Top 10 bar movies
Considering that many of us spend a great deal of time in bars, it’s surprising how few movies feature bars as a central element of the story. There are classic bar scenes (Star Wars Cantina, for example, or the lounge in High Noon), but few movies feature a bar as a character in its own right. Bars are usually plot devices included as shorthand. Depressed or alone? Then the seedy ramshackle bar on the bad side of town reflects the character’s inner angst. Happy? The trendy martini bar with its bright neon colors is front and center. Mysterious, jaded or nervous? The characters are then sitting in the hotel bar drinking whiskey.
Despite all the available evidence and places for solid research, few movies really capture the atmosphere of a real bar. Bartenders rarely respond to “hello bartender,” and “give me whiskey” is usually met with a blank stare. Apparently, capturing the scent, smells, sounds, and feel of a true drinking hole is difficult. Here are ten movies set in a bar. Not necessarily realistic renderings, but interesting nonetheless.
10. Ugly coyote. (2000) A goofy bar movie that follows a young woman who tries to make it in New York as a songwriter but ends up working at a girls’ bar called Coyote Ugly. This movie featured a lot of bar dancing and scantily clad women throwing bottles. The bar was inspired by an infamous Greenwich Village watering hole and spawned a host of copycat bars across the United States.
9. Highway House. (1989) Either the best janitor genre movie of all time or one of the worst nonsense ever made on film. But you can’t resist anything with Patrick Swayze, who hung up his dancing shoes to play a tai chi gorilla. Swayze plays our pec-flexing hero who is given the impossible task of quelling the violence at the Double Deuce, a bustling honky tonk bar. He, too, must learn the secret ways of the goalkeeping guru and then face off against the most evil man in Jasper, Wyoming: Ben Gazarra.
8. Cocktails. (1988) The “flair bartending” trend hit its nadir or peak depending on your point of view with this cheese from 1988. A young Tom Cruise is the young bartender who is shown the ropes by Brian Brown. They become partners, then they quarrel over a woman and become rivals. Rivals in throwing bottles into the air and shaking girl drinks. He imagines John Wayne asking these guys for a drink.
7. Robin and the seven hoods. (1964) Ocean’s Eleven is the most famous and probably the worst rat pack movie. Far better is this elegant retelling of the Robin Hood legend. This film took place primarily in the prohibition-era speakeasies of Chicago, where Frank Sinatra’s gang of hard-drinking, crooning, and party-loving Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, and Bing Crosby, take on the evil sheriff and Guy Gisborne ( Peter Falck). The gang signs, trades zingers, and spends most of their time drinking whatever they can whip up.
6. Swapping partners. (1996) This movie doesn’t technically take place in a bar, but his big tour of LA and Vegas drinking is money, baby. This film launched the careers of Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn and brought swing bars and tiki-lamp cocktail lounges back into fashion.
5. 54. (1998) Studio 54 was the most famous nightclub of the late 1970s in New York. It was the quintessential nightclub and was the place to party for the famous and would-be famous. Mike Myers steals the show as gay club owner Steve Rubell, while Ryan Phillipe, Salma Hayek and Neve Campbell play the beautiful people who made the nightclub their home. It perfectly captures the disco era and the exuberance of 70’s nightclubs.
5. Bar fly. (1987) On one level depressing, on another a great expression of the joy of living. Mickey Rourke plays Henry Chinaski, a poet and alcoholic (loosely based on the real poet Charles Bukowski). He spends his life in Los Angeles bars drinking every night. One day he meets and falls in love with Wanda (played by Faye Dunaway). She is also an alcoholic, but she sees the real Charles. She helps him publish his poems and for a short time he becomes famous. But in the end they are both happy as anonymous bar flies.
3. Hall of trees. (1996) Independent star Steve Buscemi directed this little movie by imagining what would have happened to him if he had stayed in his small hometown on Long Island and not moved to Manhattan to pursue acting. His film perfectly centers and captures a neighborhood bar full of colorful eccentrics who can’t seem to get on. Also starring Anthony LePaglia, Samuel L. Jackson and Chloe Sevingny, Buscemi plays Tommy Basilio, a drunk who wanders through life desperate for some kind of meaning beyond the bar that is his only home.
2. Lost in translation. (2003) Sofia Coppola’s gem of a movie takes place primarily in a hotel bar in Tokyo. Disillusioned, tired and bored actor Bill Murray meets newlywed Scarlett Johansson and the two form an unlikely bond as they try to discover or rediscover each other in a strange and confusing land. They end up in a Japanese nightclub which is a great counterpoint to the austere bar. While they don’t form a traditional romantic bond, they do find something that arouses them.
1.Casablanca. (1942) Perhaps the perfect film. The brilliance of Bogart and Bergman is this classic romantic drama. Originally called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” Casablanca regularly tops the best lists. It’s World War II and Rick Blaine, an exiled American and former freedom fighter, runs Casablanca’s hottest bar. It is full of thieves, spies, Nazis, partisans, refugees and pianists. The Nazis and their puppet Captain Renault are after underground leader Victor Laszlo, who is supposed to be somewhere in Casablanca. Lazslo secretly comes to Ricks, only not alone. With him is Ilsa, Rick’s one-time love and the breaker of his heart. “Of all the bars in the world, she walks into mine.” The rest is movie magic.