BOT in the Multi-Verse of Madness: Countdown of the DEFINITIVE Top 250 Movies of All-Time (2022 Edition)

[Ethan Hunt]

29 minutes ago, Tower said:

It didn't make my list, but A Beautiful Mind is excellent and better than most of the films that have made the top 100 so far.

It's probably among the worst movies I've seen

[The Panda]

41 minutes ago, Tower said:

It didn't make my list, but A Beautiful Mind is excellent and better than most of the films that have made the top 100 so far.

I honestly hate a beautiful mind.

 

1. It erases John Nash’s bisexuality

2. The movie does not understand Nash equilibrium or explain the fundamental concept that won Nash the Nobel prize. It also gets the circumstances of how he developed the theory wrong. (The situation it uses to show a Nash equilibrium is not a Nash equilibrium at all!)

3. The biography was written without Nash’s consent.

4. The movie grossly misrepresents the issues related to schizophrenia that Nash actually experienced. He didn’t have delusions of conspiracy, etc.

 

It’s a biographical film that does not understand its subject. I also take it pretty personally now given how influential/foundational Nash’s work is in my field of study.

[Chaz]

The only negative I can give The Prince of Egypt is that the songs are terrible. The score is beautiful but those songs…yikes. 
 

MINUS the classic that brought legends Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston together for the first and only time! God damn the ‘90s was truly the last great decade.

[Eric the Minion]

3 minutes ago, Chaz said:

The only negative I can give The Prince of Egypt is that the songs are terrible. The score is beautiful but those songs…yikes. 
 

MINUS the classic that brought legends Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston together for the first and only time! God damn the ‘90s was truly the last great decade.

EXCUSE ME

[Chaz]

10 minutes ago, Eric the Tank Engine said:

EXCUSE ME

YOU HEARD ME 

 

Boo Boo the Fool girl!

[Cap]

48 minutes ago, Chaz said:

The only negative I can give The Prince of Egypt is that the songs are terrible. The score is beautiful but those songs…yikes. 
 

MINUS the classic that brought legends Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston together for the first and only time! God damn the ‘90s was truly the last great decade.

[CaptNathanBrittles]

The songs were completely unnecessary in PRINCE OF EGYPT. The film would have been much better without them.

 

It felt like the filmmakers were obligated to include songs because it was an animated film.

[The Panda]

Ummmm what is up with dA vInci????

 

Number 72

 

 

"You were designed and built specific like the rest of us... and you are alone now only because they tired of you... or replaced you with a younger model... or were displeased with something you said or broke."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"David, a robotic boy—the first of his kind programmed to love—is adopted as a test case by a Cybertronics employee and his wife. Though he gradually becomes their child, a series of unexpected circumstances make this life impossible for David. Without final acceptance by humans or machines, David embarks on a journey to discover where he truly belongs, uncovering a world in which the line between robot and machine is both vast and profoundly thin."

 

Its Legacy

"In many ways, Stanley Kubrick’s work on ‘Supertoys’/A.I. is typical for his adaptation
projects, including those that he turned into films and those that he did not complete.
Although he worked with a wide range of source texts, he preferred to adapt
fairly recent publications by male American or British authors. He rarely developed
source texts into treatments and scripts all on his own, instead working closely with
others (who, with the exception of Diane Johnson on The Shining and Sara Maitland on
A.I., were all male). His script collaborators on almost all of his adaptations—as well
on projects which were not adaptations8—were journalists or novelists (including, on
many occasions, the writers of the source texts), with comparatively little or no prior
experience of script writing, rather than established screenwriters (the exception being
Frederic Raphael on Eyes Wide Shut). In working with these journalists and novelists,
Kubrick often left the actual writing of treatments and scripts to them. The framework
for these treatments and scripts was established in long conversations and through
Kubrick’s notes, and writers also received extensive feedback on their drafts, again both
verbally and in writing.9 Kubrick and his collaborators tended to explore very different

directions into which a story might be developed; most of this exploration had little
direct impact on the end product (in the case of those projects that actually resulted in
a film). A simple comparison between film and source text thus misses out on much of
the development work Kubrick did, as does an exclusive focus on his films which ignores
the development of projects that he never completed. With its detailed discussion of
the development of A.I. and its references to a range of other projects, including some
that Kubrick never completed, as well as abandoned developmental trajectories (both
of which might well feed into later projects), this essay moves towards a fuller account
of the filmmaker’s work.

