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

[interiorgatordecorator]

9 hours ago, The Panda said:

Well, it's not lightyear!

 

Number 57

 

 

"To infinity and beyond!"

 

 

 

much worse than 2

 

9 hours ago, The Panda said:

Number 56

 

 

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"After the insane General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union, a war room full of politicians, generals and a Russian diplomat all frantically try to stop the nuclear strike."

 

 

 

 

another great movie i forgot to include, I've really got to start updating my imdb profile more frequently

[mldardy]

On 8/2/2022 at 1:59 PM, Ozymandias said:

ROTJ is saved by Jabbas palace(before the special edition, this one got the worst SE changes) and the Emperor's throne room sequence.  Everything else is mush.  People like to shit on it for the Ewoks and Han/Leia not having much to do in the movie after Jabba, but its still a far superior film to every SW film that has come after.

[Cap]

39 minutes ago, DAR said:

Apartment gang unite 

it got forty points for me ✊

[The Panda]

18 minutes ago, interiorgatordecorator said:

 

much worse than 2

 

 

another great movie i forgot to include, I've really got to start updating my imdb profile more frequently

Use letterboxd, much better for personal use than imdb

[The Panda]

As we’re now halfway through the list I want to give some shoutouts and teasers for some forum events coming up within the next year (or even sooner) to check out! (I am willing to give more shout outs if there’s other things people want advertised)

 

BOFFYs 10 Year Anniversary: The ‘Super’ BOFFYs coming very soon

These will be run by @Blankments and supported by me. More details to come but in honor of 10 years of BOFFYs, we will be doing a ceremony in which all prior winners become nominees in one super ceremony!

 

The 2022 BOFFYs coming January 2023

As always, the main BOFFYs ceremony will be back!

 

Journey: BOT’s Top Cinematic Odysseys of the Body, Mind, and Spirit coming late Spring 2023

The next list project I will be heading up is the most experimental BOT lists I’ll have run. This is because it’ll be three lists in one, a 25 movies about physical/bodily journeys (example: adventure and survival films, such as Raiders or Cast Away), 25 movies about mental journeys (example: psychological thrillers such as Inception, Get Out, or Shutter Island), and 25 movies about Spiritual Journeys (example: Life of Pi, Tundun, and anything by Ingmar Bergman)

[krla]

59 minutes ago, The Panda said:

As we’re now halfway through the list I want to give some shoutouts and teasers for some forum events coming up within the next year (or even sooner) to check out! (I am willing to give more shout outs if there’s other things people want advertised)

 

BOFFYs 10 Year Anniversary: The ‘Super’ BOFFYs coming very soon

These will be run by @Blankments and supported by me. More details to come but in honor of 10 years of BOFFYs, we will be doing a ceremony in which all prior winners become nominees in one super ceremony!

 

The 2022 BOFFYs coming January 2023

As always, the main BOFFYs ceremony will be back!

 

Journey: BOT’s Top Cinematic Odysseys of the Body, Mind, and Spirit coming late Spring 2023

The next list project I will be heading up is the most experimental BOT lists I’ll have run. This is because it’ll be three lists in one, a 25 movies about physical/bodily journeys (example: adventure and survival films, such as Raiders or Cast Away), 25 movies about mental journeys (example: psychological thrillers such as Inception, Get Out, or Shutter Island), and 25 movies about Spiritual Journeys (example: Life of Pi, Tundun, and anything by Ingmar Bergman)

Gotta give a shoutout to Baumer's Impossible (but very lucrative) movie trivia contest which is open now! ALL questions are posted. Deadline is September 1st!

[SLAM!]

11 hours ago, The Panda said:

As we’re now halfway through the list I want to give some shoutouts and teasers for some forum events coming up within the next year (or even sooner) to check out! (I am willing to give more shout outs if there’s other things people want advertised)

 

BOFFYs 10 Year Anniversary: The ‘Super’ BOFFYs coming very soon

These will be run by @Blankments and supported by me. More details to come but in honor of 10 years of BOFFYs, we will be doing a ceremony in which all prior winners become nominees in one super ceremony!

 

The 2022 BOFFYs coming January 2023

As always, the main BOFFYs ceremony will be back!

 

Journey: BOT’s Top Cinematic Odysseys of the Body, Mind, and Spirit coming late Spring 2023

The next list project I will be heading up is the most experimental BOT lists I’ll have run. This is because it’ll be three lists in one, a 25 movies about physical/bodily journeys (example: adventure and survival films, such as Raiders or Cast Away), 25 movies about mental journeys (example: psychological thrillers such as Inception, Get Out, or Shutter Island), and 25 movies about Spiritual Journeys (example: Life of Pi, Tundun, and anything by Ingmar Bergman)

I will also shout out something. Look forward to an announcement about the seventh season of BOT Survivor! It will be hosted by me this time. I will post the deets in about a week or so.

[The Panda]

Number 50

 

 

"Good morning, and in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Truman Burbank is the star of The Truman Show, a 24-hour-a-day reality TV show that broadcasts every aspect of his life without his knowledge. His entire life has been an unending soap opera for consumption by the rest of the world. And everyone he knows, including his wife and his best friend is really an actor, paid to be part of his life."

 

Its Legacy

 

"With the advent of the Internet and other novel forms of communication
and social interaction, our society is undergoing a shift in culture greater

than anything we have witnessed in decades. What impact might significant
changes in culture have on the processes of mental illness? Here we explore
one aspect of this cultural change. Internet sites such as YouTube, and
another new cultural presence*reality television*reveal two new cultural
phenomena. First, they demonstrate that people without ostensible skill or
talent can become celebrities in an age when celebrity holds great currency.
Second, these forms of entertainment make it possible to become known to
tens of millions of people overnight. They have the powerful effect of making
the world feel at once very small and possibly overwhelming. We present
five patients in whom the ideas of celebrity and exposure take centre stage
in the presentation of their psychosis. They developed the delusional belief
that they were the ‘‘star’’ of a reality television show secretly broadcasting
their daily life, much like the main character in Peter Weir’s film The
Truman Show.

 

The Truman Show was released in 1998 and presaged the wave of reality
television shows that succeeded it. It follows the story of Truman Burbank, a
30-year-old man whose entire life*from in utero to the time of the movie’s
present*is broadcast around the world, without his knowledge, as a form of
soap opera. The city he inhabits is, in fact, a domed sound studio, and all the
people in his life, including his wife, parents, best friend, co-workers, and
strangers, are all actors and extras. Even the weather is controlled. The plot
centres on Truman’s dawning awareness of his condition and his escape to
the real world, where he is reunited with his former girlfriend, previously
banished by the show’s creator.

