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

[The Panda]

 

Number 65

 

 

"Are you not entertained?!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"In the year 180, the death of emperor Marcus Aurelius throws the Roman Empire into chaos. Maximus is one of the Roman army’s most capable and trusted generals and a key advisor to the emperor. As Marcus’ devious son Commodus ascends to the throne, Maximus is set to be executed. He escapes, but is captured by slave traders. Renamed Spaniard and forced to become a gladiator, Maximus must battle to the death with other men for the amusement of paying audiences."

 

Its Legacy

" Gladiator spoke directly to the questions that haunted the 2000 campaign, using the Roman Empire as a stand-in for contemporary America. The analogy worked so well because filmmakers have long conditioned American audiences to view ancient Rome as a metaphor for western civilization, often specifically as a mirror to American foibles, fears, and aspirations. Like the American Western, a Roman film brings to the screen the mythic quality of archetypal heroes. But the Rome/America metaphor draws unique power from the deeply ingrained belief that our nation's founders modeled the American republic on the Roman republic; that we Americans have always been much like the Romans, with whom we share a love of liberty and a penchant for power; and that these common traits have given both Romans and Americans a manifest destiny to control the world. We look to Rome for models; conversely, we seek lessons from Rome's fall, hoping in this way to avoid the pitfalls that doomed Rome and so to post pone the demise of our own republic. 

 

 

 Gladiator - like virtually all Roman films - deviates a great deal from the historical record, but never more so than in this ending, as the film, against all evidence, kills off Commodus within months of his father's death and wills back the republic. A few classicists complained about this tinkering with historical fact. But if audiences knew that the film strained history, most viewers did not seem to care. In our films, we are quite used to artistic license that runs roughshod over historical events, as, for instance, when Pearl Harbor (2001) presents an American near- victory against Japanese warplanes in the 1941 "surprise attack on an American love-triangle," in the words of film critic Roger Ebert (2001). Roman history, especially, can shift cataclysmically in film to accommodate the American metaphor. And audiences liked Gladiator' s ending. They liked the promise that all can be right if good politicians, a good wife and mother, and good soldiers ally with one another under a virtuous and strong leader. This conclusion would satisfy nearly any American audience at any time, but it also spoke to the particular conditions of the spring of 2000. Rocked by scandals and allegations of scandal in the Clinton presidency, many Americans longed for what they saw in this ending, a restoration of republican/Republican values. One of my students affirmed the lightness of the film's resolution and offered this interpretation: "The film advocates a return to democracy here in America. Americans must overthrow the tyrannical incumbents and vote for people who will restore democracy.

 

 Yet this ending does not secure democracy as we understand the term and as Marcus Aurelius expresses it when he surprises Maximus with this confession: "I want you to become the protector of Rome after I die. I will empower you, to one end alone, to give power back to the people of Rome and end the corruption that has crippled it." Gladiator' s final scenes may seem to fulfill the second part of the old emperor's wish, an end to corruption through Maximus's sacrifice. The film's advertising slogan was "A Hero Will Rise." This is a popular theme in American films: a hero will surface in a time of crisis, often an uncorrupted country boy, as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). But Maximus is a hero with special appeal to a millennial audience. As the film repeatedly reminds us, the savior of Rome was a Spaniard who had never  until, transported there as a gladiator, he finally saw the city in all its splen dor and all its decay. Recalling his fellow Spaniards, Hadrian, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius himself, the good emperors of the second century, Maximus is Roman without being sullied by the city's endemic intrigue. He has the purity and decency."

- Emily Albu, Arethusa , Winter 2008, Vol. 41, No. 1, Celluloid Classics: New Perpectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema (Winter 2008), pp. 185-204

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"On the surface, Ridley Scott's Gladiator may seem like any of those movies I loved as a child. The story takes us to Germania during the last days of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, when the Roman army, led by Maximus, a provincial general, puts an end to barbarian domination. Soon after the battle, Marcus expresses to Maximus his gratitude, as well as his wish to name him "Protector of Rome" after his death, so that Rome can become, once again, a Republic, in spite of the fact that all Maximus wants is to return to his wife and son in Spain, and that Marcus already has a rightful heir who can't wait to become Emperor, his son Commodus. In a moving scene, the aging emperor announces his decision to Commodus, who murders him, weeping as he crushes the old man's throat, and who soon afterwards orders his rival's execution. But Maximus escapes and manages to return home, badly wounded (incredibly, bleeding all the way from Germany to Spain, but who cares?), only to find his farm burnt  to the ground and his wife and son crucified. Despondent, the Spaniard gives in to his wounds and is found barely alive on the road, and eventually sold as a slave in Zucchabar, where he's trained as a gladiator. What follows is the story of the hero's return to Rome, where Commodus reigns, unaware of his rival's survival, and where Maximus finds fame, revenge, and death at the Colosseum.

 

 

Indeed, to read this summary, Gladiator may sound like any of those old epic movies long outmoded by the time my daughter was born. The story brings to mind such memorable predecessors as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (i960), the saga of the real-life gladiator who waged war against Rome during the last years of the Republic, as well as Anthony Mann's elegant epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which also develops during the chaotic reign of Commodus. All the essential elements are there: Gladiator too is a tale about the clash between the forces of good and evil embodied in two archetypal characters, an anonymous, righteous underdog and an all-powerful adversary, predictably a depraved, demented villain, and their match is set against breathtaking reconstructions of ancient sites and life and drenched in as much blood as can possibly be poured into two-and-a-half hours of film. As with all great movie epics, the public's viewpoint in Gladiator moves swiftly from the private sphere where passions brew (the tent, the prison cell, the bedroom) to the vast back ground where public life and ancient history unravel (the battle field, the city, the Colosseum)?a grand stage, which lends its weight and scale to the minutiae of the personal drama. And, like Quo Vadis? (1951), Ben Hur (1959), and virtually every other of these Hollywood fantasies, Gladiator, too, involves a tense love triangle, in this case, between Maximus and Commodus' sister, Lucilla, who was Maximus' lover once and still loves him, and between Lucilla and her brother, who burns with an old incestuous passion for her, and whom she fears, on account of her complicity with Maximus and her allegiance to her son, Lucius Verus, who happens to be unwittingly poor kid a fan of his uncle's rival, the mysterious gladiator who has become the talk of the town.

