Sure, and I’m glad you want to know. Here would be my slop top 20 (just off the top of my head).
Yojimbo
Salaryman ha kiraku na kagyou to kita mon da
Nippon-ichi gomasuri otoko
Nippon-ichi musekinin yaro
Two Lane Blacktop
The Apartment
Safety Last
The Passionate Plumber
The Bank Dick
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
The Conversation
Tootsie
The Nutty Professor (1963)
A Guide for the Married Man
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
Lover Come Back
Dumb and Dumber
Rollerball (1975)
Office Space
After Hours
Anyhow, I probably like 50 more movies equally to what’s up there, but you get the idea. In general, I’m partial to comedy and feel that when a movie tries to be serious, it had better succeed or I’m not going to like it. But some of my faves are serious flicks.
I don’t have any particular beef against MNS; frankly, I’ve been surprised that his pics since 6thS haven’t been a lot better. I think he has genuine talent as a director and a writer. But I won’t pull any punches in saying that Signs and The Village were stupid beyond belief.
Tarantino? I see his sensibilities as infantile and derived from the most vulgar and trashy works pop culture has had to offer–a fact about which he seems positively proud. His movies engage with works of fiction–not with reality itself. I thought Kill Bill was just plain stupid. I’ve watched Japanese chambara of varying levels of quality, and Quentin just doesn’t get the vibe or the look. I’ve seen plenty of Hong Kong schlock (I’m a BL and JC fan), and Quentin just doesn’t make movies that send up that genre very well.
Fight Club is, IMV, pseudo-meaningful, faux arty bullshit based on the vulgar and ignorant sensibilities of CP and the director.
While we’re at it, I think Goodfellas is a stupid movie. Both my best friend (who is a serious cinema fan) and I laughed our asses off when we watched it together–was this shit supposed to be serious?
To be totally sacreligious, I don’t think Citizen Kane is an A+ movie. I respect the innovations in it, and there are some good performances and ideas in it, but for me it’s a B or B+.
IOW, the assumption seems to be that I have given enough examples of movies I dislike for my counterpart to say, “There is no significant overlap between the sets of movies we like and dislike.”
The sample size hasn’t been large enough. Further, there are many different ways in which sets of likes and dislikes can relate to each other. Examples:
The set of movies we “love” are perfectly equivalent, but the set of movies we hate vary widely (e.g., you “like” a lot of the movies I “hate”).
The set of movies I “love” is equal to the set of movies you “hate”; i.e., virulent disagreement.
Hi, Opal!
Then there are the varying reactions people have to the way sets overlap or conflict. Some people go ballistic if you mildly criticize a movie they barely like, whereas others focus on commonalities and don’t care if you hate some of the movies they love. And so on.
Oh, I’d also put Napoleon Dynamite in my Top 10 right now. Great movie!
To be totally sacreligious, I don’t think Citizen Kane is an A+ movie. I respect the innovations in it, and there are some good performances and ideas in it, but for me it’s a B or B+.
[/QUOTE]
Of the above three quotes, it’s the third that is supposed to be sacrilegious?
No need to wink. The guy puts nondescript sf flicks like Rollerball and run-of-the-mill dumb comedies like Dumb and Dumber on his top 20 list, and we’re supposed to be surprised he doesn’t adore Citizen Kane?
Hmmm, our tastes don’t intersect all that much. I will tip my hat for Yojimbo, The Conversation and After Hours. And Office Space.
We know you by your words.
I think you’ve made it quite clear where you’re coming from. You like what you like. Fine. Good for you. But your opinions on those things you don’t like are worthless to me. I could and would never trust you, except perhaps as a reverse barometer.
I don’t know who you were asking, but I think he’s amazing. I haven’t seen all of his films but I’ve liked most of what I have seen (Starship Troopers especially). I agree with Dopers like Cervaise, critics such as Jonathan Rosenbaum and Charles Taylor, and filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette that Showgirls is a brilliant satire, though I still don’t like it as much as ST.
Before you guys kill on him too badly, he’s not saying Dumb & Dumber is a top 20 film of all time; he’s giving his “slop” top 20, which I’m guessing means his top 20 cheesy flicks. Am I close?
Just for curiosity’s sake, what are your top 4 movies similar in theme to:
Fight Club
1.
2.
3.
4.
The Village
1.
2.
3.
4.
Pulp Fiction / Goodfellas
1.
2.
3.
4.
Don’t include four if you don’t know of four movies you think are truly awesome in the category; feel free to leave a list empty if there are no movies like it that you love.
You seem to be saying that Fight Club, The Village, Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction all failed miserably in what the director was trying to do. So the idea with the lists is to find out movies where you think a similar idea was pulled off successfully.
