0001. Rushmore

– I love Max Fischer. He spoke to me in a way few other characters ever have. His ability to flourish and function solely inside a school system, with almost total disregard for academia is inspired. The Max Fischer Players are a genius creation and his relationship with his father, his headmaster, Miss Cross and Bill Murray's ticking time bomb of self-loathing are beautifully orchestrated by writers Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. This was the first Anderson film I saw and I still regard it as his best work. His shot composition, art direction and musical choices are phenomenal, his sense of humor deadpan, dry and biting and the story hilarious and deeply heartfelt. It almost makes me want to go back to school. Almost.


0010. Time Bandits

– Without doubt my favorite kids movie and one of the first films to draw me into a deeper appreciation of Cinema. Toss a ten-year-old boy in with a group of marauding time traveling midgets and have them run amok through history, robbing everybody blind, from Robin Hood to Napoleon to Agamemnon, with both God and the Devil on their tail. Strain the whole thing through the twisted brain of Terry Gilliam, throw Sean Connery, Ian Holm, John Cleese, David Warner, Michael Palin, Jim Broadbent, Ralph Richardson and R2D2 into the mix and you have the ultimate fantasy adventure, epic in scale and crammed full of genuine scares and grand excitement. Plus, the dog that Benson is turned into by the Evil Genius is the exact same breed and colour as my beloved pooch from back in the day. RIP, Teddy.


0011. Hard Boiled

– My first and still favorite Hong Kong movie, so much so that when I moved to the city many years later, one of the first things I did was buy a bird in a dome-shaped cage and call him Tequila. Chow Yun Fat is at his most badass here as the cop out for revenge after his partner is killed during an epic teahouse shootout. The film generated a thousand iconic images now synonymous with HK Cinema, from sliding down a banister two guns a-blazing to characters facing off with pistols at each other's forehead, to the climactic shot of Chow clutching a newborn baby in one hand, a pump action shotgun in the other. Neither Woo nor his leading man have come close to recapturing the magic they created here, but back in their heyday they were both untouchable. The Killer is awesome – but for me Hard Boiled marks the career highpoint for both of them.


0100. Withnail & I

– When I was at school, everybody in my year knew every line in this film and it was oft quoted at high volume down hallways, particularly lines involving colorful language, which is almost the whole script. We loved it so much we actually adapted it for the stage and performed three sell-out nights, most likely illegally (I played Uncle Monty). The thrill of smoking, swearing and in some instances, getting naked, in front of the whole school and faculty was as much the point of the exercise as paying tribute to Bruce Robinson's classic comedy. Richard E. Grant's Withnail is perhaps the finest drunk in the history of Cinema. His jaunt into the countryside with fellow out-of-work actor Marwood (Paul McGann) leads them to encounter poachers, randy bulls, rampaging aristocratic homosexuals and the Great British Weather, all to disastrous and hilarious effect. The only film to inspire a drinking game that, if played correctly, will kill you.


0101. The Wild Bunch

– This is a film that regularly loses its place in my "favorites" list to The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, but today Sam Peckinpah's bloody bullet ballet is the lucky one. A great "Death of the Wild West" movie, William Holden's band of pension-eligible bandits are being left behind as the country races forward into the 20th Century, and they know it. But these boys have been up to no good for so long they don't know how to do anything else, nor have much interest in learning. So when they piss of a Mexican general and one of their number is kidnapped, these good ole boys see only one fate ahead of them.
Brimming with machismo, camaraderie and counter-culture cool, The Wild Bunch spits on the boots of Ford and Leone, delivering a film as intelligent and allegorical as it is simply a bunch of badasses out for one final hoo-har.


0110. An American Werewolf in London

– Another film in which crappy British weather plays an integral part, John Landis here creates the ultimate horror-comedy that manages to actually be both funny and scary when it means to be. Whether it's the astounding Rick Baker make-up effects, the brilliant use of moon-related music, the rotting corpse of Griffin Dunne or the almost angelic beauty of Jenny Agutter, this film has it all. On the brink of being unnecessarily remade (when simply doing another inferior sequel would have sufficed), it would be a lie to say the film hasn't dated, but its picture postcard celebration of punk-era London is as delightful as its murderous SS zombie troopers are terrifying. The unwelcoming locals of The Slaughtered Lamb send two poor American backpackers to their doom when they dare set foot in their pub and interrupt their darts game. "You made me miss!"


0111. Aliens

– After watching both Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's follow-up again last week for the countless time, it is clearer than ever before that Cameron's bombastic bug hunt is far and away the better film. That is not to say Alien is lacking, just that even in its greatest moments of tension and suspense, there was no way of predicting how this fantastical universe would be exploded into all out war. A reluctant highly traumatized heroine and a platoon of cocky, arrogant and achingly ill-prepared grunts jump headlong into the abyss, swarming with ultimate killing machines. As much a tale of female empowerment and motherhood as it is about US foreign policy, the dialogue remains instantly quotable and the characterization beautiful. All horror films take note – this is how you develop a rag tag bunch of misfits you are about to kill off, representing numerous demographics while actually convincing the audience to care about them. Fingers crossed for Avatar – Cameron has been away for far too long.


1000. Rashomon

– As is so often the case with me, the first film by a particular director has a tendency to remain my favourite. Being the unabashed Criterion addict that I am, I have steadily worked my way through almost Kurosawa's entire catalogue of films, a treasure trove of numerous masterpieces. But something about Rashomon lingers far longer than the others. It could be Kazuo Miyagawa's beautiful cinematography, the ingenious multi-perspective story-telling, the moral questions it raises about truth, trust and justice or the fabulous performances by Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. It's quite possibly a combination of all of these combined with a damn good story that unveils aspects of Japanese culture that were quite alien to a young lad growing up in the home counties of South East England. What I am relieved to discover is that many years later, after nearly a decade living in Asia it still remains one of my all-time favourite films, proving to me at least that it was Kurosawa's talent that had bewitched me and the genius of the film, rather than it simply being my first taste of something "exotic."