FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2021

One final catalogue of the top-five lists I contributed to a monthly FilmFisher feature called “Undefended.” Click on the list titles to see the original articles with the other contributors’ lists.

Cities and Towns (January 2021)

1. Hadleyville in High Noon (1952)

2. New York City in Oliver and Company (1988)

3. Koriko in Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

4. JFK Airport in The Terminal (2004)

5. Radiator Springs in Cars (2006)

Faith on Film (March 2021)

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Faith in action:

• Amazing Grace (2006, dir. Michael Apted)

• A Hidden Life (2019, dir. Terrence Malick)

• Star Wars (1977, dir. George Lucas)

Faith amidst doubt:

• The Tree of Life (2011, dir. Terrence Malick)

• The Polar Express (2004, dir. Robert Zemeckis)

Bonus: When I read the prompt, I was almost immediately reminded of two recent big loud blockbusters involving time travel in which heroes take action against the forces of nihilism in the confidence that the arc of history really does, somehow, bend toward justice: Avengers: Endgame and Tenet. 

“Everything’s going to work out exactly the way it’s supposed to.”

“What’s happened, happened. Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It’s not an excuse to do nothing.”

Against Type (April 2021)

1. Dick Van Dyke as Cecil in Night at the Museum (2006)

2. Matt Damon as La Boeuf in True Grit (2010)

3. Liam Neeson as Good Cop in The LEGO Movie (2014)

4. Daniel Craig as Joe Bang in Logan Lucky (2017)

5. Keira Knightley as Sugar Plum in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)

Animation (May 2021)

Rats-atouille! This is what I get for not creating and sending my list immediately. I will avoid duplicating others’ choices and instead go with close runners-up in five categories.

1. Classic Disney: Instead of Sleeping Beauty… Bambi (1942, dir. Algar, Armstrong, and Hand)

2. Contemporary Disney: The only first pick no one beat me to… The Emperor’s New Groove (2000, dir. Dindal)

3. Pixar: Instead of Ratatouille… Up (2009, dir. Docter and Peterson)

4. Studio Ghibli: Instead of The Wind Rises… The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013, dir. Takahata)

5. Wild Card: Instead of Fantastic Mr. Fox… The Lego Batman Movie (2017, dir. McKay)

Honora-Bear Mentions: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Brother Bear, and Kung Fu Panda 2.

Westerns (June 2021)

1. High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann)

2. The Magnificent Seven (1960, dir. John Sturges)

3. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, dir. John Ford)

4. The Shootist (1976, dir. Don Siegel)

5. True Grit (2010, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

P.S. No list of favorite Westerns would be complete without mentioning the 1991 Winnie the Pooh episode, “The Good, the Bad and the Tigger.”

Needle Drops (May 2021)

1. The Sandlot (1993): The boys playing baseball under a shower of July 4th fireworks is set to the Ray Charles rendition of “America the Beautiful”

2. Jingle All the Way (1996): The Johnny Mathis rendition of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” underscores the irony of a mob of Christmas Eve shoppers fighting over lottery balls in the Mall of America.

3. Spider-Man 2 (2004): The B. J. Thomas “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” montage.

4. The Tree of Life (2011): Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa” accompanies the creation sequence.

5. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013): This is only half cheating. “Space Oddity” begins diegetically, sung by Kristen Wiig’s character, but gives way to the David Bowie song playing non-diegetically.

Christmas (December 2021)

I’m going to play it safe and go with obvious Christmas titles:

1. In place of It’s a Wonderful Life, another Jimmy Stewart classic with a third act set at Christmastime: The Shop Around the Corner (1940, dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

2. White Christmas (1954, dir. Michael Curtiz)

3. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966, dir. Chuck Jones and Ben Washam) (Boris Karloff > Jim Carrey)  

4. In place of A Charlie Brown Christmas, another animated holiday special about competing visions for the ideal Christmas pageant: VeggieTales: The Star of Christmas (2002, dir. Tim Hodge)

5. The Polar Express (2004, dir. Robert Zemeckis)

Best of 2021 (December 2021)

To date I’ve only seen ten 2021 releases, and of those I’d only pick three, in alphabetical order:

1. Dune (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

2. Pig (dir. Michael Sarnoski)

3. West Side Story (dir. Steven Spielberg)

To round out the list, I recommend the following two 2020 releases I (and probably many others) didn’t see until 2021, also listed alphabetically:

1. Minari (dir. Lee Isaac Chung)

2. Wonder Woman 1984 (dir. Patty Jenkins)

FilmFisher Undefended Lists of 2020

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.

