Movie gift ideas under ten bucks.
The economy sucks, and if you haven’t realized it yet you probably will soon. (Sorry.) If you’re shopping for Christmas gifts but don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of money, DVD’s are just about the best gift to give: they’re easily wrapped, they’re sold almost everywhere now, and watching them kills time.
Presented below are ten movies – good ones – that are priced at th bigger retail chains for under ten dollars. They make great gifts for your second- and third-tier recipients (in-laws, office acquaintances, and so on.); or, if you need an extra something for someone to top off all the other stuff you’ve already got them, these also work really well for that, too. Each one is worth watching at least once, so finally they’re also the gifts that keep on giving.
1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) A few years before returning to the top of Hollywood with last summer’s Iron Man, Robert Downey, Jr. played a petty thief “discovered” by a casting agent and sent to Hollywood for his big break. Writer-director Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) piles on the dark humor and Raymond Chandler references, creating a smartassed romp through life in Los Angeles that’s both smart and wickedly droll. Val Kilmer co-stars as a gay private investigator, and Michelle Monaghan (Eagle Eye) appears as Downey, Jr.’s starlet sweetheart.
2. Tender Mercies (1983) A pristine music box of a film from a time when Hollywood didn’t mind producing smaller character studies, Robert Duvall plays Mac Sledge, a washed up, alcoholic country singer who befriends a widow and her son while working off a motel bill in a small Texas town. Duvall, scoring something of a comeback after several creatively fallow years, won Best Actor for his performance. Tess Harper (Crimes of the Heart), Wilford Brimley and Ellen Barkin also guest star. Directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy).
3. We Own The Night (2007) Speaking of Duvall, he co-starred in this overlooked neo-noir masterpiece as the father to two vastly different sons: the black sheep club owner (Joaquin Phoenix, never better) sinking into the Russian mob and the loyal police officer (Mark Wahlberg) who followed in his footsteps. Director James Gray (Little Odessa) constructs the film’s early-1980s drug wars setting with such visceral detail that you forget you’re watching a period piece. The car chase set piece halfway through is the best of its kind since William Friedkin’s heyday.
4. The Gift (2000) Cate Blanchett stars as a widowed mother and psychic in a small Southern town, dismissed and tolerated by police until she begins envisioning the murder of a spoiled debutante (Katie Holmes). Director Sam Raimi, working from a script co-written by Billy Bob Thornton, assembled a powerhouse ensemble cast including Greg Kinnear, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Ribisi, Hillary Swank, and Gary Cole as the local town folk. Though the impoverished, seamy look on beauties like Blanchett and Swank sometimes strains believability, the performances make up for the extra stretch of imagination.
5. Desperate Hours (1955) Humphrey Bogart plays an escaped convict holing up in the suburban home of a businessman (Fredric March, Seven Days In May) until he can make a clean getaway. Director William Wyler (Ben-Hur) pits his two leads – Bogart the movie star, March the craftsman character actor – against each other in a series of confrontations that build like a slow-boiling vat of tar. Based on a true story that eventually led to a Supreme Court decision regarding privacy and libel laws.
6. Enemy At The Gates (2001) Director Jean Jacques Annaud (Seven Years In Tibet) made World War II’s Eastern front look so crushingly violent and bloody that it’s no wonder Hollywood hasn’t really visited the subject before or since. Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes are Russian soldiers defending Stalingrad from the Nazi onslaught; Ed Harris is the German aristocrat sent into the devastated city to outmatch Law’s hero-of-the-people marksman. Brutal in a way that doesn’t wallow in its gore, but jarring nonetheless: you’ll feel every shot. Rachel Weisz and Ron Perlman also star, while Bob Hoskins steals all his scenes as a y0ung Nikita Khrushchev.
7. 61* (2001) One of the great sports legends, in 1961 New York Yankees teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle simultaneously raced to break Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season record. The made-for-HBO film precisely renders the pressures each player faced, especially the plain-spoken Maris’ (Barry Pepper, Seven Pounds) struggle to escape the negative image given him by the press. Thomas Jane (Boogie Nights) co-stars as the golden boy Mantle just sinking into the vices that would dog his career; lifelong Yankees fanatic Billy Crystal directs.
8. Insomnia (2002) Hoo hah! Al Pacino is a cop with a troubled past and Robin Williams the killer he’s come to Alaska to hunt in director Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight) neo-noir in the land of the midnight sun. Watching Pacino go slowly out of his mind from sleep deprivation while not overacting (well, for him, anyway) is a wicked pleasure. Williams, working on his early-00’s sabbatical from playing doctors and teachers, is quietly terrifying as an arrogant killer. Nolan again raises what could have been a routine genre exercise into art, loosely remaking Norweigan director Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s 1997 original with the same name.
9. While You Were Sleeping (1995) Starring a busload of people we miss seeing, this romantic comedy has Sandra Bullock’s subway worker lying to the family of her comatose, unrequited love (Peter Gallagher) as a way of staying close to him – until she falls for the guy’s earthy brother (Bill Pullman). The late, much-missed Peter Boyle and Jack Warden co-star at their cantankerous best. It’s a little difficult to believe, in this week of Marley & Me and Bedtime Stories, that films just thirteen years ago were this lacking in cynicism. Warm-hearted, sugar-coated fun – the archetypal chick flick.
10. Three Days of the Condor (1975) A nebbishy CIA drone (Robert Redford) returns from lunch and finds all his co-workers murdered and himself the chief suspect. Desperately taking a woman (Faye Dunaway) hostage until he can contact his superiors, he soon finds the agency itself is trying to kill him. The centerpiece of Redford’s 70s partnership with director Sydney Pollack – the same collaboration that produced Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were - the film also wrote the playbook for a legion of imitators through the 80s and 90s. And there may be sexier film duos than Redford and Dunaway, but not many.
- Michael Kabel
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