Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Dec 16, 2015 23:45:58 GMT -5
From a cinematic point of view, M is ahead of its time. But from a life perspective, it's just showing us the mob mentality that is an unfortunate part of any major society. It's not a deep movie. It's an obvious one. But it's one we need - just to remind us.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 17, 2015 7:30:29 GMT -5
9. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Year: 1964 Director: Stanley Kubrick Writer(s): Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George Based on: The novel "Red Alert" by Peter George Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, and Tracy Reed Studio: Columbia Country of Origin: USA Language: English Running Time: 94 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 The line of what is and isn’t “comedy in good taste” is always going to be debated over and so is the question of what constitutes good satire. It always takes a certain degree of courage to take a topic that is deathly serious and use it to make something hilarious and as far as I’m concerned the gold standard for dark comedy is still Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Despite his reputation for making “cold” and “disturbing” movies, Kubrick was always characterized by his tendency to inject comedy into his otherwise rather twisted movies and Strangelove might be the most extreme example of this. The film was based on a serious novel about the threat of nuclear war written by an RAF officer and rather than play it straight he focused in on the absurdity of nuclear deterrence. The film presents a scenario where a couple of misunderstandings and a few rogue individuals managed to lead the United States and Russia to the brink of nuclear annihilation… and then past the point of nuclear annihilation. It’s one thing to watch this in 2015 knowing that the cold war eventually more or less work itself out without missiles flying, but to have watched it in 1964 knowing that the absurd scenario on display and the ludicrous mentalities making it happen were all too real must have really been a hell of an experience. Even without the element of bold political satire, Dr. Strangelove would still have the makings of a comedy classic. First and foremost it features a really cool triple role from Peter Sellers who plays a befuddled RAF captain, a hilariously deadpan U.S. President, and the bizarre title character who speaks in an odd German accent and can’t seem to control his hands. It also features George C. Scott in an unexpectedly hilarious turn as a gung ho general who thinks with a strange right-wing mindset and of course there’s Slim Pickens, a self styled cowboy who will forever be remembered as the man gleefully riding a large phallic A-bomb as it falls to earth where it will almost certainly unleash the apocalypse. The whole film is filled with sexual wordplay and imagery, all in an attempt to ridicule the ultimate dick measuring contest that was the arms race. You’ll note that the film’s visuals are a lot looser than what you’d normally expect from a Kubrick movie, which was almost certainly a deliberate decision in order to prevent his usual meticulousness from smothering the comedy and also to give it a sort of radical slackness. I can hardly think of a movie that more boldly asserts the absurdity of the human condition at a specific moment and it definitely caught on with the public in a big way. Of course, what’s really sad and funny is that Mutually Assured Destruction would more or less remain official policy for another twenty five plus years.
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Post by Jibbs on Dec 17, 2015 9:23:20 GMT -5
Mein Fuhrer! I can VALK!!
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Dec 17, 2015 14:55:53 GMT -5
Brilliant movie. While probably not the funniest comedy of all-time, I do think it's the best.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 17, 2015 19:55:57 GMT -5
8. The Rules of the Game Year: 1939 Director: Jean Renoir Writer(s): Jean Renoir and Carl Koch Starring: Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, Roland Toutain, Gaston Modot, Pierre Magnier, and Jean Renoir Studio: Gaumont Country of Origin: France Language: French Running Time: 106 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 Generally speaking, I don’t have a whole lot of patience for the “comedy of manners” genre of literature. You know, books and movies about stuffy rich people gossiping amongst themselves in drawing rooms while their “downstairs” servants are occasionally given token attention. If you’ve ever watched PBS during sweeps month you know what I’m talking about. However, I’m nothing if not open minded and when this genre (or any genre really) is done right it can still achieve true greatness. The very best of them, to me, is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, a film made on the eve of the second world war which closes the casket on the old world aristocracy that led the world into yet another global conflict. Set at a country estate where various members of the French upper class have assembled to take part in a hunt. On its surface the various storylines that go on at this estate take the form of soapy love triangles and comic travails, but the film’s true intent to show the callous vapidity of the aristocracy. Of course given that Renoir was no propagandist he also never lionizes the “downstairs” servants just to present a simple tale of class warfare, they are just as capable of behaving foolishly as anyone else at the house. The Rules of the Game certainly draws on a number of theatrical sources from authors like Oscar Wilde and Molière but also has an element of Hollywood screwball comedy as the wacky hijinks start to go down over the course of the evening. Renoir had achieved a great deal of clout at this point in his career and used it to mount what had been the most expensive French production up to that point. He used that funding to bring top of the line visual techniques to the screen. That might not be readily apparent at first glance but the film employs a lot of the deep-focus cinematography that would be made famous two year later by Citizen Kane and includes a number of chaotic long takes and it also has a really complex audio mix for the time. The film was truly ahead of its time… so ahead of its time that audiences and critics hated it upon its initial release. It was the wrong film at the wrong time and after a short release it would be banned in France for being “depressing, morbid, immoral, and for having an undesirable influence over the young.” It was only later that the film would be restored, reassessed, and canonized as the classic it clearly is. It’s just one of many examples of how easily people can miss the point of a great movie on first blush.