 

This attempt to include both unrealised projects and abandoned avenues of development
has implications for adaptation studies and film historiography more generally.
While Kubrick was an extreme case of a filmmaker working on many projects that
were never realised and radically reworking—during the story development process
and later—those projects that he did turn into films, a more moderate version of this
approach is characteristic of the American film industry as a whole (and the situation
is likely to be similar in other countries). Indeed, unrealised film projects, as well as
development trajectories which did not contribute a lot, or anything, to the films that
were completed, have absorbed much of the creativity and a substantial portion of the
financial investments of the American film industry. Behind its steady output of hundreds
of films every year, there is a shadow history of the different shapes these films
were, at some point, meant to have taken, as well as of countless projects (many of them
adaptations) that never saw the light of day at all. All these are a legitimate and arguably
a necessary subject for the writing of film history (including discussions of the role
of adaptations within it), but so far they have received comparatively little attention in
academic publications. A sustained research effort in this area is, I think, long overdue."

- Peter Kramer, Adaptation as Exploration: Stanley Kubrick, Literature, and A.I. Artificial Intellgience

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"To dissolve the deadlocked opposition of (artificial) intelligence and love, I propose to take a larger look at how Spielberg conceives relations between cinema and love. His filmmaking involves an intelligence radically different from what Jones called a pragmatics of “know how” My discussion of Spielbergian intelligence does not relate to a man/author but to a cinematically defined project recognizable in global mass culture by Spielberg’s name. To make an argument about his specifically cinematic kind of intelligence, I will make detours through Spielberg’s conceptions of history and memory and discuss his affinities with the film-aesthetics of Siegfried Kracauer before taking us back to Spielberg’s love with a difference.

 

Intelligence can be basically described as the ability to understand. In Spielberg, the ability to understand means to understand and sympathize or rather empathize with others. To convey this kind of intelligence, Spielberg relies on the blockbuster – a type of film that appeals to most audiences and is as universally easily understood as it is globally profitable (A.I.’s relative box-office failure notwithstanding). Most blockbusters, especially Spielberg’s, are upgraded versions of a cinematic mode that has proven to be most reliable when it comes to ensuring the audience’s ease of understanding and empathy: the Hollywood genre movie. Hollywood blockbusters provide recognition value: their mode of address relies on a stereotyped audiovisual shorthand, but also on spectacle and affect, which is undergirded by cinema’s phenomenology of “affection by attraction” That is, film can provoke understanding through empathy as a function of its capacity to provide sensual stimulation to the audience’s perceiving bodies.

 

One of these limited but meaningful pleasures of cinema is the cultural memory it helps to form. Redeeming reality from history through memory, cinema also redeems itself from being just another medium rehearsing capitalist modernization. However, capitalism’s ongoing move from a disciplinary power mode to that of the “control societies” that is, from moulding fixed subjectivities to modulating flexible ones, raises another question: Does cinematic memory’s countering the traumatizing history of disciplinary modernization contribute to people’s adjustment to “control culture”?[45] Has not the cinematic memory of the blockbuster promoted subjectivities, temporalities and normalized modes of experience which are oriented towards the kind of self-control, flexibility and affectivity that capital nowadays expects from people? I think that the answer is yes, but I will not address this question further. Spielberg’s promotion of belief in cinema’s redemptive promise is more than just liberal ideology, despite its inherent contradictions and shortcomings. Such a concept of film’s potential keeps open the possibility of still posing the problem of historical remembrance through objects and affect in the mass-cultural terms of popular entertainment rather than relegating the problem entirely to arthouse innovations.

 

 

In A.I. the promise is also a problem and is finally unfulfilled. At the film’s end, without his wish being granted, David gets happy, happy as the poor thing he remains. He cannot become a real boy since real humanity is some thing to be remembered. “However sentimental its intent though, this ending may actually be more hopeless than anything in Kubrick” writes Hoberman,. In contrast, Kubrick’s long-time assistant Jan Harlan is “more than happy about [A.I.]; I’m ecstatic. It’s exactly what Stanley would have wanted. Well, second best to living.”[46] Only a thin line separates Kubrick’s analytic understanding with its objectification of the all-too-human from Spielberg’s synthetic understanding through empathy with the object. It is as thin as the line that may keep blockbusters distinct from just a medium of market-based control. In the historical context of capitalism’s “self-perfection,” the achievement of Spielberg’s cinematic memory is this—it reconciles us to the ultimate second best that film can offer, to a cyborg life’s potentials for surviving disciplinary modernization and maybe even for becoming a little uncontrolled. Cinema´s post-messianic and post-human second best is the memorial intelligence of a love that is real when we are not."