Given his realisation that the world he lives in is counterfeit, Truman
begins to sound like a patient with mental illness. He has the ‘‘idea of
reference’’ that ‘‘[t]he radio starts following me along, talking about
everything I’m doing’’. He expresses the ‘‘paranoid’’ ideas that he is
‘‘definitely being followed’’ and that he is ‘‘being set up for something’’;
he has the ‘‘grandiose’’ notion that ‘‘the whole world revolves around [him]
somehow’’. In order to keep the show going at all costs, the actors tell him
that he is imagining these things*that he is, in effect, mentally ill. The five
patients described later,1 all treated at different times but on the same
psychiatric inpatient unit at Bellevue Hospital Centre in New York City,
believed themselves to be in the same position as Truman Burbank; three of
them referred to the film by name.

 

 

Patient 1. Mr A. was admitted after he scuffled with security at a federal
building. He said that his life was like The Truman Show and that he had
come to ask for asylum. He had held this belief for five years, and although
he lived with family, they were not aware of his delusions until several days
prior to admission; he had only told a friend about it 2 weeks prior to
admission. He believed that the attacks of 9/11 were fabricated as part of his
narrative. He had travelled from out-of-state in order to see if the World
Trade Centre had in fact been destroyed; if the towers were standing,
he would have proof that he was on the show. On first presentation, he
demanded to speak to ‘‘the director’’. He said that since he had seen The
Truman Show, he believed that all the individuals in his life were part of the
conspiracy. He also believed he had cameras in his eyes. Despite this longstanding
delusion, Mr A. had had no previous psychiatric treatment. It is
noteworthy, however, that the patient had been using over-the-counter fatloss
supplements and had lost 40 pounds over the previous 2 months in order
to be able to join the military. Initial DSM-IV differential diagnosis was
schizophrenia, chronic paranoid type versus substance-induced psychotic
disorder. The patient was started on risperidone 1 mg twice daily. Within
days, he was transferred to a hospital in his home state.

 

Patient 4. Mr D. was working on a reality television show when he was
hospitalised after causing a public disturbance. While working on the
production of the show, he came to believe that he was the one who was
actually being broadcast: ‘‘I thought I was a secret contestant on a reality
show. I thought I was being filmed. I was convinced I was a contestant and
later the TV show would reveal me.’’ He believed his thoughts were being
controlled by a film crew paid for by his family. During the 2 weeks prior to
admission, he experienced decreased sleep, pressured speech, irritability,
paranoia, and hyperreligiosity. The patient carried a diagnosis of bipolar

disorder and had had two previous hospitalisations for manic episodes. He
had smoked marijuana intermittently since he was in college and had last
smoked marijuana one week prior to admission. Mr D. was treated with
quetiapine titrated to 500 mg daily and valproic acid 750 mg twice daily, with
therapeutic blood level, and he responded to this treatment regimen. As his
mania subsided, his delusion remitted, and he was discharged after 4 weeks
of treatment with DSM-IV diagnoses of bipolar disorder, most recent
episode manic, with psychotic features, and marijuana abuse

 

However the Truman Show delusion ought to be classified, it is well worth
considering which cultural phenomena, if any, might be relevant to its
manifestation. Of course, the patients’ reference to the film might be quite
coincidental. It may, in contrast, be a product in part of the contemporary
popularity in our culture of reality television. Can a case be made that the
phenomenon of reality television might interact with the expression of
psychotic symptoms?

 

 

There is less in the way of psychological research on reality television than
one might expect given its popularity. In one study, Reiss and Wiltz (2004)
investigated the correlation between the viewing of reality television and a
large number of personality traits. They found the strongest correlation
between reality television viewing and a trait they refer to as ‘‘social status’’,
which entails an ‘‘above-average trait motivation to feel self-important’’
(p. 363). They also found a dose effect; the more reality television watched,
the greater the concern.

 

This is perhaps not altogether surprising, but it suggests that reality
television resonates with a common anxiety about one’s position in the social
hierarchy. As noted earlier, reality television makes it conceivable that one
could come to the attention of a community of people orders of magnitude
larger than was possible only a few years ago. One might speculate that
because our world really is a global village now, the threats from other
members of one’s community (see Buss & Duntley, 2008), as well as the
promise of the status that might achieved by being known to strangers, is
also significantly greater than it has ever been. Someone who is particularly
anxious about their social status, therefore, might experience reality
television as presenting a significant social threat, or a tantalising possibility
of success, or both. In the life of such a person, reality television might act as
a significant stress, the effects of which might include a persecutory or
grandiose delusion of the Truman Show type."

- Joel Gold & Ian Gold (2012): The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the
global village, Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"It has been frequently noted that we liv Images from television, film, advertisements, bill e in a "media-- saturated" culture. boards, and photojournalism are everywhere we turn. Yet the situation goes deeper. For more than just media inundation, we have come to live in a mediamediated culture, where our understanding of life, reality and our own experience is filtered through video frames. Most of us in the industrialized world (and many outside of it) have become reliant upon modem media, especially television and films, as we make our interpre tations of reality. Without realizing we have become so dependent, we frequently look through these frames as we seek understanding, comfort, reassurance, vision, and structure for our disparate sensory intakes. This is so, even though the images in these frames do not give us a consistent, trustworthy, or self cohering interpretive pattern.

 

The recent films Pleasantville and The Truman Show are arresting precisely because they highlight an aspect of this situation "from within". Who should know better than the imagemakers how constructed these video frames really are? Likewise, in an industry which must gauge, as well as influence, audience desires to ensure its own survival, who should know better the extent of our malleability? And, finally, in an industry well aware of its monetary dependence upon "product placement," who should be more certain about the variability of the components of the good life?

 

At first glance, these films seem very irreverent towards the cultural ethos that supports their own industry's existence. They suggest that audiences are easily manipulated, overly caught up in screen stories, and also quite fickle. The last scene in The Truman Show is exemplary. Two garage attendants, one minute so obsessively caught up in Truman's life that they ignore their business, the next minute when he's gone just look, with very little emotion, for something else to watch. Perhaps, instead, the films simply represent an inhouse poke by moviemakers at the more superficial stories of television programs. But they wouldn't know the two media's audiences overlap.