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Post by Doomsday on Dec 17, 2015 21:22:54 GMT -5
Brilliant movie. While probably not the funniest comedy of all-time, I do think it's the best. Dr. Strangelove is one of the few comedy movies that gets funnier every time you watch it. I certainly wasn't blown away when I first watched it but man, every time I watch it again I lose it. |
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Post by Dracula on Dec 18, 2015 10:04:29 GMT -5
7. The Third Man
Year: 1949 Director: Carol Reed Writer(s): Graham Green Starring: Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard Studio: London Films Country of Origin: UK Language: English Running Time: 104 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 It’s pretty amazing how much a good backdrop does for a movie. The Third Man is a great movie that’s made ten times more fascinating simply for being set in an extremely interesting time and place: post-war Vienna during the Allied occupation. During this period the neo-realists were using similarly bombed out cities to make gritty dramas about poverty and strife, but this Graham Greene penned yarn goes in a different direction and makes Vienna into a sort of den of intrigue for expatriates working their way through the city’s seedy underbelly. That’s not to say that the film is lacking in insight into the weight of the war and the struggles of life in a location like this, in fact the war seems to haunt many of the film’s characters who seem to be fighting to find some way to return to normality after such a trauma. I’m not sure I’d classify it as a film noir but it definitely uses some of that genre’s cool visual style; most of the film seems to be set at night and director Carol Reed milks the atmospheric black and white cinematography for all its worth. He also successfully plays up the exotic locale through Anton Karas’ distinctive score performed entirely on a strange instrument called a zither. At its heart, The Third Man is a thriller, and of all the films in my top ten it’s probably the one with the leanest and most straightforward story but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have a deep resonance. The film takes on a whole new dimension when (spoiler) we meet Harry Lime, the man who was supposed to be dead the whole time but clearly wasn’t, and get to learn about his strange decent into evil. Played by Orson Welles in one of his best performances, Lime has a rather cold-blooded philosophy that he imparts in the film’s famous “Cuckoo clock” speech atop Vienna’s famous Wiener Riesenrad Ferris wheel. Villains are rarely as fascinating as Lime, who sort of over-shadows the film’s hero at times and what makes him so interesting is that he was said to have once been a good man and a close friend of the film’s protagonist. We never see him before he “turned” and a big part of what makes the character work is that it lets you imagine how the course of the war and its chaotic aftermath must have changed him. It’s a simple reminder that of how no one came out of that war the same and the film also leaves the audience with a distinct impression that the events of the film wouldn’t leave its survivors unchanged either.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Dec 18, 2015 13:56:36 GMT -5
Brilliant movie. While probably not the funniest comedy of all-time, I do think it's the best. Wait a minute. Is Clockwork Orange NOT on this list? |
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Post by Doomsday on Dec 18, 2015 14:03:54 GMT -5
I have a suspicion as to what #1 might be. Just a guess. Seven Samurai? |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 18, 2015 14:08:03 GMT -5
Brilliant movie. While probably not the funniest comedy of all-time, I do think it's the best. Wait a minute. Is Clockwork Orange NOT on this list? It is not. The first forty minutes or so of that movie are really exciting but it loses a lot of steam in its second half. Also I had a lot of Kubrick on the list already. |
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Post by Dracula on Dec 18, 2015 17:58:09 GMT -5
6. Seven Samurai Year: 1954 Director: Akira Kurosawa Writer(s): Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima, Isao Kimura, Daisuke Katō, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yoshio Inaba, Minoru Chiaki, Kamatari Fujiwara, Kokuten Kōdō, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Yukiko Shimazaki, Eijirō Tōno, and Bokuzen Hidari Distributor: Toho Country of Origin: Japan Language: Japanese Running Time: 207 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 All too often these days screen time is viewed as some kind of toxic substance that should be reduced as much as possible and that longer movies should be avoided at all costs. If you’ve been paying attention to this list you probably already know that I don’t agree. Sure there are some movies out there that could use some trimming but the knee-jerk reaction that some movies get for being long misses how much richness a movie can take on when it tries to do more than to rush through an adventure storyline and get to the action scenes. Case-in-point: Akira Kurosawa’s acclaimed 1954 film Seven Samurai. On its surface this movie should be a pretty standard western of sorts where a handful of warriors show up to a village, kill off some bandits, and then ride off into the sunset. That’s how Hollywood would handle it, and we know this because that’s more or less how the 1960 remake The Magnificent Seven played out. The Japanese original on the other hand runs a full 207 minutes and uses every one of them to explore its characters and