Bloopy
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no country for old wainds
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- Nov 23, 2002
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TechnicalBarbarity
-TheNightsBane-
I need to watch Donnie Brasco again before i do my list. I'll try to find some bootleg version online later today.
Somethingface
Member
He's frantically trying to spend what used to be his weekend coming up with something more pretentious than my work 
He's frantically trying to spend what used to be his weekend coming up with something more pretentious than my work
Give me a movie list faggot or leave the hall.
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,565
- 9,580
- 113
Somethingface
Member
1. Titanic - heart-breaking, romantic, funny, and jaw-droppingly beautiful. A real tear jerker and probably the best movie of the 1990s.
2. Men in Black - peak sci-fi that explores the existential crisis present in the modern age, the hidden government conspiracies, the secret airwaves drifting in from outer space - the movie making 'real' the aliens buried deep in the 'imaginery'
3. The Lost World Jurassic Park - as far as historically accurate movies go this is right up there with the spaghetti Westerns in terms of moving, life-like vistas into man's heroism and bravery
4. Liar Liar - laugh out loud, Carrey at his very best... a deeply moral look at how adults unknowingly influence their children and create a new generation of misfits, with a special, flurry of emotion to cap off a wild adventure...
5. Air Force One - a brilliant look into the fear lurking outside the normality of our own confines, the sacred branch of the presidential inner sanctum penetrated by those previously held away by our very best security. A piercing look into the unthought of vulnerability of that we hold impenetrable. Many would argue that Han Solo is the model president, exceeding even Trump.
2. Men in Black - peak sci-fi that explores the existential crisis present in the modern age, the hidden government conspiracies, the secret airwaves drifting in from outer space - the movie making 'real' the aliens buried deep in the 'imaginery'
3. The Lost World Jurassic Park - as far as historically accurate movies go this is right up there with the spaghetti Westerns in terms of moving, life-like vistas into man's heroism and bravery
4. Liar Liar - laugh out loud, Carrey at his very best... a deeply moral look at how adults unknowingly influence their children and create a new generation of misfits, with a special, flurry of emotion to cap off a wild adventure...
5. Air Force One - a brilliant look into the fear lurking outside the normality of our own confines, the sacred branch of the presidential inner sanctum penetrated by those previously held away by our very best security. A piercing look into the unthought of vulnerability of that we hold impenetrable. Many would argue that Han Solo is the model president, exceeding even Trump.
Somethingface
Member
Somethingface
Member
no country for old wainds
Active Member
- Nov 23, 2002
- 26,565
- 9,580
- 113
20) The Wrong Guy (Dir. David Steinberg)
the unlikely brainchild of early the simpsons writer jay kogen, dave foley of the kids in the hall fame, and the guy who played craig in malcolm in the middle? i had to check this out, and it turned out to be a magnificently absurd comedy about a guy who's on the run for a crime he didn't commit... and which nobody else thinks he committed, either. they don't make 'em like this anymore, and while i'm not sure it really deserves a place on my list ahead of, say, errol morris' fast, cheap & out of control or amos kollek's sue, i really wanted to recommend it.
19) Breakdown (Dir. Jonathan Mostow)
a surprisingly adept homage to '70s thrillers that could almost be mistaken for the real thing, with mostow giving his best duel-era spielberg impression, letting kurt russell and some superior character actors do the rest. as much as i like it i was slightly disappointed when i finally got around to duel, having been sold something even more stripped down, elemental and abstract than what i got; the climax here, with its close-ups of desperate, scrabbling humanity amidst a claustrophobic cacophony of screeching grinding metal, may surpass it in that regard.
18) The Mirror (Dir. Jafar Panahi)
initially this seems like it'll be a didactic, miserablist social drama about a little girl left alone in a sprawling, uncaring city, but if there's anything that separates panahi from his mentor kiarostami and the rest of the iranian scene, it's his warm, wry sense of humour. the mirror is packed with jokes if you're looking for them, and while it offers a kind of city symphony of tehran in its many different guises, it's less concerned with judgement than playfully exploring the borders between reality and performance, with a classic iranian mid-film metatextual fissure that enhances rather than destroys the immersion.
p.s. most of you would probably find this kid way too fucking annoying to care about any of this.