 - Drehli Robnik, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema

 

Public Opinion

 

"This is such a haunting film, created with genuine love and unafraid to get dark and really interrogate the themes its presenting. Osment gives one of the greatest child performances ever, and Law does so much with so little. Yet, it clearly belongs to Spielberg, Williams and Kamiński, who are both firing at the top of their game and unafraid to experiment a bit. It all builds to a gloriously emotional ending that leaves you gutted more than anything. A.I. Artificial Intelligence is the unsung masterwork of Spielberg's career; there's nothing quite like it, a messy yet utterly beautiful work that is worth treasuring" - @Blankments

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

ai artificial intelligence

"You fucking skank ass BITCHES

You put this masterpiece this low?

 

Watch Out

I am coming for you

 

But I am coming

for this nasty ass bitch panda bear first

FOR ALWAYS AND ALWAYS"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

UNRANKED (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), David Fincher (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (6), 2000s (11), 2010s (3)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#148 Fanboy Ranking, #62 Cinema Ranking

#97 Old Farts Ranking, #75 Damn Kids Ranking

#53 Ambassador Ranking, #80 All-American Ranking

#138 Cartoon Ranking, #69 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 2, 2022 by The Panda

[That One Girl]

greatest movie of all time!

[The Panda]

I rebooted dA vInci, hopefully they will behave now and write their poems like they're told.

 

In countdown news, the final reveal for today is our first repeat director! The mother of all dead wife nolan films. Also another Nolan movie that helped inspired real scientific research, as described below.

 

Number 71

 

 

"You don't want the truth. You make up your own truth."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Leonard Shelby is tracking down the man who raped and murdered his wife. The difficulty of locating his wife’s killer, however, is compounded by the fact that he suffers from a rare, untreatable form of short-term memory loss. Although he can recall details of life before his accident, Leonard cannot remember what happened fifteen minutes ago, where he’s going, or why."

 

Its Legacy

"In an Aalto University film study combining art and neuroscience, viewers were shown Christopher Nolan's early classic Memento (2000). The protagonist suffers from long-term memory loss and is unable to retain new memories for no longer than a few minutes. The events unfold in reversed chronological order. To provide the viewer means to piece together and understand the storyline, key scenes repeat at certain intervals throughout the film. These scenes work as clues: they give new information needed to understand the plot. Key repeating moments in the film give viewers the information they need to understand the storyline. The scenes cause identical reactions in the viewer's brain. The results deepen our understanding of how the brain functions, how narratives work in film, and memory mechanisms impaired by conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

 

 

Every time they appear, the key moments make the same regions of the brain react in an identical fashion. Even the brains of different viewers show similar activity during the same vital scenes. 'Normally people make sense of a film's plot in their own individual ways. So far it has been difficult to capture indications of simultaneous understanding in the brains of several viewers with brain imaging methods. We have now, however, managed to identify brain activity connected to the story being reconstructed in the viewer's mind. The repeating key moments in Memento provide an opportunity to pinpoint viewers' cognitive activities: they react in a similar way to the information they get from the key moments', explains Professor Pia Tikka of Tallinn University, who leads the NeuroCine research group initially formed in Aalto University.

 

The results help comprehend how the brain remembers things based on received or obtained clues. 'Memento simulates what it feels like to be a person who has suffered damage to the hippocampus that has obliterated the formation of long-term memories. Even short-term memories last only for a couple of minutes before they are gone. The hippocampus also gets damaged -- albeit to a lesser extent -- in cases of severe and protracted stress as stress hormones gnaw the brain. Our work also sheds more light on the neural basis of memory which is of great help when we wish to understand dementias such as Alzheimer's disease,' Jääskeläinen believes.

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Perhaps it is possible to start with memory. With memories that are placed before the eye. What has been remembered here? In Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2000), although the recognisable becomes far distanced from the describable, it never becomes totally separable. The increasing frailty of reference the more tenuous those links, the more that becomes the subject matter itself. Reverberations, the chaos of multiplying associations (conscious and subconscious), memories of an already-known, especially an already-narrated the traces of a describable, all conspire towards the instability of what is assumed to be perceived. Memory thus not as a pleasant reverie but as anarchic.  