examine the class struggles that shade their interactions with the villagers that they’re ostensibly supposed to be helping. Kurosawa applies a sort of John Ford western technique to this very Eastern story to give the film a very rough and tumble feel that subverts the mythmaking and supposed nobility of the samurai class. The samurai here aren’t noble heroes so much as they are mercenaries who are taking on this mission for various self-interested reasons but the villagers are hardly blameless victims either, they’re just as prone to selfishness and pettiness; this is a film about flawed humans coming together to reach a common goal. The “action” scenes are well rendered with some great slow motion effects employed in certain key moments but it isn’t really an “action movie” per se. When the swords come out the skirmishes are more like messy real-world battles in the mud rather than highly choreographed duels between acrobats. It’s a movie with a very real sense of how unglamorous violence is, but it isn’t snobby about it and doesn’t let its subtle pacifism get in the way of it being a fun and watchable yarn. This movie has long been a sort of “gateway drug” into the world of older foreign films, in part because it uses a very accessible Hollywood structure to tell a story with some more depth and flavor and it executes in a way that’s very hard to argue with.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Dec 18, 2015 18:14:12 GMT -5
Dammit!
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 18, 2015 18:26:41 GMT -5
Yeah, I saw that earlier post and thought "man, if he'd just waited half a day... Anyway, my top four will not be remotely surprising to anyone who knows my taste in film, sorry in advance for the anti-climax. |
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Post by Neverending on Dec 19, 2015 0:46:09 GMT -5
I have a suspicion as to what #1 might be. Just a guess. Seven Samurai? His #1 is 2001. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 19, 2015 10:21:51 GMT -5
5. The Passion of Joan of Arc Year: 1928 Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer Writer(s): Carl Theodor Dreyer and Joseph Delteil Starring: Renée Jeanne Falconetti, Eugène Silvain, André Berley, and Maurice Schutz Studio: Société Générale des Films Country of Origin: France/Denmark Language: French Running Time: 82 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 No one will deny that the transition to sound was necessary in the long run but man was it sad what had to get torn down to do it. Film had seemingly reached a pinnacle and the absolute high point of the era just might have been Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. The film tells the story of the final couple of days in the life of the titular saint and the title refers both to the conventional meaning of “passion” as well as the traditional meaning of “suffering” (e.g. The Passion of the Christ). The film focuses in on Joan’s inquisition style interrogation and leads up to her eventual death by burning. That would sound like a rather depressing character arc, but Dreyer films the movie in such a way that Joan’s suffering is seen less as a defeat and more as a sort of triumph of perseverance. The film stars a French stage actress named Renée Jeanne Falconetti and this was basically her only screen role, but what a record to leave behind. The movie is filled with these artful close-ups of Falconetti’s face and she has this look of anguish mixed with conviction that is really just an amazing thing to behold. When the film was first released it was controversial in many circles. French nationalists objected to a film about the country’s patron saint being made by a Dane, it was banned in England for its unsympathetic portrayal of the British soldiers holding Joan captive, and most damagingly the Catholic Church objected to a number of elements of it and the film was heavily cut because of this against Dreyer’s wishes. An uncut version of the film wasn’t to be found until 1981 when a version of the film was found in an insane asylum of all places. This newly restored version has been paired with a beautiful score by Richard Einhorn called “Voices of Light” and while I wouldn’t normally use a piece of music written sixty some years after a film’s initial release when assessing its greatness, this score really does bring the film up to yet another level in its ability to play to the emotion of the film. That emotion is important, this is a movie that’s all about what’s going on in Joan’s head and heart. The movie is about seventy minutes of tension and contemplation before it explodes into this big Battleship Potemkin inspired finale.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Dec 19, 2015 10:45:43 GMT -5
The 100 greatest silent movies of all-time.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 19, 2015 11:30:43 GMT -5
The 100 greatest silent movies of all-time. There are only eleven silent movies on the list (twelve if you want to include Modern Times). Once again, they are if anything under-represented given that a quarter of film history occurred before the invention of sound. |
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Post by PG Cooper on Dec 19, 2015 17:16:58 GMT -5
The Passion of Joan of Arc is amazing and worthy of inclusion.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 19, 2015 20:55:00 GMT -5