17) The River (Dir. Tsai Ming-Liang)
a guy agrees to play a floating corpse in a short film scene, and afterwards starts suffering terrible neck pain. that's the entire movie. oh and he wanks off his dad. in its own quiet way this is a haunting horror film about the creeping physical manifestation of societal, familial and existential hang-ups; comparisons to todd haynes' safe are pretty on-point.
16) Taste of Cherry (Dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
this was the first middle eastern film i ever saw, and one of the first foreign films for that matter, so i was intrigued to revisit it over a decade on. ultimately, i find that it's least successful when it's trying to be most meaningful--namely the central dialogues, which are a little on-the-nose, and the perspective-jolting ending, which serves an important conceptual purpose no doubt but feels gimmicky compared to many of kiarostami's other works, which weave their metatextual concerns more organically into the narrative. still, i like this film very much for the quieter moments: this lonely, disturbed, single-minded man driving around these barren landscapes, surveying them ambivalently as though searching for a reason to detour from the ending that awaits him. nobody shoots people driving around in cars quite like kiarostami, and rarely do a location and the movements around it externalise a character's headspace so vividly and mesmerisingly.
15) Gummo (Dir. Harmony Korine)
one of the most original visions ever put to celluloid, harmony korine's retarded paint-huffing verite trashterpiece is the ultimate testament to the poetry of uncompromised exploitation, and the profound ugliness of it. it rolls around in a psychological and economical gutter beyond imagining, its blasted post-apocalyptic hellscape soundtracked by burzum, bathory, bethlehem and mystifier. there has never and will never be anything else like it, for good or ill, and it absolutely transcends value judgements, but it must be seen, if only to be loathed.
14) Men in Black (Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld)
a quintessential summer movie which isn't exactly aiming for the galaxy but gets the tone exactly right, and holds up better than most of my other nostalgia touchstones. the visual effects are genuinely fantastic courtesy of the great rick baker, d'onofrio's villain is one of the most grotesque i can remember, the chemistry between jones and smith is surprisingly effortless, and the worldbuilding is both wacky enough to bring joe dante to mind and detailed enough to make it seem like this is just one of the main weird ass stories going on in this version of new york. so forget that roswell crap, and show love to the black suit!
13) Starship Troopers (Dir. Paul Verhoeven)
if there's one lesson that must be learned from paul verhoeven, it's that one should only satirise things they absolutely fucking love. this is, after all, less a satire of war or fascism or imperialism themselves than of the media, the ways in which it facilitates and identifies with those concepts, from journalism and advertising to even the most ostensibly inoffensive narratives of hollywood cinema. it works because verhoeven understands the appeal of that media intimately, understands how to get inside and lampoon it from within. he not only suggests but outright demonstrates that if you’ve ever imagined yourself as the star in some glorious romantic fantasy, ever projected yourself onto a dumb shit hollywood action movie, you are on some level susceptible to and complicit with the ideologies on show here. you're forced to consider exactly what attitudes are being propagated by the cliches of, say, teen drama, or sports movies, or post-star wars space opera, to name but three of the many things verhoeven touches on. so much of what was dismissed by critics as pandering fluff in starship troopers exists to serve this purpose, functioning on multiple levels at once. the man is a genius.
12) Cure (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
where pulse was an apocalyptic technological ghost story, cure is a slow-burning police procedural, but both are about the same things; the mutability of identity and myth of the self, the inadequacy of institutions, societal alienation and disconnection, metaphysical absence. to me this is a much, much better version of sion sono's suicide club, or the dead center; its crushingly nihilistic worldview may ultimately be just as facile, but kurosawa is one of the finest active directors and has an uncanny way of evoking emptiness, loneliness, teasing horror out of the mundane with these patient, dispassionate wide shots, use of negative space, and edits that seem to trickle down with the same paralysing inevitability as the water its villain utilises.
