Six of the Best... Pixar Features

With the recent release of the, lets be honest, disappointing Monsters University, I thought it was a good time to bring you my Six of the Best… Pixar Features. Disney Pixar has been my favourite film studio for about five or six years, since it suddenly dawned on me that all of the great animation I was seeing was from the same imaginative studio. I’ll make it clear right now that this list has one major fault and that is that of fourteen feature films to date, I’ve only seen twelve. The ones I’m missing are Monsters. Inc and Cars 2. I fully expect from what I’ve read that one of those films would be in this list. I’m also pretty sure that one of them would be absent. So, just to clarify, I except that this list is perhaps not a true reflection of the studio’s output but I’ve seen the other films at least once and in some cases several times.

For a change, this list won’t just be a list of six but I’ll order them. My favourite film will be at number one (as ordering is traditionally written). So without further ado, here are my personal Six of the Best… Pixar Features.

Six of the Best... Actors My Girfriend Wishes I Was

Last week I had a lot of fun researching for my Six of the Best... Most Beautiful Actresses feature and decided that this week I'd give their male counterparts a look in. I turned to my girlfriend who jumped at the chance to spend all week perusing Google images for sexy actors. Although I cheated and included twelve on my list, as this week's choices are all current actors, I limited her to just the usual six. From a list of what seemed like several hundred she finally managed to settle on six late last night. At least I thought she had. I woke up this morning with an email from her (we live together by the way) which asked for a last minute substitution. I shouldn't be surprised as all week I've heard shouts of "Oh, what about Fassbender?!" "Ummm.... James Franco. Oooh" and "Mark Ruffalo, MARK RUFFALO!" emanating from her direction. So after a last minute change (sorry Jared Leto) here is a list of hot actors according to my girlfriend, who obviously must have very good taste in men. Those of you who know me will be able to see the similarities between these men and myself and for anyone who hasn't seen what I look like, imagine an amalgamation of these six actors and put a beard on them.

Six of the Best... Most Beautiful Actresses

Seven weeks. That's all it took for this feature to get onto the topic of sexy ladies. If I'm honest, I'm surprised that I managed to hold out for as long as I did. This week's topic has been the most fun to research but the most difficult to decide on so far. Even up to a couple of minutes before I started writing there was a last minute change (sorry Oona) and I've decided to break the rules slightly because of my indecisiveness/perviness. Instead of the usual six I've chosen twelve and in a vain attempt to quantify the decision besides greediness, I've decided to feature six current and six former actresses. I brand myself on reviewing one hundred years of film so it would only be right. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. For fear of losing my female readers who may think (rightly) that I'm just using this feature as an excuse to look at pretty ladies, next week's list will redress the balance and feature Six of the Best... Actors my Girlfriend Wishes I Was. Her six currently also stands at twelve and there are lots of 'ooh' 'ahh' and 'yummy' noises coming from her direction whenever I bring up the topic. So make sure you come back next week for the actors but now, here are Six (Twelve) of the Best... Most Beautiful Actresses, beginning with those still working.

Six of the Best... Films Without Oscars

For better or for worse, the Academy Awards are at the pinnacle of film recognition in the English speaking world. Since 1927, awards have been handed out to hundreds of movies, many deserving, some less so. If you look down the list of winners you’ll find some of the best films of all time. Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Casablanca all won Oscars, though with just seven between them, perhaps not as many as you’d have expected. Each year there are films which are overlooked by the Academy and this week I’m going to be looking at Six of the Best… Films without Oscars, the films which didn’t receive a single one. In other words, this is a list of films which have one fewer Oscar than How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Pearl Harbor. So here they are; six films without Academy Awards.

Six of the Best... Films about Film

Many art forms dip into the self-referential. From songs about songs to paintings depicting the artist painting that particular work, art is always willing to look at itself. Films are no different. From the very earliest cinematic experiments, movies drew inspiration from or indeed focused entirely on the filmmaking process. Even at the turn of the last century, filmmakers were experimenting with the ideas of putting film on film. The Big Swallow is a 1901 surrealist short in which a man steps closer and closer to the camera before swallowing it whole. Since then films have looked at the cameraman’s craft (Man With a Movie Camera – 1929), the screenwriting process (Adaptation – 2002), Sound Design (Berbarian Sound Studio - 2012) and in some movies, characters even come to recognise their own fictional existence (Stranger than Fiction – 2006). So without further ado, here is my list of Six of the Best… Films about Film.