Unless your complaint isn’t that the execution was flawed, but rather the intent was flawed. If that’s the case, then I would say that’s a crystal clear definition of what I meant with the “hater” label.
Hey, Starship Troopers and Showgirls did NOT suck.
Actually, I like both movies. SG–unpretentious, crazy, unpredictable. Rather like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in tone and approach (a fave: just watched the DVD last night with Ebert’s commentary; very edifying).
Except a competent filmmaker can make the plot and characters of their film believable and interesting as well. In fact, that’s more important when you’re creating an allegory of some sort, because the ideas presented in The Village - concepts of social control, of resisting modernity, and so forth - are such trite ideas in themselves that you have to present them in a new and interesting way if you’re going to do it. When an artist is talking about something that a million people before have talked about, it’s incumbent upon them to say something interesting about it. And that’s part of the reason The Village failed so badly. The ideas he was presenting are such old hat, and have been addressed so much more elegantly and competently by others, that they simply are uninteresting if not approached in a novel way.
And what did he say about faith? You should have faith, assuming you live in a world filled with collossal coincidences? You should have faith that even though God sent aliens to you, he’ll also send some way for you to save yourself, even though he doesn’t send it to anyone else? Faith is useful to people who are too stupid to figure out an idea like “hit the alien with something hard” on their own?
Besides, why does he get a pass on making a movie whose basic plot doesn’t work? One of the basic features of good literature - film being included in that category - is that it works on multiple levels. It’s true, M. Night Shyamalan was obviously trying to convey some thought about faith. There’s really no missing it. But he did it so hamfistedly, and the things he said about it were so dull and so trite, that the movie simply doesn’t work.
So his ideas are not fresh, his plots make no sense, but we should enjoy them because of their “presentation”? What the hell is left to constitute “presentation”? The Village used dialog so egregiously bad - and so ridiculous either from the perspective of trying to create a historical atmosphere or as a representation of the efforts of a group of academics to recreate the society of a hundred years ago - that it pulled me out of every moment the film tried to create. What was good about the presentation? Shyamalan has had the luck of having good actors in spite of the poor quality of his work, but even that didn’t make that film remotely watchable.
I guess my central point here is that (1) a story should work on every level - and saying that a plot doesn’t have to even hang together in a convincing way if the author is conveying “ideas” about the world strikes me as simple nonsense. And (2) the ideas he’s shared so far have been hackneyed and trite, and have been mashed into his films in such obvious, hamfisted ways as to make his style strike me as simply contemptuous of his audience. I have to wonder about whether his films are mostly appealing to people without much experience in analyzing literature or film. The “ideas” he’s conveying are simply so much fluff, and so old-hat, and so obvious, that all I can think of when I see his films is how many other movies have addressed the same issues in ways that are so much more interesting, so much more fundamentally original and thought-provoking, that I feel as though I’m being talked down to.
Better you than me saying that. Incidentally, without delving into set theory, I doubt you and I have much in common in our taste in movies but you’re precisely right about Shyamalan.
Sometime I’ll bore you all with an explanation of exactly why I hate Fight Club so much. Well, assuming I can do it effectively without subjecting myself to it again.
Please give plenty of warning so I can be sure to avoid the post. I love Fight Club, you hate it. Whoop-tee-doo. I don’t give a rat’s ass “exactly why” you hate it.
Okay, I just saw the commercial. That thing is laughably bad. It hits all of the dumb ‘kids are creepy’ cliches, the worst being the use of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which cannot be made menacing no matter what the context. I still might see the movie, but they’re selling it the wrong way.
For what it’s worth, filmmakers rarely have much to do with their marketing. Directors, anyway. Producers are a different story. The director (presuming he/she isn’t also a producer) usually turns over the movie to the studio, and the marketing people use the movie as raw material from which an ad campaign is crafted, whose objective is to draw as many people to the theater as possible, period. Honestly representing the actual film is pretty far down the priority list. In many ways, the ad campaign is a work of art separate from the film, indeed a work of almost purely mercenary art in its naked commercialism. However the movie turns out, we can’t judge it based on the TV spots.
By way of comparison, remember how cool Underworld looked? I rest my case.
Oh, and regarding Shyamalan, personally, I consider him simultaneously underrated and overrated. He is an overrated writer, but an extremely underrated director. He writes obvious, gloopy, dumb scripts, and then he absolutely directs the hell out of them.
For me, then, he’s a wash. Mostly I’m excited to see Giamatti getting another lead role. He’s like Tilda Swinton for me, in that I’d pay money to watch them read the ingredients list off the side of a box of Rice Chex.
Oh, and one last thing: Fight Club is a minor masterpiece.