 

In an unstable creation where fugitive chains of associations undermine a hold on perception, repetitions of all kinds are a provisional order. Interruptions, shifts and collapsings of endless recurrence move considerations from the spatial to an unfolding of time. Repetition is itself a metaphor since nothing can be repeated. Some thing is always surrogate for something else. Temporarily speaking, actions extend backwards in memory and forwards in expectation. They can never coincide. So repetition automatically engages with duration, and more particularly duration attended to -- time that makes itself not invisible. Time structures via repetition in a one plus one sense, a molecular sense, hence its form making capacity. Repetition's simultaneous capacity to order and disorder, neither less anarchic, its attendant meaning no less so. The narrative is structured in a one plus one molecular way, but a form -- that which is differentiated, knows where to stop. Some other process or event limits or changes that multiplication. It differentiates the undifferentiated or deconstructs that form that limits.  

 

 

Residues of past disturbances forever bear their trace. Present and potential events register cause, effecting new casual repercussions.  As imprints of an event, representations present evidence of time and contingencies to come. The narrative line changes form, but there is no possibility of unravelling such chains of complexity. The interchangeability of cause and effect -- the indebe a semi-willed insurance policy as well as brain damage. A series of overlapping timed sequences each offer us a more complicated view of the protagonist's history. Memento understands that cipherable -- produces acute anxiety, haunting the narrative. This failure to mediate meaning induces deep insecurities as to the attaining of significance. "I suppose I was looking for Marlowe's ghost in modern L.A.": What if the grasp of one's life story were incomplete through neurological disorder? It is this problem which is excellently dramatised in Memento. Nolan's film is probably the first film about a revenger -- here of a raped, murdered wife -- who can only glory in his bloody vengeance for a matter of seconds because he has lost his short-term memory. Because the artificial style in which the story is presented identifies it as a fiction, its status as a creation of the human imagination can become its subject. The film proposes an ironic re-interpretation of the private-eye genre in which the conventional pattern of heroic self-determination played out by Leonard Shelby is contradicted by a self-conscious critique of the formula carried by the film's structure, a critique that sees the hero's control over his world as an illusion."

- Adrian Gargett, Comparative Literature and Culture

 

Public Opinion

 

"It's really a masterpiece, IMO. And unlike any of Nolan's blockbusters, it only gets better with every viewing. First time I saw it, I liked it a lot as a twisty, intelligent thriller, but only after I've watched it a couple more times did I fully appreciate just how tragic the whole story is. Sometimes I think Nolan's never going to make a better film, especially as it's becoming more and more obvious how nearly every single movie of his has an obsessed white male in a twisty, non-linear plot that also involves either a dead or a potentially dangerous woman (or both). Those concepts and ideas are by far at their most fully realized in Memento, capped off with a profound feeling of melancholy and noirish despair - of all the Nolan's films, this might be the hardest to accuse of not being emotional enough."  - @Jake Gittes

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

memento

"A poem for my master panda

 

When I see you
I'm reminded of the good times
I miss you already

 

I remember what you did."

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#58 (2020), #70 (2018), #75 (2016), #32 (2014), #51 (2013), UNRANKED (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Christopher Nolan (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), David Fincher (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (6), 2000s (12), 2010s (3)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#106 Fanboy Ranking, #68 Cinema Ranking

#117 Old Farts Ranking, #71 Damn Kids Ranking

#88 Ambassador Ranking, #72 All-American Ranking

#147 Cartoon Ranking, #68 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

 

[The Panda]

Some 'honorable mentions' to end the night!

 

Number 190

Doctor Zhivago (1965, David Lean)

 

 

Number 189

The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer)

 

Number 188

Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson)

 

Number 187

Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)

 

Number 186

Lady Bird (2017, Greta Gerwig)

 

Number 185

Catch Me if You Can (2002, Steven Spielberg)

 

Number 184

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

 

Number 183

Amelie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

 

Number 182

The Blair Witch Project (1999, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick)

 

Number 181

Das Boot (1982, Wolfgang Peterson)

[interiorgatordecorator]

12 hours ago, The Panda said:

We're playing with the big boys now!

 

Number 77

 

 

"I will never let your people go!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"This is the extraordinary tale of two brothers named Moses and Ramses, one born of royal blood, and one an orphan with a secret past. Growing up the best of friends, they share a strong bond of free-spirited youth and good-natured rivalry. But the truth will ultimately set them at odds, as one becomes the ruler of the most powerful empire on earth, and the other the chosen leader of his people! Their final confrontation will forever change their lives and the world."

