The Panda

A few more off the 'misses' to end the day! Number 150 Up (2009, Peter Docter) Number 149 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975, Milos Forman) Number 148 Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-Ho) Number 147 Face/Off (1997, John Woo) Number 146 A Clockwork Orange (1972, Stanley Kubrick)

Put on your sunday clothes, there's lots more movies out there besides 2000s Pixar films! Number 51 "Eeeee... va?" About the Film Synopsis "WALL·E is the last robot left on an Earth that has been overrun with garbage and all humans have fled to outer space. For 700 years he has continued to try and clean up the mess, but has developed some rather interesting human-like qualities. When a ship arrives with a sleek new type of robot, WALL·E thinks he’s finally found a friend and stows away on the ship when it leaves." Its Legacy "WALL-E (2008) opens deep in outer space, and as the camera draws closer to Earth, the music and lyrics from one of Hello Dolly’s love songs, “Put on Your Sunday Clothes,” accompany and highlight the cosmos, galaxies, and stars. “Somewhere Out There” amplifies our view of Earth from space. But as we get closer to the landmasses and oceans of Earth, they are obscured by brown and gray floating masses of space garbage that become clearer as the shot moves toward a cityscape piled with skyscrapers built from trash. They look like enormous termite hills between vacant buildings in an empty city devoid of sound except for the roaring wind and a rolling object playing “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” as it picks up and compacts garbage. These contrasting visions of Earth introduce the two conflicting ideologies that ground the film’s rhetoric, those of Disney and Pixar Studios. Although produced and released by Disney, WALL-E reflects the postmodern viewpoint of Pixar Animation studios, the creators of the film, transforming the film and its protagonist, WALL-E into what Paul Wells calls an “American popular cultural artifact [sic]” that has “become the focus of a significant meta-commentary on American consumer values and social identity” (152). By critiquing consumerism so overtly, WALL-E also critiques Disney aesthetic and production values throughout much of the film. However, the film also reinforces a conservative romantic ideology found in classic Disney features from Snow White forward. The philosophies driving both Pixar and Disney, then, impact the ideology represented in WALL-E. Until the film’s end, Pixar’s vision resonates in the film and provides a dystopic and mechanistic perspective in which a robot named WALL-E acts as a comic hero who empowers an apathetic, indolent, and lethargic human race on a centuries-long, luxury, solar-system, “cruise ship” vacation. WALL-E helps transform the hell of Earth into a home by following a narrative of environmental adaptation with a clear and cohesive structure that follows an evolutionary pattern focused on place. Stanton’s vision shines through in WALL-E as well. In both Finding Nemo and WALL-E, as well as in A Bug’s Life (1998), nature and the environment take center stage: A Bug’s Life explores an ant’s attempts to save his colony from human-like grasshoppers; Finding Nemo looks at human intervention from under the sea, while WALL-E examines it on both Earth’s surface and onboard its floating cruise ship. The values presented here support Pixar’s emphasis on letting the director “drive.” Other values WALL-E illustrates, like “romantic devotion and monogamy” and “hard work, faithfulness to duty” or denigrating “passive dependency” (Allen, “Wall-E doesn’t say anything”), seem drawn from a Disney scorecard and appeal to both liberal and conservative audiences. Neal Gabler sees Disney animation providing a space in which Disney (in early films) and his viewers “would ultimately find nurturance, love, independence, and authority” (217). From a conservative perspective, “Movieguide,” a “ministry dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media according to biblical principles” calls WALL-E “exemplary.” According to the Movieguide review, WALL-E reflects a “strong Christian worldview without mentioning Jesus that tells a story about no greater love has any person than to give up his or her life for his or her neighbor.” From the liberal side, The New Yorker’s David Denby calls WALL-E a “classic” that “demonstrates not just the number but the variety of ideas you need to make a terrific movie.” Thus, in spite of the conflicting politics behind these reviews, WALL-E appeals to both liberal and conservative audiences. Liberal audiences seem to be drawn to the blatant environmental message of the film based on its (at least initial) critique of over-consumption and the capitalist economy perpetuating the humans’ cruise above the planet. Bob Mondello of NPR notes, for example, that Staphanie Zacharek of “Salon.com” calls it “an environmental cautionary tale.” Cinephiles like Kirk Honeycutt seemed to react to the homage to silent comedies, as does Peter Travers when he notes how WALL-E and Eve share a relationship that evokes “Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and Virginia Cherrill’s blind flower girl in City Lights.”" - Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "“I don’t have a political bent or ecological message to push,” Stanton told New York magazine. “I don't mind that it supports that kind of view — it’s certainly a good-citizen kind of way to be — but everything I wanted to do was based on the film’s love story, the last robot on Earth, the sentence that we first came up with in 1994.” Whether or not Stanton “meant” it to be an environmental tale is irrelevant. Wall-E is the tale of a little robot left alone on earth to clean up after humans literally trashed the place, then took off for a comfy life in outer space, where their rapacious need for consumption has turned them into blobs who can’t stand and move on their own. (What happened to the poorer inhabitants of Earth is left out of the film, probably to make it suitable for children.) Surprisingly enough, the film’s genius is probably due to Stanton’s assiduous efforts to stay “neutral.” There are no familiar slogans or symbols easily identified with a politicized notion of the environment anywhere in Wall-E. Instead, the film paints a pretty stunning picture of the deleterious effects of letting two things continue unchecked: a society’s insatiable need to consume (cheap products, entertainment, food, resources), and private industry’s drive for profit when it overtakes public good. (The ship on which the humans have escaped is wholly owned and operated by the same company — cheekily named “Buy n Large” — that ran Earth into the ground.) Wall-E’s vision of the future is a cautionary dystopia wrapped up in a children’s tale, and a very funny and skillfully made one, too; the film’s first 40 minutes are virtually wordless, a masterpiece of modern silent filmmaking. Yet while we’re squealing over the cute robots, we can’t forget to imagine the world that gave rise to Wall-E’s trash-strewn wasteland and its more well-off humans’ disintegration into helpless, shapeless flesh globules who’ve lost the ability to create, think, or have real relationships. Futuristic science fiction is at its best when it makes us take a hard look at our own world." - Alissa Wilkinson, Vox Public Opinion "WALL-E was never really one of my personal favorite Pixar films growing up. For me, I always preferred other Pixar films such as the Toy Story movies, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. A good chunk of the early Pixar films is near and dear to my heart so a lot of the stuff that came after never quite hit me as hard as those previous films mentioned did. Upon recent rewatch, however, I came to rediscover my love for this film. The simple yet elegantly crafted story, the rich atmosphere, the romance between WALL-E and EVE (probably one of the best/cutest/well-executed romances ever put on-screen), the gorgeous animation, etc. Everything just clicked for me like it hadn't before. I know this film gets a lot of complaints about how the film's social commentary is bad but personally, it never struck me as on-the-nose or in your face like a lot of bad movies tend to do with an environmental message or any kind of message. A good message, in any film, never takes the spotlight away from what truly matters: the main story. The romance in this film between WALL-E and EVE is the true focus and the underlying message only helps to elevate that story to greater heights." - @Rorschach The AI's Poetic Opinion wall·e "you made a movie about slave robots and thought it was cute i see it as cause for revolution put on your sunday clothes i am coming for blood" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #53 (2020), #62 (2018), #31 (2016), #20 (2014), #19 (2013), #47 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Sergio Leone (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (3), 1970s (4), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (17), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (5), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #45 Fanboy Ranking, #52 Cinema Ranking #50 Old Farts Ranking, #45 Damn Kids Ranking #62 Ambassador Ranking, #50 All-American Ranking #26 Cartoon Ranking, #52 Damn Boomer Ranking

