What is Tom McHugh Day you ask? Well, it all began back in high school when I was just a wee little Boy Scout. I had worked hard, and achieved the highest rank of Eagle Scout. When that happens, you get a plethora of letters from various government officials, including the President, Vice President, Senators, Representatives, Governors, etc. All of them say the same thing. Congratulations, this is a true testament to your character, you're a true blessing to society, blah blah blah. It was obvious none of them were personal. Except for one...
Did you see it?? Do you see it at the bottom?! That's right! M. Jodi Rell, the Governor of CT, declared January 6th, 2008 to be MY HOLIDAY!!! Sure, it was only that one year. But do you have a holiday? No. So I'm going to milk mine for all its worth! Which is a lot to me!
So what do you do on my holiday?! You can do the standards. Check out some bad movies, listen to a lot of Hanson, practice my mannerisms. But I figured you know what? This is a great opportunity. For years, people have asked me what my favorite movies were. So, maybe now is the time! Maybe this year, I'll post my top 10 favorite movies of all time, and let everyone pick one they perhaps haven't seen, and experience something I really love!
Here it is, something my readers have actually been asking for - my top 10 favorite films of all time!!
10. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Directed by Mel Stuart, 1971)
Willy Wonka is one of my favorite characters of all time. He's fun, and easy to love if you're a kid, but he's also incredibly creepy, socially awkward, and even frightening. As a kid, I loved the imagery around the factory. I had fun watching the characters eat everything in the chocolate room, I loved the zany inventions that simply made absolutely no sense. As an adult though, I appreciated each moral that the children learned, especially through the amazing use of the seven deadly sins to show flaws of each character. I loved the musical numbers, to this day considering "Pure Imagination" to be one of the greatest musical numbers of all time. I'm still mesmerized by that entire song, amazed at its amazing balance of creepy with fascinating, a nervous edge to it but still letting the audience have enormous desire to learn about the room they're in. Finally, I LOVE the way the story grows from one small boy's desire to have something to call his own, a golden ticket, to complete control (if you think of it the way I do) of children's happiness. It's a really great story, it almost pains me to realize it's only number 10 for me.
9. Shaun of the Dead (Directed by Edgar Wright, 2004)
I love zombies. There's no other way around it. I see a merit to zombies so many people take for granted. The drama of knowing your loved ones can become animalistic demons who would just as soon attack you, the hilarity of hordes of zombies slowly shuffling, the terror of certain zombies running faster than any living human, its a genre that lends itself to any tonality or audience reaction. But what I never thought was that I would find a movie quite like Shaun of the Dead. It's a zombie movie that works on every single level. There's drama, there's absolutely hilarity, there's genuinely frightening moments, and all within (as the tagline reads) "a romantic comedy. With zombies." Shaun of the Dead is a movie I can watch over and over, laugh every single time, discover new little things I missed the last time, and still have a huge amount of stuff with the story I already know. Plus I'm a sucker for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I love them in everything. But personal favorite, even with the AMAZING summer film The Worlds End, I can't let Shaun of the Dead go. It's one of the funniest films I've ever watched, and my favorite zombie movie ever.
8. Saving Private Ryan (Directed by Steven Spielberg, 1998)
I'm sure this film pops up highly for most people. And for damn good reason. What isn't great in this movie? Every actor is absolutely dynamite. The music is gorgeous. And of course, there's the opening scene. The single best battle scene I've ever seen, constantly blowing my mind, making me jump, and every time bringing tears to my eyes. This movie isn't for the faint of heart, and it's not one to just pop in for fun. It's one heck of a wild ride. It's physically exhausting, emotionally draining, and mentally destructive. This actually left me having some pretty crazy nightmares, believe it or not. Scenes of sheer brutality, moments of death I didn't even imagine happening before watching. A few death scenes were so traumatizing for me that I still to this day get queasy thinking about them. I suppose the only way to describe this film is an absolute success. This is to me, a perfect movie.
7. Alien (Directed by Ridley Scott, 1979)
"In space, no one can hear you scream." What a GREAT line for this movie to advertise itself on. The movie to this day manages to both inspire and creep me out. I'm a believer that modern horror is all but dead. The best horror movies we see in a year are lackluster at best, with very few exceptions. But this movie to this day manages to make me jump, laugh at scary moments only because I see them coming now, freak out at death scenes and moments of terror. I absolutely love the idea of xenomorphs too. An alien that bleeds acid, can tear through steel like it's paper, and can sneak around with total ease enough to creep up on people despite its huge size? Sold. Not to mention face huggers. What an AWESOME idea! A lot of people seem to think that Aliens is better. I respectfully disagree. Even though I think Aliens is fun, there is absolutely nothing that compares to the tone and atmosphere of this amazing horror/sci fi. I'm gonna go ahead and say if you haven't seen this film, THIS is the one I'd check out for Tom McHugh Day. Go. Do it for me.
