I’ll just jump back in here and apologise for the remarks mentioned above…it was in jest, no offence meant, and, as I see, none really taken.
To clarify, I do enjoy watching movies like Predator, Die Hard, Top Gun, Rainman et al. They are good fun entertainment for a night. But that’s what they are…entertainment.
Would you read “Love in the time of Colera” then read “Calvin & Hobbes” and list them in the same literary level? You might, but not me.
The distinction is that some films (books) are made to entertain, others are made to reflect a certain time in history, some are art house films, some are meant to be watched with a critical eye. Some directors concentrate and think deeply about camera angles, pans, zooms, cuts, the intellectual side of film-making. Others don’t.
I don’t consider most ‘entertaining films’ as being as worthy as films which are challenging and thought-provoking. Although I probably didn’t enjoy it as much to watch, I would still say “Crash” by David Cronenberg is a far superior film to “Austin Powers”. I judge the films by the artistic and intellectual input added by the director. That is why a Peter Greenaway film is on my list. (and there could have been more of his too).
But again, apologises to others, esp. Jaystercom. Oh, and thanks for the random character judgement elfkin477. Nice.
I agree that films that are challenging and thought-provoking must be appreciated on an deeper aesthetic level than mere celluloid entertainment, but not every arthouse flick meets that level. To take your examples, Cronenberg’s Crash is sadomasochistic twaddle. It doesn’t really address any of the deeper issues of human sexuality or the erotic connection between sex and death–it merely presents a cult of people who get off on car crashes. Not profound, not thought-provoking, just a blatant attempt to shock and disgust. Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo cover the same themes with greater artistry.
I certainly see no reason to sneer at Austin Powers for being what it is–a hilarious parody of the James Bond spy genre.
It’s like comparing a bottle of Shiraz to a chocolate milkshake. Yes, Shiraz has a floral, woody bouquet and a savory finish; it has mutiple layers of flavor and texture. Yet a simple dollop of ice cream blended with milk can satisfy in ways that good wine cannot.
Of course, anyone who would name Austin Powers as a great film on the level of Kurosawa or Fellini has seriously deficient aesthetic judgment.
Several colleagues and acquaintances were part of the voting body for the BFI list. If I had voted, these would have been my choices (in chronological order):
The General (Keaton) Footlight Parade (Bacon) The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Renoir) The Lady Eve (Sturges) Black Narcissus (Powell/Pressburger) The Man from Laramie (Mann) Ordet (Dreyer) Salesman (Maysles) The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice) The Marquise of O (Rohmer)
My 10 in no particular order:
American Beauty
Star Wars
Road to Predition
Nosferatu
Married to Margo
Three Kings
Insomia
The Good The Bad and The Ugly
Shawshank Redemption
LOTR
Gosh, I can think of so many more. I’ll never be able to have a real top ten.
And FWIW, Salo has very little (if anything) in common thematically with Crash; you’re judging an apple by an orange’s standards.
I have seen all ten films on the list linked in the OP, and would not have included all of them. My favorites among them have to be Tokyo Story and Rules of the Game.
My top ten list (in no particular order), which is, other than a solid four or five, constantly in flux, and may at times include anything from Showgirls to Nanook of the North:[ul]Solaris (Tarkovsky) The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer) Zentropa (Von Trier) The Crowd (Vidor) I Walked with a Zombie (Tourneur) Parents (Balaban) Blowup (Antonioni) To Sleep with Anger (Burnett) The Night of the Hunter (Laughton) The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes)[/ul]
Yeesh. Nothing like a movie-top-ten list to bring out the pretentious in people.
So watch me come running! I even brought my reasons with me!
Miller’s Crossing – everything great about the Coen Bros. in one movie! It’s got dialogue and cinematography so good they’re weep-worthy. It goes from comedy to action scenes to suspense to truly horrifying scenes without skipping a beat. Reviewers are quick to compare it to The Godfather, but that’s missing the point – it’s a movie about movies, that happens to have gangsters in it.
Star Wars – To this day it amazes me how much this movie gets absolutely right, all the details that are dead-on perfect. One thing the movie doesn’t get enough credit for, and none of the subsequent movies were able to reproduce, was the way it established a world that was ancient. Spaceships and aliens and laser swords were taken for granted; they’d always been there. It’s not science fiction; no time is wasted explaining how things work, they just do, and they all work to advance the story.
His Girl Friday – Best dialogue of any movie. Best chemistry between the leads; not even Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall could give a performance like that.
Casablanca – Everything works; it’s as simple as that.
The Shining – The best (if not the scariest, that’s be The Exorcist) horror movie ever made. Just about every scene builds on that sense of dread and cold; you start to feel as if you’re going insane along with Jack.
