Ask anybody who the best actor in comedy over the past two decades and they will likely mention Jim Carrey at some point. The man rakes in millions of dollars for every movie he appears in, and there is a reason for that.

Of course, you’ll get a lot of argument about what his crowning achievement might be. He’s been in so many successful films that it’s hard to settle on just one as being the best. And people have a lot of different opinions.

I mean, look at the first two movies to put him on the map. There was the original Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the Mask.

These films put together forges Carrey’s persona into a household name. His mad antics and bold comedy pushed him over the top into stardom. He has ridden those successes even further to the top of the entertainment game.

Dumb and Dumber, for example, followed about a year after those films and many consider it to be the best of Jim Carrey‘s long career. He starred along with Jeff Daniels as the lovable dimwit Lloyd Christmas. The duo traverse the country in pursuit of the woman of his dreams.

After that came films like Me, Myself and Irene and the Cable Guy. People either seem to love these flicks or hate them. Some actually regard these as Carrey’s best films. That’s totally open to interpretation.

Then Jim Carrey turned to a little more serious roles. He picked up starring roles in movies like the Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which both garnered him critical praise as well as exhibited his more subtle talents to the world.

Of course, Jim Carrey has a lot more films to go through, but narrowing his work down to the very best is a difficult task for many a movie fan. Nonetheless, everybody has their own personal favorites that will stand the test of time.

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Set in the harsh and beautiful Carpathian Mountains, the film tells of a doomed love between a couple belonging to feuding families, Ivan (Ivan Mikolajchuk) and Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova), and of Ivan’s life and marriage after Marichka’s death.

The plot is affecting, but it serves Paradjanov mainly as an armature to support the exhilarating rush of his lyrical camera movements (executed by master cinematographer Yuri llyenko), his innovative use of nature and interiors, his deft juggling of folklore and fancy in relation to pagan and Christian rituals, and his astonishing handling of color and music.

A film worthy of Aleksandr Dovzhenko, whose poetic vision of Ukrainian life is frequently alluded to, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors also evokes fairy tales in general and even at times some of Walt Disney’s animated representations of their settings, such as the cottage in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

The visceral physicality of many other shots is no less unmistakable, exemplified by a startling one early on which places the camera on top of a just-chopped tree—taking the viewer with it on its vertiginous plunge toward the ground.

Red Desert comes at the tail end of Antonioni’s most fertile period, immediately after his remarkable trilogy The Adventure (1960), The Night (1960), and The Eclipse (1962). Although Red Desert may fall somewhat short of the first and last of these earlier classics, the film’s ecological concerns look a lot more prescient today than they seemed at the time of its initial release.

Monica Vitti plays a neurotic married woman (Giuliana) attracted to industrialist Richard Harris. Antonioni does eerie, memorable work with the industrial shapes and colors that surround her, shown alternately a threatening and beautiful as she walks through a science-fiction landscape. Like any self-respecting Antonioni heroine, she is looking for love and meaning—and finds sex. In one sequence a postcoital melancholy is strikingly conveyed via an expressionist use of color, following Giuliana’s shifting moods.

The film’s most spellbinding sequence depicts a pantheistic, Utopian fantasy of innocence, which the heroine recounts to her ailing son, implicitly offering a beautiful girl and a beautiful sea as an alternative to the troubled woman and the industrial red desert of the title.

There have been many classic movies remade years later, some are good and some are not. It depends on the how the story is interpreted. In the early movies sex and violence are hardly ever shown they are implied. In the newer versions they don’t hold back anything. This might be what is appealing to the new audiences. They have seen the classic and want to see the actual murder or love scene between two characters.

In the newer versions of movies they have been able to take special effects to a whole new level. Sometimes this isn’t always good. In the 1960′s series of Batman, the cheesiness of the show was the best part. Batman always had whatever they needed to escape or apprehend the bad guy. For example, he would say “good thing I put this vial of shark repellent in my bat belt this morning”. Never has anyone been better prepared for anything since the old Batman shows. In the remakes they took him to a whole new level making everything very slick and futuristic. They took out the innocence, the heart and soul of why we loved it so much as children.

Another example of a remake gone badly is Godzilla. The reason everyone loved the old Godzilla movies is because you could tell it was a man in a monster suit crushing a cardboard Tokyo. Half the fun of watching these movies was to see how fake many things were and try to find the wires swinging the monsters around. In the recent version, they made Godzilla the bad guy. This turned the character into something else. Even in a remake the basic personality of a character shouldn’t be changed. In the old movies he was the protector even if he destroyed everything he was trying to protect.

But there are great remakes of mediocre classic movies. For example, the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, this movie was based on a book and for anyone who loved the book the original classic movie was a disappointment. But in the updated version, starring Johnny Depp, they stayed very close to what the author of the story was trying to convey. Making the new release an instant classic.

Then there is the comic remake of the classics. Often a writer will take the best parts of a particular genre and combine them into a comic spoof, these movies have formed a genre all their own. Mel Brooks is a master with this type of remake. For example, Blazing Saddles pokes fun of the old westerns and makes a statement about racism. Another classic remake was Young Frankenstein, based on the old Frankenstein movies.

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Undoubtedly the production of the classical movie has got to be one of the finest “inventions” since the stapler. In fact, the classical movie is one which we had the benefit of when we were kids, when at that time there were only three television channels restricted viewing opportunities were given reprieve as Saturday afternoons and Sundays–when Dad wasn’t sucked into The Wide World of Sports –held movies from the times of the past; movies that feature glamour girls and fearless males that had long since passed out of our way of life.

Although there is evidently a clear distinction, between classical movies and classical movies with only classical period elements (music, costumes, storylines, etc.), I would like to address the delight of the classical movie of yesterday and today that does involve only a particular period of history and does, then feature only classical period elements.

Let’s first start with my favorite classical movie of all time, Impromptu. This film portrays a few years in the lives of George Sand, Franz Liszt, Freiderich Chopin, as well as the royal and prosperous people who took the artists in, thus permitting them to compose, write, paint, create…this was in exchange for enjoyable company and entertainment. The focus of the film is Sand, who is obsessed on partnering with Chopin…her aggression as great as his weakness (physical instabilities). In addition the costuming, the music (for sure), the dialogue, and the setting are all as dramatic as the direction, the technique, and the delivery of words and emotion. What’s more there is even a theme or two that every person from the beginning of time until now can identify with or appreciate- the love/hate, good/evil and longing/belonging motifs that are as classic as the film itself.

There are other classical movie choices that I enjoy, and these are also the more marginal (or less mainstream popular) ones. I personally find Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (though evidently POST-classical periods), Wilde, and Jefferson, for example, as creditable of classical movie acclaim as Amadeus, Emma, The Piano, and any number of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson brilliant [re-]productions.

When you think classical movie, what comes to your mind? For some, may think black and white, or big powdered wigs or perhaps maybe classical music? Do you often think about fanciful dresses and formalities? Or do you think classic movie in terms of it being colossal in popularity? Or just maybe do you consider classic movie is as any individual might determine it–according to appeal, accuracy and aesthetics? As for me, I tend to take in the black and white flicks with the beauties and the beaus, the comedies with the curmudgeons, the histories with the insight into who people were then…like us but with an added je ne sais quoi that we must investigate, discover about, and appreciate in as great a depth and as wide a breadth as we might.

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