B
Boing
Guest
32. PLATOON 1986
The Vietnam era's All Quiet on the Western Front captures the bone-deep hopelessness of being on the front lines of a lost cause. Oliver Stone's Oscar winner is sometimes overblown and self-important, but the emotional center is where it's always been in great war pictures: in the life-and-death bonds forged between individuals under fire.
Key Scene: Torching a village to the Adagio for Strings.
Best Line: "We've been kicking other peoples' asses for so long I figure it's time we got ours kicked."
33. ANIMAL HOUSE 1978
This smash-hit, pig-out, anarchy-loving comedy didn't so much reverse the post-sixties antifraternity trend as take it to the next level, focusing on a guerrilla enclave of losers and geeks who trash the system from within. It's either the first flatulent trumpet blast of the spring break generation or a profound look back at the essence of sixties politics. Either way, it's still the funniest college flick ever.
Key Scene: John Belushi kisses off phony folk singers once and for all by smashing one's guitar.
Best Line: "I'm a zit!"
34. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY 1966
Sergio Leone cooks up the ultimate spaghetti western, so tickled by its own sun-baked amorality that we have to laugh. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and a cackling Eli Wallach inventively double-cross each other for a chest of Confederate gold. Rent or buy only the restored director's cut DVD, which reinstates the film's narrative sweep.
Key Scene: The three men's final showdown in the cemetery: the definitive Mexican standoff.
Best Line: "When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk."
35. THE LONGEST YARD 1974
The best football-in-prison movie ever. Bone-crushing game sequences play as slapstick, and Burt Reynolds is perfect as the disgraced former pro quarterback, jailed for a point-shaving scandal and redeemed by leading a squad of convicts against a team of brutal guards.
Key Scene: Burt's "Gipper" speech.
Best Line: "You could've robbed banks, sold dope, stole your grandmother's pension check, and none of us would have minded. But shaving points off a football game? Man, that's un-American."
36. BLADE 1998
In a steel-cage death match between Blade and Wolverine, the smart money would be on Wesley the Vampire Slayer, the half-undead guy with the silver sword. This gothic gorefest is still the best attempt yet to duplicate the flamboyant dynamism of hard-action comic book mayhem on the big screen. Mr. Snipes always strikes the perfect heroic pose.
Key Scene: The grisly vampire nightclub episode.
Best Line: "Crosses and water don't do dick, so forget what you saw in the movies."
37. STRIPES 1981
What a relief! Shrugging off the antimilitary guilt of the post-Vietnam era, goof-off turned enlisted man Bill Murray tells sarcastic slackers it's cool to kick ass and wave the flag again. Along with Meatballs this may be Murray's most irresistible comedy. Plus, it's got John Candy mud-wrestling.
Key Scene: Costar Harold Ramis teaching his ESL class to sing "Da Doo Run Run."
Best Line: "Any of you guys call me Francis, and I'll kill ya."
38. NORTH DALLAS FORTY 1979
One of the toughest, funniest movies ever made about the big business of pro sports, with a surprisingly moving subplot about friendship and betrayal. Nick Nolte is a broken-down hulk of a wide receiver, bent and twisted by injuries, who continues in spite of the blinding pain.
Key Scene: Two players are goaded into a racially charged fistfight to get their blood up for a big game.
Best Line: "I love your legs. They got your feet at one end and your pussy at the other."
39. THE UNTOUCHABLES 1987
Hollywood's version of the guy trifecta -- Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, and Kevin Costner -- join forces in Prohibition-era Chicago to retell the story of lawman Elliot Ness and mobster Al Capone. Another tough guy, Chicagoan David Mamet, wrote the script, and his dialogue crackles and pops like a tommy gun.
Key Scene: The train station shootout, with a baby carriage right out of Battleship Potemkin.
Best Line: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way. And that's how you get Capone."
40. THE GREAT ESCAPE 1963
This true tale of Allied POWs outfoxing their German captors offers the irreplaceable pleasure of watching some top actors (James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and above all Steve McQueen) exhibit unflappable coolness under pressure. The no-sweat heroism practiced here by gallant Brits and laconic Yanks is a refreshing alternative to the head-banging bluster of contemporary action films.
Key Scene: McQueen in solitary, bouncing that baseball.
Best Line: "It is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape."
41. THE THREE STOOGES
Stooge-o-philia came out of the closet when Mel Gibson adopted their trademark gestures in Lethal Weapon. Spider-Man director Sam Raimi is another key aficionado. These men know something that many nonfans (and all women) do not: The dumber and more violent it gets, the funnier it is. Stooge fans can now rejoice that practically the entire oeuvre is out on DVD.