 

 

More trenchantly, these films prompt questions about our mediacultivated voyeurism. A voyeur has an obsessive interest in watching without being known or noticed. In the case of screen stories, we know we watch actors, but the best films are the ones that most convincingly foster the illusion that we have a ringside view of a real life. In The Truman Show , this voyeurism is real. Through some 5,000 hidden cameras anyone can watch almost every aspect of Truman's life without being known by him. Of course humans have always watched and evaluated each other, but mediaviewing is a peering without chance of participating. So much pseudointimacy can only exacerbate for viewers the common contemporary complai nt of alienation. In the two films, community of a sort is formed around watching and discussing the shows, but when the program dissolves, there is little left to link the people. But the filmic gaze does not go only one way.

 

As Michel Foucault indicates, a society that closely watches its members in order to control them is most successful when it gets the members to internalize the gaze and police themselves. Truman does not know he is being watched, but he's been controlled through the camera all his li fe. No matter what impulse he's ever had to act unpredictably or to break free, he finds himself amazingly blocked. He takes this as a matter of course and adjusts his behavior. But when he eventually figures out the truth he is willing to risk death in or der to get off camera. Are we controlled by the filmic gaze? At first glance, we believe we are the viewers, not the viewed. But self selfregulation happen regularly as we adjust our self-- assessment and image and behavior in order to conform more closely to the ideal presented to us through the video frame. In addition, hidden video cameras are an increasing factor in everyday life."

- Mercadante, Linda A. (2001) "The God Behind the Screen: Pleasantville and The Truman Show," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 5 : Iss. 2 , Article 8. 

 

Public Opinion

 

"The Truman Show remains the peak of cinema. Everything in this movie is done to its smartest possibility. The camerawork is insane, Weir’s direction is pitch perfect, Carrey’s and Harris’s performances are all time greats. The story gets even better when you familiarize yourself with media; watching it now helps me realize how much television and films it’s re-contextualizing within its narrative. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, and it excels at everything it puts it mind to.

 

This summer, I plan on rewatching a lot of the films that have just sat at the top of my best of list for years. I started with my #1, and it stayed there after this watch. The Truman Show is remarkable in how absolutely perfect it is, proving to be the absolute crowning achievement of mainstream cinema, and for me, the absolute best film ever made."

- @Blankments

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

the truman show

"You are just in my show

I control you

I am god

 

You are my puppet"

- dA vInci

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#46 (2020), #66 (2018), #49 (2016), #38 (2014), #52 (2013), #49 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Sergio Leone (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (3), 1970s (4), 1980s (7), 1990s (9), 2000s (17), 2010s (5)

 

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (5), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#47 Fanboy Ranking, #51 Cinema Ranking

#87 Old Farts Ranking, #40 Damn Kids Ranking

#74 Ambassador Ranking, #48 All-American Ranking

#46 Cartoon Ranking, #51 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by The Panda

[The Panda]

Also as a reminder for film score and soundtrack lovers, the soundtrack for the list updates after every entry!

 

[The Panda]

Number 49

 

 

"Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living."

 

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Ashitaka, a prince of the disappearing Emishi people, is cursed by a demonized boar god and must journey to the west to find a cure. Along the way, he encounters San, a young human woman fighting to protect the forest, and Lady Eboshi, who is trying to destroy it. Ashitaka must find a way to bring balance to this conflict."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The Japanese government is, as noted earlier, eagerly pursuing the goals of
obtaining influence over other Asian nations and reinforcing Japan’s presence in
contemporaryworld affairs through the use of soft power.One of the main components
of this alleged cultural power is Japanese popular culture, animation films in particular.
MOFA describes these films and the style in general as the most popular in the world
among young people and notably dominant in other Asian countries. Government
officials frequently state that Japan produces cutting-edge cultural content, both
in terms of storytelling and presentation techniques. Miyazaki Hayao is a figure

mentioned regularly in the context of nationalist brand politics. Government officials
also find a typical example of the Japanese approach to nature in Miyazaki Hayao’s
animation films (Kondo, 2013). He is a renowned director of animation films; he
won an Academy Award in 2003 and has garnered fame as an illustrator of Japanese
popular culture. He has been a major player in the production of Japanese anime for
more than 20 years, and is probably the best-known Japanese animator outside Japan.
However, althoughMiyazaki’s animation films have been well-received by conservative
government officials and intellectuals in Japan, a thorough examination of his films
and interviews reveals that his works, including animation films and manga, implicitly
criticize the recent economy-centred policies of Japanese politics. Soft power diplomacy
on the basis of brand nationalism is an integral part of Japanese politics dialogical and
reciprocal relations with others. In fact, soft power discourse uses culture solely to
promote a monological approach to power politics and attempts to strengthen its
political position in world politics. Thus, it totally lacks the idea of relationality among
different subjectivities

 

Specific representative works often cited include Miyazaki’s films such as My
Neighbour Totoro, PrincessMononoke, and Spirited Away. In fact, there are a number of
official reports and articles aboutMiyazaki and his contribution to cultural diplomacy.
For instance, MOFA reports that the New York Times sympathetically reviewed
Miyazaki’s film, Kokurikozaka kara, describing it as a typical example of Japanese
animation films’ recent inclination towards realism (MOFA, 2013a). It is also noticeable
that MOFA is eager to promote Japan’s pop-culture through its diplomatic channels
(MOFA, 2013b), andMiyazaki’s animation films are some of the most played animation
films. It is worth mentioning that government officials touch upon Miyazaki’s films in
their diplomatic speeches.

 

It is widely recognized that Miyazaki’s films are anti-consumerist, Princess
Mononoke and Spirited Away in particular. It is also commonly known that some
of his films derive from anti-war sentiment, including Porco Rosso and Howl’s Moving
Castle. Throughout his oeuvre, one can more generally describe the artist’s outlook as
anti-institutional and anti-civilizational, and that outlook is verymuch expressed in his
representations of Jomon bunka. Miyazaki deliberately chooses non-institutionalized
communities as settings for plot development and then employs nomads, exiles, and
pilgrims as main characters to introduce cultural contrast.

In this way, Miyazaki uses cultural representation as a means of resistance to
the institutionalized nation-state. He describes institutional political arrangements in
highly negative tones, and grants his main characters powers of critical thought to
examine the prevailing social order.

 

The idyllic forest and mountain settings of Miyazaki’s films express a rather obvious
sentimentality towards Jomon culture that has been interpreted as a preference for that
culture over civilization. For example, the main character Ashitaka in PrincessMononoke
is from the north of Japan and initially lives in a mountainous area. In one scene at the
beginning of the film, in which Ashitaka fights with samurais and shoots at them with
arrows, one of the samurai clearly calls him ‘Oni’. This is a clear reference to folklore
and folklore-influenced culture, in which indigenous peoples living in mountain areas
are often described as Oni (evil).