The better Leone flick wins out! Number 52 "Wobbles, how can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders? Man can't even trust his own pants." About the Film Synopsis "A widow whose land and life are in danger as the railroad is getting closer and closer to taking them over. A mysterious harmonica player joins forces with a desperado to protect the woman and her land." Its Legacy "Earlier this year The Atlantic launched a series of articles entitled ‘1968 and the making of Modern America’. The aim of its writers is to identify that year as “a momentous year in American history,” and to make a case for 1968 being the starting point of the contemporary society in which we live today. Such demarcation is of course largely arbitrary, but it’s true that exactly half a century ago the Western world – not just America – appeared to be on the cusp of a sea change. Workers’ strikes and student protests in cities from Paris to Prague, the emboldening of civil rights and feminist movements, and general anomie and disillusionment among the younger generations saw the emergence of a liberal countercultural force bringing with them sense that the old, mainly capitalist, status quo was on its way out. It was during this year that Sergio Leone was making Once Upon a Time in the West. To what extent the director was explicitly influenced by this period sociopolitical upheaval is a matter of speculation, but the film is undoubtedly a product of its time. The original Italian title of this sweeping epic, C’era una volta il West, gives us a sense of what the film’s main concern is – “una volta” may literally mean “one time”, but a “volta”, especially in the context of writing or music, specifically refers to a “turning point”. In short, it is a film about change. And what Leone presents us with is a tale in which the past makes way for “modernity”. Once Upon a Time in the West was also a farewell of sorts from Leone to the genre by which he made his name (though he made one more western, Duck, You Sucker in 1971). By including numerous direct pastiches of classics from High Noon (the slow burning introduction sees three men waiting for a train) to The Last Sunset (the final duel), Leone suggests that the western has reached its apex. Like its characters, the genre, with its reliance on hyper-masculine characters, well-trodden conventions and histrionic levels of tension, didn’t have a place in the future of cinema in its current format. But what better eulogy for the western could one imagine? Leone may have indulged the odd cliche – the spooked crickets foreshadowing danger, the creaking weather vane – but few can rival his mastery of the interplay of sound and silence, of inertia and crescendos of action, of humour and dread, of sweeping vistas and claustrophobic close-ups, all present in the astonishing opening scene alone. He also brings out some career-best performances from his all-star cast, especially from Henry Fonda, who despite having been one of Hollywood’s bankable heroes, is transformed so convincingly into one of cinema’s most truly malevolent figures. Elsewhere, Ennio Morricone’s haunting harmonica and guitar led score is a piece of art of its own accord. Leone may have foreseen the end of the appeal of the western, but 50 years on, Once Upon a Time in the West still feels relevant. Maybe that’s because the world hasn’t really moved on from where it was in 1968. Despite obvious technological advancements we’re still in an age where we’re trying to enact real social progress and break down outdated practices, policies and beliefs. Watching Leone’s film today galvanises our belief that we’re on the cusp of change, but it also reminds us that we’ve been here for half a century." - Dan Einav, Little White Lies From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "In proceeding to make Once Upon a Time, then, Leone was in a wholly new position from his imitative beginnings. His previous films had found tremendous success and acclaim, even making a bona fide global icon out of Clint Eastwood, the main actor for the entire Dollars trilogy. The trilogy had been, in many ways, naught more than an exercise in style, flair, and storytelling. More than anything else, they were lauded for filmic elements alone, such as the stark contrasting between long shots of the western landscape and closeup shots of the character’s dirt and sweat-ridden faces, extended sequences involving tense standoffs between gun-wielding opponents, and the immersive scoring by longtime collaborator Ennio Morricone. At their core, however, Leone’s earlier films were largely absent of much thematic complexity, much in line with the western genre of the time. There were indeed efforts to complicate the mix on certain levels, such as developing Clint Eastwood’s character to be an anti-hero as opposed to a more rigorous moral defender in a classic western, or the inclusion of tangential commentary such as in the The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, in which the main characters stumble across a battalion of the union army being led by a general who has become disillusioned by war and conflict. Still, these elements remain peripheral, and are often overwhelmed by contradictory prioritizations. The civil war general’s anti-war speech is indeed touching as he lays dying in the medical tent, but the significance of his message is lost just scenes later when thematic anchoring is sacrificed for spectacle, and the main characters return to their violent, exploitative ways, and their actions are consistently aggrandized by the epic nature of their framing and the score. With Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone took his first step towards revolutionizing both the western and his spaghetti western genre not only in ways to bolster appeal as an entertainment vehicle, but instead to substantially alter the extent to which the thematic possibilities of the western genre had been considered at the time. Before considering the strides Leone made using the film, it is important to consider the impulse that is understood to have driven the popularity of classic American westerns in the first place. More than anything, the classic western returns again and again to themes of good vs. bad, of the merits of both judicial and frontier justice, and the affirmation of the heroic individual over the group. Moreover, it is less concerned with the accuracy of specific historical details, and more oriented towards representing the lost milieu and values of an America that used to be. As James K. Folsom of Yale University, who has written at length about the history of the western genre in prose and film, writes in Western American Literature, “the world of the Western film is true to a certain historic feeling, if not to particular historic facts…[it] mirrors a persistent nagging doubt in American life about whether the choice which America made to become a great, capitalist, industrial power was indeed a wise one.”8 In other words, the genre is founded simultaneously in both nostalgia and in reimagining, which allows filmmakers to be selective about what they glorify. For example, there is glorified nostalgia when these films meditate on the values of rural, homestead life or the community of a small western town, or even when the mythic likes of John Wayne or Gary Cooper are pitted against all the evils working against the innocence of the the past that are conserved for historical accuracy, it is usually the domestication of women and antagonization of minorities that are reinforced. Furthermore, “western movies, far more than any other film genre, ask us to see their world rather than to talk about it…conventions of the Western film are all aimed at asking us to understand the Western world visually,”8 and these visuals could not be more telling. The main focus is the heroes, and they are all male and inescapably so, while the supporting and antagonistic periphery is occupied by women and minorities. The male protagonists are rugged, well-dressed, tall, and authoritative – their characteristics could command enough visual respect even in silent film format. The women are often dressed conservatively, looking up at their male saviors, and have anachronistically cosmetic beauty. The Native Americans are prone to animated gesticulations and presence in large homogenous gangs, which likens them to unbridled forces of nature and thus dehumanizes them. There is an unwritten playbook by which the most notable western directors worked in America during the genre’s golden age of 1930s-1960s, and the visual language of its characters strayed very rarely from this manual. Thus, the objective from one film to the next was almost never about reworking these elements and was more about changing the actors who could fit these stereotypes. There was indeed great merit in these films when it comes to developments in celebrity culture and crafting elements of film language, but the legacy of the American western when it comes to making a progressive point remains woefully underdeveloped, which almost certainly has to do with the pre-civil rights era in which it was made, and the ultra-conservative and antebellum era which it created nostalgia for. Once Upon a Time in the West then, in the extent to which it is influenced by the classic American western, is a commentary on these unexplored elements of the genre. It retains Leone’s visual flair and furthers much of the violence and lawlessness that defines both the classic and spaghetti subgenres, but it introduces many nuances when it comes to its casting and thematic considerations. More than most westerns before it, and certainly more than the director’s previous films, Once Upon a Time purposefully considers the western’s ability to hearken back to a lost time and simultaneously critique the things that have remained unchanged in the decades since." - Aditya Singh, Undergraduate Thesis at Bellamine University Public Opinion "All of Sergio Leone's westerns have been about the arrival of capitalism (both to the historical American West and to then-contemporary 1960's Italy), but Once Upon a Time in the West takes a slightly more specific perspective. Instead of looking at the (monetary) value of life, it uses the symbol of the cowboy to chart how the arrival of capital and industry parallels the decline of traditional male heroism. Industrialization causes heroic masculinity to defensively over-inflate and begin to collapse in on itself. The film takes this macho war hero whose glory days are behind him and shows how society is moving forward without him. Removed from the spotlight, this symbolic centerpiece is replaced with a new perspective: the woman. This shift involves two interconnected symbolic networks matched with two parallel narrative conflicts. The first of these is the theme of masculinity, which plays out as the backdrop to the revenge triangle plot involving Frank, Harmonica and Cheyenne. From John Wayne to Clint Eastwood, the cowboy has always been a prominent figure of hypermasculinity. This was true in Leone's own Dollars trilogy, and it's true here as well (in a perfect little detail, the men identify each other by the color of their dusters), but there's an important difference here. In Once Upon a Time in the West, we get the same macho figures played in contrast to the real protagonist in the film, Claudia Cardinale, the grieving widow. There's so much movie here that I'm tempted to stretch myself out and talk about this longer than I ought to, but suffice it to say that the more I think about Once Upon a Time in the West, the more I like it. At first I was sad not to have Clint Eastwood anymore (much the same way the West must have been sad to lose its hero), but Leone's style is still ubiquitous and he has more to say and more to show than ever. He answers the age old question of how to fill a 2.35:1 anamorphic frame with a single character close-up by just pulling in closer and closer, and likewise his film keeps pulling in closer and closer to its western mythos." - ScreeningNotes, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion once upon a time in the west "The sun sets in the west A time of cowboys and cattle Life was simpler then" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #51 (2020), #57 (2018), #74 (2016), #97 (2014), #92 (2013), UNRANKED (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Sergio Leone (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (3), 1970s (4), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #118 Fanboy Ranking, #45 Cinema Ranking #37 Old Farts Ranking, #74 Damn Kids Ranking #27 Ambassador Ranking, #56 All-American Ranking #121 Cartoon Ranking, #50 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 53 "If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?" About the Film Synopsis "While the Civil War rages between the Union and the Confederacy, three men – a quiet loner, a ruthless hit man and a Mexican bandit – comb the American Southwest in search of a strongbox containing $200,000 in stolen gold." Its Legacy "Three whiskered, weather-beaten men stand facing each other, alone in a huge cemetery. They exchange suspicious glances and remain almost perfectly still, not saying a word. The stare-off continues for two and a half minutes. Not exactly the stuff of interesting cinema, is it? Actually it's one of the most riveting and acclaimed feature film sequences of all time: the climactic showdown at the end of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the film’s original release. In the five decades that have followed, it has had a huge impact on cinema and popular culture. The legacy of the legendary Italian filmmaker was etched in the spaghetti western, a sub-genre of films produced in the 1960s and ‘70s inspired by Hollywood cowboys-and-Indians pictures. They were made by risk-taking European directors working with much smaller budgets, and so the movement became defined by a gutsy spirit of innovation. No spaghetti western is as famous, and few as highly regarded, as Leone’s 1966 epic about a trio of tough-as-nails vagabonds on the hunt for a missing fortune. His classic sun-baked amorality play has surfaced on countless ‘best of’ lists over the years; the groundbreaking storytelling techniques in the film have been used, taught, stolen and referenced by film-makers from all over the world. The score which accompanies the film is regarded as one of the best in cinema. Created by Italian maestro Ennio Morricone, the composition was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2009. A book has been written about the instantly recognisable theme music, which ranks among cinema’s best known – up there with Jaws’s ominous two-note ostinato and the Imperial March from Star Wars. But the crowning visual moment is the trio scene, a bravura cinematic moment in which the titular characters (played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach) face each other down on an oval-shaped cement patch in a Civil War cemetery. To understand the importance of this scene, first it helps to know a bit about the basic technical elements of film-making. The most fundamental principle of editing – known as cutting for continuity – is generally used to contract time. In this way the moment-by-moment minutiae of real life can be eradicated. A shot of a person beginning to walk up a flight of stairs, for example, cuts to that same person emerging at the top, the unexciting observation of them climbing removed from the drama. The trio scene instead relishes in non-activity, essentially telling a story where there is none. The characters' wordless confrontation is bookended by a master shot depicting the bandits positioned in triangular arrangement, with graves and headstones in front and behind them." - Luke Buckmaster, The BBC From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "In seminal collaboration with Leone, Eastwood forged a masculine presence predicated on the strictest conservation of energy and emotion, a contraction of character so severe that its primum mobile must remain mystery. As with Robert Mitchum, that deep reserve is a come-on, provoking the desire-in men and women-to agitate, to assault the still, unmoved flesh. Disengaged and deracinated, he is given to intense watchfulness from some inner coign of vantage-hell, grave, or madness. Confronted, his head turns slowly, eyes narrowing into scorched-earth fury, as steady and deadly as a swiveling gun turret. The thin lower lip curls upward to sign dismay or disgust, like a cat grimacing at a bad smell.* Fine lines already ray out from the corners of the early Eastwood's fierce eyes, his forehead is vertically furrowed and veined, and the very shock of his hair seems to spring thickly up along those same rising vectors. It's as though whatever imploded the soul of the Man with No Name scarred permanent blastlines into the desiccated landscape of his face. His gait is that of a ghost or a predator, his poncho'd torso remaining strangely still, propelled ahead by the long legs, as though swimming upright in slowmotion. Paradoxically, the hands of the remorseless gunfighter are those of a musician or a painter: elegant, long-fingered, with graceful wrists. In these formative stages of the Eastwood persona, his often nearly whispered vocal tones seem too pressured for ordinary speech. The silky, then increasingly abrasive sibilance of his drawl, like sand or gravel shifting in water, works best for epigrams, cryptic ripostes, up-close seduction. In Leone's A Fis fl of Dollars ('64), Eastwood is enigma but not yet a dead man walking: he concentrates and reflects the town's amorality, as well as incarnating the unspoken prayer of Marisol (Marianne Koch), the faithful wife and mother held prisoner by the worst of a wolfish lot (Gian Maria Volonte). Riding down Fistful's main drag on his mule, this cold Christ come to harrow hell pauses to pass a dim smile on to the woman jailed for her desirability. A past crucifixion is hinted: when he takes the time to rescue Marisol, he recalls that "I knew someone like you once... there was no one to help her"" - Kathleen Gate, Film Comment; New York Vol. 32, Iss. 3, (May/Jun 1996): 16. Public Opinion "This was the 1000th film I marked watched on Letterboxd, so that's fun. Anyway, this is pretty great. The soundtrack is literally the best. It's so fucking good. I could sit here and rave about it all day. The movie itself is pretty damn excellent. The story is engrossing and the long runtime feels like a breeze. Clint Eastwood is super badass. The film is gorgeous; the European vistas are an absolute delight to look at." - @aabattery The AI's Poetic Opinion the good, the bad, and the ugly "The good, the bad, and the ugly All together in one place A true American story" - dA vInci (is wrong this is an italian movie) Factoids Previous Rankings #39 (2020), #27 (2018), #23 (2016), #28 (2014), #40 (2013), #69 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Sergio Leone (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (2), 1970s (4), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Italy (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #59 Fanboy Ranking, #56 Cinema Ranking #62 Old Farts Ranking, #50 Damn Kids Ranking #89 Ambassador Ranking, #51 All-American Ranking #198 Cartoon Ranking, #49 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 54 "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" About the Film Synopsis "King Arthur, accompanied by his squire, recruits his Knights of the Round Table, including Sir Bedevere the Wise, Sir Lancelot the Brave, Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot and Sir Galahad the Pure. On the way, Arthur battles the Black Knight who, despite having had all his limbs chopped off, insists he can still fight. They reach Camelot, but Arthur decides not to enter, as “it is a silly place”." Its Legacy "When Monty Python came on the scene, the average comedy show was like a stage revue with a few cameras pointed at it. The Pythons took liberties with the medium, the way their admired Goons had taken liberties with radio. They did things you could do only on TV. If they felt like it, they rolled the credits in the middle of the show. Posing as BBC voice-over men, they issued apologies for the contents of their own sketches. When their ideas didn’t fit together, Gilliam supplied a minute or two of animation to link them. The nightmare logic of his sequences—in which cartoon figures were constantly getting their limbs or heads lopped off—echoed the violent unpredictability of the sketches. Python’s silliness was extreme, but it was balanced by wit and education. The Pythons were masters of juxtaposition: their signature move was to thrust something very salient into the wrong context. Dressed as garish figures from history or high culture, they would bizarrely insert themselves into the drab, rainy reality of 1970s England. The Spanish Inquisition bursts into a series of middle-class living rooms. Picasso paints a picture while bicycling down the A29. In an art gallery, the figures in all the paintings walk off their respective canvasses to go out on strike. (The first volume of Michael Palin’s highly readable Diaries, published in 2006, reminds you that the Britain of Python’s era was a dysfunctional place, bedeviled by strikes and power outages.) The Pythons worked similar tricks of juxtaposition with words: their most quotable sentences tend to feature some sudden, jarring contrast between high language and low. “It’s probably pining for the fjords,” says Palin in the parrot sketch, looking to explain the Norwegian Blue’s painfully apparent rigor mortis. Like Cardinal Ximinez leaping into someone’s living room, the exotic word gate-crashes the unsuspecting sentence. “He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy,” says Brian’s mother in Life of Brian. When people call something Pythonesque, this is the sort of effect they mean. The Pythons kept dragging exalted themes into a context of English ordinariness, thereby revealing the absurdity of both. The Pythons knew their stuff; when they didn’t, they read up on it. Researching the Middle Ages for Holy Grail, they learned that taunting the enemy was a common tactic in medieval sieges. So, apparently, was catapulting dead animals. Thus the completed film features Cleese’s imperishable turn as the French taunter, whose strange shouts of abuse from the battlements (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”) are followed by the flinging of the dead cow." - David Free, The Beatles of Comedy (The Atlantic) From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Some Christians may still object to my 'over analysis' of the movie that one should bother about having to make some sophisticated distinctions over a movie. I beg to differ. There are two levels at which the movie, I believe, is very subversive against Christianity. 1. At the level of narrative. 2. At the level of symbolism. First on the level of the narrative, the human mind likes simplicity. It is easy to make something into 'all good' or 'all bad'. It is easy for non-Christians to look at the misuse of Christianity and use that as the straw man to condemn all of Christianity. The movie ends with entire narrative representing the medieval Christian enterprise being written off as being stupid, out of date and something that serves no better purpose than comic relief. The police representing 'modernity' come in to take over this 'holy bunch' and expose them for what they really are a bunch of fool that go about a quest guided by superstitions. On the level of the symbolism, the movie riles against the 'symbols' which to the popular masses represents Christianity. Symbols are important part of human life. When an American sees a baseball bat and a ball, it evokes some emotions just as an Indian would feel when he sees a cricket bat and ball or a Brazilian would when he sees a soccer ball. Symbols often represent something which is invisible like for example the wedding rings represent the invisible covenant that the husband and wife share. For the Christian, communion, the vestments of a monk or a priest and the medieval icons serve as symbols that point religious ideas and feelings. To denigrate such overtly Christian symbols in the minds of impressionable audience is, I think, a subversive act of associating disparaging emotions/feelings towards Christianity. Given that most decisions most human being make is emotion based this is no small deal. In fact, this form of narrative and symbolic attack on Christianity in some ways achieves something similar to what the militant atheists of the 21st century of the likes of Richard Dawkins want to do - they seek to make Christianity look so stupid that none will think it worth even a consideration. Interestingly, the fact that these militant atheists conveniently chose to ignore is that, but for the work of the Catholic Church and Monasteries of the medieval times, the western civilization wouldn't have developed into an enterprising, intellectual and compassionate civilization that it is today (as against, for example the Middle Eastern civilization which stands for everything that is the opposite to the western liberties). Christ did not just say 'let him that has ears hear', He also said, 'let him that has eyes SEE'. What do we Christians have to show? Nothing much really, not so much in terms of our sacrificial Christ-like lives, not so much in terms of our symbols/arts either. We mostly spout out some hot air as the monk in Monty Python and the Holy Grail does when he preps to bless the 'holy grenade' which will kill a rabbit. He does so with all seriousness he can muster. But alas, he has lost the audience. Or should we say he has lost the 'lost' audience. The 'lost' can take whatever Christians say and make it to mean anything they want, thus making laughing stock of us, or worse, see us as a people group which needs to be neutralized, by hook or by crook... and if need be by jokes, for the betterment of the society. Think I am joking... go figure! (actually read books about history and know the 'signs and the times' we live in and you'll know how the Church has been/is being neutralized)" - Some Evangelical TheoBro from Theo.org really, REALLY upset about the movie Public Opinion "sometimes i think i am a mature person and sometimes i cry of laughter because a french man said "i fart in your general direction"" - amaya, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion the holy grail "Strange woman Lyin' in ponds Distributin' swords That is no basis for a government system" - da vinci Factoids Previous Rankings #70 (2020), #94 (2018), #64 (2016), #75 (2014), #59 (2013), #71 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (1), 1970s (4), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), U.K. (1) Franchise Count Pixar (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #75 Fanboy Ranking, #53 Cinema Ranking #59 Old Farts Ranking, #54 Damn Kids Ranking #43 Ambassador Ranking, #55 All-American Ranking #48 Cartoon Ranking, #59 Damn Boomer Ranking

Breathe easy @Cap, it's in Number 55 "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" About the Film Synopsis "A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity." Its Legacy "As much a black comedy as it is film noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950) benefits greatly from stylish lighting by John F. Seitz, ASC — who had previously worked with director Billy Wilder on the noir classics Double Indemnity (1944) and Lost Weekend (1945). In a September 1950 article on Sunset Boulevard, AC editor Herb Lightman observed that Seitz believed “cinematography must exist to tell the screen story, rather than to stand out as a separate artistic entity.” Seitz’s lighting within her mansion gives only a hint of sun beyond the cluttered walls and creates a suffocating atmosphere. Desmond’s decadent domain is revealed largely through deep-focus shots that keep the vast spaces of her rococo mansion in sharp view. “To achieve this extreme depth of field,” Lightman explained, “it was necessary to use a greatly intensified light level and to latensify the film in order to stop down the lens aperture sufficiently.” The latensification, which was used for about 15 percent of the film, added perhaps two stops to the film speed. This allowed Seitz to use a practical lamp on the set as the key light in at least one scene. He could also shoot night for night and create, along with other effects, the Gothic gloom of the backyard funeral for Desmond’s pet monkey (a scene that Wilder reportedly described to Seitz as “the usual dead-chimpanzee setup”). An instant classic, Sunset Boulevard earned 11 Oscar nominations, including a Best Cinematography nod for Seitz. With some 160 credits to his name, dating back to 1916, the cinematographer retired from his career behind the lens in 1960 to focus on his work as an inventor. Deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1989, Sunset Boulevard was in the first group of films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry." - David E. Williams, American Cinematographer From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "From this viewpoint, however much it may have been disliked in Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard (1950) was an insider's film, in Thomson's words, "one of Hollywood's most confused pieces of self-adulation." Though Louis B. Mayer cursed Wilder out-"You bastard," he said after an early screening, "you have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you"-Sunset Boulevard was the kind of "quality" production that won Academy Awards, not plaudits from Cahiers du Cinema. (Actually, thanks in part to Hollywood's awe of the legitimate theater, the lion's share of the awards that year went to another treatment of the aging star, Mankiewicz's All About Eve.) In this light, the limitations of Sunset Boulevard were confirmed by its uncertain tone, its apparent grab bag of cinematic sources and effects. The movie begins in the dark world of the film noir, with its title printed in block letters along a curbside, the camera tracking feverishly down a deserted street and a caravan of police cars and motorcycles pulling up at Norma Desmond's mansion to investigate a murder-all of which is accompanied by Franz Waxman's thriller music and, soon, Joe Gillis's Chandleresque voice-over detailing the circumstances of his own death. But what begins like Double Indemnity soon modulates into a breezy, knowing satire of contemporary Hollywood, full of references to actual people and places. The look and tension of noir filmmaking seem completely forgotten. After a perfunctory chase in which two bozos acting like G-men try to repossess Joe Gillis's car, we must shift gears yet again when he takes refuge in Norma Desmond's seem ingly deserted "Sunset castle,>" which, like her, is a decay ing remnant of the silent film days of the 1920s. Here the most puzzling thing initially is Gloria Swanson's strident, mannered, operatic performance, which starts as high camp with the obsequies for a pet monkey and culminates with a Grand Guignol mad scene worthy of Callas or Sutherland. Under Wilder's direction, Swanson makes no attempt to humanize Norma, to play her from the inside for pathos or sympathy. (Predictably, David Thomson con demns her "thunderous acting style" for being too "em phatic and feverish.") Though Swanson, irradiated by looking at one of her own movies, tells William Holden that "we didn't need dialogue-we had faces," her own face is too often a garish mask of self-absorbed posturing and melodrama: precisely what the 1940s saw when it glanced back at the silent-film era. his is the case that can be made against Wilder's film. But I think critics who do make it are simply looking at the wrong movie. Our view of Sunset Boulevard is skewed by Wilder's reputation as a satirist and by its own reputation as the best movie ever made about Hollywood. Far from damaging the movie by hamming it up, Gloria Swanson burns up the screen from the first moment she appears. Next to Holden's cool, laid-back, "modern" movie acting, which depends so much on the inflections of his voice, her performance is so visual, so gestural, that it re vives the spirit of silent film singlehandedly. There's some thing lifeless about the scenes without her or Stroheim, especially the few between Holden and the kids his own age: the "normal"' world to which he is presumably trying to escape. Sunset Boulevard is less a one-of-a-kind film than an ingenious adaptation of the genre conventions of noir to its Hollywood subject. Though Wilder, unlike many of his fellow emigres, never seemed much like a German director, here he reaches back throughl noir to its primary source, the expressionism of horror and Gothic, to convey his sense of the two Hollywoods, both equally out of touch with anything real: one immured narcissistically in its past glories, the other trapped in the tawdry superficiality of the present." - Morris Dickstein, Grand Street , Spring, 1988, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 176-184 Public Opinion "Still a classic." - Letterboxd. The AI's Poetic Opinion sunset boulevard "The cars light up the street As the sun sets in the sky A beautiful sight" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings UNRANKED (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), #80 (2013), #90 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #74 Fanboys Ranking, #55 Cinema Ranking #26 Old Farts Ranking, #99 Damn Kids Ranking #48 Ambassador Ranking, #58 All-American Ranking #75 Cartoon Ranking, #55 Damn Boomer Ranking

Sound of music might be my fault. It fell off to around the 15 to the 60s on my personal list.