Key Scene: The Stooges fast asleep, collaborating on a syncopated snore.
Best Line: "I'd knock your brains out if you had any!"
42. THE HUSTLER 1961
Hot-wired young pool shark Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) cares so much about playing the game with dash and flair that he sets himself up for defeat at the hands of a cool, calculating bottom-liner: Jackie Gleason as the mythical monster Minnesota Fats, a sort of pool-hall killer whale. Fast Eddie would be dismissed as a sap and a loser in any modern big-studio story meeting, but it's still a lovely dream: a celebration of the kind of high-minded code of values that hardly anybody lives by anymore.
Key Scene: Eddie pouring out his heart to girlfriend Piper Laurie; it's Paul Newman's "I coulda been a contender" speech, as intense as Brando's but less mannered.
Best Line: "Even if you beat me, I'm still the best."
43. SLAP SHOT 1977
The perfect movie for those of us who watch hockey only for the fights. The misfits in a bush league team finally start winning only when they knuckle down and start playing dirty. The cynicism never seems to rub off on Paul Newman, who, as the team's coach, manages to remain sympathetic even when he's instituting a bonus system that rewards acts of violence on a sliding scale.
Key Scene: Michael Ontkean's on-ice strip tease.
Best Line: "I may be bald, but at least I'm not chickenshit."
44. THE FRENCH CONNECTION 1971
Famous for its great car-against-train chase sequence, this fact-based police procedural used the hero's viciousness to jack up the suspense. You're never sure when narcotics detective Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is going to pistol whip a suspect or drop a casual racial slur.
Key Scene: The chase was essentially improvised, executed pedal-to-the-metal without permits.
Best Line: "All right, Popeye's here!"
45. OFFICE SPACE 1999
Seething with frustration at his life in fluorescent-lit cubicles, a sarcastic smart guy has himself hypnotized into a state of blissed-out recklessness. The only live-action feature by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head, this is the sort of movie that in its dialog and even in its tone and editing sums up the attitudes of way too many office workers. Guys who love it fantasize about tying their boss to a chair and forcing him to watch it.
Key Scene: Making copies.
Best Line: "It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care."
46.
EASY RIDER 1969
With this low-budget road movie Peter Fonda and first-time director and costar Dennis Hopper shrewdly smuggled their brand of hippie hedonism into the pop mainstream. Hollywood was never the same. The film pioneered the use of wall-to-wall rock hits on its soundtrack and features a breakout performance by a B-movie veteran named Jack Nicholson, who took a small role as a boozy Southern lawyer and ran with it.
Key Scene: Nicholson's first joint, around the campfire.
Best Line: "We blew it."
47. DAZED AND CONFUSED 1993
For a generation of guys who graduated from suburban high schools in the late eighties and nineties, Richard Linklater's pot-smoking, muscle car-driving teen saga is a cultural touchstone. Matthew McConaughey, as an aging loser who can't let go of his glory days, steals the show.
Key Scene: Ben Affleck's bully gets his comeuppance.
Best Line: "That's what I like about these high school girls. I keep getting older; they stay the same age."
48. THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI 1957
Who can forget the column of whistling British POWs marching off to build that bridge? Or Alec Guinness's startled expression when he realizes that the Allied commandos, led by William Holden, want to blow it up? Director David Lean structured this war epic like a suspense picture: The stiff-upper-lipped POWs help the Japanese construct a strategically crucial bridge, while the commando team creeps through the jungle on a mission to destroy it.
Key Scene: Holden blows the bridge.
Best Line: "The fact is, what we're doing could be construed as -- forgive me, sir -- collaboration with the enemy."
49. COOL HAND LUKE 1967
A raunchy, violent, crudely humorous melodrama in which a colorful assortment of grinning redneck thugs are brutalized in a Southern prison camp. Paul Newman heads a memorable cast of sweat-stained freakazoids: George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker. In the sixties some viewers saw the camp as a savage metaphor for a corrupt, repressive society. What were they smoking?
Key Scene: Eating those eggs.
Best Line: "What we got here is a failure to communicate."
50. FLETCH 1985
Chevy Chase's smirky contempt for everything decent is a welcome tonic here. While investigating a murder he makes fools of an endless series of unsuspecting jerks. He also bags the foxy Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, whose hyphenated name is still mentioned in hushed and reverent tones wherever video geeks congregate.
Key Scene: Mattress police.