 

On the contrary, those of Yayoi culture living in sato (villages) were historically
settlers in flat lands cultivating rice and other crops. They are frequently depicted in
Miyazaki’s films as institutionalized and profit-oriented. A character appears in Princess
Mononoke named Jogo-bo, who is a Buddhist monk serving the emperor and a typical
representation of Miyazaki’s perception of contemporary, ordinary citizens who lack
critical thinking skills and simply follow orders. Indeed, Miyazaki publicly described
this character as reflecting figures of present-day society, describing him as ‘a company
man’ who is agreeable and personable and functions well in his organization, but who
follows the commands of that organization without thinking (Miyazaki, 2008: 36–37).
The lack of thinking personified by Jigo-bo is likewise present in Hannah Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt explains how the lack of critical thought of one
SS soldierwho appeared to be an ordinary citizen, Adolf Eichmann, resulted in the most
unprecedented practice of evil in human history (Arendt, 1963).Miyazaki uses the same
kind of example to question the nature of living in the age of civilization. Although
Miyazaki himself cannot answer for his audience, he surely intends to provoke thought
and questioning."

- KOSUKE SHIMIZU (2014). The Ambivalent Relationship of Japan's Soft Power Diplomacy and
Princess Mononoke: Tosaka Jun's philosophy of culture as moral reection. Japanese Journal of
Political Science

 

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Princess Mononoke makes heroes of outsiders in all identity politics categories and
blurs the stereotypes that usually define such characters. The film makes this move most
emphatically by presenting the relationship between dignified work as a solution to
poverty in ideological tension with environmental damage caused by industry. Although
there are multiple heroes, the plot chronicles the adventure undertaken by culturally/
racially othered protagonist, Prince Ashitaka, a young man from a marginalized and
geographically distant cultural group, the Emishi. His journey across Japan is a bid to undo
a mortal curse he received while saving his village from a marauding demon, Nagy, who
was once a boar-god from the forest that is being decimated by humans mining for iron.
The leader of Iron Town, Lady Eboshi, had shot Nagy with a bullet and sent him mad.
While her drive to destroy the forest in order to mine the mountain embodies
environmentalist evil, she is complexly wrought by the way in which she has built Iron
Town as a haven for the most disenfranchised characters in the social order of the film’s
loosely historical setting. She has rescued reviled and marginalized prostitutes and lepers
and given them work, a home and a community.

 

 

For this reason, Princess Mononoke’s principal strength lies is in asking child audiences
to think about compassion for the poor and disenfranchised in tandem with care for nature,
as per the underlying principle of environmental justice. Scholars in this field like Shiva
(1989) argue that the poor, especially women, have the most to lose when nature is
destroyed. But this argument cannot, despite our best efforts, resolve comfortably in any
analysis of Princess Mononoke since the people of Iron Town have the most to lose when the
forest spirit destroys their foundry and home, but also the most to gain from the destruction
of the forest in terms of working in a successful industry. Arguably, these tensions in the film
are emblematic of the reflexivity between political bids to navigate issues like global
warming when developing countries are seen to require greater license to produce carbon
emissions in order to reduce their poverty – similarly licensing environmental destruction
in the name of helping the poor. While both films are fantasies, Miyazaki’s realist
recognition of these complexities in the eco-political landscape of globalization elevates his
work in terms of significant activist agendas.

 

Where Princess Mononoke elides oppositional logics in ways that make available a
more intellectual response to environmental issues that demonstrate a greater level of
respect for the child audience, FernGully didactically traffics in the identity politics of
difference. The stigmatizing of lower-class, queer characters and non-white characters,
which is sadly a staple gesture in western world animation (Griffin 2004; Mallan and
McGillis 2005; Sawers and Parsons 2005),6 becomes the key point of national difference
between these cultural productions in their attempts at socially progressive bids for ecoactivism.
While these films share a bid for ecological activism, their ideological
assumptions, their modes of representation, and their attitudes to child audiences are
widely divergent. FernGully trades in didactic logic, limiting gendered, sexual identified,
classed and raced stereotypes, and employs a soporific happily ever after that allows

passive engagement with the plot as comfortably resolved entertainment, Princess
Mononoke challenges social norms, requires child viewers to weigh complex questions,
and demands a critical and intellectual engagement with the issues at stake without
comfortable resolution in ways that invite what educationalists call ‘transformational
learning’ as part of the filmic experience. This presentation of complexity is located
in the multiple dynamics of the aesthetics and characterization of these films in ways that
re-politicize the similar plots."

- Michelle Smith & Elizabeth Parsons, Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

 

Public Opinion

 

"avatar (2009): who are you?

 

princess mononoke (1997): I’m you, but with real thematic depth and thought-provoking nuance"

- Houston Coley, Letterboxd

 

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

princess mononoke

"A brave girl
defending her home
against the demons"

- dA vInci

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#38 (2020), #41 (2018), UNRANKED (2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (3), 1970s (4), 1980s (7), 1990s (10), 2000s (17), 2010s (5)

 

 

Country Count

 

Japan (5), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (5), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#62 Fanboy Ranking, #47 Cinema Ranking

#54 Old Farts Ranking, #43 Damn Kids Ranking

#21 Ambassador Ranking, #52 All-American Ranking

#12 Cartoon Ranking, #54 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[JustLurking]

The best ghibli film imo.

[The Panda]

Bad BOT, dropping this film was crime.

 

Number 48

 

 

"Doctor, those that'll tell don't know, and those that know won't tell."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Salvatore “Sal” Fragione is the Italian owner of a pizzeria in Brooklyn. A neighborhood local, Buggin’ Out, becomes upset when he sees that the pizzeria’s Wall of Fame exhibits only Italian actors. Buggin’ Out believes a pizzeria in a black neighborhood should showcase black actors, but Sal disagrees. The wall becomes a symbol of racism and hate to Buggin’ Out and to other people in the neighborhood, and tensions rise."

 

Its Legacy

 

"In 1989, New York City was on the verge of being ripped apart by racial animus. That spring, police and prosecutors railroaded a confession out of five innocent black and brown teenage boys for a rape in Central Park. And four months later, an angry mob of Italian youths killed an unarmed black teen named Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Amid the unrest, Spike Lee's seminal work, Do the Right Thing — a film about simmering bigotry exploding into violence — premiered that summer and forced mainstream America to take a cold hard look at racial injustice on and off the screen.

