May 19th, 2008
1. Gray's Sports Almanac, Back To The Future II (1989)
Objects don't come more pedestrian than the dull recitation of facts and figures comprising Gray's Sports Almanac—unless, of course, you have a time-traveling DeLorean, in which case it's a ticket to untold riches. Perpetually shortsighted when it comes to maintaining the space-time continuum, Marty McFly recognizes the chance to make his fortune with a few "sure thing" bets—an egregiously greedy plan, considering that his most recent tinkering with the fabric of time already bumped him up a couple of tax brackets—but he's shot down by the ever-conscientious Doc Brown, who once again warns the myopic Marty of the dire consequences inherent in toying with the past. Multigenerational bully Biff Tannen provides a more concrete illustration: He steals the almanac, the DeLorean, and Marty's plan, then returns to 1955 to give his teenage self the chance to rewrite his life. Never has so much hung in the balance over a mere collection of sports scores—except perhaps in a Martin Scorsese movie.
2. The Fountain Of Youth, The Fountain (2006)
Since his debut feature, Pi, about a mathematician's attempt to find a numerical formula for everything from patterns in the stock market to God's presence in the Torah, director Darren Aronofsky has been interested in impossible quests. In his madly ambitious studio fantasia The Fountain, Aronofsky follows mankind's desire for immortality throughout the ages, as seen in a scientist convinced that death is a disease that can be cured, and a tai-chi-practicing astronaut who floats around in space inside a bubble full of magic. Or something like that. But the third story, about a 16th-century Spanish conquistador, is inspired by Ponce De León's actual quest to find the Fountain Of Youth in what's now known as Florida, except here, the conquistador succeeds in finding the "Tree Of Life." Pierce it with a Mayan dagger, and you get the healthiest maple syrup in creation.
3. Treasure map, Treasure Island (1920, 1934, 1950, etc.)
With his first novel, Treasure Island, Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson almost single-handedly put together all of the major elements of the still-thriving pirate genre. (Except for their longstanding antipathy to ninjas.) And just as the story's swashbuckling sailors and parrot-bedecked scurvy dogs are spurred into action by the discovery of a secret map showing the location of long-lost buried pirate loot, the book itself was inspired by a map drawn by Stevenson's stepson. His creativity piqued, Stevenson elaborated grandly on the boy's initial watercolor painting with tantalizing place names like "Skeleton Island" and "Spyglass Hill," not to mention a chest of stolen gold—it's from this map that we get the phrase "X marks the spot." He eventually spent weeks spinning the tale into a full-fledged, much-adapted-to-film novel featuring the unforgettable one-legged, treacherous rogue Long John Silver. And with it, he sailed into literary history.
4. White Castle burgers, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle (2004)
It's said that one of marijuana's negative effects is that it robs a person of ambition. So when a couple of young eggheads—Indian medical student Kal Penn and Korean investment banker John Cho—smoke their weight in weed in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, their life goals are downgraded significantly. Suddenly, a simple trip to square-mini-burger paradise becomes an epic journey fraught with perils, including bad directions, vicious animals, skinheads, a racist police officer, the Asian-American Students Association, and Neil Patrick Harris as a manic, horndog hitchhiker named Neil Patrick Harris. For anyone who's spent a lazy hour trying to motivate themselves to go get that bag of chips a few feet from the couch, this is a movie that understands how hard it can be.
5. A bike, The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)
On the surface, Vittoria De Sica's neo-realist classic and Tim Burton's rollicking, cartoonish comedy seem to have little in common, but under the surface… well, they don't have much in common there, either. But they do share lead characters who believe a bike is the most important thing they own, and who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to find it once it's been stolen. For a poor laborer and his son in post-war Rome, the bike represents their livelihood and survival; as they conduct a needle-in-a-haystack search for it, De Sica tours through a devastated city and into the hearts of fundamentally decent people forced into a shameful act. Pee-wee's beloved bicycle is a more tricked-out, one-of-a-kind creation, but finding it takes him on a circuitous journey where he survives run-ins with leather-clad biker toughs, an escaped convict, and the ghost of a trucker named Large Marge. All roads lead to The Alamo, in the basement.
6. The Mysterious Briefcase Of Doom, Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Pulp Fiction (1994)
Robert Aldrich's 1955 pulp masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly pushes the darkness and brutality of film noir and pulp fiction to surreal extremes. Big slab of beefcake Ralph Meeker stars as Mickey Spillane's iconic Mike Hammer, a tough-as-nails shamus chasing down a mysterious nuclear valise that just might bring about the end of the world. In the process, Aldrich gave the world the very first atomic detective and provided a haunting metaphor for the free-floating paranoia and apocalyptic danger of the Cold War. Thirty-nine years later, pop-culture magpie Quentin Tarantino "borrowed" the concept of a mysteriously glowing briefcase for 1994's Pulp Fiction, this time putting it in the loving care of a pair of philosophical, wisecracking hoods (Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta) who inhabit the same hardboiled universe as Meeker's unsentimental gumshoe. In paying homage to his pulp predecessor, Tarantino once again embodies the old adage that the good borrow, while the great steal.
7. The Maltese Falcon, The Maltese Falcon (1941)
For his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett constructed a labyrinthine plot of murder and deception in which all paths lead to a black statue of a bird. Filmed three times—most famously by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart as Hammett's iconic private eye Sam Spade—the story follows the pursuit of a priceless, long-lost, bejeweled bird later covered in enamel to hide its value. In the climactic scene of Huston's take, the bad guys get their coveted bird, only to find nothing of value beneath the black coating. All that in pursuit of a worthless trinket. Or maybe it was, in Bogart's famous closing lines, truly the stuff that dreams are made of.
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