The Panda

And last (and potentially least) The Damn Boomer List Lists with less animated movies were given more weight

The Cartoon List Lists with more animated movies were given more weight

The All-American List Movies with more English language films were given more weight

The Ambassador List Lists with more non-English language films were given more weight

The Damn Kids List Lists with more films from 1980 and on were given more weight

The Old Farts List Lists with more movies from pre-1980 given more weight

The Cinema List Lists which had less franchise films given more weight

The Fanboy List Lists which ahd more franchise films given more weight.

Now, what everyone has been waiting for. All of the multiversal alternative versions of the list (although I am not reformatting them because that's too much) First thing is first! The Official List (I will update with links on the main page of this later, please do not archive until after I do that, which may be next week! @Cap)

Number 2 Number 1 About the Films Synopsis: Empire "The epic saga continues as Luke Skywalker, in hopes of defeating the evil Galactic Empire, learns the ways of the Jedi from aging master Yoda. But Darth Vader is more determined than ever to capture Luke. Meanwhile, rebel leader Princess Leia, cocky Han Solo, Chewbacca, and droids C-3PO and R2-D2 are thrown into various stages of capture, betrayal and despair." Synopsis: Fellowship "Young hobbit Frodo Baggins, after inheriting a mysterious ring from his uncle Bilbo, must leave his home in order to keep it from falling into the hands of its evil creator. Along the way, a fellowship is formed to protect the ringbearer and make sure that the ring arrives at its final destination: Mt. Doom, the only place where it can be destroyed." Dueling Legacies "Shortly after the release of the final installment of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the film critic Caryn James pondered in these very pages whether women were “just bored” when it came to Peter Jackson’s blockbuster films. “Any movie so popular has to grab an audience across all lines of age and sex,” James wrote. “But both demographic and empirical evidence suggests that the trilogy is still primarily a boys’ toy.” Whether women at that time felt enthralled or bored with these films, which began 20 years ago this month with “The Fellowship of the Ring,” isn’t for me to say. But I know that I, then a 13-year-old girl, and my 12-year-old sister, loved the story of Sam and Frodo and their quest to destroy the One Ring. And we weren’t alone. “I was obsessed with the DVDs,” Karen Han, 29, a TV and film writer based in Los Angeles, said. “I think it was pretty much every holiday, I would watch all three movies in a day and do a marathon, and I would do that pretty much every year.” For a certain subset of Millennial women, the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy occupies the same role that “Star Wars” might for those who grew up from the late ’70s into the ’80s: It’s become a treasured part of the comfort-watch genre for women in their late 20s and 30s. In the years after the films came out, rewatching them felt like a ritual only my sister and I observed. (My parents saw them with us in theaters, then never watched them again.) Through college, I met the occasional “Lord of the Rings” girl — a few friends in graduate school, and strangers on drunken nights out. And, of course, there were the memes and the accompanying meme accounts. “I was absolutely obsessed with reading gay hobbit erotica,” said Chelsea McCurdy, 35, who works for a nonprofit based in Conway, Ark. “And I think that was a huge deal for me as far as my queer journey and the love for these movies.” McCurdy, who is married to a transgender man and estimates that they watch at least one of the films every two to three weeks, said her fascination went beyond being “a horny teenager,” adding, “Nothing feels unsafe because the good guys are all actually good. And there’s no rape, there’s nothing that makes you feel uncomfortable as a woman in the entire trilogy.” Indeed, the films’ most toxic male characters often meet satisfying ends. They’re stabbed in the back and impaled (Saruman), shot with arrows (Grima Wormtongue), or fall to their deaths after setting themselves on fire (Denethor). Twenty years later, McCurdy remains especially moved by the female characters — Arwen, Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Eowyn (Miranda Otto) — whose roles were enhanced in the screenplays by Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson’s longtime partner, and their writing collaborator Philippa Boyens. “My all-time favorite No. 1 scene is ‘I am no man,’” said McCurdy, referring to the pivotal scene in which Eowyn kills Sauron’s most terrifying servant, the Witch-king of Angmar. “That whole scene just makes me have goose bumps, and baby feminist Chelsea just ate that up.”" - How the Lord of the Rings became Star Wars for millennial women, The New York Times From the Filmmaker Why They're Great: Star Wars vs Lord of the Rings Critic Opinion "The road goes ever on”, wrote Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But the esteemed Oxford don and creator of the high fantasy genre probably wasn’t expecting it to lead to a billion dollar multimedia franchise to rival Marvel and Star Wars. But that, it seems, is what Tolkien’s Middle-earth tales are slowly morphing into, almost 70 years after he completed work on The Lord of the Rings, which was originally published in 1954 and 1955. This week, Deadline reports that a new anime movie, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, is moving into production – and it all looks surprisingly legit. Brian Cox will play Helm Hammerhand, legendary defender of the Rohirrim, with Miranda Otto returning from Peter Jackson’s turn-of-the-century Lord of the Rings trilogy as Eowyn (now the story’s narrator). That triptych’s producer and screenwriter, Philippa Boyens, is executive producing, along with conceptual designer Alan Lee and visual effects expert Richard Taylor of Weta Digital. Altogether this makes up a decent portion of the dream team that gave us Jackson’s multiple Oscar-winning trilogy. But of course, this isn’t the only Tolkien project heading to screens. On TV, Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is also imminent. Where will this all lead, one has to ask? And do we really need all these tales of Middle-earth? There are fundamental differences between Marvel and Star Wars and Tolkien’s fantasy world, and not just the fact that the Oxford professor backed up his world-building with entirely new fantasy languages and mythic pre-histories, wonderfully imagining himself as creating an entire missing mythology for the English people. The two Disney-owned franchises boast mythologies that have grown gradually over the decades: hundreds of different creators have built on the work of Stan Lee since the 1960s, while dozens of directors have now taken on George Lucas’ space fantasy saga and begun to build it into something new with TV shows such as The Mandalorian. Middle-earth on the other hand, despite Jackson’s clumsy tinkerings during the middling Hobbit trilogy – elf/dwarf romances anyone? – remains resolutely Tolkien’s creation. The War of the Rohirrim will expand on stories told in the original Lord of the Rings about a time centuries before, when Helm saved his people. The idea of filming a fantasy battle as an anime is particularly appealing, but otherwise this isn’t the most obvious LOTR subplot that Warner and New Line might have plucked. It does have the benefit of a positive ending, however, whereas many of Tolkien’s other tales of Middle-earth (as the producers of The Rings of Power may be about to find out) are ultimately tragic and bleak in nature. I imagine few people would want to view a movie all about the early life of Gollum, or sit up until 3am binge-streaming the latest series of Saruman’s Fall. Let’s face it though: the inevitable place that this is all going, provided there are no contractual disputes with the Tolkien estate, is new stories set in Middle-earth not based on Tolkien’s writings. Perhaps producers can learn something from Marvel and Star Wars here: the former has gone so far beyond its source material that it now represents the definitive media form for the superhero saga, while suits for the latter have only recently worked out that continuing to regurgitate Lucas-era stories in only vaguely new forms is probably not the way forward when you have a proposition as masterfully fresh and new as The Mandalorian up your Jedi robe. Surely we’ll get there in time with Lord of the Rings, too. It just might take a decade or two before we get a show about the two blue Istari (wizards) who travelled south and east into parts of Middle-earth we’ve never even heard of – now that would be a story. And in the meantime, most of us will be perfectly happy chowing down as Hollywood and Amazon microwave every last ounce of content out of Tolkien’s remaining writings. I’m especially looking forward to the episode of The Rings of Power in which Sauron falls on his arse after being kicked out of Lindon by Elrond and Gil-galad. Secretly, you probably are too." - Ben Child, "Is The Lord of the Rings becoming a Never-Ending Franchise like Marvel and Star Wars?" The Guardian Public Opinion "Watched the Extended Edition. I had a shitty day today, so I figured I'd throw on a comfort film to distract me from everything going on in life. God, I love this trilogy so much; it's probably the main reason I'm pursuing a career in film, to begin with. For that reason alone, I owe so much gratitude to Peter Jackson. Happy 20th to one of the best films ever made." - @Rorschach "Far and away the best film of the franchise, this entry was probably my first introduction to the series as a young kid and I still find it to be the most infinitely re-watchable Star Wars film out of all 10 currently released live-action films. It far surpasses A New Hope in quality, doubling down on everything that already made that film so great and adding so much more: the drama, humor, action scenes, worlds, etc. are all heightened up here. The Dagobah scenes here are by far the most interesting and powerful stuff in the entire franchise. The scene with Yoda lifting the X-Wing out of the swamp is incredible. Easily the highlight of the entire film. Darth Vader feels like a far more compelling antagonist in this film, where we finally get to see him interacting off of the heroes where we really didn't get any of that in A New Hope." - @Rorschach The Poetic Opinion “Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night, Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead, We'll wander back and home to bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade!” - JRR Tolkien Some Final Factoids Previous Rankings Fellowship #5 (2020), #1 (2018), #3 (2016), #7 (2014), #5 (2013), #2 (2012) Empire #2 (2020), #3 (2018), #1 (2016), #1 (2014), #1 (2013), #3 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (7), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Francis Ford Coppola (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Hayao Miyazaki (3), Peter Jackson (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Irvin Kershner (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (11), 1980s (13), 1990s (21), 2000s (23), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (7), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (5), Star Wars (4), Middle Earth (3), Alien (2), The Godfather (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Indiana Jones (1), Jaws (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

