Click images for desktop size: "Baseball" When I was 15 I hated everybody.
Maybe not everybody. I loved my teammates. And the guys on the surf crew. But everybody else I hated. Except for the people who came to the shows, except them and every girl who walked with a twitch in their sashay, especially the ones who leaned against juke boxes and asked me what my favorite song was. I didn't hate them.
I loved my mother.
I guess I really just hated my step-father. Being a kid I let that rage spill over so that most everybody thought I hated everybody else.
Most of you know that my step-father played pro football and he was a drunk. He used some terribly botched knee surgery to justify the drinking. Even without drinking he never liked me.
When he and my mother would go out, when I was a little kid, they'd dump me at a movie theater - double bills. It was great. Even when I was seeing films that were totally inappropriate I had an awesome time. I loved all those movies, the trailers and the cartoons. I didn't understand a lot of them - never had a clue as to what was going on, but I still loved the movie, any movie.

After a lot of foolish deliberation (hey, its better than thinking about my job! Although not as good as playing with a puppy.) my pick as the 5th best movie ever made is:

5) The Unforgiven Clint Eastwood
One thing that gets overlooked is that two of the best films ever made were both based on books by this guy Alan LeMay.
He wasn't a great writer but since John Ford used his book to make "The Searchers" and Eastwood to make this film forty years later, the inability I have to see genius in LeMay's stuff probably says more about me than anything else.
Hollywood has always hated the Western, even as Westerns fueled the empire they treated them as little better than porn.
When Marlon Brando started his own production company he APOLOGIZED that his first film would be a Western ("One Eyed Jacks"). He explained it as he wanted to make real movies but they had to make money first.
Even when the Spaghetti Western was big box office Hollywood sniffed and ignored it. The independents rushed out a few lackluster films . . .
Eastwood and Don Seigal made a couple but they were ignored until the pair bought the Cowboy to the Big City in "Coogan's Bluff" and then finally made the cowboy transmogrification into "Dirty Harry".
After that the western was truly dead, and has been for a few decades. It was courageous of Eastwood to make a film that could have been a career killer. Remember the last quasi western from Hollywood was the terrible "Heaven's Gate" and the brat pack "Young Gun" flics.
Courage in accepting a project doesn't mean much if you don't have the talent to pull it off. Eastwood learned to direct from a master film maker: Don Seigal.
I know Seigal was a genius because he did nothing but make consistently brilliant films. He never moaned about it, complained about studio cuts or budget. He just made beautiful extreme movies.
When the producers cut his movies he didn't moan, he just wouldn't let them put his name on it. No big deal. He always had another story to tell. He never whined about not getting an Oscar, he just continued making better movies than anybody else.

Click images for desktop size: "Chaos Raine" by Hellwolve With his background and Seigal as a friend and mentor its no surprise that Eastwood risked his actor's icon status by playing a film that made him appear as weak craven boob when he was trying to be "good" and a heartless unsympathetic monster when he does his final act of "heroism".
Its a testament to the power of Eastwood's abilities as an actor and a director that he made this pretty loathsome creature both fascinating and identifiable.
The line "Don't you cut up no more whores or I'll come back and kill everyone of you sons a bitches," is hardly commendable and is too brutish to be ironic, but the thrill of it, shouted against the rain while riding a plow horse who in the lightening has become the devil's steed, is the same thrill of watching an unspotted hero fall to the dust firing his gun that holds only two bullets at the two men who mean to kill him. ("Stagecoach")
The actor who got himself elected mayor of Carmel so that kids could eat ice cream on the side walk (very true) knows subtlety and how to use power in personal interactions and in the medium. He forces us to examine the characters we cherish, re-examine ourselves and our place in society.
It starts with Gene Hackman, following a consistently high leveled career with a definitive performance, in a frightening monologue debunking the myths of the west. Debunking them cruelly and carnally, while relishing their more innate savagery of reality as opposed to the safety of myth.
Hackman and Eastwood are the protagonists. Hackman is clearly intended to be the villain but in the film he never kills anyone!
He sets a new high for cruelty and sadism, but his violence is in the communal cause for peace and well being.
His is the brutishness of the cop that we accept and tacitly admire because we value out possessions more than we value people.
Hackman wants to live in peace, be a part of society that shares his peace and well being.
Eastwood lives as a widower with two young children he abandons to their own devices while he goes out on a killing mission. That the mission may result in a better life for them all highlights the bitter failures in Eastwood's life.
Hackman lives in the town he protects, while Eastwood lives far out in the wilderness, his nearest neighbor an old gang member.
Hackman fights for peace and Eastwood is a man in stasis who doesn't know or care for peace. He plans to kill as dispassionately as a soldier.
There are levels of complexity running throughout "The Unforgiven". Deeply etched so that the film becomes an exploration of our own expectations from life. Much more so and more expertly than most "art house" films.
Here in an entertaining movie we are forced to confront, our base nature, the peace we strive for and the world that forces its own tight restrictions upon us. Here the world spins around the two protagonists while not giving an easy answer.
Eastwood wins by killing Hackman. Eastwood has always been "good at killing things".
Hackman points out, correctly, that Eastwood is a low down dirty dog. Eastwood accepts this with no dissent.
Once, during an interview to promote his film "The Gauntlet" Eastwood let his image slip just a little in a most surprising way. When asked about why, in the movie, things like houses and buses were shot into tiny shards while people were merely threatened. Eastwood responded that he was exploring the Lichstenian concept of constructive deconstruction through the anthromorphication of the objects which provide us with our most solid sense of security. A surprising slip of the mask for the laconic star.

Click images for desktop size: "Coyote" Throughout the movie Eastwood is constantly being as truthful as the world permits, and he constantly reminds himself about his struggle to gain and retain his humanity. He tells of his battles to become a human being and the high value he places on his humanity. He tells the story with a sense of pride undiminished. He tells that tale over and over even when cajoled into telling of his gritty exploits shooting down large groups of men who had the drop on him. He blames his previous snakiness and sociopathy on whiskey.
It creates one of the most terrifying moments in movies when Eastwood discovers that Morgan Freeman has been shot and killed and put on display with a mocking sign around his neck.
Against an overtly dramatic sky he takes a bottle and takes a long drink.
He asks for reaffirmation of each sordid detail, punctuates each fact with a long pull of whiskey.
Like in "Frankenstein" Eastwood is forcing us to watch the creation of a monster, and the monster exists because the world exists. And men and society must coexist in an unnatural cohabitation.
Like all great art it is metaphor and simile and reality in one crystal moment. What happens next is inevitable. Society needs monsters in order to have the check and balance so that it not forget its humanity. Then it would sink into a brutal world of peace and a singular idea of well being.
This is a great movie, even on TV. And its fun.

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