The Panda

Here are five more of the misses! Number 115 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, Steven Spielberg) Number 114 Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, Gore Verbinski) Number 113 Before Sunrise (1995, Richard Linklater) Number 112 Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey) Number 111 Some Like it Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)

Fucking heathens, this is a top 5 all-time movie and you ranked it this low? There's only one movie ranked above this that is arguably better! Number 16 "Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't." About the Film Synopsis "The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II." Its Legacy "The magnitude of the vision presented in "Schindler’s List" and its global impact marked a turning point to those of us in the field of Holocaust education and remembrance. It ushered a sea change of understanding and created a window of opportunity for ongoing learning — on a subject matter that is impossible to comprehend — as never had been seen before. "Schindler’s List" opened the floodgates for survivors and other witness to come forward to share their stories with the world, for the world was now ready to listen. The film also had an impact on the filmmaker himself before, during and after the production. Spielberg was moved by his experiences directing the film to take action and launch what is today known as USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation). In establishing this organization, Steven made two promises to survivors of the Shoah: one, that he would preserve their stories in perpetuity, and two, that their stories would be shared for educational purposes around the globe. Now, as the film comes to theaters again, the world is at a critical crossroads similar to what the generation in the film faced: Globally, authoritarian governments are in ascendance — with fascist parties gaining traction in many European nations. Further, a stark rise in violence targeting Jewish communities has reflected rising antisemitism as not seen since the Second World War. Domestically, there has been a 57 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents as reported by the ADL — the largest year-over-year jump, ever. Today’s headlines are flooded with news reports of swastika graffiti, public Nazi salutes, and many other incidents, including violent attacks and mass murders. This rise of anti-Semitism — coupled with a waning consciousness of the Holocaust and other genocides among millennials and younger Americans — has created a new urgency. As "Schindler’s List" approaches the quarter-century mark, USC Shoah Foundation is redoubling its efforts to ensure that as many young people as possible see this important film and are challenged to think critically about the consequences of their actions upon other human beings, and also the consequences of inaction. In the 25 years that have transpired since the film’s release, USC Shoah Foundation’s work to fulfill the two promises made to the witnesses has grown in size and scope: USC Shoah Foundation currently houses more than 115,000 hours of testimony from more than 55,000 eyewitnesses, and has expanded its efforts beyond collecting and sharing the stories of the survivors of the Holocaust to include testimony from more than 100 years of history, from the genocide in Armenia to most recently the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. USC Shoah Foundation's interactive programming, research, and testimony-based materials are accessed in museums and universities, cited by government leaders and NGOs, and taught in classrooms around the world. "Schindler’s List" delivers a universal message: The actions of one person can make a difference in the lives of others. Even in the face of the worst of humanity, we all have within us the power to take action — and to be stronger than hate. Our hope is that this is a message the next generation is ready to hear, because our survival depends on our evolution into a more cohesive and inclusive world." - Stephen D. Smith, Detroit News From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " Adapted faithfully by Steven Zaillian from Thomas Keneally's fact-based novel, Schindlers List tells the remarkable and uplifting tale of Oskar Schindler, a German Catholic industrialist who courageously and uncharacteristically rescued some 1200 Pol ish Jews from extermination at Auschwitz. The film arrives with the visible and tempo ral signs of high seriousness on the Holly wood screen: black and white cinematogra phy and three-hour-plus running time. Forsaking the visual pleasure and contem porary perspective of color stock, the mono chromatic film grain resonates with the documentary memo ry of the Holocaust, the stark newsreels of liberated concentra tion camps taken by American, British, and Soviet forces, later supplemented by captured footage from the Nazis themselves, always inveterate record keepers. Likewise, the prolonged run ning time is com mensurate with the gravitas of the mate rial and the esthetics of immersion in an extended, complex, and emotionally wrenching narrative. Little is said of Schindler's spiritual transformation from narcissist to altruist, war profiteer to angel of mercy. Just as well - even in the Kenneally novel, the man's motives remain obscure, his heroism understood more as a personal gesture than a political stance or moral imperative. Spiel berg's strategy is to show the action rather than probe the impulse. Save for the infor mational titles that signpost time and place, the weave and texture of the film is a sud den, unbidden immersion in a nightmare world. Rousted from their homes, families knead diamonds in clumps of bread to swal low them, like communion, for retrieval later. To pass medical inspection, women prick their fingers and rub the blood into their cheeks for color. Like the most com pelling Holocaust literature, the tone is flat, mute, and dispassionate; death is presented matter of factly, in all its clinical, biological apathy, without shocked reaction shots or musical cues (for once, John Williams's score is an unobtrusive guide, not a thun dering imperative). Since the disclosure of desperate mea sures and concentra tion camp ethnog raphy unfolds wordlessly, the spec tator must invest the narrative with the moral sense unspo ken from the screen. The payoff in sympa thetic participation can be heartstop ping, as when a sprightly singalong tune blares out from the camp speakers and the next shot frames a huge chorus of children, hun dreds of them, filling the screen and walk ing forward, happy lemmings ignorant of the fate awaiting them. Of course, this gem of rare price in an auteur's canon serves as more than the ulti mate leverage on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. No less than the opening of the Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall, a site heretofore pre served for memorials to the American past, Schindlers List is a capstone event in a process that has been called "the American ization of the Holocaust." Edward Lutvak recently observed how, with the passage of time, the Holocaust has come to seem more and more the central event of World War II. More and more, too, Hollywood has come to seem the prism through which all history, genocidal or otherwise, is witnessed and felt. The medium that in 1945 indelibly con firmed the rumors of war now passes the information on to a new generation - with filmmakers like Spielberg the custodians of an awful legacy. No wonder then that Spielberg's act of historical reclamation in an age in which Holocaust denial advertises itself in the pages of college newspapers has shielded the director from the usual critical qualifica tions. Schindlers List is overlong, lachry mose, and preachy in its final act; Neesom is a weak centerpiece, soft focus matinee idol photography notwithstanding; the sec ondary characters are a faceless chorus; and, though this is a story of endurance and sur vival, a Holocaust movie in which none of the sympathetic characters dies seems to miss the point of its subject (even in a box car on the way to Auschwitz, Ben Kingsley's character is blessed by providential Hollywood intervention, never truly a risk). Schindlers List closes with a frame-break ing coda in which the survivors of 1945 transmute cinematically into their present day selves and descendants. In the real pre sent now, in color, in Israel, a procession of Schindler's Jews and Spielberg's actors march by to lay a pebble on the grave of Oskar Schindler. The last mourner, standing alone at the foot of the grave in a long shot, is Liam Neesom, head bowed in reverence. One wonders why it is not the director him self at the graveside - a gesture rejected as too Hitchcockian and self- aggrandizing? until one realizes that Spielberg's homage this time is to history, not film." - Thomas Doherty, Cineaste Public Opinion "It’s no doubt that Schindler’s List is still one of the greatest films ever made. It’s almost 29 years old and it’s been shown to people all over the world. Whether they found the film by accident, if they had to watch it for any research or if they were curious because it was a film by Steven Spielberg. Back in 1993, he shook the world with the emotional weight and the affected sorrow for millions and millions of lives lost in the Holocaust. Listening to Spielberg’s experience of making this film was so heartbreaking for him. If I was a director making a powerful story with a gruesome depiction, it would shake me up and made me needed a moment. He rightfully earned that Best Director Oscar for bravely making a historical film that would shake you, stun you, and leave you speechless. It was good of Martin Scorsese stepping down to let Steven Spielberg direct Schindler’s List for his family, their history and the Jewish culture. I’ve already talked about this film a few years ago when it was put back into theaters for it’s 25th anniversary, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it that much. So I guess I can talk about it again. I was about 15 or 16 watching Schindler’s List for the first time, my grandmother had is on VHS and I liked learning about history growing up, so I decided to watch it. I know it was about the Holocaust and I heard a lot of unanimous reviews. I’ve also already learned about the horrific atrocities happening to millions and millions of Jews in school. But this? This was like nothing I’ve prepared for. It was like it was happening in front of me! I didn’t cry about it as much as I do now when I watch it. But my first reaction to the film’s nature was filled with disgust, anger, and I was left speechless. Until it got to being a powerful and beautifully made film. I applaud Spielberg for making an incredible film!" - Stanley Scorsese, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion schindler's list "I see the aching words of Elie Wiesel born in black and white: the metal eyes of Nazi Germany on Israel, the numbered numberless, the animalized who once were men — whose children will not know the innocence of childhood again — and still, the falling ash, the burning snow, the deep, remorseless appetite of sin. And there am I, entirely, one of them, lost in the heavy silence of the room without the power to conquer or condemn the tyranny, the terror, or their doom. Too many think of hell and live in fear of death, and never know that hell was here." - Corey Harvard Factoids Previous Rankings #4 (2020), #15 (2018), #10 (2016), #15 (2014), #10 (2013), #21 (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), 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), Francis Ford Coppola (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 (7), 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), 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 #22 Fanboy Ranking, #13 Cinema Ranking #16 Old Farts Ranking, #16 Damn Kids Ranking #16 Ambassador Ranking, #16 All-American Ranking #25 Cartoon Ranking, #16 Damn Boomer Ranking (AKA the greatest scene ever shot, so heart breaking and powerful)