Number 3 "White shores... and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise." About the Film Synopsis "Aragorn is revealed as the heir to the ancient kings as he, Gandalf and the other members of the broken fellowship struggle to save Gondor from Sauron’s forces. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam take the ring closer to the heart of Mordor, the dark lord’s realm." Its Legacy Ending 1 Ending 2 ending 3 ending 4 ending 5 ending 6 And so on! From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "At last the full arc is visible, and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy comes into final focus. I admire it more as a whole than in its parts. The second film was inconclusive, and lost its way in the midst of spectacle. But "Return of the King" dispatches its characters to their destinies with a grand and eloquent confidence. This is the best of the three, redeems the earlier meandering, and certifies the "Ring" trilogy as a work of bold ambition at a time of cinematic timidity. That it falls a little shy of greatness is perhaps inevitable. The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece. It is a melancholy fact that while the visionaries of a generation ago, like Coppola with "Apocalypse Now," tried frankly to make films of great consequence, an equally ambitious director like Peter Jackson is aiming more for popular success. The epic fantasy has displaced real contemporary concerns, and audiences are much more interested in Middle Earth than in the world they inhabit. Still, Jackson's achievement cannot be denied. "Return of the King" is such a crowning achievement, such a visionary use of all the tools of special effects, such a pure spectacle, that it can be enjoyed even by those who have not seen the first two films. Yes, they will be adrift during the early passages of the film's 200 minutes, but to be adrift occasionally during this nine-hour saga comes with the territory; Tolkien's story is so sweeping and Jackson includes so much of it that only devoted students of the Ring can be sure they understand every character, relationship and plot point. The third film gathers all of the plot strands and guides them toward the great battle at Minas Tirith; it is "before these walls, that the doom of our time will be decided." The city is a spectacular achievement by the special- effects artisans, who show it as part fortress, part Emerald City, topping a mountain, with a buttress reaching out over the plain below where the battle will be joined. In a scene where Gandalf rides his horse across the drawbridge and up the ramped streets of the city, it's remarkable how seamlessly Jackson is able to integrate computer-generated shots with actual full-scale shots, so they all seem of a piece." - Roger Ebert Public Opinion "The film has never hit me as hard as it did tonight. Seeing this on the biggest screen possible, with the grandest audio I can get was wonderful. Yes, it's long, and takes a long time to end. But those emotional beats hit so hard." - @SchumacherFTW The Poetic Opinion the road goes ever on "The Road goes ever on and on, Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say." - JRR Tolkien Factoids Previous Rankings #17 (2020), #6 (2018), #8 (2016), #4 (2013), #15 (2013), #9 (2013) Director Count Steven Spielberg (7), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Francis Ford Coppola (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Hayao Miyazaki (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Peter Jackson (2), =Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (11), 1980s (12), 1990s (21), 2000s (22), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (7), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (5), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The Godfather (2), The MCU (2), Middle Earth (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Indiana Jones (1), Jaws (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #2 Fanboy Ranking, #4 Cinema Ranking #18 Old Farts Ranking, #2 Damn Kids Ranking #5 Ambassador Ranking, #3 All-American Ranking #2 Cartoon Ranking, #3 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 4 "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli." About the Film Synopsis "Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge." Its Legacy "Like millions of other people around the world, I have been obsessed by The Godfather trilogy. I wanted to write about that. And, then, as I started writing about the films, I realized that I also wanted to write about other films depicting Italian-Americans and how horrible the stereotypes were. That made me start thinking about the journey that immigrants had made coming to America, the whys behind the journey and really the history of the mob. I started thinking about my own life, and I thought, I want to make this, in part, a memoir because I am half-Italian and half-English. There was a pull, because I had a very Italian name growing up in a very Anglo world. When I saw The Godfather: Part II, and when ten minutes into the film there is the image of the young Vito on board the ship coming to America and passing by the Statue of Liberty, all of a sudden the light bulb went off. That image brought home to me my grandfather’s journey and how brave, at age 13, he was arriving here alone. At age 13, I was in a private school running around wearing my uniform and school tie, so removed from his experience. So it became not just a movie I loved as a movie lover, but a very personal depiction of the American journey for me. The film changed Hollywood because it finally changed the way Italians were depicted on film. It made Italians seem like more fully realized people and not stereotypes. It was a film in Hollywood made by Italians about Italians. Previously, it had not been Italians making the mobster films featuring Italian gangsters. I feel it helped Italianize American culture. All of a sudden, everyone was talking about Don Corleone and making jokes about, “I am going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” I think it helped people see that in this depiction of Italian-Americans was a reflection of their own immigrant experience, whether they were Irish or Jews from Eastern Europe. They found that common ground. Then, of course, it changed me because when I saw what I felt was my grandfather on that ship coming to America, it was as if I was fully embracing my Italian-ness. I had never really felt Italian until then. Italian-Americans are very sensitive about their image in movies because it has traditionally been so negative, as either mobsters or rather simple-minded peasants who talk-a like-a this-a. I don’t like these stereotypical images, and yet, I love these films so much. I think the vast majority of Italians have come to accept and actually embrace the film because I think the genius of the film, besides the fact that it is so beautifully shot and edited, is that these are mobsters doing terrible things, but permeating all of it is the sense of family and the sense of love. Where I feel that is completely encapsulated is in the scene toward the end of the first film when Don Corleone [Marlon Brando] and Michael Corleone [Al Pacino] are in the garden. It is really the transfer of power from father to son. Don Corleone has that speech: “I never wanted this for you.” I wanted you to be Senator Corleone. They are talking about horrible deeds. They are talking about transferring mob power. The father is warning the son about who is going to betray him. But you don’t even really remember that is what the scene is about. What you remember is that it is a father expressing his love for his son, and vice versa. That is what comes across in that crucial scene, and that is why I feel that overrides the stereotypical portrayal that others object to. I think it squashed the idea that Italians were uneducated and that Italians all spoke with heavy accents. Even though Michael is a gangster, you still see Michael as the one who went to college, pursued an education and that Italians made themselves a part of the New World. These were mobsters, but these were fully developed, real human beings. These were not the organ grinder with his monkey or a completely illiterate gangster. It is an odd thing. I think to this day there are still some people who view the Italian as the “other”—somebody who is not American, who is so foreign. In films like Scarface [1932], the Italians are presented almost like creatures from another planet. They are so exotic and speak so terribly and wear such awful clothes. The Godfather showed that is not the case. In the descendant of The Godfather, which is of course “The Sopranos,” once again the characters are mobsters. But they are the mobsters living next door in suburban New Jersey, so it undercuts a bit that sense of Italian as the “other.”" - Tom Santopietro, author of the Godfather Effect From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "The artistic achievements of both the literary and the movie version of the "Saga" seem therefore more uneven and nebulous than its social ones. It is true that they brought to the foreground for the first time the indisputable fact that the Mafia could never have gathered the strength it needed to prosper without the connivance of the political and financial structures of the system, showing that in this country it developed into a new institution modeled on the organizational statutes of the big corporation. But as long as the analysis is not brought deep into the heart of the structures sustaining both the corporation and the Mafia as oppressive and alienating institutions, we are bound to remain in an ambiguous zone in which condemnation and exaltation are confused and confusing. In this zone, the Mafia receives a patina of luster that makes the mark of infamy that relentlessly smeared a whole ethnic group in the country of self-determination look tolerable and even acceptable. What I find disconcerting about The Godfather is its portrayal of a world totally pessimistic regarding human nature and society. Even though the work has to be seen, as I pointed out before, as genetically justified by the deep crisis which made it possible, it was also generated in a moment when a new American conscience seemed to be on the rise. At the instant when Michael Corleone decides to become the new "don," any possible alternative was wiped out. Along with this alternative, Puzo (and consequently Coppola) lost the only vehicle that would have allowed him to get out of the grey zone of ambiguous alibis and attain truth instead of certainty; a vehicle that would have allowed him to give us a dispassionate and courageous analysis of both the Mafia and the corporation, instead of a fresco glorifying the family "gestes." Puzo refused to go that far; as I said, he simply did not have the guts. He knew very well that in order to give us the truth about the Mafia and the whole brotherhood of its associates, he would have to go beyond the New York police force and beyond the occasional judge and the occasional politician. Thus the Mafia, even elevated to the rank of a corporation, remains as mysterious as ever. The mystery will never be solved as long as we do not have the guts to go and uncover its true origins in this country, back to that Little Italy which was not as idyllic as Coppola's Mulberry Street and San Gennaro's fireworks would like us to believe a Little Italy that was much more monstrous and infinitely more tender, as was the untold life of Vito Corleone." - Giovanni Sinicropi, Italian Americana Public Opinion "Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, and it truly deserves this title. Although long, at almost three hours, it keeps you engrossed through its entirety. Personally, I am not a huge fan of mafia films and television (although maybe I just haven't watched the right ones). The likes of Goodfellas and Boardwalk Empire were kind of a drag for me and the long running times of most of the "greats" really put me off. But The Godfather was an excellent experience. Marlon Brando steals every scene he is in, which is impressive considering the talent of the cast surrounding him. Micheal's turn towards the family business is engrossing and the weight it puts on his shoulders make him an enormously interesting character, supported by a great performance by Al Pacino. John Cazale is also a delight. His portrayal of Fredo is, again, excellent and his arc away from the family contrasts the arc of Michael towards it. The film is shot beautifully and the sets are rich with character. I think the US Film Registry sums it up best; The Godfather is "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Overall, I would give the movie an A+." - @aabattery The Poetic Opinion the godfather "This is the tale of the greatest gangster on earth. A price on his head from even before birth. As a child he taught teachers, as a man he cursed the church. He left his hometown in turmoil, when he started his walk. Astonishing many by who he called to his flock. You heard the term curse like a sailor? Most came from the dock. Even a tax collector joined the crew. One dozen heavy hitters guarding the talking Jew. Who said he was of the father and his father made the rules. "Your body is your temple" he said the church is a house of fools". Word traveled quickly, even faster was their fame. Warrants in every kingdom for every member of The gang. He spoke against money and churches and taught us to be l eary of kings. Sometimes you've got to defy the authorities and do the right thing. To yourself always be honest because he watches above, the greatest gangster in history "The Godfather of Love"." - barberhead Factoids Previous Rankings #6 (2020), #9 (2018), #4 (2016), #6 (2014), #8 (2013) #16 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (7), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Francis Ford Coppola (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Hayao Miyazaki (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (11), 1980s (12), 1990s (21), 2000s (21), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (7), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (5), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The Godfather (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Indiana Jones (1), Jaws (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #11 Fanboy Ranking, #2 Cinema Ranking #1 Old Farts Ranking, #7 Damn Kids Ranking #3 Ambassador Ranking, #4 All-American Ranking #6 Cartoon Ranking, #4 Damn Boomer Ranking

This is the highest any non-English, non-Hollywood, or animated movie has ever finished on our list! Number 5 "Oh, what a pretty name! Be sure to take good care of it, dear!" About the Film Synopsis "A young girl, Chihiro, becomes trapped in a strange new world of spirits. When her parents undergo a mysterious transformation, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free her family." Its Legacy "On September 20, 2002, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away was released to North American audiences. Like many of his films that had been translated and dubbed over to English, it had little marketing — only 151 theaters across the United States premiered the movie. Yet, limited viewing wasn’t considered an issue. With an expected target audience comprised overwhelmingly of children, and adults already familiar with Miyazaki’s work, Disney producers understood that a film deeply rooted in Japanese culture might not be the biggest Blockbuster hit of the year. Yeah, Spirited Away was expected to be a good movie — a decent movie, at worst. Miyazaki’s track record at this point had been impeccable. Coming off hugely successful films such as Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke, it wasn’t wrong to assume that Miyazaki would deliver something meaningful and worthwhile — he usually always did. And deliver he did. Spirited Away went on to become to most successful film in Japanese history. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, the first of its kind as a non-English animated movie. Acclaimed by critics and audiences worldwide, its service as a gateway into Japanese animation does not go unnoticed. Nearly two decades after its conception, the legacy of Spirited Away endures. Year after year, it tops lists titled ‘Best Animated Movies of All Time’ or ‘Films You Need to Watch Before You Die’. In my hometown, people flood my local theater for its annual re-showing of the movie. I see tattoos of Haku and Chihiro’s reunion frequently inked on arms and the iconic still-frame of Chihiro sitting on the train next to No-Face set as the background of many computer screens. The love that people nurture for this movie is unmeasurable and unparalleled. People love Spirited Away. It should not go unmentioned that Spirited Away is hand drawn. Each frame has been individually drawn and painted by artists. This traditional style of animation is hardly ever seen in the West, where computer animated graphics have become the norm. As the realization that every frame has been labored over sets in, the beauty of Spirited Away’s animation only strengthens. Human hands have touched every scene, every last detail, from the light reflecting off of hair to the water currents lapping against the building. To know that every frame has been created with overwhelming amount of care and generosity only emphasizes that Spirited Away is indeed, a very special movie. Although generally considered to be a children’s movie, Spirited Away can and is enjoyed by people of all ages. While the movie maintains all the childhood wonder of discovering a fantastical world of spirits and gods, it also never groups its characters as good or bad — a characteristic of many childhood movies. Each character has their own motivation at heart, each with their own idea of good intentions. There is never a scene that feels like it was made only for children. The dialogue, the humor, and the characters all display a unique sense of realism and maturity that normally isn’t present in animated movies, especially those made by Disney. At the core of it, you don’t need to be a child for this film to capture your imagination." - Michelle Kim, Medium From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Miyazaki's work ranges across both the kokusaika (albeit as part of a dis tinctively Miyazaki-esque treatment of the "international") and the furusato categories (although again embodying Miyazaki's specific vision of the fu rusato). His 2001 fantasy Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi), however, occupies a more ambiguous position. Although at first glance seem ing to celebrate various aspects of "Japanesness," embodied in the film's pri mary mise-en-sc?ne, a magical bathhouse of the gods, Spirited Away's narra tive trajectory revolves around the tension between Japanese cultural identity and otherness and at least implicitly calls into question the viability of "Japa neseness" in a changing world. Whether the director is fully conscious of the extent to which the film shows the vulnerability of Japanese identity is open to question. As Miyazaki makes clear in a number of interviews and writings on the film, his primary agenda in Spirited Away was to show the maturation of a contemporary young girl in the face of an array of frightening and fantastic encounters. In this re gard he is certainly successful. The story of a ten year old venturing into a fan tasy world when her parents are transformed into pigs, the film mixes humor, sentiment, and horror with dazzling imagery to provide an effective coming of-age story with an arguably upbeat ending. This combination of elements clearly struck a chord with the Japanese audience and, as of this writing, Spir ited Away remains the highest grossing film in Japanese history. To the film's many admirers, Chihiro, the young protagonist, serves as a potential role model for today's generation of apathetic Japanese youth. Other, less conscious notions and themes may also have come to the sur face in the creation of Spirited Away. When asked by an interviewer whether the film includes unclean things along with fantasy, Miyazaki explained that "in the act of creating a fantasy, you open up the lid to parts of your brain that don't usually open."2 These more subversive elements found when the director "lifted the lid" of his unconscious make the film one of Miyazaki's most powerful and protean works. Spirited Away offers disturbing visions of excess, liberating moments of carnival, and a sharp critique of the material ism and toxicity of contemporary Japanese society through its complex vi sion of a quasi-nostalgic fantastic realm threatened by pollution from within and without. Although it should be acknowledged that the film contains many celebratory moments, its powerful depictions of cultural pollution, alienation, and fragmented or lost subjectivities imply a more pessimistic subtext. Embodying in certain ways the tension between kokusaika and the furusato, Spirited Away may also be seen as participating in a significant cur rent debate concerning globalization. This is the issue of the rise of local culture or boundedness in relation to what many theorists until recently have seen as an all-encompassing tidal wave of hegemonic and homogenizing uberculture (usually identified with American popular culture). This tidal wave was viewed as creating what Paul David Grange in a commentary on Arjun Appadurai calls a "deterritorialized community," resulting from the "substantial weakening of national communities and the creation of a de centered transnational global system."3 One of the casualties of globaliza tion, in this view, is the nature of "authenticity," producing what Appadurai calls the possibility of "nostalgia without memory" in which "the past be comes a synchronie warehouse of cultural scenarios."4 More recently, however, an alternative view of globalization has begun to take form in which local culture is seen as reconstructing and reaffirming itself in the face of globalization. In his article "Cultural Boundaries," Simon Harrison notes that "the increasing transnational flows of culture seem to be producing not global homogenization but growing assertions of het erogeneity and local distinctiveness." In fact, as he points out, the very per meability of boundaries in the contemporary world may be an inducement to the creation of what he calls "representations of boundedness" (his italics), i.e., "bodies of symbolic practices which ... collectivities attribute to them selves, in seeking to differentiate themselves from each other."5 At the same time, however, Spirited Away's diegesis suggests a more un easy cultural trajectory in which disparate or alien elements are no longer included but instead problematized or even expelled from the film's major visual trope, the gigantic, richly detailed bathhouse of the gods where most of the action takes place. These elements?including odor, vomitus, blood, and (arguably) excrement?all come from outside the bathhouse and are clearly marked as polluting. They are "matter out of place," as Mary Douglas describes dirt, obviously positioned to contrast with the world of the bath house which, in its very function, serves to emblemize cleansing and purity of a quintessential^ Japanese kind.6 The basic action of the film revolves around a series of polluting invasions of the bathhouse, which are repulsed by its denizens with the significant help of Chihiro, the human protagonist. Chihiro herself is initially signified as a polluting alien marked by her hu man stench, but gradually she becomes incorporated into the bathhouse collectivity where she grows in agency and maturity. Ultimately, the var ious rites of passage she undergoes lead to her accession of powers of per ception that allow her to free her parents from the magic spell that has trans formed them. While Spirited Away draws from an immense array of sources, includ ing Greek myth and Western fantasy such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard ofOz, the content and themes of the film suggest that Miyazaki may be performing a distinctive version of "Nihon e no kaiki," a shift from the West and a turn toward Japanese culture that many Japanese writers and artists took throughout the twentieth century.7 In Miyazaki's case, this "re turn to Japan" was presaged in Princess Mononoke's vision of fourteenth century Japan, one that drew on major issues in Japanese history but treated them in an original and often critical manner. In the more carnivalesque world o? Spirited Away, the repressed past re turns in the form of a fantastic array of spirits who occupy the bathhouse, an institution that has largely disappeared, except for the occasional hot spring visit, from the lives of most contemporary Japanese. These creatures are clearly uncanny in Sigmund Freud's sense of the term as describing some thing that is familiar yet at the same time out of place. The bathhouse spir its and their environs are no longer part of the "real world" in which the young protagonist Chihiro initially appears but, to the Japanese viewer, their visual manifestations and functions evoke images from Japanese folklore and, according to the critic Shimizu Masahi, a sense of "having seen them somewhere before."14 Overall, to its enormous Japanese audience, the movie's special allure may be found in its ability to satisfy what Ivy calls the two "horizons of desire" on the part of contemporary Japanese: the desire to "encounter the unexpected, the peripheral unknown, even the frightening ... a desire that reveals itself under the controlled and predictable conditions of everyday life under consumer capitalism," and "an opposite longing to re turn to a stable point of origin, to discover an authentically Japanese Japan that is disappearing yet still present." - Susan J. Napier, The Journal of Japanese Studies Public Opinion “A masterpiece. One of my favorite films ever, not only animated. Probably in my top 10 or top 15. Pure magic.” - @peludo The Poetic Opinion https://pblovesswriting.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/img_-gotb1x.jpg?w=1024 Factoids Previous Rankings #16 (2020), #28 (2018), #62 (2016), #68 (2014), #38 (2013), #64 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (7), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Hayao Miyazaki (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (10), 1980s (12), 1990s (21), 2000s (21), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (7), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (5), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Indiana Jones (1), Jaws (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #13 Fanboy Ranking, #6 Cinema Ranking #11 Old Farts Ranking, #9 Damn Kids Ranking #1 Ambassador Ranking, #13 All-American Ranking #1 Cartoon Ranking, #12 Damn Boomer Ranking

