartment, and Dr. Dreyfus needs some answers. So the only way out for him is to keep up the charade of Buddy Boy the Sex Pot, on his way up at Consolidated Life and out of liquor, and more ominously, out of sleeping pills. What’s he really thinking? We never know. It’s possible even Baxter doesn’t know what he’s thinking, other than how much he likes Fran Kubelik.

Baxter is in search of an identity: as a good-natured buddy to his executive betters; as a ladies’ man to his tolerant neighbors; as a nurse to Fran; as Sheldrake’s assistant, finally as a mensch. He adopts the patter of Kirkeby, of Dobisch, of Sheldrake, of Dreyfus, of anyone who might give him a clue of how to act — even the bartender. Where does it get him? Not much of anywhere.

Billy Wilder’s films are often referred to in the press (and so in many a conversation) as cynical. That vinegary term is poured over his work supposedly to make it more palatable. However, there’s a distinction to make between Cynicism and something I’d call Reality Elegantly Rendered, and the difference is that brute cynicism cares nothing for elegance. Elegance is a thing of beauty, and beauty is something a human being is capable of appreciating on the worst of days in the worst of places. If you can’t see the distinction, maybe you should watch more films and read less of what’s written about them.

And there is elegance in the dance Wilder choreographs between the movements of his camera and those of the actors on his set: a master pushes in to become a two-shot, then pans and moves right to make a clean single of a third character; a single dollies in and pans left to make a new master. All throughout the film the camera moves in and out of action, pans left and right to follow it, exploring every foot of an understated but ingenious production design (the desks on the far end of the vast 19th floor were sized smaller to make the space even larger).

Beyond the elegance of the blocking of camera and actor, the film is defiantly hopeful. It knows that everywhere, over every holiday season, some person weighs the balance of his life, finds it wanting, and considers checking out. The film does not valorize, romanticize or pity these people. It sees their lonely as difficult but not intolerable, and they are never so alone they cannot reach out to someone who needs more help than they do.

Baxter is a guy who spends Christmas Day and New Years alone and does so without any self-pity. He spent his previous Christmas wandering the zoo, after getting his Christmas dinner at the automat. When it seems like it’s all over he tells the girl he loves that he can’t walk her to the subway because he has a date, and the moment she’s out of sight he walks over to the news stand to buy a book for his evening reading, because even in defeat he has his pride. He is ever hopeful that he will find his way.

The scenes involving the insurance executives, Kirkeby, Dobisch, Eichelberger and Vanderhoff, are the lightest and silliest. They’re such obvious buffoons, but something darker lurks under that frivolity: with their feet propped up on desks and nothing better to do all day than their nails, their lovers making them just as unhappy as their spouses, they’re more like the women they have so much contempt for than they could ever imagine, all of them bored and restless and just as likely to off themselves at any moment as Fran Kubelik. Is that cynical? Not after you’ve seen how they behave, and why. How could any story, so observant in every detail, with such carefully manicured dialogue, delivered with such precise timing, be considered cynical?

By the end of the film Baxter’s on his way out of New York. He has no job, no apartment, and no girlfriend. All of his belongings — including a handgun and a tennis racket that moonlights as a colander — fit in a few medium-sized boxes. The Fifties have turned into the Sixties. He’s still in search of an identity, but he has made at least one choice better than the ones he made before. In the end he seems happiest just being the guy who loves Fran. Maybe she’ll join him wherever he goes, or maybe she’ll convince him to stay. Will they last longer than a game of gin rummy? The movie doesn’t say. It fades out.

Awesome Films Also Worth Considering

A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 2001

A futuristic love story about a woman named Monica and a robot designed to be a twelve year-old boy. Not nearly as creepy as I’ve made it sound, but then it is a little creepy, the intimacy this film creates between Monica and David, who wants only what he was programmed to want: the bottomless love of a mother. But Monica can’t really love David because he’s not real, so she casts him out into a world determined to destroy him. And from there David embarks on a quest to become a real boy and win her heart for keeps. It’s a profoundly moving story, and sad and beautiful too. Who among us could imagine that after 2,000 years of history pass, after humanity becomes extinct, that our heart’s fondest wish might still endure, waiting patiently to be granted? It’s a childish thought, but doesn’t that describe the hopeful love of a child, and isn’t that love something so many of us hold dear? That the film would tell us Love will outlast human life itself is not daring, but to tell us that Love hardwired into the circuitry of a sensory gadget manufactured for a consumer product will be the one thing that outlasts human life is perversely poignant. And as narrated by Ben Kingsley, it’s a story we can all fall asleep to.