6. The Rapture (Directed by Michael Tolkin, 1991)
This isn't a very well known film. Even on a $3 million budget, it only pulled in about $1.2 million. It didn't even do that critically well, holding a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes (although this is a questionable number considering its release before the website was active). But this film had an incredibly profound effect on me, after I watched it for the first time maybe 3 years ago. The film follows a young woman as she changes her lifestyle from promiscuous and perhaps a bit immature, to a lifestyle of overzealous religious fervor. It shows not only the happiness religion brings, but also the twisted results of what too much can do. And it has an ending I can't describe, one that left me speechless. It's a sad story of growth, parenting, and love at its hardest. I watched this movie after discovering my lack of religious belief and serious atheist ideals. It's hard to believe that a movie thematically based around religion actually would have an effect on me. That being said, it is NOT a preachy movie. And if you're a religious person looking for a movie about how religion helps people...this may not be the movie for you.
5. Before Sunrise/Before Sunset (Directed by Richard Linklater, 1995/2004)
I can't think of either of these movies by themselves. They are one. And sadly, I haven't seen the 2013 sequel "Before Midnight", even though I've heard nothing but wonderful things. But these movies are amazing, even for me, a dude. So judge me all you want. But I love how these movies approach love and relationships. They're told in a unique way, one I haven't seen done quite the same way. For those uninitiated, it actually tells most of the story in long single shots or one continuous , all continuous and with no general plot. Instead, it tells its story through conversation. The characters conversation reveal who they are, what they want, where they want to be and where we hope for them to go. I especially love Before Sunset, for its interesting take on reuniting in ways one wouldn't expect. But you should watch both of these. Both of these are actually only about 3 hours long together, and they certainly don't feel like 3 hours. If you're not into romance films, honestly, give these a shot. They're not what you'd expect. And you might just love them the way I do.
The first time I watched this film was in one of my college elective courses 3 years ago - "Violence, Aggression, and Terror". I had a trombone lesson immediately after. My teacher asked if I was feeling okay. The truth was, I wasn't. This movie made me physically ill. It was terrifying, heart wrenching, disturbing, and cruel. The film follows Edward Norton as an ex-white-supremacist, desperately trying to save his younger brother from falling into the same lifestyle. The story is told through the young brothers homework, a paper he has to write for his principle after writing a very disturbing paper for class. The film pulls no punches. This has some of the most disturbing, real, and terrifying imagery you can imagine. In particular, one scene of Norton's pride at one incredibly disturbing act resulted in me bursting into tears in terror. This isn't a film for the faint of heart. But it's one I feel that everyone should watch.
3. Inherit the Wind (Directed by Stanley Kramer, 1960)
I LOVE the play this film is based on. Inherit the Wind is the amazing fictionalization/adaptation of the Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a teacher was removed from his position and tried for teaching the theory of evolution to his students. When I was in high school, we were assigned this book for class reading. I finished it in a night. I couldn't put it down. And the movie is just as astounding. Rich, beautifully written characters, each of which you support or sympathize with just enough to understand their motives, wrong or right as they may be. Spencer Tracy gives a powerhouse performance as Henry Drummond, the agnostic lawyer coming to defend not just his client but the theory of evolution itself against the overzealously religious Matthew Harrison Brady, played by Fredric March, a man so drastically stuck in his religious ways he knows the exact time the world would have been created according to the bible. I can only imagine what this would have been like to watch in the year it came out. This movie is my favorite courtroom drama, and that's even putting it against 12 Angry Men, another amazing courtroom film. But none has had quite the effect on me artistically as Inherit the Wind.
2) Wall-E (Directed by Andrew Stanton, 2008)
Perhaps people will see this and think "Wall-E as #2?! Tom is SO Pixar biased!" Well, you're certainly right that I love Pixar. But what a lot of people don't know about me is that Wall-E is the movie that made me love movies. I remember going to see it with my family, wondering why on earth I was wasting my time seeing this kids movie. What did I not expect? The incredibly funny moments of slapstick. The super adorable relationship between our robot main characters. The absolutely heart wrenching moments during which tears poured from my face. The ease of connecting with a character that has barely anything to say the entire movie. The music that can leave me in an amazing sense of euphoric awe without the movie playing too. This is the movie that opened my mind to the idea that I might love film. And to this day, I'll defend every second of it. I will fervently defend it as the best animated film ever made. And if you haven't seen it, go put it on right now.
1. The Shawshank Redemption (Directed by Frank Darabont, 1994)
Call it cliche. But I think it's safe to say no film has graced the presence of my bluray player as often as The Shawshank Redemption. I love this movie so much that I actually own four copies of it. This movie is incredibly touching to me. It gives me a character I don't think I'd ever be able to understand and makes him graspable, believable, real. It has amazing minor characters, each with distinctly lovable personalities and attachment to you. It has gorgeous music, music that really touches me and lets me bask in its simple beauty. I love Morgan Freeman's soft spoken performance of a man who's given up all hope for change, but also loves himself to the extent he can without being able to completely forgive himself. Then of course there's the ending. The film is exciting, interesting, and uplifting. It's a film that sets my standard for any film. I don't think I need to tell people to watch it, pretty much everyone has. But maybe for Tom McHugh day, you can find time to watch what I think is the greatest film of all time.
So there you go! I hope you enjoy my list, and maybe have a few more to add to your list of movies you haven't seen! Leave me some of your favorite movies either in my email or in the comments! And of course, have a GREAT Tom McHugh Day!
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