Number 17 "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts." ( @Plain Old Tele seeing every entry on this list that isn't Black Stallion, Lawrence of Arabia, or a black and white silent french commentary on the Communist state told through the perspective of the children in Disney's Lab Rats) About the Film Synopsis "The story of British officer T.E. Lawrence’s mission to aid the Arab tribes in their revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Lawrence becomes a flamboyant, messianic figure in the cause of Arab unity but his psychological instability threatens to undermine his achievements." Its Legacy "Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadog, Wales on 16 August 1888. From a young age he exhibited an active interest in architecture, monuments and antiquities. At the age of 15, he and a friend completed a survey of parish churches in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire, and monitored building sites in Oxford to ensure that any antiquities found were properly catalogued and presented to the Ashmolean Museum. Between 1907 and 1910, Lawrence studied History at Jesus College, Oxford. During this time, he toured France by bicycle, collecting photographs, drawings, and measurements of medieval castles. This would form the basis of his dissertation. In 1909, he completed a remarkable solo 1,000-mile trek through Ottoman Syria visiting Crusader castles. Following his studies, Lawrence became an archaeologist. He worked in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, at that time all part of the Ottoman Empire. This first-hand knowledge and experience earned him a posting to Cairo after he enlisted in the British Army in October 1914. He served in the intelligence staff of the British Middle East Command in the First World War campaign against the Turks. In 1916, Lawrence was posted to Hejaz, in modern Saudi Arabia, to work with the Hashemite forces. The campaign would secure him lasting fame in British popular legend. His role was to act as a liaison officer between the British Government and the Arab tribes. The British were attempting to rally the Arabs against the ruling Ottoman Empire. They hoped that an internal revolt could help break the deadlock in the war in the Middle East. Lawrence was not the only British officer engaged in this work, but he is undoubtedly the most famous. His role required diplomatic as well as military skills, and he was able to build an effective relationship with Emir Feisal, a son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca and an important commander. As impressive as his military feats were, it was the image that Lawrence created for himself, of the European adopting Arab dress and customs, that furthered his reputation and sealed his legend in popular culture. In August 1919, the American journalist Lowell Thomas launched a multimedia show in London called ‘With Allenby in Palestine’, which included a lecture, dancing, and Arabic music. Lawrence had initially featured in a supporting role. But it soon became clear to Thomas that images shot of Lawrence on campaign had captured the public imagination. Thomas arranged to photograph Lawrence again, this time wearing white robes and carrying the jambiya Sherif Nasir had given him. With these new photos he relaunched his show as ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’ in early 1920. It was extremely popular. It was seen by more than 3 million people between 1920 and 1924, and made Lawrence a star. In 1962, the legend of Lawrence was renewed again with David Lean’s epic feature film Lawrence of Arabia. Its star, Peter O’Toole, was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance. Once again, it was Lawrence’s appearance in Arab dress that was central to the film’s marketing. Lawrence's robes and dagger play major roles in the film. When Sherif Ali, the character played by Omar Sharif, burns Lawrence’s British kit before giving him his Arab robes, it is a moment of enormous dramatic and narrative significance. It marks Lawrence’s cultural transition from British officer to a member of the tribe and helps complete his cultural assimilation, making his mission more successful. The attack on Aqaba, for which Lawrence was awarded the jambiya dagger, was no doubt overly dramatised in the film. But the dagger and the robes are the iconic items at the heart of the movie. They have shaped and dictated the prism through which we in modern Britain and elsewhere in the world - including the Middle East - think of Lawrence of Arabia, and Britain's role in shaping the region." - U.K. National Propaganda Army Museum From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Why, in the midst oř the activities oř Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and the French New Wave, would so much money be squandered in 1962 on a realist epic? Terry Eagleton contends, in another context, that "empire was a response to modernism" (5). Stylistically, Lean went against the current oř his time, which in the cinema was modernist. In privileging realism to serve the narrative oř an imperial protagonist, Lean was retarding a cinema struggling to emerge řrom Hollywood's own hegemony- classical, realist, narrative cinema. This "camel opera," as Bosley Crowther dismissed it in his 1962 review in the New York Times, was, above all, a deřense oř a menopausal empire and oř "Englishness" against the mounting assaults řrom the margins and centers oř Europe by sympathizers oř the cause oř world liberation movements and, more parochially, a European modernist cinema. It is relevant to note, in passing, that the Lawrence of the film never uttered a word which was not in English, although the real-life counterpart wrote (and bragged) prořusely about his knowledge oř Arab dialects and took the trouble to speak them. From water-boys to Prince Faisal, řrom the Howeitat Auda to his little son, the imperial hegemony oř English in the film was rampant, total. To be human was to be English, one could not escape řearing. Clearly, the vision oř universal "Englishness" repulsed the eřřort oř the narrative to be liberal. There is no doubt that Lawrence of Arabia meant to promote liberal humanism, the only banner an empire sympathizer could raise while mustering justifications řor approving the domination oř other people. Lean, the řuture adapter oř E. M. Forster's A Passage to India ( 1988), pleaded already in Lawrence of Arabia řor a dialogue between East and West while at the same time advancing the notion that the more Westernized the colonial Other got, the easier the dialogue became. Witness the romance between Ali and Lawrence, growing with Alfs indoctrination into Western ideology to which he acceded by reading about parliamentary democracy -a reading he undertook stung by Lawrence's charge that the "Arabs are a little people" and would not become great until they put their diřřerences aside, as Europeans presumably do, in their parliaments. Witness, by contrast, the alienation between Lawrence and Auda, portrayed as an un-reclaimable residue oř Arab tribalism, a naturally good man (even řatherly) but habituated to the Bedouin's love oř plunder and to allegedly "amusing" and childish notions oř honor. Lean's portrayal oř Auda as brave but simple-minded is the more damning as Auda, not Lawrence, seems to have been, according to Aldington's account, the real strategist, with British approval, behind the Akaba plan and its true leader. The condescending or outright hypocritical liberal postures go on: Lean celebrated Forstels famous cliche "only connect" with Lawrence's passion for Arabia, a passion regrettably, the film qualified, thwarted by English habits of repression so that Lawrence gave it expression through battle; similarly, the disinterested, passionate hero was undermined, bogged down, and finally compromised by a bureaucratic order which he despised. As a liberal film, therfore, Lawrence of Arabia was racked with contradictions, bleating two cheers for the Empire, in Forster 's witty tradition of cheering democracy with which Lean equated the British venture of conquest. Both Suleiman Musa and Richard Aldington insist that Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia, as sanctioned by the "legend," were largely fantastical. Musa advances a case for the Arabs being far more prepared to fight and aware of their perils vis-a-vis the Turkish occupation than Lawrence, the condottiere. First, he describes Lawrence as having a "low, apologetic voice, a silly giggle, a schoolboy grin, a habit of playing stupid practical jokes, and above all, a perpetual kidding" (34). Second, Aldington argues, "he was determined," like his father, "not to work," aping the medieval custom that a knight overlord "never work in order that no peaceful means of gain should mitigate his military ferocity" (40). Third, he attacks Lawrence's prose: "Something like six thousand words of fine writing are devoted to a two-day camel ride from the coast to Feisal's camp, which shows a singular contempt for his reader's patience" (328). Fourth, he sneers at the myth of Lawrence's the Medieval scholar, which had it that he read "strange" books, chief among them, The Song of Roland , a classic that, in Aldington's words, "every schoolgirl" of his generation read (40). Fifth he tackles Lawrence's military prowess: he was not, as he promoted himself, the lone saboteur of the Hejaz railroad but worked with a task force of French officers (140); Akaba was Auda's initiative, ordered by the London War committee on 16 July 1916 (183); Lawrence did not like Feisal (whom he considered a weak military leader) nor Feisal him ( 140); as for his "heroic" actions at the taking oř Akaba, Aldington reports that "in fact, Lawrence accidentally shot his own camel in the back of the head and was thrown from it, remained stunned, and woke up when the action was over over and Turkish soldiers were being massacred [by Auda's tribe]" (184-185). In other words, a professional orientalist had to deliver a vision of the Orient in a consonant narrative that might justify the West's will-to-power. One thinks, by way of an analogy, of those Ingres "Odalisques" in the Turkish baths, naked, fleshy, perpetually poised between the waters they have bathed in and the towels they cannot reach to dry themselves, trapped by their poses into immobility and blamed by the hypocritical spectator for their nakedness. Likewise, the hero of Lawrence of Arabia is constrained by the propaganda he is a vehicle for from emerging as a meaningful rather than a foolish contradicton." - Luciana Bohne, Film Criticism Public Opinion "Possibly the most majestic movie ever made. Every shot and cut is carefully considered; the film is jaw-dropping in a theater. Obviously, the brownface is not good to say the least, and the second half somehow feels as long as the first due to it not being as compelling, but this movie is more than the sum of its parts. O’Toole and Sharif elevate their characters to feeling immense, and Jarre’s score sweeps you away just as much as that perfect cinematography. Absolutely a transcendent experience; see this epic in 70mm at any opportunity you get." - @Blankments The Poetic Opinion lab rat or scientist "Cops are the Justice Self Defense is jail time Humans are the causes of crime Government is cause of crime Blood is for the cops Money is for the government Glory is got the military Capitalism dominates the citizens School is our gateway to lifetime jobs College isn't free College is the government way of getting money in their pockets" - Aeric Johnson Factoids Previous Rankings #22 (2020), #87 (2018), #21 (2016), #47 (2014), #31 (2013), #66 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (4), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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 (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (11), 1990s (19), 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), 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 #34 Fanboy Ranking, #9 Cinema Ranking #4 Old Farts Ranking, #28 Damn Kids Ranking #2 Ambassador Ranking, #19 All-American Ranking #15 Cartoon Ranking, #17 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 18 "Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth." About the Film Synopsis Dinosaurs go roar, stomp, chomp, chomp. Its Legacy "Legendary visual effects magician Dennis Muren admitted that two decades ago while supervising the full-motion dinosaurs on Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park — a film that would become a defining work in the history of visual effects — he “wasn’t aware of how much of a game-changer it was going to be.”mBut George Lucas knew. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Muren recalled that while working on Jurassic Park at Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic VFX house, “George came by, and I said I was hoping that [someday] we could do something like 2001: A Space Odyssey. George said, ‘you don’t know it, but you’re working on it.'” That same year, Tim Alexander started his first industry job at Disney’s former Buena Vista Visual Effects, and a group from the team went to see Jurassic Park. “We were blown away; we weren’t doing anything remotely like what ILM was doing,” said Alexander, who 20 years later would find himself at ILM as VFX supervisor on Jurassic World. “Jurassic Park was a huge leap forward, everyone recognized it. It was a milestone in the switch over to the computer realm.” “When I started [at Buena Vista] there were only six people in digital, and most came over from optical [effects]. Digital was the future,” Alexander said. “Within a year we were up to 35 people in the digital department. Jurassic Park was the turning point.” Muren — who recently celebrated 40 years at ILM — is the most honored artist in his field, having won a remarkable nine Oscars in VFX for such seminal films as The Empire Strikes Back, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and, of course, Jurassic Park. The latter brought to the screen the most realistic dinosaurs audiences had ever seen at that time, a combination of animatronics and fully computer-generated creatures. The CG work was difficult, and during production even Muren had moments of doubt. “I had never seen CG skin that looked real, other than some university research. [Before Jurassic Park] we did T2, and that was complicated. We did a lot of tests to see if we could make the dinosaurs work. It was a lot of algorithms, [for instance] to see if we keep the creatures’ skin from tearing. We had the fallback of stop motion.”" - Denis Muren, The Hollywood Report From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "A heart-pounding pace and a zoo parade of prehistoric behemoths power Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park," a hellzapopping tour of the land that time almost forgot. A dumbed-down adaptation of Michael Crichton's techno-novel on the dangers of dinosaur cloning, it's not Spielberg at the top of his game, but it's dino-mite just the same. "Jurassic Park" does for live-action critters what "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" did for toons. In that sense, it's a cinematic landmark, but in terms of plot and character, it's about as well developed as "Godzilla." The human actors are little more than Spielberg's designated dinosaur-gawkers. Jaws suitably agape, they simulate awe for the arrival of every skyscraping beast. Crichton's cautionary tale has been altered to reflect Spielberg's sappy sensibilities, but the premise remains implausibly monstrous: Dinosaurs get a second chance at world dominance when a shortsighted billionaire developer, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), stocks his Costa Rican theme park with a variety of humongous Mesozoic has-beens. Talk about raiding the lost ark. The wondrous menagerie has been cloned from blood cells found in the stomachs of fossilized mosquitoes. There are what the kids of the cast (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello, as Hammond's grandchildren) call the "veggiesaurs" -- herds of lowing, long-necked brachiosaurs and gallivanting, fleet-footed gallimimuses. And there are the "meatasaurs," like the sweetly chirping dilophosaurus, who seems E.T. sweet till she spits a blinding poison loogie in your face. Parents, these things have big, long teeth and a powerful hunger for the young ones. There's a reason for the rating: Under 13, be well advised." - Rita Kempley, The Washington Post (1995) Public Opinion "i strongly relate to jeff goldblum in this film because in this scenario i too would just walk around being sexy and flirting with laura dern then get injured at literally the first instance of danger and spend the rest of the time lying dramatically on a table, still being sexy and annoying everyone but with my top off this time" - ciara, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion jurassic world "how weird that i could miss something as simple as your odd habit of saying "zoom zoom zoom" any time you're in motion" - Megan Grace Factoids Previous Rankings #18 (2020), #19 (2018), #35 (2016), #9 (2014), #27 (2013), #38 (2012) Director Count Steven Spielberg (4), James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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), 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 (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (11), 1990s (19), 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), 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 #10 Fanboy Ranking, #26 Cinema Ranking #42 Old Farts Ranking, #14 Damn Kids Ranking #17 Ambassador Ranking, #18 All-American Ranking #7 Cartoon Ranking, #21 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 19 "They are nice because they're rich." About the Film Synopsis "All unemployed, Ki-taek’s family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident." Its Legacy "Korean culture has created buzz all around the globe with it’s music (Kpop), K-Dramas, and movies. Bong Joon-ho's dark comedy drama, Parasite (2019) had a significant hand in the same as it won the Academy Award for the Best Picture and it was a cultural breakthrough. With numerous accolades, 'Parasite' brought significant interest and curiosity among consumers and non-consumers of the Korean culture. It marked a watershed change in Korean cinema by getting international recognition and a new spotlight on it. What were the elements that captured the audience's interest in Parasite? Was it just the daunting reality of our society that people can relate to, or the freshness of a new kind of cinema that moved beyond the commercialisation? All these reasons played an essential role in engaging the audience, not just with the film but the Korean culture, much like what happened with India and Indian culture when 'Jai Ho' won an Oscar. Like a national victory, the people of South Korea collectively celebrated this feat. The world, through this movie, was able to see and explore more of Korean cinema; its quality content was hidden before Parasite happened. Bong Joon-ho's filmography has always left the audiences in awe and broadened their perspective. The rich and the poor class gap and the class warfare, the hierarchy between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat can be felt and experienced globally as the gap between them widens. Bong Joon-ho's movie gave a boost to the non-commercialised cinema. At the same time, they were bringing back the hope that non-English films will have a chance at being recognised on a global platform. The streaming sites have now made available different, and all kinds of content from across the world at just a click away. Pandemic and the lockdown increased the usage of streaming sites with which people explored the unexplored, unraveled the path they never thought existed. These sites and subtitles/dubbing has put a stop to the perennial question of accessibility. As Boog Joon said while giving his golden globe acceptance speech for the best foreign film, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” the pandemic gave Korean culture new audiences, new explorers who delve right into it, whether after Parasite, Crash Landing on You, or BTS (K-Pop boy band). How much of this will help or has helped in stopping/reducing Asian hate crimes is debatable but it positively impacted movie lovers; it increased Korean cinema consumption globally while creating an interest in regional films and not the commercialised ones. In giving filmmakers a boost to go for movies, they believe in and challenge themselves by creating movies alike. From contributing to the Korean wave to becoming a part of cultural diplomacy, Parasite did it all, and how it has affected these aspects is not going anywhere anytime soon." - Entertainment Desk, City Spidey From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Bong Joon Ho’s thriller film, Parasite, has swept away viewers and critics since it premiered in May 2019. The film was the first to win the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d'Or with unanimous votes since 2013 and garnered four Academy Awards including Best Picture, becoming the highest-grossing South Korean film and first South Korean film to receive an Academy Award nomination (Jurgensen 2020). The film tracks the poor Kim family as they tactfully infiltrate—as English tutor, art tutor, housekeeper, and chauffeur—the rich Park family, “parasitically.” The film begins as charming and comedic but gradually turns into horror and tragedy as worlds of wealth and poverty collide, and the consequences of feigning rich leaves more than splattered blood (Joon Ho 2019). Parasite, beyond its ability to move seamlessly between the emotional extremities of cinematic experience, provides important questions for medical practitioners and educators. As a writer in nonfiction, Parasite struck me as a story which unfolded with layers of moral complexity the way I remembered reading Crime and Punishment for the first time or any harrowing contemporary memoir. While many films directly tackle the experience of illness—(Shu 2020) most recently The Farewell as well as Dallas Buyers Club, Still Alice, and James White—we might look to Parasite as a film for better understanding narrative humility. Beyond the sociopolitical tensions Parasite navigates, the film is effective as a tool for better understanding this construct of narrative humility in the context of medicine. The vexed interpersonal relationships in the movie—between rich and poor families, between old and new housekeeper, between the seemingly innocent or ignorant children—constantly disrupts our sense of “knowing,” urging viewers to reckon with their own discomfort while still being engaged, active witnesses to the unfolding story. There is no point in the film when the viewer, I would agree, feels comfortable because the characters are reliably unpredictable—the former housekeeper seems one-dimensionally sweet until she is not, the English tutor’s actions seem to follow a logical trend until suddenly they do not. Manhola Dargis, film reviewer for the New York Times, wrote that “the movie’s greatness isn’t a matter of [Bong’s] apparent ethics or ethos—he’s on the side of decency—but of how he delivers truths, often perversely and without an iota of self-serving can” (10 October 2019). Perhaps even more productive is the way Parasite creates space for discussion around social justice that relates to the work of caregiving without being directly about it. I teach a series of narrative medicine workshops to undergraduate students and find myself resisting the urge to rely on stories that relate directly to experiences of illness. Health Humanities courses at the college or graduate level often invoke direct representations of illness, and humanities workshops for medical professionals often use such texts as well (Berry et al. 2017). But, if we consider what DasGupta writes, “Narrative humility allows clinicians to recognise that each story we hear holds elements that are unfamiliar—be they cultural, socioeconomic, sexual, religious, or idiosyncratically personal” (981), then we must seek stories from outside of medicine to better understand the work within the encounters of medicine. Just like evaluating and reflecting on the Self is a necessary step in understanding the Other that sits across from us in any hospital, classroom, or daily encounter." - Yoshiko Iwai, Journal of Medical Humanities Public Opinion "Have you ever gone to see a great film by yourself? And after you've seen the film, have you gone back home to hear nothing but a quiet whir, the film's imagery still enduring in your mind? I hear that same quiet whir. I feel that same stillness. With Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho has made a significant work. This is a work of art with iconic set-pieces and well-rounded characters. Classic cinema with a distinct message to share--in others words, a film that manages to say something. Do not miss out on this one" - @SLAM! The Poetic Opinion parasitic adams "Hatched my biochemical egg. Looking into a clutch displace. Waiting for the Sun that I didn't make. So I parasite Eve. Married them to the birthstone; of another world. Far from the frozen throne. And sitting on the moon. So I parasite Eve. The lungs that held air; also held back. What plants grew. To clutch; myself in on your games. Where launch forth the Diabolic lunch. What human remains I gave up to you. My soul; like a liquid language of the mind. That tastes the flames delight! When the parallel world meets my tomb. When the angels live on the moon. I'll sit up forever counting the stars, like brain cells in curbs. My Satellite children racing me and completing to a unfinished line. So I parasite Eve." - reflectionshadow Factoids Previous Rankings #27 (2020), NA (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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), 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 (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (11), 1990s (18), 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), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (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 #7 Fanboy Ranking, #29 Cinema Ranking #68 Old Farts Ranking, #12 Damn Kids Ranking #14 Ambassador Ranking, #21 All-American Ranking #5 Cartoon Ranking, #26 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 20 "Witness me." About the Film Synopsis "An apocalyptic story set in the furthest reaches of our planet, in a stark desert landscape where humanity is broken, and most everyone is crazed fighting for the necessities of life. Within this world exist two rebels on the run who just might be able to restore order." Its Legacy "The characters were intriguing, the stunts were exhilarating, and every frame was bursting with incredible, how’d-they-do-that nerve. “Mad Max: Fury Road” set a new high-water mark for action filmmaking when it came out in 2015, and no summer blockbuster since has been able to match its turbocharged ingenuity. Even Oscar-winning auteurs have been awed by George Miller’s operatically staged spectacle. “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho said last year that the scale of the movie brought him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” he said in a 2017 interview, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” So how did Miller and his cast pull it off and survive to tell the tale? Five years after “Fury Road” was released, I asked 20 of its key players what making it was like. Though its post-apocalyptic plot is deceptively simple — road warrior Max (Tom Hardy) and the fierce driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron) must race across the desert to escape the vengeful Immortan Joe and his fleet of kamikaze War Boys — filming the movie was anything but easy. “Like anything that has some worth to it, it comes with complicated feelings,” Theron said. “I feel a mixture of extreme joy that we achieved what we did, and I also get a little bit of a hole in my stomach. There’s a level of ‘the body remembers’ trauma related to the shooting of this film that’s still there for me.” “It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life,” said the actress Riley Keough, while her co-star Rosie Huntington-Whiteley added, “You could have made another movie on the making of it.” As for Hardy? “It left me irrevocably changed,” he said. Here, in the cast and crew’s own words, is how a nearly impossible project managed to become an Oscar-winning action masterpiece. FIND OUT AND READ MORE BEHIND THE NYTIMES PAYWALL!" - NYT From the Filmmaker JK This is the rest of that NYT article GEORGE MILLER (director) For so long, whenever the idea of another “Mad Max” movie came up, I thought there wasn’t much more I could do with it, but I specifically remember the moment that changed. I was crossing the street in Los Angeles and this very simple idea popped in my head: “What if there was a ‘Mad Max’ movie that was one long chase, and the MacGuffin was human?” I was flying back to Australia a month later, ruminating on it, and by the time I landed, I called Doug Mitchell and said, “I think I’ve got an idea.” DOUG MITCHELL (producer) There were a number of names thrown out for the female lead back when we first started, [like] Uma Thurman. MILLER I remember we were talking about Charlize even then. Her agent said she wasn’t interested, but I mentioned it to her over a decade later, and she said, “No one ever told me!” RILEY KEOUGH (Capable, another one of the Immortan’s escaped “wives”) They were holding crazy, nontraditional auditions in Australia. They’d have bunches of us, five to six girls, go through this audition process with no scenes from the film but a lot of improv, a lot of acting-class stuff. We had no idea if we’d get chosen or not, and out of my group, I was the only one who got selected. KRAVITZ When they cast me, I was brought to a room that I wasn’t allowed to leave, and I sat there and read the script. It was one of the strangest scripts I’d ever seen, because it was like a really long comic book. JOHN SEALE (cinematographer) I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, so I gave up. I thought, “They’ve been in preproduction for 10 years, let’s just go make it.” KEOUGH It was the craziest thing you could imagine, and the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced. For one, it felt very real, which is why it looks so incredible. Everyone in this film was so excited to be their characters that walking around on set was like actually walking around in that world. It was almost like a cosplay thing. NICHOLAS HOULT (Nux, one of the Immortan’s War Boys) Hugh, who played the Immortan, would put photos of himself all around the stunt gym where the War Boys trained. GIBSON All the action had to be real. The hair can’t stand up on the back of your neck — not for me, anyway — watching Vin Diesel drag a three-ton safe down through perfect right-angle turns on the street. The whole rationale was to make it as real as possible so that as much as possible was at stake. HARDY As we dug in, it was dangerous, or certainly could have been extremely so, if it weren’t for the methodical professionalism and preparation of the experts: stunt coordination, stunt team and riggers. KRAVITZ We would do exercises like writing letters to our captor, really interesting stuff that created deep empathy. I’m glad we had that, because it was such a crazy experience — so long and chaotic — that it would be easy to forget what we were doing if we didn’t have this really great foundation that we could return to. KEOUGH I thought it was amazing that George cared so much. It could have just been like, “This is a big Hollywood movie, now put on your bathing suits and get outside.” THERON The biggest thing that was driving that entire production was fear. I was incredibly scared, because I’d never done anything like it. I think the hardest thing between me and George is that he had the movie in his head and I was so desperate to understand it. SIXEL It was very difficult for the actors, because there’s no master shot, no blocked-out scenes. Their performances were made of these tiny little moments SEALE (cinematographer) It was tough for them. The crew can be protected by the elements — the cold and wind and sand — but they can’t. They’re wearing a wardrobe that is very specific. ABBEY LEE (the Dag, another “wife”) It looks warm, but we shot it in the winter and it was blisteringly freezing. Us girls weren’t wearing much, and Riley got hypothermia. KEOUGH There were night shoots that were brutal, and there was so much dust that your face would be covered with three inches of sand by the end of the day. We kept it together pretty well, I think, for the first five months. KRAVITZ By the end, we wanted to go home so badly. It had been nine months, and not nine months where you’re in a city and you hang out in your trailer. It was nine months of the environment you’re seeing in the movie, with nothing around. You really do start to lose your mind a little bit. MILLER There was a high degree of difficulty on the film, and unless you are entirely rigorous about safety, something is inevitably going to go wrong. That was my biggest anxiety — it’s something I’d experienced before [when a stuntman broke his leg], and it gnaws at you. I guess the actual working process of the actors, I probably should have paid more attention to." - Kyle Buchanan, NYT Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Like Mad Max 2, Fury Road is an after-Eden narrative that represents the human Fall from the Garden due to capitalist accumulation gone wild. Ostensibly depicting a post-nuclear-holocaust world, Fury Road could equally represent a future marked by climate change and the environmental issues associated with the Anthropocene – drought, pollution and severe weather patterns. We learn from the opening voiceover that there have been oil wars and then later water wars, battles fought over these increasingly scarce natural resources. The film's plot follows Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and the Five Wives as they seek the Green Place, Furiosa's former homeland that supposedly lies to the east of the Citadel. In seeking the Green Place, these women hope to not only recover the Garden of Eden, but also to escape patriarchal oppression and enslavement by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the lord of the Citadel, and his army of 'War Boys'. Furiosa says that in seeking the Green Place, she hopes to find redemption, a term that refers both to being saved from evil and to reclaiming one's freedom. Thus, as in the traditional recovery narrative, the film initially sets up the Garden of Eden as a beautiful, good place in need of rediscovery. Unlike the traditional recovery narrative, however, the film also marks the Garden of Eden as a place of freedom from patriarchy, particularly for women like Furiosa and the Five Wives. In this way, Fury Road disrupts the traditional Edenic recovery narrative by representing nature as a space of feminist possibility rather than a safe haven for masculine agency. Despite this promise, however, the women discover midway through the film that the Green Place no longer exists. After a hard journey, the women, along with Max (Tom Hardy) and the recently acquired Nux (Nicholas Hoult), arrive at the Green Place, only to learn from the remaining female caretakers of the Green Place that the soil and water was poisoned so badly that they 'couldn't grow anything' anymore. Thus, the film's protagonists and audience learn that the Garden of Eden no longer exists in the material reality of the film's world. Rather, the Garden of Eden only exists in the memories and imaginations of the film's characters." - Michelle Yates, Science Fiction Film and Television Public Opinion "me driving 1MPH above the speed limit: I’M GONNA DIE HISTORIC ON THE FURY ROAD" - Iana, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion "Where must we go? We who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves." - The First History Man Factoids Previous Rankings #10 (2020), #21 (2018), #24 (2016), NA (2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (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 (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (11), 1990s (18), 2000s (17), 2010s (9) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Australia (1), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (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), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (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 #23 Fanboy Ranking, #20 Cinema Ranking #28 Old Farts Ranking, #17 Damn Kids Ranking #42 Ambassador Ranking, #17 All-American Ranking #24 Cartoon Ranking, #19 Damn Boomer Ranking

alright. let's go rapid fire! Number 125 Blazing Saddles (1974, Mel Brooks) Number 124 The Dark Knight Rises (2012, Christopher Nolan) Number 123 Toy Story 3 (2010, Lee Unkrich) Number 122 Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve) Number 121 North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock) Number 120 The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese) Number 119 The Terminator (1984, James Cameron) Number 118 All About Eve (1950, Joseph K. Mankiewicz) Number 117 Dunkirk (2017, Christopher Nolan) Number 116 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004, Alfonso Cuaron)