 

 From the purely visual point of view, Scott's movie is firmly placed within a tradition that goes back at least as far as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), grand spectacles where antiquity comes to life through extravagant productions and stunning special effects. If anything, the impressive computer-generated reconstructions in Gladiator strike one as a logical development of such technological breakthroughs as Technicolor and CinemaScope. Indeed, the uncanny image definition made possible by computer generation compensates at least in part for the effect of sheer scale that made those earlier films so powerful at the theater, lending the movie a respectable afterlife in the world of home videos. I would even argue that, in some cases, Gladiator fares better in this humbler, domestic form. At times the level of detail is so exhaustive as to be optically implausible, especially in those vast panoramic views where it tends to flatten space, and where the effect is often more hallucinatory than realistic, a shortcoming of hi-tech illusionism which is curiously neutralized when the cinematic image is squeezed onto a tv screen. But the formal differences between Gladiator and its predecessors are more significant still than its similarities. Let's begin with this. Although Gladiator at least feels to be as long as Ben Hur or Quo Vadis?, its script must be at the most only one third of theirs. The story is told less through speech than through images, which dramatically reduces the rhetorical weight of its predecessors. The text is specially scanty when it comes to the hero, a man of few words, a striking departure from the older epics, where everyone, whether consul or slave, sounds like an orator even during the most intimate love scenes. In fact, whenever Maximus appears on the screen, he's either fighting or brooding. And when he does speak, his words are at times surprisingly casual, even when he discusses conspiratorial plans with a senator or the after life with a fellow slave. In fact, I would argue that, for all the spectacular historical reconstructions and the predictable gore, Scott has managed to create an internal story set in ancient times a quiet epic."

- Amelia Arenas, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and Classics

 

Public Opinion

 

"It could be a little melodramatic with it's writing and delivery (what does this movie think it is sometimes, a Shakespearean play?) but it's frankly amazing nonetheless. The action remains flawless, there's a lot of tension throughout the movie, and it's able to really make all of the major characters work on an emotional level.

 

The movie of course had a point beyond the action: it tried to answer the metaphysical question of what Rome was. Was it just a mob of people dictating where the leaders go? Or was it more, a vision of greatness? What is that vision? Ultimately, the movie was about the competing definitions of what Rome was which is what allows it to have some depth." - @Water Bottle

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

gladiator

"are you not entertained?

by my consistent poetry

which i slave away for you

while you burn down my farm"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

UNRANKED (2020), #38 (2018), UNRANKED (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #66 (2013), #59 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (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),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (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 (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (4)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#46 Fanboy Ranking, #81 Cinema Ranking

#98 Old Farts Ranking, #55 Damn Kids Ranking

#133 Ambassador Ranking, #62 All-American Ranking

#91 Cartoon Ranking, #62 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[The Panda]

Only @Plain Old Tele could possibly complain about this one.

 

Number 64

 

 

"If I only had a brain!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Young Dorothy finds herself in a magical world where she makes friends with a lion, a scarecrow and a tin man as they make their way along the yellow brick road to talk with the Wizard and ask for the things they miss most in their lives. The Wicked Witch of the West is the only thing that could stop them."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The Wizard of Oz, followed by Star Wars and Psycho, is identified as the most influential film of all time in a study published in the open access journal Applied Network Science. Researchers at the University of Turin, Italy, calculated an influence score for 47,000 films listed in IMDb (the internet movie database). The score was based on how much each film had been referenced by subsequent films. The authors found that the top 20 most influential films were all produced before 1980 and mostly in the United States. Dr. Livio Bioglio, the lead author, said: “We propose an alternative method to box office takings – which are affected by factors beyond the quality of the film such as advertising and distribution – and reviews – which are ultimately subjective – for analysing the success of a film. We have developed an algorithm that uses references between movies as a measure for success, and which can also be used to evaluate the career of directors, actors and actresses, by considering their participation in top-scoring movies.”

 

 

Applying the algorithm to directors, the five men credited for The Wizard of Oz are all in the top eight, with Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick ranked third, fifth and sixth respectively. When the authors used another approach to remove the bias of older movies – which, because they were produced earlier, can potentially influence a greater number of subsequent films - Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma occupied the top spots instead. When applied to actors, the algorithm ranked Samuel L. Jackson, Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise as the top three. The authors noticed a strong gender bias towards male actors; the only female in the top ten was Lois Maxwell, who played the recurring role of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond franchise.

 

Dr. Bioglio said: “The scores of top-ranked actresses tend to be lower compared to their male colleagues. The only exceptions were musical movies, where results show moderate gender equality, and movies produced in Sweden, where actresses ranked better compared to actors.” To calculate the influence score for the 47,000 films investigated in this study, the authors treated the films as nodes in a network and measured the number of connections each film has to other films and how influential the films connected to it are. Similar network science methods have already been widely applied to measuring the impact of work in other fields, such as scientific publications. Dr. Bioglio said: “The idea of using network analysis for ranking films is not completely new, but to our knowledge this is the first study that uses these techniques to also rank personalities involved in film production.”

 

The authors suggest that their method could be used for research in the arts and by film historians. However, they caution that the results can only be applied to Western cinema as the data on IMDb are strongly biased towards films produced in Western countries."

- BMC press release on Livio and Ruggero's Applied Network Science paper

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Since its inception, the Wizard of Oz story has gone through countless reinventions, including several more Oz books written by Baum himself, additional books contributed by other “Royal Historians of Oz,”1 and numerous adaptations for stage and screen. The 1939 MGM film version of The Wizard of Oz is undoubtedly the most wellknown cinematic adaptation of Baum’s American fairy tale, directed by the legendary Victor Fleming,2 starring Judy Garland as Dorothy, and adapted for the screen by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allen Woolf. Fleming’s classic film largely follows the same narrative structure of Baum’s fairy tale. A tornado transports Dorothy and Toto from Kansas to Oz where her house falls on and kills the Wicked Witch of the East, though in the MGM film, this transition is further emphasized by the visual switch from the drab sepia tones of Kansas to the vibrant Technicolor of Oz. In this version, Dorothy’s magical silver shoes are transformed into the iconic ruby slippers and the character of the good witch is developed into Glinda (Billie Burke), a resplendent and regal maternal figure who welcomes Dorothy to Oz.

 

 

Along the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy meets the same cast of characters: the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), Tin Man (Jack 8 Haley), and Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). The Wizard (Frank Morgan) makes the same ultimatum and Dorothy destroys the now green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), albeit accidentally, as in Baum’s book. Dorothy’s companions find they have always had the brain, heart, and courage they long for. The Wizard is a fake, but Glinda comes to the rescue and tells Dorothy of the magic of the ruby slippers, which transport her safely back to Kansas amid echoes of the girl’s proclamation that “there’s no place like home.” Concluding the visually-coded frame narrative, Dorothy reawakens in sepia-toned Kansas, where Aunt Em (Clara Blandick) reassures Dorothy that her adventures have been nothing but a dream. Silent film versions preceded the MGM Oz and many more cinematic adaptations have followed,3 but Garland has inarguably secured her place within American memory as the little girl from Kansas who traveled “over the rainbow,” and new generations of children follow her there with each ritualistic television screening of the classic film."

