(Don’t call it “best of the 21st century”, as some publications did, or it will get some people’s noses bent out of joint due to the movies on it which were released in the year 2000.)
I missed this when it came out last August (I need an app that sends me such things directly!), and checked to see if it had a thread here, but it appears it was only used as a jumping off point to discuss “Mulholland Drive” specifically. I’m interested in discussing the list more broadly.
It is such an interesting and sometimes frustrating list. I’ve seen many of these, especially the ones nearer the top. It’s a mix of unsurprising and deserving selections (“Spirited Away”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, “No Country for Old Men”, “Children of Men”), little-known gems that I’m excited to see get this much recognition (“Holy Motors”, “25th Hour”, “Margaret”), unsurprising and UNdeserving picks that I already knew were critically overrated (“There Will Be Blood”, “Tree of Life”, “Boyhood”), and movies that were perfectly fine, but which I consider total WTF picks in a list like this (“Inside Llewyn Davis”, “Zodiac”, “Inside Out”).
Last time I checked, we still had 83 years and 7 months to go in this century. Calling this list the best of the 21 century seems somewhat presumptuous, denying that there will ever be any better films produced in the future.
The point the article was making was that people too often discount recent films as being inferior to the classics. So it was offering a list of great recent films.
Yes, I absolutely applaud the effort. And there have been many such lists based on decades; to go for a 17 year span just makes it all the (potentially) richer. I’m just puzzled by some of the picks.
Have you seen Inside Out? It’s a beautiful coming of age film and it deserves to be on this list.
I haven’t seen most of these films, but I’m thrilled to see so many Wes Anderson titles, and Oldboy deserves to be there, but it just about fucked me up for life.
I did see Inside Out, and I expected a lot more than I got. I thought it was pretty thin. Not bad, just not great.
Agree about Wes Anderson.
Oldboy, I was eager to check out because I had really liked Park’s previous film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. But I was seriously offended by the way he treated an attempted rape as a comedic moment in cinematic language (regardless of anything someone might argue about the characters themselves), so I turned off the film at that point.
Definitely agree that it’s messed up for Kill Bill to be missing, particularly when you have stuff like *Zodiac *high on the list.
My least favourite film from that list (and admittedly I haven’t seen many of the foreign and arthouse films from the list) is “Inherent Vice” which I found stilted and uninteresting. I got about 70% of the way through before deciding I had better things to do with my time.
I think “Inside Out” certainly deserves to be on the list more than “Ratatouille” which was no great shakes (but naturally critics would love a movie about the joys of being a critic).
“Oldboy” is an incredibly stupid film, but it has a few interesting moments.
Some of PT Anderson’s output I consider masterful (Magnolia is one of my very favorite films), but yeah: Inherent Vice is just mostly inert. I see recency bias there and with InsideLlewellyn Davis.
I’m not seeing much to explain what parameters they used for their choices.
Film critiques have always been tricky and even problematic for me, because of a seemingly inescapable phenomenon of how people come to be hired AS critics. Quite simply, the amount of in depth knowledge they have about film making plays a part; the depth of passion that they bring to the whole experience of watching films plays a part; and the egotism needed to be decisive about bashing sensitive peoples’ efforts publicly plays a part.
Too often, that adds up to the same thing I dislike about Oscar decisions: critics as a group, tend to choose “Filmy-films” to heap praise upon, to the extent that people watching them have to work VERY hard to understand why in the hell they chose as they did.
I’m not JUST talking about how many popular films get short shrift for being popular. I’m talking about how experts often have so much interest in minutia of a craft, that they lose sight of the bigger picture, and end up chastising the rest of us for failing to do likewise.
Anyway. I could go on for many boring pages about my problems with the critics and awards voting I’ve observed over the years, but this isn’t the place. As for this particular list, I can’t comment on the majority of the films because I haven’t seen them. The best I can do is say that I think there are better Miazaki films than Spirited Away in my opinion, though that one is very good. And I’m VERY glad that Frozen doesn’t appear anywhere on the list, since I found it to be boring in the extreme, and annoying for the same reasons why many critics praised it while it was in theaters.
I’m surprised by how few of these I’ve seen, and most of the ones I’ve seen are animated.
Of those I’ve seen, the only one I strongly disagree with is AI. The message most people took away from the movie is very different from what’s actually there, which leads me to conclude that they didn’t communicate it very well.
There are a number of others that didn’t make the list but should have, and some I can say should have been displaced in their favor. For instance, while Ratatouille wasn’t bad, there are better Pixar movies, like The Incredibles.
There are also some Best Picture winners which are conspicuously missing from that list. While some years are certainly better than others, you still wouldn’t expect an entire year out of 17 to be missing from a list of the top 103, which means that the creators of this list have very different standards than does the Academy.
I had to stop perusing the list once I saw *Margaret *at number 3. Holy crap. I hated that film so much I had to come here and post about it at the time. It actually, actively pissed me off :mad: (I’m mostly kidding. That movie is a piece of dreck but most of the items on the list deserve to be there).
I’ve seen 24 of the movies on the list, and mostly agree with their picks (although I wanted to love Ratatouille and just didn’t). Very sorry not to see Limitless (Neil Burger, dir., 2011) on the list, though - a great what-if sf adventure and a tour de force for Bradley Cooper. He should have won an Oscar.
I remember the controversy about that at the time, but yes, I would encourage you to see it. A gripping movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden; Jessica Chastain is very good in the lead role as a CIA analyst.
I think sometimes it takes a while for critics to just relax about a film and appreciate it for its entertainment value. This is especially true for action movies and comedies.
Could have used more sci-fi. I just re-watched Edge of Tomorrow (2014) last weekend and I’d put that movie in the top 100, easy. A few other sci-fi movies I’d nominate:
District 9 (2009) The Martian (2015) Interstellar (2015)
I’m sure I could come up with more after investigation.
Some movies I didn’t love on the list: All the Wes Anderson stuff, Crouching Tiger, Ratatouille, The Assassination of Jesse James…, Dogville.
Ratatouille is probably the most egregious addition for me. I’d probably put Frozen, Brave and a few other Disney flicks above it.
Well, I’d consider the following films the most egregious oversights, since I consider them the best of their respective years:
Gerry (2002) Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) L’Enfant (2005) Once (2007) Man on Wire (2008) Winter’s Bone (2010) Upstream Color (2013) Mustang (2015)
My other choices rank at #1, 2, 6, 7, 13, 18, 36 and 95 (way, way too low)
Best Picture winners that got left off:
2000 Gladiator
2001 A Beautiful Mind
2002 Chicago
2003 The Return of the King
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2005 Crash
2006 The Departed
2008 Slumdog Millionaire
2010 The King’s Speech
2011 The Artist
2012 Argo
2014 Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
2016 Moonlight
Wow, I didn’t realize that the list would be that long. In fact, only four Oscar Best Picture winners did make the list. Only one nominee even shows up from 2000, 1 from 2001, 1 from 2002, 1 from 2003, none from 2004, 1 from 2005, none from 2006, and at that point I got bored and stopped counting.
At this point, I think the makers of this list really need to explain their methodology. It’s almost like it’s a list of the top 100 underappreciated films, or something, except that they do have four Oscar winners on there.