11) Face/Off (Dir. John Woo)
I want to take his face... off. Eyes, nose, skin, teeth - it's coming off. It's like looking in a mirror, only not. Hey Sean, how's your dead son? The man you think is your husband isn't. This nose. This hair. This ridiculous chin. Well, Sean... Looks like Elvis done left the building. Nothing like having your face cut off to disturb your sleep. I torched *all* the evidence that proves you're you, so, like, WOW! Looks like you're gonna be in here for... [looks at his watch] THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS! I never really enjoyed the Messiah, in fact, I think it's fucking boring. But your voice makes even a hack like Handel seem like a genius. [sings "Hallelujah" along with the choir, then grabs the girl's butt and orgasms]
10) Happy Together (Dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
strangely, this film begins in buenos aires, just like starship troopers. it's another of wong's deeply sad, romantic films about lonely, displaced, damaged people loving and losing and loving over again, time slipping by like raindrops as they search for home away from home.
9) Eye of God (Dir. Tim Blake Nelson)
many will know tim blake nelson from his various coen brothers collaborations (most recently, he played buster scruggs himself), but if his directorial debut is anything to go by, this could be where his greatest talent lies. this is a parable of sorts about the problem of evil, which sounds desperately uninteresting to me on paper, but with its dreamily edited non-linear structure, its intimate, sensitive camera, its authentic performances (particularly from the simply amazing martha plimpton) and small-town riverside location, nelson somehow carved up a hidden masterpiece of the american gothic, with one of the most perfect and devastating endings of any i've ever seen. a film with such a schematic, sermonising premise has no right to feel so human and lived in at every moment, and were it not for nelson's crippling doubt over such notions, i'd be inclined to call it miraculous.
8) Fireworks (Dir. Takeshi Kitano)
this is a very old favourite i didn't get around to rewatching, else maybe the rank would be different. kitano's most personal film: on grief and regret, on masculinity and the difficulty of expressing emotion, on violence and artistic creation as two interrelated ways of exorcising trauma or communicating what one isn't capable of saying, on impulses toward self-destruction, on unconditional love. there's something almost sentimental about the premise, but from what i remember kitano's patient, understated, almost ozu-esque editing allows him to avoid any such thing.
7) Nowhere (Dir. Gregg Araki)
probably the greatest camp transgressive acid-fucked high school alien invasion sex comedy ever to grace the screen, incorporating everything from twin peaks to john waters to every shitty drugged out '90s indie music video you've ever seen. araki is the director who most definitively captures the nineties for me, perhaps because his films resemble memories and dreams of my childhood more than the actual decade itself, but this takes those qualities to breaking point; a manic, absurd, wildly sexualised and gloriously silly bombardment of hallucinatory images that feel like they were dredged up from the weirdest corners of my generation's collective past.
6) Henry Fool (Dir. Hal Hartley)
there are people who consider this trilogy the Great American Film(s) of the past quarter century, and for sure this opening film is a dense text that's particularly prescient about the role digitalisation has played in the democratisation of art and politics (complete with some remarkably accurate references to a donald trump-esque president). i do find the way it presents its dichotomies and ironies a little schematic at times, but i suspect this is a film that rewards many rewatches as there's so much to unpack, and so much of it is about itself, anticipating our interpretations and criticisms and turning them back on us. on the basis of this and trust, a film i adore at this point, i'm ready to accept hartley as every bit as much of a deadpan brechtian genius as greenaway or lanthimos, with a tone and perspective entirely his own.
5) Boogie Nights (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
of the two comparisons regularly levelled at paul thomas anderson's early work, i find scorsese a little more accurate than altman. it's a love of movies that fuels this stuff, an excess of style in which cracks begin to appear and 'humanity' seeps through, and that's something i'll always associate with scorsese, at least from the nineties onwards. there are a growing number of critics calling out anderson as a fake, an insincere show-off who cares more about impressing than expressing, but i always seem to find strong emotional (and sometimes intellectual) undercurrents to his work, and despite its obvious debts to other films and slightly labored metaphors for cultural change, boogie nights and its depiction of a wild, screwed up sub-culture (or family, more accurately) are no exception. this is a great moving picture in the classic sense, in that it moves, it's as alive with motion as any dance, and it's impossible not to get swept up along with it.