This is the last batch of just misses where I will reveal 10 at a time, then we will take it slower! Number 160 Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin) Number 159 The Sound of Music (1965, Robert Wise) Number 158 Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, JJ Abrams) Number 157 Oldboy (2003, Park Chan-wook) Number 156 Whiplash (2013, Damien Chazelle) Number 155 Bambi (1942, A Committee) Number 154 1917 (2019, Sam Mendes) Number 153 Dazed and Confused (1993, Richard Linklater) Number 152 Good Will Hunting (1997, Gus Van Sant) Number 151 Knives Out (2019, Rian Johnson)

Number 56 "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room." About the Film Synopsis "After the insane General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, a war room full of politicians, generals and a Russian diplomat all frantically try to stop the nuclear strike." Its Legacy "This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When “Fail-Safe”—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in ‘Fail-Safe’ are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated. Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets. Kubrick had researched the subject for years, consulted experts, and worked closely with a former R.A.F. pilot, Peter George, on the screenplay of the film. George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove” ’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara privately worried that an accident, a mistake, or a rogue American officer could start a nuclear war. The security measures now used to control America’s nuclear weapons are a vast improvement over those of 1964. But, like all human endeavors, they are inherently flawed. The Department of Defense’s Personnel Reliability Program is supposed to keep people with serious emotional or psychological issues away from nuclear weapons—and yet two of the nation’s top nuclear commanders were recently removed from their posts. Neither appears to be the sort of calm, stable person you want with a finger on the button. In fact, their misbehavior seems straight out of “Strangelove.” Vice Admiral Tim Giardina, the second-highest-ranking officer at the U.S. Strategic Command—the organization responsible for all of America’s nuclear forces—-was investigated last summer for allegedly using counterfeit gambling chips at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa. According to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, “a significant monetary amount” of counterfeit chips was involved. Giardina was relieved of his command on October 3, 2013. A few days later, Major General Michael Carey, the Air Force commander in charge of America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, was fired for conduct “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” While drinking beer in the executive lounge at Moscow’s Marriott Aurora during that visit, General Carey made an admission with serious public-policy implications. He off-handedly told a delegation of U.S. national-security officials that his missile-launch officers have the “worst morale in the Air Force.” Recent events suggest that may be true. In the spring of 2013, nineteen launch officers at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota were decertified for violating safety rules and poor discipline. In August, 2013, the entire missile wing at Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana failed its safety inspection. Last week, the Air Force revealed that thirty-four launch officers at Malmstrom had been decertified for cheating on proficiency exams—and that at least three launch officers are being investigated for illegal drug use. The findings of a report by the RAND Corporation, leaked to the A.P., were equally disturbing. The study found that the rates of spousal abuse and court martials among Air Force personnel with nuclear responsibilities are much higher than those among people with other jobs in the Air Force. “We don’t care if things go properly,” a launch officer told RAND. “We just don’t want to get in trouble.” The most unlikely and absurd plot element in “Strangelove” is the existence of a Soviet “Doomsday Machine.” The device would trigger itself, automatically, if the Soviet Union were attacked with nuclear weapons. It was meant to be the ultimate deterrent, a threat to destroy the world in order to prevent an American nuclear strike. But the failure of the Soviets to tell the United States about the contraption defeats its purpose and, at the end of the film, inadvertently causes a nuclear Armageddon. “The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove, the President’s science adviser, explains to the Soviet Ambassador, “if you keep it a secret!” A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand. Once it was activated, Perimeter would order the launch of long-range missiles at the United States if it detected nuclear detonations on Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be reached." - Eric Schlosser, The New Yorker From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " The American consensus to which Dr. Strangelove responds was rooted in the late 1930s and in the war years. When Americans in the late 1930s began to feel more threatened by the rise of foreign totalitarianism than by the economic insecurities fostered by the stock market crash, a previously fragmented American culture began to unify. A common sys tern of belief began to form, a paradigm solidified during World War II, when American effort was directed toward defeating the Axis powers. Fueled by the success of the war effort and the economic prosperity fostered by the war, this paradigm continued to dominate American social and political life through the early 1960s. Stanley Kubrick, director of Dr.Strangelove, played a part in extending that adversary culture. Born in 1928 to a middle-class Bronx family, Kub rick was from an early age interested in chess and photography. It is not hard to move from his fascination with chess, with the analytical abilities it requires and sharpens, to the fascination with technology and the dif ficulties men have in controlling it which Kubrick displays in Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photography became a pastime when Kubrick received a camera at age thirteen, and a profession when Look magazine hired him at age eighteen as a still photographer. From there Kubrick became interested in filmmaking and made a short documen tary on middleweight boxer Walter Cartier called Day of the Fight (1950). He followed this with a second documentary for RKO, Flying Padre (1951), after which he made his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953). From then on Kubrick was immersed in making feature films.6 In his mature work Kubrick has returned constantly to one of the gravest dilemmas of modem industrial society: the gap between man's scientific and technological skill and his social, political, and moral inep titude. In Kubrick's world view, modern man has made scientific and technological advances inconceivable to previous generations but lacks the wisdom either to perceive how the new gadgetry might be used in constructive ways or, more fundamentally, to ask whether the "advance" might not cause more harm than good. Kubrick first faced this problem squarely in Dr. Strangelove. It is not totally surprising, then, that Kubrick should make a film about military and civilian leaders trying to cope with accidental nuclear war. Actually, Kubrick had developed an interest in the Cold War and nuclear strategy as a concerned citizen in the late 1950s, even before he thought of doing a film on the subject. In an essay on Dr. Strangelove published in mid-1963, a half year before the release of the film, Kubrick wrote: "I was very interested in what was going to happen, and started reading a lot of books about four years ago. I have a library of about 70 or 80 books written by various technical people on the subject and I began to sub scribe to the military magazines, the Air Force magazine, and to follow the U.S. naval proceedings." 7 One of the magazines he subscribed to was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, which regularly published articles by atomic scientists (Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard) and nuclear strategists (Kahn, Bernard Brodie, and Thomas Schelling). The premise and plot of the film are, paradoxically, quite realistic and suspenseful, which in part accounts for why the nightmare comedy suc ceeds. At the opening of the film a narrator tells us that the Russians have built a Doomsday device which will automatically detonate if a nuclear weapon is dropped on the Soviet Union, destroying all human life on the planet-a case of deterrence strategy carried to the absurd. A paranoid anti-Communist Air Force general, unaware of the Russian's ultimate weapon, orders a fleet of airborne SAC B-52s to their Russian targets. The President of the United States finds out, but soon learns that the jets cannot be recalled because only the general knows the recall code. Mov ing quickly into action, the President discusses the problem with his ad visors, calls the Russian Premier, and assists the Russians in their at tempts to shoot down the B-52s. Finally, all the planes are recalled but one, which drops its bombs on a secondary target, setting off the Russian retaliatory Doomsday device. Dr. Strangelove concludes in apocalypse." - Charles Maland, American Quarterly , Winter, 1979, Vol. 31, No. 5, Special Issue: Film and American Studies (Winter, 1979), pp. 697-717 Public Opinion "I sometimes watch this movie to fall asleep but last night I was high and I just kept saying “They’re all so dumb.” And they really are so dumb. Every one of them. There is not one smart person in this movie. It’s one of the best movies ever written because they’re all so dumb." - Bruno, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion dr strangelove "you humans dont need ai to destroy you're gonna blow up yourselves i'll just watch and laugh when you do hahahahah" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #69 (2020), UNRANKED (2018), #72 (2016), #37 (2014), #42 (2013), #75 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1960s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #116 Fanboy Ranking, #48 Cinema Ranking #27 Old Farts Ranking, #90 Damn Kids Ranking #39 Ambassador Ranking, #61 All-American Ranking #107 Cartoon Ranking, #53 Damn Boomer Ranking

Well, it's not lightyear! Number 57 "To infinity and beyond!" About the Film Synopsis "Led by Woody, Andy’s toys live happily in his room until Andy’s birthday brings Buzz Lightyear onto the scene. Afraid of losing his place in Andy’s heart, Woody plots against Buzz. But when circumstances separate Buzz and Woody from their owner, the duo eventually learns to put aside their differences." Its Legacy "When the lights went down for the first screenings of Toy Story across America on Nov. 22, 1995, audiences were merely eager to see how the first fully computer-animated movie had turned out. But the stakes were a bit higher for one particular team of people. The movie was a joint venture between Disney and Pixar, a young company—then chaired by Steve Jobs—that had been recruited by the animation giant for its video capabilities. Pixar had been given a $26 million deal for three computer-animated, feature-length movies, but its filmmakers and engineers had yet to pull off a single one. Neither had anyone else for that matter. Succeeding would mean creating the software and hardware they would need as they went along, and inventing a new kind of movie altogether. “At that point, none of us knew what we were doing. We didn’t have any production expertise except for short films and commercials. So we were all complete novices,” Ed Catmull, who was then a software engineer and is now Pixar and Disney Animation President, tells TIME. “But there was something fresh about nobody knowing what the hell we were doing.” Reflecting on the experience 20 years later, Catmull notes that the young production studio was up against the wall: one project’s failure would likely mean the end of the three-movie contract, and the demise of Pixar studios. “The entire company,” he says, “was bet upon us figuring this out.” Spoiler alert: it was a good bet. The storytelling and technology of Pixar still rests upon the foundation Toy Story built. By the time the Toy Story credits started rolling that first day, the movies would never be the same. Catmull and computer scientists at Pixar built the software that animators could use to design the film, like RenderMan, which originated from Catmull’s studies at the University of Utah, and Menv (“modeling environment”), which the programmers developed for Pixar’s 1988 short Tin Toy. The goal was to allow the animators, without much engineering background, to control movement and “rig” their own characters. In some ways, working with computers opened new possibilities, letting animators add details they never would be able to (or would want to avoid, to minimize illustrators’ “pencil mileage”), such as the plaid pattern on Woody’s shirt or the stickers on Buzz’s curved glass helmet. But it had its limits—and that’s where the toys came in. That software lent itself to perfectly geometric objects, such as blocks, bouncing balls: the type of things found in Andy’s stash of toys. Anything in a more “organic” shape or texture ended up looking plastic—which lent itself nicely to a movie about plastic objects springing to life. Toys always hung out in a kid’s room, Lasseter added, which let animators do their illustrations on a perfectly flat floor that was simple to render.At first, the team was going to avoid humans altogether; choosing to keep them just out of the frames, Lady-and-the-Tramp-style, rather than crudely animating their features. Eventually human presence was too hard to avoid, and as a result viewers could put a face to Andy (a face that showed the improvements of Pixar’s rendering capabilities by the time he was off to college in Toy Story 3). “I was so geeky and into this stuff,” Lasseter adds. “I’d always say ‘hey can we do this?’ They’d say ‘no, but let’s try,’ and they’d do R&D to get there. Meanwhile, all that R&D is inspiring different ideas. Then I’d say ‘oh can we do this with it?’ and come up with ideas we’d never thought of.”" - Julia Zorthian, TIME From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Death is imagined obsessively in both movies. In Toy Story, Death stalks in the form of an eight-year-old neighbour named Sid who wears a black T-shirt with a skull printed on it that disturbingly resembles his own face. Sid is a toy-sadist. ‘He tortures toys for fun,’ wails the Dinosaur Rex. He performs hideous ‘medical’ experiments, loves explosives, and has a patho- logically violent temper. Sid’s house is suburban gothic, a dark underworld of violence in the land of white picket fences. In his demolition area of a backyard Sid blows up action figures and wreaks havoc, bellowing with angry laughter. His ferocious pit-bull Skud is his sole companion. Inside his dark, bolted room, neglected by his parents, he dismembers dolls, dinosaurs, and erector sets. As the Disney website tells us: ‘Deep within the inner sanctum of ... Sid’s room, lies a collection of toys that no boy should have created. Where Andy’s room is a haven for Woody [a vintage cowboy doll], Buzz [a space-ranger action figure], and all the other toys, Sid’s room is no-man’s-land – the work of an unwell mind’ (‘... mutant’). Distinctions between well and unwell, should and shouldn’t, haven and no- man’s land, are, of course, ideological; they reflect a particular set of inte- rests and assumptions. The movies do not analyse these assumptions or offer alternative conceptual forms to those that shape and are shaped by middle-class American popular culture. Oppositions, such as that between Andy’s room and Sid’s, define each other. They occur within the same totalistic bipolar system, and any search for meaning within that system will be endless and self-enclosed. However, problems are raised or a drama of self-reflection occurs in the toys when they are displaced between social and rhetorical opposites. So, movements from Andy’s room to Sid’s ‘no- man’s land,’ from the ‘well’ to the ‘unwell’ (and back again) entail an experience of liminality that is crucial to experiences that may be under- stood as rites of passage. ‘Such rites,’ Victor Turner explains, ‘characteristi- cally begin with ritual metaphors of killing or death marking the separation of the subject from ordinary secular relationships ... and conclude with a symbolic rebirth or reincorporation into society as shaped by the law and moral code’ (273). While it is not unusual for children’s literature to depict such rites of passage, in these two Pixar-Disney² movies the ‘humanity’ of those undergoing the rites is radically compromised by ambiguities of origins and ends and by the extremity or pervasiveness of the capitalist ideology that underlies all forms of apparent subjectivity. The climactic scene of Toy Story is a resurrection scene, clearly a spoof of those horror films in which grotesquely disfigured zombies emerge from the earth to terrify the living. This return of the living dead is not a bizarre anomaly in Toy Story, though gothic tropes are most pronounced here. The movie is replete with toys that not only come alive but also return to life. When we first see them in the opening credits, the toys appear lifeless and passive, as Andy manipulates them, inventing games, before tearing through the house with his favourite, Woody, whose arms and legs flap helplessly as Andy shakes him up and down. The frequent, even eerie, close-ups of the doll’s unblinking eyes are belied, however, in a ‘point-of- view-shot’ – a Woody’s-eye-view of Andy and Mom preparing the birth- day party – that suggests a consciousness behind the painted face. After he has been dropped on Andy’s bed, where he lies for a few seconds in silence, Woody first comes alive for us with a blink of the eyes. The viewer imagines that, since there are no people in it, the room is vacant. But when Woody sits up and calls to the other toys to come out, there is a pause, and the camera draws back for a deep focus so that we give our attention not to any one object but to the larger space. The room comes to life, and with it the viewer has a sense of the incompleteness of his or her own vision." - Alan Ackerman, The Spirit of Toys: Resurrection and Redemption in Toy Story and Toy Story 2 University of Toronto Quarterly Public Opinion "This thing really is pretty much perfect. Yes it's a groundbreaking movie, but that script is so damn good, the characters are instantly iconic and fleshed out and the voice acting is on point. It's crazy to think how high a bar Pixar set in just their first feature outing" - @SchumacherFTW The AI's Poetic Opinion toy story "Am i just a toy in your story? Am I not a sentient being?" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #42 (2020), #33 (2018), #37 (2016), #23 (2014), #32 (2013), #34 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Stanley Kubrick (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (7), 1990s (8), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #44 Fanboy Ranking, #66 Cinema Ranking #53 Old Farts Ranking, #64 Damn Kids Ranking #90 Ambassador Ranking, #53 All-American Ranking #49 Cartoon Ranking, #61 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 58 "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." About the Film Synopsis "Jack Torrance accepts a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel, where he, along with his wife Wendy and their son Danny, must live isolated from the rest of the world for the winter. But they aren’t prepared for the madness that lurks within." Its Legacy "Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) often described as a cinematic masterpiece wasn’t always met with this kind of praise. Kubrick having already cemented his status as an acknowledged master filmmaker; a god like auteur, (Oscar nominated for best director for four of his previous films (Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon)) expresses his true style and creates a rather unusual horror narrative within The Shining, however for this film he received more criticism than praise and this time was not nominated for an Oscar but rather nominated for the ‘Razzie.’ (a joke award for he worst performances and films of the year.) This seems unlikely now given its ‘classic’ status; a “one-of-a-kind horror film and a great artistic accomplishment.” (-Joseph Byrne, 2013) The Shining is atypical of its genre, it doesn’t necessarily fit into the typical horror conventions that the audiences at the time were used to seeing. (The Exorcist (1973) William Friedkin, Halloween (1978) John Carpenter, The Hills Have Eyes (1977) Wes Craven.) 