Ace in the Hole, 1951

Billy Wilder catches Kirk Douglas hustling his way to the top of the newspaper game…in the middle of New Mexico. Perhaps Wilder’s work was labeled cynical because he could set his noir-ish stories almost anywhere. Here the city reporter is banished to the desert, where his shady talents lead him to fabricate a rescue story ala Floyd Collins. What ensues is a media celebration to SMH at. Cynical, no. Prescient, yes. Kirk Douglas was never so persuasive in his surly, macho posture, in his uncanny ability to get under your skin, to make you want to wash your eyes at the sight of him.

Alien, 1979

In the late 1970s alien movies held no sway with moviegoers: modern life was plenty horrible enough. Sci-fi was either Star Trek or Star Wars: you could be a nerd or a cowboy. So to shock the public to attention Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Walter Hill and David Giler, came up with a sci-fi premise involving the disgruntled drivers of the enormous mining vehicles that would surely be a part of our real future in space; and with the help of HR Giger and Ridley Scott, they conceived a new kind of alien for these space truckers to deal with: a fleshy arachnid that attacks one of their number in its first moment of life, strangles him, rapes him, then makes him give birth through his chest cavity to its offspring, a maggot with razor teeth and acid for blood which rapidly morphs into a protean mass of shiny black exoskeleton that stalks his fellow truckers one by one with retractable horse choppers and perpetuates the nightmare over and over again. On its own merits, the story seemed eerily plausible: yes, these are the people we’d fling into space to bring back mineral ore; and yes, they would have familiar complaints about hazard pay and shares; and yes, these are the terrifyingly efficient organisms they would likely encounter in those unimaginable reaches. Such dire notions were advanced, such horrendous images were conjured to make a dent in the bashed-up psyches of the audiences in 1979. I saw it when I was nine. Like so many others, I never got over it.

All or Nothing, 2002

Though I haven’t yet visited the UK, I once harbored romantic notions of the genteel people who live there and the spaces they occupy. The films of Mike Leigh dispelled those notions, and I encourage any like-minded American to watch them before taking a trip to that scepter’d isle. The cost of losing my naivety was small compared to the rewards yielded by the unblinking gaze this film (and all his others) levels at these flawed people lost in their own desperate searches for love, happiness, and belonging in a system that has very little use for them. Roger Ebert used to say there’s nothing depressing about a great film, no matter what its subject matter. “All Or Nothing,” “High Hopes,” “Naked,” “Life Is Sweet,” “Secrets and Lies,” and all of Mike Leigh’s other movies, stand as proof of that argument.

Amarcord, 1974

Maybe we should all watch this film next year. Has Fascism come to America? If so, let us review Fellini’s memory tale to learn how they dealt with this phenomenon in 1930s Italy: by reveling in their own lusty, busty, grungy, burpy, farty, horndog humanity every moment of every day. Here the blackshirts are just as absurd as the tree-climbing lunatics at the rest home in the country, except the lunatics know they’re up a tree, and why (because they’re not getting any!). Fellini makes romantic comedy of the moment Italians let go of their 19th century pastoral fantasies and embraced the hard-edged technological fantasies of the 20th. Everything was way sexier in the olden days. In the end the Fascists triumphed and brought Italy to ruin, but the riff-raff they scorned survived to smoke, loaf, screw, and fantasize another day. And after the war sent the Fascists running for their lives, the riff-raff became the storytellers, clowns, jugglers, singers, dancers, magicians, and the people who enjoy them, who populate nearly every frame of Fellini’s films.

American Splendor, 2003

Sometimes I yearn to move back to the Midwest, back to Chicago. It’s no longer my home, but sometimes I think I’ll retire there — there or Cleveland, where the ashen skies and rusty structures have never looked so broken-nose beautiful than in the story of Harvey Pekar, the comic book writer and defiant sad sack who was invited to offer sardonic commentary from the sidelines as the fictionalized version of his life played out. The film captures a working city in decay, just as Pekar’s comics describe a man in decline. And yet Harvey, despite all the head scratching and grumbling, seems so happy in the end. I envied him a little. No one moves to Cleveland to retire, but this film might inspire a few to try.

