––What movie and why?

Dalton: Bull Durham, not because I think it’s the best movie ever made (even if thought I could say such a thing about a movie) but because, like my book choices, it is a love story wrapped in a lost cause. The original Durham Bulls stadium where the movie was filmed has since been relegated to little league games and what not, just like Greensboro’s War Memorial—both given up on in favor of slicker digs. The movie came out twenty years ago and already the places it depicts have ceased to exist in the same way. I saw it when I was sixteen and I thought it was such a smart comedy—I was so ready for it after the Brat Pack years (apologies, and read my homage to Sixteen Candles in Don’t You Forget About Me.) Plus it’s set in the south and my family had moved to Ohio a few years earlier from South Carolina . When Annie Savoy said “Oh, my,” it was music to my ears. Plus I was on a date and in love. Plus, watching it recently, I thought: no email, no texting—you only see one phone call in the whole movie. Bliss. But me loving a baseball movie? Who knew? I’ve never sat through an entire baseball game…well, I’ve sat through them, but not paid attention. I guess I like the idea of baseball more than the reality. In general, I love the idea of things more than the reality. And I don’t think it was a baseball movie at its heart anyway. It’s a good old-fashioned romance with some well-placed literary references. The quote from Walt Whitman at the end will always make me teary-eyed.

King: No Country For Old Men is the best movie I've seen this year, and another work of art that's representative of our age, albeit in a way that’s a good deal more harrowing than the Pullman novels. This is the other side of the coin, where an apocalyptic force - the crazy-eyed Javier Bardem - cannot be understood or bargained with or stopped, ever. It's interesting to note that the film has been a box office disappointment. One of the unhappiest tendencies of our nation over these last few years is the collective shying away from the real, repugnant human cost of the war in Iraq. I say this from a position of complete guilt; I recently quit reading the newspaper, cold turkey, because it simply made me too depressed. No Country For Old Men might as well be page A-1 of the Times: good-hearted people strive, and fail, and die, for no reason.

Did I mention that this movie is not the feel-good-hit of the year?

I also want to add that it's directed by the Coen Brothers with an exceptionally novelistic eye for detail. At the beginning of the movie, Chigurh (the bad guy, played by Bardem) uses a pair of handcuffs to strangle a police officer. The camera holds on Bardem's face for an uncomfortably long time. He's pulling so hard on the handcuffs that he appears on the verge of an aneurism. When it's finally over, when the officer is still, when Chigurh is just lying there breathing, the camera slips away to show us the linoleum, which is tracked with a constellation of black scuff marks from officer's boots. It's a horrible, perfect detail. I wish I'd written it.

Langer: I’ve always been a sucker for the overblown movie, the book that reached out for the big brass ring and came crashing down to the ground empty-handed. The more appropriate movie for the capsule would probably be something ironic, smart, and knowing, something from the playbook of Alexander Payne or Richard Linklater, both of whom I like a good deal. But I’d prefer people in the future to think that we lived in more artistically ambitious times, that we were a more warm and open-minded people with greater attention spans. So, I’d stuff the time capsule full of the last three Wim Wenders’ movies (Million Dollar Hotel, Land of Plenty, and Don’t Come Knocking), all of which are beautiful failures. I might even splice bits of them together—the lover’s leap from Million Dollar Hotel, the final breathtaking shot of Land of Plenty, the exteriors in Don’t Come Knocking—to create some crazed triple bill. And if there were room in the time capsule, I might toss in Terrence Malick’s The New World, Alain Resnais’ Hearts, and just about everything that Cedric Klapisch has done, to make the future think that we were watching all these movies. After all, in the future as Mike Judge’s Idiocracy has taught us, the most popular film will be one called Ass.

Reifler: I always thought that if it were the end of the world, or you were about to die with a group of people, you would rise in that moment to your highest possible moral and spiritual potential. I imagined that you’d embrace the person closest to you, absolve them of what haunted them, and tell them that you loved them—even if you had never met before. I’d had a reservation to travel on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. I cancelled it when I got a cheaper flight on Jet Blue. Flying across country that morning we watched in real time on our little seat-back television sets as the World Trade Center collapsed, and I saw images of the wreckage of the airplane I might have been on. CNN announced that flights remaining in the air would be shot down by the military if they did not land immediately. We were not yet descending. I moved to touch the young woman next to me; we’d been chatting amiably at the beginning of the flight. She pulled away from me and pressed herself against the window, turning her face from mine. I can tell you without giving too much away that in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice we spend time with a small group of people in the hours and moments before Armageddon. But the movie is not about the apocalypse: it is about those people. They don’t hug and console and absolve; knowing the world is about to end does not make them suddenly perfect. It’s a beautiful movie, and it was Tarkovsky’s last opus. He made it in Sweden, using some of Bergman’s regular crew. I can’t tell you about the sacrifice at the center of the movie because that would give too much away. I can say, though, that the ending fills my heart with hope… and that is just one of the many reasons I am putting it in my time capsule. It would be both a warning and a hopeful call.