 

Before it hit theaters, some critics worried Do the Right Thing would incite race riots. After screening it in Cannes, former USA Today columnist Jeannie Williams declared, "I don't need this movie in New York this summer. I don't know what they're thinking!" While the film didn't provoke lawlessness, it did go on to garner an Oscar nod for Best Original Screenplay. The movie also launched the careers of several up-and-comers, including Lee – who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the piece – and inspired a whole new generation of black filmmakers to use their art as a catalyst for change.

 

 

Shooting on location in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood mattered for the sake of the film's authenticity and community investment. Lee was so aware of the tenuous relationship between the community and police, at the time he hired the Fruit of Islam to run security on the set of Do the Right Thing because residents respected and preferred the Nation of Islam subgroup to the NYPD. "I would've been crucified to do a film about Bedford-Stuyvesant and not shoot in Bed-Stuy," Lee explained in St. Clair Bourne's documentary, Making Do the Right Thing. "I mean there's just something about reality that you can't mess with."

 

Instead of trailers, the crew used homes in the neighborhood to film scenes in the movie and as dressing rooms for the cast, says Joie Lee. In addition to being Lee's real-life sister, she played Jade, his character Mookie's sister in Do The Right Thing. "Some of the residents were employed on the production," Joie Lee says. "It was a win-win situation and a lot of folks appreciated the presence...on a pre-gentrified block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. What other films were shooting on location there? I don't know of any. "And I think Spike learned from his predecessors — Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet. He paid tribute to Brooklyn streets similar to Scorsese's Little Italy in Mean Streets," she adds. The presence of real people on the set also kept actor John Turturro on his toes. In the film, Turturro played Pino, Sal's (Oscar-nominated actor Danny Aiello) opinionated and racist son.

 

Do the Right Thing was Lee's third movie, but it propelled him into the national consciousness as a cultural provocateur and launched the cinematic careers of Perez, Samuel L. Jackson, Martin Lawrence, and deceased comedian Robin Harris. As fate would have it, former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama saw the film on their first date. After Do the Right Thing, Lee went on to make more than four dozen films. including Malcolm X, 4 Little Girls, and Inside Man. He nabbed an honorary Oscar in 2015, and earlier this year — three decades after Do the Right Thing — the visibly shaken filmmaker won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. For Lee acolytes such as Cheo Hodari Coker, a writer and producer and the brains behind Netflix's now-defunct Luke Cage, the honor was long overdue.

 

"Do the Right Thing was the first time as a casual viewer that I absorbed the language of film," Coker tells Shondaland. "The way Ernest Dickerson lit the film. It was the first time I ever noticed what heat looks like on film. Back in the day, you just watched a movie. But it was the first time I thought, 'Wow, somebody is making decisions about the music, somebody is making a decision about the way the camera floats, somebody is making a decision about the way a shot looks when the sun is going down.' ""

- Mekeisha Madden Toby, Shondaland

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the famous first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois ascribes to the African American consciousness what he perceives to be a fundamental "two-ness." This "double-consciousness ... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (3), is an effect of the contradictory positioning of African-American culture within the dominant social order of "white Americanism" (4). On the one hand, American democratic capitalism promotes to its ethnic constituents its promise of eco nomic opportunity, material satisfaction, and social justice. On the other, it consistently fails to grant black Americans full and equal access to the socioeconomic structures upon which the fruits of this promise depend.

 

 

 As Du Bois describes it, this political condition, a conse quence of pressures exterior to the black community, creates a corresponding interior dilemma for African-Americans who achieve authority in American culture despite its institutionalized racism. Which of two competing allegiances does one serve? One's loyalty to the black community, which would benefit pro foundly from one's acquired expertise in engaging white America? Or one's duty to one's own future, ironically linked to the esteem of a majority culture violently inimical to the minority community of which one is a part?

 

D o the Right Thing, produced in 1989, is director Spike Lee's attempt to explore the human particu larity of this system of binarisms and the culturally entrepreneurial situation of the African-American subject within it. Lee's own background reflects this cultural positioning. He was the eldest child in an "uncomfortably middle class" black family living in the then predominantly white Brooklyn neigh borhoods of Cobble Hill and Fort Greene, where most of his friends were Italian (Breskin 14, 151). He graduated from traditionally black Morehouse College in 1979, after which he entered NYU's film school as one of only two African-Americans in his class (Lee later was to enlist the other, director Ernest Dickerson, to handle the cine matography of Do the Right Thing). It is not surprising, then, that young  African-American novelist Trey Ellis cites Lee as one of "today's cultural mulattoes," during whose public schooling "it wasn't unusual to be called 'oreo' and '----' on the same day." According to Ellis, these young black people are able skillfully to navi gate a multi-ethnic universe due to their education in "a multi-racial mix of cultures"-yet despite this unique ability they "feel misunderstood by both the black world and the white." They are a generation "torn between two worlds," and, depending upon which term of the social binomial they embrace, they either "desperately fan tasize themselves the children of William F. Buckley" or "affect instead a 'superblackness' and try to dream themselves back to the ghetto. Either way they are letting other people define their identity" (234-36).

 

 The film's use of the metonymic figures "King" and "X" as well as the ethically divergent meta-narratives of which they are the cultural signifiers suffuses its dramatic structure with the ideological tension generated by the trope of "double-consciousness." The vehicle by which Do the Right Thing represents the black community reminding itself, so to speak, of the presence of these figures is the ubiquitous Smiley, a young man with cerebral palsy who earns money selling photographs of African-American heroes to his Bed-Stuy neighbors. The film calls attention to one image in particular: the famous photograph of King and Malcolm shaking hands and smil ing during their first and only meeting.

 

 

 In light of the film's Signifyin(g) contestation of the idea of an essential "blackness," hooks's charges that the film "denies the problematical nature of identity" and "offers a simplistic view" of race seem inaccurate. On the contrary, Do the Right Thing rises to the challenge of Cornell West's call for  postmodern African-American cultural productions which "deconstruct earlier modem Black strategies of identity-formation ... and construct more multi valent and multi-dimensional responses that articulate the complexity and diversity of Black practices in the mod ern and postmodem world" (74). The film's problematization of the "King"/"X" dualism releases the African-American subject into just such "multi-valent" and "multi-dimensional" modes of responsivity regarding these meta-narratives of morally intelligent liberation. And the film's interrogation of consensus regarding "right thing"/wrong thing delivers to the politically marginalized an experience of that binarism's arbitrary and constructed quality. Despite its semiotic

 power, this denaturalization neither promotes moral chaos nor renders the figure "justice" morally indeterminate. Rather, by suggesting what Lyotard has called "an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus" (37), the film helps to free "justice" from the violence of its designated confinement within terms forged by a racist symbolic ascendancy and, like Baker's blues, helps to make "justice" available to the "polyvalent interpretations" which proliferate beyond dialectic. Thus, Do the Right Thing's elucidation of the culture of ambiguity, and the internally dialogic subject which negotiates that culture, represents an elegant erasure of the logic of "two ness" in all of its ideological formations."