Well... In other news y'all snubbed the greatest film of all-time from repeating its crown! Number 6 "Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?" About the Film Synopsis "When Dr. Indiana Jones – the tweed-suited professor who just happens to be a celebrated archaeologist – is hired by the government to locate the legendary Ark of the Covenant, he finds himself up against the entire Nazi regime." Its Legacy "“That belongs in a museum!” Indiana Jones shouts at the man in the Panama hat, instantly creating the most memorable archaeological catch phrase of all time, though perhaps the competition isn’t all that fierce. Forty years after Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered to the public on June 12, 1981, the outsized shadow of Indy still looms large over the field he ostensibly represented. Over three movies in the 1980s, plus a prequel television series and a fourth film that came out in 2008, Harrison Ford’s portrayal of Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., became indelibly tied to American archaeology. Despite it being set in the 1930s, an homage to the popcorn serials of the 1940s, and a cinematic blockbuster of the 1980s, Raiders of the Lost Ark is still influential to aspiring and veteran archaeologists alike. Even in the 21st century, several outdated myths about archaeological practice have endured thanks to the “Indiana Jones effect.” And contemporary archaeologists, many of whom harbor a love/hate relationship with the films, would like to set the record straight. Raiders was set in the 1930s, “a time when 99 percent of archaeologists were white men,” says Bill White of University of California, Berkeley. Casting Ford was true to the time, as was the portrayal of Indy’s “treatment of cultural materials, because that’s how archaeologists treated sites, women, and non-white people back then,” according to White, who partners with African American communities to do public archaeology on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the fictional Raiders world, White adds, Jones ignored safety precautions, did not listen to the wishes of Indigenous people, and broke every sort of ethical guideline about archaeological remains, such as destroying sites rather than preserving them. In the movies, Indiana Jones teaches archaeology at fictional Marshall College, and his close collaborator, Marcus Brody, is a museum curator who helps arrange and fund Indy’s treasure-hunting adventures. These job titles are reflective of the early 20th-century enterprise of archaeology, but today, up to 90 percent of American archaeologists work in a broad field known as cultural resource management (CRM). Also known as heritage management, CRM deals with the relationship between archaeology and everyday life. On its most bureaucratic level, CRM covers the broad and the specific regulations that govern historical, architectural, and archaeological interests and preservation in the U.S. Driven by legislation passed in the 1970s, particularly the Archaeological and Historical Preservation Act, CRM work may be done by private companies, federal agencies such as the National Park Service, or preservation officers working with Indigenous communities. Rather than following treasure maps, trawling for clues in ancient texts, or digging where no one wants them to, CRM archaeologists often work wherever others are already digging. According to Adrian Whittaker, an archaeologist with the CRM firm Far Western Anthropological Research Group, “Often our research is driven by the sites we happen to find rather than a targeted location or site type.” Showing Indiana Jones’s travels on a map is one of Steven Spielberg’s enduring visuals from Raiders. This colonialist cinematic trope harkens back to the adventurers he watched as a kid, keeping the Raiders watcher ensconced in Indy’s journey to exotic locales. “The [movie’s] map route fade as we travel to sites would look a lot less impressive today,” Whittaker jokes, “since we usually work much closer to home.” Community-based archaeology is on the rise in the U.S., as people recognize that understanding of the human past starts in our own backyards. This type of archaeology emphasizes personal connections that collapse time and space and contribute to a more well-rounded type of archaeological practice. Terry P. Brock, an archaeologist with the Montpelier Foundation, uses his research to shake up the historical record of life at President James Madison’s plantation in Virginia. Working in the local community “immediately brings relevance and importance to the work,” he says, “because the objects we are excavating together belonged to the community’s ancestors and are a direct link for the community to the people who came before them.” By far, the most enduring and problematic myth to come from the Indiana Jones movies is the idea that all ancient and historic objects belong in a museum. While he’s correct that private collectors contribute to looting and other heritage crimes, “there isn’t a single object that belongs in a museum,” says Heppner. “Objects belong with their communities.”Heppner is one of many anthropologists and museum professionals engaged in ongoing discussions about decolonization, repatriation and presentation of museum collections. “Most museums don’t do enough to help visitors examine their pop-culture influences,” she says. “When you walk into a gallery or exhibition space and you see an object all lit up in a pedestal case—it looks like Indy picking up the crystal skull.” Even using the term “artifact” to refer to objects in museum collections is fraught, according to Rippee. The word “creates a false narrative that the object is only valuable for its scientific value or because it looks cool,” she says. Rather, these materials are “belongings,” a term that centers the relationship between the object and its community." - Kristina Killgrove, Smithsonian Magazine From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Myth is a people's cultural story, an attempt to express in narrative a people's own self-under­ standi ng. In contemporary society, where those "everlasting patterns" may be moribund, myth and religion often disguise, naturalize, or reify certain historically specific, crassly political ideas. Just as myth served to order the chaotic experience of life for our primitive forbears, so modern cultural objects like films can be seen to function as social acts, both concealing and revealing their production of social meaning and ideological rhetoric at the same time. Raiders of the lost Ark (1981), for example, can be shown to follow the epic mode of clas­ sical myth, the oedipal trajectory of primitive initiatory rites and rituals, and the religious quests of legend and holy writ-however, the social end (as noted by Levi-Strauss) is directed toward the political sphere: the justification and reflection of the damaged social fabric of an American society at a loss for real life super­ heroes in the advent of the humiliating loss of the Vietnam War, Marxist uprisings in Nicara­ gua and El Salvador, Middle East oil embargos, the year-long Iranian hostage situation, and, of course, the Watergate experience. It is per­ haps no accident, then, that the film's principal locations are Southeast Asia, South America, the Middle East ... and Washington, D.C. Indeed, the film's concerns with domination and exploitation (especially of Third World nations and nationals, women, and technol­ ogy), the appropriation of religious artifacts (the quest is, after all, for the Lost Ark of the Covenant), and the adventures of the self­ positing individualistic conqueror Indiana Jones put the film in the ideological position of spokesperson for the new Reagan administra­ tion's policies in the Middle East, Central and South America, as well as the new regime's positions on women's rights, laissez-faire capi­ talism, CIA covert operations, the Moral Major­ ity, and America's renewed stature in the world of nations. Like its British counterpart Chariots of Fire (also 1981), Raiders of the lost Ark must harken back to a past era of national greatness and achievement in the interna­ tional arena in order to restore and dynamize a cultural renewal in a nation beset with prob­ lems foreign and domestic, political and eco­ nomic. Karl Marx's principle of "conjuring up the spirits of the past to their service" appears to be at work in both these films; they both borrow earlier, more heroic images of national life in order to "present the new scene in time­ honored disguise."2 So, rather than reflecting the culture it comes out of, Raiders all but rewrites the history of its epoch in order to create what Frederic Jameson calls a new "national allegory."3 The film can be shown to use its mythoreli­ gious structuration to mask and efface its con­ temporary ramifications. Indiana Jones, the putative hero of Raiders, follows the classical narrative trajectory of the mythological hero as outlined by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell's notion of the "Monomyth" involves a tripar­ tite journey characterized by Separation, Trials and Victories of Initiation, and Return and Reintegration with Society. This structure is further broken down into a total of seventeen discrete narrative units.4 Raiders of the lost Ark can be plotted, point by point, along the graph of this universal schema. Joseph Campbell has noted that the return of the hero to the world of common day con­ tains a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought back from the spiritual world and the reality principles needed to function in the day-to-day world. As Campbell points out, "good people are at a loss to com­ prehend" (p. 216). Thus, Jones says of the government bureaucrats: "They don't know what they've got there." The bureaucrats store the Ark in an anonymous warehouse, where it will no doubt be ready for the anticipated Raiders sequel. Nonetheless, the cut between the two worlds makes the point that God's Word is in Washington, D.C., that it is linked to male domination and phallic power, and that the political bureaucrats have taken it out of American life and put it in cold storage. This is precisely the 1980 campaign rhetoric of the New Right and the Moral Majority, who saw in the candidacy of Ronald Reagan a return to basic religious principles and ideals. It is interesting to note that while earlier bourgeois classes rejected religion as a moral fetter to the cutthroat competition necessary for the accumulation of capital, in the Reagan era the ideology of the dominant classes has taken on a religious form in order to stem the legitimation crisis endemic to the current social order. Nietzsche's Zarathustra pro­ claimed the death of all the gods; Raiders of the Lost Ark proclaims their rebirth. God is alive and well, the film seems to be saying; He divides his time between living in Washington . . . and Hollywood. In conclusion, Georg Lukacs (not George Lucas) should be quoted: "Every work, through the style of its language, its groupings of images and ideas, feelings and moods, evokes events and thoughts capable of mobilizing us for or against something."6 Contemporary film theory and criticism now allow us to see behind the instant gratifications and Skinner- ian response mechanisms built into a film's form. We can see that a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark affirms the existing norms of cine­ matic intelligibility and therefore that its repe­ titions reinforce recognition, a process which is desublimating and destructive to the imagina­ tive processes on which art traditionally relies. Raiders aspires to the political status of Muzak, yet it provides, in so doing, the background hum for corporate power. Through what Adorno and Horkh imer called "the predominance of the effect," thrill-a-minute films like this turn everything-love, war, religion, myth, exploita­ tion, and death-into disposable spectacle. Frederic Jameson's recent chapter title is appro­ priate to this sort of spectacle: "The Epic as Cliche, the Cliche as Epic."7 Furthermore, by relying on a structure bor­ rowed from our mythological past, a transhis­ torical ideology is put into place which masks and denies the actual problems of an age by transporting them into a timeless unreality, where the socially conditioned real world becomes a cosmic, unconditioned one. Al­ though it has always been the function of myth and religion to supply the symbols and icons which carry the human spirit forward, films like Raiders of the Lost Ark attempt the reverse; they enhance and cement the status quo." - Frank P. Tomasulo, Quarterly Review of Film Studies Public Opinion "Raiders of the Lost Ark is a masterful popcorn film from Steven Spielberg. There's not a single flaw in this movie, and it's constantly thrilling. Indiana Jones is the ideal hero, and Harrison Ford plays him to perfection. Karen Allen as Marion is excellent too, and the two have great rapport. From the opening sequence to the truck chase, the action never ceases to be excellent, and the score by John Williams might be his best ever. There's not much to say about Raiders of the Lost Ark that hasn't already been said, but it's still the pinnacle of blockbuster filmmaking." - @Blankments The Poetic Opinion "He walks the shadows, and I walk the light. In gazing upon this archaeological find, the miniaturized city of Tanis, I reflect upon the headpiece to the Staff of Ra, sought after by my greatest adversary, Indiana Jones; the tattered cloth of his fedora, as persistently vigilant as its wearer, the one who hearkens to the rhythm of even the deadliest—of antiquities. Ever weary, I simply revel in my life's—wildest pursuits, almost as if the Sahara itself—had inadvertently foreshadowed my quest for that which had successfully eluded my reach, the Well of Souls, as transcribed in the Book of Exodus, as the final resting place for—the lost Ark of the Covenant." - Belloq's Quest for the Well of Souls Factoids Previous Rankings #1 (2020), #4 (2018), #2 (2016), #12 (2014), #6 (2013), #13 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (7), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (10), 1980s (12), 1990s (21), 2000s (20), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Indiana Jones (1), Jaws (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #12 Fanboy Ranking, #8 Cinema Ranking #8 Old Farts Ranking, #11 Damn Kids Ranking #13 Ambassador Ranking, #6 All-American Ranking #20 Cartoon Ranking, #6 Damn Boomer Ranking