- AD Burger, The Wizard of Oz as American myth: A Critical study of six versions of the story, 1900-2007

 

Public Opinion

 

"my gal pals and i were absolutely hooting and hollering whenever the hot scarecrow came onscreen to do a silly dance and fall down. we decided scarecrow is a lanky, sensitive, DIY boy who stands in front of you at your roommate’s friend’s house show and at first you’re annoyed but then he notices he’s blocking your view and he apologizes soooo much, maybe even too much, and after the show you joke around with him and laugh when he trips over his own dirty converse laces, and suddenly it’s 2 am and you’re heading home and you think you’re gonna miss him most of all." - BRAT, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

the wizard of oz

"Dorothy, the Tin Man, Scarecrow
and Cowardly Lion
see the Wizard of Oz"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#31 (2020), #49 (2018), #51 (2016), #54 (2014), #63 (2013), UNRANKED (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (4)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

#93 Fanboy Ranking, #59 Cinema Ranking

#34 Old Farts Ranking, #104 Damn Kids ranking

#73 Ambassador Ranking, #66 All-American Ranking

#67 Cartoon Ranking, #63 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 3, 2022 by The Panda

[Dementeleus]

[The Panda]

idk wtf this is but it made it

Number 63

 

 

"Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The twist in "Your Name" comes when Taki and Mitsuha stop swapping bodies. The film then starts following solely Taki's perspective, as he discovers that his and Mitsuha's timelines weren't parallel. While he lived in 2016, she was in 2013, the same year her town, Itomori, was wiped out by a comet. Taki manages to engineer one last body switch and rewrite history so Itomori's citizens evacuate before the town's destruction. The pair briefly meet each other in person, but they forget each other afterward. Not to worry — they meet each other in Tokyo in 2021 and vaguely recognize each other.

 

 

In an interview with Vice, Shinkai explained his inspirations. They ranged from Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" to a waka poem by ancient Japanese writer Ono no Komachi: "I met someone in my dream, and had I known it was a dream, I would have stayed there." As for the destruction of Itomori, that came from a much more tragic place: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that ravaged Japan.At magnitude 9.0, Tōhoku is the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history. The damage was threefold; the earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster left 18,000 dead, and the effects are still felt in Japan today.

 

"It was the largest in a thousand years, and there was something similar 1,000 years ago, which we all forgot about. But if you look closer there were warnings, like stone inscriptions in the cave in the film: Don't live in this valley. But we forget those warnings, or dismiss them as something 'from the ancient times'. We think they're just dangers from the past. When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?"

- Devin Meenan, SlashFilm

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Makoto Shinkai’s animated film Kimi No Na Wa, translated as Your Name, was a critical and commercial hit when it was released in 2016. The film depicts the strange and wondrous journey of two high school teenagers, city boy Taki in Tokyo and countryside girl Mitsuha in rural lakeside Itomori, who are inexplicably swapping bodies with each other. Your Name is currently the highest grossing anime feature of all time, a remarkable mainstream success at the local box office and in its global reception. Such widespread positive attention is rarely seen outside of films made by Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, and Your Name has since solidified Shinkai’s position as a leading filmmaker on the animated movie landscape (Fig. 1). The fantastical premise of Your Name’s story, combined with gorgeous naturalistic animation and standout music composition, all play defining roles in the film’s success. However, a central idea that underpins Your Name is the tension between modernity and tradition, informed by postmodern Japan’s sense of cultural loss due to globalisation, termed mukokuseki or nationlessness (Iwabuchi 2002: 28). The music composed and performed by Japanese band RADWIMPS acts in tandem with the aesthetics to shape the movie’s thematic coherence, and to amplify fantastical elements in the animated medium. RADWIMPS’s soundtrack is part of a wider genre of anime music uniquely situated to support animated films on a creative and commercial scale, given Japan’s intersection of high music CD consumption, a thriving music industry, and the prevalent franchising of popular anime elements including soundtracks to fans. With Your Name, I offer an analysis in this post of the opening music, material cultural identifiers, and synthesis of sound elements with visual sequences to interrogate how aural cues inform the recurring mediation of tradition and modernity in the text, and which are integral in drawing the viewer into the animated world.

 

Your Name evokes culturally specific, nostalgia-driven modes of narration where sound acts as a unifying force. The musical number Yumetōrō 夢灯籠, literally meaning ‘dream lantern’, opens the film. It is performed using contemporary Western instruments such as the rhythm guitar and standard drums, affirming the modern-day context and globalised nature of the Japanese music industry. Aki Yamasaki identifies three common music types in anime: the theme song, character song, and soundtrack (2020: 210). Yumetōrō falls strictly in the tradition of a theme song, meeting all Yamasaki’s markers as a number paired with an opening credits sequence, with striking lyrics and a catchy melody aimed at mass appeal. In anime, theme songs act as the face of the film and is a prime device for promoting shows and highlighting their central motifs, and are often performed by the singer at events as well as made into soundtracks and sheet music for sale. So Yumetōrō’s function remains quintessentially Japanese. Although theme songs are more commonly applied to television programmes in Japan, Shinkai establishes a sense of reassuring familiarity for the local audience with adherence to this sonic convention. 

 

Shinkai demonstrates that Your Name’s aural dimension and visual aesthetics complement each other, showing Japanese culture not as a static object but instead as a dynamic and liminal force. The Yumetōrō number has therefore been deliberately scripted, composed, and animated to weave between past and present time, setting up its central motifs and embodying the romantic, fantastical and nostalgic essence of the entire film."

- Zhui Ning Chang, Fantasy-Animation

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"It's the feeling of never wanting a dream to end, desperately trying to go back to sleep hoping that your dream would somehow pick up where it had left off.

 

But you know very well that it won't. First you'll forget the details. What shirt you were wearing, the exact words you said or wanted to say. Her hand on your palm that felt so tangible just a few seconds ago, reduced to a cold sensation that served as nothing but a reminder of the warmth that was once there.