Number 21 "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." About the Film Synopsis "Eighties teenager Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time to 1955, inadvertently disrupting his parents’ first meeting and attracting his mother’s romantic interest. Marty must repair the damage to history by rekindling his parents’ romance and - with the help of his eccentric inventor friend Doc Brown - return to 1985." Its Legacy "The Power of Love With Huey Lewis and the News coming fresh off their chart-topping 1983 album Sports, the band was a no-brainer choice to contribute Back To the Future’s soundtrack. Along with the lesser known “Back in Time,” “The Power of Love” appears in all three of the series’ films, most notably when Marty is skateboarding to school in Part I. A hard-rock version is also featured when his band the Pinheads auditions for the school’s Battle of the Bands competition, with Lewis himself making a cameo to tell the kids they’re “just too darn loud.” The song’s ties to the film carried over to the song’s music video, which features Doc Brown accidentally losing the DeLorean while watching a performance from the group. Reviving the Phrase "Great Scott" Aside from time travel, we can thank Doc Brown for bringing the phrase “Great Scott!” back into the American lexicon. The phrase was widely used in literature throughout the late 1800s, but had basically been phased out well before the film’s release. With it being Doc’s catch-phrase throughout the series, it was revived and eventually immortalized in memes across the internet. Elijah Wood's Film Career Even though Elijah Wood was well on his way to becoming a child star after appearing in a David Fincher-directed Paula Abdul video, his brief appearance in Part II was his first major film role. Wood is “Video Game Boy #2” and meets Marty in the diner while playing a light gun arcade game. Marty shows him how to play the “primitive” game with Wood replying, “You mean you have to use your hands?” Admittedly, Wood most likely still would’ve marched into Mordor and voiced a tap-dancing penguin without this credit on his résumé, but as we learn in BTTF, whatever changes in the past affects the future, so let’s not take any chances by leaving out this role on his road to stardom." - Paste Magazine From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "It could all have been so different. In fact, it could all have been a disaster. At the end of 1984 director Robert Zemekis, who had been shooting his second movie, Back To The Future, for over a month was not a happy man. He was saddled with a lead actor who just didn't cut it as a happy-go-lucky, wisecracking teen. He was more like an angst-ridden 40-year-old struggling to make sense of existence in a godless universe. To make matters worse he'd seen a young actor perfect for the role. Michael J. Fox, then the star of TV sitcom Family Ties radiated youthful joie de vivre and frankly, for a movie with a solid teen base, was just gosh-darned cuter. Something had to be done. Eric Stoltz was out. Fox was in. And they started all over again. But if Back To The Future was the product of a fractured shoot, what emerged was well worth the agony. An almost perfectly wrought slice of old fashioned escapist fantasy, it not only announced the celluloid arrival of the finest light-comedy actor of his generation, but was one of the very few films made in the avaricious, style-challenged 80s that transcended and survived the ugly extremes of its era (skintight stonewashed jeans which, one unkind critic remarked, "look like they've been masturbated over by a troupe of boy scouts" excepted) and which remains an utterly beguiling little gem. There's Alan Silvestri's Williamsesque score; a plethora of memorable set-pieces — Marty's premature invention of the skateboard as he rips the top of a young kid's box-cart; his introduction of rock 'n' roll which develops into an anachronistic, Hendrix-style guitar solo ("Maybe you're not ready for that," McFly admits, "but trust me, your kids are going to love it.") as well as nods to other sci-fi movies — an innovation in the mid-80s when Tarantino was still re-racking the late-returns. When Marty has to convince his not-yet-dad to ask his not-yet-mom out he poses as Darth Vader (a variation on the joke appears in Part III when he calls himself Clint Eastwood) and claims to have come from the planet Vulcan. And then there's the tastefully-handled Oedipal riff which, in less talented hands, might have been uncomfortable, if not downright nauseating. But at the heart of Back To The Future is the towering talent of the diminutive (his least favourite word, "Why can't they just call me short?") Michael J. Fox. Thrust into the spotlight in recent times due to illness, Fox established himself here as quite simply the most charming screen presence of the 80s. Zemekis seems to be accusing the 80s of betraying the American Post War dream; Marty's frumpy, nervous, bullied family are not the way things were meant to turn out (next to them at the dinner table you wonder if Marty ever inquired whether he was adopted) in the same way that the grasping 80s are not the legitimate offspring of the "innocent" 50s. Of course this is all a bit speculative. But if Back To The Future doesn't hold big ideas well, it remains like its star — small, but perfectly formed." - Adam Smith, Empire Public Opinion "This is easily one of the greatest movies of all-time! Not only that, but one of my favorites! Such a great story and it is full of great performances. I think it is one of the few perfect movies!" - @Empire The Poetic Opinion back to the future "I walk into the cafe The jukebox is on loud It's the latest Bill Haley record My head is in the clouds I can see Elise sitting in a booth I want so much to have a chat She is the girl of my dreams Life without her is awfully flat I have my new sneakers on my feet Maybe at last our orbits will collide I walk right past her and nod as I do No response, I really want to hide The date is November 5 1955 This date is going to go down in history Just another day, snakes alive! This is the day I ask Elise to marry me I sidle over with a piece of paper On it is written my poem: "Roses are red, violets are blue S*d the rest, it's just me and you" Elise looked at me stunned for a while Then she said hello and gave me a wry smile!" - Cignlargo Factoids Previous Rankings #7 (2020), #13 (2018), #19 (2016), #16 (2014), #13 (2013), #19 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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 (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (11), 1990s (18), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (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), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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 #16 Fanboy Ranking, #23 Cinema Ranking #21 Old Farts Ranking, #24 Damn Kids Ranking #35 Ambassador Ranking, #20 All-American Ranking #19 Cartoon Ranking, #23 Damn Boomer Ranking

UGH IT POSTED WITHOUT MY PERMISSION WILL REPOST

Number 22 "You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn't have been that sentimental." About the Film Synopsis "A retired San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia investigates the strange activities of an old friend’s wife, all the while becoming dangerously obsessed with her." Its Legacy "Alfred Hitchcock was a director whose films are recognisable as his own, even without the use of odd or striking techniques, and even without creating his own plotlines or scripts. Hitchcock drew his ideas from other sources, such as novels, and seldom wrote his own screenplays, yet most movie buffs know the look and tone of a Hitchcock film almost instantaneously. Vertigo, released in 1958, famously showcases his style of directing exceptionally well. While, of course, it is another of the horror films he is known for, the film is a more profound, more psychological thriller than much of his work. Vertigo may or may not be Hitchcock’s favourite creation, as some movie historians claim, but it is certainly one he put an excessive amount of effort into. The idea of obsession fascinated him, and he was immediately drawn to the obsession-themed novel, which is the basis for the film D’entre Les Morts. He had also expressed great interest in the horror potential of a confusion of fantasy with reality, which Vertigo also provides. He contributed to the script, which took over a year to write and was closely involved with every aspect of the movie’s production, including the set design, costume design, and soundtrack. Every aspect of Vertigo expresses Hitchcock’s vision for the film. The horror in Vertigo is subtle, based not on outward menace but on the dangers of self-deception, obsession, treachery and misplaced trust. In the second half of the movie, much of the tension derives from Ferguson’s compulsion to remake Judy Barton in his dead lover’s image. A scene in which he chooses clothing for Judy which resembles what Madeleine used to wear is not conventionally frightening, but his intensity, and Judy’s losing battle to be accepted as more than another woman’s ghost, have a chilling quality which Hitchcock exploits beautifully. Their relationship is clearly doomed, but how it might end, what the hidden truth is about Judy Barton, and how far the emotionally unbalanced Ferguson might go in the process provides suspense until the grim and ironic conclusion. Hitchcock uses every detail in Vertigo to establish a mood and further the story. He made a point of using a new type of film, which provided more explicit images and allowed for more subtlety of shade and colour than was previously available. He chose Kim Novak’s wardrobe himself, dressing Madeleine elegantly in muted colours of white and pale grey in a bid to portray her as withdrawn and elusive. Novak as Judy Barton, meanwhile, wears bright colours, and her clothing is attractive, even voluptuous, but commonplace. Madeleine really does appear to be the idealised ghost of the more honest and ordinary Judy. Hitchcock helped design the sets and had to have some sets custom-built, as no studio set or real-life setting provided precisely the look and mood he wanted. He also chose the music, which was typical of 1950s films but effective. Hitchcock was open to new and unusual uses of music to set the tone in a film – his distinctive use of a single violin in the murder scene in Psycho may be the best-known example – and he specifically sought out composer Bernard Hermann, who wrote the score for Citizen Kane, to provide music for Vertigo, in addition to carefully chosen classical music for certain scenes. Even the cinematography was innovative for the time. The film made use of unusual zoom-in techniques, apparently explicitly invented for the film, which helped to establish the feeling of actual vertigo during some of Ferguson’s worst moments. Some of the problematic interior shots of the famous bell tower cost inordinate amounts of money for brief images, which contributed to the suspense of the scene." - Monica Reid, Far Out Magazine From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " For more than a decade, since the publication, in 1975, of Laura Mulvey's essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Hitch cock's 1958 film Vertigo has been at the vortex of critical debates about the fundamental structures of classical narrative cinema.1 Psychoanalytic, formalist, feminist, post-structuralist, and Marxist readings of the film have multiplied, making it one of the most frequently analyzed films in the Hitchcock canon, if not in cinema history in general. I will not attempt to explain why Vertigo has been thus honored by critics, though I hope that the intrinsic interest of the film will become obvious in what follows. This is, rather, a critical review of the essays on Vertigo that seem to me most relevant to feminist theory. My aim is to identify certain fundamental prob lems in some of the most interesting of these readings: to point to, for example, a nostalgia for an empirically-based history, the es sence of which is an unproblematized set of references, upon which the "truth" of the film or the ultimate reading of that film would rely. In my confrontation with Hitchcock critics including Mulvey, Rothman, Cavell, Wexman, Modleski, and Jameson, such issues as maternity, bisexuality, the place of the "real" woman in a materi alist reading of the film, and the meaning of allegory from a for malist perspective on Vertigo will be considered. I will offer, finally, a reading that speaks of critical failure even as it gives itself as yet another ultimate, in this case allegorical reading of the film. I will add that, of course, my own presentation of these critics' work is itself "allegorical," in De Man's sense of the word, in that they are figures for me: my allusions to these critics' theories about the film no doubt fail to capture any referential "truth" about their argu ments. Tania Modleski also describes the mother-daughter relationship as an occulted but extraordinarily powerful model for structures of identification in Hitchcock's films. Vertigo is what Modleski calls a "limit text" (p. 87) in its treatment of the problematics of identifi cation first introduced in Rebecca, in that both Vertigo and Rebecca tell the tale of a dead woman's grip on a living "daughter" figure. Hitchcock's ambivalent fascination and Scottie's identification with this mother-daughter dyad, in which the mother constitutes the ghostly, unknown figure the daughter risks becoming, seems to Modleski to deconstruct the very notion of masculine identity. In deed, this is a powerful reading. Unlike Keane, Modleski empha sizes the violence with which the threatened male spectator or di rector seeks to reassert the control destablized in Vertigo by, among other things, the spectacle of female bisexuality, as evidenced in the daughter's continued investment in the ghostly mother. Why is this bisexuality so threatening? Modleski tells us that this is because the woman's bisexuality reminds the man of his own (menacing and alluring) bisexual nature. Just as the Stewart char acter in Rear Window is immobilized and in that way can be iden tified with the victimized female invalid whose murder he is inves tigating, Vertigo's Stewart is in a position of enforced passivity-he suffers from his painful identification with femininity, his own po tential, even actual femininity. At the beginning of the film, while he watches Midge draw a brassiere designed on the principle of the cantilever bridge (a double gesture of demystifying the woman's constructed body and alluding to the mystery of Madeleine, who will jump into the Bay near the bridge), Scottie, too, is wearing female undergarments-a corset. By the mid-point in the film, Scottie has become completely identified not just with Madeleine, but with the sad Carlotta: like her he wanders the streets looking for a lost loved one. Scottie is the deprived mother, just as, for Rothman, Hitchcock is the "unknown" and victimized woman (p. 79). I would add to Modleski's argument about the threatening nature of female bisexuality that, as I have implied above, it is the woman's seeming epistemological privilege with respect to the mother and to the fact of maternity that also renders her bisexu ality both suspect and enviable-and finally eminently co-optable by the desiring man who is watching her, though not without risks. (He risks, among other things, the catatonia, the immobilization, and the symbolic castration undergone by Scottie during the course of the film. He also risks death, but does not die. It is the woman, the "feminine" part of the man, his more vulnerable other, the part of him that is umbilically linked to the mother, who dies or is cast off at the end of the film.) In his essay on the unknown woman, Cavell reminds us that for Freud the repudiation of the feminine is "the bedrock beyond which psychoanalysis cannot go."8 In Vertigo the male subject investigates, adores, abhors, bonds with, and fi nally abjects (in the Kristevian sense) the feminine.9 The fascination with the mother may indeed only be invoked in order to permit a more decisive casting off than was earlier, only partially accom plished." - Susan Write, MLN, Dec., 1991, Vol. 106, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1991), pp. 91093 Public Opinion "Watching a Hitchcock film is rather like going to a play: you're constantly reminded that everything is just pretend. Even if the experience is great, it never quite makes you realize that the same things can happen to you, that people like these can plausibly exist in real life. But Vertigo feels startlingly true, almost confessional, because it's clear that it's Hitchcock's most personal film, the one that came closest to revealing his inner turmoil. Vertigo has a plot so convoluted that it's fully apparent that it's a mere set-up to get to the heart of the film: a chronicle of the protagonist Scottie's obsession. The film is also considerably sympathetic toward the two slighted women in Scottie's life: his friend Midge, and Judy, the woman he tries to mold into Madeline, the woman he has grown obsessed with. Judy is looked upon with sympathy throughout the film. She is not an object of desire, and therefore she is allowed to show emotion. She loves Scottie, and all she wants is for him to love her back. "If I change, will you love me?" she asks him, when she realizes that he will never love her for who she is. It's a heartbreaking moment, one that any girl can identify with. It's also a brilliant demonstration of the changes that women, particularly actresses, go through in order to allow others to consider them desirable. Scottie cannot love any of these women. He only loves an untouchable image, a fantasy that even Madeline would have been unable to fulfill. Scottie isn't the victim here; he is in fact something like a villain, someone who cannot understand the pain he is inflicting upon the people around him. Scottie is Hitchcock, and Vertigo is a piece of Hitchcock's soul put up for endless scrutiny. It was a brave move, and one that revealed him to be a slightly better human being than Scottie, because his protagonist never realized the harm he caused women, while Hitchcock was fully aware of what he was doing, as the film illustrates. Of course he continued to ignore his wife and lust after a fantasy anyway. Vertigo never tries to present solutions. It simply illustrates a situation, and asks us to care." - Judy, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion vertigo "Last time I fell in a shower room I bled like a tumbril dandy and the hotel longed to be rid of me. Taken to the town clinic, I described how I tripped on a steel rim and found my head in the wardrobe. Scalp-sewn and knotted and flagged I thanked the Frau Doktor and fled, wishing the grab-bar of age might be bolted to all civilization and thinking of Rome’s eighth hill heaped up out of broken amphorae. When, anytime after sixty, or anytime before, you stumble over two stairs and club your forehead on rake or hoe, bricks or fuel-drums, that’s the time to call the purveyor of steel pipe and indoor railings, and soon you’ll be grasping up landings having left your balance in the car from which please God you’ll never see the launchway of tires off a brink. Later comes the sunny day when street detail whitens blindly to mauve and people hurry you, or wait, quiet." - Les Murray Factoids Previous Rankings #52 (2020), #50 (2018), #61 (2016), UNRANKED (2014, 2013), #79 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (6), 1960s (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (18), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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 #32 Fanboy Ranking, #17 Cinema Ranking #15 Old Farts Ranking, #25 Damn Kids Ranking #9 Ambassador Ranking, #25 All-American Ranking #14 Cartoon Ranking, #25 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 23 "That's the way it crumbles... cookie-wise." Synopsis "Bud Baxter is a minor clerk in a huge New York insurance company, until he discovers a quick way to climb the corporate ladder. He lends out his apartment to the executives as a place to take their mistresses. Although he often has to deal with the aftermath of their visits, one night he’s left with a major problem to solve." Its Legacy "It’s not a walk in the park to make a truly wonderful film and then do an equally entrancing follow-up. The pressure is sometimes hard to handle, with the audience’s expectations soaring and studio ambitions, in financial terms, just as demanding. It’s definitely not a walk in the park, at least unless you’re Billy Wilder. After the great success of Some Like It Hot, the legendary director once again joined forces with Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, the 1960 comedy-drama that earned the impressive number of ten Academy Award nominations, five of which turned to gold. Written by Wilder and favourite collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, The Apartment is a niftily crafted comedy full of smart humor and not the least dishonest, unconvincing romance, elevated by beautiful performances by Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray and a memorable score by Adolph Deutsch, with an especially successful main theme by renowned British composer Charles Williams. The imaginative work of art director Alexandre Trauner shouldn’t be overlooked as well, for his way of staging the interier of the huge insurance company office is very original and refreshing. But most of all, it is the talented cast, a brilliant man behind the camera and one of the best comedic screenplays of the past century that make the film work so well. The Apartment meant a lot for the careers of Lemmon, who proved his diversity by demonstrating the ability to play both tragic and light-hearted roles, and MacLaine, who built a name for herself in the following years founded on the success of this film. The Apartment is quite frankly a masterfully shot picture based on exquisite writing, a film whose value hasn’t diminished one single bit in over a half of a century, a film which continues to hold a special place in our hearts and minds. Billy Wilder was certainly one of a kind. The Apartment is quite frankly a masterfully shot picture based on exquisite writing, a film whose value hasn’t diminished one single bit in over a half of a century." - Sven Mikulec From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " Billy Wilder credited Berlin as the inspiration for his filmmaking career (Au rich and Jacobsen 50) and twice used the city to conjure the shadow of Na zism and indicate German culpability, but Vienna has mostly remained a subtext, a source of ideas, attitudes, and intertexts that nevertheless seasoned much of his oeuvre. In these too often discounted or disregarded memory jolts is a tacit expression that provides valuable nuance to the knowledge about the man and the artist. Wilder was born into a German-speaking and Austria-identifying Jewish bourgeois family in Sucha, a Polish town in what was Austria-Hungary, but many biographies, even after his death in 2002, have falsely identified his birthplace as Vienna (Hutter). The most surprising such work was the remembrance written by the author of a popular inter view book on Wilder, filmmaker Cameron Crowe (Crowe, "Beyond Sunset Boulevard"). Wilder was indeed educated in Vienna, gaining his first tastes of social hierarchy and identity creation/destruction there, topics that would figure prominently in his cinema. But already in Vienna he was the "other"; the fledgling First Republic rejected his family's application for Austrian citi zenship even though they had been German-speaking subjects of the mon archy and had relocated to Vienna before the end of the War, in 1916. Wilder thus held Polish citizenship during his time in Vienna and Berlin (Krenn 7 8). Ironically, it was perhaps because of this awareness of being (officially) transcultural, he stood out more as an Austrian in Berlin than the other The Apartment's masses also embrace the other sub-rosa sexual contract that Schnitzler displays in Liebelei, Reigen, and particularly Leutnant Gustl— that of the mature married woman and the young gentleman. But even here, modern America has clouded an already questionable moral issue with a banal sense of both independence and conformity. When Baxter ultimately rejects the desires of a married woman he picks up in a bar whose husband is "in Cuba," (suggesting geopolitical tensions and potential America fense), she loudly threatens to complain about his negative attitude directly to her husband. With the exception of Baxter's neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss (jack Kruschen and Naomi Stevens), an obviously Central European Jewish cou ple, many of the characters in the film bear German and Slavic surnames such as Eichelberger, Dobisch, and Matuschka but like Fran Kubelik are not typed as foreigners. Instead, these first- or second-generation "other" Americans blend in with the traditionally American nativist Anglo-Saxons, Scottish, and Dutch like Sheldrake, Baxter, MacDougall, and Vanderhoff, and their aspira tions to crawl up the corporate/class ladder are more than a nod to Americas socially unequal melting pot. It provides a biting reflection of Wilder's own experiences in late imperial Vienna, where non-ethnic German subjects from the monarchy's crownlands would conform and vie for social advancement. Dr. Dreyfuss's name suggests the notorious Dreyfus Affair and the difficulty of assimilation (either in Old Austria or New America) given anti-Semitism, class structures, and racism. Yet the Dreyfuss couple is the most assimilat ed of all in the healthiest understanding of the concept. They are concerned about their community and their neighbors, and they respect the dignity that America has promised them in an egalitarian democracy. Dr. Dreyfuss saves the life of the suicidal Fran, and he and his wife convey the concept of humanism-as-morality to Baxter—as Dreyfuss puts it, to be a "Mensch." It is this Menschlichkeit or humanism that functions as a most important reference to Wilder's own mourning regarding the Holocaust. The suggestion of its loss flashes back to an Austria-Hungary as a duality of mythic soul and corrupt body, or of the once Jewish haven and the future hell." - Robert Dassanowsky, Journal of Austrian Studies Public Opinion "I’ll fully admit that it was really hard to pay attention to the second half because I learned about the loss of Betty by then, and it really clouded my head and put me in a bad mood. I’m only giving this 5 stars because I know it’ll rock my socks when I’m actually in a good mood, because Billy Wilder is a king and can do no wrong." - @Eric the Tank Engine The Poetic Opinion look who's inside again "Trying to be funny and stuck in a room There isn't much more to say about it Can one be funny when stuck in a room? I took a big f*cking breath Trying to be funny and stuck in a room There isn't much more to say about it Can one be funny when stuck in a room? Being in, trying to get something out of it Try making faces Try telling jokes, making little sounds" - Bo Burnham Factoids Previous Rankings #78 (2020), UNRANKED (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (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), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (5), 1960s (6), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (18), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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 #43 Fanboy Ranking, #16 Cinema Ranking #2 Old Farts Ranking, #41 Damn Kids Ranking #18 Ambassador Ranking, #24 All-American Ranking #68 Cartoon Ranking, #18 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 24 "Gentlemen, that's a very sad thing... to be nothing." About the Film Synopsis "The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors’ prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other." Its Legacy "12 Angry Men (1957), the first feature film directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, is a Hollywood classic that, ironically, helped to define an era of filmmaking grounded in the gritty realism and frenetic energy of urban New York. A simple story of a jury’s deliberations in a murder case, where tensions boil over during a hot summer day in the city, it launched Lumet’s career as a filmmaker with a special gift for capturing ordinary lives tossed into difficult situations of moral choice. 12 Angry Men has become a cultural touchstone, a time capsule of American justice before the civil rights era and the expansion of civil liberties in the 1960s. Its influence has been vast, and it established Lumet’s reputation as an artist at the forefront of social change. Without anyone’s necessarily realizing it at the time, 12 Angry Men was among the first films to signal a shift away from the influence and sensibility of the Hollywood studio system. The movie was shot in New York and, with the exception of its star, Henry Fonda, was cast with actors, the eleven other jurors—an all-star roster of character actors, including E. G. Marshall, Ed Begley, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman, and Jack Warden—known, if at all, for their New York stage and television work. This was typical of the so-called New York School of filmmaking—with its focus on social issues, urban settings, and moral decay—which came to define an era of social consciousness and realism in cinema, stretching from On the Waterfront (1954) to Midnight Cowboy (1969) and into the 1970s. The movie also foreshadowed America’s cultural obsession with the law as both moral object lesson and entertainment. If not for the enduring legacy of 12 Angry Men, there may never have been an audience for television’s Law & Order or The Practice, or even the novels of John Grisham and Scott Turow. Interestingly, the small screen’s first iconic lawyer, Perry Mason, began pacing courtrooms and breaking down witnesses in 1957 as well, three years after Twelve Angry Men, the teleplay, made its debut during American television’s golden era. Lumet, who died in 2011 at the age of eighty-six, would, of course, go on to direct many other classics in a career that spanned six decades, around two hundred teleplays, and more than forty feature films. He was nominated for five Oscars before receiving one for lifetime achievement in 2005. And yet in the minds of many, 12 Angry Men is the film that defined his career, one that so memorably, if not obsessively, focused on social justice and moral inquiry. It is not surprising that Lumet, whose lifetime coincided with so many of the injustices of the twentieth century—from the Holocaust to the Hollywood blacklist—would choose as the subject of his first feature a story painted in the gray brushstrokes of prejudice." - Thane Rosenbaum, The Criterion Collection From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Sidney Lumet's 1957 film "12 Angry Men" is required viewing for any Americans old enough to sit on a jury. More than just an intense character drama (although it is exemplary in that regard), "12 Angry Men" depicts a criminal justice system wherein thoughtful deliberation, context, crime, and class are all carefully discussed and considered during a murder trial. It's essentially a version of jury deliberation wherein everything seems to be working the way it ought to be — that means disagreements, that means confronting biases and prejudices, and that means considering the implications of how brutal and unjust it may be to sentence a young man to death. And while it may be an idealized version of the criminal justice system, "12 Angry Men" is also very critical of it. The jury deliberation process, the film points out, is vulnerable to the lazy, disinterested caprices of ordinary people who would rather be anywhere else, and who accept that the death penalty is just sort of a natural, unquestioned part of all this. At the start of the film, most of the jurors think their murder case is so cut-and-dry, they have no problems with killing the defendant in the electric chair (the preferred form of execution used by the state of New York in 1957). It takes a full day of heated deliberation for some of them to realize that the death penalty may not be the best idea to mix into a criminal case. Lumet, as far as I have been able to discover, never spoke out directly against the death penalty, but all throughout his career, his films were about how institutions are prone to corruption and lackadaisical expressions of banal evil, and how individuals who listen and understand one another can break that cycle. This was true in "Dog Day Afternoon," it was true with "The Verdict," it was certainly true with Lumet's corrupt cop dramas "Serpico" and "Prince of the City," and it's especially true of "12 Angry Men." The history of the death penalty in the United States is checkered at best, often leaving the choice of whether or not to execute its citizens left in the hands of state legislatures. Michigan abolished the death penalty as long ago as the 1840s. In 1897, Congress ruled that it could be used to punish those convicted of federal crimes. Despite this, in 1911, Minnesota abolished the practice. After 1957, when "12 Angry Men" came out, six additional states were to abolish it as well. In the landmark 1972 case Furman v. Georgia, the death penalty was considered to be rife with racist leanings — Black people were executed far more than white people — and it was banned outright. Several states, however, re-worded their laws to gain access to capital punishment again, and by 1977, it was back on the table. In 2022, 24 states still use the death penalty." - Witney Seibold, SlashFilm Public Opinion ""Jury Duty For Dummies." You had 12 characters you had to balance, but their personalities were all clear. Even with the 12 characters and back and forth banter, it was easy to follow." - @Jandrew The Poetic Opinion twelve angry men "It was on Playhouse 90 That Twelve Angry Men began The story of a jury's judgment Of an innocent man. Eleven men on the jury Said the defendant had done wrong But one juror said to them I do not go along. The lone holdout stated patiently You've all made a snap judgment One by one he convinces them That the man is innocent. Robert Cummings was the star When it was presented on TV Henry Fonda is most remembered As the star of the movie." - RobertLust, AllPoetry Factoids Previous Rankings #14 (2020), #5 (2018), #7 (2016), #8 (2014), #28 (2013), #35 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Sydney Lumet (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (5), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (18), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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 #31 Fanboy Ranking, #19 Cinema Ranking #14 Old Farts Ranking, #29 Damn Kidis Ranking #33 Ambassador Ranking, #22 All-American Ranking #51 Cartoon Ranking, #22 Damn Boomer Ranking