Welp, Juby has spoken. I guess I just have to shut things down now and not reveal anything else.

Number 7 "You're gonna need a bigger boat." About the Film Synopsis "When an insatiable great white shark terrorizes the townspeople of Amity Island, the police chief, an oceanographer and a grizzled shark hunter seek to destroy the blood-thirsty beast." Its Legacy "The original trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” hardly hinted at the industry-changing blockbuster it was ultimately selling, instead playing up some serious melodrama (“it is as if God created the Devil and gave him jaws” is easily the best line of a highly quotable bit of marketing) and leaning into the best-selling bonafides of the book it was based on. The trailer boasted some of the film’s iconic shots and lines (you better believe “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” is in there), but mainly seemed interested in imparting the high stakes drama and horror of the story to audiences seeking a scary summer distraction. That “Jaws” would become a mega-hit that would push Spielberg’s burgeoning career into the stratosphere was a surprise, but nobody could have predicted that it would also establish the blueprint for modern-day blockbusters. Now celebrating its 42nd birthday, right in the middle of yet another summer movie-going season, it’s worth acknowledging just how much every big movie released this time of the year owes to Spielberg and his shark. And at a time when audiences are positively swimming in big, loud franchise movies, it’s productive to recall just how much this one represented a true filmmaking talent. Made for less than $9 million, “Jaws” went on to make over $470 million in global returns, including a $260 million domestic take that earned it the top spot at the box office in 1975. The film toppled other high-powered hits like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” all huge moneymakers that were decidedly non-blockbuster in nature (at least, as we currently know the term). “Jaws” was the first feature film to break $235 million in domestic returns (in 1973, “The Exorcist” became the first film to break $230, and it too spawned a unique path for future horror offerings). Nearly half a century after its release, it still ranks in the all-time top 100; adjusted for inflation, it ranks at number 7. Spielberg’s big hit — his first and obviously not his last — paved the way for the massive tentpole features that now dominate the summer season, huge earners that capture both the zeitgeist and hefty audiences. Moreover, the film was bolstered by a modern, forward-thinking marketing campaign that still influences the way movies are sold today. Universal spent nearly $2 million to market the movie, plenty of which went to utilizing television marketing in its earliest stages, using a slew of prime-time network spots that introduced the film to a huge audience in nifty 30-second blocks. Ads played up the John Williams score and the now-iconic imagery of Jaws emerging from the water. There were talk show tours (including appearances that dated more than eight months before the film hit theaters) and marketing tie-ins, a big push towards the readership of the original novel (including a brand new cover art that reflected the poster and other stills) and a number of exceedingly well-received test screenings. “Jaws” hit theaters with not just a ton of hype, but actual recognition of the property. Audiences were excited about things they already knew about, plots they could read about in Peter Benchley’s book, and characters they were already familiar with — just like today’s movies that now arrive in theaters after massive marketing blitzes that show off huge bits of material before films even open. But while “Jaws” helped kickstart a wave of high-earning features with studio power behind them, it didn’t do it at the expense of quality, a lesson that many modern blockbusters still need to learn. The film debuted to mostly positive reviews, many of which rightly hailed Spielberg as the next big thing in major moviemaking. “Jaws” was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and went on to win three of them. The film showed that movies could make money and appeal broadly and still be of high quality and craft; those things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive." - Kate Erlbland, IndieWire From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Our perceived reality is often a metamorphosis of images, where the real and the fictional renditions of the real blend together seamlessly, loosening up the distinction between reality and simulation of reality. One such image and global marketable commodity in the last three or four decades have been the image of the poster boy of all sharks, the Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias). In the 21st century, the world was ready for a monster, a monster that was close enough to reality to exist but resembled all the worst fears we could conjure up—cue 1975—and the movie Jaws (Spielberg, 1975). The story with certain elements of Hitchcock-like horror treatment of the film (Schwanebeck, 2017), and the music-initiated creation of this monster (Biancorosso, 2010; Nosal et al., 2016), and the myth of the Great White Shark was manufactured. Before seeing them face to face in my ethnographic investigation of human-white shark encounter in New Zealand, I had often wondered will they be the same entities I had seen in my mind and on media for all these years? What I found is a matter of discussion for another day (Aich, in Press), here I introduce the conceptual foundations of this image from the theoretical perspective of hyperreality. I would argue, that the present image of the Great White Shark that the public is most acquainted with, may be best expressed as a hyperreal or para-real avatar of the white shark, the real fish (Aich, In press). In the early 80s, Baudrillard coined the term ‘hyperreality’ to describe places and things that feel more real than the real world by blending an existing environment with simulated sensations (Baudrillard, 1988, 1994; Bonanni, 2006, p. 135; Smith &Clarke, 2015). In hyperreality, the original version of the objects, ideas, or signs have no significance to the general consumers, because ‘it belongs to a different realm and therefore loses its referential value… Reality, in this sense, dies out’ (Wolny, 2017, p. 76). Reality is reduplicated, and the context and environment, and settings are built around it to create the illusion of reality. In this reality, meaning is created through systems of signs, and images interacting and working against and with each other. Hyperreality is composed of two significant components, simulation, and simulacrum. A simulacrum is an image that is simulated to resemble something else without constituting the inherent property of it and is merely an imitation. Simulation is the process or practice of simulating or imitating, through the process of simulation a simulacrum takes on its function (Wolny, 2017). But in hyperreality, the simulacrum has no more association with reality whatsoever and while offering images of the real, allow reality to evaporate into hyperreality as copies proliferate’ (Bougen & Young, 2012; Macintosh et al., 2000). The image or sign bears no relation to any reality whatsoever, in effect, it is its own simulacrum- that is hyperreality. Almost everything we perceive around us in this industrialized ‘connected’ world is no longer ‘real’, but an exaggerated representation of the real, often created by a concoction of different elements of different ideas, and more than real. Simulation absorbs representation as a simulacrum, to the point where, the understanding and experience of identities- of not just of people, but also fields such as outdoor learning, images, models, are determine by it (Leather & Gibson, 2019). Philosopher Rick Roderick mentioned in a lecture that different animals, rather images of animals like dinosaurs and even the shark in Jaws were hyperreal concepts (The Partially Examined Life, 2012). I propose, If Jaws was a simulacrum of the real shark, almost everything that has been presented by the media in the last 30–40 years after that is a simulacrum of that simulacrum of Jaws, hence the contemporary image (rather than the shark in Jaws) is a hyperreal concept. That is, can we think of any significant source of global image before Jaws, which had created the widespread irrational negative image of the sharks that the global society recognizes them from? The hyperreal or para-real are not ‘non-real’, but either more than (hyper) or beside/alongside (para) the real, and the produced images by mass media (circulated through a multitude of printed and virtual outlets) of the shark are grander than the reality, or they exist parallel to the reality. There are different images to different people, to some fishers and ocean-going communities, they are often just another fish or fin in the water, sometimes competitors in fishing, and even prey and trophies themselves. For biologists, they are often a symbol of a healthy ecosystem. For people who associate with them, they are a symbol of beauty, strength, and vitality. But for a large section of the global society, since Jaws, they may have been a symbol of terror. Furthermore, often the borders between these varied avatars of the same fish are permeable, and the identities morph and transmit among the different groups." - Raj Sekhar Aich, Academia Public Opinion "ust when I thought I couldn't love a movie any more than I do....I bought the BR last night and OH MY GOD! what a film. The job they did restoring this is nothing short of remarkable. For the first time in my life (I'm still a BR neophyte) I can understand why BR is so revered. I've seen JAWS more than 1000X, honestly, and I saw things last night I have never seen before. I could see a clock in Brody's kitchen, it read 7:45AM, that's when he got the call about the Watkins shark attack. I could see signs on the street much more clearly, the opening beach scene with the bonfire looks like it was filmed in 2012, not 1974. I could almost read the labels on Hoopers wine bottles that he brought to dinner. I have never experienced JAWS like this before and I can say I feel like this is perhaps the best $20.00 I have ever spend on a HV purchase. I love this movie already, this just elevates it to something new." - @baumer The Poetic Opinion baby shark "Baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Baby shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Baby shark! Mommy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Mommy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Mommy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Mommy shark! Daddy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Daddy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Daddy shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Daddy shark! Grandma shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Grandma shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Grandma shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Grandma shark! Grandpa shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Grandpa shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Grandpa shark, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Grandpa shark! Let's go hunt, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Let's go hunt, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Let's go hunt, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Let's go hunt! Run away, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Run away, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Run away, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Run away! Safe at last, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Safe at last, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Safe at last, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. Safe at last! It's the end, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. It's the end, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. It's the end, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. It's the end!" - A Children's Folksong Factoids Previous Rankings #11 (2020), #18 (2018), #17 (2016), #18 (2014), #11 (2013), #36 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (6), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (10), 1980s (11), 1990s (21), 2000s (20), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jaws (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #15 Fanboy Ranking, #5 Cinema Ranking #9 Old Farts Ranking, #10 Damn Kids Ranking #25 Ambassador Ranking, #5 All-American Ranking #38 Cartoon Ranking, #5 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 8 "You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind." About the Film Synopsis "Set in the 22nd century, The Matrix tells the story of a computer hacker who joins a group of underground insurgents fighting the vast and powerful computers who now rule the earth." Its Legacy Did you know Christian Evangelicals took the Matrix and repurposed it to discuss Christian themes to young people they thought would be bored with traditional messages? They literally did that in my youth group growing up, so I am going to provide a quote from that perspective. Obviously the film's larger legacy rests in the stylization and VFX work, but I figured this might be an interesting tidbit some might not be aware of. ""The Matrix 1 was a firepowerfueled film that spinkicked filmmaking and popular culture. Its impact came from such components as its striking visual style (from black leather to "bullet time”) as well as its many syncretistic visual and textual references to various religions ( Buddhism 2 to Gnosticism 3 ), science fiction literature and action films, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Platonic to postmodern philosophies, Campbell. 5 4 and the mythic hero's journey as described by Joseph Although various other allusions exist, a major mythological motif in the film and its two sequels consists of blatant and vital references to Christ. How the Christ figure is portrayed in the trilogy and some of the implications will be examined here. 6 To truly be considered a Christ fig ure in a film, the character's resemblance to Jesus, as Peter Malone suggests, "needs to be significant and substantial, otherwise it is trivial.” 7 Also, the symbolism "needs to be understood from the text and texture of the work of art, be it classical or into the text with Christian presuppositions.” Many films have used Christ figures to enrich their stories through references in actions, dialogue, or visual symbols. Although the messianic metaphors add meaning to the story, they a re not usually an essential part of the plot. In most cases, the metaphors theoretically could be stripped out of the film, and the plot, although diminished, would still function on some level. In The Matrix trilogy, however, the Christ figure motif goes beyond superficial plot enhancements. It forms the fundamental core of the story. messianic growth (in self9 Neo's awareness and power) and his eventual bringing of peace and salvation to humanity form the essential plot of the trilogy. The three acts of t he trilogy even roughly parallel the New Testament collection. Without the messianic imagery, there could still be a story about the human struggle in the Matrix, of course, but it would be a radically different story than presented on the screen. Media and cultural critic Read Mercer Schuchardt writes: t is not without coincidence that The Matrix was released on the last Easter weekend of the dying twentieth century. It is a parable of the original Judeo Christian worldview of entrapment in a world gone wrong, with no hope of survival or salvation s hort of something miraculous. The Matrix is 27 a new testament for a new millennium, a religious parable of the second coming of mankind's messiah in an age that needs salvation as desperately as any ever has The film's cult following can be explained with many reasons, but the followers also included a surprisingly large number of devout Christians. A reviewer for Christianity Today calls The Matrix one of the best movies of 1999. 30 The Christian following especially may find that this "film is surprisingly true to Biblical theology - despite its unorthodox appearance.”31 To the diverse audience of the films, a generation that would never sit through turgid traditional Bible epics, Christian theology becomes more accessible and attractive because of Neo's presentation as a postmodern messiah." - Mark D. Stucky, Journal of Religion and Film From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Action heroes speak volumes about the couch-potato audiences that they thrill. So it's understandable that ''The Matrix,'' a furious special-effects tornado directed by the imaginative brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski (''Bound''), couldn't care less about the spies, cowboys and Rambos of times gone by. Aiming their film squarely at a generation bred on comics and computers, the Wachowskis stylishly envision the ultimate in cyberescapism, creating a movie that captures the duality of life a la laptop. Though the wildest exploits befall this film's sleek hero, most of its reality is so virtual that characters spend long spells of time lying stock still with their eyes closed. In a film that's as likely to transfix fans of computer gamesmanship as to baffle anyone with quaintly humanistic notions of life on earth, the Wachowskis have synthesized a savvy visual vocabulary (thanks especially to Bill Pope's inspired techno-cinematography), a wild hodgepodge of classical references (from the biblical to Lewis Carroll) and a situation that calls for a lot of explaining. The most salient things any prospective viewer need know is that Keanu Reeves makes a strikingly chic Prada model of an action hero, that the martial arts dynamics are phenomenal (thanks to Peter Pan-type wires for flying and inventive slow-motion tricks), and that anyone bored with the notably pretentious plotting can keep busy toting up this film's debts to other futuristic science fiction. Neat tricks here echo ''Terminator'' and ''Alien'' films, ''The X-Files,'' ''Men in Black'' and ''Strange Days,'' with a strong whiff of ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' in the battle royale being waged between man and computer. Nonetheless whatever recycling the brothers do here is canny enough to give ''The Matrix'' a strong identity of its own." - Janet Muslin, The New York Times (1999) Public Opinion "Haha Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha I forgot how joyful and glorious that third act is. Bless that new Dolby Atmos mix" - @WrathOfHan The Poetic Opinion Factoids Previous Rankings #23 (2020), #11 (2018), #16 (2016), #17 (2014), #9 (2013), #10 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (9), 1980s (11), 1990s (21), 2000s (20), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #9 Fanboy Ranking, #11 Cinema Ranking #25 Old Farts Ranking, #5 Damn Kids Ranking #8 Ambassador Ranking, #8 All-American Ranking #16 Cartoon Ranking, #7 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 9 "As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster." About the Film Synopsis "The true story of Henry Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who is adopted by neighbourhood gangsters at an early age and climbs the ranks of a Mafia family under the guidance of Jimmy Conway." Its Legacy "The world, as Fredo Corleone knew it, has never been an easy place for middle children. Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas opened 30 years ago this week, on September 19, 1990. It came out between The Godfather, which opened in March 1972, and The Sopranos, which premiered in January 1999. And if you imagine Goodfellas as the second installment in the great informal American mob trilogy made up of these works, then it’s clear that Scorsese’s madcap gangster epic is the hardest to talk about on its own, even as it might be the greatest artistic achievement of the three. It’s possible to talk about The Godfather and The Sopranos without mentioning Goodfellas, but any conversation about Goodfellas inevitably involves a lot of discussion of one or both of the other two works. Even if the upshot is to argue that Goodfellas is better than The Godfather, as Roger Ebert thought it was, or that it inspired The Sopranos, as David Chase acknowledges it did, its counterparts seem to keep it under a kind of reverential shadow. In part, this is because its importance is harder to quantify. The Godfather revolutionized the movies. The Sopranos revolutionized TV. Scorsese’s film, the sprawling story of Henry Hill, a mid-shelf, midcentury mobster played by Ray Liotta, and his cronies in the not-quite-big-time Brooklyn underworld, didn’t revolutionize anything. The movie didn’t launch an array of imitators (at least, not imitators that weren’t already imitating The Godfather) or transform an industry. It contained its share of iconic moments—“Now go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox”; “You think I’m funny?”—but none on the “May the Force Be With You” god-tier rung of half a dozen moments from The Godfather, or on the slow-burn cultural-obsession level of the gradually unfolding plots of The Sopranos. (The ending of Goodfellas, for instance, didn’t provoke a national nervous breakdown.) Goodfellas didn’t do any of that stuff. It was only a perfect movie. The partially eclipsed condition of what might be Scorsese’s best film isn’t really fair. In one sense, though, it’s understandable. Goodfellas is far more than a transitional film, but it does link the past and the future in some important ways. If it’s true that every great work of art ends one genre and founds another, then Goodfellas could be seen as the culmination of the tradition represented by The Godfather and as the vital link between the New Hollywood cinema of the ’70s and what we now think of as the golden age of TV. It took the central tension of the old mob-movie genre—the tension between our emotional identification with the characters and our moral judgment of their actions—to a giddy new place that looked ahead not just to Tony Soprano but to Walter White, Don Draper, and the other prestige antiheroes of 21st-century TV. Why does a person become a gangster, and how do we, the audience, feel about the choice? This has been a driving question for mob movies since Scarface meant James Cagney, not Al Pacino: How, filmmakers ask, can we be made to invest emotionally in characters who behave in ways (murdering, lying, cheating, stealing) we would find terrifying, even evil, in real life? This is not a new tension in art—Don Giovanni was not exactly a Presbyterian—but in a genre obsessed with the codes and customs of people who reject the usual norms of society, it can be a powerful line of inquiry into the moral status of art itself. If I can enjoy watching someone doing evil deeds on screen, the gangster movie asks, if I can root for that person despite knowing on another level that what he’s doing is wrong, then what kind of moral judgment falls on me? What kind of moral judgment falls on the artistic medium that coaxed me into this position? (That this is a problem not just for crime movies but for more or less the whole gamut of film genres ranging from war movies to superhero epics—“Why do I like watching someone shoot/stab/rob/lightsaber/retractable-hand-claw someone?”—is maybe one reason the mob movie, as a major venue for exploring the question, seems to have such lasting importance for film.)" - Brian Phillips, The Ringer From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " GoodFellas is arguably the apex of Scor sese's most openly ethnic production. Wishing to make a "good commercial picture," Scorsese re turned to the Italian/American setting which had already inspired his best films (except Taxi Driver).' Scorsese's first feature, Who's That Knocking At My Door? (1969), portrayed and examined sexism and masculinity in the character of J. R. (Harvey Keitel), a young Italian/American in crisis over his Catholic faith. This promising debut revealed Scor sese's inspirational sources (the American cinema of Ford and Hawks, and the French New Wave) and it also contained the seeds of a cinematic style capable of both accepting and bending narrative conventions. Scorsese again returned to ethic con cerns with Mean Streets (1973), a film which artfully y blended documentary reality with subjective fiction in the portrayal of four young men on the fringes of society in New York's Little Italy. In 1975, Scorsese turned to documentary with Italian american, in which he interviewed his own family. Italianamerican also confirmed Scorsese's tendency to use his personal environment for his cinema. This tendency to personalize the set and make it into a family emerges clearly in his long-standing collaboration with such actors as Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.2 In 1980, Scorsese and De Niro returned to the Italian/American milieu with the highly acclaimed Raging Bull, a film in which vio lence and masculinity are at once celebrated and ruthlessly exposed.3 Even at a cursory glance Scorsese's ethnic films appear to share a common attitude, an intensely contradictory ambivalence. It is a love/hate rela tionship which is best summarized in the song at the end of GoodFellas, Sid Vicious's version of Si natra's My Way. Scorsese is drawn to tradition but he also questions it with the brutal aplomb of a punk. This transgressive celebration results in cog nitive fury. Italian/American culture is the reality of his personal as well as cinematic formative years, and it remains the reality he can best recreate vis cerally. It is no accident that the most blatantly documentary qualities of his films (voice-overs, in tertitles, Super-8 snippets inserted in the narrative) all appear in his ethnic films. In fact, it is mainly to re-create the truth of ethnic situations and con cerns that Scorsese has perfected his own brand of expressionistic realism. GoodFellas contributes to, enhances, and explains that realism. The adaptation of the book is extremely faith ful, and if the book is a piece of documentary jour nalism, GoodFellas is a piece of documentary film fiction, a docudrama of sorts. It provides on-screen factual information (dates and places; what hap pened to the characters in real life) as well as histor ical allusions making the viewer feel that, by the end of the film, s/he has gained knowledge about the world depicted. Henry's voice-over provides contextual and narrative connections for us, so that most scenes require no beginning and no ending but merely a few illustrative, emblematic shots. This documentary adherence to the facts is at once com plemented and countered by Scorsese's ebullient style. At first his restless camera and jump-cuts seem to recreate the improvisational style typical of documentaries. On a couple of occasions, Scorsese even utilizes the nonfictional device of having char acters address the camera-a long tracking shot in a dimly lit bar room, with Henry's voice identify ing the wiseguys who say hello to the camera. As the film proceeds, however, the camerawork in creasingly defeats the supposed objectivity of a documentary style. The close-ups of such details as food and shoes, the freeze-frames, the rhythmic editing are constant reminders of authorial expres sion. However short the shots, the camera is in cessantly zooming or tracking, signaling a strong subjectivity behind the lens. The seamless, smooth editing does not efface the director's production of meaning. On the contrary, one is always aware of Scorsese behind the camera." - Maurizio Viano, Film Quarterly Public Opinion "Do you like movies?" - @DAR The Poetic Opinion wise guy "I know you are wise So you reached skies Only problem is You cannot stop lies Brothers and sisters You start your speech Sweet promises made But beyond our reach Cash in every account Ahead good days Sorry Nirav took it Will give if he pays Would give vast fortune If Mallya didn't run away People need to wait now There's no other way Your position is big We indeed respect Stop telling lies sir Time to introspect" - Richie John Pais Factoids Previous Rankings #9 (2020), #16 (2018), #20 (2016), #21 (2014), #7 (2013), #20 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Martin Scorsese (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (9), 1980s (11), 1990s (21), 2000s (20), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #17 Fanboy Ranking, #7 Cinema Ranking #13 Old Farts Ranking, #13 Damn Kids Ranking #12 Ambassador Ranking, #10 All-American Ranking #28 Cartoon Ranking, #8 Damn Boomers Ranking

