Even if I haven’t seen a movie it’s not hard to decide which one I’d rather watch in most cases. For example, horror movies don’t stand a chance with me because I generally dislike them.
I acknowledge that a bit of an odd duck in this respect; for example, I have seen both The Godfather and The Hunt for Red October, but I couldn’t bring up enough feeling to vote for one over the other. Just a resounding “meh”… even though I don’t in any way dislike either film! Just had literally zero emotional connection to either one over the other to give it a vote as my favorite…
Well, think of it with this hypothetical: You’re locked in a room with only a TV, a VCR and 2 tapes. You have to watch one of them to get out. Which one do you watch?
Oddly, I had a much easier time picking my movies in this round vs. the last round. The only really hard choice for me in this round was Aliens vs. Empire Strikes Back. (Why yes, i am a sci-fi nerd; how did you guess?)
Last round I had a lot of trouble with
Casablanca vs Project Hail Mary.
Pulp Fiction vs To Kill a Mockingbird
Ghost Busters vs Good Will Hunting
The Big Lebowski vs Fight Club
On the other hand we voted on twice as many movies so maybe it makes sense.
At any rate my own preferred Humphrey Bogart film by a mile is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which didn’t make it. The Caine Mutiny probably number two. By contrast while The Maltese Falcon is historically important, it’s always been a bit of a meh film for me for whatever reason. I’ve never been a big Sam Spade/gumshoe fan.
In the parallel narrower Rock and Roll Hall of Fame threads I’ve been trying to favor importance over my own preferences. But this one I’m doing the exact opposite . I might watch both films again if they popped up in front of me on cable (but maybe not, I’ve seen both multiple times). But I’d rather watch Pulp Fiction at this point.
I liked pulp fiction when I first saw it, but QT is like one of those guitarists who knows like three riffs and he just plays them over and over and louder and louder, even when the underlying song is otherwise different.
I think saying something “isn’t cinema” is a silly argument. Say what you really mean, which is that you don’t like a particular genre. That’s fine; no one is asking you to. But some of us enjoy sampling a wide variety of genres and don’t care that film snobs sneer at grindhouse, horror, romantic comedies, action, superheroes, animation, or whatever genre is getting looked down on this decade.
And it is “this decade,” because the list keeps changing. Gangster pictures, westerns, and film noir were all once treated as cheap genre product. Today’s junk genre has a habit of becoming tomorrow’s canon.
Pulp Fiction is a good example. Tarantino built it out of the pulp magazines and grindhouse movies critics used to spit on (it’s right there in the title), and you’d be hard-pressed to argue it isn’t a well-made film. The dialogue and nonlinear structure were fresh at the time and have been copied endlessly since, which is about as good a sign of an excellent movie as you can get.
That’s why Scorsese’s “not cinema” line struck me as so hypocritical. He took the gangster movies and crime stories of his youth, stuff the critics of that era dismissed, and made great films out of them. That’s no different from what Christopher Nolan did with The Dark Knight or Sam Raimi did with Spider-Man 2. And by his own admission, he’d barely watched the movies he was dismissing: he said he “tried” a few and gave up.
To be fair, his longer NYT op-ed made a more reasonable point about franchise filmmaking crowding mid-budget movies out of theaters. I’d agree with a lot of that. But that’s a complaint about studio economics, not about whether a genre can be art, and “not cinema” was the line he chose to lead with.
I wonder how the results of this round would compare to a poll where we each pick our favorite 16 movies from the list of 32. I tried picking my favorite 16 and matched on 11 of the current leaders.
(And don’t take this as criticism of the poll structure. Head-to-head matchups, including the difficult choices between two favorites, are a lot more fun.)
((And being an annoying pedant – this is the round of 32, not 16. Brackets are generally named for how many entries there are, not how many matchups.))
. I might watch both films again if they popped up in front of me on cable (but maybe not, I’ve seen both multiple times). But I’d rather watch Pulp Fiction at this point.