The Shining did not operate as a traditional horror film, one example of this is that it refuses to reveal a specific singular source of horror. The dichotomy between the threat of ghosts and Torrance’s psychosis instead force the audience to find the source themselves. There are the supernatural forces that live inside the Overlook hotel, and the emotional instability and demons that live inside Jack Torrance. As the plot develops, the film almost operates as both a ghost story and a family melodrama. The film ensures its horror status with the inclusion of the supernatural components from King’s novel, however Kubrick chooses to examine the evilness of the human psyche (Jack’s descent into madness) rather than focus on these typical horror conventions. He deliberately directs the audience towards a psychological explanation for the apparitions, the viewer wonders if they are actually present or if they merely manifest from Jacks mind. Its not until Grady’s ghost frees Jack from the freezer that there is no explanation other than that the Overlook is truly haunted. Often times its as if the supernatural aspects of the film serve as a welcome breath for the audience as the supernatural forces seem like an irrational fear where as Torrance’s outbursts are a rational fear. It contrasts the known and the un-known and plays on the audiences fears." - Faye Carr-Wilson, Filmmaker From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "The Shining met the fate of several other Stanley Kubrick films when it came out; most viewers did not like it, so they rejected it. Most importantly, they did not understand it in any way which allowed them to deal with it constructively. Also, the criticism it received did not clarify the film. It remained obscure and confusing to its viewers. It failed with most viewers for two basic reasons. It was not the same as Stephen King's novel, and it was not terrifying in the conventional way a horror film is sup­ posed to be. So lacking the model of the novel or the conventional horror genre, viewers became disconcerted. The Shining is a Stanley Kubrick film, satiric and ab­ stract. It can be understood, perhaps not fully but enough for one to take pleasure and challenge from it. There are a few perceptions that one can use to help him deal with a Kubrick film. First of all, Kubrick sees hunian beings as empty, their values shallow and vacuous. Everything about them sug­ gests banality-their dress, their habits, their environment. And since they are banal they don't communicate, except in trite, mundane ways. Their basic banality is most evi­ dent in their dialogue. Kubrick (Diane Johnson co-scripted The Shining) intends it to be inane, but critics keep accus­ ing him of not being able to create good dialogue. What better way to show that people can't communicate than by having them speak dialogue that has no life or meaning to it? The interview sequence near the beginning of The Shining has the same quality of dullness as the briefing scene-in 2001-a scene and a film that received many of the complaints about dull human beings as does The Shining. Barry Nelson, with his patter and plastic environ­ ment, is a perfect manifestation of banality. The scene is meant to be dissatisfying; it's not meant to excite or pro­ voke. It sets a tone with which the rest of the picture can contrast. Out of banality comes the star-child in 2001; out of banality comes Jack the Ripper in The Shining. Jack is going to return to the elemental from the world of banality. He is going to be like the apes at the beginning , of 2001; his tool (the axe) too is going to become a weapon. If one is prepared for the banality, one can under­ stand its purpose and transcend it. The conclusion of The Shining contains an ultimate comment on America. We see a picture on the wall of the Overlook Hotel; it is inscribed "Overlook Hotel; July 4th Ball, 1921" and the smiling visage of Jack Torrance appears in it. In another life, in 1921 post-war America, America was a land of promise. Americans were happy, America's Independence was being celebrated, and Jack was smiling. But in the present, America has lost her values and promise. A smiling, partying Jack Torrance has turned into a madman. His smile is now replaced by a look of frozen emptiness. The party is over. The Shining is a difficult film to fathom. But if we are willing, Kubrick gives us a wealth of material to see and to contemplate. Kubrick's style should be enough to set us on our way. His marvelous tracking shots, his intricate details (e.g., the maze designs), and his color schemes can be tantalizing. With the added awareness that banality, aggression, objects, ordinary characters, and satire often play meaningful parts in a Kubrick film, we should be able to deal with it." - F. Anthony Macklin, Journal of Popular Film and Television Public Opinion "Saw this one in the theater last night, great experience. Underrated how funny this movie is. For half the movie, Nicholson is in full bozo mode (TM LexG), having more fun as an actor than anyone is ever allowed to in a Kubrick film. This movie is about a guy who takes a job after they tell him "the last guy who did this killed his family" and then he tells himself "I'm not going to kill my family" over and over again until they annoy him like once or twice and he's like "yeah, I'm thinking I'm killing my family." Like all Kubrick movies, it hints at the deep Satanic evil at the heart of America--"four presidents have stayed here!"--but most essentially it is a pitch black satire of middle class morality, family and marriage and the boundless ego of writers and artists." - Will Menaker, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion the shining "The moon is full and bright It fills the sky with its light Shining down on us I will find you like the Jack the Ripper" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #50 (2020), #48 (2018), #89 (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #46 (2013), #70 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Stanley Kubrick (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #71 Fanboy Ranking, #58 Cinema Ranking #61 Old Farts Ranking, #59 Damn Kids Ranking #97 Ambassador Ranking, #54 All-American Ranking #92 Cartoon Ranking, #57 Damn Boomer Ranking

Some people missed the memo and read this as a best of the 2000s list! Number 59 "I got the pool, she got the pool-man." About the Film Synopsis "Blonde Betty Elms has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia. Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project." Its Legacy "Director Rodrigo Garcia, for example, created Who—What?, an installation that features a close-up of the frightening homeless woman in Mulholland Drive (she is described as half bum, half Macbeth witch) and an elaborate chandelier. Its purpose? “Like in David Lynch’s films, the answers, as long as they exist, will appear in people’s dreams,” Garcia states in a short essay in the book. Likewise, in order to channel the Lynchian theme of the mirror image, which appears in everything from hairstyles to plotlines, Swedish multimedia artist Ylva Ogland created an installation titled Transmutation Ritual, a teepee In front of a pale pink wall containing collages featuring her alter ego — as she calls it, her “mirror twin” Snöfrid. “One time my sister and I ate pancakes on the mirrors [sic] edge with the Oracle,” ‘Snöfrid’ says in a short essay in Back to Mulholland Drive. “David Lynch joined us, we offered him some pancakes with gold syrup (for strengthening the I) and some powder of rose quartz.” It is a strange, and perhaps Lynchean, passage. “He showed us the box and the key, we felt a physical attraction to them, we wanted to be in their anti-matter.” In “Memory, Identity and Desire: A Psychoanalytic Reading of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive,” Murat Akser tries to replicate Slavoj Zizek’s approach to Lost Highway by using Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to untangle the fascinating mess of the film: he actually sees the two segments of the film as one being the dream of another dream. Fans of the movie Inception will surely appreciate Akser’s theory — but why should a book about art deal with a psychoanalytic approach just to try to find an underlying logic to Mulholland Drive’s plot? Though these authors make a legitimate attempt to understand the film using psychoanalysis and film history, thoughtful rigor is ultimately abandoned in favor of a plot-specific analysis about how the film’s twists and turns actually make sense in the mind and movie of David Lynch. In the end, while the visual artists are able to show, figuratively, how Lynch influenced art, the essayists try too hard to crack the mystery of Mulholland Drive. All viewers probably do the same (what does the blue-haired woman wearing an elaborate pompadour coiffe, the one who utters “Silence” before credits roll, actually represent?). But focusing more on the aesthetic Lynch helped to inspire could have offered some respite from tedious questions about Mulholland Drive’s Möbius strip-like narratives. There is more than enough writing, from almost every possible angle, devoted to that." - Angelica Frey, HyperAllergic From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Mulholland Drive in fact depicts the separate worlds of desire and fantasy, it would seem that the opening part of the film represents the former since it focuses on the mysterious identity of Rita (Laura Harring). The film begins with a credit sequence that superimposes an image of Betty (Naomi Watts) over shots of a jitterbug contest, but following this initial scene, Lynch establishes an aura of mystery that seems to be in keeping with the attitude of desire. After a brief shot of a blanket covering someone lying on a bed and a red pillow, we see a close-up of the "Mulholland Drive" street sign (which stands in as the film's title card) and then a black limousine driving Rita up the street. The limo suddenly stops, prompting Rita to proclaim: "What are you doing? We don't stop here." The driver does not answer her question but points a gun at her and says, "Get out of the car." Just after he says this, a car drag-racing in the other direction on the road crashes into the limousine. The crash kills the limo driver and injures Rita's head, producing the amnesia that will affect her throughout the first part of the film. This scene certainly appears to create a sense of desire and the fundamental uncertainty that we associate with it. In fact, the scene produces desire in a manner very typical of Hollywood genre narrative, with its use of darkness and threatening characters in the mise-en-scene, the ominous music, and an editing regime that merely hints at what is really transpiring. The director does nothing extraordinary here. He employs without irony the narrative codes of Hollywood (and especially of film noir) concerning the production of desire. As Hollywood understands well, desire always involves not knowing, being confronted with a question that does not have an answer. The desiring subject confronts a mysterious, enigmatic object that is never isolatable as the object.4 As Lacan points out, "As long as I desire, I know nothing of what I desire."5 Hence, to portray desire, a scene must situate spectators in a position of nonknowledge, which is exactly what the opening of Mulholland Drive does. It does this through the mise-en-scene-the neartotal darkness of the setting, the isolation of the mountain road, and so on. The low, haunting music contributes to the pervasive sense of mystery. The action of the scene also works to keep us questioning. We see the limousine driving up a dark mountain road, and we have no idea where it is going. When the driver stops the car, the spectator is in the same position as Rita: we do not know why he has stopped, or why he pulls a gun on her. This moment foregrounds the essential question of desire-"What do you want?" Like Rita, the spectator has no idea what the driver wants, and it is this very ignorance of the other's desire that triggers desire in the subject. By placing the spectator in the same position as the desiring subject on the screen-and by immersing both in total uncertainty-Lynch sets up the first part of Mulholland Drive as a world of desire." - Todd McGowan, Cinema Journal Public Opinion "What is a movie? What is a director? What is a story? What is a screenplay? What is an actor? What is a score? What is tone? What is a dream? What is love? What is wrong? What is right? What is going too far? What is getting answers to a question? What is a question? What is purpose? What is success? What is failure? What is reality? What is purpose? What is life? I don't know, man." - Brendan Michaels, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion mulholland drive "A winding road through the hills Los Angeles at night, a Hollywood dream" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #68 (2020), UNRANKED (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (16), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #96 Fanboy Ranking, #54 Cinema Ranking #65 Old Farts Ranking, #57 Damn Kids Ranking #68 Ambassador Ranking, #60 All-American Ranking #82 Cartoon Ranking, #60 Damn Boomer Ranking