heat. Number 25 "I'm angry. I'm very angry, Ralph. You know, you can ball my wife if she wants you to." About the Film Synopsis It's heat. Its Legacy "heat." - @aabattery, in telegram "the thing about Heat is it's Heat." - @TOG, in telegram "Heat." - @cannastop, in telegram "heat." - @tribefan69501 in telegram "Heat." - @Ethan Hunt, in telegram "Heat." - @Jake Gittes, in telegram "Red Heat." - @DAR, in telegram "Bathroom, heat, shitty blinds." - @SchumacherFTW, in telegram "Heat" - @MCKillswitch123, in telegram "heat." - @MrPink, in telegram "Yay the heat rash healed." - @YM!, in telegram "Heat" - @WrathOfHan, in telegram "In the Heat of the Heights" - @Rorschach, in telegram "see, here's the problem, that type of water exists in the tropics but tropical summer not quite for you, you're found of dry heat." - @Jason to @Plain Old Tele in the telegram From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "In Heat, all the meticulous authenticity and coolly portrayed characters inherent to a Michael Mann picture fulfill a crime epic of incredible scale and ambition. Over the course of twenty years, Mann developed and accumulated detail for his script, and in 1995 he set out to broaden the limitations of an otherwise formal genre structure. Lending an atypical approach to a basic “cops and robbers” scenario, Mann achieved a film less about crime genre exploits and more about the failing machismo of two uncompromising men. As a professional thief heading an expert crew and the unrelenting detective pursuing them, icons Robert De Niro and Al Pacino make their first onscreen appearance together in the film. Through their magnificent performances and Mann’s operatic script, Heat becomes a crime-infused melodrama beyond compare. More than basic genre thrills, which this film has in abundance, Mann’s moody character piece explores the inner lives of his subjects, how their work affects their relationships, and how their ongoing existential and personal dilemmas derive from their professional lives. Unique to the film is Mann’s daring balance of human tragedy and genre excitement; even while he considers weighty themes of identity and troubled masculinity, his treatment of the action operates in a hyper-real mode that grounds the film’s theatricality into a stirring, convincing drama. Mann’s career as a feature filmmaker consists of projects infused with a single unchanging contradiction: his are films marked by their realism yet brimming with style. By definition, style is an ornamentation of reality, and this aesthetic conflict has never been ideologically resolved by Mann yet it is the balance of these components that makes many of his films great. Amid Mann’s occasional failures, the normally incongruous pairing of style and realism delivers the kind of motion picture to which the director is best attributed. After growing up in a tough Chicago neighborhood where he filmed some of the Chicago riots as a student, Mann attended the London International Film School in the mid-1960s and studied documentary film-making. His footage of the 1968 Paris riots earned him some notoriety, and after several years he broke into television by writing and producing TV movies and cop shows (such as Starsky and Hutch, Police Story, Vega$, Miami Vice, and Crime Story). Strong notices for his ABC movie-of-the-week, The Jericho Mile (1979), about prison life shot entirely within Folsom State Penitentiary, earned Mann and his severe realism attention from Hollywood. Mann’s reputation would be forever solidified by his immersive, stunningly detailed environments that are at once loaded with the capacity for narrative drama, but his work was also inhabited with a remarkable level of pure information. Mann’s authenticity is then counteracted and sometimes balanced by his visual style, which includes a rich use of colors and visual metaphors to enhance his realism with superbly melodramatic flourishes. Heat remains an enduring classic for a number of reasons, not the least of which are De Niro, Pacino, and a number of strong supporting performances. The actors benefit from Mann’s script, as he fleshes out nearly every character in this crime epic, ingraining a level of seriousness and dramatic heft to heighten not only his film’s realism but its emotional impact. This quality sets the film apart from prototypical “cops and robbers” stories. Not one character feels one-dimensional, unnecessary, or unauthentic within the story. Every subplot adds to the complexity of his characters and the film’s dramatic gravitas. Lauren’s shocking suicide attempt is one example among many. Consider also Shiherlis’ wife Charlene (Ashley Judd) and her affair with scummy criminal Alan Marciano (Hank Azaria), a reluctant snitch who gives Charlene up to Hanna. Charlene, who must contend with her gambling addict husband and the risks he takes as a professional thief, while also trying to ensure a future for their young child, resolves to help Hanna capture her husband. But Shiherlis doesn’t follow McCauley’s strict professional code; he says he will forever remain devoted to Charlene, but his fluidity in this respect allows him to eventually evade capture by abandoning his family to escape. Another subplot involves Breeden (Dennis Haysbert), an ex-con just out of Folsom and struggling to reform for his loving wife Lillian (Kim Staunton) in a shoddy-but-legitimate diner post. When McCauley needs to replace his getaway driver on the morning of the bank robbery, he spots Breeden flipping burgers and asks him to join. Breeden agrees and the decision gets him killed. In the aftermath of the robbery, a news report announces Breeden’s death. Mann cuts to Lillian for a wordless expression of utter heartbreak. Mann’s affinity for tragedy throughout Heat might reach too far if he did not counterbalance his melodrama with astounding realism and subtle style. The director demonstrates efficiency, self-control, and simplicity worthy of comparison to Jean-Pierre Melville’s similarly themed Le cercle rouge (1970), whose penchant for cool style and scrupulous details were clearly an influence on Mann. Note the Melvillian stroke in Mann’s robbers and how they dress; McCauley’s crew does not look like crooks or even very masculine. They look stylish, if not chic in their designer suits; clean cut and organized. As McCauley notes, “Do you see me doin’ thrill-seeker liquor store hold-ups with a ‘Born To Lose’ tattoo on my chest?” Of course not. McCauley’s crew is professional, and therefore not subject to the stupid mistakes made by robbers in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) or Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). Mann has elevated these professionals with melodrama and tragedy. Another clear influence is Raoul Walsh’s gangster classic White Heat (1949), an equally tragic tale starring James Cagney as a criminal made insane by his inner conflicts and his chosen line of work. Mann’s film is distinct in that he resolves to conceal his drama within the reality of his setting, the sprawling concrete wasteland of Los Angeles. Shooting at 85 locations around LA, Mann depicts a mythic asphalt jungle where the muted street scenery provides a contrast to his dramatic characters. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti’s lensing is blue-hued and dark, conveying characters that appear pale in their surroundings, yet their lives are filled with hugely dramatic events. The look of Heat is textured and gloriously cinematic, just as much as Mann’s choice of music that alternates between classic orchestral strings to the booming sounds of Moby’s “New Dawn Fades”. Always, the director is juxtaposing realism and style." - Brian Egert, Deep Cut Review Public Opinion "It's cool when a bunch of geniuses at the height of their powers all converge on one single perfect project." - Patrick Williams, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion heat "O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air— fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat— plough through it, turning it on either side of your path." - H. D. Factoids Previous Rankings #35 (2020), #75 (2018), #77 (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #89 (2013), UNRANKED (2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Michael Mann (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (18), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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 #37 Fanboy Ranking, #18 Cinema Ranking #30 Old Farts Ranking, #22 Damn Kids Ranking #24 Ambassador Ranking, #26 All-American Ranking #71 Cartoon Ranking, #20 Damn Boomer Ranking

