The PG Cooper List Thread: Gamer Days

I've been busy!

PG Cooper was murdered. PhantomKnight posts under his name to throw us off.

Fantastic Beasts is actually number one in this list. Grindlewald is seventh.

Fuck it, let's just finish this.


16. Chinatown (Roman Polanksi, 1974)



The perfect noir. Chinatown is stylishly told, with fantastic dialogue, sharp characters, and an engaging mystery, but it's the unnerving nihilism at the heart of the story which makes Chinatown a classic. Most noir aim for a certain world weary cynicism, but few earn it quite as well as Polanski's masterpiece.


15. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)



Perhaps the last great practical effects masterpiece of world building, on par with the accomplishments of Metropolis or 2001: A Space Odyssey. That Blade Runner is an exemplar of visual storytelling is rarely disputed, but driving this stark vision of the future is a great sense of despair regarding a loss of humanity and alienation in the face of rising industry. It's not exactly easy viewing, but there are rays of hope in Blade Runner, never more so than Roy Batty's moving final speech.


14. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)



The most breathlessly entertaining two and a half hours you'll ever have watching a movie. Scorsese may have made deeper, more challenging films, but none are as purely fun to watch as Goodfellas. The fact that it feels like such a breezy entertainment is itself a testament to the filmmakers accomplishment, as this is actually a pretty complex narrative spanning decades and with several major speaking roles. But Goodfellas never feels heavy. It's just a blast to watch from beginning to end, and in its own way probably does a better job demonstrating the allure of organized crime than any other gangster film.


13. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)



I've watched There Will Be Blood many times, and I'm still not totally sure what exactly is it that makes the film so special. It's clearly a great film, with a towering performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, some mesmerizing imagery, and one of the most singular scores in film history. But it's hard to put my finger on what keeps me coming back to PTA's masterpiece. Uniqueness is a factor. There's just nothing quite like There Will Be Blood, and it explores issues of violence, greed, and American history with a certain purity. It's also a film you can appreciate for its individual scenes, namely the oil spill and the amazing climactic showdown between Daniel and Eli.

12. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)



From one exploration of the dark heart of America to another, we come to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Loosely adapted from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now is less concerned with depicting the realities of the Vietnam War and more capturing the fractured psyche of the soldiers fighting it. At times, the movie is an intense and exhilarating action movie of sorts, while delving into an almost surreal hellscape at others. The film's production was famously a disaster, but that only seemed to fuel the chaos Coppola attempts to capture. Moreover, the behind the scenes trouble don't weigh down on the film's technical qualities, with Apocalypse Now being one of the most beautifully shot films ever made.


11. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)



If part of the New Hollywood was about mastering the storytelling structures and styles of classic Hollywood, than no film represents the era better than The Godfather. Building on the bones of the Warner Brothers gangster films of the 1930s, The Godfather tells the classic rise and fall gangster story of old, but injects it with a greater level of sophistication and nuance in both content and execution. Indeed, the film transcends its low-brow roots and becomes something more Shakespearean. The film is also a fine example of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, with a wonderfully structured screenplay which builds on builds and is also loaded with some of the most memorable dialogue in film history. The Godfather also rivals the original Star Wars in terms of sheer iconic scenes, and that cast? Goddamn. The Godfather is about as close to perfect as movies get. But it doesn't quite crack my top ten.



Final ten to come tomorrow.

In high school Blade Runner was my number two. Chinatown is aided by the fact that I made a video essay on it. I find if I spend a lot of time working with a film I really love it raises my enthusiasm for it. Barry Lyndon probably had a similar boost.

Nice pull.

I came here for the top 5.

Howard the Duck
X-Men: The Last Stand
Avatar
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
Seabiscuit

I'm just not sure how he'll place them...

The final five...


5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)



I don't think I need to belabor Kubrick's technical accomplishment with this movie. It's pretty much universally acknowledged that 2001: A Space Odyssey is still an unmatched achievement in visual effects, with fantastic cinematography and and amazing visual storytelling. The film has also been analyzed and dissected endlessly so I don't think I really need to convince people of its thematic weight either. Really, what surprises me the most about 2001 is just how emotional the experience has become for me. For a film frequently accused of being cold and distant, subsequent viewings have become increasingly personal and emotional. That's the thing about 2001; it asks a lot from viewers, but if you're willing to really give yourself to the film, the results are pretty awe-inspiring.


4. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)



Still the high water mark of action-adventure filmmaking. Seven Samurai deftly fuses a fun, Western-style samurai yarn with fantastic character work and a subtle but poignant critique of social structures. The film sets up a simple dynamic of simple villagers besieged by bandits, and while it doesn't exactly subvert this premise by the end, Kurosawa does gradually reveal greater levels of moral complexity which muddy what seemed like a simple story of good and evil. This of course ties into the film's theme of class division which runs throughout the film and the characters within it. And speaking of characters, the lengthy runtime really allows Kurosawa to flesh out his cast in a way that a tighter samurai film couldn't. The standouts are Kurosawa heroes Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, the former feels like a version of Kurosawa himself, and the latter creates one of his most memorable characters on screen. And of course, the battle scenes here are amazing, extremely well-staged and viscerally exciting, but with a sense of weight that still stands out. This is Kurosawa's masterpiece.


3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)



Legacy or not, Citizen Kane is entertaining as balls. Charlie Kane's life is an exhilarating epic that Welles brings to life in grand fashion, and
yet the film still has an incredibly tight runtime of just under two hours. The performances are fantastic, the dialogue sparkles, and the visual storytelling is impeccable. The film was something of a breakthrough in terms of cinematography upon release, but all these years later it's still a textbook example of visual storytelling for aspiring filmmakers. But more importantly for this list, it's also just a riveting story that I love to watch.


2. Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb! (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)



Stanley Kubrick may have made more technically accomplished movies, but I don't know if he ever made anything braver and more profound than Dr. Strangelove. The film takes a critical look at the cold war and has the audacity to laugh in its face. Rather than treat the potential of Mutually Assured Destruction with a type of fearful awe (as in Sidney Lumet's very good movie Fail-Safe, released a few months after Strangelove), Strangelove sees the absurdist comedy that underlies the arms race. Kubrick and Terry Southern's screenplay is brilliantly structured in how it gradually adds new comic touches/nuclear complications and the dialogue is also quite witty, but its the actors who solidify the laughs. Peter Sellers pulls triple duty to wonderful effect, Slim Pickens sincere gungho cowboy is a delight, the supporting cast is full of solid little performances, and then there's George C. Scott, who was tricked into giving one of the funniest performances in film history, effortlessly making a big performance feel nuanced. This movie rules.


1. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)



This movie shouldn't be that good. Coppola and Mario Puzo had already adapted most of Puzo's novel for the first Godfather, so only about 40% of this sequel actually comes from the source material. Additionally, last minute changes like the replacement of Clemenza with the never-before-mentioned Frankie Pentangeli and writing Marlon Brando out of the penultimate scene should have robbed the film of a lot of its value. But instead, these challenges helped foster a masterpiece that deepens and enriches its predecessor. With no more new story, Coppola and Puzo were first to dig deeper into Michael's life and fully unravel the consequences of his choices. The resulting portrait of the man and his family is so complete its hard to imagine Part I without it. Clemenza may be missed, but Pentangeli is integrated seamlessly and is himself a rich character. And of course, the lack of Brando in the final scene is everything, with Vito's shadow looming so large his presence is felt weighing down on Michael regardless.

The Godfather Part II is just such a rich piece of drama. The film has a fairly dense plot of two different timelines and a complex scheme against Michael, but the core of this movie is really a character study, one which slowly observes a man desperately trying to keep his life together as everything falls apart. Michael's downfall is famously contrasted with his father Vito's rise, with many seeing the contrast emphasizing Vito's innate goodness and his son's wickedness, but I think that's reductive. This isn't two stories of a good man and bad man, respectively, it's one long story about how one man's choices echo through time to haunt his family. And it's all told so perfectly. The actors are impeccably cast, with damn near everyone on-screen doing something memorable and interesting. Robert De Niro won a well-deserved Oscar for his turn as a young Vito, effortlessly capturing Brando's essence without copying his performance, but Al Pacino is really the lynch-pin of the movie. He carries the film as the burden of his life becomes greater and greater. His scenes with John Cazale's Fredo are particularly devastating. The film on the whole stews in a sense of loss. The golden browns of Part I may still be found in Part II's flashbacks, but the main story is defined by deep blacks, as divided characters further alienate each other. Indeed, Part II is a heavy watch, and in many ways the film is not as traditionally entertaining as the first Godfather. But what you get in return is a far more tragic portrait. And that's why The Godfather Part II is my favourite movie. The film is a deeply engrossing piece of storytelling, one which is highly engaging moment to moment, but also resonates deeply long after.

Dr. Strangelove to me is the #1 example of a movie that gets better with each viewing.

This top five needs more Resident Evil.

Are you doing just straight up Disney or Pixar too?