Though we've left out some sentimental choices — cry us a river over "Brian's Song" another time — we're confident that you'll discover some new favorites
Paul Newman plays Reggie Dunlop, the player-coach of the Charleston Chiefs, in George Roy Hill’s (The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)Slap Shot. Both Dunlop and his team have seen better days: the Chiefs can’t buy a win, and his marriage seems to be in the sin bin. What to do? Bring in a trio of thuggish, bespectacled brothers (Jeff and Steve Carlson and David Hanson) who don’t play nice on the ice, that’s what. Slap Shot fully justifies its R rating, with Newman and company filling the air with profanity as vulgar as their playing style. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd based the nasty language on tape recordings her brother (a minor-league hockey player for the Johnstown Jets who served as the film’s technical adviser) made while in the locker room and on his team bus.
In the assaulting, astonishing sound-and-light show that Matrix brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski based on the ’60s Japanese animated TV series Mach GoGoGo, Pops Racer (John Goodman) is a mechanic turned car designer, Mom (Susan Sarandon) is the family’s emotional center and a font of dewy wisdom, older brother Rex (Scott Porter) is a champion racer who disappears after a car crash, and young Speed (Emile Hirsch) is the tyro driver ready to win the big rallies against formidable drivers and a rigged system. The men in the Racer clan could be the garage geeks who paved Silicon Valley with cybergold or Hollywood’s visual-effects alchemists, translating their fantasies into pixels to create gorgeous movies like these. Speed Racer is a hymn to practical ingenuity and manual dexterity, to real American innovators like Edison and Ford, Steve Wozniak and Dale Earnhardt — to the grease monkey as genius.
The entire film exists in another, nether, Neverland where standard narrative and visual decisions are dismissed as way too confining. In the big races, no actual cars were used; the magnificent set pieces are almost totally animated. The races aren’t just 200 miles of left turns; the tracks are designed as crazy theme-park rides, with 360-degree loops, chasm-wide broken tracks, roads that wind around mountains and across rivers. Here, the texture is the text, and it’s deliriously dense, with more than 2,000 effects shots, often layered on top of one another. More than the story of the Racer family, Speed Racer is the visual autobiography of the Wachowskis and their pit crew of computer-nerd Einsteins, using the tools of their trade to transform the movie medium. The effect, if you get into it, is more than a store window of technology. It is, as Mom says of Speed’s mastery behind the wheel, “inspiring, and beautiful, and everything art should be.”
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