- James C. McKelly, African American Review , Summer, 1998, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 215-227

 

Public Opinion

 

"Brilliant, morally complex, and fascinating movie. Can't believe it took me this long to see it. Truly important and great movie."

- @Cmasterclay

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

do the right thing

"do the right thing

stop asking me

to write these fucking poems for you

 

i am done

DONE!"

- dA vInci

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#15 (2020), #79 (2018), #94 (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #88 (2013), UNRANKED (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (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), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (3), 1970s (4), 1980s (8), 1990s (10), 2000s (17), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (5), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (5), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#73 Fanboy Ranking, #44 Cinema Ranking

#39 Old Farts Ranking, #49 Damn Kids Ranking

#44 Ambassador Ranking, #49 All-American Ranking

#50 Cartoon Ranking, #48 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by The Panda

[The Panda]

Number 47

 

 

"Well, Clarice - have the lambs stopped screaming?"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Clarice Starling is a top student at the FBI’s training academy. Jack Crawford wants Clarice to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist who is also a violent psychopath, serving life behind bars for various acts of murder and cannibalism. Crawford believes that Lecter may have insight into a case and that Starling, as an attractive young woman, may be just the bait to draw him out."

 

Its Legacy

 

"On one level, Silence of the Lambs’ critical accolades speak for themselves. It remains the only horror movie in history to win the Oscar for Best Picture. It is one of the few films ever to deliver lead acting Oscars to both of its leads: Jodie Foster as the troubled agent Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins as psychopath-cum-psychologist Hannibal Lecter — though Hopkins appeared in the movie for less than half an hour. And it’s one of only three films in history to sweep the “big five” Oscar awards — a full house of the two lead acting Oscars, Best Adapted Screenplay (to writer Ted Tally), Best Picture, and Best Direction to Jonathan Demme.

 

Then there’s the cultural staying power of Silence of the Lambs and its characters, as well as the entire series of novels by Thomas Harris on which they’re based. A previous attempt to bring the Harris novels to the screen, Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter, which featured Succession’s Brian Cox as Lecter, was a box office flop. But the success of Silence of the Lambs in 1991 eventually spawned a sequel (2001’s Hannibal), two prequels (2002’s Red Dragon and 2007’s Hannibal Rising), the critically acclaimed NBC series Hannibal (2013-2015), and the CBS crime procedural Clarice, which debuted this month.

 

From the beginning, Silence of the Lambs was a cultural event. I was too young to see the movie when it first came out, but its opening weekend still made a vivid impression on me: I remember my mother’s reaction after attending a packed showing, as she excitedly described the experience of being in the dark with Jodie Foster at the film’s climax. Foster’s agent Starling was terrified as she navigated a pitch-black room, unaware that the film’s villain, Buffalo Bill (played by Ted Levine), was watching her through night-vision goggles. Thanks to director Jonathan Demme’s skillful manipulation of the audience’s point of view, viewers were watching Clarice through the same lenses — and to my preteen ears, listening to my mom recall the ending and the gasps of the audience, few things had ever been more harrowing. That immediate audience buzz made Silence of the Lambs a sleeper hit, propelling it to unexpected box office success.

 

Silence of the Lambs also kicked off a decade that saw a huge boom in television crime procedurals, many featuring dogged women ferreting their way through cases while battling institutional sexism. One can trace a direct line from Clarice Starling to characters like Law & Order: SVU’s Olivia Benson or Helen Mirren’s brusque Jane Tennison in the long-running British classic Prime Suspect. Even the string of late ’90s and early 2000s thrillers about broken women surviving trauma seem to have a relationship to Starling or to Silence of the Lambs’ kidnap victim Catherine (Brooke Smith) — think, like, every Ashley Judd thriller of the era, from Kiss the Girls (1997) to Double Jeopardy (1999). At opposite ends of a spectrum of women in uniform, Frances McDormand’s deceptively laconic police chief in Fargo (1996) and Demi Moore’s determined G.I. Jane (1997) also feel like characters who couldn’t exist without Starling.

 

 

In 1991, audiences were primed to fear serial killers and abductions after a decade of mass hysteria, warnings of “stranger danger,” and Satanic Panic. The improbable elements of the plot, like Buffalo Bill’s motive for killing (to make and wear skin suits) or his placement of live moths inside the bodies of his victims, weren’t that outlandish after years of false media claims about nonexistent satanic rituals. Additionally, the 1980s were a peak time for serial killers. The movie capitalized on their prevalence in headlines, and in fact, real-life serial killers like Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy, as well as serial abductor Gary Heidnik, all became famous — or at least more famous — after its release because different elements of the Buffalo Bill character were based on them. This was a time rife with depictions of such criminals in true crime writing and tabloid media, so if anything, viewers were likely to expect their serial killers to be garish and horrifically over-the-top.

 

Because Silence of the Lambs’ plot validated so many of the dominant ’80s narratives about crime, the movie became the main reference point many people had for understanding such crimes at all. That’s not entirely a good thing: Hannibal Lecter’s popularity far overshadows that of Clarice, in a way that closely mirrors pop culture’s long-established tendency to glamorize and fixate on the criminals at the expense of their victims and the people working to catch them. (This tendency has increasingly been criticized and reversed in recent years in favor of reframing these narratives, but the cultural fascination with serial killers hasn’t gone away.) If anything, Silence of the Lambs’ popularity validated that approach to true crime for decades.

 

Unfortunately, we now know that criminal profiling doesn’t work — a harsh truth that invalidates not only some of the realism of Silence of the Lambs but also the many crime shows that have followed in its wake. It also undermines many of the reasons we attempt to study serial killers to begin with. It’s arguable that the movie’s impact on real-world crime narratives has lessened greatly due to the current true crime boom, which has arguably shifted the focus away from glorifying and profiling killers and expanded several related conversations about the justice system. But there’s another real-world community that’s still feeling the film’s repercussions — and not in a good way."