Best Line: "If you shoot me you're liable to lose a lot of those humanitarian awards."
https://www.filmsite.org/guyfilms.html
The Vietnam era's All Quiet on the Western Front captures the bone-deep hopelessness of being on the front lines of a lost cause. Oliver Stone's Oscar winner is sometimes overblown and self-important, but the emotional center is where it's always been in great war pictures: in the life-and-death bonds forged between individuals under fire.
Key Scene: Torching a village to the Adagio for Strings.
Best Line: "We've been kicking other peoples' asses for so long I figure it's time we got ours kicked."
33. ANIMAL HOUSE 1978
This smash-hit, pig-out, anarchy-loving comedy didn't so much reverse the post-sixties antifraternity trend as take it to the next level, focusing on a guerrilla enclave of losers and geeks who trash the system from within. It's either the first flatulent trumpet blast of the spring break generation or a profound look back at the essence of sixties politics. Either way, it's still the funniest college flick ever.
Key Scene: John Belushi kisses off phony folk singers once and for all by smashing one's guitar.
Best Line: "I'm a zit!"
34. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY 1966
Sergio Leone cooks up the ultimate spaghetti western, so tickled by its own sun-baked amorality that we have to laugh. Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and a cackling Eli Wallach inventively double-cross each other for a chest of Confederate gold. Rent or buy only the restored director's cut DVD, which reinstates the film's narrative sweep.
Key Scene: The three men's final showdown in the cemetery: the definitive Mexican standoff.
Best Line: "When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk."
35. THE LONGEST YARD 1974
The best football-in-prison movie ever. Bone-crushing game sequences play as slapstick, and Burt Reynolds is perfect as the disgraced former pro quarterback, jailed for a point-shaving scandal and redeemed by leading a squad of convicts against a team of brutal guards.
Key Scene: Burt's "Gipper" speech.
Best Line: "You could've robbed banks, sold dope, stole your grandmother's pension check, and none of us would have minded. But shaving points off a football game? Man, that's un-American."
36. BLADE 1998
In a steel-cage death match between Blade and Wolverine, the smart money would be on Wesley the Vampire Slayer, the half-undead guy with the silver sword. This gothic gorefest is still the best attempt yet to duplicate the flamboyant dynamism of hard-action comic book mayhem on the big screen. Mr. Snipes always strikes the perfect heroic pose.
Key Scene: The grisly vampire nightclub episode.
Best Line: "Crosses and water don't do dick, so forget what you saw in the movies."
37. STRIPES 1981
What a relief! Shrugging off the antimilitary guilt of the post-Vietnam era, goof-off turned enlisted man Bill Murray tells sarcastic slackers it's cool to kick ass and wave the flag again. Along with Meatballs this may be Murray's most irresistible comedy. Plus, it's got John Candy mud-wrestling.
Key Scene: Costar Harold Ramis teaching his ESL class to sing "Da Doo Run Run."
Best Line: "Any of you guys call me Francis, and I'll kill ya."
38. NORTH DALLAS FORTY 1979
One of the toughest, funniest movies ever made about the big business of pro sports, with a surprisingly moving subplot about friendship and betrayal. Nick Nolte is a broken-down hulk of a wide receiver, bent and twisted by injuries, who continues in spite of the blinding pain.
Key Scene: Two players are goaded into a racially charged fistfight to get their blood up for a big game.
Best Line: "I love your legs. They got your feet at one end and your pussy at the other."
39. THE UNTOUCHABLES 1987
Hollywood's version of the guy trifecta -- Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, and Kevin Costner -- join forces in Prohibition-era Chicago to retell the story of lawman Elliot Ness and mobster Al Capone. Another tough guy, Chicagoan David Mamet, wrote the script, and his dialogue crackles and pops like a tommy gun.
Key Scene: The train station shootout, with a baby carriage right out of Battleship Potemkin.
Best Line: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way. And that's how you get Capone."
40. THE GREAT ESCAPE 1963
This true tale of Allied POWs outfoxing their German captors offers the irreplaceable pleasure of watching some top actors (James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and above all Steve McQueen) exhibit unflappable coolness under pressure. The no-sweat heroism practiced here by gallant Brits and laconic Yanks is a refreshing alternative to the head-banging bluster of contemporary action films.
Key Scene: McQueen in solitary, bouncing that baseball.
Best Line: "It is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape."
41. THE THREE STOOGES
Stooge-o-philia came out of the closet when Mel Gibson adopted their trademark gestures in Lethal Weapon. Spider-Man director Sam Raimi is another key aficionado. These men know something that many nonfans (and all women) do not: The dumber and more violent it gets, the funnier it is. Stooge fans can now rejoice that practically the entire oeuvre is out on DVD.