1. Cinema Paradiso – 1988

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Italian masterpiece features a middle aged film director returning to his small Sicilian village for the first time in decades in order to attend the funeral of his friend and mentor. The movie then takes us forward from the director’s earliest years until adulthood through his love of the motion picture. I’ve never seen adoration of cinema so beautifully and overtly displayed before and the movie features clips of many famous and less so well known movies from the silent era forwards. The local cinema becomes the beating heart of the town and brings joy to many in the post war depression that hit the country hard. The process of projection is lovingly demonstrated and the movie’s final scene is perhaps the most beautiful I’ve ever seen and contains some of the most breathtaking images in all cinema history.

Six of the Best... First Films

Some film directors are able to maintain success over several decades and get bums on seats or haul awards for almost every film. A select few are able to do both. Whether successful or not, every director has to start somewhere. Steven Spielberg started promisingly with Duel in 1971 and Martin Scorsese’s debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door has its charms but neither film set the world alight. Some director’s though burst onto the scene with critically acclaimed works in what is their debut feature. With often minimal experience, little support and tight budgets, several directors have created debut films which astound audiences and critics alike. Here are Six of the Best…

1. Quentin Tarantino – Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Although he had shot the amateur My Best Friend’s Birthday in the mid to late 1980s, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was his first real feature. A dialogue driven heist movie, the film was a hit on its initial release and has since gained cult status. Many of the tropes that have come to define the director’s career are evident in the movie and a lot of people, including myself, still consider it amongst his best work. Its bold, violent approach set it apart from the action heavy thrillers of the time and an impeccably neat script not only impressed audiences but also the actor Harvey Keitel who liked it so much that he co-funded, produced and agreed to star in the movie. The direction is slightly more conventional than in his later work but is still recognisably ‘Tarantino’ with long, slow dialogue heavy scenes interspersed with frantic action and innovative camera movement. Reservoir Dogs was released independent of the major studios and as such it afforded the director the freedom rarely found in modern cinema to follow his ideas through to completion unmolested.

Six of the Best... Films I Should Like More But Don't

How many times have you faced someone whose mouth is agape before the words “You don’t like…?” are shot from their mouth, roaring towards your opinions like a bullet to the side of a large barn door. You attempt to justify your opinion but you get a shake of the head in return. After a while you begin to make concessions. You stutter that “It’s not as bad as…” or “I didn’t hate it.” But it’s no good. That person now looks at you like you are something brown and stinky on the bottom of their shoe. I get this look often and not just because of my personality. Just as there are films which you may be embarrassed to like, there are others which you are embarrassed that you don’t like. While I don’t dislike any of the films below, I don’t like them as much as ‘society’ tells me I should. I expect ‘society’ will now also hate me for the opinions I’m about to express below, but anyway here are Six of the Best Films I Should Like More But Don’t.

Six of the Best... Actors Who Died Too Young

Highlander, Dorian Gray, Interview with a Vampire… There are plenty of movies that feature themes of eternal youth or everlasting life but unfortunately they’re fantasy. People are born, they live and then they die. Although we can extend the middle part of that previous sentence through medicine, we can’t remove the final part altogether. While many of us will live to reach a ripe old age,  grumpily hating the world that has left us behind, sadly some people die in their prime. In this week’s Six of the Best I’m looking at six of the best actors who died too young. Although these actors died in their heyday or at the peak of their careers, their death has in many cases bought them an almost everlasting, close to immortal status which their names may have lacked had they lived to grow old, thus granting eternal youth. So here are Six of the Best… Actors Who Died Too Young. Let me know who you would have included.

1. Rudolph Vantentino. (Died in 1926 – aged 31)

The world has largely forgotten cinema’s first male sex symbol. The Italian born actor appeared in close to forty films between 1914 and 1926 including The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921. His death at the age of thirty-one caused mass hysteria among his female fans to whom he was affectionately known as the ‘Latin Lover’. Valentino’s life has been the subject of several films but his popularity has been overshadowed by those whose careers continued on into the late 20s and early sound era.

Six of the Best... Marvel Films

Marvel Studios have been responsible for creating some of the biggest box office draws in recent years with their variety of super hero movies taking over from the action movies that preceded them as some of the highest earning films in the world. Beginning as Marvel Films in the early 1990s, the studio originally turned their comic book properties into animated cartoons and with the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men they created popular and long running animated series. The studio began venturing into movies in the late 1990s with co-productions alongside large studios and began going it alone in 2008. Here are Six of the Best…

6. Spider-Man 2 (2004). The best of the Sam Raimi trilogy, Spider-Man 2 contained some decent CGI and great stunt work as well as a deeper, more emotional story than the first movie. It’s funny and the ‘spidey cam’ looks great. It’s just a shame that Raimi went on to ruin all the good work in his third movie.