Well, at least we didn't copycat IMDb. Number 26 "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'" About the Film Synopsis "Framed in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates – including an older prisoner named Red – for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope." Its Legacy From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "It is neither possible nor desirable to provide a comprehensive account of all the films that might qualify for consideration under the above heading. Rather four significant ‘prison films’ of the 1990s will be discussed. The chosen films are: The Shawshank Redemption (1994), d. Frank Darabont,American History X(1998), d. Tony Kaye, Convict Cowboy(1995), d. Rod Holcomb, Con Air(1997), d. Simon West.The Shawshank Redemption (1994) starred Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. Although not hugely successful on its initial cinema release it wenton to achieve enormous success through video rental and sales.4This incred-ibly popular film is set almost entirely within a prison and yet is often referred to in review and comment as being ‘not really a prison film’. It both ‘fits’ and does not ‘fit’ the suggested conventions of the prison film genre and the arguments of the authors reviewed above. American History X (1998)is in some ways almost a mirror image of, or answer-film to, The ShawshankRedemption. Set in contemporary Los Angeles the story of the film concerns the drift of its main character (Derek Vinyard/Ed Norton) into right wingextremist violence and his redemption/rehabilitation whilst in prison for the murder of two young black men. The film attempts to be a hard-edged look at one aspect of life in contemporary urban America. The film is widely used as a basis for discussion across a variety of courses in American univer-sities and in other educational settings. Set initially in the 1940s, The Shawshank Redemptionis the story of a Mainebanker, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), who is (wrongly) convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover and sentenced to life imprisonment in Shawshank Penitentiary. For the first three years of his sentence, Andy has a tough time surviving, particularly as he becomes the object of attention of a gang of prison ‘gays’ known as the sisters.8 However, when the captain of the prison guards and then the prison warden come to discover and benefit from Andy’s financial acumen his star in the prison begins to rise. Andy becomes responsible for laundering the money generated by the warden’scorrupt scams and in return is allowed to expand the prison library and start a prisoner education scheme. However, when the warden denies Andy an opportunity to prove his innocence (by murdering another inmate) Andy is left with no option but to escape Shawshank and to blow the whistle on the warden’s corrupt schemes. But The Shawshank Redemptionhas quite a different feel to the prison filmscomplained about by Wilson (1993). Rather than being shown as beingbeyond redemption the prisoners organise their own rehabilitation. Andyexpands the library and provides an opportunity for prison education, buthis fellow inmates assist, participate in, and support these activities. The pris-oners in Shawshank are shown as being supportative of one another, with theactivities of ‘the sisters’ being the only real significant example of institu-tionalised inmate violence. The prison population, particularly the friend-ship group associated with Andy and Red, are a long way from being acinematic equivalent of the popular conception of ‘the worst of the worst’.This is significant.Stylistically Shawshank is an interesting film to analyse. The film is set inthe past, although the action unfolds chronologically, approaching but notreaching the present day. The visual action takes place in the present tense,whilst the wistful voice-over, supplied by the narrator (Red/MorganFreeman), is given in the past tense. The voice-over serves to establishbeyond doubt that Andy was/is someone special. There is no ‘frame story’provided within which to locate the past events. Despite the past tense ofthe voice-over the story does not unfold as if told in flash back. In additionto the use of these devices, the lighting, choice of camera shots, use ofmusic, and the emotional pull of the viewer to identify with the heroicnature of Andy’s struggle, all serve to give the film its fabular quality whichis invariably recognised in discussions of the film. Shawshank does not in any way pretend to be a ‘realist’ examination of the US prison system. It is ‘just’a story. It would seem then that, as Rafter (2000) suggests, The ShawshankRedemptionis an ideal candidate for the category of feel-good escapist fantasy. It is relatively easy to generate an unfavourable reading of the filmwhich could be accused of being hypocritical on two counts. Firstly, that itputs a formulaic and superficial critique of prison which is in no way seri-ously critical of any actually existing experience of incarceration.Secondly, that through the casting of Morgan Freeman as co-lead, the filmis given an appearance of racial equality which it in fact does not live upto. On closer examination the film reproduces a predominantly white main cast and only a weakly multi-racial mise en scene. However, theresearch undertaken for this article might suggest that a revision of this assessment is appropriate. Shawshank was produced against the back-ground of a growth of action-adventure movies set in prisons. These oftenfeature a mise en sceneof racially divided prisons controlled by warring factions of ‘hard-core gang members’ and characterized by high levels institutionalized inmate violence. This representation of prison, it couldbe argued, resonated with the popular conception promoted by some sections of the US prison system that some prisons were becoming unmanageable and required a new generation of supermax institutions to housethe ‘worst of the worst’ of the inmate population (King 1999). But, it couldbe argued, both the notion of ‘the worst of the worst’, and its cinematic equivalent, are a misrepresentation of the actual composition of the USprison population and its characteristics, and could be regarded as one ofthe ‘prison myths’ that underpinned the substantial increase in the rate of incarceration witnessed in the US in the 1990s. The Shawshank Redemptionclearly sets itself against this trend and attempts to circulate an alternative representation of prisoners as being worthy and capable of rehabilitation.In this respect the film might be welcomed by anyone wishing to transformprisons away from their role as ‘holding pens’ and towards them becom-ing a more therapeutic environment (Wilson and Reuss 2000). The Shaw-shank Redemption could be regarded as an attempt at ‘doing good by stealth’." - Sean O'Sullivan, The Howard Journal Public Opinion "If you ever feel down, If you ever feel like giving up, If you ever feel like nothing is gonna workout, If you ever feel hopeless, If you ever feel like dying, Watch this film. It is a miraculous medicine. It is a wonderful movie." - Peaceful Stoner, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion letter to red "Dear Red, If you're reading this, you've gotten out And if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don't you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. I'll keep an eye out for you and the chessboard ready. Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend Andy" - Shaun Cronick Factoids Previous Rankings #25 (2020), #25 (2018), #18 (2016), #14 (2014), #22 (2013), #24 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (17), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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 #24 Fanboy Ranking, #22 Cinema Ranking #35 Old Farts Ranking, #21 Damn Kids Ranking #40 Ambassador Ranking, #23 All-American Ranking #55 Cartoon Ranking, #24 Damn Boomer Ranking

I am facing my judgement Number 27 "Hasta la vista, baby." About the Film Synopsis "Nearly 10 years have passed since Sarah Connor was targeted for termination by a cyborg from the future. Now her son, John, the future leader of the resistance, is the target for a newer, more deadly terminator. Once again, the resistance has managed to send a protector back to attempt to save John and his mother Sarah." Its Legacy "Today it’s easy to forget how risky it was to turn the Terminator, an iconic villain, an unstoppable, merciless death machine from an apocalyptic future, into a good guy who doesn’t kill anyone, stands on one leg when ordered, and looks like a horse when he attempts to smile. But Kassar didn’t balk, granting Cameron a budget ten times what he had had for the original, while stipulating that the film had to be in cinemas just 14 months later. Even with some expensive sequences cut – including John Connor sending Kyle Reese back through time in the heart of Skynet HQ, a scene that would ultimately materialise in Terminator Genisys – the script was lengthy and extremely ambitious. Beginning on October 8th, 1990, the shooting schedule was front-loaded with effects shots to give the maximum time for CGI pioneers Industrial Light and Magic to realise the liquid metal T-1000 (Robert Patrick). To further ease ILM’s burden, every trick in the book was employed to get T-1000 shots in camera wherever possible: quick shots of the villain’s fight with the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) in the steel mill finale were done with a stuntman in a foil suit; a chrome bust of Patrick was hand-raised into frame for a helicopter pilot’s reaction shot; the reforming of the shattered T-1000 was achieved by blowing mercury around with a hair dryer; bullet hits on the character’s torso were represented by spring-loaded silver “flowers” that burst out of a pre-scored shirt on cue. Stan Winston Studio also constructed a number of cable-controlled puppets to show more extensive damage to the morphing menace. These included “Splash Head”, a bust of Patrick with the head split in two by a shotgun blast, and “Pretzel Man”, the nightmarish result of a grenade hit moments before the T-1000 falls to its doom in the molten steel. The film’s legacy in visual effects – for which it won the 1992 Oscar – cannot be understated. A straight line can be drawn from the water tendril in Cameron’s The Abyss, through T2 to Jurassic Park and all the way on to Avatar, with which Cameron again broke the record for the highest-grossing film of all time. The Avatar sequels will undoubtedly push the technology even further, but for many Cameron fans his greatest achievement will always be Terminator 2: Judgment Day, with its perfect blend of huge stunts, traditional effects and groundbreaking CGI." - Neil Oseman, Red Shark News From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " Ninety years ago, when the United States was caught in the grip of an economic and political crisis fueled by the rapid changes in industrial and agrarian relations, L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard ofOz, a work with a strong allegorical undercurrent that reflected the economic and political conflicts of his day.1 As the twenty-first century approaches, the United States again faces economic dislocations, and different anxi eties permeate the country. Post-modern faiiy-tales are not found in books, but rather in the popular culture of the movies. Today's fairy-tale is Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger's megahit, an escapist action flick that features sensational special effects and lots of violence. Costing nearly $ 100 million to produce—more than any previous motion picture—Terminator 2 has proven itself well worth this massive initial investment, grossing more than $200 million at the American box office with even larger returns predicted from overseas distribution and video rentals. By all accounts, this movie has set both new records and new standards for an industry that has stagnated in recent years. Yet Terminator 2 is more than just an escapist action flick—it is an unwitting allegoiy and judgment on the United States in the closing years of the twentieth century. Once the premise that the characters and events in the Terminator movies have symbolic meaning is accepted, a viewer can see that a sophisticated political, economic, and social commentary about the future of the United States runs unconsciously throughout the entire film. While these subliminal themes have less to do with the film's immense box office appeal than Schwarzenegger, they do exercise a certain unseen pull on the audience by pandering to their anxieties and fears about the future. Indeed, a careful analysis of the movie reveals much about what concerns Americans today. A quick perusal of any major newspaper will soon turn up an article about a new plant closing, a domestic industry that is threatened by foreign competition, or increased calls for protectionism in the Congress. This economic turmoil was not always the case. In the wake of the Second World War, the American economy surpassed all the other economies in the world. Two-thirds of the world's gold supplies were in American posses sion, more than half the items manufactured in the world came from American factories, half the world's merchant tonnage was American, and nearly one-half of all world trade involved the United States either as exporter or importer.2 This artificial economic dominance gradually fell away in the years after World War II. With European and Japanese rivals no longer digging themselves out from beneath the rubble of their bombed out cities, our industries have increasingly had to face competitors from abroad. In the past decade, whole sectors of the American economy have fallen into economic crisis. The United States' once dominant economic position in steel and automobiles has come under great threat from abroad. The newly developing industries based on computer and information technologies are increasingly becoming the domain of America's economic competitors in Japan. These present-day realities are reflected in Termi nator 2. A look at Terminator 2's allegorical content shows that it represents a struggle between declining industries in the United States and the rising high-technology ones of an economically vibrant Japan. In the first Terminator movie, the Terminator represents American industrial capi talism during its worst stage—man mechanized to the point of complete exhaustion and dehumanization. A disastrous wedding of old with new occurs in the body of the Terminator. The old technology of the manufac turing industry is merged with high-technology computer chips and biotechnology as the Terminator's metal skeleton is covered with living tissue. This marriage of "Steel and Flesh" is just as dysfunctional and violence-prone as Bismarck's marriage of "Iron and Rye" was more than a century earlier.3 The Terminator lacks both the morality of humans and the productivity of other machines. Rather, it is a conscienceless cyborg assassin programmed to kill and destroy. It is the worst of both worlds." - Mark Duckenfield, Terminator 2: A Call to Economic Arms? Studies in Popular Culture Public Opinion "By acclamation, the best film of the franchise (or of all time, depending on who you ask). I'll always love its predecessor more though. It's more ruthless, more atmospheric. T2's got a lot going for it, but there's this undercurrent of awareness it has that's always bothered me; it starts early, with the opening riff of "Bad To The Bone", and it continues from there. Some of it is tedious (we have to set the rules of cybernetic behavior and regularly refine them, we have to reuse certain lines of dialogue), and some of it rules (we have to have an even bigger finale, we have to continually dunk on the cops) - but there's a recognition that's being wanted from me that I could do without. Regardless of all this, the movie still rules. The effects hold up very well, Sarah Connor delightfully takes zero shit, and the feels at the end are genuine in a way that's pretty unique for a blockbuster." - Adam, Letterboxd The Poetic Opinion terminator too "Poetry, Wordsworth wrote, will have no easy time of it when the discriminating powers of the mind are so blunted that all voluntary exertion dies, and the general public is reduced to a state of near savage torpor, morose, stuporous, with no attention span whatsoever; nor will the tranquil rustling of the lyric, drowned out by the heavy, dull coagulation of persons in cities, where a uniformity of occupations breeds cravings for sensation which hourly visual communication of instant intelligence gratifies like crazy, likely survive this age." - Tom Clark Factoids Previous Rankings #13 (2020), #14 (2018), #25 (2016), #33 (2014), #12 (2013), #16 (2012) Director Count James Cameron (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Wes Craven (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (16), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (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, #33 Cinema Ranking #47 Old Farts Ranking, #18 Damn Kids Ranking #28 Ambassador Ranking, #28 All-American Ranking #43 Cartoon Ranking, #27 Damn Boomer Ranking

I'll take movies that have brainwashed people into liking them for $500 please. Number 28 "E.T. phone home!" About the Film Synopsis "After a gentle alien becomes stranded on Earth, the being is discovered and befriended by a young boy named Elliott. Bringing the extraterrestrial into his suburban California house, Elliott introduces E.T., as the alien is dubbed, to his brother and his little sister, Gertie, and the children decide to keep its existence a secret. Soon, however, E.T. falls ill, resulting in government intervention and a dire situation for both Elliott and the alien." Its Legacy "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was one of Spielberg’s greatest achievements; according to Box Office Mojo, when adjusted for inflation, the film has made the fourth highest gross of all time (boxofficemojo.com). E.T. was his most successful in terms of revenue. Spielberg’s combination of alien supernatural occurances and suburban reality created an incredibly loved film. The use of a mysterious film elements created such an interesting atmosphere of uncertainty and possibility, which when in contact with Elliott, was able to provide answers for the concerns he was dealing with. The authentic human characters and normal day to day situations made the film seem relatable, in many ways, to a large audience. As Andrew Gordon, in his article “E.T. as Fairy Tale” puts it, “For children, E.T. is a voyage of emotional discovery, for adults, a rediscovery of feeling we thought we had lost or outgrown”(Gordon, 303). With the target audience being kids, each of the three siblings could appeal to a different age a children viewing the movie. With the film appealing to such a wide audience, it became the highest grossing movie of it’s time, beating the current records of another film that Spielberg made, Jaws; both films were made early in the modern blockbuster process that Spielberg played a huge role in. E.T. had an incredible heart warming impact with a happy ending, and would pave the way for future science fiction films to come that would involve children and their experiences with the extraterrestrial. The link between reality and the supernatural in this film as a means of displaying childhood conflicts and their solutions played a large role in the success of the movie. Gordon argues that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial depicts a fairy tale environment that is suitable for all children, while the characters experience meaningful conflicts throughout the film. His argument goes along with mine, in that this film depicts childhood conflict, and because of this, it adds to the films greatness and the film is successful. Spielberg was able to create a masterpiece by combining realistic problems with a non-realistic environment; attracting people who either wanted to see a cool sci-fi film or a family friendly film, or both. While E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wasn’t the first film to put aliens in a realistic environment, it was definitely one of the most iconic films to do so, and it used the lurking factor of childhood conflict within its reality. This film paved the way for other films and shows that have used children in a realistic setting being affected by supernatural sources, and the film continues to be used today. Two great examples of film being that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had an influence on are Super 8 and Stranger Things. The film, Super 8, has direct ties with E.T. because Steven Spielberg was a producer for the film. The film stars children in a realistic environment dealing with alien activity, just like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The Netflix original series Stranger Things, a currently running, popular show, also depicts kids in the same kind of setting, once again, dealing with aliens. The show goes so far as to copy E.T. with scenes of the characters on their bikes, levitation special effects, and much more. These shows and movies that copy aspects of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, do so because the films was an incredible depiction of the conflicts mixed with extra-terrestrial elements that are discussed in this exhibit. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has influenced films since its creation, and will continue to do so, because of its incredibly accurate depiction childhood conflict in a sci-fi genre." - Digital Exhibits From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Rather than rehash old shibboleths about the right-wing political "messages" and "sunny, peculiarly Reagan-era attitude of happiness bought with ignorance, magical wish-fulfillment, and historical mutability" (Bick, 25) of the era's movies, this article will investigate the reincorporation of religious values, motifs, and iconography into 1980s American cinema, specifically in the work of the Hollywood icon of the epoch, Steven Spielberg. In particular, the director's blockbuster hit E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Universal, 1982) marks a site for investigating the role of the Moral Majority's New Right rhetoric in the context of a hugely popular and ostensibly apolitical "feel-good" entertainment movie, despite the bittersweet "up-cry" at the film's conclusion (Brode, 82). That the film amassed more than $228 million in net rentals in the U.S. and Canada alone {Variety Annual, 30) by i986 and over $400 million by 1994, when combined with the knowledge that the E.T. videotape had the highest sales volume ever (over 14 million copies sold), suggests that the movie struck a responsive chord with an American and international audience {Entertainment Tonight). Indeed, the film still ranks as the second-highest-grossing film of all time (next to Titanic [1997]), with $720 million in worldwide revenue (Royal, 133). What explains this cultural and financial phenomenon? Just as Spielberg's previous film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, established a mythoreligious substratum for Moral Majority and New Right political messages (Tomasulo, 1982), so the director's next film, E.T., created an even more overt representation of Christian iconography and ideology. As a latter-day American Rudyard Kipling, Spielberg combined sentimental religiosity and patriotic colonialism within the context of the jingoistic juvenilia and imperialistic imperatives of the Age of Reagan. In fact, Spielberg used Christianity just as President Reagan did: as a referent for political rhetoric (i.e., the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire), thus providing a moral base for governmental legitimization while simultaneously clothing the state in religious robes to achieve popular acceptance. This political use of sectarian myth, the sublation of America-First chauvinism and theology, amounts to the creation of a "civil religion." Although the father is restored at closure, the spectator is left as a child. Furthermore, as Robin Wood points out, this subject construction produces a particular kind of child: a male child. The heartwarming ending of E.T. shows the rubbery alien transmitting his power to young Elliott while dismissing his little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) with an injunction to "Be good" (Wood, 5). Throughout the film, low-angle point-of-view shots also inscribe a child's eye view of the proceedings, including several subjective shots through the eyes of the diminutive space man and his immature doppelganger, Elliott. This inscription of childhood refers us back to the mythic figure of the puer aeternus, the eternal child. According to Marie-Louise von Franz, "Puer aeternus is the divine youth who is born in the night, a god of vegetation and resurrection" (1). And, indeed, E.T. is a botanist by profession who returns from the dead. Examples of the puer aeternus would be Adonis, Hyacinthus, and Narcissus—whose deaths produced blooming flowers, just as E.T.'s demise and rebirth are related to his emblematic geranium plant. There is even a subset of the puer aeternus myth dealing with "ascensionism": a fascination with flying. This subgenre would include Icarus, who flew too close to the sun on wax wings, Bellerophon, who tried to ride to the top of Mount Olympus on the winged horse Pegasus, Jesus Christ, who ascended to Heaven after the crucifixion, and, of course, E.T. on a bicycle flying across the harvest moon. The primary trait of the eternal child is the refusal to grow up, the refusal to resolve one's Oedipal crisis by remaining in—or regressing to—the pre-Oedipal attachment to the idealized mother. The most famous case of puer aeternus (of the flying variety) is no doubt Peter Pan, which Mother Mary actually reads to Gertie in Spielberg's E.T. James M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was preoccupied with the Christian meaning of death and immortality. Hence, Tinker Bell's sacrifice to save Peter Pan has obvious Christian overtones, not to mention her eventual return from the dead. Instead of Peter Pan, the little boy who teaches children how to fly, we have E.T., the mini-creature who introduces a group of children to flying on bicycles and wants to "go home." Thomas Wolfe said that, caught in the inexorability of time, "You can't go home again," yet E.T. suggests that you can go home again and even reach Never-Never Land—if you believe strongly enough in the myths and religious of the past." - Frank P. Tomasulo, Quarterly Review of Film and Video Public Opinion "A top 50 movie of all time. Pretty much perfect. Just next level of filmmaking 92.5 A-" - @Kvikk Lunsj The Poetic Opinion the atari poem series no. 2: e.t. the extra-terrestrial "I gave you a quarter You should have called someone who cared Instead, you just wandered As though you were drunk Falling down into black hole After black hole After black hole One depression after another You couldn’t get out of And to think it only took Five weeks To make you this way It’s official: You are simply a catastrophic failure Unwilling to be controlled Unwilling to be counted upon Unwilling to be a contributing factor Toward easing the burden rate There are garbage dumps out in New Mexico We will bury you in And encase you in cement You had the quarter Don’t you wish you had just phoned home?" - Zachary House Factoids Previous Rankings #24 (2020), #35 (2018), #34 (2016), #69 (2014) #25 (2013) , #45 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Steven Spielberg (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Wes Craven (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (10), 1990s (15), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), E.T. (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #29 Fanboy Ranking, #24 Cinema Ranking #32 Old Farts Ranking, #27 Damn Kids Ranking #36 Ambassador Ranking, #29 All-American Ranking #45 Cartoon Ranking, #28 Damn Boomer Ranking