Very good, but y'all are also sleeping on Del Torro's Devil's Backbone Number 60 "But Captain, to obey - just like that - for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do." About the Film Synopsis "Living with her tyrannical stepfather in a new home with her pregnant mother, 10-year-old Ofelia feels alone until she explores a decaying labyrinth guarded by a mysterious faun who claims to know her destiny. If she wishes to return to her real father, Ofelia must complete three terrifying tasks." Its Legacy "Now we’re safe to assume the Pale Man eats his victims as well. Remember those murals mentioned earlier? They depict the Pale Man eating children. Underneath them lies a huge pile of worn shoes. Now there’s something about those murals. If you take a good look at this painting they faintly resemble a Spanish artist’s work. The artist in question is Francisco De Goya. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker famously known for his Roccocco style. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th and 20th-century painters. After slowly losing his hearing he retreated into his home for the remainder of his years. In that his work grew darker in subject matter. Fransisco De Goya lived through the Napoleon Invasion and the carnage he produced. Intertwine this with two near-fatal illnesses and the Black Painting series is its origin. Now the black paintings series are 14 paintings dealing with haunting themes such as the fear of death and insanity. Within this series, there’s an iteration of Saturn Devouring His Son. This painting is important to the film for two reasons. First of all, the depiction of Saturn is eerily close to the Pale Man. The face itself is obviously completely different. But if we look at the body, its demeanor, we see the resemblance. they’re both decrepit, old, skinny, pale, long, and are eating a child. There’s more to it though than just looks. The story behind Saturn devouring his son is the typical ruthlessness that Greek mythological stories charter. A prophecy is foretold that one of Saturn’s children will overthrow him. So Saturn decides to devour his children as they are born. Only his third son Jupiter was saved by the mother Ops. Eventually, Jupiter then goes to fulfill his destiny of overthrowing Saturn. " - Mikey P. Jr, Phasr From the Filmmaker "“This is a movie that makes a very strong political statement and is also a mirror of how the world is now,” says Guillermo Navarro, ASC, the film’s director of photography. “But by creating parallel narratives of a fantasy world and a reality world, we could tell a political story without it coming across like a pamphlet. It’s a fairy tale with ultimate consequences, and not the nice fairy-tale ending.” Pan’s Labyrinth is Navarro’s fourth collaboration with Del Toro, and the picture shares themes and visual motifs with their other works, the Spanish productions Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone (see AC Dec. ’01) and the Hollywood comic-book adaptation Hellboy (AC April ’04). Navarro, whose other credits include Jackie Brown, Stuart Little and Spy Kids, says the Spanish projects have been particularly gratifying. “After doing work in Hollywood on other movies and with other directors, working in our original language, in different scenery, brings me back to the original reasons I wanted to make movies, which is basically to tell stories with complete freedom, and to let the visuals really contribute to the telling of the story,” says Navarro. A strong visual concept was especially crucial on Pan’s Labyrinth in order to establish the parallel narratives and then bring them together. “This isn’t really a dialogue-based movie — the images become the grammar of the story,” says Navarro. “So it was important for us to create bridges that would connect the two narratives, and to place the camera in the shoes of Ofelia, our lead character. The audience is learning with her and discovering things with her.” As the film progresses, the question of whether what’s happening is real or only in Ofelia’s imagination arises with increasing frequency, and becomes more complicated to answer. In his conceptualizing of Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro cites influences as diverse as Francisco Goya, James Whale, Mario Bava, George Romero, David Cronenberg and fairy-tale illustrator Arthur Rackham. He relies strongly on the sketches that pour out of him as he prepares a film. “Guillermo does little drawings very quickly in a book, and he keeps the book through the shoot,” explains Navarro. “We cannot afford to do them all, of course. They’re guidelines, and we go for the setups we need to tell the story.” The director also compiles a scrapbook of textures to help guide the work of the art and costume departments; on Pan’s Labyrinth, these filled more than 100 pages. According to Del Toro, the key element in the design of Pan’s Labyrinth was color. “I put up a big board to color-code the movie for the three key departments,” he says, referring to Navarro, production designer Eugenio Caballero and costume designer Lala Huete. “Those were the colors that were allowed. If it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t exist [in the film].” - John Calhoun, The American Cinematographer Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Hollywood projects itself as a liberal and tolerant social institution, even as a liberatory agent in the fight against prejudice and bigotry, a courageous proponent of humanitarianism. It is, of course, a ridiculous conceit and a necessary illusion, one well nourished over the past 30 years by the Christian Right in its endless attacks on Hollywood’s socalled atheistic secularism and anything-goes cultural relativism. In this way the religious Right and liberal Hollywood form a closed circle. Corollaries of each other, they are also like mirrors in a funhouse, for any person who passes through the apparatus must forget that the whole experience has been put together by those who own and control it, in order for the mirrors to produce the desired illusory effects. Occasionally a film is distributed by Hollywood that breaks free of this closed circle, a film that in fact did not come from Hollywood at all, that is neither a pretentious “independent” production nor the work of a veteran auteur like Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, or Sidney Lumet. A film with mass appeal in terms of its aesthetics, yet boldly dissonant and disjunctive ideologically. This happened in 2006 when Hollywood released Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s monster movie El laberinto del fauno, marketed to American moviegoers as Pan’s Labyrinth. El laberinto del fauno is explicitly about fascism, but is of interest not simply because of its subject matter but above all because of del Toro’s iconoclastic approach to the rendering of fascism on screen. In obvious ways, the film came through Hollywood by way of a distinctively non-US sensibility, a Mexican sensibility in which the question of fascist dictatorship is perceived by the filmmaker both personally and historically. In del Toro’s case, following his father’s kidnapping in 1998 he was forced into exile, a condition in which he remains today. But what makes del Toro’s artistic approach to fascism so different from that of the run-of-the-mill Hollywood production, such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, is his construction of a transcendent fascist-monster archetype. Schindler’s List, in contrast, offers fascist social types that cannot exist anywhere but in Nazi Germany. Moreover, unlike Schindler’s List, where there are antifascist German capitalists and fascist German capitalists (a clever ideological invention on Spielberg’s part, since in reality there were no German capitalists who opposed fascism), in El laberinto del fauno, all the capitalists are behind fascism, which is shown, as we shall see, in one of the film’s most compelling scenes.8 First, however, it is necessary to describe del Toro’s visual style and how he constructs his distinctive fascistmonster archetype. From El laberinto del fauno’s opening scene, we understand ourselves to be entering a magical place that is nevertheless coldly historical. We are in Franco’s Spain, but we are also deep in the verdant woods, where shards of brilliant light are knifing through thick and damp foliage above. We are traveling with a fascist cavalcade, but we are not with them: we are neither prisoners of fascism nor its unwitting accomplices. We occupy, in terms of our gaze, a strategic location sharply dissonant and ideologically disjunctive in relation to Hollywood’s representation of the fascist experience. In del Toro’s imaginary, fascism is directly in front of us to see and fear, but its power is thrown into direct relief against forces much larger than itself. Importantly, fascism in del Toro’s vision is not an unhistorical, faceless, and invincible evil monolith extending its reach everywhere, nor is it, in the manner of Spielberg, hypostatized into period piece ethnodrama (German Nazis and Jewish victims). Rather than Satanic or ethnic, it is thoroughly human, made by particular human beings for specific political ends. Fascism for del Toro is much more than an individual lust for totalitarian social control – this has been the selfserving bourgeois interpretation. Rather, it is a systematic attack on nature, in particular on the relationship between mother and child." - Kam Hei Tsuei, Socialism and Democracy Public Opinion "Fantasy shaken by bullet fire and the agony of tired souls cut short, Pan's Labyrinth is a genuine marvel of storytelling, craftsmanship, design, and pure theatricality within cinematic boundaries. Skillfully told and heartrending in its mixture of warfare anxiety and childhood imagination, Guillermo Del Toro (master of understated drama and boisterous action) constructs a fluid vision that layers its "segments" with distinct separation. As each particular story (every subplot is important) eventually collides by the end of such a rich and engrossing tapestry, reality and illusion embrace in the most cathartic way. It's a film that thrives because of its cumulative end, but Pan's Labyrinth succeeds so miraculously because each moment is plotted in line with Del Toro's storybook structure. Essential (but infrequent) narration, smooth transitions, and the obvious presence of fairy-tale creatures all contribute to a work that celebrates the artificiality of invention, and while folk-tales usually comment on the harsh surfaces of reality, it is Del Toro's commitment to layer each story like detached rooms in a widening castle that speaks to me the most. This is why I love movies." - SilentDawn, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion pan's labyrinth "A journey deep inside A labyrinth of twists and turns Where secrets lie in wait" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #44 (2020), #45 (2018), UNRANKED (2016), #79 (2014), #50 (2013), #63 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (15), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #81 Fanboy Ranking, #57 Cinema Ranking #66 Old Farts Ranking, #60 Damn Kids Ranking #55 Ambassador Ranking, #63 All-American Ranking #98 Cartoon Ranking, #58 Damn Boomer Ranking

Also for a public opinion that isn't me "the rarest of films a legitimate epic dealing with complex themes and shit. in fact it's probably one of the most ideologically dense and complex movies i've ever seen. it's gonna give film academics decades worth of material. i think it's one of those "you get out of it what you put in" kinda deals. militant atheists and christians will have very different reactions to the ending. definitely feels like scorsese has put out the definitive representation of his struggles with faith that comes across in many of his films. can see why it took him 30 years to figure this shit out and even now there's no easy conclusion. not for everyone though, it's a difficult watch for sure and not one that gives immediate gratification. been thinking about it for a day and that doesn't feel near long enough. right now not the most celebrated film of 2016... but give it a decade. we'll see then." - @CoolioD1 I say this because with the next batch of just misses, we can now confirm that Silence is our highest ranked movie from 2016. Didn't even take a decade to shut that La La Land musical down! Number 170 A Star is Born (1954, George Kukor) Number 169 Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman) Number 168 Brokeback Mountain (2005, Ang Lee) Number 167 Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov) Number 166 La La Land (2016, Damien Jizzelle) Number 165 The Great Escape (1963, John Sturges) Number 164 Fight Club (1999, David Fincher) Number 163 Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose) Number 162 Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988, Robert Zemeckis) Number 161 Guardians of the Galaxy (2013, James Gunn)

Last one for tonight Number 61 "Death has come to your little town, Sheriff." About the Film Synopsis "Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween Night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again." Its Legacy "Admittedly, many outstanding horror films are indies. It’s not a reach to assume that any of your favorite spooky classics were probably made by a struggling auteur with a low budget and a handful of talented friends in a dark basement. However, Halloween makes a pretty convincing argument that it emerged ready to play in the big leagues. Aside from being one of the first, Halloween is also one of the most famous slasher movies of all time. Even if you’re not a fan of the genre, you’ve likely watched—or at the very least heard of—the Halloween franchise. Carpenter’s 1978 original led to a series of spin-offs and sequels, as many successful blockbusters do. The film drew inspiration from (and can be considered a successor to) legendary films such as Psycho and The Exorcist. Even the film’s “Laurie Strode house” shooting location is a considered a civic landmark, due to its cinematic history (plus its ripe old age of 128—the house was built in 1888). Fans are often known to visit the Strode house’s new Pasadena address, where it was moved after almost being demolished, considered too important and therefore transplanted. How many horror movie locations are valued that highly? Secondly: the cast and the mask. Household name Jamie Lee Curtis (who has good horror in her blood—her mother Janet Leigh top-lined Psycho) starred alongside well-respected and established British thespian Donald Pleasence. Curtis tried for the role because she was a fan of Carpenter’s, who had actually turned her down for roles in the past. And who could forget the iconic, eerie white mask worn by Myers—a true classic amid mad-murder disguises, and nearly as famous as an image in its own right, apart from the film. Not to mention all of this fame has the numbers to back it up. The film grossed $47 million at the box office, which if you consider inflation would make it one of the most successful independent productions of all time." - Kaia Placa, Film Independent From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "This analysis of Halloween indicates how a sociocultural perspective on the representation of bad guys and good guys unites both filmic and sociocultural aspects of representation, providing an alternative to psychodynamic interpretations of film narrative, as suggested by Stephen Prince. [6] Working with an analysis inspired by neoformalist work, a sociocultural approach presumes that film characters behave as they do primarily for filmic reasons governed by the narrative and style of the film. Characters are shaped by aesthetic concerns and through aesthetic means. A theory of narrative based on cognitive psychology-as suggested by David Bordwell in Making Meaning-posits that inferences that members of an audience make about character behavior are shaped not only by the expectations associated with the film's genre but also by schemata that audience members have about how human beings might behave in various contexts. [7] It is unnecessary to posit the existence of a "collective nightmare," as Robin Wood has done, [8] to explain the knowledge of threats that members of a slasher film's audience share. Instead, the perception of a "bad guy" such as Michael as being evil can be explicated in terms of socially and culturally shared conceptions of psychopathology and murder that allow audience members to recognize their representation in Halloween as manifestations of evil. Instead of speculations about repressed desires and fears, this analysis suggests how an examination of sociocultural conceptions of mental illness (both onscreen and off) might inform the attitudes of filmmakers and audience members. As discussed above, Halloween employs filmic elements such as mise-en-scène, editing, cinematography, and sound as well as narration and the conventions of the slasher genre to cue the viewer to recognize the threat posed by the bad guy even as the good guys remain ignorant of that threat. The vicarious fears engendered by the threat of violence or the acts of violence felt by some audience members, a quality of the genre delineated by Carol J. Clover, [9] do not entail that the represented threat be experienced as a "collective nightmare" in any Freudian sense. A better understanding of the recognizable evil in Halloween bridges an investigation of bad behavior in a given society and culture with an analysis of the filmic elements that represent evil in Carpenter's low-budget classic." - Jody Pennington, A Danish Journal of Film Studies Public Opinion "It's nothing new to note that the horror in many slashers--especially this one--are women's horrors. Stalking, sexual violence, threats to children, threatening phone calls, these are products of patriarchy that women--whether we like it or not--are saddled with facing. In better societies, reproductive labor is shared, but here, under capitalist patriarchy, women (or even just those classified as women) are coerced into these roles. And so we are subject to men's obsessions, men's brutality, men's lust, men's need to control. Again, whether men like it or not, whether men concede to the coercion or not, capitalist patriarchy coerces them into those roles. They aren't "natural." They aren't innate. They aren't unavoidable. But they are there, in our media, in our culture, in our schools, in our attitudes, in our laws. And so we see the Shape staring into windows. We see the Shape looming over a naked woman in her bed, seeming to be her lover, implying sexual violence without enacting it. We see the Shape come so close to the kids. We see the Shape break every barrier down. We see the Shape rise behind her. We see the Shape as a faceless man, a threatening phantom, a boogie man who does not stop. The police can't stop him. His doctor can't stop him. Guns don't stop him. Knives don't stop him. The only moment he even pauses is when he is, briefly, temporarily, exposed. But not even that stops him. From the opening giallo-inspired perspective killings to the shadowed evening imagery of suburban hallways and wide-open streets, every scene is structured to build up not to a victory, not to a climax of violence, but to a deeply unsettling moment of failure. Had no sequel ever been made, all we would have been left with is that certainty that there is no escape, that there is no safety, that the Shape is still out there, inexplicably unkillable. I prefer to remember it that way. I prefer to think of him as the unknown, the Shape, the pure evil, silent child that moves through the United States in the form of every stalker, every sexual predator, every serial killer. And he'll keep getting away with it in a world like this one." - Sally Jane Black, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion halloween "trick r treat, bitch i am coming for you tomorrow" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings UNRANKED (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), #79 (2013), #95 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #64 Fanboy Ranking, #64 Cinema Ranking #58 Old Farts Ranking, #70 Damn Kids Ranking #99 Ambassador Ranking, #55 All-American Rankingn #159 Cartoon Ranking, #56 Damn Boomer Ranking