Singin’ in the Rain – The best musical ever made. From the opening titles on, it feels as if everybody’s there just to show off and have a good time.
Yojimbo – An action movie without very much action, but the most bad-ass character in any movie, ever.
Raiders of the Lost Ark – Again, it just gets everything right.
Rear Window – The Birds is scarier, and Vertigo has more to say, but Rear Window is my favorite Hitchcock movie. It’s told wonderfully, the characters are interesting, Grace Kelly is astounding, and that one moment when Raymond Burr figures out he’s being watched is one of the greatest moments in any movie.
Aliens – everything good about action movies, from back before action movies started to really suck. The entire last half of the movie is so well-paced; it builds the suspense up until you think nothing more could happen, and then turns it up a notch after that.
The moral: sometimes popular movies are popular for a reason.
Using the same method as Sight and Sound, namely one point for each time a movie is listed in a top 10 list, regardless of ranking, I’ve put together a top 10 list based on what has been posted so far. Actually, it turns out to be a top 8 list, as only 8 movies received 3 or more votes, with another 10 tied at 2, and 125 movies listed by only one poster. I lumped votes for a movie series in with votes for the first movie in the series (Star Wars, Raiders, and Godfather), but in cases where a later movie in the series was listed it was counted seperately. If I were to have included movie series, I would likely have had the James Bond, A Better Tomorrow, or Once Upon a Time in China series on my list, though if I were to make a new top 10 right now, it would likely have four or five different movies on it anyway.
The top 8, in order:
Star Wars
Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Shawshank Redemption
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
The Godfather
Schindler’s List
The Seven Samurai
Well, except, gobear, that you DON’T get Cronenberg’s intent. Obviously, from your post. And my POINT was that your tone in trashing the film was obNOXiously superior.
See, here’s the thing: it really gets on my nerves when somebody tells me what’s NOT in a movie (book/poem/whatever) rather than what’s in it. In a discussion of factual matters, you can’t prove a negative. There’s a parallel in discussion of artistic, opinion-oriented matters. It’s fine for you to say that you didn’t see such and such in a movie, but to say that such and such ISN’T THERE–especially as in this case when I happen to know it is, because I SAW IT–is just, well, obnoxiously superior. It’s like looking at one of those computer generated optical illusions that, when you wonk your eyes just right, spring into three dimensions, and declaring “I can’t see it, so there’s nothing there.”
Thus my translation of your statement that Crash “doesn’t really address any of the deeper issues of human sexuality or the erotic connection between sex and death.” Because, actually, it does. Just because you were in a distracted state when you saw it, or its idiom didn’t communicate to you the way it did to me (and many others), or whatever, doesn’t mean, as you so obnoxiously declare, that it wasn’t there.
I’m surprised that someone who “got” Salo, a film that’s often the subject of smugly superior ignorance, would adopt such a tone about a film that simply, for whatever reason, didn’t speak to you.
I agree with you, and I thought it was a good movie. But I think you are misunderstanding gobear’s point. He is saying that Cronenberg did not have a “deep” intent while making the film. The fact is, it is very possible to get deep meanings and have new thoughts based on a movie made by someone who did not specifically intend you to have those thougts. I could take a movie camera and leave it running on a street corner, and it might happen to film something very interesting, but I am not a genius based on this footage. I don’t know exactly how much of the meaning I took from Crash was actually intended by Cronenberg, and I don’t really care, because, presumably like you, I judge a movie based on my response to it, rather than on a perceived judgement of the director’s intentions.
Well, FWIW, JGBallard’s novel Crash is one of my alltime favorite novels, so going into it I was familiar with Cronenberg’s source material. I found it interesting that Cronenberg’s took from the novel something different from what I took from it, but it was clear to me nonetheless that his intentions as a director and as an interpreter of the novel were achieved.
Perhaps, upon further reflection, gobear was looking for the wrong thing in Crash, which is why he didn’t find it. The film makes no general point about “the erotic connection between sex and death.” Ballard’s pet motifs revolve around modern culture’s compulsions of violence, technology, and sex (as distinct from erotica). Ballard, as one of the mose cynical authors I know, is also (I’d almost say ‘therefore’) the most clear-eyed. His fictions are a series of nose-rubbings that show up our inability, as a consumer culture, to distinguish between our ravenous–even compulsive–consumption and conflation of technology, violence, and sex. He’s addressing a very specific issue: the technology of sex, the technology of violence, the sex of technology, the sex of violence, etc.; and not the liebestod that gobear seems to have sought in Crash.
Frankly, even though I thought Cronenberg produced a valid, if personal, interpretation of Ballard’s work, I think Paul Verhoeven is a more fitting director to tackle Ballard: they share many of the same concerns, though Ballard’s approach is a kind of world weary cynicism and Verhoeven’s is a kind of bitter glee.