blasting time. Number 29 "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling." About the Film Synopsis "Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: “inception”, the implantation of another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious." Its Legacy "Inception was not your typical type of blockbuster. The film found itself surrounded by a lineup of sequels, remakes and adaptations, all of which relied on the stereotypical expectancies of the modern tent-pole. But here it stood regardless, a brilliantly unique and complexly layered film that relied more on its unravelling story than it did explosions and special effects. Taking in over $800 million at the box office worldwide, Inception clearly resonated with its audiences. It proved to the world that a film could be a success while telling an unattached story that made you think rather than mindlessly stare as you shovel another handful of popcorn into your mouth. Yet, all the same, there were no immediate copycats, nor was there a flurry of brave bolstering originals. In fact, Hollywood has struggled to conjure up much comparable work since, outside of a small handful and Nolan’s own filmography. However, while Inception failed to ignite the passion for filmmaking in the Tinseltown high-ups, it did mark the turning of the tide – planting the idea of the more intelligent blockbuster. Impressing audiences since his directorial debut in 1998, Nolan has always been known for trying to push the envelope. From his memory-loss thriller Memento to the Victorian-era-based The Prestige, the director has long been a spokesperson for original and off-kilter stories. However, it wasn’t until the release of his 2008 comic book movie sequel The Dark Knight that the director finally and definitively put his name on the map. For a period, the film became one of the highest grossing of all time, and as a result Nolan was effectively given free reign for his next feature – which just so happened to be something he had been sitting on for a decade. Approaching Inception with an incredulous cast and whopping $160 million budget, Nolan worked away on a film that would categorically stand out from the crowd – even bagging DiCaprio in an uncharacteristically mainstream role. From its extended runtime to slower paced nature, Inception defied, in any form, the urge to be the loud, crass and blisteringly dumb summer film that so has often instigated success. It managed to take the familiar concept of a heist movie and blend it with an excellent dose of sci-fi, leaving its viewers as invested in the gang pulling off the job as they were waiting to see if a spinning top finally toppled. Inception is not by any means a difficult film to follow. Yet where many films would spoon feed their audience, Inception trusts that you’ll be able to keep up. There is, naturally, exposition – something completely unavoidable with a premise such as this – but it gets to the point and gives its viewers just enough of what they need in order to understand. The film even warrants repeated viewings as new details and plot intricacies reveal themselves." - Guest, The Film Magazine From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Nolan’s films are preoccupied with, to paraphrase Memen to’s Teddy, the lies that we tell ourselves to stay happy. Yet the situation is worse even than that. It’s one thing to lie to oneself; it’s another to not even know whether one is lying to oneself or not. This might be the case with Cobb in Inception, and it’s notable that, in the Wired interview, Nolan says: “The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn’t care.” Not caring whether we’re lying to ourselves may be the price for happiness—or at least the price one pays for release from excruciating mental anguish. In this respect, Will Dormer (Al Pacino) in Insomnia (2002) could be thought of as the antiCobb. His inability to sleep—which naturally also means an inability to dream—correlates with the breakdown of his capacity to tell himself a comforting story about who he is. After the shooting of his partner, Dormer’s identity collapses into a terrifying epistemological void, a black box that can’t be opened. He simply doesn’t know whether or not he intended to kill his partner, just as Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) in The Prestige (2006, adapted from a novel by Christopher Priest) can’t remember for sure which knot he tied on the night of a fatally bungled escapology act. In Nolan’s worlds, it’s not only that we deceive ourselves; it’s also that we’re deceived about even having an authentic self. There’s no separating identity from fiction. In Memento, Lenny literally writes (on) himself, but the very fact that he can write a script for future versions of himself to read is a horrifying demonstration of his lack of any coherent identity—a revelation that his Sisyphian quest both exemplifies and is in flight from. Inception leaves us with the possibility that Cobb’s quest and apparent rediscovery of his children could be a version of the same kind of loop: a purgatory to Memento’s inferno. It’s not at all surprising that Nolan has adapted Priest, since there are striking parallels between the two men’s methods and interests. “The urge to rewrite ourselves as real- seeming fictions is present in us all,” writes Priest in The Glamour (1984). Priest’s novels are also puzzles that can’t be solved, in which writing, biography, and psychosis slide into one another, posing troubling ontological questions about memory, identity, and fiction. The idea explored in Inception of minds as datascapes which can be infiltrated inevitably recalls the “consensual hallucination” of William Gibson’s cyber space, but the dream-sharing concept can be traced back to Priest’s A Dream of Wessex. In that extraordinary 1977 novel, a group of researcher volunteers use a “dream projector” to enter into a shared dream of a (then) future England. Like the dream-sharing addicts we briefly glimpse in one of Inception’s most disturbing scenes, some of the characters in A Dream of Wessex inevitably prefer the simulated environment to the real world, and, unlike Cobb, they choose to stay there. The differences in the way that the concept of shared dreaming is handled in 1977 and 2010 tell us a great deal about politics then and now—the contrasts, in short, between social democracy and neoliberalism. While Inception’s dreamsharing technology is—like the Internet—a military invention turned into a commercial application, Priest’s shared dream project is government-run. The Wessex dream world is lyrical and languid, still part of the hazy afterglow of 1960s psychedelia. It’s all a far cry from Inception’s noise and fury, the mind as a militarized zone. Inception synthesizes the intellectual and metaphysical puzzles of Memento and The Prestige with the big-budget ballistics of Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). The synthesis isn’t always satisfactory, the problem being the prolonged action sequences, which come off as perfunctory at best. At points, it’s as if Inception’s achievement is merely to have provided a baroquely sophisticated motivation for the oddly half-hearted chasing and shooting. An unsympathetic viewer might think that the entirety of Inception’s complex ontological structure had been built to justify clichés of action cinema—such as the ludicrous amount of things that characters can do in the time that it takes for a van to fall from a bridge into a river. Blogger Carl Neville complains that Inception amounts to “three uninvolving action movies playing out simultaneously” (theimpostume.blogspot.com/ 2010/07/inception-takes-long-time-get-going-and.html). “What could have been a fascinatingly vertiginous trip into successively fantastic, impossible worlds, not to mention the limbo of the raw unconscious into which a couple of the central characters plunge,” Neville argues, “ends up looking wholly like a series of action movies, one within the other: ‘reality’ looks and feels like a ‘globalization’ movie, jumping from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa to Sydney with a team of basically decent technical geniuses who are forced to live outside the law, making sure there are lots of helicopter shots of cityscapes and exotic local colour. " - Mark Fisher, Film Quarterly Public Opinion "Seriously, the first thing I noticed was the wobble at the end, so I was like, yep, probably real. And I prefer it that way. I'd like to think Cobb got his happy ending so to speak. The wedding ring evidence (which seems a little more than intentional) I think would support that. First viewing is a pretty intense and gripping experience, but the over-reliance on expository dialogue makes this one more of a chore to get through with repeat viewings. Some great performances from Leo and Tom Hardy, and JGL was fine as well. The 2nd half is still very entertaining for me to watch. Middle of the pack Nolan film. Fuck you Jake" - @MrPink The Poetic Opinion inception "Forget every single thing that you were told Power through inception; for only you – behold Your pathways through time You’re sure to grow old The magic, the fortune of love The gift, the spirit of your soul The power, through inception Never to be replaced or forgotten Through the Rayne & through Shine You should know that you’re mine If you think otherwise Know that it’s LIES Forget every single thing that you were told Power through inception; only for you – behold The magic, the gift, the feeling of up- Lifting the weight of the world in just your hands You don’t know the pain But I still can tell that you understand" - Eric Scott Melton Factoids Previous Rankings #29 (2020), #24 (2018), #22 (2016), #10 (2014), #24 (2013), #14 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Christopher Nolan (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), The Russos (2), Steven Spielberg (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Wes Craven (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (9), 1990s (15), 2000s (17), 2010s (8) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #21 Fanboy Ranking, #30 Cinema Ranking #51 Old Farts Ranking, #19 Damn Kids Ranking #60 Ambassador Ranking, #27 All-American Ranking #41 Cartoon Ranking, #29 Damn Boomer Ranking

Turns out the Samantha AI just packed up and left without a trace. I have decided to now take poems from real people instead. Turns out real people still write poems better than robots anyways. Number 30 "You're only as healthy as you feel." About the Film Synopsis "A mentally unstable Vietnam War veteran works as a night-time taxi driver in New York City where the perceived decadence and sleaze feed his urge for violent action, attempting to save a preadolescent prostitute in the process." Its Legacy "In the USA of the 1970's, a new generation of film directors emerges, generally designated New Hollywood Cinema, The American New Wave, or The Brat Pack.1 A common trait shared by these directors - Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, and others - is that they all achieve an extension and vitalization of the language of film by making personal and modernistic films. As opposed to the American filmmakers of earlier times, they have university degrees and possess knowledge of film theory and the film traditions of other countries. They are particularly inspired by the French New Wave2 and the films made by this movement in the sixties, with their modernist qualities. Modernism is a paradigm which by now carries a lot of different connotations, within the sphere of literature as well as film. Thus, in film history, both the German expressionist films (Murnau, Wiene, and others), the Russian montage films (Eisenstein, Vertov, and others), and the surrealist films, for instance Buñuel, are comprised under the designation modernistic. But most often, however, the expression is used in connection with the experimentalist European films of the 60's and 70's, such as Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), 1960, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, 1966, and Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, 1960. These films care less about a progressing continuity and are often experimental and fragmented in form. In contrast to Hollywood's traditional focus on outer tension, the European films dare to take as their starting point the psychological and existential problems of the individual in a modern world. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, which won the 1976 Palme d 'Or at Cannes, is one of the finest examples of this subdued modernism which we find in the American movies of the 70s. The film was written by Paul Schrader4 and stars Robert de Niro – an actor Scorsese has worked with often – in the all-important lead role as the taxi driver Travis Bickle. Taxi Driver is a city film. It is about the city and human existence in the city – about how the city and the culture influence human life. The cityscape of Taxi Driver is not idyllic; it is a city dominated by unrest, noise, dirt and suffering, by a disintegrating culture. A city in which man is lonely and alienated. A city where nature is absent. A city modeled on Babylon rather than heavenly Jerusalem. The city as an inferno. The city is the birthplace of modernity. By modernity I understand the historical upheavals that via industrialization and urbanization have taken place since the mid-18th century. Modernity belongs to an epoch. But at the same time modernity is a standard. Baudelaire5 defines modernity as the transitory and fleeting, which is opposed to the eternal and constant. Terms that could just as well be applied to the city. Modernity can be viewed as a process which breaks forth and shows itself in urban environments. For the city is before anything else the environment of the modern, and as such a consequence of modernity. Urbanity and modernity are intertwined notions. But modernity is also bound up with the break-down of values in general, with Nietzsche's negation of God. The city is transitory, the place of the ever-changing. And in an unstable world stability is absent. The individual has to create a meaning himself. God is dead, and the only certainty is uncertainty. Taxi Driver is part of modernity. It is about experiences of modernity, about the existence of the human subject in the modern city. In the editing of Taxi Driver a lot of attention is given to P.O.V. The editing is mainly orchestrated through P.O.V. shots with the protagonist Travis as starting point, but a surprising number of P.O.V. shots from the viewpoint of other characters of the film are in evidence. In this film, perception and psyche are bound up with the multitude of the city, connected to modernity's emphasis on the individual's perception and the individual's severance from former social taxonomy. The changing P.O.V.s confuse and enhance the feeling of fragmentation, of paranoia. An example of the changing viewpoint takes place outside the cafeteria, when Travis is about to talk to Wizard. A black man comes walking down the street and stares at Travis, who stares back. In this scene, Scorsese cuts between two different subjective cameras, and the whole thing is in slow motion. After this "evil stare" exchange, it is easy to understand Travis' hatred of "the scum". Bernard Herrmann's13 music underscores the feeling of the city as fragmented and threatening. The music abruptly changes from beautiful, lyrical passages, and deep, ominous tones that keep reappearing. It is difficult to explain with words, but the music perfectly models the different themes and sequences of the film. It supports the action and creates a frightening atmosphere of something threatening about to break through to the surface." - M. Weinreich, A Danish Journal of Film Studies From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Only a New Yorker like Scorsese could do justice to TAXI DRIVER's governing conceit - that the guy behind the wheel of the yellow cab that is bearing you through the streets of New York has a lot more on his mind than beating the lights and watching the meter go up, that he has it in him, in fact, to become a killer. In Schrader's scenario, the nature of New York - as well as that of the cabbie makes the realization of that potential inevitable. He is a young man, in his twenties perhaps, with the square, memorable but untraceable name of Travis Bickle. (Arthur Bremer at least had a German ring to it.) More to the point, he is a Vietnam veteran (Marine), who fulfills the current front-page definition of a 'loner": lives all by himself in a dingy one-room apartment; watches a lot of TV; talks to himself in a diary; can't mix easily with his fellowcabbies; can't sleep easily; pops a lot of pills. New York is a jungle of sexual avarice. The only citizens on the sidewalks at night are pimps, muggers, and whores; his passengers are bleary businessmen who order him to drive faster while whores unzip their flies in the back seat. For afterhours diversion there are only 42nd-Street skin flicks. Plant a vision in Travis's path of shining, uncorrupted beauty in the person of a beautiful, self-assured blonde who is idealistically campaigning for a clean-up Presidential candidate; have Travis attract her, then be spurned by her; introduce the candidate himself as an Arrow shirt mannequin with a gift for populist hot air; and the recipe is complete - for a bloody stew of violence. Travis buys himself the most up-to-date arsenal of guns on the black market, takes to the streets, and vengeance is his. Reduced to its baldest terms, this is topical pulp, compounded not simply of the Bremer saga, Vietnam fallout, junior psychology of sexual frustration, and lurid confirmation of Johnny Carson jokes about Fun City, but other recent movies: DEATH WISH and NASHVILLE. But like the best popular artists, Scorsese has a way of converting pulp into something more. The conventional Hollywood way with pulp - Michael Winner's death wish - is to pump up clichés into political and moral archetypes. Mavericks like Altman (and before him Preston Sturges) have squeezed new life into pulp by means of satire and irony. Scorsese's concerns are neither political nor, precisely, moral; and he's no ironist. He is a fantasist who supercharges the clichés of TAXI DRIVER into the surreal figments of a nightmare that is at once comic, romantic, and terrifying. As in all nightmares, there is nothing in this one that we don't already bioiu - either about New York or fellow-citizens like Travis Bickle - but the feeling of a nightmare is never stale, and TAXI DRIVER, at its best, makes us feel New York and the Travis Bickles in it as no other movie has ever done before. As long as Scorsese stays within the confines of the nightmare, taxi driver projects a febrile, enveloping immediacy that is almost intoxicating. Scorsese obviously agrees with Ingmar Bergman's remark that "the camera is erotic," and he exhausts the arsenal of cinematic tricks with terrific panache, letting the images accumulate as a series of implosions-in preparation for the final explosive bloodbath. He has cast and directed his actors with an eye and feeling for their immediacy on screen, and in most cases obtained it. (Two exceptions are Harvey Keitel's enormously engaging pimp, which smacks of a virtuoso riff, and Scorsese's own cameo as the psychotic wife-watcher, which smacks aishtick.) As the super-clean, unattainable blonde, Cybill Shepherd is perfect: allowed to be Cybill Shepherd, she gives her most alertly relaxed performance since the last picture show. Albert Brooks, the TV comedian, registers neatly as a rather desperately plugged-in rival for her affections, a foil for the desperately unplugged Travis. Peter Boyle supplies thick-headed warmth as one of the boys at the Belmore. And Robert DeNiro, in his most film-sustaining performance to date, is so right in the title role that cab riders will look twice at their driver to make sure if s not Travis up there behind the wheel. DeNiro is probably the most engaged disengaged figure on the American screen today - and you can't take your eyes off him." - Charles Michener, Film Comment Public Opinion "I find it strange that this movie is so popular. I see 'bros' quoting it and they always have this next to Goodfellas and The Sopranos and Entourage in their collection of movies(as do I). I think a lot of people like it for the wrong reasons. They like the violence and the guns and DENIRO. But for me this is the quintessential art house film: ambiguous in it's meaning, a meandering story with no plot in sight, a protagonist that has more psychological disorders than Edward Norton in Fight Club and every character except the Presidential campaign’s employees are completely fucked up. But I'm not giving these 'bros' enough credit, maybe they feel just as lonely as Travis Bickle and this movie offers some sort of escape into a fantasy world where they can take their frustrations out in. The simple but exceptionally challenging mission Taxi Driver accomplishes is making Travis Bickle a fully formed, unique, polarizing and all together fascinating character. Characters like Travis Bickle aren’t written very often and when they do pop up(ie Christian Bale in American Psycho, Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler) the film that surrounds them is usually less interesting than the character. With Taxi Driver the movie itself is an amalgam of Travis, they are fully intertwined and illuminate each other in ways that only great films can do. The most impressive aspect for me and all the other humans that love this movie is we can all relate to Mr. Bickle. It's a slippery slope that we're on when we feel that sense of isolation and loneliness that Travis tumbles into. Paul Schrader, Bobby D and Scorsese obviously connected with these emotions, opening up their inner demons in a vulnerable but also creative way. I just respect them so much for making it with such conviction in their vision. To collaborate on this filmmaking level over emotions and ideas that are so complex and personal seems damn near impossible. It's the fiercest movie Scorsese has ever made, and that's saying something. It's easy to talk about and easy to admire. I mean my god the cinematography in this movie is breathtaking. The music is soul searing. The editing and camera techniques are still being analyzed. It's just so god damn glorious in what it's trying to do. These guys were born to make this movie." - Andrew Boley, Letterboxd Poetic Opinion a taxi driver on his death "When with prophetic eye I peer into the future I see that I shall perish upon this road Driving men that I do not know. This metallic monster that now I dictate, This docile elaborate horse, That in silence seems to simmer and strain, Shall surely revolt some tempting day. Thus I shall die; not that I care For any man’s journey, Nor for proprietor’s gain, Nor yet for love of my own. Not for these do I attempt the forbidden limits, For these defy the traffic-man and the cold cell, Risking everything for the little, little more. They shall say, I know, who pick up my bones, “Poor chap, another victim to the ruthless machine”— Concealing my blood under the metal." - Timothy Wangusa Factoids Previous Rankings #33 (2020), #63 (2018), #27 (2016), #64 (2014), #39 (2013), #26 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Martin Scorsese (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Steven Spielberg (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Wes Craven (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (7), 1980s (9), 1990s (15), 2000s (17), 2010s (7) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), UK (2), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #33 Fanboy Ranking, #28 Cinema Ranking #33 Old Farts Ranking, #31 Damn Kids Ranking #11 Ambassador Ranking, #34 All-American Ranking #27 Cartoon Ranking, #32 Damn Boomer Ranking