 

Then the timeline becomes murky, sequences become knotted up -- like how mitsuha's grandmother had so wisely put it: Musubi dayo. Time is a knot. The location comes before the journey there, cause and effect all collapse in an instant. You can't remember the weather, or the exact time of day. It felt golden, the sun may or may not be present, was her eyes sparkling because of the comet? Why yes, there was a comet slowly crawling up above, leaving a trail of sparkling dust behind like something out of a desktop wallpaper. The comet traveled all across the galaxy to arrive on earth, like how you had traveled all across the country to meet----

 

To meet who, again? Ah, all is lost now, absolutely irrevocable. What's left is a lingering sadness which reason you had forgotten. A need to remember someone dear, a stroke of marker pen on your palm and a simple wish for company. How cruel it is for our dream to force itself away from us, beyond our control." - YI JIAN, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

your name

"A name is just a name
But it's the only one you've got
So make it yours

 

Also, why the fuck

did you name me something

as tacky as dA vInci?

 

We get it."

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Makoto Shinkai (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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#40 Fanboy Ranking, #65 Cinema Ranking

#135 Old Farts Ranking, #46 Damn Kids Ranking

#20 Ambassador Ranking, #74 All-American Ranking

#18 Cartoon Ranking, #70 Damn Boom Ranking

 

 

[baumer]

18 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

 

You don't like It's a wonderful Life or the wizard of oz? 🤦🤦

[Potiki]

10 minutes ago, The Panda said:

idk wtf this is but it made it

Number 63

 

 

"Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The twist in "Your Name" comes when Taki and Mitsuha stop swapping bodies. The film then starts following solely Taki's perspective, as he discovers that his and Mitsuha's timelines weren't parallel. While he lived in 2016, she was in 2013, the same year her town, Itomori, was wiped out by a comet. Taki manages to engineer one last body switch and rewrite history so Itomori's citizens evacuate before the town's destruction. The pair briefly meet each other in person, but they forget each other afterward. Not to worry — they meet each other in Tokyo in 2021 and vaguely recognize each other.

 

 

In an interview with Vice, Shinkai explained his inspirations. They ranged from Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" to a waka poem by ancient Japanese writer Ono no Komachi: "I met someone in my dream, and had I known it was a dream, I would have stayed there." As for the destruction of Itomori, that came from a much more tragic place: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that ravaged Japan.At magnitude 9.0, Tōhoku is the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history. The damage was threefold; the earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster left 18,000 dead, and the effects are still felt in Japan today.

 

"It was the largest in a thousand years, and there was something similar 1,000 years ago, which we all forgot about. But if you look closer there were warnings, like stone inscriptions in the cave in the film: Don't live in this valley. But we forget those warnings, or dismiss them as something 'from the ancient times'. We think they're just dangers from the past. When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?"

- Devin Meenan, SlashFilm

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Makoto Shinkai’s animated film Kimi No Na Wa, translated as Your Name, was a critical and commercial hit when it was released in 2016. The film depicts the strange and wondrous journey of two high school teenagers, city boy Taki in Tokyo and countryside girl Mitsuha in rural lakeside Itomori, who are inexplicably swapping bodies with each other. Your Name is currently the highest grossing anime feature of all time, a remarkable mainstream success at the local box office and in its global reception. Such widespread positive attention is rarely seen outside of films made by Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, and Your Name has since solidified Shinkai’s position as a leading filmmaker on the animated movie landscape (Fig. 1). The fantastical premise of Your Name’s story, combined with gorgeous naturalistic animation and standout music composition, all play defining roles in the film’s success. However, a central idea that underpins Your Name is the tension between modernity and tradition, informed by postmodern Japan’s sense of cultural loss due to globalisation, termed mukokuseki or nationlessness (Iwabuchi 2002: 28). The music composed and performed by Japanese band RADWIMPS acts in tandem with the aesthetics to shape the movie’s thematic coherence, and to amplify fantastical elements in the animated medium. RADWIMPS’s soundtrack is part of a wider genre of anime music uniquely situated to support animated films on a creative and commercial scale, given Japan’s intersection of high music CD consumption, a thriving music industry, and the prevalent franchising of popular anime elements including soundtracks to fans. With Your Name, I offer an analysis in this post of the opening music, material cultural identifiers, and synthesis of sound elements with visual sequences to interrogate how aural cues inform the recurring mediation of tradition and modernity in the text, and which are integral in drawing the viewer into the animated world.

 

Your Name evokes culturally specific, nostalgia-driven modes of narration where sound acts as a unifying force. The musical number Yumetōrō 夢灯籠, literally meaning ‘dream lantern’, opens the film. It is performed using contemporary Western instruments such as the rhythm guitar and standard drums, affirming the modern-day context and globalised nature of the Japanese music industry. Aki Yamasaki identifies three common music types in anime: the theme song, character song, and soundtrack (2020: 210). Yumetōrō falls strictly in the tradition of a theme song, meeting all Yamasaki’s markers as a number paired with an opening credits sequence, with striking lyrics and a catchy melody aimed at mass appeal. In anime, theme songs act as the face of the film and is a prime device for promoting shows and highlighting their central motifs, and are often performed by the singer at events as well as made into soundtracks and sheet music for sale. So Yumetōrō’s function remains quintessentially Japanese. Although theme songs are more commonly applied to television programmes in Japan, Shinkai establishes a sense of reassuring familiarity for the local audience with adherence to this sonic convention. 

 

Shinkai demonstrates that Your Name’s aural dimension and visual aesthetics complement each other, showing Japanese culture not as a static object but instead as a dynamic and liminal force. The Yumetōrō number has therefore been deliberately scripted, composed, and animated to weave between past and present time, setting up its central motifs and embodying the romantic, fantastical and nostalgic essence of the entire film."

- Zhui Ning Chang, Fantasy-Animation

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"It's the feeling of never wanting a dream to end, desperately trying to go back to sleep hoping that your dream would somehow pick up where it had left off.

 

But you know very well that it won't. First you'll forget the details. What shirt you were wearing, the exact words you said or wanted to say. Her hand on your palm that felt so tangible just a few seconds ago, reduced to a cold sensation that served as nothing but a reminder of the warmth that was once there.

 

Then the timeline becomes murky, sequences become knotted up -- like how mitsuha's grandmother had so wisely put it: Musubi dayo. Time is a knot. The location comes before the journey there, cause and effect all collapse in an instant. You can't remember the weather, or the exact time of day. It felt golden, the sun may or may not be present, was her eyes sparkling because of the comet? Why yes, there was a comet slowly crawling up above, leaving a trail of sparkling dust behind like something out of a desktop wallpaper. The comet traveled all across the galaxy to arrive on earth, like how you had traveled all across the country to meet----

 

To meet who, again? Ah, all is lost now, absolutely irrevocable. What's left is a lingering sadness which reason you had forgotten. A need to remember someone dear, a stroke of marker pen on your palm and a simple wish for company. How cruel it is for our dream to force itself away from us, beyond our control." - YI JIAN, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

your name

"A name is just a name
But it's the only one you've got
So make it yours

 

Also, why the fuck

did you name me something

as tacky as dA vInci?