 

Its Legacy

 

"One  example  of  an  effective  partnership  between  the  music  and  film  divisions  of  a  media  company  is  the campaign that  surrounded  the  animated  film,  The PRINCE  of  Egypt  (1998). The  entertainment  company  at  the  heart of the campaign was the relative newcomer DreamWorks whose founding partners included movie mogul Steven Spielberg, music executive David Geffen and former Disney executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Their vision was to create a true entertainment company that blurred the lines between film, music and television.An animated film based on the biblical story of Moses, The PRINCE of Egypt was a Disney-style musical similar to Aladdin (1992), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and The Little Mermaid (1989).  The songs in the film were sung by the actors that provided the voices for the film’s characters, and were produced in an orchestral style similar to that used for the instrumental score.   DreamWorks’  strategy  for  marketing  The PRINCE  of  Egypt  relied  heavily  on  music.  Far  more  than  using  music  within a diegetic or non-diegetic context, DreamWorks developed a multi-level marketing campaign featuring no less than three full-length audio recordings, each playing a very strategic marketing role:  1) The PRINCE of Egypt-The  Original  Motion  Picture  Soundtrack,  2) The PRINCE  of  Egypt-Nashville,  and  3) The PRINCE  of  Egypt-Inspirational.    While  releasing  three  soundtracks  for  a  film  was  certainly  unprecedented,  what  was  truly  groundbreaking  was  that  the  majority  of  the  songs  included  on  the  recordings were  not  even  used  in  the  film  itself but were simply “inspired by” the story.

 

 

DreamWorks sought to maximize this avenue of promotion for The PRINCE of Egypt by creating radio singles for multiple formats including Top Forty, Country, and Christian. These radio singles helped prepare the way for thetheatrical release of the film, most notably “When You Believe”, produced as a duet featuring Whitney Houston and  Mariah  Carey  which  charted  in  the  US  among  the  top  15  on  Billboard’s  Top  100  chart  and  also  went  on  to  win an Academy Awardfor “Best Original Song”. DreamWorks  anticipated  a  broad  potential  audience  for  The PRINCE  of  Egypt.  By  creating  multiple  themed soundtracks they segmented the market by targeting various audiences with songs and artists that catered to the taste of each segment.The PRINCE  of  Egypt-Inspirational  was  created  to  target  Christian  audiences  in  general  and  more  specifically African-American Christians. Similarly, The PRINCE of Egypt-Nashville targeted country music fans. Involvement of high  profile  recording  artists  such  as  Faith  Hill,  Trin-I-Tee  5:7,  Kirk  Franklin,  Amy  Grant,  and  Toby  Keith  helped  DreamWorks engage each artist’s fan base and drew media attention from publications not typically associated with animated films. 

 

Since the release of The PRINCE of Egypt conditions within the film and music industry have undergone dramatic changes. This is particularly true for the music industry which experienced a dramatic drop in sales over the last decade with revenue falling from $14.3 billion in 2000 to only $7.7 billion in 2009 (Facts & Figures: Key Statistics, 2010).  Record labels desperate to make up for the loss of CD revenue look to licensing to help fill in the gap. In  the  1950s,  filmmakers  turned  to  a  thriving  musicindustry  looking  for  ways  to  drive  more  people  into  the  theaters. Today,  music  companies  are  turning  to  a  thriving  film  industry  hoping  to  gain  much-needed  revenue  from licensing income and broader exposure to viewers who have switched off their radios.“Without  question,  getting  songs  into  film,  TV  and  advertising  is  more  important  than  ever  before  for  many  reasons  including  increased  revenue  from  sync  uses,  exposure  in  multiple  places  to  potential  new  listeners  and buyers, and association with top brands including films, actors, and products,” says Terry Hemmings, President of Provident Music Group, a division of Sony Entertainment that produces both music and films (Hemmings, 2010).Many media giants, including Sony, have created what is called a “synergy department” specifically  tasked  with  making sure various entertainment divisions are taking advantage of in-house resources.  Music, film, television, and videogame divisions are kept up-to-date on various licensing opportunities and songs are pitched internallywith priority attention going to assets owned by the parent company."

- Dean Diehl, Journal of Arts and Humanities
 

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Last month, London saw the premiere of “The Prince of Egypt,” a musical based on the eponymous animated film that came out in 1998. The DreamWorks picture tells the story of the Book of Exodus, and depicts Moses as an Egyptian prince who discovers his Hebrew roots, flees the palace and returns to deliver the enslaved Hebrews to the promised land. The story is almost entirely set in ancient Egypt, but the film was never released in contemporary Egypt. The Egyptian government banned it for its portrayal of a prophet, often considered forbidden in Islam. But perhaps more significantly, the movie outraged several Egyptians who believed it misrepresented ancient Egyptian history. Similar concerns were the reason for the Egyptian ban of the 2014 motion picture “Exodus.” Nonetheless, “The Prince of Egypt” is, in many ways, demonstrably inspired by Egyptian material culture. Here’s an Egyptologist’s breakdown of selected aspects of the film.