4) Jackie Brown (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)
if this is the most graceful, sincere, soulful and tragic film of tarantino's career, it's because everything seems to grow out of the characters (especially the great pam grier). he seems less enamoured--though still plenty enamoured, don't get me wrong--with plot, script and genre, more ready to just hang out with these people, discover them and their melancholy and anxiety with his camera. maybe that isn't what most people want out of tarantino, as it's rather more old-fashioned than what made his name, but i personally think an extra sprinkle of the old-fashioned only makes his pop culture pastiche fizz all the more--his music cues, for example, were rarely more deeply felt than here.
3) Lost Highway (Dir. David Lynch)
you can never really capture the experience of watching a movie in words, obviously, but doing so with lynch at his most instinctual and precognizant and unrestrained seems particularly pointless. besides, i haven't rewatched it for this list, and despite seeing it a couple of times i don't remember the 'plot' in any great detail, just certain images and oppressive moods and the disorienting narrative fractures that result from a disturbed man's attempts to reconfigure his memories(?). i'd echo what i said about araki, though, in that this magnifies the feeling of remembering suppressed, specifically '90s childhood memories.
2) Career Girls (Dir. Mike Leigh)
this has a reputation as one of mike leigh's weaker films, and it's true that it's rather dated. its use of music in particular is pretty misguided, and it isn't exactly subtle about its flashback structure in the way that, say, eye of god is. but man, give me something this unhinged and messy and raw over one of his safer, more refined works every time, and over most other movies in general--it might actually be the closest leigh i've seen to NAKED, only it's focused on the girls. despite its problems it's just so alive, lurching between extremes of depravity and tenderness, rage and despair, remaining ultra quotable and gloriously obnoxious all the while. it's not very often i see a movie that manages to repeatedly disturb me, move me and make me laugh, and i've kept thinking about it ever since i saw it. RIP katrin cartlidge, what an absolutely fucking singular presence that woman was.
1) Perfect Blue (Dir. Satoshi Kon)
what makes perfect blue so chilling is the way it plays upon the nature of its medium, just like vertigo all those years ago. anime is traditionally an intrinsically childlike mode of storytelling, and the same can be said for pop music; perfect blue presents both at their most idealised, innocent and naive, only to brutally, perversely corrupt them, or perhaps expose them as the facades they are, fragile fantasies designed to sugarcoat our deepest insecurities, fears and perversions until one mistake, or perhaps just the passage of time, causes the bubble to burst and all of them to pour out. like mulholland drive, this film is so disturbing because although most of us aren't so deluded as to hallucinate a fantasy world, all of us tell ourselves stories to suppress the undesirable parts of our existence and ourselves, whether it's our envy, our guilt over our more bestial and immoral impulses, our physical insecurities, our fears of death and decay and aging, our failures in life, and more. and we derive these stories from the arts, even the most basic pleasure of escapism is derived from a dissatisfaction with reality and the desire for something simpler, so to experience a movie that presents itself as a perfect projection of that desire only to begin unravelling before our eyes, fragmenting and crumbling and allowing all these dark thoughts and fears to mix in with its idealised movie-ness, the last place they're welcome, is an affront to the psyche. that sweet, fun pop song plays again, except now it makes you think of a repulsive stalker jerking off in his room, of death and degeneracy, your failing career, the pounds and years you've put on, and it's taunting and mocking you with its knowingly unattainable innocence and happiness.
---------------
the unlikely brainchild of early the simpsons writer jay kogen, dave foley of the kids in the hall fame, and the guy who played craig in malcolm in the middle? i had to check this out, and it turned out to be a magnificently absurd comedy about a guy who's on the run for a crime he didn't commit... and which nobody else thinks he committed, either. they don't make 'em like this anymore, and while i'm not sure it really deserves a place on my list ahead of, say, errol morris' fast, cheap & out of control or amos kollek's sue, i really wanted to recommend it.