 

We get it."

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Makoto Shinkai (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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#40 Fanboy Ranking, #65 Cinema Ranking

#135 Old Farts Ranking, #46 Damn Kids Ranking

#20 Ambassador Ranking, #74 All-American Ranking

#18 Cartoon Ranking, #70 Damn Boom Ranking

 

 

Damn legit didn't think this would make it!

 

I'm pleasantly surprised looks like my top 10 will go 9 out of 10. 

 

Also the visuals of this movie are still insane 6 years later and I love the unique plot twist, was a great time in the cinemas with a full crowd. 

[THUNDER BIRD]

7 hours ago, The Panda said:

welp...

 

 

Number 67

 

 

"Noobmaster, hey, it's Thor again."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"The Avengers assemble and do some silly comic book shenanigans and shit."

 

Its Legacy

 

"When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema. Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way. Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

 

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

 

 

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

 

So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters. That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

 

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all. I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary."

 

 

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other. For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness."

- Martin Scorsese, I Said Marvel Movies Aren't Cinema. Let Me Explain. (2019)

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"End of an era. There was a thunderous applause at the end. WOM is gonna be throught the roof, the ending is so emotional, everyone was crying so much. The perfect blockbuster. The perfect end to the MCU." - @CJohn

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

avengers: endgame

"The end is near
Who will survive?
Only time will tell"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#76 (2020), NA (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (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),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (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 (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (12), 2010s (4)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#36 Fanboy Ranking, #99 Cinema Ranking

#84 Old Farts Ranking, #68 Damn Kids Ranking

#257 Ambassador Ranking, #59 All-American Ranking

#77 Cartoon Ranking, #66 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

If Endgame has made it, Infinity Wars should too. 

 

You should've just added in Public Opinion - People embracing their inner Monke.

 

And if Infinity War do makes it, Please add in Public Opinion - People finally achieving what their teachers asked of them everyday, Pin Drop Silence. 

[Chaz]

Judy Garland was the greatest star of the 20th century. 

[Dementeleus]

32 minutes ago, baumer said:

 

You don't like It's a wonderful Life or the wizard of oz? 🤦🤦

They’re okay.  

[Ozymandias]

Bruh these posts making my mouse wheel finger ache

1 hour ago, The Panda said:

 

Number 65

 

 

"Are you not entertained?!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"In the year 180, the death of emperor Marcus Aurelius throws the Roman Empire into chaos. Maximus is one of the Roman army’s most capable and trusted generals and a key advisor to the emperor. As Marcus’ devious son Commodus ascends to the throne, Maximus is set to be executed. He escapes, but is captured by slave traders. Renamed Spaniard and forced to become a gladiator, Maximus must battle to the death with other men for the amusement of paying audiences."

 

Its Legacy

" Gladiator spoke directly to the questions that haunted the 2000 campaign, using the Roman Empire as a stand-in for contemporary America. The analogy worked so well because filmmakers have long conditioned American audiences to view ancient Rome as a metaphor for western civilization, often specifically as a mirror to American foibles, fears, and aspirations. Like the American Western, a Roman film brings to the screen the mythic quality of archetypal heroes. But the Rome/America metaphor draws unique power from the deeply ingrained belief that our nation's founders modeled the American republic on the Roman republic; that we Americans have always been much like the Romans, with whom we share a love of liberty and a penchant for power; and that these common traits have given both Romans and Americans a manifest destiny to control the world. We look to Rome for models; conversely, we seek lessons from Rome's fall, hoping in this way to avoid the pitfalls that doomed Rome and so to post pone the demise of our own republic. 

 

 

 Gladiator - like virtually all Roman films - deviates a great deal from the historical record, but never more so than in this ending, as the film, against all evidence, kills off Commodus within months of his father's death and wills back the republic. A few classicists complained about this tinkering with historical fact. But if audiences knew that the film strained history, most viewers did not seem to care. In our films, we are quite used to artistic license that runs roughshod over historical events, as, for instance, when Pearl Harbor (2001) presents an American near- victory against Japanese warplanes in the 1941 "surprise attack on an American love-triangle," in the words of film critic Roger Ebert (2001). Roman history, especially, can shift cataclysmically in film to accommodate the American metaphor. And audiences liked Gladiator' s ending. They liked the promise that all can be right if good politicians, a good wife and mother, and good soldiers ally with one another under a virtuous and strong leader. This conclusion would satisfy nearly any American audience at any time, but it also spoke to the particular conditions of the spring of 2000. Rocked by scandals and allegations of scandal in the Clinton presidency, many Americans longed for what they saw in this ending, a restoration of republican/Republican values. One of my students affirmed the lightness of the film's resolution and offered this interpretation: "The film advocates a return to democracy here in America. Americans must overthrow the tyrannical incumbents and vote for people who will restore democracy.

 

 Yet this ending does not secure democracy as we understand the term and as Marcus Aurelius expresses it when he surprises Maximus with this confession: "I want you to become the protector of Rome after I die. I will empower you, to one end alone, to give power back to the people of Rome and end the corruption that has crippled it." Gladiator' s final scenes may seem to fulfill the second part of the old emperor's wish, an end to corruption through Maximus's sacrifice. The film's advertising slogan was "A Hero Will Rise." This is a popular theme in American films: a hero will surface in a time of crisis, often an uncorrupted country boy, as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). But Maximus is a hero with special appeal to a millennial audience. As the film repeatedly reminds us, the savior of Rome was a Spaniard who had never  until, transported there as a gladiator, he finally saw the city in all its splen dor and all its decay. Recalling his fellow Spaniards, Hadrian, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius himself, the good emperors of the second century, Maximus is Roman without being sullied by the city's endemic intrigue. He has the purity and decency."

