My top 10: quarantine watches

Although I’ve been lucky enough to work throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, like the rest of America, I’ve spent a lot of time in my house. And because I still haven’t become a home improvement expert (or a guy with any knowledge of home improvement, whatsoever), I don’t have a long list of projects to finally cross off of my list.

Nonetheless, I have started working out again (we’ll see how long it lasts), and I’ve done what I usually do for fun: played my guitar, read books and watched movies in an attempt to expand my cultural horizons beyond arguing strictly about sports and politics.

I’ve been slacking on writing columns lately, so I figured a great way to get back on the horse would be do one of my infamous top 10 lists, this one ranking some of the best films I’ve seen during quarantine. I know the readership of the Register tends to skew older, so don’t worry: it ranges from the ‘50s and ‘60s to the last decade or so.

Feel free to send me an e-mail with comments, insults or any other words you’d like to share. And as always, stay healthy and safe during this crazy time.

(Editor’s note: for the sake of clarity, “quarantine” is being designated as March 20 and on. Also, this is a list for films only, so TV series are not eligible. Sorry, “Tiger King.”)

10. Buffalo ’66 (1998)- A truly oddball, singular offbeat comedy-drama from actor-director Vincent Gallo, “Buffalo ‘66” follows an ex-convict’s bizarre journey from prison release back to his parents’ house and includes a chance meeting with an unsuspecting young woman (Christina Ricci) who comes to play a central role in the remainder of the film. With echoes of “The Big Lebowski” and last year’s Adam Sandler masterpiece “Uncut Gems,” it covers sports betting, bowling, loneliness and a host of other topics while remaining simultaneously unsettling and moving. It’s a rare balance, but Gallo somehow manages to pull it off.  

9. The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)- Nine years ago, the McConaissance took root relatively inauspiciously when the man previously condemned to the dustbin of romantic comedies with Kate Hudson and Sarah Jessica Parker played a sleek LA attorney who runs his law office out of his car and meets with the members of a biker gang led by Trace Adkins periodically because he’s just that cool!

Now, it feels as if that wonderful creative period in McConaughey’s life may be nearing its end (the first season of “True Detective” and “Mud” are still the highlights, in my view), but we’ll always have that 2011 to 2015 period. And “The Lincoln Lawyer,” an adaptation of a novel by Bosch author Michael Connelly, made it all possible. At least we’ve still got the commercials.

The feeling stays.

8. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)- Sometimes, we all just need a good laugh. This deceptively smart comedy features a star making performance from then 10-year-old Abigail Breslin and a dazzling cast of comedic actors including Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin and Paul Dano just a year before he established himself as a big serious actor with his turn in “There Will Be Blood.”

The story, which follows a family of losers making a hopeless journey across the southwest to attend a beauty pageant (and hits a highly inconvenient snag along the way), alludes to both The Grapes of Wrath and As I Lay Dying while still aiming its humor at a mass audience, and it’s one of the few truly great comedies of the last 15 years. Kellie recommended it because it’s one of her all-time favorites, and I had inexplicably never seen it. Big oversight on my part.

7. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)/North by Northwest (1959)- Like any human being who’s ever taken an interest in film and film history, I got obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock sometime late last year. Once again, I credit Kellie for turning me on to “The Birds,” and from there, I crossed off some of the obvious classics like “Vertigo,” which is probably one of the five greatest movies of all time, and “Psycho,” quite possibly the single most influential film ever created.

“North by Northwest” more or less launched the spy/espionage genre that James Bond, Ethan Hunt and Jack Ryan would spend their careers attempting to imitate, and “Shadow of a Doubt” remained the director’s favorite of his own works for most of his life. Joseph Cotten’s unfathomably creepy turn as Uncle Charlie—fresh off of “Citizen Kane”— still stands out as one of the great performances of any era. Is he a serial killer, or isn’t he? Well, it’s a Hitchcock movie. Take a wild guess.

6. Enemy of the State (1998)- The late Tony Scott was rarely remembered as a visionary or much more than a schlocky action director best known for “Top Gun,” but his 1998 National Security Agency thriller “Enemy of the State,” starring a young Will Smith and the legendary Gene Hackman in a sly nod to his earlier role in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation,” is one of the true masterpieces of late ‘90s megabudget cinema.

Equally noted for its incredible cast (Jon Voight, Jason Robards, Lisa Bonet, Regina King, Jack Black, Seth Green, Barry Pepper and Scott Caan all play supporting roles) and its strange prescience with regard to 9/11 and the Patriot Act, “Enemy of the State” perfectly blends popcorn filmmaking with a thinking man’s lament on the loss of privacy and government overreach in the digital age.

5. Red Rock West (1993)- Nicolas Cage is currently in the process of something resembling the McConaissance with recent acclaim for his performances in “Mandy” and “The Color Out of Space” and the news that he’ll be playing American folk hero Joe Exotic in a scripted “Tiger King” television series. He was once the toast of Hollywood from the late ‘80s through the mid ‘90s when he won a Best Actor Oscar for “Leaving Las Vegas” before becoming the biggest punchline in town with a string of cheesy paycheck roles, off the wall performances and personal debts that necessitated the work.

Still, movies like the 1993 neo-noir “Red Rock West,” featuring supporting turns from the great Dennis Hopper, JT Walsh, Dwight Yoakam and Lara Flynn Boyle, remind us that Cage, the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, was and is a prodigious talent who can pull off pretty much any role if he wants to.

4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)- It honestly feels like a crime that this is only ranked fourth, but when you see the top three, you might understand. Featuring the greatest triple lead performance of all time, John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is the legendary director’s late career masterpiece about the settling of the west, the relationship between intellectuals and tough guys and the conflicting interests of the parties involved in that process.

John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin. Need I say more?

3. Citizen Kane (1941)- I finally crossed “the greatest movie of all time™” off of my list, and, yes, like everyone else, I should’ve seen it way sooner. Remember when guys who ran newspapers were the richest people in the world?

“Citizen Kane” is a great film, but it’s not really worth going into detail about it. There are probably more words written about it than any other movie in history. What could I possibly add?

2. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)- Depending on which generation you belong to, your perspective on what can be considered the greatest World War II film varies wildly, but anyone who’s seen David Lean’s 1957 opus about the building (and subsequent destruction) of a railroad bridge built by British POWs in the middle of an isolated Burmese jungle would almost certainly put it high on the list.

WWII, for a number of reasons, remains our most dramatized and filmed armed conflict, so it’s hard to make anything that stands out or comes off as less than derivative of classics of the genre from “Casablanca” and “Sands of Iwo Jima” all the way up to “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Thin Red Line.”

But from Alec Guinness and William Holden’s masterful lead performances to the lush visual scenery of the filming location in Sri Lanka to the moral conflict at the heart of the story, “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is in a league of its own.

1. The Godfather Part II (1974)- I have a confession: I didn’t love “The Godfather” quite as much as I expected to. Despite the electric combination of Al Pacino, Marlon Brando and James Caan, its over romanticized take on life in the mob and its pernicious influence on plenty of the worst real-life criminals—most notably, the heads of drug cartels—leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth all these years later.

Part II, on the other hand, exceeds the original in every way imaginable, as controversial a take as that may be. This is the grand opera, the portrait of a man who has abandoned any notion of decency or decorum on his way to the top, the story of the degradation of a once proud subculture and the back story on how a family came from nothing and gained everything but managed to lose their souls in the process.

I still haven’t seen Part III, and from what I’m told, I shouldn’t even bother. Why ruin something perfect?