*The BKO 100: Annotated - I'm adding review notes for every film on the list of my 100 personal favorite movies ever made, in order of their release.*
The purpose of this Letterboxd list was written in the first line description when I began this project couple of years ago:
"An utterly subjective, woefully incomplete, and perpetually in-progress attempt to list my 100 personal-favorite movies."
And while it is obviously impossible to speak of such things definitively, that doesn't mean…
Larry Cohen pitched this idea to Hitchcock in the early ‘60s, and finally got it made by Schumacher 40 years later, in the last moment that you could plausibly set your movie in a phone booth. Like, I’m pretty sure that there was a public phone at the Regal Cinema in Mission Viejo when I first saw this trailer play there, and that it had already been removed by the time I saw the movie play there a few weeks later.
They Live is a great movie dressed up as a pretty bad movie. We forgive all manner of its deficiencies- the convenient plot devices, the questionable visual effects, the acting chops of one “Rowdy" Roderick Toombs- because John Carpenter had the gumption to foreground his social critique in one of the least subtle films of its time. He's said that he was inspired by America's reaction to Reaganomics, when people enjoyed more gratuitous wealth than ever before at the same…
Most people are going to eventually see this at home, and it’s probably not going to have the impact that last night’s completely sold-out screening at the Clinton Street Theater had on all of us.
That’s as much of a qualification as I can muster for a rave review, because this film is a fucking miracle. An instant word-of-mouth classic. Almost certainly the best film comedy of this century. The most sustained joy I’ve felt watching something with other people in I can’t even remember how long. Go find it in a theater near you, and bring friends.
Welcome to the BKO 100, Hundreds of Beavers!