19) Breakdown (Dir. Jonathan Mostow)
a surprisingly adept homage to '70s thrillers that could almost be mistaken for the real thing, with mostow giving his best duel-era spielberg impression, letting kurt russell and some superior character actors do the rest. as much as i like it i was slightly disappointed when i finally got around to duel, having been sold something even more stripped down, elemental and abstract than what i got; the climax here, with its close-ups of desperate, scrabbling humanity amidst a claustrophobic cacophony of screeching grinding metal, may surpass it in that regard.
18) The Mirror (Dir. Jafar Panahi)
initially this seems like it'll be a didactic, miserablist social drama about a little girl left alone in a sprawling, uncaring city, but if there's anything that separates panahi from his mentor kiarostami and the rest of the iranian scene, it's his warm, wry sense of humour. the mirror is packed with jokes if you're looking for them, and while it offers a kind of city symphony of tehran in its many different guises, it's less concerned with judgement than playfully exploring the borders between reality and performance, with a classic iranian mid-film metatextual fissure that enhances rather than destroys the immersion.
p.s. most of you would probably find this kid way too fucking annoying to care about any of this.
17) The River (Dir. Tsai Ming-Liang)
a guy agrees to play a floating corpse in a short film scene, and afterwards starts suffering terrible neck pain. that's the entire movie. oh and he wanks off his dad. in its own quiet way this is a haunting horror film about the creeping physical manifestation of societal, familial and existential hang-ups; comparisons to todd haynes' safe are pretty on-point.
16) Taste of Cherry (Dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
this was the first middle eastern film i ever saw, and one of the first foreign films for that matter, so i was intrigued to revisit it over a decade on. ultimately, i find that it's least successful when it's trying to be most meaningful--namely the central dialogues, which are a little on-the-nose, and the perspective-jolting ending, which serves an important conceptual purpose no doubt but feels gimmicky compared to many of kiarostami's other works, which weave their metatextual concerns more organically into the narrative. still, i like this film very much for the quieter moments: this lonely, disturbed, single-minded man driving around these barren landscapes, surveying them ambivalently as though searching for a reason to detour from the ending that awaits him. nobody shoots people driving around in cars quite like kiarostami, and rarely do a location and the movements around it externalise a character's headspace so vividly and mesmerisingly.
15) Gummo (Dir. Harmony Korine)
one of the most original visions ever put to celluloid, harmony korine's retarded paint-huffing verite trashterpiece is the ultimate testament to the poetry of uncompromised exploitation, and the profound ugliness of it. it rolls around in a psychological and economical gutter beyond imagining, its blasted post-apocalyptic hellscape soundtracked by burzum, bathory, bethlehem and mystifier. there has never and will never be anything else like it, for good or ill, and it absolutely transcends value judgements, but it must be seen, if only to be loathed.
14) Men in Black (Dir. Barry Sonnenfeld)
a quintessential summer movie which isn't exactly aiming for the galaxy but gets the tone exactly right, and holds up better than most of my other nostalgia touchstones. the visual effects are genuinely fantastic courtesy of the great rick baker, d'onofrio's villain is one of the most grotesque i can remember, the chemistry between jones and smith is surprisingly effortless, and the worldbuilding is both wacky enough to bring joe dante to mind and detailed enough to make it seem like this is just one of the main weird ass stories going on in this version of new york. so forget that roswell crap, and show love to the black suit!
13) Starship Troopers (Dir. Paul Verhoeven)
if there's one lesson that must be learned from paul verhoeven, it's that one should only satirise things they absolutely fucking love. this is, after all, less a satire of war or fascism or imperialism themselves than of the media, the ways in which it facilitates and identifies with those concepts, from journalism and advertising to even the most ostensibly inoffensive narratives of hollywood cinema. it works because verhoeven understands the appeal of that media intimately, understands how to get inside and lampoon it from within. he not only suggests but outright demonstrates that if you’ve ever imagined yourself as the star in some glorious romantic fantasy, ever projected yourself onto a dumb shit hollywood action movie, you are on some level susceptible to and complicit with the ideologies on show here. you're forced to consider exactly what attitudes are being propagated by the cliches of, say, teen drama, or sports movies, or post-star wars space opera, to name but three of the many things verhoeven touches on. so much of what was dismissed by critics as pandering fluff in starship troopers exists to serve this purpose, functioning on multiple levels at once. the man is a genius.