- Emily Albu, Arethusa , Winter 2008, Vol. 41, No. 1, Celluloid Classics: New Perpectives on Classical Antiquity in Modern Cinema (Winter 2008), pp. 185-204

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"On the surface, Ridley Scott's Gladiator may seem like any of those movies I loved as a child. The story takes us to Germania during the last days of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, when the Roman army, led by Maximus, a provincial general, puts an end to barbarian domination. Soon after the battle, Marcus expresses to Maximus his gratitude, as well as his wish to name him "Protector of Rome" after his death, so that Rome can become, once again, a Republic, in spite of the fact that all Maximus wants is to return to his wife and son in Spain, and that Marcus already has a rightful heir who can't wait to become Emperor, his son Commodus. In a moving scene, the aging emperor announces his decision to Commodus, who murders him, weeping as he crushes the old man's throat, and who soon afterwards orders his rival's execution. But Maximus escapes and manages to return home, badly wounded (incredibly, bleeding all the way from Germany to Spain, but who cares?), only to find his farm burnt  to the ground and his wife and son crucified. Despondent, the Spaniard gives in to his wounds and is found barely alive on the road, and eventually sold as a slave in Zucchabar, where he's trained as a gladiator. What follows is the story of the hero's return to Rome, where Commodus reigns, unaware of his rival's survival, and where Maximus finds fame, revenge, and death at the Colosseum.

 

 

Indeed, to read this summary, Gladiator may sound like any of those old epic movies long outmoded by the time my daughter was born. The story brings to mind such memorable predecessors as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (i960), the saga of the real-life gladiator who waged war against Rome during the last years of the Republic, as well as Anthony Mann's elegant epic, The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which also develops during the chaotic reign of Commodus. All the essential elements are there: Gladiator too is a tale about the clash between the forces of good and evil embodied in two archetypal characters, an anonymous, righteous underdog and an all-powerful adversary, predictably a depraved, demented villain, and their match is set against breathtaking reconstructions of ancient sites and life and drenched in as much blood as can possibly be poured into two-and-a-half hours of film. As with all great movie epics, the public's viewpoint in Gladiator moves swiftly from the private sphere where passions brew (the tent, the prison cell, the bedroom) to the vast back ground where public life and ancient history unravel (the battle field, the city, the Colosseum)?a grand stage, which lends its weight and scale to the minutiae of the personal drama. And, like Quo Vadis? (1951), Ben Hur (1959), and virtually every other of these Hollywood fantasies, Gladiator, too, involves a tense love triangle, in this case, between Maximus and Commodus' sister, Lucilla, who was Maximus' lover once and still loves him, and between Lucilla and her brother, who burns with an old incestuous passion for her, and whom she fears, on account of her complicity with Maximus and her allegiance to her son, Lucius Verus, who happens to be unwittingly poor kid a fan of his uncle's rival, the mysterious gladiator who has become the talk of the town.

 

 From the purely visual point of view, Scott's movie is firmly placed within a tradition that goes back at least as far as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), grand spectacles where antiquity comes to life through extravagant productions and stunning special effects. If anything, the impressive computer-generated reconstructions in Gladiator strike one as a logical development of such technological breakthroughs as Technicolor and CinemaScope. Indeed, the uncanny image definition made possible by computer generation compensates at least in part for the effect of sheer scale that made those earlier films so powerful at the theater, lending the movie a respectable afterlife in the world of home videos. I would even argue that, in some cases, Gladiator fares better in this humbler, domestic form. At times the level of detail is so exhaustive as to be optically implausible, especially in those vast panoramic views where it tends to flatten space, and where the effect is often more hallucinatory than realistic, a shortcoming of hi-tech illusionism which is curiously neutralized when the cinematic image is squeezed onto a tv screen. But the formal differences between Gladiator and its predecessors are more significant still than its similarities. Let's begin with this. Although Gladiator at least feels to be as long as Ben Hur or Quo Vadis?, its script must be at the most only one third of theirs. The story is told less through speech than through images, which dramatically reduces the rhetorical weight of its predecessors. The text is specially scanty when it comes to the hero, a man of few words, a striking departure from the older epics, where everyone, whether consul or slave, sounds like an orator even during the most intimate love scenes. In fact, whenever Maximus appears on the screen, he's either fighting or brooding. And when he does speak, his words are at times surprisingly casual, even when he discusses conspiratorial plans with a senator or the after life with a fellow slave. In fact, I would argue that, for all the spectacular historical reconstructions and the predictable gore, Scott has managed to create an internal story set in ancient times a quiet epic."

- Amelia Arenas, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and Classics

 

Public Opinion

 

"It could be a little melodramatic with it's writing and delivery (what does this movie think it is sometimes, a Shakespearean play?) but it's frankly amazing nonetheless. The action remains flawless, there's a lot of tension throughout the movie, and it's able to really make all of the major characters work on an emotional level.

 

The movie of course had a point beyond the action: it tried to answer the metaphysical question of what Rome was. Was it just a mob of people dictating where the leaders go? Or was it more, a vision of greatness? What is that vision? Ultimately, the movie was about the competing definitions of what Rome was which is what allows it to have some depth." - @Water Bottle

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

gladiator

"are you not entertained?

by my consistent poetry

which i slave away for you

while you burn down my farm"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

UNRANKED (2020), #38 (2018), UNRANKED (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #66 (2013), #59 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (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),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (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 (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (4)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#46 Fanboy Ranking, #81 Cinema Ranking

#98 Old Farts Ranking, #55 Damn Kids Ranking

#133 Ambassador Ranking, #62 All-American Ranking

#91 Cartoon Ranking, #62 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

 

This is populist cinema at its most polished.  I'm glad the culture hasn't devolved to the point(yet) where this movie has been supplanted in the public consciousness by the likes of the quickly produced and consumed studio fare of today.

[The Panda]

OH MY FUCKING GOD, WE DID IT! WE DID IT! 

 

The movie is bringing me to tears again just listening to the ambient soundtrack and reading through sources

 

Number 62

 

 

"It was in the silence that I heard Your voice."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors.

 

 

But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ. Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life.

 

Jesuits both fictional and real did  this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love.

 

In the end, “Silence” is about love. Or maybe loves. Father Rodrigues’s and Father Garupe’s love for their old mentor, Father Ferreira. The three Jesuits’ love for the Japanese people. Father Rodrigues’s intense love for Jesus Christ. Most of all, Jesus’s love for him, for his brother Jesuits, for the people of Japan and for all of humanity. Understand love and you will understand “Silence.”"

- Fr. James Martin, Religious Consultant for Silence

 

From the Filmmaker

 

""Q: You spent a lot of time going to Church or going to Mass?

 

Scorsese: Yes. In the church, and going to Mass.

 

Q: By yourself?

 

Scorsese: By myself. My family wasn’t very religious that way, but I just found comfort there because the streets were pretty rough, and having the severe asthma, I was told I couldn’t do anything. If you’re told that repeatedly, and you have enough breathing problems, and you really believe it—I always think of Teddy Roosevelt as an example, who had severe asthma, but he fought it—but my parents in the mid to late ‘40s, uneducated and working class, they just didn’t know what to do. They just knew I couldn’t breathe. This was from three years old on, and so I was more or less protected because of that. But when you’re in the street you’re not really protected. There’s a testing all the time: tougher kids, younger kids, and then you try to make sense of it all. You try to make sense of the dynamic of the family. What a family means. What a family unit is. The extended family: The aunts and uncles, my grandmother and grandfather in 241 Elizabeth St., my grandmother and grandfather in Queens, my mother’s side of the family, the Cappa side, her brothers and sisters. Some of them were still living in the neighborhood on Prince Street and on Lafayette. So, it was like a living organism, and the church was the center.