Key Scene: The Stooges fast asleep, collaborating on a syncopated snore.
Best Line: "I'd knock your brains out if you had any!"
42. THE HUSTLER 1961
Hot-wired young pool shark Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) cares so much about playing the game with dash and flair that he sets himself up for defeat at the hands of a cool, calculating bottom-liner: Jackie Gleason as the mythical monster Minnesota Fats, a sort of pool-hall killer whale. Fast Eddie would be dismissed as a sap and a loser in any modern big-studio story meeting, but it's still a lovely dream: a celebration of the kind of high-minded code of values that hardly anybody lives by anymore.
Key Scene: Eddie pouring out his heart to girlfriend Piper Laurie; it's Paul Newman's "I coulda been a contender" speech, as intense as Brando's but less mannered.
Best Line: "Even if you beat me, I'm still the best."
43. SLAP SHOT 1977
The perfect movie for those of us who watch hockey only for the fights. The misfits in a bush league team finally start winning only when they knuckle down and start playing dirty. The cynicism never seems to rub off on Paul Newman, who, as the team's coach, manages to remain sympathetic even when he's instituting a bonus system that rewards acts of violence on a sliding scale.
Key Scene: Michael Ontkean's on-ice strip tease.
Best Line: "I may be bald, but at least I'm not chickenshit."
44. THE FRENCH CONNECTION 1971
Famous for its great car-against-train chase sequence, this fact-based police procedural used the hero's viciousness to jack up the suspense. You're never sure when narcotics detective Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is going to pistol whip a suspect or drop a casual racial slur.
Key Scene: The chase was essentially improvised, executed pedal-to-the-metal without permits.
Best Line: "All right, Popeye's here!"
45. OFFICE SPACE 1999
Seething with frustration at his life in fluorescent-lit cubicles, a sarcastic smart guy has himself hypnotized into a state of blissed-out recklessness. The only live-action feature by Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-head, this is the sort of movie that in its dialog and even in its tone and editing sums up the attitudes of way too many office workers. Guys who love it fantasize about tying their boss to a chair and forcing him to watch it.
Key Scene: Making copies.
Best Line: "It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care."
46.
EASY RIDER 1969With this low-budget road movie Peter Fonda and first-time director and costar Dennis Hopper shrewdly smuggled their brand of hippie hedonism into the pop mainstream. Hollywood was never the same. The film pioneered the use of wall-to-wall rock hits on its soundtrack and features a breakout performance by a B-movie veteran named Jack Nicholson, who took a small role as a boozy Southern lawyer and ran with it.
Key Scene: Nicholson's first joint, around the campfire.
Best Line: "We blew it."
47. DAZED AND CONFUSED 1993
For a generation of guys who graduated from suburban high schools in the late eighties and nineties, Richard Linklater's pot-smoking, muscle car-driving teen saga is a cultural touchstone. Matthew McConaughey, as an aging loser who can't let go of his glory days, steals the show.
Key Scene: Ben Affleck's bully gets his comeuppance.
Best Line: "That's what I like about these high school girls. I keep getting older; they stay the same age."
48.
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI 1957Who can forget the column of whistling British POWs marching off to build that bridge? Or Alec Guinness's startled expression when he realizes that the Allied commandos, led by William Holden, want to blow it up? Director David Lean structured this war epic like a suspense picture: The stiff-upper-lipped POWs help the Japanese construct a strategically crucial bridge, while the commando team creeps through the jungle on a mission to destroy it.
Key Scene: Holden blows the bridge.
Best Line: "The fact is, what we're doing could be construed as -- forgive me, sir -- collaboration with the enemy."
49. COOL HAND LUKE 1967
A raunchy, violent, crudely humorous melodrama in which a colorful assortment of grinning redneck thugs are brutalized in a Southern prison camp. Paul Newman heads a memorable cast of sweat-stained freakazoids: George Kennedy, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Joe Don Baker. In the sixties some viewers saw the camp as a savage metaphor for a corrupt, repressive society. What were they smoking?
Key Scene: Eating those eggs.
Best Line: "What we got here is a failure to communicate."
50. FLETCH 1985
Chevy Chase's smirky contempt for everything decent is a welcome tonic here. While investigating a murder he makes fools of an endless series of unsuspecting jerks. He also bags the foxy Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, whose hyphenated name is still mentioned in hushed and reverent tones wherever video geeks congregate.
Key Scene: Mattress police.
Best Line: "If you shoot me you're liable to lose a lot of those humanitarian awards."
https://www.filmsite.org/guyfilms.html