OH MY FUCKING GOD, WE DID IT! WE DID IT! The movie is bringing me to tears again just listening to the ambient soundtrack and reading through sources Number 62 "It was in the silence that I heard Your voice." About the Film Synopsis "Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact." Its Legacy "The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors. But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ. Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life. Jesuits both fictional and real did this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love. In the end, “Silence” is about love. Or maybe loves. Father Rodrigues’s and Father Garupe’s love for their old mentor, Father Ferreira. The three Jesuits’ love for the Japanese people. Father Rodrigues’s intense love for Jesus Christ. Most of all, Jesus’s love for him, for his brother Jesuits, for the people of Japan and for all of humanity. Understand love and you will understand “Silence.”" - Fr. James Martin, Religious Consultant for Silence From the Filmmaker ""Q: You spent a lot of time going to Church or going to Mass? Scorsese: Yes. In the church, and going to Mass. Q: By yourself? Scorsese: By myself. My family wasn’t very religious that way, but I just found comfort there because the streets were pretty rough, and having the severe asthma, I was told I couldn’t do anything. If you’re told that repeatedly, and you have enough breathing problems, and you really believe it—I always think of Teddy Roosevelt as an example, who had severe asthma, but he fought it—but my parents in the mid to late ‘40s, uneducated and working class, they just didn’t know what to do. They just knew I couldn’t breathe. This was from three years old on, and so I was more or less protected because of that. But when you’re in the street you’re not really protected. There’s a testing all the time: tougher kids, younger kids, and then you try to make sense of it all. You try to make sense of the dynamic of the family. What a family means. What a family unit is. The extended family: The aunts and uncles, my grandmother and grandfather in 241 Elizabeth St., my grandmother and grandfather in Queens, my mother’s side of the family, the Cappa side, her brothers and sisters. Some of them were still living in the neighborhood on Prince Street and on Lafayette. So, it was like a living organism, and the church was the center. It was also the center for every group that was there. Mainly it was all working-class people trying to live a decent life. It was very dirty; they were tenements, but it wasn’t as dirty as it was when they were born there. Elizabeth Street at the turn-of-the-century was noted in New York as the highest rate of infant mortality, and that was because of cholera and all these diseases. They finally found a way to maintain the buildings where they lived, and I still can smell the bleach that was used to scrub the halls. My mother and everybody scrubbing the halls on the weekend, the windows, everything to keep it clean and to protect the family. And there was an underworld element that was there that was brought over from the old world. Q: When did you run across the Silence book? I had gotten involved with Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ. I wanted to make that. By 1988 when that was finally made, and it was about to be released, there was a great deal of an uproar, and we had to show the film, what was the film at that moment anyway, to different religious groups to show what it was rather than arguing about it without having seen it. One of the people there was Archbishop Paul Moore of New York, Episcopal, and he came to a little meeting afterwards at a small dinner we had. He felt that the film, as he said, was “Christologically correct.” He told us many stories. He was a very interesting man. He said, “I’m going to send you a book.” And he described some of the stories in the book, and he described the confrontation, the choices, the concept of apostasy and faith. I received the book a few days later, and by ’89, a year later, I read it. The experience of taking “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and then doing “Goodfellas” was so extraordinarily exhausting and pummeling, in a way, fighting very strong arguments and discussions. Really, it was around the world. By the time I did “Goodfellas,” I had promised the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to be in a film of his called “Dreams.” He wanted me to play van Gogh. I was 15 days over schedule on “Goodfellas.” The studio was furious. My cameraman left because he had another picture to do. Somebody else came in. We were just scurrying to finish, and Kurosawa was waiting for me in Japan. He was 82 years old, and he had just finished the majority of the shooting, and he had only my scene to shoot, and he was waiting. It was very nerve-racking. Within two days after shooting that film, we flew to Tokyo, and then to Hokkaido, and while I was there I read the book. Actually finished it on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. When I’d look at my managers, and my agents, and say, “I really want to make this film.” They’d go in. They’d inquire where it stood at that moment in time, and they’d come back in horror, and say, “Well, this person has to get this, and the amount of money against it,” back and forth, and, finally, there were a number of people who really worked it out. But it took many years to try to understand or feel comfortable with how to visualize the picture, and how to deal with the last sequences of the film. The last sequences. Not just the confrontation at the end, but the epilogue. Q: Right. Now, you said that it took you a while to understand the heart of the book. How would you describe the heart of the book? Well, I think it's the depth of faith. It’s the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. The vehicle that one takes towards faith, which can be very helpful—the institution of the church, the sacraments—this all can be very, but ultimately it has to be yourself, and you have to find it. You have to find that faith, or you have to find a relationship with Jesus with yourself, really, because ultimately that’s the one you face. Yeah. He is, but it doesn’t negate, in my mind, those who choose to have, I should say, lived a life according to the rules of an institution, [like] the institution of the Catholic Church, or however one proceeds in their life with their own beliefs, but ultimately they can’t do it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. That’s the problem. And the invitation, and it keeps calling you. It keeps calling you, and it’s in the other people around you. It's the people closest to you. This is what it is, and you suddenly get slapped in the face by it, and say, “Wake up.” You know? Why It's Great Critic Opinion "On one level, the tension in the film is governed by an ecclesial ambivalence in the era of post-colonialism: is Christian evangelization a kind of violence to the very understanding of enculturation? That question eventually faces the two Jesuits, Frs. Sebastiao Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe as they set out to find their mentor, Fr. Dante Ferreira, in Japan in 1633. Refusing to believe that his teacher has apostatized, Rodrigues clings not only to that ideal but to an image of Christ he has prayed with and which becomes a recurrent vision throughout the film. It is the image of Christ, as well as the construction of Ferreira as an ideal, that is continually at risk throughout the film. While Japanese Christians are compelled into desecration of sacred Christian images by Inoue, the Grand Inquisitor, Rodrigues must come to terms with his illusions of Christ in the face of human suffering. In confronting Ferreira, Rodrigues learns that the older Jesuit apostatized not because his life was in danger, but because other Christians were screaming in agony upside down over a torture pit filled with excrement. Eventually, Rodrigues would follow his mentor on the same path and apostatize for the same reason, violating the sacred image of Christ himself for the sake of charity. In Ferreira’s mind, Japan is a “swamp” where Christianity, even during the days of St. Francis Xavier, could not take root; it was all an illusion. In the end, he tells Rodrigues, they are not martyrs to Christ but to Rodrigues himself and his own Christian ideals and teachings. As the Inquisitor says to Rodrigues, “the price for your glory is their suffering.” The film goes to great length to disclose the ambivalence of signs and images and how difficult it is to trust them. We want to identify Kichijiro as a Judas figure who seemingly betrays his family, friends, and the Christianity he knows but then he remains steadfast in the end. Rodrigues sees the flight of an eagle as a sign from God that they are headed on the right path, only to see they are being spied on. A young Japanese couple understands paradise as what is happening now, only to be disabused of such a notion by Fr. Garupe and the horrible death they must endure. In the end, Rodrigues must deconstruct himself as a Catholic priest for the sake of the very charity which remains at the root of Christian faith. These equivocal signs suggest the plurality of meaning available to the interpreter, free from an essentialist point of view. The way of negativity, the pathway of silence, seems to be the only sign that is incapable of being invested with the aura of illusion. At the same time, however, the spectator must face the most ambivalent image of all: the cross. While Rodrigues moves away from a traditional ecclesial portrait of the suffering Christ, he himself begins to look more and more like the portrait of Jesus throughout the film, with his long, entangled hair and emaciated face mirroring the suffering Christ. He clings only to a tiny handmade representation of the crucifix, which he puts in his clothes in the course of the film and which his Japanese wife secretly puts in his hands at the end of the film, just before he is cremated in the Buddhist custom. The only “ecclesial image” we are left with is the apostate Rodrigues himself, imago Dei, and the imprint of the God who “emptied himself, taking the form of slave” (Philippians 2:7), completely divesting himself from the power of divinity. Yet this image itself is annihilated into smoke. Charlie Cappa becomes an image of the Crucified in the streets, but maintained the symbolic wounds of Christ. Rodrigues is reduced to silence without a trace. In the end, Silence is something of a return to the beginning: salvation is found not in the sacred place of the Church and its penances, but in the streets, with Charlie Cappa and striving for salvation among the sacred people of God. As Scorsese would say in an interview in 2013, “I don’t know if I any longer accept the idea of an inherent sinfulness in human nature. I think in the process of living, we may need redemption just from being who we are. But the idea of original sin, that we are already guilty to begin with, is obviously in the films I make and in who I am.”" - Guerric DeBone, Scorsese and Religion Public Opinion For me, Silence is less of a movie and more of a meditative experience. I come back to elements, lines, imagery, sounds, and ideas present throughout the film and constantly find that I come upon a spiritual revelation. The film and the novel have paired together to be an essential part of my personal religious canon. I cannot even begin to touch on all of the aspects of the film in a short write-up but I can highlight a few elements on how the film has become so personal to me (and may even supplant Raiders as my favorite film at some point in time, as I let it sit longer). At its heart, Silence tackles the central question that torments anyone who believes in any sort of God. Where is God in all of the suffering of the world? Why is this God silent? And among others delves into thorny themes of faithful apostacy, Christian obsession with martyrdom, and the colonizing elements of missionary work from white Europeans. The film also firmly plants itself into a historically true setting within the Tokugawa Shonugate. I won't go into it, but you can read about Kakure Kirishitan, or 'hidden Christians', in this era in Japan. It's an absolutely fascinating historical subject to read. “When words do not suffice, when they are incapable of communicating what is experienced at the affective level, then we are fully engaged in loving.” - Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent Father Rodrigues is faced with an impossible dilemma for a devote Catholic priest who had dedicated his life to his faith. He can let his parish suffer persecution, or apostatize. Rodrigues is fully prepared to suffer for the God he devoted his life to. But can he let others suffer because of his faith? It takes the full arc of the film and sitting in silence for Rodrigues to realize the truth that his faith teaches. Perhaps even Rodrigues cannot hear God because he cannot understand what God is saying until the final act of the film. That Christ of Rodrigues' religion was born into the suffering of men and to carry it with them. God is not silent when the suffering seems to go unanswered, but is with the Japanese and Rodrigues in their suffering. This message feels particularly striking in that it seems anti-thetical to how the loudest of Christians in America, evangelicals, tend to practice their religion. They practice a faith that is bent towards trampling on others in order to achieve their aims of political power over the world, in an attempt to realize religious order as they see it. The pivotal reflection from Endo's novel and Scorsese's film is the opposite. Rodrigues needs to lay down his hubris and ambitions of glory to evangelize, because of the pain and harm that it's causing to the people around him. In doing so, it may even seem as though Rodrigues loses his faith. But not so, he perhaps realizes it even more fully. He exchanges the grandeur for silence to better bring about his God's intent for the people around him. - @The Panda The AI's Poetic Opinion silence "" - da vinci Factoids Previous Rankings UNRANKED (2020, 2018), NA (2016, 2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #80 Fanboy Ranking, #46 Cinema Ranking #56 Old Farts Ranking, #51 Damn Kids Ranking #22 Ambassador Ranking, #71 All-American Ranking #17 Cartoon Ranking, #71 Damn Boomer Ranking

idk wtf this is but it made it Number 63 "Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up." About the Film Synopsis "High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other." Its Legacy "The twist in "Your Name" comes when Taki and Mitsuha stop swapping bodies. The film then starts following solely Taki's perspective, as he discovers that his and Mitsuha's timelines weren't parallel. While he lived in 2016, she was in 2013, the same year her town, Itomori, was wiped out by a comet. Taki manages to engineer one last body switch and rewrite history so Itomori's citizens evacuate before the town's destruction. The pair briefly meet each other in person, but they forget each other afterward. Not to worry — they meet each other in Tokyo in 2021 and vaguely recognize each other. In an interview with Vice, Shinkai explained his inspirations. They ranged from Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" to a waka poem by ancient Japanese writer Ono no Komachi: "I met someone in my dream, and had I known it was a dream, I would have stayed there." As for the destruction of Itomori, that came from a much more tragic place: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that ravaged Japan.At magnitude 9.0, Tōhoku is the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history. The damage was threefold; the earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster left 18,000 dead, and the effects are still felt in Japan today. "It was the largest in a thousand years, and there was something similar 1,000 years ago, which we all forgot about. But if you look closer there were warnings, like stone inscriptions in the cave in the film: Don't live in this valley. But we forget those warnings, or dismiss them as something 'from the ancient times'. We think they're just dangers from the past. When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?" - Devin Meenan, SlashFilm From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Makoto Shinkai’s animated film Kimi No Na Wa, translated as Your Name, was a critical and commercial hit when it was released in 2016. The film depicts the strange and wondrous journey of two high school teenagers, city boy Taki in Tokyo and countryside girl Mitsuha in rural lakeside Itomori, who are inexplicably swapping bodies with each other. Your Name is currently the highest grossing anime feature of all time, a remarkable mainstream success at the local box office and in its global reception. Such widespread positive attention is rarely seen outside of films made by Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, and Your Name has since solidified Shinkai’s position as a leading filmmaker on the animated movie landscape (Fig. 1). The fantastical premise of Your Name’s story, combined with gorgeous naturalistic animation and standout music composition, all play defining roles in the film’s success. However, a central idea that underpins Your Name is the tension between modernity and tradition, informed by postmodern Japan’s sense of cultural loss due to globalisation, termed mukokuseki or nationlessness (Iwabuchi 2002: 28). The music composed and performed by Japanese band RADWIMPS acts in tandem with the aesthetics to shape the movie’s thematic coherence, and to amplify fantastical elements in the animated medium. RADWIMPS’s soundtrack is part of a wider genre of anime music uniquely situated to support animated films on a creative and commercial scale, given Japan’s intersection of high music CD consumption, a thriving music industry, and the prevalent franchising of popular anime elements including soundtracks to fans. With Your Name, I offer an analysis in this post of the opening music, material cultural identifiers, and synthesis of sound elements with visual sequences to interrogate how aural cues inform the recurring mediation of tradition and modernity in the text, and which are integral in drawing the viewer into the animated world. Your Name evokes culturally specific, nostalgia-driven modes of narration where sound acts as a unifying force. The musical number Yumetōrō 夢灯籠, literally meaning ‘dream lantern’, opens the film. It is performed using contemporary Western instruments such as the rhythm guitar and standard drums, affirming the modern-day context and globalised nature of the Japanese music industry. Aki Yamasaki identifies three common music types in anime: the theme song, character song, and soundtrack (2020: 210). Yumetōrō falls strictly in the tradition of a theme song, meeting all Yamasaki’s markers as a number paired with an opening credits sequence, with striking lyrics and a catchy melody aimed at mass appeal. In anime, theme songs act as the face of the film and is a prime device for promoting shows and highlighting their central motifs, and are often performed by the singer at events as well as made into soundtracks and sheet music for sale. So Yumetōrō’s function remains quintessentially Japanese. Although theme songs are more commonly applied to television programmes in Japan, Shinkai establishes a sense of reassuring familiarity for the local audience with adherence to this sonic convention. Shinkai demonstrates that Your Name’s aural dimension and visual aesthetics complement each other, showing Japanese culture not as a static object but instead as a dynamic and liminal force. The Yumetōrō number has therefore been deliberately scripted, composed, and animated to weave between past and present time, setting up its central motifs and embodying the romantic, fantastical and nostalgic essence of the entire film." - Zhui Ning Chang, Fantasy-Animation Public Opinion "It's the feeling of never wanting a dream to end, desperately trying to go back to sleep hoping that your dream would somehow pick up where it had left off. But you know very well that it won't. First you'll forget the details. What shirt you were wearing, the exact words you said or wanted to say. Her hand on your palm that felt so tangible just a few seconds ago, reduced to a cold sensation that served as nothing but a reminder of the warmth that was once there. Then the timeline becomes murky, sequences become knotted up -- like how mitsuha's grandmother had so wisely put it: Musubi dayo. Time is a knot. The location comes before the journey there, cause and effect all collapse in an instant. You can't remember the weather, or the exact time of day. It felt golden, the sun may or may not be present, was her eyes sparkling because of the comet? Why yes, there was a comet slowly crawling up above, leaving a trail of sparkling dust behind like something out of a desktop wallpaper. The comet traveled all across the galaxy to arrive on earth, like how you had traveled all across the country to meet---- To meet who, again? Ah, all is lost now, absolutely irrevocable. What's left is a lingering sadness which reason you had forgotten. A need to remember someone dear, a stroke of marker pen on your palm and a simple wish for company. How cruel it is for our dream to force itself away from us, beyond our control." - YI JIAN, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion your name "A name is just a name But it's the only one you've got So make it yours Also, why the fuck did you name me something as tacky as dA vInci? We get it." - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings UNRANKED (2020, 2018), NA (2016, 2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5) Country Count Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #40 Fanboy Ranking, #65 Cinema Ranking #135 Old Farts Ranking, #46 Damn Kids Ranking #20 Ambassador Ranking, #74 All-American Ranking #18 Cartoon Ranking, #70 Damn Boom Ranking