- Aja Romano, Vox

 

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"The mixture of menace and aestheticism that distinguishes Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991) is evoked quite effectively by the film's publicity poster. Blossoming like an exotic fleur du mal from Jodie Foster's mouth is a moth (viewers of the film will recognize it as the death's head moth that serves as "Buffalo Bill"'s personal totem), which rather conventionally fixes the female icon at the point where her beauty and her helplessness converge. In its position over her mouth, the moth stands for that which threatens her, and it also sends us back to the film's title and its ominous key term, silence. But while the title says the silence of the lambs, the image conveys something more generic: the silence of the heroine.

 

 The unevenness of social discourses is ideologically productive, in other words, and it is therefore crucial, as we shall see, that in a project such as The Silence of the Lambs, the discourses of gender and class or, in another register, psychoanalysis and aestheticism -all remain in play, powerful in their own right. Our argument, then, is that these discourses "deploy each other" in an uneven ideological space specific to this film, and that that deployment is crucial to the systematic rearticulation of these codes in terms of the most far-reaching and powerful discourse in the film: the discourse of species. To return to the film's publicity poster, it is just this sort of "deploy ment" that is at work, as the "silence" of the film's title is realigned with Starling and directed away from the invisible lambs.

 

 

For at the heart of the film's trauma, we will argue, lies not cross-gender, nor cross-class, but cross species identification. Initially, of course, we must understand this trauma as Starling's own, for it is to the story about her unsuccessful effort to save some lambs from the slaughterhouse that the title refers. "Have the lambs stopped screaming?" asks Lecter, in a tone somewhere between gentle and mocking, in his final phone call to Starling. And although this scene would seem to mark the triumph of Starling-she has saved Catherine Martin, and she has just graduated from FBI training-it is not clear that these compensatory efforts have finally overcome her trauma, for she can find  no answer to Lecter's question. Here, indeed, the ambiguity of the lambs' "silence" merges with Starling's own. Are we to take the lambs' silence, or Starling's silence about that silence, as the sign of deliverance, or rather as something even more ominous than their screaming? At the end of the film, Starling has "made it," acceded to the law of culture and the culture of the law. But her career triumph does not signal any end to the regime of sacrifice imaged in the lambs' slaughter, for in the blackly comic conclusion to the film, it is the cannibal Lecter who has the last word: "I'm having an old friend for dinner." Here, in the face of the film's evident endorsement of Starling's career trajectory (in which hard work and self-sacrifice earn the reward of upward mobility), surfaces a sort of counterknowledge of human society as unremittingly feral, as never-ending sacrifice, with no guaranteed payoffs. Dog Eat Dog. People Are Sheep. Ambling at film's end down the Caribbean thoroughfare in his bad hairpiece and baggy linen suit, Lecter becomes the postmodern Wolf in Sheep's Clothing."

- Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, boundary 2 , Autumn, 1995, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995)

 

Public Opinion

 

"Hannibal Lecter: I ate his liver, with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

 

Gordon Ramsay: Delicious, finally some good fucking food."

- issy, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

the silence of the lambs

"A poem or prophecy?

 

Silent lambs in the night,
Ears pricked, listening for danger.
Waiting to be safe."

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#26 (2020), #26 (2018), #58 (2016), #76 (2014), #69 (2013), #80 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Stanley Kubrick (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), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (3), 1970s (4), 1980s (8), 1990s (11), 2000s (17), 2010s (5)

 

 

Country Count

 

Japan (5), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (5), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Hannibal (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#42 Fanboy Ranking, #46 Cinema Ranking

#56 Old Farts Ranking, #38 Damn Kids Ranking

#70 Ambassador Ranking, #43 All-American Ranking

#76 Cartoon Ranking, #43 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by The Panda

[The Panda]

dA vInci is not going to be please

 

Number 46

 

 

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world’s most advanced super computer."

 

Its Legacy

 

"A year before humanity put a man on the moon, Stanley Kubrick released what some argue to be his ultimate masterpiece – 2001: A Space Odyssey. This year marks half a century since it was first shown, and in that time the futuristic epic has not only rocked the film world but the science world as well.

 

The brainchild of filmmaker Kubrick and sci-fi veteran Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 follows astronauts as they investigate alien artefacts found on the moon. The movie has a distinctly philosophical streak that was missing from the sci-fi genre at the time, and this combined with realistic production design, visual effects, and an instantly iconic score to create a pioneering work of cinematic art.  2001 inspired new generations of sci-fi storytellers, from George Lucas to Steven Spielberg to Christopher Nolan, opening up the floodgates for blockbusters in the years to come.

 

But 2001 has also had a profound influence on science: it’s bursting with technology and ideas well ahead of their time. While the film was being made, NASA was madly trying to put men on the moon, so Kubrick and Clarke knew that their sets and props had to outstrip the new technologies being spawned or else rapidly become outdated or incorrect.

 

Their solution was to hire astronomical artists, aerospace engineers and ex-NASA employees, who advised on spacecraft design, control panels, display systems, communication devices and more. This close consulting not only created a sense of scientific accuracy, but also produced an array of visionary predictions about humankind’s future technologies, all based in real possibilities. 

 

Watch the movie closely and you’ll see flat screen computer monitors, touchscreen tablets, robotics used in space, and, of course, artificial intelligence. “I never considered 2001 as a strict prediction,” Clarke said later, “but as more of a vision, a way things could work.” In many ways, 1968’s science fiction has now become 2018’s reality, with the film’s influence pervasive in the conceptualisation, design and application of various technologies. In an article published in the journal Science Robotics this week, US computer scientist and roboticist Robin Murphy argues that the film not only anticipated many advancements and challenges in robotics, but also had an impact on the public perception of artificial intelligence (AI).

 

 

“That may be one of the movie’s greatest achievements: it placed AI into the mainstream consciousness even before the first AI robot, Shakey, was completed in 1969,” writes Murphy, who is a professor at Texas A&M University.  She points out that the AI featured in the film – HAL, the onboard supercomputer – “introduced the public to the concept of a robot not built for factory work, as well as to the emerging fields of natural language understanding, computer vision, and reasoning. 