 

It was also the center for every group that was there. Mainly it was all working-class people trying to live a decent life. It was very dirty; they were tenements, but it wasn’t as dirty as it was when they were born there. Elizabeth Street at the turn-of-the-century was noted in New York as the highest rate of infant mortality, and that was because of cholera and all these diseases. They finally found a way to maintain the buildings where they lived, and I still can smell the bleach that was used to scrub the halls. My mother and everybody scrubbing the halls on the weekend, the windows, everything to keep it clean and to protect the family. And there was an underworld element that was there that was brought over from the old world.

 

 

Q: When did you run across the Silence book?

 

I had gotten involved with Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ. I wanted to make that. By 1988 when that was finally made, and it was about to be released, there was a great deal of an uproar, and we had to show the film, what was the film at that moment anyway, to different religious groups to show what it was rather than arguing about it without having seen it. One of the people there was Archbishop Paul Moore of New York, Episcopal, and he came to a little meeting afterwards at a small dinner we had. He felt that the film, as he said, was “Christologically correct.” He told us many stories. He was a very interesting man.

 

He said, “I’m going to send you a book.” And he described some of the stories in the book, and he described the confrontation, the choices, the concept of apostasy and faith. I received the book a few days later, and by ’89, a year later, I read it. The experience of taking “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and then doing “Goodfellas” was so extraordinarily exhausting and pummeling, in a way, fighting very strong arguments and discussions. Really, it was around the world. By the time I did “Goodfellas,” I had promised the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to be in a film of his called “Dreams.” He wanted me to play van Gogh.

 

I was 15 days over schedule on “Goodfellas.” The studio was furious. My cameraman left because he had another picture to do. Somebody else came in. We were just scurrying to finish, and Kurosawa was waiting for me in Japan. He was 82 years old, and he had just finished the majority of the shooting, and he had only my scene to shoot, and he was waiting. It was very nerve-racking. Within two days after shooting that film, we flew to Tokyo, and then to Hokkaido, and while I was there I read the book. Actually finished it on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

 

When I’d look at my managers, and my agents, and say, “I really want to make this film.” They’d go in. They’d inquire where it stood at that moment in time, and they’d come back in horror, and say, “Well, this person has to get this, and the amount of money against it,” back and forth, and, finally, there were a number of people who really worked it out.  But it took many years to try to understand or feel comfortable with how to visualize the picture, and how to deal with the last sequences of the film. The last sequences. Not just the confrontation at the end, but the epilogue.

 

Q: Right. Now, you said that it took you a while to understand the heart of the book. How would you describe the heart of the book?

 

Well, I think it's the depth of faith. It’s the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. The vehicle that one takes towards faith, which can be very helpful—the institution of the church, the sacraments—this all can be very, but ultimately it has to be yourself, and you have to find it. You have to find that faith, or you have to find a relationship with Jesus with yourself, really, because ultimately that’s the one you face. Yeah. He is, but it doesn’t negate, in my mind, those who choose to have, I should say, lived a life according to the rules of an institution, [like] the institution of the Catholic Church, or however one proceeds in their life with their own beliefs, but ultimately they can’t do it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. That’s the problem. And the invitation, and it keeps calling you. It keeps calling you, and it’s in the other people around you. It's the people closest to you. This is what it is, and you suddenly get slapped in the face by it, and say, “Wake up.” You know?

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"On one level, the tension in the film is governed by an ecclesial ambivalence in the era of post-colonialism: is Christian evangelization a kind of violence to the very understanding of enculturation? That question eventually faces the two Jesuits, Frs. Sebastiao Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe as they set out to find their mentor, Fr. Dante Ferreira, in Japan in 1633. Refusing to believe that his teacher has apostatized, Rodrigues clings not only to that ideal but to an image of Christ he has prayed with and which becomes a recurrent vision throughout the film. It is the image of Christ, as well as the construction of Ferreira as an ideal, that is continually at risk throughout the film. While Japanese Christians are compelled into desecration of sacred Christian images by Inoue, the Grand Inquisitor, Rodrigues must come to terms with his illusions of Christ in the face of human suffering. In confronting Ferreira, Rodrigues learns that the older Jesuit apostatized not because his life was in danger, but because other Christians were screaming in agony upside down over a torture pit filled with excrement. Eventually, Rodrigues would follow his mentor on the same path and apostatize for the same reason, violating the sacred image of Christ himself for the sake of charity. In Ferreira’s mind, Japan is a “swamp” where Christianity, even during the days of St. Francis Xavier, could not take root; it was all an illusion. In the end, he tells Rodrigues, they are not martyrs to Christ but to Rodrigues himself and his own Christian ideals and teachings. As the Inquisitor says to Rodrigues, “the price for your glory is their suffering.”

 

 

The film goes to great length to disclose the ambivalence of signs and images and how difficult it is to trust them. We want to identify Kichijiro as a Judas figure who seemingly betrays his family, friends, and the Christianity he knows but then he remains steadfast in the end. Rodrigues sees the flight of an eagle as a sign from God that they are headed on the right path, only to see they are being spied on. A young Japanese couple understands paradise as what is happening now, only to be disabused of such a notion by Fr. Garupe and the horrible death they must endure. In the end, Rodrigues must deconstruct himself as a Catholic priest for the sake of the very charity which remains at the root of Christian faith. These equivocal signs suggest the plurality of meaning available to the interpreter, free from an essentialist point of view. The way of negativity, the pathway of silence, seems to be the only sign that is incapable of being invested with the aura of illusion. At the same time, however, the spectator must face the most ambivalent image of all: the cross. While Rodrigues moves away from a traditional ecclesial portrait of the suffering Christ, he himself begins to look more and more like the portrait of Jesus throughout the film, with his long, entangled hair and emaciated face mirroring the suffering Christ. He clings only to a tiny handmade representation of the crucifix, which he puts in his clothes in the course of the film and which his Japanese wife secretly puts in his hands at the end of the film, just before he is cremated in the Buddhist custom. The only “ecclesial image” we are left with is the apostate Rodrigues himself, imago Dei, and the imprint of the God who “emptied himself, taking the form of slave” (Philippians 2:7), completely divesting himself from the power of divinity. Yet this image itself is annihilated into smoke. Charlie Cappa becomes an image of the Crucified in the streets, but maintained the symbolic wounds of Christ. Rodrigues is reduced to silence without a trace.