Kyrie Irving got in touch with and told me he is withdrawing Uncle Drew from consideration because he didn't want his favorite movie Titanic missing the top 250. Number 10b "I'll never let go, Jack. I'll never let go. I promise." *Proceeds to let him go* About the Film Synopsis The legacy of a boat that hits an iceberg and sinks. Its Legacy From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "There is a debate that has raged for decades. One that cleaves whole families in two. A conundrum so fundamental to what it is that makes us human that it divides not only nations, but the populace of an entire planet. That planet is Earth – this planet – and the question in question is this question: did Jack really have to die to save Rose at the end of Titanic? Or is Rose a despicable, door-hogging monster? These are murky waters, dear reader. This isn’t the first time that someone has sought answers. In 2013, pop-science show MythBusters attempted to nix it once and for all, concluding that, yes, Rose could have scooched over a bit, and Jack would have lived dishily ever after. But only if Rose had removed her lifejacket and given it to Jack to tie it beneath the portion of door he would then be occupying. Otherwise, they would have faced the single biggest threat to makeshift, flotsam-based lifeboats: wobbliness. Nevertheless, MythBusters heralded that particular myth Busted, and Rose’s good name was henceforth for ever tarnished. So … Solved? Not exactly. There’s more to life on driftwood in the north Atlantic than simple wobbliness. Firstly, the debris wasn’t actually a door at all, but a chunk of oak door frame, according to comparisons made to actual wreckage recovered from the ship. And it was certainly big enough in terms of surface area to accommodate both bodies: Leo’s height is 183cm, Kate’s is 169cm; the shoulder width of the average man is 39.6cm and a woman’s is 36.7cm, forming a body warmth-sharing total of 76.3cm. According to a deep dive done by Physics Central, Rose’s raft was 183cm x 91cm. Room to spare, then. But what this doesn’t take into account is buoyancy. The boating boffins at Physics Central discovered that a piece of oak of that size and thickness has a weight (volume x density x gravity) of 1,920 newtons. The couple’s weights at the time – which are apparently discoverable if you look hard enough – are 715N for Leo and 549N for Kate. That’s a combined bulk of 3,184N. In ice-cold salt water, oak in those dimensions would give an upward buoyant force of 2,490N. You don’t need a white coat and bushy eyebrows to know that 3,184 is bigger than 2,490, and Jack, Rose and one quite intricately carved piece of wood are therefore sinkier than Armitage Shanks. What about the lifejacket theory, though? What if Rose did the honourable thing and gave hers up? In water that cold (around -2.2 celsius at the time of the boat’s sinking), Jack would be unconscious within 15 minutes of first going in – and he’d already been in there for a fair old while before even getting round to trying to affix a lifejacket to a bobbing piece of wood. More importantly, even modern lifejackets top out at a buoyancy of 275N, which still leaves our pair a full 419N over. In other words, after all that faffing about, they’d sink anyway. So there you have it: for Jack, it was either push Rose in or sacrifice himself. Whether he made the right call there is up to you." - Luke Holland, The Guardian Public Opinion "This is my favorite movie. I give up my spot on this list so Titanic can take its place. I am pretty much Jesus." - The Poetic Opinion Factoids Previous Rankings #8 (2020), #8 (2018), #28 (2016), #59 (2014), #26 (2013), #5 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (4), Christopher Nolan (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (9), 1980s (11), 1990s (20), 2000s (20), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1) Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #6 Fanboy Ranking, #14 Cinema Ranking #46 Old Farts Ranking, #4 Damn Kids Ranking #7 Ambassador Ranking, #12 All-American Ranking #9 Cartoon Ranking, #10 Damn Boomer Ranking

And here are the final movies that just missed the list! Number 110 Aladdin (1992, Rob Clemens and John Musker) Number 109 Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan) Number 108 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001, Chris Columbus) Number 107 Spider-Man 2 (2004, Sam Raimi) Number 106 The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan) Number 105 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, Ramsey, Persichetti, and Rothhman) Number 104 Coco (2017, Adrian Molina and Lee Unkrich) Number 103 Avengers: Infinity War (2018, The Russos) Number 102 The Prestige (2006, Christopher Nolan) Number 101 Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter)

