FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2020

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While writing for FilmFisher regularly a few years back, I contributed to a monthly feature called “Undefended,” where each writer submitted a top-five list based on a themed prompt. As you can see below, I really got into making these. With the recent relaunch of FilmFisher and its migration to Substack, I thought it would be nice to revisit my Undefended lists and put them all in one place. Here are the ones I created in 2020. Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

Unloved Gems (February 2020)

  1. Topper Returns (Roy Del Ruth, 1941)

  2. A Tanú (The Witness) (Péter Bacsó, 1969)

  3. Treasure Planet (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2002)

  4. The Gospel of John (Philip Saville, 2003)

  5. Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006)

Quarantine Recommendations (March 2020)

  1. Rear Window (1954): Jimmy Stewart helped catch a murderer while he was stuck at home. What have you accomplished this week?

  2. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) and The Tigger Movie (2000): Two sweet, calming films about loving our neighbors, even when they get on our nerves.

  3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010): The second act of this film is suddenly deeply relatable.

  4. The Wind Rises (2013): A meditation on the fragility and beauty of life.

  5. A Hidden Life (2019): This is the perfect film for our moment.

Opening Titles (April 2020)

  1. North by Northwest (1959)

  2. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)

  3. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

  4. Babe (1995)

  5. You’ve Got Mail (1998)

Dream Adaptations (June 2020)

Each of my picks have been adapted at least once before, but that would not make the following pairings any less exciting:

  1. George Orwell’s Animal Farm, directed by Chris Noonan

  2. The Gospel of John, directed by Terrence Malick*

  3. Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, directed by Wes Anderson

  4. Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, directed by Joe Johnston

  5. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, directed by David Yates

*Yes, I did just recommend a Gospel of John adaptation in a recent Undefended list, but when I revisited the film at Easter—sandwiched between viewings of The Tree of Life and The New World—I couldn’t help but think of how much better the film would have been if Malick had directed it.

Scenes from Childhood (July 2020)

  1. The girls explore the house and countryside in My Neighbor Totoro (1988). Houses in particular are magical things to a child.

  2. I can’t think of a film that better captures the transition from childhood to adolescence than Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989).

  3. Harry meets Ron and Hermione on the Hogwarts Express in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). Lifelong friendships begin in wonderfully mundane ways.

  4. The snowball fight and the epic dirt-clod fight it foreshadows in Where the Wild Things Are (2009). Nine times out of ten, the most audacious playtime ideas end with someone (often the instigator) in tears.

  5. The LEGO Movie (2014) really does feel like it’s being improvised by a child playing in his room.

Old Age (September 2020)

  1. Dibs on Up (2009) before someone else inevitably claims it.

  2. A Beautiful Mind (2000) has always struck me as the best example of using makeup to age actors, but it’s ultimately Russell Crowe’s incredible performance that makes the effect believable.

  3. I know I mention or write about MCU films too much already, probably giving readers the impression I like the films far more than I actually do. Even so, I can’t stop thinking about that beautiful conclusion to Captain America’s story in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

  4. Say what you will about the rest of the film, but the first hour of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is something special. Ford’s professor persona was never better, and there’s an aching wistfulness to those early scenes, especially as we watch the post-war America Indy helped build start to turn on him.

  5. Yoda is one of the most iconic elderly characters in all of cinema, but instead of picking The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, I’ll go with the final three episodes of Clone Wars Season 6 (2014). Titled “Voices,” “Destiny,” and “Sacrifice,” these episodes send Yoda on a journey of mythic proportions and reveal that, even though he is centuries old and the wisest of all living Jedi, he still has much to learn about the ways of the Force and still has to fight his own flesh.

Monsters (October 2020)

  1. Jonathan Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

  2. The board game in Jumanji (1995)

  3. Judge Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

  4. Carol in Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

  5. The Horde in Split (2017) and Glass (2019)

Hitchcockian (November 2020)

  1. The Stranger (1946, dir. Orson Welles). Like Notorious, a 1946 post-war thriller about the complications of marrying a covert Nazi.

  2. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961, dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wolfgang Reitherman). If Hitchcock had pulled a Wes Anderson and adapted a children’s book into an animated heist film with talking animals, the result couldn’t have been much different than this.

  3. Charade (1963, dir. Stanley Donen). A shoe-in for this list, so on-brand you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a Hitchcock film.

  4. Mission: Impossible (1996, dir. Brian De Palma). Classic Hollywood elegance and star power? Check. Suspense and paranoia? Check. Wrong man on the run? Check. Train sequence? Check. Echoes of Oedipus? Check check check.

  5. Signs (2002, dir. M. Night Shyamalan). I could’ve picked any of the three Shyamalan supernatural thrillers that start with ‘S’, but this one best fits the bill. Hitchcock would’ve come up with a better ending, though.

The Best 5 Films You’ve Seen All Year (December 2020)

  1. Unbreakable (2000, dir. M. Night Shyamalan)

  2. Minority Report (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg)

  3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, dir. Steven Spielberg)

  4. The Farewell (2019, dir. Lulu Wang)

  5. Tied: Of Machinery and Men Double Feature: First Man (2018, dir. Damien Chazelle) and Ford v. Ferrari (2019, dir. James Mangold)

P.S.: Allow me to use this opportunity to once again beat the drum for the four-part finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2020); if it was a film, and if I hadn’t already included it on a recent list, it would have taken 4th place.

John, James, and Joe: Film Composer Retrospectives

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Three albums I’ve been listening to regularly lately are each career-spanning retrospectives from major composers of film scores: 

  • John Williams and Anne-Sophie Mutter’s Across the Stars (Deutsche Grammophon, 2019)

  • James Newton Howard’s Night After Night: Music from the Movies of M. Night Shyamalan (Sony Classical, 2023)

  • Joe Hisaishi’s A Symphonic Celebration: Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Mizazaki (Deutsche Grammophon, 2023)

What I love about all three albums is that they aren’t “greatest hits” compilations that only pull together old recordings from across the artist’s discography. These are all brand-new recordings, and each composer has created new arrangements of his signature works for the occasion. 

For the Williams project, the organizing principle is that each composition has been selected and adapted to foreground violin soloist Mutter. Across the Stars is primarily a collaboration between a composer and a performer. But for the other two albums, the organizing principle is that each composition emerged from the composer’s collaborations with one director. So the Newton Howard retrospective is also a Shyamalan retrospective; the Hisaishi retrospective is also a Miyazaki retrospective. As much as I enjoy the Williams and Mutter album, this gives Night After Night and A Symphonic Celebration a richer subtext: these albums are celebrations of life-long creative partnerships, even friendships. 

This friendship element is particularly striking considering Night After Night. Miyazaki has an extraordinarily consistent track record for making good-to-great films, and it would be unsurprising if this inspired a complementary consistency of excellence from Hisaishi. But Shyamalan’s films fluctuate wildly in quality, and yet Newton Howard seems to have always done his best by them as if they were all destined to be classics. Night After Night doesn’t discriminate between music made for a masterpiece like Unbreakable and music made for a career blunder like The Last Airbender. Including one as well as the other on this album shows that Newton Howard valued then and values now all of his collaborations with Shyamalan. When two people enjoy working together and bring out the best in each other’s work, the critical or financial outcome of the project is irrelevant.