12) Cure (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
where pulse was an apocalyptic technological ghost story, cure is a slow-burning police procedural, but both are about the same things; the mutability of identity and myth of the self, the inadequacy of institutions, societal alienation and disconnection, metaphysical absence. to me this is a much, much better version of sion sono's suicide club, or the dead center; its crushingly nihilistic worldview may ultimately be just as facile, but kurosawa is one of the finest active directors and has an uncanny way of evoking emptiness, loneliness, teasing horror out of the mundane with these patient, dispassionate wide shots, use of negative space, and edits that seem to trickle down with the same paralysing inevitability as the water its villain utilises.
11) Face/Off (Dir. John Woo)
I want to take his face... off. Eyes, nose, skin, teeth - it's coming off. It's like looking in a mirror, only not. Hey Sean, how's your dead son? The man you think is your husband isn't. This nose. This hair. This ridiculous chin. Well, Sean... Looks like Elvis done left the building. Nothing like having your face cut off to disturb your sleep. I torched *all* the evidence that proves you're you, so, like, WOW! Looks like you're gonna be in here for... [looks at his watch] THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS! I never really enjoyed the Messiah, in fact, I think it's fucking boring. But your voice makes even a hack like Handel seem like a genius. [sings "Hallelujah" along with the choir, then grabs the girl's butt and orgasms]
10) Happy Together (Dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
strangely, this film begins in buenos aires, just like starship troopers. it's another of wong's deeply sad, romantic films about lonely, displaced, damaged people loving and losing and loving over again, time slipping by like raindrops as they search for home away from home.
9) Eye of God (Dir. Tim Blake Nelson)
many will know tim blake nelson from his various coen brothers collaborations (most recently, he played buster scruggs himself), but if his directorial debut is anything to go by, this could be where his greatest talent lies. this is a parable of sorts about the problem of evil, which sounds desperately uninteresting to me on paper, but with its dreamily edited non-linear structure, its intimate, sensitive camera, its authentic performances (particularly from the simply amazing martha plimpton) and small-town riverside location, nelson somehow carved up a hidden masterpiece of the american gothic, with one of the most perfect and devastating endings of any i've ever seen. a film with such a schematic, sermonising premise has no right to feel so human and lived in at every moment, and were it not for nelson's crippling doubt over such notions, i'd be inclined to call it miraculous.
8) Fireworks (Dir. Takeshi Kitano)
this is a very old favourite i didn't get around to rewatching, else maybe the rank would be different. kitano's most personal film: on grief and regret, on masculinity and the difficulty of expressing emotion, on violence and artistic creation as two interrelated ways of exorcising trauma or communicating what one isn't capable of saying, on impulses toward self-destruction, on unconditional love. there's something almost sentimental about the premise, but from what i remember kitano's patient, understated, almost ozu-esque editing allows him to avoid any such thing.
7) Nowhere (Dir. Gregg Araki)
probably the greatest camp transgressive acid-fucked high school alien invasion sex comedy ever to grace the screen, incorporating everything from twin peaks to john waters to every shitty drugged out '90s indie music video you've ever seen. araki is the director who most definitively captures the nineties for me, perhaps because his films resemble memories and dreams of my childhood more than the actual decade itself, but this takes those qualities to breaking point; a manic, absurd, wildly sexualised and gloriously silly bombardment of hallucinatory images that feel like they were dredged up from the weirdest corners of my generation's collective past.