And Nolan misses the top 10 for the first time in forum history. Number 11 "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." About the Film Synopsis "Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lt. Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as the Joker." Its Legacy "“You’ve changed things. Forever,” the Joker says, leering at a caped crusader on the verge of defeat. It’s been 10 years since The Dark Knight carved a crooked smile into the world of pop culture. The film made Christopher Nolan a household name, redefined blockbuster movies, necessitated recognition of the artistry of big-budget filmmakers and transformed how the public viewed the mythos of Batman and the Joker. Simply put, The Dark Knight changed things. Forever. Ten years on, and with pages of comic panels spilling onto the screen on an almost monthly basis, The Dark Knight, which opened July 18, 2008, remains the high point of comic book adaptations. Yet, despite the recognition of the film’s unequivocal greatness, much of the reason behind its greatness has become dislodged in the explosion of superhero movies, and the so-called dark, gritty, and grounded reboots that followed in its wake. Nolan delivered unto us what was arguably the first prestige superhero movie, but what did The Dark Knight cost? It’s easy to misremember The Dark Knight as a superhero movie. And why shouldn’t we see it as such? Batman is a superhero, after all. He is, along with Superman, the most recognizable character to carry that title. And that’s in part what makes Nolan’s treatise on the character so interesting and risky. Even more so than its predecessor Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight detaches itself from many of the tropes associated with superhero movies and instead operates along the lines of a crime thriller-drama devoid of world-ending stakes or shared universe connections. Nolan’s Batman operates as a public servant rather than a superhero. There’s very little action in The Dark Knight, at least when compared to the superhero films that had set a precedent before its release, Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels, X-Men (2000) and its proto-grounded franchise, or going even further back, the Batman films shaped by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher from 1989 to 1997. And now, looking at the films that followed The Dark Knight, the DC universe, the recalibrated X-Men franchise, and most notably, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Dark Knight is a far cry from cinematic superheroics before or after. Yes, The Dark Knight is ultimately a film about a rich man-child dressed up like a bat facing off against a terrorist in clown makeup — the ethos of so many great Batman stories. But there’s also the fact that so much of the film comprises talk of finances, politics, extradition laws and exposition of complicated story beats — all things that we don’t associate with the most popular superhero movies of today, which opt for splashier if less narratively complex thrills. It was this sure-handedness in which Nolan approached Batman, as a character not simply for kids or cartoonish urban fantasies, that awakened the voice that cried for genre films to be contenders during awards season. While many would stake The Dark Knight’s award season reputation on the late Heath Ledger’s magnetic, transcendent performance as the Joker, for which he posthumously won best supporting actor at the 2009 Academy Awards Ceremony, the film’s prestige caliber goes beyond that. It wasn’t simply that The Dark Knight took itself seriously in a way that a superhero based film hadn’t done before, or that it boasted emotionally complex portrayals of Bruce Wayne, James Gordon and Harvey Dent from award-friendly actors like Christian Bale, Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart. The Dark Knight’s prestige came largely because of the particular way it captured the American zeitgeist. It’s a film built on rules, and the breaking of them — order and chaos. With the Patriot Act still a hot button issue with President George. W. Bush in the White House, and Barack Obama making moves in Washington months before he would be elected President, The Dark Knight felt connected to who we were as a people. The Joker’s brand of disorder, his call for anarchy became a rallying point, particularly for young adults who would vote in their first college election that fall. The Joker became more than a popular Halloween costume, but a political slogan, one that saw Jokerized variations of Shepard Fairey’s famous Barack Obama “Hope” poster tacked to phone polls and graphited in alleyways. Batman was the hero of the film, but in the unjust world of 2008, the Joker held more answers. “They’re only as civilized as the world allows them to be. When the chips are down, these civilized people…they’ll eat each other,” the Joker says. His words rang true, and now 10 years after the film’s release they carry even more weight. It was the prophetic voice of the Joker that captured hearts and minds, particularly for a generation that was just beginning to know what it was like to have a little power. And that power had to extend beyond just political spheres, to the people who recognized the best that film had to offer. The call for The Dark Knight’s best pictures nomination, and subsequent backlash that followed when it wasn’t, was a call for movies to be recognized beyond their ability to hold meaning for aging white men." - Richard Newby, The Hollywood Reporter From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Using Batman, not Superman, as the protagonist, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) takes this problem posed by the hero and the hero’s exceptional status in relation to the law as its overriding concern. The title for the film (though not the plot) derives from Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and it provides a less idealizing portrait of Batman than those developed previously. The film is not simply, however, a critique of heroic exceptionality. The film's universe makes clear the need for an exception to the law. Without Batman (Christian Bale) providing extra-legal assistance to Police Lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman), the crime lords that menace Gotham would render the city uninhabitable. Even with Batman’s help, the film’s ominous and brooding mise-en-scène reveals the extent to which criminality sets the tone for life there. Unlike Nolan’s earlier film Batman Begins (2005), in which Gotham appears as a futuristic city despite its crime problem, here crime shapes the look and feel of the city as grim. Buildings stand in disrepair; people’s dress is generally disheveled; and even daytime scenes occur under dark skies. Given the film’s appreciation of the need for heroic exception to the legal order, it is easy to understand why a right-wing political commentator, after viewing the film, might regard it as a tribute to George W. Bush and his prosecution of the Iraq War. In his Wall Street Journal article, “What Bush and Batman Have in Common,” Andrew Klavan contends in this vein, “There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”[6] The similarity between Bush and Batman consists in their joint recognition that an exceptional threat to the legal order requires an extra-legal exception in order to quell the threat. Though Klavan has to read the film creatively in order to arrive at the thesis that it constitutes “a conservative movie about the war on terror,” he does rightly grasp the film’s fundamental contention that we need a figure of exception.[7] The problem with accepting and celebrating the hero’s exceptionality is not simply that such acceptance produces conservative misreadings but that this exceptionality has an inherent tendency to multiply itself exponentially. In Dark Knight, this kind of proliferation occurs early in the film when copycat vigilantes place both themselves and others at risk. In the United States during the War on Terror, exceptionality takes the form of an ever-increasing extension of surveillance and security. Once we grant the necessity of the position of the exception, the law can no longer define those who will occupy this position nor restrain their activity. Once we violate rights of non-citizens, we will soon be violating the rights of citizens as well, and finally we will end up with a society in which rights as such cease to exist. The exception necessarily exists beyond the limits of the law, and if the law could contain its magnitude, it would cease to be exceptional. This is the dilemma that shapes The Dark Knight. The film’s incredible popularity attests not simply to Nolan’s skill as a filmmaker or to a successful marketing campaign by Warner Brothers but also to the contemporary urgency of the question it addresses." - Todd McGowan, Jump Cut Public Opinion "It's perfect, because Nolan." - @MrPink The Poetic Opinion the joker "Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah Some call me the gangster of love Some people call me Maurice 'Cause I speak of the pompatus of love a People talk about me baby Say I'm doin' you wrong, doin' you wrong Well, don't you worry, baby, don't worry 'Cause I'm right here, right here, right here, right here at home 'Cause I'm a picker I'm a grinner I'm a lover And I'm a sinner I play my music in the sun I'm a joker I'm a smoker I'm a midnight toker I sure don't want to hurt no one I'm a picker I'm a grinner I'm a lover And I'm a sinner I play my music in the sun I'm a joker I'm a smoker I'm a midnight toker I get my lovin' on the run Ooh, whoo, ooh, whoo You're the cutest thing that I ever did see I really love your peaches Wanna shake your tree Lovey dovey, lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time Ooh wee baby, I'll sure show you a good time 'Cause I'm a picker I'm a grinner I'm a lover And I'm a sinner I play my music in the sun I'm a joker I'm a smoker I'm a midnight toker I get my lovin' on the run I'm a picker I'm a grinner I'm a lover And I'm a sinner I play my music in the sun I'm a joker I'm a smoker I'm a midnight toker I sure don't want to hurt no one Ooh, whoo, ooh, whoo People keep talkin' about me baby Say I'm doin' you wrong Well don't you worry, don't worry, no don't worry mama 'Cause I'm right here at home You're the cutest thing I ever did see I really love your peaches Wanna shake your tree Lovey dovey, lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time Come on baby now, I'll show you a good time" - The Steve Miller Band Factoids Previous Rankings #3 (2020), #2 (2018), #9 (2016), #2 (2014), #3 (2013), #7 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), Christopher Nolan (4), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (9), 1980s (11), 1990s (20), 2000s (19), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Batman (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #8 Fanboy Ranking, #15 Cinema Ranking #31 Old Farts Ranking, #8 Damn Kids Ranking #31 Ambassador Ranking, #7 All-American Ranking #13 Cartoon Ranking, #9 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 12 "Po-TAY-toes! Boil em' mash em' stick em' in a stew!" About the Film Synopsis Imagine if the Battle of Winterfell from Game of Thrones didn't suck. Its Legacy From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "The battle of Helm’s Deep is the first major battle in the War of the Ring and serves as the climax for the second part of the quintessential fantasy trilogy: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It ends in victory for Mankind, but that victory was far from assured. As the heroes slog through rain and mud against an otherworldly foe, so did the cast and crew slog through months of difficult night shoots to finish this cinematic masterpiece. The result of their effort is one of the greatest battles in cinematic history. After the burning of the Westfold, Théoden King (Bernard Hill) takes his people to the stronghold of Helm’s Deep. It is nested within a steep canyon, meaning that the enemy can only attack them head-on. Théoden seems confident that this will be enough to protect his people and he boasts that the Deeping Wall has never been breached. But when Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) brings news that 10,000 of Saruman’s Uruk-hai are en route to eradicate Rohan’s people, the King begins to despair. Throughout the battle, the defenders must fight against that hopelessness as they are forced to retreat again and again in the face of overwhelming odds. Taking place almost entirely at night and in the rain, the sheer scale of this battle sequence was unheard of in film at the time. Filming it was entirely another kind of struggle. It took three and a half months of freezing night shoots to finish the sequence. On nights when there was no precipitation, gallons of water was rained down upon the cast. To keep the scene intelligible, a misty blueish backlight was used, ostensibly emulating the light of the moon. As a result, the action and actors expressions remained remarkably clear in the dark (looking at YOU, Game of Thrones). Seventeen years later, the effects of this battle hold up surprisingly well. This is partly due to the sheer number of practical effects used. The Uruk-hai were created from makeup and prosthetics rather than mocap and CGI. As a result, they look as good now as they did at the turn of the millennium. Multiple sets were used to film this battle: a scale fortress built in a disused quarry and two smaller scale models (1/4 scale and 1/85 scale) for distance shots. The Two Towers swept the first annual awards from the Visual Effects Society, claiming two-thirds of the awards it qualified for. MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) is a software that was developed specifically for the Lord of the Rings trilogy to handle the massive crowds needed for these battle scenes. It has been used ever since in a variety of films and television including 300, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in the finale episode, “Chosen”), and the Hobbit films. This software used a kind of AI to determine how each member of the crowds needed to move. “When these characters are in groups they need to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ what’s around them,” said