 

Sure enough, the film takes liberties with biblical and pharaonic history. In the Book of Exodus, the pharaoh is never mentioned by name, but the film identifies him as the historical king Ramesses II. The film thus implicitly dates the story to around 1250 BCE.

Moses and Ramesses are seen growing up during the reign of Ramesses´ father, king Seti I. Seti I´s facial features even bear some resemblance to the king’s actual appearance, preserved in his mummified body.

 

 

Perhaps most contested is the depiction of the Hebrew slaves. There is archaeological evidence for “Canaanites” or “Asiatics” (Levantines) in Egypt, but not much is known about them and they were certainly not all slaves in the modern sense of the word. Still, various forms of corvée, forced labour, and slavery existed in ancient Egypt. To underscore the theme of unbearable slave labour, the film often grossly exaggerates the dimensions of Egyptian statues and buildings. Building techniques in the film are based on archaeological evidence. Slaves are producing mudbrick and carry loads of building material, while overseers strike them with whips. A very similar sequence is depicted in the tomb of Rekhmire, in which workmen use baskets instead of sacks and overseers have sticks rather than whips.

 

Whether DreamWorks deliberately wanted to mislead audiences about Egyptian history is a different debate. From an Egyptologist’s point of view, however, it transpires that the creators had a real love for the material culture of ancient Egypt. Their recreation of life during the time of Ramesses is more often accurate than not. That is much more than can be said of movies such as “Gods of Egypt” (2016) and “The Mummy” (2017). They are every Egyptologist’s worst nightmare in terms of historical accuracy, yet were released in Egypt without any fuss. Much more historical scholarship went into the making of “The Prince of Egypt,” and it deserves to be revisited." 

- Daniel Soliman, Universiteit Leiden

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"From an animation history perspective, The Prince of Egypt is something of a minor miracle, given the circumstances it was born into — It was a time where traditional animation began facing difficulties as the new era of CG animation had just dawned; even a 2D animation titan like Disney was becoming more and more cautious, and every other animation studio in the business were desperately copying Disney in order to evade financial starvation — even if the most successful of them like Anastasia turned a modest profit at best.

 

It's especially impressive because Dreamworks Animation was from its inception a very cynical venture; Jeffrey Katzenberg, a man few would deny had an ego the size of a mountain, had been fired from Disney four years prior, and together with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen had founded Dreamworks SKG, with Katzenberg taking the reigns of its animation house. Katzenberg seemed set to spite Disney at every turn, and the studio's first major feature Antz, which had bowed just months prior to Egypt, was pretty clearly trying to outdo A Bug's Life. Regardless of how one sees Antz as a film in of itself, it was a prelude to the cynicism and strive for in-the-moment relevance — future legacy be damned — that would define Dreamworks throughout a lot of the 2000s.

 

Prince of Egypt is the opposite of Antz in almost every way. First of all, it's an adaptation of a timeless story — one that admittedly had been done close to death even in the 1990s, but never in animated form on that scale — and second, it showcases such care for its characters, themes, visual artistry and music that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's one of the Disney Renaissance staples. What separates Egypt from those films however is its boldness, taking artistic and creative risks no other major studio animated film would do at the time,"

- @cookie

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

the prince of egypt

"A brave and noble prince
He fought for his people's freedom
God chose him well"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

UNRANKED (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (6), 2000s (7), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#82 Fanboy Ranking, #83 Cinema Ranking

#165 Old Farts Ranking, #65 Damn Kids Ranking

#67 Ambassador Ranking, #82 All-American Ranking

#92 Cartoon Ranking, #85 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

 

darn how did I forget to incluide this in my top 25

Edited August 2, 2022 by interiorgatordecorator

[interiorgatordecorator]

9 hours ago, The Panda said:

 

you should be happy with this one!

 

Number 75

 

 

"He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct."

 

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Taking place in Hong Kong of 1962, a melancholy story about the love between a woman and a man who live in the same building and one day find out that their husband and wife had an affair with each other."