6) Henry Fool (Dir. Hal Hartley)
there are people who consider this trilogy the Great American Film(s) of the past quarter century, and for sure this opening film is a dense text that's particularly prescient about the role digitalisation has played in the democratisation of art and politics (complete with some remarkably accurate references to a donald trump-esque president). i do find the way it presents its dichotomies and ironies a little schematic at times, but i suspect this is a film that rewards many rewatches as there's so much to unpack, and so much of it is about itself, anticipating our interpretations and criticisms and turning them back on us. on the basis of this and trust, a film i adore at this point, i'm ready to accept hartley as every bit as much of a deadpan brechtian genius as greenaway or lanthimos, with a tone and perspective entirely his own.
5) Boogie Nights (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
of the two comparisons regularly levelled at paul thomas anderson's early work, i find scorsese a little more accurate than altman. it's a love of movies that fuels this stuff, an excess of style in which cracks begin to appear and 'humanity' seeps through, and that's something i'll always associate with scorsese, at least from the nineties onwards. there are a growing number of critics calling out anderson as a fake, an insincere show-off who cares more about impressing than expressing, but i always seem to find strong emotional (and sometimes intellectual) undercurrents to his work, and despite its obvious debts to other films and slightly labored metaphors for cultural change, boogie nights and its depiction of a wild, screwed up sub-culture (or family, more accurately) are no exception. this is a great moving picture in the classic sense, in that it moves, it's as alive with motion as any dance, and it's impossible not to get swept up along with it.
4) Jackie Brown (Dir. Quentin Tarantino)
if this is the most graceful, sincere, soulful and tragic film of tarantino's career, it's because everything seems to grow out of the characters (especially the great pam grier). he seems less enamoured--though still plenty enamoured, don't get me wrong--with plot, script and genre, more ready to just hang out with these people, discover them and their melancholy and anxiety with his camera. maybe that isn't what most people want out of tarantino, as it's rather more old-fashioned than what made his name, but i personally think an extra sprinkle of the old-fashioned only makes his pop culture pastiche fizz all the more--his music cues, for example, were rarely more deeply felt than here.
3) Lost Highway (Dir. David Lynch)
you can never really capture the experience of watching a movie in words, obviously, but doing so with lynch at his most instinctual and precognizant and unrestrained seems particularly pointless. besides, i haven't rewatched it for this list, and despite seeing it a couple of times i don't remember the 'plot' in any great detail, just certain images and oppressive moods and the disorienting narrative fractures that result from a disturbed man's attempts to reconfigure his memories(?). i'd echo what i said about araki, though, in that this magnifies the feeling of remembering suppressed, specifically '90s childhood memories.
2) Career Girls (Dir. Mike Leigh)
this has a reputation as one of mike leigh's weaker films, and it's true that it's rather dated. its use of music in particular is pretty misguided, and it isn't exactly subtle about its flashback structure in the way that, say, eye of god is. but man, give me something this unhinged and messy and raw over one of his safer, more refined works every time, and over most other movies in general--it might actually be the closest leigh i've seen to NAKED, only it's focused on the girls. despite its problems it's just so alive, lurching between extremes of depravity and tenderness, rage and despair, remaining ultra quotable and gloriously obnoxious all the while. it's not very often i see a movie that manages to repeatedly disturb me, move me and make me laugh, and i've kept thinking about it ever since i saw it. RIP katrin cartlidge, what an absolutely fucking singular presence that woman was.