4. Lawrence of Arabia Year: 1962 Director: David Lean Writer(s): Robert Bold and Michael Wilson Starring: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, and Arthur Kennedy Studio: Columbia Country of Origin: USA/UK Language: English Running Time: 227 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 2.20:1 The “epic” movies of the 50s and 60s could be a mixed bag to say the very least. There were some respectable ones mixed in there like Spartacus but more often than not they were just bloated and childish; the franchise blockbusters of their time. It’s with that in mind that you begin to better appreciate just how exceptional David Lean’s epics were and he really topped himself with Lawrence of Arabia. Lean’s previous epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, was certainly amazing but most of its power came from its writing and acting. It was a fine looking movie to be sure but it didn’t really pave new stylistic ground and generally stuck to the conventional playbook of expensive Hollywood films. By contrast, Lawrence of Arabia is gorgeous. Where most filmmakers thought the best use of the cinemascope format was to fill it with extras, Lean instead decided to fill the screen with the vast expanses of desert that characterize the film’s setting. The vistas on display are beautiful in themselves but Lean had the sense to really photograph them correctly, putting small figures into the vastness and slowing things down when necessary. Of course “slow” shouldn’t be taken the wrong way. At its heart this is a big war movie with some really exciting battle scenes that take place over the course of a guerrilla campaign that would perhaps unintentionally mirror a number of conflicts that would occur over the course of the Cold War. Then of course there’s the film’s second half, which isn’t discussed enough even though it does show the birth of the Arab states that are central to modern conflicts. At its heart though, this is a character study. Of course T.E. Lawrence was a real person and I guess you could call this a biopic, but the film lacks all the telegraphed “greatest hits moments” that tent to taint movies in that genre. Lawrence as depicted in the film is a really complicated figure and the film has a great deal of time to flesh out his idiosyncrasies. His exact motivations are never entirely clear, perhaps he truly felt a kinship with the Arabs, perhaps he was manipulating them to help mother England, or perhaps he was simply a vainglorious attention seeker. It certainly helps that this character is being played by Peter O’Toole, who was pretty much plucked from obscurity in order to take this part and it also marked the international debut of the great Omar Sharif. There are a great many people who will tell you that this film absolutely must be seen on a gigantic screen, preferably in 70mm, and I can certainly attest that that is an excellent way to see the movie but I feel like that advice all too often needlessly scares people away from seeing the film in a timely manner and that it’s misguided advice in the first place because it reduces the film to pure spectacle when there’s a whole lot more there to dig into.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 20, 2015 9:12:24 GMT -5
Doomsday, low enough for you? 3. Citizen Kane
Year: 1941 Director: Orson Welles Writer(s): Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ray Collins, George Coulouris, and Agnes Moorehead Studio: RKO Radio Country of Origin: USA Language: English Running Time: 119 Minutes Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 I’ve run into a severe case of the “what more is there to say” syndrome when writing about a lot of the movies on this list, but none more than Citizen Kane, which has a long history of being declared the greatest movie of all time. As you can tell by the film’s ranking here I’m not quite on board with the notion of this being the absolute pinnacle of cinematic achievement but it’s certainly up there. There’s something about the movie that’s just hard to argue with, it’s about as close as a movie comes to being objectively perfect. Just about every textbook element of filmmaking here is exemplary. It’s got excellent acting, set decoration, camerawork, and features a screenplay which is structurally ambitious, thematically rich, and pleasantly written. It featured technical innovations in terms of camera work and cinematography and is also accessible enough to be appreciated by people who aren’t dedicated cinephilles. You can’t help but wonder how Orson Welles managed to get so much right, especially considering that he’d never made a film before writing, directing, and starring in his undisputed masterpiece. At its heart Citizen Kane is a veiled biopic of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (a fact that would come to haunt the film after the real Hearst tried to bury it) but it doesn’t really feel like a biopic, partly because the real Hearst has increasingly faded into history and partly because the film doesn’t hue at all to the usual patterns of film biography. In fact the film almost mocks the very idea of a biopic by going out of its way to suggest that there’s no way to truly encapsulate a single life in a simple set of stories and anecdotes, and yet Charles Foster Kane is nonetheless one of the richest characters in fiction. It’s a film that can be both meticulously deconstructed through shot by shot analysis but also casually watched as a sterling example of what old Hollywood could have been like if it had allowed more of its filmmakers to put a little extra thought and time into their work. The maturity that Welles injected into the film is probably a big part of why it stands out so much. Much as he did with his Mercury Theater radio program, his goal here was to use a new medium to create art for adults but not in a way that pretentious or above the heads of a general audience.
