Hoai-Tran Bui's Favorite Movies Of All Time

Hey, /Film. What's a nice place like you doing in a girl like this? Wait, let me start over...

My name is Hoai-Tran Bui, and I'm just happy to be here. Before you ask me how to pronounce my name (not important, and you'd probably get it wrong anyway), let me tell you about my favorite films.

I struggled more than I probably should have over this list. See, I wanted to impress you, /Film. I wanted to list films that I thought were Important (capital "I" intended), but were also Important to Me. After hours of angsting, I narrowed it down to this list of 15 movies that if you'd asked any of my friends, they'd say, "Ah, that's the most Hoai-Tran list I've ever seen." (I did ask them, and they did say that.) It's not just because there's an abundant amount of time travel movies, or surreal fairy tales or sweeping romances. It's because these movies embody, to me, the sheer wonder of cinema and all that it is capable of.

Now that we're over the awkward pleasantries, let's get to the meat of things, shall we?

Before I properly became a cinephile, I had a high-school obsession with Japanese dramas. This led to an obsession with Japanese movies — though sadly, I hadn't yet discovered Akira Kurosawa. Instead, it was mid-aughts slice-of-life movies that I devoured, and one of those movies was Linda Linda Linda, directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita. Part whimsical underdog story, part ode to female friendship, Linda Linda Linda follows a four-girl rock band as they rush to prepare for their school's annual music festival. With an injury incapacitating one of their members, they randomly recruit a Korean foreign exchange student (a pre-Sense8 Doona Bae!) to be their lead singer, despite her knowing minimal Japanese. The movie's a slow burn, but it's a droll, nostalgic love letter to the transience of youth.

A feminist tour de force masquerading as a dystopic car chase, Mad Max: Fury Road is high-octane art. The action sequences — as perfectly edited and artful as they are — serve as easy distractions to the rich story underneath. It's masterful how simple the storytelling is – each expression and gesture from Max (an understated Tom Hardy) or Furiousa (Charlize Theron, at the beginning of what is now the Theron-aissance) tells a lifetime of backstory and past trauma. Every frame is exquisitely composed, fully realizing the dystopian world of Mad Max through bold, saturated colors and magnificent CGI sand storms.

As accomplished as The Dark Knight is as a genre-transcending superhero movie, it never captured my attention as much as Batman Begins did. Directed by Christopher Nolan, a mostly unknown Brit who only had a few feature films under his belt, and starring Christian Bale years before he was a household name, Batman Begins was the little Batman movie that could. The movie throws Batman mythology, Buddhist philosophies and horror tropes and into a blender to make a riveting superhero action movie. Batman Begins brought Batman into the modern age after the campy debacles that were Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, and began my own obsession with comic book movies — the Caped Crusader in particular.

I love me a good noir. Couple that with modern Gothic aesthetics and a satirical takedown of the Classic Hollywood studio system, and you've got Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson, herself a former silent film star, gives the performance of her career as Norma Desmond, the delusional and narcissistic faded diva who lives in a dilapidated mansion and yearns for a return to the spotlight. William Holden is a fine foil as the young writer Norma pounces on to engineer her return to Hollywood, and who ultimately meets a tragic end (this is no spoiler, the first scene of him floating in a pool is perhaps one of the movie's most famous scenes). Billy Wilder directs this incisive, disturbing and deliciously macabre film, which still serves as one of the best satirical commentaries on Hollywood to date.

When I watch The Princess Bride, my fellow viewers have often complained about "an echo in the room," because I always feel compelled to quote each line in the movie. A satirical but sincere fantasy adventure, The Princess Bride is more than the iconic one-liners and Billy Crystal cameos that have gone down in cinematic history. Rob Reiner takes a loving brush to the flippant fantasy, letting none of that ironic humor seep into the genuinely romantic moments of the film. In keeping with the perspective of Fred Savage's character, The Princess Bride is delivered with a childlike wonder, reveling as much in the swashbuckling antics of Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) as it does the sweeping romance between Wesley (Cary Elwes) and Buttercup (Robin Wright). It's witty, funny and pure joy.

In an act of cinematic sacrilege, I actually watched Before Sunset before I was even aware that Before Sunrise existed. But I was immediately enraptured by the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), whose verbal sparring hid a wounded romance underneath the surface. Taking place in real time over the course of an afternoon in Paris, the two former lovers get slowly reacquainted, alternately jabbing at and flirting with each other while philosophizing about life, love and humanity. There's an immediacy present in Before Sunset that is not in the other Before entries, and arguably most of Richard Linklater's other works. It's not just because of the limited time frame in which Jesse and Celine can spend time together, but the fact that these two dreamers from Before Sunrise have now lived in the world, and are now bound to its realities. But there's still a sense of hope for reconciliation and redemption apparent throughout the film, which makes it easier to swallow than the depressing Before Midnight.

I can praise for hours the stunning animation in Hayao Miyazaki's magnum opus, Spirited Away. I can laud the lovely coming-of-age story of the main character, the stubborn Chihiro. I can compliment the wealth of symbolism, the eye-opening depictions of Japanese spirituality, that breathtaking flying sequence.

But my favorite part of Spirited Away is perhaps its quietest and most mundane: the virtually silent four-minute scene — except for the melancholy score by Joe Hisaishi — in which Chihiro sits on a train, looking out at the flooded landscape and the crowd of faceless spirits walking in and out of each other's lives. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the ostentatious plot — in fact, it could easily be plucked out and you wouldn't notice. But to me, it's the heart of Spirited Away and its musings on youth, loss of innocence, and life and death. It also embodies to me what animation has lost nowadays: the ability to stop, take a breath, and just let the story play out.