1) Perfect Blue (Dir. Satoshi Kon)
what makes perfect blue so chilling is the way it plays upon the nature of its medium, just like vertigo all those years ago. anime is traditionally an intrinsically childlike mode of storytelling, and the same can be said for pop music; perfect blue presents both at their most idealised, innocent and naive, only to brutally, perversely corrupt them, or perhaps expose them as the facades they are, fragile fantasies designed to sugarcoat our deepest insecurities, fears and perversions until one mistake, or perhaps just the passage of time, causes the bubble to burst and all of them to pour out. like mulholland drive, this film is so disturbing because although most of us aren't so deluded as to hallucinate a fantasy world, all of us tell ourselves stories to suppress the undesirable parts of our existence and ourselves, whether it's our envy, our guilt over our more bestial and immoral impulses, our physical insecurities, our fears of death and decay and aging, our failures in life, and more. and we derive these stories from the arts, even the most basic pleasure of escapism is derived from a dissatisfaction with reality and the desire for something simpler, so to experience a movie that presents itself as a perfect projection of that desire only to begin unravelling before our eyes, fragmenting and crumbling and allowing all these dark thoughts and fears to mix in with its idealised movie-ness, the last place they're welcome, is an affront to the psyche. that sweet, fun pop song plays again, except now it makes you think of a repulsive stalker jerking off in his room, of death and degeneracy, your failing career, the pounds and years you've put on, and it's taunting and mocking you with its knowingly unattainable innocence and happiness.
---------------
1. perfect blue
2. career girls
3. lost highway
4. jackie brown
5. boogie nights
6. henry fool
7. nowhere
8. hana-bi
9. eye of god
10. happy together
2. career girls
3. lost highway
4. jackie brown
5. boogie nights
6. henry fool
7. nowhere
8. hana-bi
9. eye of god
10. happy together
TIED FOR 10th
TOTAL POINTS: 18 RESPECTIVELY
TOTAL POINTS: 18 RESPECTIVELY
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery directed by Jay Roach
Voted for by:
@Krow (3rd place)
@Bloopy (4th place)
@Terasophe (8th place)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park directed by Steven Spielberg
Voted for by:
@Terasophe (1st place)
@dwellerINTHEdark (3rd place)
TechnicalBarbarity
-TheNightsBane-
damn, i missed the deadline
here's my list anyway ...
1 - LA Confidential
2 - Cop Land
3 - Good Will Hunting
4 - Con Air
5 - Men in Black
6 - Gattaca
7 - Titanic
8 - Starship Troopers
9 - The Fifth Element
10 - Liar Liar
Didnt get around to watching Donnie Brasco, Boogie Nights and Austin Powers again. They might've made the bottom half of my list.
here's my list anyway ...
1 - LA Confidential
2 - Cop Land
3 - Good Will Hunting
4 - Con Air
5 - Men in Black
6 - Gattaca
7 - Titanic
8 - Starship Troopers
9 - The Fifth Element
10 - Liar Liar
Didnt get around to watching Donnie Brasco, Boogie Nights and Austin Powers again. They might've made the bottom half of my list.
Last edited:
=8th) Jackie Brown directed by Quintin Tarantino
Voted for by:
@no country for old wainds (4th place)
@Anom@nder Rake (5th place)
@Bloopy (5th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 19
=8th) Princess Mononoke directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Voted for by:
@zabu of nΩd (3rd place)
@Krow (5th place)
@challenge_everything (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 19
Voted for by:
@no country for old wainds (4th place)
@Anom@nder Rake (5th place)
@Bloopy (5th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 19
=8th) Princess Mononoke directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Voted for by:
@zabu of nΩd (3rd place)
@Krow (5th place)
@challenge_everything (6th place)
IMDB
Main cast:
Yōji Matsuda / Billy Crudup
Yuriko Ishida / Claire Danes
Yūko Tanaka / Minnie Driver
Main cast:
Yōji Matsuda / Billy Crudup
Yuriko Ishida / Claire Danes
Yūko Tanaka / Minnie Driver
TOTAL POINTS: 19
=6th) Hana-bi (Fireworks) directed by Takeshi Kitano
Voted for by:
@CiG (1st place)
@challenge_everything (4th place)
@no country for old wainds (8th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 20
=6th) Cube directed by Vincenzo Natali
Voted for by:
@challenge_everything (3rd place)
@Anom@nder Rake (4th place)
@Bloopy (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 20
Voted for by:
@CiG (1st place)
@challenge_everything (4th place)
@no country for old wainds (8th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 20
=6th) Cube directed by Vincenzo Natali
Voted for by:
@challenge_everything (3rd place)
@Anom@nder Rake (4th place)
@Bloopy (6th place)
TOTAL POINTS: 20