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Post by Doomsday on Dec 20, 2015 10:05:17 GMT -5
Eh I'll take it.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Dec 20, 2015 14:01:46 GMT -5
His #2 is Godfather 1&2 and #1 is 2001.
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Post by IanTheCool on Dec 20, 2015 14:14:08 GMT -5
Godfather is probably too mainstream.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Dec 20, 2015 17:16:19 GMT -5
Hell of a list so far. Looking forward to seeing it close out.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Dec 20, 2015 19:04:35 GMT -5
2. The Godfather Parts I & II Year: 1972/1974 Director: Francis Ford Coppola Writer(s): Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo Based on: The novel "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo Starring: Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, James Caan, Talia Shire, Morgana King, John Cazale, and Richard Castellano Studio: Paramount Country of Origin: USA Language: English Running Time: 375 Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve continued writing for this project the is how often I’ve brought up “accessibility.” Part of this might be a defensive measure to highlight that these movies aren’t as difficult as they may seem at first blush but mostly because I do think there’s a certain nobility in being able to bring artistic merit to the screen while still making movies that are exciting to watch and easy for all audiences to enjoy. No movies more perfectly fuse the demands of populist entertainment with the weighty thematic and narrative resonance of art cinema quite like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. For the purposes of this list I’ve hesitantly lumped the two films together into a single slot partly to save space on the list, partly to save myself from having to pick between the two, and partly because it’s really when taken together as a single saga that the full greatness of this character arc really becomes apparent. The first film runs through its narrative with a streamlined efficiency as the audience watches in suspense as Michael Corleone descends into the life of a cold blooded gangster. The second film employs a rather brilliant format in which we watch a sort of prequel about the rise of Don Vito Corleone intercut with the fallout of Michael Corleone’s decisions in the first film and it becomes increasingly clear that what we’ve been watching this whole time is an epic tragedy about the father’s best intentions leading to nothing but bloodshed for his family as his sins linger on. Like Citizen Kane, this is another case where every individual element of a film somehow manages to be functioning on all cylinders. The film’s script somehow managed to take a rather trashy novel by Mario Puzo, strip it down to its essentials, and mine it for its thematic richness and add a lot of really quotable dialogue. The film’s cast is a who’s who of brilliant young actors like Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, Talia Shire, Robert De Niro (in part II), and of course featured the legendary comeback of the veteran movie star Marlon Brando. On the technical side the films featured vivid cinematography by Gordon Willis and of course it also featured an iconic score by Nino Rota. The two films have a collective runtime of 375 minutes but neither films feels that long at all. The films were made at a time when filmmakers were looking back on the genre films of Hollywood’s past like westerns and film noirs and trying to make them relevant for a new generation, in part by seeing how they could play out when freed of the limitations of the old production code. In the case of this movie that meant we could see more onscreen violence but more importantly there could be a more complex morality onscreen. The films in their totality certainly still condemn the criminal lifestyle but they didn’t need to express this through didactic moralizing and could instead use more subtle tactics. It’s the film’s violent genre elements that probably got the film its mass audience, but it’s that complex morality that has made it a classic for the ages.
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