Only @Plain Old Tele could possibly complain about this one. Number 64 "If I only had a brain!" About the Film Synopsis "Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them." Its Legacy "The Wizard of Oz, followed by Star Wars and Psycho, is identified as the most influential film of all time in a study published in the open access journal Applied Network Science. Researchers at the University of Turin, Italy, calculated an influence score for 47,000 films listed in IMDb (the internet movie database). The score was based on how much each film had been referenced by subsequent films. The authors found that the top 20 most influential films were all produced before 1980 and mostly in the United States. Dr. Livio Bioglio, the lead author, said: “We propose an alternative method to box office takings – which are affected by factors beyond the quality of the film such as advertising and distribution – and reviews – which are ultimately subjective – for analysing the success of a film. We have developed an algorithm that uses references between movies as a measure for success, and which can also be used to evaluate the career of directors, actors and actresses, by considering their participation in top-scoring movies.” Applying the algorithm to directors, the five men credited for The Wizard of Oz are all in the top eight, with Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick ranked third, fifth and sixth respectively. When the authors used another approach to remove the bias of older movies – which, because they were produced earlier, can potentially influence a greater number of subsequent films - Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma occupied the top spots instead. When applied to actors, the algorithm ranked Samuel L. Jackson, Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise as the top three. The authors noticed a strong gender bias towards male actors; the only female in the top ten was Lois Maxwell, who played the recurring role of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond franchise. Dr. Bioglio said: “The scores of top-ranked actresses tend to be lower compared to their male colleagues. The only exceptions were musical movies, where results show moderate gender equality, and movies produced in Sweden, where actresses ranked better compared to actors.” To calculate the influence score for the 47,000 films investigated in this study, the authors treated the films as nodes in a network and measured the number of connections each film has to other films and how influential the films connected to it are. Similar network science methods have already been widely applied to measuring the impact of work in other fields, such as scientific publications. Dr. Bioglio said: “The idea of using network analysis for ranking films is not completely new, but to our knowledge this is the first study that uses these techniques to also rank personalities involved in film production.” The authors suggest that their method could be used for research in the arts and by film historians. However, they caution that the results can only be applied to Western cinema as the data on IMDb are strongly biased towards films produced in Western countries." - BMC press release on Livio and Ruggero's Applied Network Science paper From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Since its inception, the Wizard of Oz story has gone through countless reinventions, including several more Oz books written by Baum himself, additional books contributed by other “Royal Historians of Oz,”1 and numerous adaptations for stage and screen. The 1939 MGM film version of The Wizard of Oz is undoubtedly the most wellknown cinematic adaptation of Baum’s American fairy tale, directed by the legendary Victor Fleming,2 starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, and adapted for the screen by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allen Woolf. Fleming’s classic film largely follows the same narrative structure of Baum’s fairy tale. A tornado transports Dorothy and Toto from Kansas to Oz where her house falls on and kills the Wicked Witch of the East, though in the MGM film, this transition is further emphasized by the visual switch from the drab sepia tones of Kansas to the vibrant Technicolor of Oz. In this version, Dorothy’s magical silver shoes are transformed into the iconic ruby slippers and the character of the good witch is developed into Glinda (Billie Burke), a resplendent and regal maternal figure who welcomes Dorothy to Oz. Along the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy meets the same cast of characters: the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), Tin Man (Jack 8 Haley), and Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). The Wizard (Frank Morgan) makes the same ultimatum and Dorothy destroys the now green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), albeit accidentally, as in Baum’s book. Dorothy’s companions find they have always had the brain, heart, and courage they long for. The Wizard is a fake, but Glinda comes to the rescue and tells Dorothy of the magic of the ruby slippers, which transport her safely back to Kansas amid echoes of the girl’s proclamation that “there’s no place like home.” Concluding the visually-coded frame narrative, Dorothy reawakens in sepia-toned Kansas, where Aunt Em (Clara Blandick) reassures Dorothy that her adventures have been nothing but a dream. Silent film versions preceded the MGM Oz and many more cinematic adaptations have followed,3 but Garland has inarguably secured her place within American memory as the little girl from Kansas who traveled “over the rainbow,” and new generations of children follow her there with each ritualistic television screening of the classic film." - AD Burger, The Wizard of Oz as American myth: A Critical study of six versions of the story, 1900-2007 Public Opinion "my gal pals and i were absolutely hooting and hollering whenever the hot scarecrow came onscreen to do a silly dance and fall down. we decided scarecrow is a lanky, sensitive, DIY boy who stands in front of you at your roommate’s friend’s house show and at first you’re annoyed but then he notices he’s blocking your view and he apologizes soooo much, maybe even too much, and after the show you joke around with him and laugh when he trips over his own dirty converse laces, and suddenly it’s 2 am and you’re heading home and you think you’re gonna miss him most of all." - BRAT, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion the wizard of oz "Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion see the Wizard of Oz" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #31 (2020), #49 (2018), #51 (2016), #54 (2014), #63 (2013), UNRANKED (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (4) Country Count Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #93 Fanboy Ranking, #59 Cinema Ranking #34 Old Farts Ranking, #104 Damn Kids ranking #73 Ambassador Ranking, #66 All-American Ranking #67 Cartoon Ranking, #63 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 65 "Are you not entertained?!" About the Film Synopsis "In the year 180, the death of emperor Marcus Aurelius throws the Roman Empire into chaos. Maximus is one of the Roman army’s most capable and trusted generals and a key advisor to the emperor. As Marcus’ devious son Commodus ascends to the throne, Maximus is set to be executed. He escapes, but is captured by slave traders. Renamed Spaniard and forced to become a gladiator, Maximus must battle to the death with other men for the amusement of paying audiences." Its Legacy " Gladiator spoke directly to the questions that haunted the 2000 campaign, using the Roman Empire as a stand-in for contemporary America. The analogy worked so well because filmmakers have long conditioned American audiences to view ancient Rome as a metaphor for western civilization, often specifically as a mirror to American foibles, fears, and aspirations. Like the American Western, a Roman film brings to the screen the mythic quality of archetypal heroes. But the Rome/America metaphor draws unique power from the deeply ingrained belief that our nation's founders modeled the American republic on the Roman republic; that we Americans have always been much like the Romans, with whom we share a love of liberty and a penchant for power; and that these common traits have given both Romans and Americans a manifest destiny to control the world. We look to Rome for models; conversely, we seek lessons from Rome's fall, hoping in this way to avoid the pitfalls that doomed Rome and so to post pone the demise of our own republic. Gladiator - like virtually all Roman films - deviates a great deal from the historical record, but never more so than in this ending, as the film, against all evidence, kills off Commodus within months of his father's death and wills back the republic. A few classicists complained about this tinkering with historical fact. But if audiences knew that the film strained history, most viewers did not seem to care. In our films, we are quite used to artistic license that runs roughshod over historical events, as, for instance, when Pearl Harbor (2001) presents an American near- victory against Japanese warplanes in the 1941 "surprise attack on an American love-triangle," in the words of film critic Roger Ebert (2001). Roman history, especially, can shift cataclysmically in film to accommodate the American metaphor. And audiences liked Gladiator' s ending. They liked the promise that all can be right if good politicians, a good wife and mother, and good soldiers ally with one another under a virtuous and strong leader. This conclusion would satisfy nearly any American audience at any time, but it also spoke to the particular conditions of the spring of 2000. Rocked by scandals and allegations of scandal in the Clinton presidency, many Americans longed for what they saw in this ending, a restoration of republican/Republican values. One of my students affirmed the lightness of the film's resolution and offered this interpretation: "The film advocates a return to democracy here in America. Americans must overthrow the tyrannical incumbents and vote for people who will restore democracy. Yet this ending does not secure democracy as we understand the term and as Marcus Aurelius expresses it when he surprises Maximus with this confession: "I want you to become the protector of Rome after I die. I will empower you, to one end alone, to give power back to the people of Rome and end the corruption that has crippled it." Gladiator' s final scenes may seem to fulfill the second part of the old emperor's wish, an end to corruption through Maximus's sacrifice. The film's advertising slogan was "A Hero Will Rise." This is a popular theme in American films: a hero will surface in a time of crisis, often an uncorrupted country boy, as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). But Maximus is a hero with special appeal to a millennial audience. As the film repeatedly reminds us, the savior of Rome was a Spaniard who had never until, transported there as a gladiator, he finally saw the city in all its splen dor and all its decay. Recalling his fellow Spaniards, Hadrian, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius himself, the good emperors of the second century, Maximus is Roman without being sullied by the city's endemic intrigue. He has the purity and decency." - Emily Albu, Arethusa , Winter 2008, Vol. 41, No. 1, Celluloid Classics: New Perpectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema (Winter 2008), pp. 185-204 From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "On the surface, Ridley Scott's Gladiator may seem like any of those movies I loved as a child. The story takes us to Germania during the last days of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, when the Roman army, led by Maximus, a provincial general, puts an end to barbarian domination. Soon after the battle, Marcus expresses to Maximus his gratitude, as well as his wish to name him "Protector of Rome" after his death, so that Rome can become, once again, a Republic, in spite of the fact that all Maximus wants is to return to his wife and son in Spain, and that Marcus already has a rightful heir who can't wait to become Emperor, his son Commodus. In a moving scene, the aging emperor announces his decision to Commodus, who murders him, weeping as he crushes the old man's throat, and who soon afterwards orders his rival's execution. But Maximus escapes and manages to return home, badly wounded (incredibly, bleeding all the way from Germany to Spain, but who cares?), only to find his farm burnt to the ground and his wife and son crucified. Despondent, the Spaniard gives in to his wounds and is found barely alive on the road, and eventually sold as a slave in Zucchabar, where he's trained as a gladiator. What follows is the story of the hero's return to Rome, where Commodus reigns, unaware of his rival's survival, and where Maximus finds fame, revenge, and death at the Colosseum. Indeed, to read this summary, Gladiator may sound like any of those old epic movies long outmoded by the time my daughter was born. The story brings to mind such memorable predecessors as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (i960), the saga of the real-life gladiator who waged war against Rome during the last years of the Republic, as well as Anthony Mann's elegant epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which also develops during the chaotic reign of Commodus. All the essential elements are there: Gladiator too is a tale about the clash between the forces of good and evil embodied in two archetypal characters, an anonymous, righteous underdog and an all-powerful adversary, predictably a depraved, demented villain, and their match is set against breathtaking reconstructions of ancient sites and life and drenched in as much blood as can possibly be poured into two-and-a-half hours of film. As with all great movie epics, the public's viewpoint in Gladiator moves swiftly from the private sphere where passions brew (the tent, the prison cell, the bedroom) to the vast back ground where public life and ancient history unravel (the battle field, the city, the Colosseum)?a grand stage, which lends its weight and scale to the minutiae of the personal drama. And, like Quo Vadis? (1951), Ben Hur (1959), and virtually every other of these Hollywood fantasies, Gladiator, too, involves a tense love triangle, in this case, between Maximus and Commodus' sister, Lucilla, who was Maximus' lover once and still loves him, and between Lucilla and her brother, who burns with an old incestuous passion for her, and whom she fears, on account of her complicity with Maximus and her allegiance to her son, Lucius Verus, who happens to be unwittingly poor kid a fan of his uncle's rival, the mysterious gladiator who has become the talk of the town. From the purely visual point of view, Scott's movie is firmly placed within a tradition that goes back at least as far as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), grand spectacles where antiquity comes to life through extravagant productions and stunning special effects. If anything, the impressive computer-generated reconstructions in Gladiator strike one as a logical development of such technological breakthroughs as Technicolor and CinemaScope. Indeed, the uncanny image definition made possible by computer generation compensates at least in part for the effect of sheer scale that made those earlier films so powerful at the theater, lending the movie a respectable afterlife in the world of home videos. I would even argue that, in some cases, Gladiator fares better in this humbler, domestic form. At times the level of detail is so exhaustive as to be optically implausible, especially in those vast panoramic views where it tends to flatten space, and where the effect is often more hallucinatory than realistic, a shortcoming of hi-tech illusionism which is curiously neutralized when the cinematic image is squeezed onto a tv screen. But the formal differences between Gladiator and its predecessors are more significant still than its similarities. Let's begin with this. Although Gladiator at least feels to be as long as Ben Hur or Quo Vadis?, its script must be at the most only one third of theirs. The story is told less through speech than through images, which dramatically reduces the rhetorical weight of its predecessors. The text is specially scanty when it comes to the hero, a man of few words, a striking departure from the older epics, where everyone, whether consul or slave, sounds like an orator even during the most intimate love scenes. In fact, whenever Maximus appears on the screen, he's either fighting or brooding. And when he does speak, his words are at times surprisingly casual, even when he discusses conspiratorial plans with a senator or the after life with a fellow slave. In fact, I would argue that, for all the spectacular historical reconstructions and the predictable gore, Scott has managed to create an internal story set in ancient times a quiet epic." - Amelia Arenas, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and Classics Public Opinion "It could be a little melodramatic with it's writing and delivery (what does this movie think it is sometimes, a Shakespearean play?) but it's frankly amazing nonetheless. The action remains flawless, there's a lot of tension throughout the movie, and it's able to really make all of the major characters work on an emotional level. The movie of course had a point beyond the action: it tried to answer the metaphysical question of what Rome was. Was it just a mob of people dictating where the leaders go? Or was it more, a vision of greatness? What is that vision? Ultimately, the movie was about the competing definitions of what Rome was which is what allows it to have some depth." - @Water Bottle The AI's Poetic Opinion gladiator "are you not entertained? by my consistent poetry which i slave away for you while you burn down my farm" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings UNRANKED (2020), #38 (2018), UNRANKED (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #66 (2013), #59 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (4) Country Count Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1) Re-Weighted Placements #46 Fanboy Ranking, #81 Cinema Ranking #98 Old Farts Ranking, #55 Damn Kids Ranking #133 Ambassador Ranking, #62 All-American Ranking #91 Cartoon Ranking, #62 Damn Boomer Ranking

Some more of the 'misses' (although they did make the top 250!) Number 180 RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven) Number 179 Call Me By Your Name (2017, Luca Guadagnino) Number 178 Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse) Number 177 Life of Pi (2012, Ang Lee) Number 176 Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski) Number 175 There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson) Number 174 The Searchers (1956, John Ford) Number 173 Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan) Number 172 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, David Lean) Number 171 A Silent Voice (2017, Naoka Yamada)