Animal House, 1978

This one doesn’t hold up as well as the others: it’s almost nothing but gags, like a silent picture of epic length, and now the timing of so many of its gags feels slack. But when I was thirteen there wasn’t a more balls to the wall comedy in the canon of American Cinema. It’s still a triumph of funny by frontal assault, the scum of the earth shoveling scorn on America’s future leaders for daring to look at them sideways. But the moments of schadenfreude don’t make me laugh the way they did when I was still a child, except for the barrel-bottom antics of Belushi’s Bluto Blutarsky. Whether he’s catching a flung bottle in mid-air, micturating on the pledges, trashing Arlo’s guitar, starting food fights or driving off with the BMOC’s best girl on his way to becoming a US Senator, John Belushi, Chicago’s most cherished prodigal son, continues to deliver.

Andrei Rublev, 1966

There’s too much to say about Tarkovsky’s banned epic about a medieval Russian painter wandering a world of pagans and tyrants, and few of those words suffice. At the center of the story is a painter of icons who we never see paint; who says very little, and then takes a vow of silence; who observes the key events in the film’s story, but does not participate. So many images in this film stay with me, but what the characters say is just as important as what we see. You’ll just have to watch this film with the same patience you would give a novel of ideas. Along the way you’ll witness man’s first flight, Christ martyred in the snow, and a mighty bell sprout from the mud, and if there is a lesson perhaps it’s just this: the secret to casting a bell, or painting an icon, or flying through the air like a bird, is that there is no secret; those whose acts stir the soul are simply those willing to pay the ultimate price.

Apocalypse Now, 1979

The lights go down. Lines of palm trees explode as Jim Morrison starts to sing “The End.” Ray Manzarek’s Vox Continental organ alights as images of a jungle on fire cascade upon us. I saw it onscreen for the first time in the warehouse-sized basement theater of the dearly departed McClurg Court in downtown Chicago. I may as well have been at Mass in a French cathedral. I have never had such an experience of grandeur at the movies. A confluence of sources —from the silent epics to the dark comic timing of Altman, from tales of LeMay to Brando’s shabby ramblings, from fashionable analysis of a lost war to the Conrad novel itself — are on full 3-strip Technicolor display in this irresistible, enthralling symphonic entertainment. And it is an entertainment. Never has a film about the insanity of modern combat dared to be as funny or rousing, to tell its maddening tale with such showmanship. Note: watch the original cut, not the Redux.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007

A western narrated with arcane language, as though the outlaw had fashioned the words himself; told with little regard for plot, so that the inevitable event is drawn out interminably (which is how I imagine Robert Ford felt as he awaited the guiding hand of Fate); shot through a menagerie of filters, so that the entire film seems encased in amber. The web is flush with analysis of this film’s examination of celebrity culture, most of it idle chatter. When Reality TV no longer colors our discussions of this film, when hipsters no longer take their cues on how to dress, groom and decorate their homes from it, what will remain is a unique visual and aural experience, a frank conjoining of cinema and biographic literature, told from the viewpoint of one of the most unusual characters you’ll ever see in an American film, played by the only actor who could have pulled it off. That would be Ben’s twitchy kid brother.

Atlantic City, 1980

An elegant romance for a benighted age. Louis Malle made all kinds of film: noir films, war films, comedies, memoirs, literary adaptations, sexy thrillers, and My Dinner with Andre. But this one, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon as neighbors adrift in a city being torn apart and rebuilt at the same time, is a true jewel. Sarandon cemented her rep as a serious actress here, but it’s Lancaster’s rediscovery that wins the day. Burt made some remarkable choices as an actor —the megalomaniacal JJ Hunsecker in “The Sweet Smell of Success,” the aging, death-obsessed nobleman in Visconti’s “The Leopard”— and here he sheds his gravitas to play a chivalrous fool whose suit dates back to the days when he was Bugsy Siegel’s cellmate, which coincidentally is something he can never shut up about. In a low moment he defiantly declares, “I’m a lover!” and the range of emotions this moment evokes is so complicated I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But Malle and screenwriter John Guare know how to handle each moment with uncommon grace.

ALSO, THESE

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994),

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984),

Afterhours (1985), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972),

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), An Actor’s Revenge (1963),

Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Animal Kingdom (2010), Annie Hall (1977),

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Army of Darkness (1993),

Ashes and Diamonds (1958), The Asphalt Jungle (1951),

L’Atalante (1934), At Close Range (1985), Au Husard Balthazar (1966)

COMING JANUARY 15, B: A tough choice between the best of Kubrick, Ang Lee, and Powell & Pressburger; Woody Allen, Arthur Penn, and one really not very good movie.