Disney Animation and Expressive Individualism

It is often said that Disney films, at least in the past few decades, espouse expressive individualism. I have thought the same thing, and still think it is largely the case. However, over time I have realized that three among my favorite Disney animated films, all three of them from what to me is the most eclectic and daring period in Disney Animation’s recent history—The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Treasure Planet (2002), and Brother Bear (2003)—each show the dangers of expressive individualism and suggest that maturity involves submitting to community standards and accountability. So, in fairness to the creators of these films, while the generalization is mostly true, we shouldn’t paint all of Disney’s productions with such a broad brush.

First, in my debut article for FilmFisher in 2018, I had this to say about Brother Bear:  

Charles Taylor has described secular individualism this way: “People are called upon to be true of themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content.” [The quotation is from Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 14.]

This statement could describe the hero’s journey of several Disney protagonists. But Brother Bear subverts Disney’s individualistic mythos. To adapt Taylor’s words: Kenai is never told to be true to himself. That would actually be disastrous, because what Kenai learns about himself is ugly and shameful. In biblical terms, he is a sinner at heart, not a saint. Instead, he is told by Tanana to pattern his life after love, something outside himself. In the end, he does not seek his own fulfillment, but another’s good. If Kenai had had his way, he never would have determined that path for himself. At first, he outright rejected it as folly. Others dictated the content of his attainment of mature manhood. The spirits chose his totem, Tanana and his brothers told him to follow his totem, and the spirits set him on a path to reconciliation when he abandoned his totem. If Taylor is right, and my analysis of Brother Bear is on to something, this truly is a counter-cultural message.

Second, when I wrote an article on Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire in 2020, I argued the former may not be as individualistic as it certainly seems to be:

The trouble with making the moral of the film “chart your own course,” in the individualistic sense, is that the film, intentionally or not, presents strong reasons against that kind of philosophy. Captain Flint charted his own course, and died alone. Silver charts his own course, but realizes “you give up a few things, chasing a dream” — in his case, parts of his own body. Worst of all, Jim’s father, for all we can tell, charted his own course, and he abandoned his wife and son. But the moral exemplars of the film — Sarah, Dr. Doppler, and Captain Amelia — are marked by their principles, discipline, and service. They take initiative and responsibility for themselves, but never without regard for others. Jim matures when he honors his mother, submits to Captain Amelia’s leadership, and follows Silver’s instructions. When Jim does start charting his own course, he fights to protect his friends, not to pursue his own interests. When Silver invites Jim to join him for a life of open, endless possibilities, the course he charts instead is toward a life constrained by limitations. He enrolls in the Naval Academy — and militaries, schools, and military schools especially, are not places for expansive, self-determining individualism.

In the next paragraph, I quoted the same Charles Taylor passage I had used in the Brother Bear article, and then continued: 

Up until I was working on this article, I always thought Silver’s speech exemplified this kind of thinking. That may still be the case. After all, Taylor’s description encapsulates the Disney ethos. But as I now consider the speech within the context of the film, it seems to take on a newer and truer meaning. Perhaps, even as Jim is called to be true to himself, he is also called to be true to others. Perhaps those others still need to tell him who he should be, and even better, help him become who he should be. Otherwise, if Jim pushes everyone away, who will be there to catch the light coming off him?

Third, I haven’t written an article on The Emperor’s New Groove—not yet—but here is the short version of my argument it is not in favor of expressive individualism: Is there any character in all of Disney who is more expressively individualistic than Emperor Kuzco, and isn’t he clearly portrayed as a terribly selfish and destructive person who needs to change and start showing concern for others?

All this leads me to two takeaways: 

One, as seen with Treasure Planet, the characters in these films can say one thing (“chart your own course”) while the story can silently undercut those words (the character saying those words is not a moral exemplar). This is why we have to consider every scene in the context of the whole. We have to consider subtext. 

But, two, this presents a difficulty: the target audience for these films is not very good at detecting subtext. When I grew up watching Silver say “Chart your own course,” I took it as the unchallenged viewpoint of the whole film. Similarly, most of the kids who grow up with Frozen likely do not pick up the irony that “Let It Go” is being sung by someone who, swinging the pendulum too far the other way in a response to a restrictive upbringing, is in danger of hurting herself and others. So, those who are reluctant to show these films to children, lest they encourage them to have a me-first mentality, have a point. However, what if these films could be used to help young viewers, when they are ready for it, learn how to recognize subtext? In the context of a discussion with a parent or teacher, these films that seem to espouse expressive individualism could be used to help inoculate against it.