And 5 more of the just misses! Number 130 Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele) Number 129 Nashville (1975, Robert Altman) Number 128 The Matrix Reloaded (2003, Lilly and Lana Wachowski) Number 127 Ghostbusters (1984, Ivan Reitman) Number 126 The Intouchables (2011, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano)

I mean, it's no Dunkirk. It's not fix you. Number 31 "FUBAR" About the Film Synopsis "As U.S. troops storm the beaches of Normandy, three brothers lie dead on the battlefield, with a fourth trapped behind enemy lines. Ranger captain John Miller and seven men are tasked with penetrating German-held territory and bringing the boy home." Its Legacy "Saving Private Ryan is perhaps the most iconic WWII film ever made. Its depiction of the Normandy landings drew critical acclaim when the film premiered in 1998, leaving many viewers breathless. The film was lauded at the Oscars, winning in five categories, and was honored at many other award ceremonies. It is seen as a fitting tribute to the American troops who landed in France and thereby opened the second front in Europe, an event which would eventually lead to the final defeat of Nazi Germany. The first 27 minutes of the film offers an incredible insight into the horrors of Omaha Beach landings, which took place on June 6th, 1944, as the main characters battle almost seemingly impossible conditions while being pinned down on the beach. What strikes people the most is the realistic depiction of the landing, as it doesn’t present the soldiers as superheroes, but rather as confused and scared men who are simply doing their best to survive. The film definitely provided a glimpse of the hell on earth that was unleashed on D-Day, but it also brought back some painful memories for those who had experienced the event some 54 years before the film was made. In a period of two weeks from when the film was first screened, the Department of Veterans Affairs had to increase staffing on its telephone counseling line, as numerous veterans were disturbed by the film and were compelled to seek professional help. There were more than 100 phone calls during this time, which was more than the department had received in years from WWII vets. According to experts, the reason behind this surge of calls for help is the different perception in the public’s eye of WWII veterans as compared to the veterans of wars that came afterward, such as the Vietnam War or Gulf War. At home, the men who risked their lives on the beaches of Normandy were perceived as heroes and heroes aren’t allowed to show emotion. Also, the generations that fought in WWII were children of the Great Depression, raised not to complain much and to suppress their feelings, to grin and bear it. Thus, the explosion of emotion that occurred during the initial screenings, which many surviving veterans had been invited to see, was both natural and terrible. It also meant that audiences across the country had a chance to see first-hand the trauma caused by war." - Nikola Budanovic, War History Online From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion " THE RELEASE IN 1998 OF Saving Private Ryan by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has revived again the debate over war and remembering. In this case, audiences have flocked to see a story of American troops, led by a dedicated captain, John Miller (Tom Hanks), attempt to rescue a young private from the field of battle just after the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Some reviewers have stressed how Spielberg's film is the first to truly show the horror of battle, especially in its opening scenes, which depict the American landing on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944. Modern technology has allowed the filmmaker to reproduce the frightening sound of German gunfire and the brutal reality of exploding body parts. American soldiers are shattered and maimed on the beachhead, and some fall apart emotionally from the stress of battle. As many reviewers have suggested, the movie counters images of heroic warriors by disclosing the real terror of combat and is in many ways an antiwar story.1 Ironically, while the Spielberg film reveals the brutality of war, it preserves the World War II image of American soldiers as inherently averse to bloodshed and cruelty. The war was savage; the average American GI who fought it was not. American men in this story are destroyed by war, and only a few actually enjoy killing Germans. At its rhetorical core, the story's argument would have seemed very familiar to audiences in the 1940s: the common American soldier was fundamentally a good man who loved his country and his family. He went to war out of a sense of duty to both, and he wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. Rather than being a natural-born killer, he was a loving family man who abhorred the use of extreme force but could inflict it when necessary. This point is made well in the figure of John Miller. A high school teacher and part-time baseball coach from Pennsylvania, he disdains brutality and says that every time he kills another man he feels "farther from home." Traumatized himself at times by battle, this common man still has heroic potential and is always up to the task of taking on the German war machine. It is a model found in dozens of wartime films that depicted average guys from Brooklyn or Texas who loved their everyday life in America or the girl next door. Miller is ultimately a representation of the brand of common man heroism that infused the culture of wartime America. Without a doubt, a platoon of men like him could save Private Ryan and win the war. Norman Corwin's famous radio broadcast of May 8, 1945, on the occasion of Germany's surrender, makes the case for the courageous possibilities of the ordinary person. "Take a bow, GI. Take a bow, little guy," Corwin told his listeners. "The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men this afternoon." But, as Spielberg remembers, he also forgets. Forties' calls to patriotic sacrifice were contingent on assurances of a more democratic society and world. Govern ment leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt took pains to make democratic promises in pronouncements like "The Four Freedoms." And the Office of War Information (OWI) told Hollywood producers to make films that not only helped win the conflict but reminded audiences that it was "a people's war," which would bring about a future with more social justice and individual freedom. The democracy for which "the people" fought, in fact, was a cultural blend of several key ideas: tolerance, individualism, anti-totalitarianism, and economic justice. The representation of open-mindedness was aimed particularly at reducing ethnic tensions at home. American individualism was venerated in the call for personal freedoms and even in the rhetoric of military recruiters. They promised that army life would not destroy a man's self-interests but would preserve the same balance between individualism and teamwork that Americans experienced in their sporting endeavors. Frank Capra's series "Why We Fight" (1942-1945) was a vivid example of the use of anti-totalitarian images to encourage support for the war. And slogans like "Freedom from Want" acknowledged the popular desire for economic security after the 1930s. Spielberg's turn to the moral individual in heroism and in pain at the expense of the moral or democratic community, however, suggests just how much this film is a product of the late twentieth century and not of the 1940s. The attainment of democracy rested in the 1940s on a sense of reciprocity between individuals and the institutions that governed their lives. In a totalitarian state, government and institutions dominated individuals; in a democracy, a relationship of mutual respect existed between citizens and institutions. People served the nation because they believed the nation would serve their democratic interests in return. Narratives that endorsed this relationship, such as those found in many wartime films, effectively linked the fate of the individual with the fate of the nation. Today, however, narratives and images about the destiny of individuals command more cultural space than those about the fortunes of nations. As a result, both political speech and commemoration have more to say about victims or people who have met tragic fates. Spielberg's memory narrative of moral men represents very much the late twentieth century's concern with the singular person in the past, present, and future. Cohesive narratives that effectively link personal stories to collective desires for progress are harder to find. Those that exist are disrupted by images of victims. Heroism and patriotism remain, but they must fight for cultural space with the claims of those who have sorrowful tales from the past or those who insist on redress rather than self-denial. Many believe that, since Vietnam, it is harder to commemorate gallantry and victory or to suppress individual subjectivities at the expense of collective ones. Thus delineations of victims-from Vietnam, from the AIDS epidemic, from racism, from child abusers, from rapists, from drugs, even from World War II-now command more cultural space. Statements of what was lost now eclipse expressions of what was gained. Postwar films tended to treat the American warrior and American society in a more evenhanded way. They shared with Saving Private Ryan a tendency to remember the turmoil and stress. This is not an invention of the 1990s. Postwar films and culture actually went further, however, in exploring the consequences of the war, which is exactly what Bartov argued when he claimed that the acknowl edgment of victims impelled individuals to find reasons for the suffering.21 Because the Spielberg film attempts to preserve the memory of patriotic sacrifice more than it desires to explore the causes of the trauma and violence, however, it is more about restoring a romantic version of common-man heroism in an age of moral ambivalence than about ending the problem of devastating wars. The failure of Saving Private Ryan to evoke the memory of "a people's war," moreover, reveals the film's conservative politics. Past, present, and future are now contingent on standards of individual behavior rather than on democratic ideals such as the quest for equality, a just capitalism, or citizen participation in political life. Spielberg's film about trauma and patriotism suggests why the contemporary turn to memory, anguish, and the testimony of victims is about more than the demise of the cultural power of the nation. It also has a great deal to do with a sense of disenchantment with democratic politics and with turning political life over to "the people." Visions of a democratic community are feeble in this story, which remembers individuals in a more exemplary way than they were understood by their own generation." - John Bodnar, The American Historical Review , Jun., 2001, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Jun., 2001), pp. 805-817 Public Opinion "absolutely lost my shit when Vin Diesel showed up." - Diamonbold, Letterboxd The AI's Poetic Opinion saving private ryan "Imagine To save the life of a man But give up your own Drown the wild red feeling with a ray I'm fucking tired of this poetry Make up with dA vInci already" - Samantha Factoids Previous Rankings #41 (2020), #22 (2018), #83 (2016), #49 (2014), #67 (2013), #29 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Steven Spielberg (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Wes Craven (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (6), 1980s (9), 1990s (15), 2000s (17), 2010s (7) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #28 Fanboy Ranking, #32 Cinema Ranking #52 Old Farts Ranking, #26 Damn Kids Ranking #45 Ambassador Ranking, #30 All-American Ranking #40 Cartoon Ranking, #30 Damn Boomer Ranking

A movie which has a making of documentary as good as the movie. Number 32 "The horror... the horror...." About the Film Synopsis "At the height of the Vietnam war, Captain Benjamin Willard is sent on a dangerous mission that, officially, “does not exist, nor will it ever exist.” His goal is to locate - and eliminate - a mysterious Green Beret Colonel named Walter Kurtz, who has been leading his personal army on illegal guerrilla missions into enemy territory." Its Legacy "Whichever movie wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes this week, it is highly unlikely to have the scale and ambition of Francis Ford Coppola’s three-hour opus Apocalypse Now. Awarded the prize (jointly with Volker Schlondorff’s Tin Drum) 40 years ago in May 1979, some four months before a shorter, two-hour version was released in cinemas, it’s widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. But it wasn’t initially. Indeed, Coppola’s trippy transposing of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Gotterdammerung of the Vietnam War in which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard is dispatched up river to execute Marlon Brando’s rogue Green Beret colonel Kurtz – was met with mixed reviews on its US release. So, although Roger Ebert wrote that the film “achieves greatness not by analysing our experience of Vietnam, but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience”, Frank Rich in Time argued that “while much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally and intellectually empty”, and Vincent Candy called it “an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur”. Others were enraged by Coppola’s press conference at Cannes, in which the director claimed that “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam”. But in ways I’ll look at later, Coppola’s claim turned out to be oddly prophetic. First, however, a bit on the history of the production. The best and most immediate account of the logistically mind-boggling five-month shoot in the Philippines during 1976 was written by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, in her book culled from her diaries and letters, Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now. Eleanor Coppola recounts the infamous misfortunes that beset the production, from the typhoon that destroyed the set, Martin Sheen’s heart attack and how Brando turned up overweight and underprepared, as well as her husband’s gradual descent into a nervous breakdown and the near destruction of their marriage. Or as Coppola himself admitted at the Cannes press conference: “Little by little we went insane.” Notes begins with a quickfire insight into the casting of Brando (Kurtz was also offered to Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino) and Sheen (Willard was turned down by Steve McQueen, James Caan and Robert Redford, while Harvey Keitel was replaced after three days of filming). One can only wonder what Apocalypse Now would have been like with Nicholson as Kurtz and McQueen as Willard, but then movie history is littered with such casting what-ifs. Coppola has since made the fair point that it’s virtually impossible to make a war movie that’s entirely anti-war, but I think I can see what he was trying to do with this scene. What’s more troubling, and harks back to the director’s contentious statement at Cannes, is how life then imitates art. “The Ride of the Valkyries” was used in the Iraq War to psych up American troops before the battle for Fallujah in 2004, the marines’ Humvees blaring out the music as they prepared for some of the most intense fighting since Vietnam. And then art imitated life imitating art when the use of amplified Wagner in Iraq was replicated in the Sam Mendes’s 2005 movie Jarhead. In the minds of those who were never involved (that’s to say, most of us), Apocalypse Now has come to define our image of the Vietnam War much more vividly than other celebrated movies about the conflict: The Deer Hunter, Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, the latter filmed in London’s Docklands and feeling about as Indochinese as a multi-storey car park in Croydon. Earlier this year, Coppola released what would seem to be the definitive version of Apocalypse Now, the so-called Final Cut, still including Redux’s French plantation stopover, a wordy interlude that does slow the action (as well as featuring an opium-infused soft-core sex scene that could have come from the contemporaneous Emmanuelle films of Just Jaekin). The encounter with the French does, however, provide some much-needed political and historical context, the plantation owner claiming that it was the Americans who invented the Viet Minh (the precursors of the Viet Cong) during the Second World War. What is clear from Coppola’s various edits is that Apocalypse Now is not 40 years old, but 40 years in the making. It has its flaws and Coppola could never find a satisfactory ending however many times he re-arranged the footage because perhaps he has never really worked out what he was trying to say (was Kurtz mad or sane? Was he as resigned to his death as the sacrificial caribou?). But taken as a whole, it’s a bold (verging on insane), original and epic piece of movie-making and, in the age of Netflix and CGI, we shall probably never see its like again. Meanwhile, like the America that was still in its imperial pomp when it became embroiled in Vietnam, Coppola was never quite the same again once he returned from the jungle." - Gerard Gilbert, The Independent From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Francis Ford Coppola's stated reason for making Apocalypse Now (1978) was to assist Americans in "putting the Vietnam experience behind them."6 In the context of Lévi-Strauss's and Malinowski's analyses, then, this statement of authorial intentionality reveals much about almost all the post-Vietnam War Hollywood films, the film in question, and American society in general. Only a handful of U.S. films about Vietnam--The Green Berets (1968), In the Year of the Pig (1969), and Hearts and Minds (1974) being the most notable--were made during the Indochina conflict. Those that followed tended to depoliticize the struggle, turning it into a test of manhood, a rite of passage, or personal trial. Many dealt with the valid issue of "Vieterans'" return to postwar American civilian life (Rolling Thunder [1977], Coming Home [1978] The Deer Hunter [1978], First Blood [1982]) but avoided overt commentary on the moral and political questions of the war itself. Instead, they tended to focus on an individual's personal reaction to his Vietnam experience and subsequent readjustment. Apocalypse Now turned the real-life specificity of U.S. imperialism into an abstract and philosophical cinematic meditation on good and evil, light and dark. In the process, American society was treated to a film that represented not so much Vietnam-era America as America's idealized view of itself post-Vietnam, that is, from the enlightened perspective of a historical hindsight that could sublate contradictions. As such, Apocalypse Now might be categorized as both a pro-war movie and an anti-war movie in that the film's cinematic and political ambiguity both conceals and reveals a national ambivalence toward the Vietnam War. This same strategy of "having it both ways" can be seen in Apocalypse Now. Having been rewarded with an Oscar, financial success, and increased professional prestige for his articulation of national divisions in Patton, Francis Coppola seemed to have learned his lesson well when he came to make the equally ambivalent Apocalypse Now. In the latter project, however, he enlisted the aid of cowriter John Milius, who is well known for his right-wing jingoistic predilections (Dirty Harry [1971], Magnum Force [1973], The Wind and the Lion [1975], Conan the Barbarian [1982], Red Dawn [1984]). This divided authorship may account for some of the film's unresolved combinations of dovish and hawkish elements. On the one hand, Apocalypse Now has been read as an anti-war statement because many scenes depict the absurdity and outright lunacy of America's Vietnam policies, as well as the machinations of high-level military commanders. On the other, certain elements of its content and style work against this dovish reading. For instance, the title, Apocalypse Now, seems to emphasize the destructive, pro-war side of the film, derived as it was from the anti-war slogan "Peace Now!" Yet it is also possible that the title is an ironic warning of the ultimate dangers of extended conflict." - Frank P. Tomasulo, The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as a Pro-war and Anti-war film Public Opinion "Monumental cinema. Coppola's greatest achievement and probably one of the four or five greatest films I've ever seen. Was in awe from the first minute to the last. Oh, and Vittorio Storaro is a God among cinematographers." - @Jake Gittes The AI's Poetic Opinion apocalypse now "I smell napalm Beamless and grim,— Mimes in thine eyes, Dead men and him." - Samantha Factoids Previous Rankings #37 (2020), #56 (2018), #29 (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #44 (2013), #30 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Francis Ford Coppola (1), Wes Craven (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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (6), 1980s (9), 1990s (14), 2000s (17), 2010s (7) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #39 Fanboy Ranking, #27 Cinema Ranking #41 Old Farts Ranking, #30 Damn Kids Ranking #26 Ambassador Ranking, #32 All-American Ranking #22 Cartoon Ranking, #33 Damn Boomer Ranking