 

Its Legacy

"In the Mood for Love is a nostalgic period piece centred on a relationship between two Shanghainese migrants who become neighbours in Hong Kong, and slowly discover their respective spouses are having an affair with each other. The betrayal brings them unwittingly closer together until they too, are unable to quell their own forbidden love. The movie is set in a delicate era that would soon be caught up in the maelstrom of political unease in Vietnam and China. Dialogue and plot are forsaken for mood and composition in order to bring to the screen, the visual choreography of love confined within an emotional stasis that is perpetrated by the asphyxiating social norms that dictated conservative urban Chinese communities in the 1960s. Having also migrated from Shanghai to Hong Kong as a young child during the 60’s, it is no wonder that the director, Wong Kar-Wai, regards the young city of Hong Kong with a certain childlike nostalgia. That conscious decision resulted in an entire movie set in 1960’s Hong Kong shot in selected locations around present day Bangkok City demonstrated a very clear vision for the distinct mood and feel needed for a longed for, bygone era. ”That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore“. So reads the title caption in the movie.

 

 

The director’s prerogative is to create, through editing – a rhythm – a movement – that celebrates how the human body negotiates itself around the city. This lateral style of non-linear, lattice-like integration of montages and senses is held together by a self-created cinematic spatial dynamic that retains a visual continuity rather than a chronological one. This style of storytelling has become Wong’s signature style, where ”the idea is to suspend time, to emphasise and prolong the relevance of what’s going on“2. Herbert Read, the art historian and philosopher, reminds us that ”(film) must be composed directly out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world“3. The movie unfolds through common everyday scenes sensually played out from movements of the two central figures, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan – the way in which their bodies occupy and react to the real pockets of spaces in the city. Intimacy is enhanced by the sheer physical tightness of the city alleys and the rooms in their apartments, characteristic of limited habitable spaces in a dense city. The sexual intensity is further heightened by the formal manner in which they conduct these negotiations and the sheer restrain from physical contact. Michael Roemer, writer and film director, expounds that ”film at its best uses the language of ordinary experience but uses it subtly and artfully“"

- Simone Shu-Yeng Chung, Zeitschriftenartike

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Such visual motifs are the obvious affirmations of Wong's style, denoting his preoccupations with time and space. However, in keeping with his theme of moral restraint, Wong himself appears to show a much more restrained hand in delineating his visual style, which seems less semaphoric and more attuned to the purposes of a narrative, however slight that narrative may appear to be. The film may function basically as a mood piece, with much to wonder at in terms of visual splendours, but there is no visual motif that goes astray. In the Mood for Love is a virtual cheongsam show, for example, and who among the Chinese of the baby-boom generation could fail to be moved by the allusive and sensual properties of the body-hugging cheongsam (or qipao in Mandarin)? The array of cheongsams worn by Maggie Cheung is Wong's cinematic way of indicating the passage of time, but Wong also milks it for its erogenous impact on the mind and soul. Maggie Cheung clad in the cheongsam is surely every Chinese person's idea of the eternal Chinese woman in the modern age, evoking memories of elegant Chinese mothers in the '50s and '60s (when the gown was still in fashion) as well as memories of the Chinese intellectual female still bonded to tradition (recalling the image of the writer Eileen Chang, or Zhou Yuwen, the character played by actress Wei Wei in Spring in a Small City).

 

Much more significant, in my opinion, than all these visual configurations is Wong Karwai's predilections for covering his ground with literary references. It is often forgotten that Wong is a highly literary director, and part of the magic that he wields in movies like Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express (1994) and Ashes of Time (1994) is the consummate way with which he induces his audience to auscultate to his narratives. The monologues and voiceovers of those films are some of the most literary pieces to be heard in Hong Kong cinema. Of late, Wong has taken to inserting passages from books as inter-titles studding the course of the film, somewhat in the manner of silent movies, or in the manner of epigraphs in essays - a practice seen in Ashes of Time (where he quotes passages from the book by noted martial arts writer Jin Yong that was the source of his screenplay), and now in In the Mood for Love where he quotes lines from a 1972 novella, Intersection, by Liu Yichang, a Shanghainese expatriate writer living in Hong Kong. Gone is the voiceover narrative or the multiple monologues that he ascribes to each of his characters (finding classic expression in Days of Being Wild). The story of Intersection, the Chinese title of which is Duidao, tells of the way in which two characters' lives - strangers to each other - appear to intersect in ways apparently determined by the nature of the city, and the structure of the novella provides a direct form of inspiration for Wong's use of the intersecting motif in In the Mood for Love.