visual effects supervisor Jim Rygiel, “MASSIVE has both artificial sight and hearing to aid in that process.” In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, the Battle of the Hornburg (called the Battle of Helm’s Deep in the film) is not nearly as large in scale as Peter Jackson’s adaptation. It serves as one of several battles that lead up to the final climax at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. However, Jackson made a choice to beef it up as the climax of The Two Towers, which helps the film exist as a standalone storyline. This battle has a full narrative arc within itself indicative of the themes of the overall series narrative. Clocking in at 39 minutes long, it is almost a movie within a movie." - Samantha Olthof, Film School Rejects Public Opinion "anyway Two Towers is a good, even great film in practically every respect but I still hate it" - @Jason The Poetic Opinion Factoids Previous Rankings #36 (2020), #10 (2018), #12 (2016), #19 (2014), #29 (2013), #11 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Peter Jackson (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (9), 1980s (11), 1990s (20), 2000s (18), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Middle Earth (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #4 Fanboy Ranking, #25 Cinema Ranking #45 Old Farts Ranking, #6 Damn Kids Ranking #49 Ambassador Ranking, #9 All-American Ranking #8 Cartoon Ranking, #15 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 13 "May the force be with you." About the Film Synopsis It's Star Wars. Its Legacy From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Star Wars, George Lucas' lavish space opera, is truly a fantasy for our times, this generation's Wizard of Oz. Nevertheless, whereas Lucas' film has been almost universally praised for its costuming, sets, technical perfection, and wondrous special effects, its plot has been largely dismissed as corny or hokey, strictly kids' stuff. "The film's story is bad pulp, and so are the characters of hero Luke and heroine Leia," says Richard Corliss.1 "I kept looking for an 'edge,' to peer around the corny, solemn comic-book strophes," writes Stanley Kauffmann.2 And Molly Haskell sums up the critics' objections: "Star Wars is childish, even for a cartoon. "3 Well, if Star Wars is childish, then so are The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien's Middle Earth series, Star Wars is a modern fairy tale, a pastiche which reworks a multitude of old stories, and yet creates a complete and self-sufficient world of its own, one populated with intentionally flat, archetypal characters: reluctant young hero, warrior-wizard, brave and beautiful princess, and monstrous black villain. I would argue that the movie's fundamental appeal to both young and old lies precisely in its deliberately old-fashioned plot, which has its roots deep in American popular fantasy, and, deeper yet, in the epic structure of what Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces calls "the monomyth." In an era in which Americans have lost heroes in whom to believe, Lucas has created a myth for our times, fashioned out of bits and pieces of twentieth-century American popular mythologyold movies, science fiction, television, and comic books- but held together at its most basic level by the standard pattern of the adventures of a mythic hero. Star Wars is a masterpiece of synthesis, a triumph of American ingenuity and resourcefulness, demonstrating how the old may be made new again: Lucas has raided the junkyards of our popular culture and rigged a working myth out of scrap. Like the hotrods in his previous film, American Graffiti, Star Wars is an amalgam of pieces of mass culture customized and supercharged and run flat out. This essay will therefore have two parts: first, a look at the elements Lucas has lifed openly and lovingly from various popular culture genres; and second, an analysis of how this pastiche is unified by the underlying structure of the "monomyth." George Lucas, who both wrote and directed, admits that his original models were the Flash Gordon movie serials and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series of books. "I wanted to make an action movie- a movie in outer space like Flash Gordon used to be. ... I wanted to make a movie about an old man and a kid. . . . I also wanted the old man to be like a warrior. I wanted a princess, too, but I didn't want her to be a passive damsel in distress."5 In other words, he wanted to return to the sense of wonder and adventure that movies had given him as a child, but to update it for modern tastes and to take advantage of all the technological and cinematic innovations of the past thirty years since Flash Gordon. Thus, just like American Graffiti, Star Wars is simultaneously innovative and conservative, backward-glancing and nostalgic. Graffiti takes a worn-out genre (the teenage beach party movies) and reanimates it; Star Wars gives new life to the space fantasy. "I didn't want to make a 2001, " says Lucas. "I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came. . . . they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes."6 Both Graffiti and Star Wars express a yearning for prelapsarian eras: the former for the pre-Vietnam era and the latter for innocence of the time before the Bomb. While lamenting the dearth of classic adventure films and the consequent lack of a healthy fantasy life for contemporary youth, Lucas told an interviewer, "I had also done a study on . . . the fairy tale or myth. It is a children's story in history and you go back to the Odyssey or the stories that are told for the kid in all of us."7 "You just don't get them any more, and that's the best stuff in the world -adventures in far-off lands. ... I wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth. "" - Andrew Gordon, Literature/Quarterly Public Opinion "would be cooler if there was a giant fucking worm" - Cartsen, Letterboxd and also probably @Plain Old Tele The Poetic Opinion Factoids Previous Rankings #12 (2020), #7 (2018), #5 (2016), #3 (2014), #4 (2013), #6 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), George Lucas (1) Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (9), 1980s (11), 1990s (20), 2000s (17), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Star Wars (3), Alien (2), The MCU (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #5 Fanboy Ranking, #21 Cinema Ranking #10 Old Farts Ranking, #15 Damn Kids Ranking #32 Ambassador Ranking, #11 All-American Ranking #23 Cartoon Ranking, #11 Damn Boomer Ranking

Of the 5 critic consensus "greatest of all-time movies" (Vertigo, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Tokyo Story, and the Passion of Joan of Arc) it seems our choice is Casablanca! Number 14 "Frankly, daring. I don't give a damn." About the Film Synopsis "In Casablanca, Morocco in December 1941, a cynical American expatriate meets a former lover, with unforeseen complications." Its Legacy "On November 26, 1942, in the midst of World War II, a film called "Casablanca" premiered at the Hollywood Theater in New York City. Warner Brothers actually rushed the release of the film, as the Allies, led by General Dwight Eisenhower, secured their hold on North Africa and invaded Casablanca that month. The film became an American icon, ranking third on the American Film Institute's 100 best movies of the last 100 years. "Casablanca" launched Ingrid Bergman's career and established Humphrey Bogart as a romantic lead. It is one of the most referenced films of all time, from Woody Allen's "Play it Again, Sam" to the Muppets. Jeanine Basinger, professor of film studies at Wesleyan University and author of "The Star Machine," curates the Ingrid Bergman archives. She says that the "Casablanca" team had no idea their film would become such a major part of American film history. Basinger attributes the movie's durability to it's technique, rather than it's content. "The plot really isn't the point of it, it's the way it's done that's made it last," she says. "It's about the myth of Americans as being heroic, as going out into fights that aren't necessarily their own to fight, for people who are being treated unjustly," she says. "The romantic hero of Rick represents that." "There's a kind of melancholy quality to it," she says. "The reluctance to fight unless you have to. It's romanticizing a definition of our personal American hero." Bogart has the face for this part, she says — he isn't a pretty boy. He looks weathered, rugged, and tough. Though the movie may have been quite timely in its spirit of wartime patriotism, it has held up for 70 years. And while Bergman and Bogart will always have Paris, we will always have Casablanca." - New York Public Radio From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion ""Was it the cannon fire or is my heart pounding?" Whenever Casablanca is shown, at this point the audience reacts with an enthusiasm usually reserved for football. Sometimes a single word is enough: fans cry every time Bogey says "kid." Frequently the spectators quote the best lines before they are uttered. According to the traditional standards in aesthetics, Casablanca is not a work of art-if such an expression still means anything. In any case, if the films of Dreyer, Eisenstein, or Antonioni are works of art, Casablanca represents a very modest aesthetic achievement. It is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes strung together implausibly; its characters are psychologically incredible, its actors act in a manneristic way. Nevertheless, it is a great example of cine matic discourse, a palimpsest for the future students of twentieth-century religiosity, a paramount laboratory for semiotic research in textual strategies. Moreover, it has become a cult movie. What are the requirements for transforming a book or a movie into a cult object? The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world, so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were part of the beliefs of a sect, a private world of their own, a world about which one can play puzzle games and trivia contests, and whose adepts recognize each other through a common competence. Of course all these elements (characters and episodes) must have some archetypal appeal, as we shall see. One can ask and answer questions about the various stations of the subway in New York or Paris only if these spots have become or have been taken as mythical areas, and such names as "Canarsy Line" or "Vincennes Neuilly" do not only stand for physical places, but become the catalyzers of collective memories. Which are the elements of a movie that can be dislocated from the whole and adored for themselves? In order to go on with this analysis of Casablanca, I should use some important semiotic categories, such as the ones (provided by the Russian Formalists) of theme and motif. I confess that I find very diffi cult to ascertain what the various Russian Formalists meant by motif. If according to Veselovskij-a motif is the simplest narrative unit, then one wonders why "fire from heaven" should belong to the same category as "the persecuted maid" (since the former can be represented by an image, while the latter requires a certain narrative development). It would be interesting to follow Tomacevskij and to look, in Casablanca, for free and tied motifs or for dynamic and static motifs. We should distinguish between more or less universal narra tive functions a la Propp, visual stereotypes like the Cynic Adventurer, and more complex archetypal situations like the Unhappy Love. I hope that someone will do such a job, but let me today assume, more prudently (and borrowing the concept from the research in artificial intelligence), the more flexible notion of "frame." We are interested, moreover, in finding out those frames which not only are recognizable by the audience as belonging to a sort of ancestral intertex tual tradition, but which also display a particular fascination. "A suspect who escapes a pass control and is shot by the police" is undoubtedly an intertextual frame, but it does not have a "magic" flavor. Let us take intuitively the idea of "magic" frame. Let us define as "magic" those frames which, when appear ing in a movie, and when then separated from the whole, transform this movie into a cult movie. In Casablanca we can find more intertextual frames than "magic" intertextual frames. Let us call these latter intertextual archetypes. The term "archetype" here does not pretend to have any particular psycho analytic or mythic connotation, but serves only to indicate a pre-established and frequently re-appearing narrative situation that is cited or in some way recycled by innumerable other texts, and provokes in the addressee a sort of intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of a deja vu that everybody yearns to see again. I would not say that an intertextual archetype is neces sarily "universal." It can belong to a rather recent textual tradition, as it happens with certain "topoi" of slapstick comedy. It is sufficient to consider it as a topos or standard situation that comes to be particularly appealing to a given cul tural area or historical period." - Umberto Eco, SubStance Public Opinion "Movie hands out classic lines like candy." - The Poetic Opinion casabianca "The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle’s wreck, Shone round him o’er the dead. Yet beautiful and bright he stood, As born to rule the storm; A creature of heroic blood, A proud, though childlike form. The flames rolled on – he would not go, Without his father’s word; That father, faint in death below, His voice no longer heard. He called aloud – ‘Say, father, say If yet my task is done?’ He knew not that the chieftain lay Unconscious of his son." - Felicia Hemmons Factoids Previous Rankings #19 (2020), #23 (2018), #15 (2016), #22 (2014), #14 (2013), #33 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Michael Curtiz (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (4), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (8), 1980s (11), 1990s (20), 2000s (17), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #18 Fanboy Ranking, #10 Cinema Ranking #5 Old Farts Ranking, #20 Damn Kids Ranking #10 Ambassador Ranking, #14 All-American Ranking #21 Cartoon Ranking, #13 Damn Boomer Ranking