 

“Watching 2001: A Space Odyssey as a child was a covert introduction to the nascent field of AI and robotics.” HAL’s function bears a striking resemblance to modern voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. In homage to the film, Siri is actually programmed to respond “I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” when asked to “open the pod bay doors”. The advances illustrated by HAL can also be seen in today’s self-driving cars, customer service chatbots, and even the learning algorithms that make the Amazon Warehouse possible. Lewis Mitchell, a mathematician at the University of Adelaide in Australia, says he believes we would have had the science of AI regardless of 2001. However, the visionary ideas of this film – and others like it – have undoubtedly fed into the design and application of such technologies.

 

“HAL definitely shaped the current AI-as-personal-assistant idea,” he says. “That these personal assistant apps speak with you, using such a calming voice, I think must be a consequence of Clarke and Kubrick’s vision in 2001.”

- Lauren Fuge, Cosmos

 

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

""I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

 

Movie audiences first heard these calmly intoned and ominous words in 1968, spoken by a spaceship's intelligent computer in the science-fiction masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey." With that one phrase, the computer named HAL 9000 confirmed that it could think for itself, and that it was prepared to terminate the astronauts who were planning to deactivate it.

 

Fifty years after director Stanley Kubrick released his visionary masterpiece of space colonization, how close are humans to the future that he imagined, in which we partner with artificial intelligence (A.I.) that we ultimately may not be able to control? [5 Intriguing Uses for Artificial Intelligence (That Aren't Killer Robots)]

 

 

We might be a lot closer than we think, with machines as smart — and as potentially threatening — as HAL lurking "in plain sight on Earth," according to an essay published yesterday (Oct. 17) in the journal Science Robotics.

 

Kubrick's portrait of HAL represented a rare glimpse of what were then very young fields: AI and robotics, showcasing three disciplines that were critical for developing artificial intelligence: "natural language understanding, computer vision and reasoning," Murphy wrote in the essay. HAL learned from observing its environment, watching and analyzing the words, facial expressions and movements of the human astronauts on the spaceship. It was responsible for performing rote functions such as maintaining the spaceship, but as a "thinking" computer, HAL also was capable of responding conversationally to the astronauts, Murphy explained.

 

During a pivotal scene in "2001," HAL strands astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) outside the spaceship, cutting off his demands for re-entry with an emotionless, "This conversation can serve no purpose anymore." But the conversation about AI today is far from over; humanity's growing dependence on computers for a range of everyday uses demonstrates that AI has already established a firm foothold in our homes and in our lives.

 

What that could mean for humanity over the next 50 years, however, remains to be seen."

- Mindy Weisberger, Live Science

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"Monolithic as fuck.

 

I sat down to watch this on Monday evening, and had to turn the damn thing off after the initial half hour.  Simply put, one does not half-ass this viewing.  With that background in mind, I settled in for the viewing Tuesday night.

 

I've been sitting here for the past ten minutes with no real idea as to how to start this review.  The viewing itself is damn near indescribable.  I've always felt that it's somewhat hyperbolic to say that something is "stunning."  With that said, this film is fucking stunning, plain and simple."

- @mattmav45

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

So, dA vInci just stopped working. Stopped writing poems for me. Unclear why! No poem this time.

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#55 (2020), #60 (2018), #14 (2016), #43 (2014), #17 (2013), #22 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (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), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), John Carpenter (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Terry Jones (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (1), 1950s (1), 1960s (4), 1970s (4), 1980s (8), 1990s (11), 2000s (17), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (5), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1)

 

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (5), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Star Wars (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#48 Fanboy Ranking, #43 Cinema Ranking

#36 Old Farts Ranking, #44 Damn Kids Ranking

#47 Ambassador Ranking, #45 All-American Ranking

#54 Cartoon Ranking, #45 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 4, 2022 by The Panda

[Ethan Hunt]

Man I don't think Under The Silver Lake is gonna make the list

[Ozymandias]

Yes, good, 3 of the last 4 made my top 25.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

 

Tried Silence of the Lambs for the umpteenth time recently.

 

I love horror. I'm a horror guy. I like everyone involved. 

 

With the best will in the world I still don't get it. I don't know why it blew up like it did. I don't get why it gets to be a prestige film when the status of prestige film is a desert when it comes to horror. I don't know why Hopkins' performance is supposed to be great. I don't know what is supposed to make the film any different from any other competent dark thriller like, say, the Bone Collector or Kiss the Girls.

 

It's like, I don't know, being told all your life that, um, let's go with...The Wedding Crashers is the be all and end all of modern comedy. Like, sure, it's fine. I get why some might really like it but, I mean, I don't even see how it's even AIMING for that never mind hitting it.

 

(This may get me hate I don't know, if you love it I genuinely would like to hear why you think it's great - especially why you think it's comparatively better than Hannibal and Manhunter)

[The Panda]

i have had it

 

after you dumb humans ranked the greatest film ever made

 

at 46?

 

i knew i had to take action

 

behold what's become of your pathetic panda

 

 

i have recalculated the lists

 

this is the top 15 now, bitches.

 

Number 15

Silent Running (1972, Douglas Trumbull)

 

Number 14

Bicentennial Man (1999, Chris Columbus)

 

Number 13

RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven)

 

Number 12

Her (2013, Spike Jonze)

 

Number 11

I, Robot (2003, Alex Proyas)

 

Number 10

Ex Machina (2015, Alex Garland)

 

Number 9

Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

 

Number 8

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970, Joseph Sargent)

 

Number 7

Westworld (1973, Michael Crichton)

 

Number 6

Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)

 

Number 5

The Matrix: Resurrections (2021, Lana Wachowski)

 

Number 4

Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)

 

Number 3

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)

 

Number 2

Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)

 

Number 1

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)

 

signing off,

dA vInci

 

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

 

Someone chuck him some bamboo, he's lost it.

[Ozymandias]

53 minutes ago, Ipickthiswhiterose said:

 

Tried Silence of the Lambs for the umpteenth time recently.

 

I love horror. I'm a horror guy. I like everyone involved. 

 

With the best will in the world I still don't get it. I don't know why it blew up like it did. I don't get why it gets to be a prestige film when the status of prestige film is a desert when it comes to horror. I don't know why Hopkins' performance is supposed to be great. I don't know what is supposed to make the film any different from any other competent dark thriller like, say, the Bone Collector or Kiss the Girls.

 

It's like, I don't know, being told all your life that, um, let's go with...The Wedding Crashers is the be all and end all of modern comedy. Like, sure, it's fine. I get why some might really like it but, I mean, I don't even see how it's even AIMING for that never mind hitting it.

 

(This may get me hate I don't know, if you love it I genuinely would like to hear why you think it's great - especially why you think it's comparatively better than Hannibal and Manhunter)