Bloodless Coup

I have to give them props for including Office Space as an honorable mention, and to you for thinking of Dr. Strangelove. I would also throw in Cool Hand Luke, Red Dragon or Seven, Glengarry, Glen Ross, In the Heat of the Night, The Insider, Leaving Las Vegas, Jerry Maguire, Chasing Amy, and As Good as it Gets.

Several of those I have not seen... but Glengarry Glen Ross is a great addition. So many things going on in that movie, so well done, and Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon.... And how to forget Cool Hand Luke! Good calls, Morris.

Tough, tough question. But if we are talking about US films:

From LGM's list and comments, some stand out as very right. Lone Star is a superb pick (and a really great film - can't recommend that highly enough). Network and Citizen Kane and The Insider are all, to me, very right as well. And while I don't know that I'd put them in the top 10 (maybe) Office Space and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance make a lot of sense to me too.

More? I think I glanced over Meet John Doe and Scarface as I breezed through the comments. Both good choices. Vertigo too. And I'd add another Hitchcock - Shadow of a Doubt.

And I'll throw two other titles into the mix - two I didn't see, but capture a lot about the US to me: Giant and Far From Heaven.

"Salt of the Earth."

first, morris kudos for both GGGR and for Leaving Las Vegas, long one of my favorite films in just about every regard, which captures the disjoin between aspiration and compromise by twisting both almost beyond recognition (and it's also one of the great tragic love stories, IMHO, bar none). binky, Rocky and Strangelove are both great choices.

for all the westerns chosen at LGM, i'm kind of perplexed that the at least arguably superior (in terms of production and verisimilitude) "Unforgiven" was excluded.

others deserving mention, in no particular order: Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Glory; Apocalypse Now; The Natural (or, if you prefer, perhaps Bull Durham, but there has to be a baseball movie in the top 10); Miller's Crossing; 2001; Wall Street; Collateral, maybe (wanted an LA movie); Scarface; Saturday Night Fever; Three Days of the Condor (great New York movie); and, the outlier, Logan's Run. there are others, i'm sure, but that's enough.

Moon - From your list (other than Scarface) my #1 pick would be Wall Street. I mean it's so obvious. Can't believe that one didn't leap to mind.

yeah, there are only two arguments against including Wall Street in any top 10, both of which are really appealing but both of which ultimately fail:

1) F*&k the 80's.
2) F*&k Oliver Stone.

oh, and i also think Close Encounters is a pretty obvious choice. unless, maybe, ET is better, for adding to a similar alien story a rather fascinating portrait of suburbia. both reflect well (and in some sense contributed to) America's obsession with extraterrestrial life, which in turn reflects something essential about modern America. just don't ask my what.

F@ck Oliver Stone? He's not a likeable figure, and he's made some bombs, but he's also made some great movies. In fact I considered adding another one (Nixon) to my list.

Thanks for the kudos. I'd have to agree with Wall Street, Scarface, and Saturday Night Fever, all excellent choices. And there does seem to be something Clint Eastwood missing from the other Westerns, although I'd probably favor another outlier (Outlaw Josey Wales). And I'd probably go more blockbuster on Moon's baseball and alien themes (Field of Dreams and ID4), though Field of Dreams very closely edges out the Natural, and honestly Major League would be a contender too. Miller's crossing is a great choice to cover New Orleans, I'd thought about Angel Heart but Miller's is better. You also hit the Vietnam theme, but though I enjoy Apocalypse Now more, I wonder if something more American isn't captured by Heaven and Earth or Full Metal Jacket. And now that i think about it, Treasure of the Sierra Madre is missing, too.

When Stone makes a movie that's not the equivalent of him lying on a couch rehashing his father issues, let me know. He has, I'll grant, gotten lucky, and his visual vocabulary has been quite striking at its best, but his best stories have been those that best suit his own obsession with the father-son thing. To rehash, Nixon, of course, is one, as is Platoon. Born on the Fourth of July also approaches that topic, though in that case the betraying father at issue is Uncle Sam, as it were. Wall Street and Any Given Sunday are perhaps even more heavy-handed in this regard, as is JFK, where the father issues are more or less coextensive with those in Born on the Fourth. The guy's a walking Freudian freakshow. To the extent Alexander and U-Turn (say) reflect departures from this leitmotif, it's notable that they're just plain bad.

Majikthise's list is excellent and features a number of things not included here. She also suggested, and then added, a useful list of topics underrepresented by her ten selections.

Morris, I actually was thinking of Miller's as more of a period piece and a way to shoe-horn the Cohn brothers into my list, but you make an excellent case for an added dimension. I considered Independence Day for my alien movie, but ultimately rejected it as substantially more shallow and heedlessly paranoid than ET or Close Encounters, though that I considered it is telling.

As for Field of Dreams, I was really racking my brain for baseball movies, and for whatever reason totally overlooked that one. My choice definitely would be between that and the Natural, leaving Bull Durham behind. I can't agree about Major League, however, being for me to baseball movies what ID4 is to alien movies.

I don't know Heaven and Earth, and haven't seen Josey Wales, but Full Metal Jacket is a definite contender beside Apocalypse for being more directly about Vietnam and the largely unwilling conscript military of that era.

I wonder why it's seventies movies I keep coming back to: in addition to those several I've already listed, I think the paranoia-generated anti-crime / vigilante movies of the seventies also deserve a representative. I'm thinking Fort Apache, Taking of the Pelham 123, Warriors, or the original Dirty Harry, maybe. This is surprisingly fun.

still more:

an HBO film, Long Gone, a fairly raw look at minor-league baseball in the 1950's south, was really effing good, and featured a young William Petersen (CSI) and Virginia Madsen (who was so insanely hot then in capri pants and poofy blonde hair and with that accent that now that i've thought of it i probably won't be able to get any work done this afternoon).

armand's comments on Junebug also got me thinking about small-town movies, and i'm wondering whether Waiting for Guffman might deserve consideration (notwithstanding all the Canadian performers).

finally, for now, what about Donnie Darko. part of what i love about that movie is how it simultaneously captured the 80's in the in-frame ambience and detail and reflected it in the frame itself. i'd like to see the 80's represented as it was for younger people, and i feel like DD is more on-point than Wall Street. of course, this is all kinds of generation-centric, but whatever, we are who we are.

OK, from her comments thread I'd add Casablanca. It captures a number of things about our disrespect for authority, our fascination with the darker side of life, double dealing, our yearning for second chances, and viewing women as prizes. And of course we still don't like Nazis. Most of us anyway.

I would have included Nixon b/c 1) the long-term impact of so many of our citizens coming from staunchly, harshly religious families and 2) our thing for driving/endless amibition (much more important than personal relationships) and rising above the station in which we are born.

i think you're right about nixon. i don't really know why i resist so hard; i love the movie, but i've always imagined that i do more in spite of than because of stone's involvement. allen and hopkins both give career performances, and i think hopkins basically set the gold standard for playing historic figures of the TV age -- that is, those whose actual visages and mannerisms most people are familiar.

and really why not JFK? i mean, our obsession with that president, that era, and his assassination is like no other collective obsession in american history, and while the movie is specious on many levels, that doesn't change the fact that it caught the paranoid flavor that even the most sober discussion of the assassination tends to have in this country.