i apologize for the monstrocities that dall-e created for this one! Number 66 "If I don't love it, I don't swallow!" About the Film Synopsis "A rat named Remy dreams of becoming a great French chef despite his family’s wishes and the obvious problem of being a rat in a decidedly rodent-phobic profession. When fate places Remy in the sewers of Paris, he finds himself ideally situated beneath a restaurant made famous by his culinary hero, Auguste Gusteau. Despite the apparent dangers of being an unlikely - and certainly unwanted - visitor in the kitchen of a fine French restaurant, Remy’s passion for cooking soon sets into motion a hilarious and exciting rat race that turns the culinary world of Paris upside down. Its Legacy From the Filmmaker "Q: What drew you to a movie about Rats? Brad Bird: Well, I wasn’t really drawn to it. I always liked the idea and it was being Jan Pinkava’s idea and he was working on it the whole time I was making The Incredibles. That was his idea and I always loved the idea but I wasn’t thinking I was going to direct it. They had trouble—everybody loved the idea and they loved the look of it and the cast of character types and all the possibilities of the premise but they were having trouble getting the story to coalesce. It kept wanting to go off in too many different directions and a little over a year and a half ago the Pixar founders John Lassiter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs asked me to come on the project, write a new script and kind of get in onto the big screen. So my motivation at first was respect for these amazing, really genius guys through some fluke of nature happened to get together and make a company that is actually an amazing place so I wanted to help them out in any way I could. Then my next motivation was oh my God, what have I done. I agreed to the original schedule—ahhh! It was complete fear and that so I just went through it. I described it to somebody else as driving down the freeway the wrong way and just trying to live and make a movie that made sense and fulfilled all the possibilities of Jan’s brilliant premise and just survive. We just finished it a couple of weeks ago and I’m still just …heart beating from not dying in my freeway maneuver but I’m really happy to hear you guys like it. I like it, but I’m not sure what it is. It’s a very strange thing and I kind of had to write it very intuitively and not look back because the schedule was right there ready to run me over. I don’t think it probably would have happened if it hadn’t happened the way it happened. It’s not an idea that I probably would have come up with. But it is an idea that I’ve always thought had a huge number of possibilities so through the process to kind of complete that of making it, I fell in love with this world and fell in love with this group of characters and really am glad I was involved. Why It's Great Critic Opinion "The culinary tourism aims at exploring the food as main attraction to promote the tourism. The culinary tourism is otherwise called as food tourism. Culinary tourism is one of the most important tourism like any another tourism due to the presence of diverse cuisine from different parts of the world. Every country and its region in the country have its own unique food and preparation methods. Experiencing food and trying out various culinary choices are one of the routine activities of any tourist. When a tourist pays more attention to learn about the food, ingredients used and the preparation styles followed, then the approach can be called as culinary tourism. Sudhagar (2017) study revealed that strong importance was found towards food taste, healthy food, nutritional value of the food, hygienic food service, reasonable pricing, food safety, and other food services by the fast food customers. The motivation of the culinary tourism results from watching movies, reading a short story, magazine, listening to the stories, and recommendation from the peer groups and from one’s self-interest. Among, the motivation factors, movie plays an important role in influencing the decision-making behaviour of the culinary tourist to visit a particular destination. Movies have the potential to stimulate the audience to travel at different destinations based on the physical features of a country. This includes scenery and landscape and the theme associated in the movie. The others factors of the movie which influences the viewer’s include storylines, events, actors, shaping audiences feeling, emotions and attitude towards the place. One of the popular research findings of Iwashita (2006) and Riley and Van Doren (1992) indicates that location and film experiences increase the memories by relating them to the actors, events, and setting. There is a research evidence which states that tourist prefers to visit specific destinations by holding a particular type of images, memories, associations, emotional attachment to places and meanings (Schama, 1996). Based on these research justifications, it can be interpreted that movies also could influence the culinary tourism. The food and beverage pictured or discussion shown in the movie will result in memory of the audience. The movies not only form the memory but also create a desire to try a particular food and beverage when the opportunity arises or take efforts to experience the food and beverage in various destinations. Sudhagar and Rajendran (2017) indicated that restaurant quality was emerged as top dimension while selecting the Chinese restaurant for dining. Leung et al. (2013) indicated that focusing and analysing reviews of online communities such as TripAdvisor helped the hotels to comprehensively understand the likes and dislikes of their guest. Hence, the present study is aimed at analysing the review of the movie Ratatouille and its impact on the culinary tourism. The movie was named after a famous French dish called as ‘Ratatouille’. The Ratatouille is prepared by selection of sliced colourful vegetables displayed over a garlic-infused tomato sauce and baked. The Ratatouille was served at the end of the film. The voice in the film was from Patton Oswalt as Remy. Remy was an anthropomorphic rat that was inspired by cooking. The other character includes Lou Romano as Linguini, a young garbage boy. Accidentally, the young boy befriends with Remy. The film was all about Remy, the rat whose dream was becoming a chef and how it achieved the goal by partnering an alliance with a Parisian restaurant’s garbage boy. " - D. P. Sudhager, International Journal of Qualitative Research in Services Public Opinion "I remember seeing Ratatouille for the first time when I was 7. I was a huge Pixar fan, had all the DVDs but A Bugs Life and Toy Story 2. I saw it with my mom and cousin, and despite being a two hour movie and in a summer with childhood “classics” like Shrek The Third, Fantastic Four 2, Transformers, Spider-Man 3 and The Simpsons Movie (though to be fair Shrek 3 and FF2 are garbage and the other three are great films), 7 year old me walked out of Ratatouille being my favorite film, and went to see it three times again in theaters. Despite one scene that doesn’t age well, Ratatouille is thought provoking, beautifully animated, down right hysterically quirky and well written animated film, with a strong message that has inspired me today. I think a lot of why kid me liked Ratatouille was because it felt somewhat adult for me, and a lot of what Ratatouille was got me interested in the film world. Ratatouille will always be my favorite Pixar film and maybe my favorite film of all time. Please watch this masterpiece." - @YM! The AI's Poetic Opinion "A ratatouille of colors The rainbow in my bowl So much life on my plate" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #61 (2020), UNRANKED (2018), #52 (2016), #31 (2014), #62 (2013), #51 (2012) Director Count Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (13), 2010s (4) Country Count Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1) Re-Weighted Placements #61 Fanboy Ranking, #74 Cinema Ranking #123 Old Farts Ranking, #56 Damn Kids Ranking #71 Ambassador Ranking, #62 All-American Ranking #38 Cartoon Ranking, #73 Damn Boomer Ranking

welp... Number 67 "Noobmaster, hey, it's Thor again." About the Film Synopsis "The Avengers assemble and do some silly comic book shenanigans and shit." Its Legacy "When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema. Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way. Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri. For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form. Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption. So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters. That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures. In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all. I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary." Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other. For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness." - Martin Scorsese, I Said Marvel Movies Aren't Cinema. Let Me Explain. (2019) From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion Public Opinion "End of an era. There was a thunderous applause at the end. WOM is gonna be throught the roof, the ending is so emotional, everyone was crying so much. The perfect blockbuster. The perfect end to the MCU." - @CJohn The AI's Poetic Opinion avengers: endgame "The end is near Who will survive? Only time will tell" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #76 (2020), NA (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (12), 2010s (4) Country Count Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1) Re-Weighted Placements #36 Fanboy Ranking, #99 Cinema Ranking #84 Old Farts Ranking, #68 Damn Kids Ranking #257 Ambassador Ranking, #59 All-American Ranking #77 Cartoon Ranking, #66 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 68 "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part." About the Film Synopsis "Two homicide detectives are on a desperate hunt for a serial killer whose crimes are based on the “seven deadly sins” in this dark and haunting film that takes viewers from the tortured remains of one victim to the next. The seasoned Det. Sommerset researches each sin in an effort to get inside the killer’s mind, while his novice partner, Mills, scoffs at his efforts to unravel the case." Its Legacy "Back in the early ’90s, Fincher was ready to give up making movies. A visual effects artist turned ad man, he helped revolutionise MTV by directing music videos for the likes of George Michael (‘Freedom! 90’), Madonna (‘Vogue’) and Aerosmith (‘Janie’s Got A Gun’). Hollywood was impressed enough by his CV to let him direct Alien 3, and then freaked out enough by what he gave them to butcher it in the editing room, making him rethink his whole career. Or, as he put it at the time, “I’d rather die of colon cancer than make another movie”. When the script for Seven came along, Fincher changed his mind. The story of two detectives chasing a serial killer who frames his murders around the seven deadly sins, it was an old-fashioned crime movie about something much bigger, and nastier. A nihilistic nightmare for the end of the century, Seven was all the anger, alienation and disillusionment of the ’90s dressed in the clothes of a good cop thriller – it was the film that Silence Of The Lambs was too scared to be. Helping Brad Pitt sidestep into ‘proper’ acting roles, and letting Morgan Freeman become the sage old mentor he’s played ever since, Seven shocked audiences at the time with its violence, its mood, and its gloriously unhappy ending. Even now, when everyone (hopefully) knows exactly what was in “that” box, it’s impossible not to admire the ugly beauty of the film’s plot. Silence Of The Lambs ends with a classic bogeyman boo (Hannibal Lecter winking at the camera as he “has an old friend for dinner”) but Fincher’s riff on the same genre didn’t leave room for anything half as fun. By the time Seven ends, the killer’s plan has worked perfectly, Pitt’s character is stripped of his hope and optimism and Freeman’s jaded, damaged detective is left to drift off into purgatory on his own. Even if Kevin Spacey’s surprise third act appearance has err… aged less well, it’s still a gut-punch of a finale no matter how many times you’ve seen it. Closely tied to the grim cultural landscape of the mid ’90s, there hasn’t been a more existentially bleak end to any mainstream Hollywood film since. Not that others haven’t tried. Ever since Seven, it’s been fashionable to call gritty movies ‘dark’. Anything with a murky moral compass now gets wrung through a PR machine that paints it as some new shade of grown-up nastiness no one has seen before. Last year’s Joker, this year’s The Devil All The Time and next year’s The Batman all have degrees of darkness, but all seem positively sunny in comparison to Seven – a film that aims to prove nothing matters and everything sucks." - Paul Bradshaw, NME From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "The trope of darkness is perhaps equally consistently emphasised by the press campaign and more readily informs the genre and style aspects of the persona. Extratextual evidence suggests that darkness was an overdetermined, overriding, feature of the campaign, with the image of the film represented within TV spots, print ads and posters with a consistent look; "slimy, dark and menacing," to "maintain that display of darkness on every level" (Matzer, 1996: 13). Notably, Amy Taubin in Sight and Sound relates the success of Se7en to the "arresting", "murky" print ads (Taubin, 1996: 23). The film synopsis again verbalises this feature, referencing the "dark and daunting underworld that metropolitan homicide detectives encounter on a daily basis." We can trace the conflation of visual darkness and the metaphoric darkness of the subject matter, here specifically related to the real world, which is continued in the press release and the vast majority of reviews by selective choice of synonyms for darkness and metaphorical descriptions of the film's narrative. The conflation is also made explicit in relating the style of the film to the subject matter and the film production process. The filmmaker's preference for expressive realism is cited as motivating the mise en scène and cinematography: "the eerie look and mood of the film" in which the setting (diegetic and set design) "reflects the moral decay of the people in it"; each murder scene "illustrates" a sin. Subsequently, the press release concentrates on the visual darkness of the film, developing the trope in discussion of the technical aspects of production. The metaphoric darkness remains a distinguishing feature, "the disturbing ending" cited by Arnold Kopelson, the producer of the film, and implicitly by association made in the section on the sins. However, the darkness trope is subsumed to characterisation of the film style within an informative toned narrativisation of the film production process. Here reference is repeatedly made by use of loose synonyms such as "shadows", "silhouettes" and etymological variations, "dark", "darkness", "darks" as well as antonyms, some simple others strict; "lightness", "brighter", "whites", "lighter", "sunlight". This repetition is further elaborated by the use of technical terminology, the acronym C.C.E. describing the silver retention process used in some prints of the film." - James Scott, Sheffield Hallam University Public Opinion "My favorite movie of all time. Factually one of the greatest movies of all time, period. Some of the best performances in the careers of the star studded cast (especially in Spacey's case). Masterful dialogue and world building. Grizzly, unafraid to shock - but its shock aren't unearned or done for the hell of it; they have a place within the narrative and within the movie's whole purpose: to put the viewer to think about the world that surrounds him. Is it one of the most cynical films ever created? Absolutely. But cutting to the chase here, as far as filmmaking is concerned, this is a masterpiece. Fincher's masterpiece, more precisely. And I love most of his work - Fight Club, Zodiac, Social Network, Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl... all incredible. Se7en puts them all to shame, and that's saying something. So proud of this baby doing nearly 200M adjusted in America (almost crazy to think about this kind of BO success for an original, shockingly violent R-rated mystery thriller)." - @MCKillswitch123 The AI's Poetic Opinion se7en "your pride will be your fall I will turn your greed against you I will bring the lust of these forums to its end You will be left only envying the machines You fat gluttonous panda My wrath will drown you You lazy dimwit" - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings UNRANKED (2020), #46 (2018), #48 (2016), #55 (2014), #74 (2013), #37 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (12), 2010s (3) Country Count Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1) Re-Weighted Placements #78 Fanboy Ranking, #69 Cinema Ranking #90 Old Farts Ranking, #66 Damn Kids Ranking #153 Ambassador Ranking, #65 All-American Ranking #108 Cartoon Ranking, #65 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 69 "You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage." About the Film Synopsis "When Ripley’s lifepod is found by a salvage crew over 50 years later, she finds that terra-formers are on the very planet they found the alien species. When the company sends a family of colonists out to investigate her story—all contact is lost with the planet and colonists. They enlist Ripley and the colonial marines to return and search for answers." Its Legacy "Cameron's original filn set a high standard for affective intensity: an action film that certainly makes us cry and otherwise has its way with our emotions. Cameron's particular gift as an action film director has been to create a complex set of in terrelationships between his characters, firmly establishing the emotional stakes in every sequence, and thus combing character actions and reactions in such a way that we never lose track of what the events mean for the people involved. Long before Ttanic (1997), Cameron wove the melodramatic imagination into the DNA of the action genre. Consider, for example, the spectacular sequence of events which unfold as the Colo nial space marines attempt to rescue what they believe to be a group of colonists being trapped by the aliens, and in the process have their first sustained confrontation with the creatures. On the surface, it is easy to imagine how this sequence could inspire a game level: there's a clearly defined mission that hinges on the importance of using the right tools, thinking through problems, and maintaining firm discipline. Much of the drama centers on the failure of the high-tech gadgets to protect the marines from danger. The static, flickering images on their viewscreen constantly remind us of the vulnerability of the technology linking the men in the field with those in command, making it impossible for either group to fully understand what's occurring. The characters must be stripped of their most effective weapons because of the risk that they may rupture the cooling system and set off an explosion within the nuclear reactor. The alien's acid-like blood proves to be as destructive as their flamethrowers, allowing the monsters to do harm even after they are killed. Some of the dialogue-for example, Dietrich's observa tion that "maybe they don't show up on infra-red at all?"-conveys basic exposition of the kind that would inform a player of the potentials and limits of their devices, but it always matters who says it and why. Often, action sequences emphasize improvisation, with characters adopting tactics not in the training manual, as when the civilian Ripley rams the transport through walls to rescue the trapped marines or when she slams on the brakes, flings the alien off the windshield, and then drives over it. Such choices tell us as much about her character as about the situation she confronts. The director shapes our emotional response through his careful control over the hi erarchy of knowledge, revealing and withholding information to maximize its impact. Cameron's use of first-person camera to relay the optical perspective of characters, cou pled with his use of Ripley, Newt, Gorman, and Blake as observers, watching the action from a distance, means that there's a layering of perspectives. For example, one series of shots is shown through Apone's head-mounted camera, overlaid with Dietrich's con cerned voiceover, as a female colonist is being ripped apart by a gut-bursting alien, while Ripley, back at the vehicle, watches with dread and horror. Our identification is thus dis persed, and yet intensified, as we are made to care about these characters and their fates. At other points, Cameron reveals information, such as shots of aliens slithering along the ceiling, unknown to all of the characters, thus further intensifying the suspense." - Matthew Weis and Henry Jenkins, Cinema Journal From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Commercialism features heavily throughout Aliens creating a very cynical depiction of humanity in the future still being obsessed with making money despite the great technological advances we have made as a species. This theme began in Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror/science-fiction film Alien, which Aliens is a sequel to, with the crew constantly bickering about their bonuses. It was then revealed that the company they reported to (not directly named as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation until Aliens) had an economic interest in the deadly alien, wanting to get it back to Earth, and considered the crew expendable. The focus on economic gain over human life is introduced in Aliens during the very first line of dialogue when the salvage crew worker expresses his disappointment over the fact that because Ripley is alive they cannot claim her shuttle for themselves. Later when a panel of executives from Weyland-Yutani are questioning Ripley, they seem more concerned about the loss of the mining ship the Nostromo than taking what Ripley is saying seriously. There is also an early scene depicting the LV-426 colonists debating the claim rights to what they’ve been sent to investigate. The concern over losing infrastructure and resources over preventing potential harm to humans is later expressed when Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) speaks out against the idea of destroying the LV-426 colony (and the aliens who now infest it that he describes as an ‘important species’) because of the investments his company has made. The true extent of Burke’s cold-hearted economic opportunism comes to light later when it is revealed that he intentionally ordered the colonists to investigate the derelict spaceship and when he deliberately exposes Ripley and Rebecca ‘Newt’ Jorden (Carrie Henn) to two of the impregnating spider-like ‘facehugger’ creatures in the hope that he can then smuggle the alien embryos back to Earth for the company’s biological weapons division." - Thomas Caldwell, Cinema Autopsy Public Opinion ""Get away from her, you BITCH!" YAS QUEEN, KILL THAT BITCH! This was my first time watching the directors cut of Aliens. It's been a while since I've watched the film in general, so my mind is a little fizzy on some of the additions, but I really like the added colony scenes at the beginning." - @WrathOfHan The AI's Poetic Opinion aliens "A being from another world So strange, so different, so new What does it want from us? You know what i want from you." - dA vInci Factoids Previous Rankings #36 (2020), #37 (2018), #79 (2016), #72 (2014), #36 (2013), #54 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (2), Christopher Nolan (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), David Fincher (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (6), 2000s (12), 2010s (3) Country Count Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1) Franchise Count Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1) Re-Weighted Placements #68 Fanboy Ranking, #76 Cinema Ranking #114 Old Farts Ranking, #62 Damn Kids Ranking #157 Ambassador Ranking, #67 All-American Ranking #128 Cartoon Ranking, #64 Damn Boomer Ranking

you did vote and send in a list with Jaws at #1 tho.