Jake Gittes

I'm in good company to die on this hill with.

I like how there are those names in the thread title like they're supposed to tell us anything.

I want JLaw to work with Von Trier just so I could see how Futurist deals with it. Or hell even someone like PTA in his Master/Inherent Vice mode.

Not sure Gokira's threadban was a wise decision. He was at least contained in the weekend thread, now he can go anywhere

There's nothing artful about the ending.

Moscow

I travelled 27 hours by train to catch The Hateful Eight on 70mm in a 1,000-seat auditorium. Worth it.

It is always that time of the week

2012 is interesting in that I can't think of any obvious favorite. Unless The Avengers is #1 after everything else proves a little too divisive, in which case let's not do that after all.

I mean, at the end of the day, the answer is all of them. Let's face it we're addicted to this stuff.

Sure, I can't think of a single reason why it wouldn't.

It's still not gratuitous or anything.

The Dead is in my top 10 of all time.

Of all the yearly best-of lists, this was certainly one of them.

Imma just break down why the ending fucking blows. 1) This movie - in the writing, the direction, the work of the cast - spends 99% of the runtime getting you to care about the characters and their situation, and does a pretty decent job doing it. The cast has chemistry, the tension is there, the sense of a threat is there. For a movie that's basically Pretty Hollywood Types vs Indestructible Space Squid it takes itself seriously enough to make you care, but not quite so seriously that it becomes a The Thing-esque lovecraftian horror that sets up the possibility that literally everyone is doomed. Everything up to and including Gyllenhaal and Ferguson's desperate final plan points to an eventual hard-won victory, where only one person survives, and, just for kicks, there's a remote chance that Calvin will someday encounter some other civilization or something and wreck havoc there. But, the point is, the movie doesn't just promise, but actively makes it look like those other five people didn't actually die for nothing. ... Except they totally did! So what's the fucking point of the entire thing then? The twist doesn't just add anything to the movie, it goes in the opposite direction and cheapens it. The movie spends 100 minutes playing fair, and then kicks you in the balls and laughs at you. It's exactly what a nihilistic 13-year-old who thinks he's way edgier than everyone else would think of - "What if it's like Alien or The Thing, except - get this - EVERYONE TOTALLY DIES LOL? And then some upbeat old song plays over the end credits! Like in Reservoir Dogs or something! Because irony!" 2) To make it even more pointless: taken just by itself, the ending sets up another cool movie... that no one involved has any intention to ever make. In the world of the movie, what must follow is humanity's desperate battle with an indestructible squid from Mars who's presumably only gonna get bigger and bigger. How awesome does that premise sound? It sounds like the best thing ever. But you're not getting that. What you're getting instead is a pointless feature-length prequel about how that squid got here, starring characters who try their best and still all die for nothing, with no reward or payoff of any kind. I haven't seen a movie shoot itself in its pretty little head in the last two minutes like this in a long, long time.

Anton Chigurh is nothing if not dedicated

WTF man this is actually important. At least tell them what you're doing here, surely they'll understand

Too slow and arty for the top 5 esp in such a year. You got two huge Oscar/auteur movies, the best-received live-action blockbuster, the Peak Pixar movie, and one film that's massively grown in stature. No place for something like Jesse James there.

Yup.

Ah. Still underrated.

Rewatched Juno a couple times in the years since it came out and it really holds up better than you'd ever think it would. Glad the aggressive internet backlash seems to have mostly died out. Sucks that Black Book is gonna be the American Honey of this list after all.

You just wait until the world finally gets to witness The Day the Clown Cried in its full glory

Eastern Promises is not good, Mortensen and the bathroom fight aside. Too po-faced and melodramatic material for Cronenberg, one of his very few movies that largely feels anonymous.

If I remember correctly we think Fury Road is the 19th best movie of all time, and that's still a little low