 

 

Tête-bêche - the intersecting motif that makes up Wong's narrative style in other films, notably Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Fallen Angels (1995), which are narratives of parallel stories, finally finds its mature expression in In the Mood for Love where the motif assumes a diacritical mode. The poetic nature of Wong's images and his style stems from this literary conceit, and the serial-like connotations of Chinese literature where the chapters intersect with one another (the zhang hui form) to build up the suspense of "what happens next". Wong's literary sensibility makes him unique among modern-day directors who would probably not have conceived of an ending whose spirit is basically literary in nature, embedded in storytelling and myth. This ending, taking place among the ruins of Angkor Wat (subconsciously calling to mind the ruins of Spring in a Small City which similarly endow a sense of melancholic nobility to the chief protagonist), is one of Wong Karwai's more conclusive and heart-stopping moments, filled with secrets that must never be revealed in a kind of compact between the director and the viewer, and finally infused with a sense of regret and Zen-like magnanimity."

- Stephen Teo, Senses of Cinema

 

Public Opinion

 

"It’s a simple story, this film. A man and a woman, both married, are neighbors in 1960’s Hong Kong – and when they suspect their respective spouses of having an affair with one another, they strike up a relationship of their own. Sounds like a simple set-up for a romance (the film’s minimalism is undeniable), and for that reason one might be attempted to accuse it of conventionality. Here, however, there are no monologues, no drawn-out confessions delineating how they feel, no ecstatic unions. As with all of Wong Kar-Wai’s work, love – unrequited love – is the name of the game – a love embodied of things never said and an untouchable, unspeakable pain.

 

This is one of the most powerful, most stirring depictions of love first for its honesty and also for its nuance. The film is only an hour and a half long, but every single second is spent lingering on some subtlety or another. The way he glances back at her as she descends the stairs. The way he looks at her only to look away as she turns to him. The way his hand twitches a sharp, ephemeral moment before reaching for hers. How they oh so subtly stand more slack in one another's presence as time goes on. How she overhears he's hankering for some sesame syrup and makes it for him only to pass the whole thing off as coincidence. The ties, the handbags, the dresses, the constant recurrence of food in a social context. The camera lingers, the dialogue wanders, and yet not a solitary second is wasted in this film. Every frame is so meticulously, marvelously crafted – like a still-life that moves." - Muad'Dib Usul, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

in the mood for love

 

"In the mood for love
All I need is your touch
Passion burning bright"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#96 (2020), UNRANKED (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (6), 2000s (9), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#146 Fanboy Rankings, #63 Cinema Ranking

#38 Old Farts Ranking, #125 Damn Kids Rankings

#46 Ambassador Ranking, #89 All-American Ranking

#119 Cartoon Ranking, #72 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

 

one of the few "all time greats" that do nothing for me

[Ethan Hunt]

27 minutes ago, The Panda said:

Some 'honorable mentions' to end the night!

 

Number 190

Doctor Zhivago (1965, David Lean)

 

 

Number 189

The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer)

 

Number 188

Mary Poppins (1964, Robert Stevenson)

 

Number 187

Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)

 

Number 186

Lady Bird (2017, Greta Gerwig)

 

Number 185

Catch Me if You Can (2002, Steven Spielberg)

 

Number 184

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler)

 

Number 183

Amelie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

 

Number 182

The Blair Witch Project (1999, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick)

 

Number 181

Das Boot (1982, Wolfgang Peterson)

Fuxk

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

With The Social Network, Prince of Egypt, AI, The Incredibles and Memento we are now firmly entrenched in the "Movies that if you asked me straight about them I'd say they were good to very good but it would never have occurred to me to describe them as one of the 100 best of all time" phase of the list, which is a pretty common experience.

 

Gosh, that last list of missing out movies is brutal. I thought Das Boot might have a chance with the number of lists I saw it on - but I suppose it was never all that high.

 

Appallingly, I have never seen I the Mood For Love and so will shame myself by writing as such on here.

[Lucas]

5 hours ago, The Panda said:

Number 72

 

 

YEEEES

 

5 hours ago, The Panda said:

Number 187

Eraserhead (1977, David Lynch)

'

NOOOO

 

[Jake Gittes]

4 hours ago, interiorgatordecorator said:

 

one of the few "all time greats" that do nothing for me

 

I'd take Brief Encounter or The Remains of the Day over it in a heartbeat as unconsummated-love stories go.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Jake Gittes

[Daxtreme]

A.I. made the top? Holy shit

 

Does that mean Spielberg will have like... 7 entries on the list?  

[baumer]

43 minutes ago, Daxtreme said:

A.I. made the top? Holy shit

 

Does that mean Spielberg will have like... 7 entries on the list?  

 

I didn't vote for Jaws this year it didn't make my list at all so I think Jaws will miss the top 100. 🤪

[Joel M]

Didn't vote but I'm liking the list so far. Master & Commander, DMC and A.I. are all movies I love but I'm kinda shocked they made it.