Number 33 "Micro changes in air density, my ass." About the Film Synopsis "During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed." Its Legacy "Mr. Scott said that when he first read the “Alien” script, by Dan O’Bannon, “it was frankly what I would call a very well-written B-movie. And we carried it out in an ‘A’ way with a terrific cast and a fantastic monster.” Those B-movie undertones were what emerged in the low-budget “Alien” knockoffs that came after, like “Galaxy of Terror” (from 1981, and perhaps best known for a sexual assault committed by a giant worm) and “Dark Universe” (1993), which features Joe Estevez and a poorly made monster. The horror-in-space premise has also been executed with more creativity and bigger budgets. There were “Event Horizon” (1997), in which the crew, including Laurence Fishburne, was tormented by hallucinations and “Doom” (with Dwayne Johnson), from 2005, in which the crew was done in by mutated Martians. Mars and attacks also factored this year into “Life,” in which crew members like Ryan Reynolds were taken down by an organism they found on the red planet. And the horror-space concept converged in a more outrageous way in “Jason X,” the 2001 entry in the “Friday the 13th” franchise that sent that film’s title killer into space along with androids. Horror films thrive on the concept of the “final girl,” the last one left standing to fend off the maniacal killer. But Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the “Alien” films made the transition from survivor to full-blown sci-fi action hero. She paved the way for other leading women in space, from Jodie Foster in “Contact” to Sandra Bullock in “Gravity.” Within the “Alien” universe, Noomi Rapace took the heroic reins in “Prometheus,” and Katherine Waterston flexes her muscles in “Alien: Covenant.” One of her alien battles bears a striking resemblance to a Ripley encounter. es, these films take place in outer space, so light is minimal. But “Alien” made distinct use of darkness, hiding its monster in the ship’s bowels, down dim corridors and inside caves. The original poster for “Alien” made the darkness a selling point, with a cracked egglike figure oozing green on a black background and the frightening tag line: “In space no one can hear you scream.” Much of “Alien: Covenant” is on the lowlight spectrum, too, with no way to know just where, or how many, threats lurk. Another film with “Alien” DNA referenced the darkness motif outright: “Pitch Black,” from (2000), which starred a rising Vin Diesel. After crashing, the passengers of a ship find themselves stranded on a planet full of E.T.s that attack in the dark. When an eclipse comes, so does terror." - Mekado Murphy, The New York Times From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "When the film Alien was released in 1979, it was marketed as a haunted house story set in space. The trailer’s first image is of a barren planet; the first sound is of strong wind and a low hum. The sound then incorporates a mechanical whir and a heartbeat, connecting the organic with the technological. Suddenly, the camera zooms over a moon-like landscape, and then, looming in the foreground, an egg-like form appears. The egg bobs and dips out of the frame while the camera continues to move across the landscape. Underneath this series of lap dissolves, transitions in which one image appears gradually over a preceding image, one can hear whispers or growls. As the title appears over the egg, the sound grows more intense. When the egg finally opens, the interior emits an unnatural bright green light and a chilling non-human scream. Immediately after, the screen fills with images from the movie: shots of the crew in panic, images of a wrecked spacecraft, a cat hiding in the walls, and brief glimpses of an amorphous, alien form. The sound of the heartbeat grows louder, more intense. The final close up of Ellen Ripley, security officer of the Nostromo, is cut, as is the sound, by the image of a planet and a ship in the depths of space. The ominous tagline is then revealed: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” The audience ascertains from this trailer that this is a horror film set in space, as it is difficult to determine what the film is about at all from its theatrical trailer alone. The film, however, demonstrates a deeper complexity than what is offered by its promotional reels. It is important to note that monsters, including aliens, represent the return and revenge of the repressed psyche. Indeed, the film’s iconic xenomorph facehugger, as argued by Slavoj Žižek, clearly represents the Lacanian “lamella,” the residue left behind once one emerges from the Real into the realm of the Imaginary. Žižek's discussion of the lamella in his essay "Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears" provides a framework for the exploration of the alien xenomorphs as representations of the horrific Other. In Alien with Kane's exploration of LV-426 and in Aliens with the USCMC's rescue mission of the Hadley's Hope colony, the viewer experiences the mythological archetype of the 'Underworld Journey,' the traveler's descent into a 'hellish' realm of the dead and emergence back into the world of the living 'reborn' as a newly-signified being. Both situations clearly illustrate one's obliteration when reconnected with the Real. The descent onto LV-426 and towards the Hadley's Hope colony draws the ill-fated characters to a place of the abject, or the repulsive object placed outside of the symbolic order. At this descent, the subjects encounter the xenomorphs and come face-to-face with these 'monsters.' Kane, in particular, emerges from this descent with the 'lamellalike' xenomorph facehugger. As the crewmembers of the Nostromo and the USCMC move outside the boundaries of the paternal company, the realm of the Symbolic and Imaginary, the audience experiences the breakdown of the characters' symbolic significations and seeks to place the characters into a new, relatable defining order. The most horrific and iconic image in the film series begins in Alien with Nostromo crewmember Kane's encounter with the xenomorph facehugger. The film opens with the crew's emergence from hypersleep. After the crew emerges from their hypersleep chambers, there is no dialogue for the first six minutes of the film. Gilbert Kane utters the first words of the film as the crew settle at the galley table for their first meal since their hibernation. The camera frames Gilbert Kane at the center of the table, where he is seen smoking a cigarette. This cigarette becomes the phallic bar between signifier and signified; it indicates Kane’s separation from the Real in his hypersleep chamber, symbolically the 'womb' of MU-TH-UR, and his entry into the imaginary and the symbolic realm of language. The first words Kane speaks are “I feel dead” (Hill and Giler). At his utterance, Kane becomes the focus of this conflict with the phallic Mother. Kane's 'birth' from hypersleep at the beginning of the film and his 'birthing' of the xenomorph represent what has "long been appreciated in the study of horror and dances close to Lacan's bifurcation of human development as one from the mute, mysterious feminine to the enlightened order of masculine reason" (Burfoot 67). These images, of Kane's emergence from hypersleep and of the alien xenomorph attached to his face, "present the possibility of a changed corporeality in terms of the body invaded and colonized by a life-taking force" (67). Kane is the first to awaken, the first to explore, and ultimately the first obliterated by the alien species the crew of the Nostromo encounter on the planet LV-426. The cycle of Kane’s separation from the union with the mother, his journey back to the womb-like planet of LV-426, and his confrontation with the alien-lamella represent the impossibility of one to experience the oceanic feeling of the Real without total self-obliteration, which defines Thanatos, or the death drive: one's unconscious desire to return to an inorganic state. His first lines culminate in the termination of the narrative, his death, and the destruction of the Nostromo. It also begins Ripley’s new signification from part of the Nostromo team to the lone hero who carries on the story of the fated ship." - Terri M. Nicholson, Georgia State University Public Opinion "Truly brilliant. The movie looks beautiful. 35mm just looks so great. Plus this movie has some much tension. A horror sci fi classic " - @Kvikk Lunsj The AI's Poetic Opinion alien "alien(s) Lightning and Jove; Penn, myrrh, and rings. Penn, myrrh, and rings." - Samantha Factoids Previous Rankings #29 (2020), #30 (2018), #45 (2016), #40 (2014), #45 (2013), #50 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Ridley Scott (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (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), 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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (5), 1980s (9), 1990s (14), 2000s (17), 2010s (7) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), Alien (2), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #30 Fanboy Ranking, #31 Cinema Ranking #22 Old Farts Ranking, #34 Damn Kids Ranking #41 Ambassador Ranking, #31 All-American Ranking #58 Cartoon Ranking, #31 Damn Boomer Ranking

People really like their problematic stockholm syndrome romances. I guess it's okay as long as there are talking candlesticks! Number 34 "If she doesn't eat with *me*, then she doesn't eat at all!" About the Film Synopsis "Follow the adventures of Belle, a bright young woman who finds herself in the castle of a prince who’s been turned into a mysterious beast. With the help of the castle’s enchanted staff, Belle soon learns the most important lesson of all – that true beauty comes from within." Its Legacy "As the Disney Renaissance hit its first peak in the late 1980s, executive Jeffrey Katzenberg had a mantra when it came to the films that Walt Disney Animation Studios would continue to produce throughout the 1990s: "Bigger, better, faster, cheaper." The Little Mermaid had certainly achieved the first two goals of that aim, but making low-budget animated films on a tight schedule was a concern for animators. They were laser-focused on the second word of his mantra: "better". After the relative failure of The Rescuers Down Under, Disney Animation wasn't going to collectively lick its wounds and mope — they were already moving onto the next project. It was, like The Little Mermaid, an adaptation that had been through development at the studio as far back as the 1930s. It was, like The Little Mermaid, a film that would retell one of the most well-known fairy tales ever written. It wouldn't be cheaper, but Beauty and the Beast was bigger, better, and made on a shockingly fast schedule, to the point where it nearly missed its release date. As noted in an oral history with Entertainment Weekly, Woolverton was aware of the fact that her style, and her commitment that the lead character of Beauty and the Beast shouldn't be the typically passive princess of Disney lore, wasn't making her friends: "I didn't make myself very popular." The film's producer, Don Hahn, said in the same oral history, "The storyboard artists weren't used to having a screenwriter in the room, and Linda, uh...Linda's manner at times could be combative." But even leaving Woolverton's style aside, Beauty and the Beast was going to have to go through major upheavals before it could even truly get off the ground. For Ashman, the production of Beauty and the Beast may have served as a way to stave off the disease ravaging his body. He and the other filmmakers holed up in upstate New York did end up following in a few of the footsteps of the Cocteau masterpiece, such as giving Gaston more of a front-and-center antagonistic role. The most notable difference, and one that was a huge key to the film's success, was giving personality to the household objects. The changes were drastic enough that Katzenberg approved a script in the early part of 1990. A number of Disney animators were tasked not just with storyboarding the script, but going back and forth between Burbank and New York, without fully grasping why. They just knew they had to get to work quickly – though the early 1990s were a far cry from how studios plant a metaphorical flag on certain dates years in advance for untitled films, the end of 1991 was coming up fast and they had to get a film ready for release. Beauty and the Beast, end credits and all, clocks in at just 84 minutes. But a whole life is lived, in the best way possible, in that brief period, starting with "Belle". The seven-minute sequence tells the audience exactly what it needs to know about the conflict that sets Belle off into the world of a mysterious prince and his castle. She seems to be the only well-read young woman in town (or, at least, the only young woman in town interested in reading), and chafes at the confines of the small unnamed town. In spite of this, the town's most handsome man, Gaston (voiced by the booming Richard White) lusts after Belle precisely because it's "only she who is beautiful as me". Within the sung-through scene, we learn that Belle's kindly father Maurice is both an inventor and perceived as being a nutcase, and that Belle loves him dearly. Most important, though, "Belle" is just a brilliant piece of musicianship from both Menken and Ashman. It's as close as you'll get in the Disney discography to the work of Stephen Sondheim. The playful use of the greeting "Bonjour" coupled with the background singing from the townspeople just going about their day fills in so much life in the small town Belle's ready to move on from. Ashman and Menken were reportedly concerned with how the executives would react to "Belle", but it's no surprise they fell for it. Who couldn't? As quickly as the film was coming together, Jeffrey Katzenberg was convinced that the film was going to be extremely special. That March, Disney convened some critics and members of the Academy in New York for a special, in-progress screening of the film. The "Belle" sequence was fully completed in color, but the rest was in black-and-white. It was the studio's first step in a campaign to bring a level of respectability to animation that it hadn't seen since the early days of Disney. Though the film was incomplete, the reaction from the crowd was clear and effusive. The filmmaking team immediately went to St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, as documented in Hahn's Waking Sleeping Beauty. There, they informed Howard Ashman of what occurred; Hahn said the film "would be a great success. Who'd have thought?" Ashman, now so ill that he had lost his sight and was extremely frail, whispered, "I would." A week later, Howard Ashman died at the age of 40. He never saw even an unfinished print of the film that would cement his legendary status. Ashman's death hit everyone hard, up to and including Jeffrey Katzenberg. According to DisneyWar, he saw in Ashman a kindred spirit with Disney himself. Arguably, there are few other people who have had the same level of influence on animation in the last 40 years as Howard Ashman. (Possibly only John Lasseter could claim such a title.) Beauty and the Beast served as a forceful capper to his influence. Ashman had been right to bring back the world of the musical to Disney; The Little Mermaid proved it was possible, and Beauty and the Beast proved it was necessary." - Josh Spiegel, SlashFilm From the Filmmaker Why It's Great Critic Opinion "When Disney's Beauty and the Beast was released late in 1991, critics hailed the film for its apparently innovative portrayal of the heroine, Belle.1In Newsweek, David Arisen claimed that "from the start, the filmmakers knew they didn't want Belle to be the passive character of the original story or a carbon copy of Ariel in The Little Mermaid, a creation some critics found cloyingly sexist" (75). In MacLean's, Brian Johnson praised Disney for "break[ing] the sexist mould of its fairy-tale heroines. . . . Beauty and the Beast spells out its enlightenment in no uncertain terms" (56). And in The New York Times, Janet Maslin asserted that Belle is "a smart, independent heroine . . . who makes a conspicuously better role model than the marriage-minded Disney heroines of the past" (1). But in spite of this insistence that Belle is a strong female character, that this fairy tale is "different," I saw the same old story, a romance plot that robs female characters of self-determination and individuality. Not at all a feminist movie, Disney's Beauty and the Beast slips easily into the mold of almost all other popular versions of fairy tales; that is, it encourages young viewers to believe that true happiness for women exists only in the arms of a prince and that their most important quest is finding that prince. Although it is clear that "Beauty and the Beast" has always been in part a love story, earlier printed versions of the tale offer valuable lessons in addition to emphasizing the love relationship. Disney, on the other hand, strips the traditional fairy tale of anything but the romantic trajectory, throws in a dose of violence, and woos its vast audience into believing it has been educated as well as entertained. Disney's Beauty and the Beast, while initially presenting a more interesting and better developed heroine than those we find in other Disney animated features, undermines the gains it makes by focusing narrative attention on courtship as plot advancement and marriage as dénouement. Certainly, romantic love is an important part of people's lives. But if we want children to develop balanced views of relationships between men and women and of their own identities as active individuals with full access to society, we should question the messages sent by such films. The deleterious effects of concluding fairy tales with marriage have been extensively examined by such critics as Marcia K. Lieberman and Karen Rowe. Lieberman points out that while [End Page 22] such stories end with marriage, the action of the story is concerned with courtship, "which is magnified into the most important and exciting part of a girl's life, brief though courtship is, because it is the part of her life in which she most counts as a person herself. After marriage she ceases to be wooed, her consent is no longer sought, she derives her status from her husband, and her personal identity is thus snuffed out. When fairy tales show courtship as exciting, and conclude with marriage, and the vague statement that "they lived happily ever after," children may develop a deep-seated desire always to be courted, since marriage is literally the end of the story." Rowe argues that the marriages at the ends of these tales are more accessible to and thus more influential on the female reader/viewer than any other aspect of the stories: "Because it is a major social institution, marriage functions not merely as a comic ending, but also as a bridge between the worlds of fantasy and reality. Whereas "once upon a time" draws the reader into a timeless fantasy realm . . . the wedding ceremony catapults her back into contemporary reality. Precisely this close association of romantic fiction with the actuality of marriage as a social institution proves the most influential factorinshaping female expectations." Undeniably, Beauty and the Beast is this kind of fairy tale." - June Cummins, Children's Literature Association Quarterly Public Opinion "Most interestingly, the movie is a subtle but damning musing on masculinity. Gaston, one of Disney's scariest villains, is Narcissus, who uses his looks and physique to rule over the town, despite not have any other qualifications. The Beast is a violent manchild who must learn that he cannot lash out in fits of violence and automatically get his way; and he must learn empathy and kindness, in order to escape his curse and truly be human. Howard Ashman was an immense talent who we lost too soon. "Tale As Old As Time" is so simple yet earnest as sung by Angela Lansbury. His lyrics are top notch throughout, particularly in the unsung hero of the show: “The Mob Song.” What a climax! Panicked! Fast! Crazed Madness! I also love the story that Alan Menken wrote part of the fight scene in like ten minutes as a placeholder, but when he went back to write the “real part” they couldn’t think of anything better. True geniuses. Beauty and the Beast is Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s magnum opus; not only is it one of the best movies (live action or animated) of all time, it is one of the best musicals of all time." - @Cap The AI's Poetic Opinion beauty and the beast "Tale as old as time Ebbs the day to side. Were toward the royal clouds Autumn's glowing pride." - Samantha Factoids Previous Rankings #54 (2020), #40 (2018), #47 (2016), #44 (2014), #68 (2013), #77 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (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), 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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (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), Billy Wilder (1), Kirk Wise (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (14), 2000s (17), 2010s (7) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), WDAS (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #26 Fanboy Ranking, #37 Cinema Ranking #23 Old Farts Ranking, #35 Damn Kids Ranking #29 Ambassador Ranking, #33 All-American Ranking #10 Cartoon Ranking, #34 Damn Boomer Ranking

rosebud. Number 35 "Rosebud." About the Film Synopsis "Rosebud." Its Legacy "Rosebud." From the Filmmaker "Rosebud." - Orson Welles Why It's Great Critic Opinion "Rosebud." Public Opinion "Rosebud." The AI's Poetic Opinion rosebud "Rosebud." - Samantha Rosebud Factoids Previous Rankings #59 (2020), #83 (2018), #50 (2016), #82 (2014), #64 (2013), #53 (2012) Director Count Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2), David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2), Ridley Scott (2), Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (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), 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), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Orson Welles (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1) Decade Count 1930s (2), 1940s (3), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (13), 2000s (17), 2010s (7) Country Count Japan (6), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1) Franchise Count Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), WDAS (1), The Wizard of Oz (1) Re-Weighted Placements #41 Fanboy Ranking, #36 Cinema Ranking #12 Old Farts Ranking, #48 Damn Kids Ranking #58 Ambassador Ranking, #35 All-American Ranking #30 Cartoon Ranking, #35 Damn Boomer Ranking

I can't believe y'all would do Kurosawa like this Number 135 Whisper of the Heart (1995, Yoshifumi Kondo) Number 134 Ran (1985, Akira Kurosawa) Number 133 Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa) Number 132 Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino) Number 131 Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)