Let the franchise onslaught begin! Number 15 "I make him an offer he don' refuse. Don' worry." About the Film Synopsis "In the continuing saga of the Corleone crime family, a young Vito Corleone grows up in Sicily and in 1910s New York. In the 1950s, Michael Corleone attempts to expand the family business into Las Vegas, Hollywood and Cuba." Its Legacy "Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, which acts as both a sequel and a prequel his 1972 original, continues to be one of a handful of films widely considered to be the gold standard of follow-up films. However, getting it there wasn’t easy. “We didn’t think it was a classic sequel. It was a very difficult film in many ways, and it took a lot of time to shoot,” explained Fred Roos, one of the film’s co-producers. “We shot all over the world from Hollywood and Miami to the Dominican Republic and Sicily, Rome, and China, to name just a few of the places. The structure of the movie was very unusual too, having it take place in two different times and so many different places, we tried lots of things to make it work. We experimented with it, trying different things.” “We did a lot of test screenings too until we finally hit one screening, I remember it was in San Diego, where we got the right balance, and it finally worked. But it was touch and go. We had some bad screenings where the cutting back and forth between the two stories bothered people, but we eventually found the right formula.” Although it’s considered a classic now, when it initially hit theaters, critical reaction was decidedly mixed. However, that didn’t affect it come awards season where The Godfather Part II secured 11 nominations, walked away with six wins, and became the first sequel to win Best Picture. It’s a time Roos remembers well. He explained: “At the time, people would say, ‘Oh, it’s no The Godfather.’ On the night of the Oscars, when we won Best Picture, Paramount Pictures had three films nominated in that category including The Conversation, which I also co-produced, and Chinatown. Everyone thought Chinatown, which is a great movie, had it in the bag.” “When they announced that The Godfather Part II was the winner, we were not expecting it. After that, the movie’s reputation just grew and grew and rightfully so. I still believe it is one of the 20 best movies ever made, not just one of the best sequels.” “What The Godfather Part II did was show, not that there have been many since, that a sequel could be as good as, if not better than, the original,” Roos recalled. “By the way, the ‘Part II’ in the title was controversial. The studio said, ‘You can’t call it The Godfather Part II. Nobody’s ever done that. You have to think of another title.’ But, Francis stuck with that. Now we have hundreds of films that are Part II or Part III or whatever. It made that OK.” “There’s a lot I miss about those days. Back then, you could let a film build and add theaters gradually. You can rarely do that anymore. You have to come out in all your theaters at once, and you live or die in that first week. There’s almost no chance now of building an audience little by little. However, there are good things about today. The streamers allow all kinds of movies to get made that might not get made any other way can be made any other way in this climate, but because of the way they are shown, they might not stick with you like a theatrical release.” Made for $13 million, The Godfather Part II grossed $88 million worldwide, considerably less than the first film in what became a trilogy. That came as little surprise to Roos, even then. He explained: “A sequel rarely sits as well as the original if the original is a big hit. The fact that it hung in there and remains seen by so many so often is amazing. Plus, it was a long film, a very long film, which the studio was not happy about but they went with it. Because of the length, it meant theaters could have fewer screenings a day, which can affect the box office.”" - Simon Thompson, Forbes From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Film critics normally view sequels as exploitative products that cash in on the popularity of earlier blockbusters, invariably inferior to the original films. However, most critics today consider the 1974 sequel to The Godfather not only better than the first movie but one of the best movies of the decade. This fact seems even more surprising when one considers that the first Godfather is one of the most beloved films of all time and was, for a brief period, the greatest blockbuster in film history. When The Godfather debuted in 1972, it shattered all the major box office records. It made $8 mil lion in its opening week in national release. It brought in a million dollars a day for twenty six days and $2 million a week for 23 con secutive weeks. In less than six months, it surpassed Gone with the Wind to become the biggest box-office grosser in history, earning $86,275,000 in rentals by the end of its first year in release. The critics loved it too, on the whole, except that many though Scholarship has hardly addressed the phe nomenon of film sequelization, and the few critical treatments that exist focus almost exclusively on the horror film series that began inundating theaters in the late seven ties and haven't tapered off since.2 One full length book has been devoted to literary and film sequels, Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, a chronologically organized collec tion of essays, mostly by period specialists, which begins by examining epic sequels of the Greek Bronze Age and ends by looking at Hollywood sequels of the 1980s and '90s. It will come as no surprise that the theme common to the essays is that sequels consistently let their audiences down. The essayists normally treat audience disap pointment as an unavoidable consequence of publishers' and movie studios' attempts to profit quickly on the successes of earlier hits by churning out invariably inferior products (although several of the essays look at some notable exceptions to this rule).3 Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg, in the introduction to Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, also note "the inevitably changed [historical] conditions which make it impossible to achieve a precise repetition of the experience" of the original work (5). In their treatments of the sequel, however, the essayists deal only in passing with per haps the most pertinent historical fact when considering audiences' common dissatis faction with sequels: the prior experience of the original popular work. Even if the sequel were every bit as good as the origi nal, and experienced by an otherwise iden tical culture in equivalent historical circum stances, it would nonetheless disappoint audiences because nothing can equal Lianne McLarty suggests that, from one perspective, the sequel "marks the end of originality and results in the triumph of sur face over depth, spectacle over meaning and history" (201).5 A movie sequel not only banks on the spectacular profitability of its predecessor; it often takes spectacle for its subject matter, hence the tendency of sequels to overdo the most spectacular ele ments of the original movie, such as vio lence, special effects, and stars. In fact, a movie sequel is almost invariably a version of the original movie as spectacle, a lavish display of the mere surface of the prior work. Even plots and characters turn into spectacles in a sequel. When C-3PO and R2-D2 make narratively gratuitous reap pearances in George Lucas's prequels to the initial Star Wars trilogy, the prequels attempt not only to reinspire the audience's affection for the characters but to call up the spectacle of C-3PO and R2-D2 by superfi cially reiterating their connection to the prior films we loved. Or consider Coppola's extraordinary efforts to include in The Godfather Part III as many of the actors from the first two movies as he could work in. It is understandable why audiences would want to see Al Pacino again, but why should we care about seeing Al Martino as Johnny Fontane or Richard Bright as Al Neri? The sequel makes these characters spectacles for us, banking on their associa tion with the original Godfather movies and on our excitement for their bare presence here. The familiar faces also help maintain continuity with the first film; their reap pearance eases us into the new movie, rein forces the existence of a world we remem ber, and strengthens our sense that we have reentered a milieu that continues to function according to consistent and recognizable patterns. After the unprecedented success of the orig inal film, the sequel was bound to disap point, and, on its release in December 1974, it did. As with most sequels, it made a prof it, but its success came nowhere near that of its predecessor. Part II took almost a year to gross as much as the original had in its first month of release, ultimately grossing in its first run only one-third of the profits of the first movie ($30.1 million in rentals as com pared to $86.3 million for the first movie), "considerably less than the conventional two third Paramount expected" rom Edwin Porter's Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902) to Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), both of which depict the confusion of film's two realities, filmmakers have played on cinema's potential for self-reflexivity. But the effect needn't be so heavy-handed. More subtle correlations between realities can have a much richer effect because the reso nances work below the level of our con scious understanding and because the con nections we make are not as logical and straightforward as in Porter's and Allen's movies. Special effects, for example, feel appropriate to the science-fiction genre not only because they allow the genre to create futuristic visual imagery but also because special effects are themselves scientific and futuristic. One need only recognize the incongruity of the digital visual effects in such films as Gladiator (2000) and Young herlock Holmes (1985) to see the point; for reasons that don't exactly make sense, the special effects in those films come across as anachronistic. In a more sophisticated com mingling of realities, as John Wayne aged in the 1960s and 1970s and as the genre grew passe, westerns-such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), True Grit (1969), The Wild Bunch (1969) and The Cowboys (1972)-often dealt with the death of old heroes or the death of the West itself. The resonance between the outmoded west ern genre and the fading western frontier gives these late westerns a feeling of right ness, because the two logically unrelated phenomena seem naturally to belong togeth er. The correlation between realities is, moreover, intellectually exciting as we make passing connections between fundamentally different, in fact mutually exclusive, uni verses: the real universe in which we are sit ting in a movie theater watching a movie and the fictional universe depicted on the screen. The Godfather Part II does something sim ilar and even less conspicuous. Part II caus es us to make casual connections between two incompatible, but genuinely analogous, realities without letting us know we are making them. We view the sequel with dis appointment (in our real world), and we see our judgments reflected thematically (in the fictional world of the movie), yet we do not consciously consider the parallel. The paral lel remains substantively irrelevant to the film (just as the parallel between the dying west and the dying western is substantively irrelevant), yet it feels felicitous because dis appointment is as natural to a sequel as the dying west is to a late western or special effects are to a science-fiction film. I suspect Part II's seductive subtlety led early review ers to mistake their opinion of what happens in the sequel for their opinion of the sequel itself. They accused the movie of being what it is about: the disappointing aftermath to the loss of the godfather." - Todd Berliner, Journal of Film and Video Public Opinion "Ehh, this was also alright. 5/5" - @Eric the Extra-Terrestrial The Poetic Opinion godfather of giggles "To the man who made me who I am Being with you was like learning without a textbook I just watched and copied and made it my own From gardening to maths You made me my own genius I didn't have to speak for you to know what was wrong You didn't judge me for the silly things I said Or how I never learnt at school You taught me to teach my self You were my Mr Miyagi With less riddles more jokes I learnt that laughter can flood rooms like tidal waves And we were leaves to float in it And now you're gone I wont mourn You would tell me to stop crying and cut my hair I will use laughter to put a smile on raggedy dolls And the stories to keep the dark days down Thank you for being the Godfather of giggles Making Sunday dinners not the day to fear Mondays Having gardening not be a chore but a way to think Rest well Granddad." - Callum Hutching Factoids Previous Rankings #20 (2020), #29 (2018), #11 (2016), #34 (2014), #8 (2013), #8 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (5), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), Francis Ford Coppola (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Robert Zemeckis (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Billy Wilder (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Frank Darabont (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Bong Joon Ho (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), David Lean (1), Richard Linklater (1), Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), George Miller (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Gary Trousdale (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (6), 1960s (7), 1970s (8), 1980s (11), 1990s (20), 2000s (17), 2010s (10) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), South Korea (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Back to the Future (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The Godfather (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Jurassic Park (1), The Lion King (1), Mad Max (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Terminator (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #20 Fanboy Ranking, #12 Cinema Ranking #7 Old Farts Ranking, #23 Damn Kids Ranking #19 Ambassador Ranking, #15 All-American Ranking #33 Cartoon Ranking, #14 Damn Boomer Ranking