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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #357: The long Goodbye

  Sometimes in a detective story the mystery is not half as fun as the detective stuck in the chaos of the story. Philip Marlow is one of those detectives. His name is synonymous with Hollywood noir and in The Long Goodbye (1973), he dives deep into a mystery involving a murder, then a suicide, then a missing person, and eventually a very violent gangster operating in sunny Los Angeles. One thing I love about this version is that this detective loves his cat enough to go buy him food at three o’clock in the morning. Now that is a dedicated pet lover. The late great director Robert Altman starts the action at a slow pace to introduce Marlowe (Eliott Gould) as he wakes up to his hungry cat. Here is a man who falls asleep in his clothes, always the same suit and tie, and is either constantly smoking or lighting a new cigarette. He is a friendly person, nice enough to pick up an item for his neighbours while going out to get cat food. It probably helps that said neighbours are five young
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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #107: An American Werewolf in London

  An American Werewolf in London (1981) is quite the strange beast. This is a werewolf movie from John Landis, director of comedy classics such The Blues Brothers and Trading Places , that is full of gore, gratuitous nudity, tension, and quite a few laughs. The movie’s tone is sometimes inconsistent, switching one minute from horror to self-aware comedy. However, it earns its place in the pantheon of horror thanks to one of the best werewolf transformation scenes courtesy of effects legend Rick Baker. I feel like I watched this movie in the wrong venue and with the wrong frame of mind. This is not a movie to watch by yourself on Tubi for free with commercial breaks. This is a movie to watch on the big screen with a midnight crowd after a few drinks. Some movies require the audience to be quiet, An American Werewolf in London needs an engaged and possibly drunk crowd to laugh at the jokes, the absurdity of the situation, and the bloody kills. Hollywood has a few weekends to fill this ye
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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #20: Blade Runner

  Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is one of those movies that gets more relevant with each passing decade. Set in a (now passed) future in which Los Angeles is overrun with people and pollution, the story focuses on artificial lifeforms clashing with their human creators. As the chase for these lifeforms progresses, writers Hampton Francher and David Peoples imply they may not be so different from the humans chasing them. If this sounds topical in 2024, imagine how relevant it will sound ten years from now. When writing these amateur reviews, I usually try to think back on the first time I watched the movie and what I felt at the time. This is tricky with Blade Runner considering there have been five versions of the film released since the 1980s. I believe the first version I did see on TV was the original theatrical version with the narration to guide the audience since executives thought that was needed. I eventually disagreed and purchased the Final Cut on Blu-Ray to see the st
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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #22: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

  Star Wars . One movie, with a two-word title that was directed by a young director who wanted to do Flash Gordon but couldn’t get the rights. Decades later and that one movie is now retitled A New Hope , is the first chapter in a trilogy, the fourth episode in a saga, and the seed of what is essentially a genre within cinema. For better or for worse, this movie was the equivalent of an Earth-shattering earthquake in Hollywood history. Before 1977 George Lucas was just an up-and-coming director whose career could have ended had this been a failure. Instead, the movie and its sequels made him one of the most known filmmakers in the world, and a whole generation became familiar with words like “lightsaber”, “X-Wing”, and “Wookie”. For some truly hardcore fans, these movies are the equivalent of a gospel, so much so that they will write “Jedi” as their religion of choice. My first dive into the Star Wars universe was as a child, watching the movies on VHS in the 1990s after my parents
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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #23: Back to the Future

  The question “if you had a time machine, what would you do?” has generated a lot of entertaining conversations. The team behind Back to the Future (1985) took that question and added “what if you met your parents when they were young?”. The result is one of the best time travel stories ever made, which catapulted Michael J. Fox to stardom and gave Christopher Lloyd one of his most enduring roles. There were plenty of ways it could have gone wrong, but with this one lightning hit, sending a DeLorean back to the future. Given the film’s relationship with time, when you see it can impact your relationship with the story. I first saw it in the late 1990s, about 15 years after it came out, and about 15 years before Marty McFly would travel to the future in the second movie. For me the 1980s and the 1950s are foreign eras to which I have no emotional connections, but I was still fascinated by the movie’s story of a young man travelling back in time and meeting his parents. It also helped
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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #24: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

  Looking back on the first movie in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings saga, my first thought is that people really need fantasy in their lives. The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, a year when to say the least the news were pretty depressing. An escape to a fantasy land filled with wizards, hobbits, elves, and dwarves engaged in a fight of good versus of evil came at just the right time. You get a certain feeling when you sit in a theater, the lights dim, and you are swept away to the beauty of Middle Earth, via New Zealand. Given the length of Jackson’s movies, it is also a fairly long escape from reality. Prior to sitting down in that theater in 2001, my knowledge of J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy work was fair at best. I believe I had read the books at least once before and has seen the animated movie from the 1980s, but I was no Stephen Colbert. Since watching that first movie my appreciation for Tolkien’s world has grown as I own the extended cuts of every one of the mov
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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #25: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  A “Spaghetti Western” is a strange concept on paper, but if well-executed it makes for one epic movie. Somehow an Italian director managed to get American actors to travel all the way to Italy, shoot in some of the warmest areas in Europe to stage the Old West, and reinvented an American movie genre. Sergio Leone is the director best known for this international collaboration, and Clint Eastwood is the American actor who became an icon for his roles in his movies. Their best collaboration is undoubtedly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967) which boasts one of the best duels of all times. As the title indicates, this is the tale of three characters. The “Good” is Blondie (Eastwood), who is not that good considering he is a bounty hunter scamming the law during the American Civil War. His scheme is to capture the “Ugly”, a vicious criminal named Tuco (Eli Wallach), collect the bounty, release him right before his hanging, then start all over in a different town. “The Ugly” of the
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