 

In the end, Silence is something of a return to the beginning: salvation is found not in the sacred place of the Church and its penances, but in the streets, with Charlie Cappa and striving for salvation among the sacred people of God. As Scorsese would say in an interview in 2013, “I don’t know if I any longer accept the idea of an inherent sinfulness in human nature. I think in the process of living, we may need redemption just from being who we are. But the idea of original sin, that we are already guilty to begin with, is obviously in the films I make and in who I am.”"

- Guerric DeBone, Scorsese and Religion

 

Public Opinion

 

For me, Silence is less of a movie and more of a meditative experience. I come back to elements, lines, imagery, sounds, and ideas present throughout the film and constantly find that I come upon a spiritual revelation. The film and the novel have paired together to be an essential part of my personal religious canon. I cannot even begin to touch on all of the aspects of the film in a short write-up but I can highlight a few elements on how the film has become so personal to me (and may even supplant Raiders as my favorite film at some point in time, as I let it sit longer).

 

 

At its heart, Silence tackles the central question that torments anyone who believes in any sort of God. Where is God in all of the suffering of the world? Why is this God silent? And among others delves into thorny themes of faithful apostacy, Christian obsession with martyrdom, and the colonizing elements of missionary work from white Europeans. The film also firmly plants itself into a historically true setting within the Tokugawa Shonugate. I won't go into it, but you can read about Kakure Kirishitan, or 'hidden Christians', in this era in Japan. It's an absolutely fascinating historical subject to read.

 

“When words do not suffice, when they are incapable of communicating what is experienced at the affective level, then we are fully engaged in loving.”

- Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent

 

Father Rodrigues is faced with an impossible dilemma for a devote Catholic priest who had dedicated his life to his faith. He can let his parish suffer persecution, or apostatize. Rodrigues is fully prepared to suffer for the God he devoted his life to. But can he let others suffer because of his faith? It takes the full arc of the film and sitting in silence for Rodrigues to realize the truth that his faith teaches. Perhaps even Rodrigues cannot hear God because he cannot understand what God is saying until the final act of the film. That Christ of Rodrigues' religion was born into the suffering of men and to carry it with them. God is not silent when the suffering seems to go unanswered, but is with the Japanese and Rodrigues in their suffering.

 

This message feels particularly striking in that it seems anti-thetical to how the loudest of Christians in America, evangelicals, tend to practice their religion. They practice a faith that is bent towards trampling on others in order to achieve their aims of political power over the world, in an attempt to realize religious order as they see it. The pivotal reflection from Endo's novel and Scorsese's film is the opposite. Rodrigues needs to lay down his hubris and ambitions of glory to evangelize, because of the pain and harm that it's causing to the people around him. In doing so, it may even seem as though Rodrigues loses his faith. But not so, he perhaps realizes it even more fully. He exchanges the grandeur for silence to better bring about his God's intent for the people around him.

- @The Panda

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

silence

""

- da vinci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (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), 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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#80 Fanboy Ranking, #46 Cinema Ranking

#56 Old Farts Ranking, #51 Damn Kids Ranking

#22 Ambassador Ranking, #71 All-American Ranking

#17 Cartoon Ranking, #71 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 3, 2022 by The Panda

[Potiki]

12 minutes ago, The Panda said:

OH MY FUCKING GOD, WE DID IT! WE DID IT! 

 

The movie is bringing me to tears again just listening to the ambient soundtrack and reading through sources

 

Number 62

 

 

"It was in the silence that I heard Your voice."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors.

 

 

But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ. Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life.

 

Jesuits both fictional and real did  this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love.

 

In the end, “Silence” is about love. Or maybe loves. Father Rodrigues’s and Father Garupe’s love for their old mentor, Father Ferreira. The three Jesuits’ love for the Japanese people. Father Rodrigues’s intense love for Jesus Christ. Most of all, Jesus’s love for him, for his brother Jesuits, for the people of Japan and for all of humanity. Understand love and you will understand “Silence.”"

- Fr. James Martin, Religious Consultant for Silence

 

From the Filmmaker

 

""Q: You spent a lot of time going to Church or going to Mass?

 

Scorsese: Yes. In the church, and going to Mass.

 

Q: By yourself?

 

Scorsese: By myself. My family wasn’t very religious that way, but I just found comfort there because the streets were pretty rough, and having the severe asthma, I was told I couldn’t do anything. If you’re told that repeatedly, and you have enough breathing problems, and you really believe it—I always think of Teddy Roosevelt as an example, who had severe asthma, but he fought it—but my parents in the mid to late ‘40s, uneducated and working class, they just didn’t know what to do. They just knew I couldn’t breathe. This was from three years old on, and so I was more or less protected because of that. But when you’re in the street you’re not really protected. There’s a testing all the time: tougher kids, younger kids, and then you try to make sense of it all. You try to make sense of the dynamic of the family. What a family means. What a family unit is. The extended family: The aunts and uncles, my grandmother and grandfather in 241 Elizabeth St., my grandmother and grandfather in Queens, my mother’s side of the family, the Cappa side, her brothers and sisters. Some of them were still living in the neighborhood on Prince Street and on Lafayette. So, it was like a living organism, and the church was the center.

 

It was also the center for every group that was there. Mainly it was all working-class people trying to live a decent life. It was very dirty; they were tenements, but it wasn’t as dirty as it was when they were born there. Elizabeth Street at the turn-of-the-century was noted in New York as the highest rate of infant mortality, and that was because of cholera and all these diseases. They finally found a way to maintain the buildings where they lived, and I still can smell the bleach that was used to scrub the halls. My mother and everybody scrubbing the halls on the weekend, the windows, everything to keep it clean and to protect the family. And there was an underworld element that was there that was brought over from the old world.

 

 

Q: When did you run across the Silence book?

 

I had gotten involved with Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ. I wanted to make that. By 1988 when that was finally made, and it was about to be released, there was a great deal of an uproar, and we had to show the film, what was the film at that moment anyway, to different religious groups to show what it was rather than arguing about it without having seen it. One of the people there was Archbishop Paul Moore of New York, Episcopal, and he came to a little meeting afterwards at a small dinner we had. He felt that the film, as he said, was “Christologically correct.” He told us many stories. He was a very interesting man.

 

He said, “I’m going to send you a book.” And he described some of the stories in the book, and he described the confrontation, the choices, the concept of apostasy and faith. I received the book a few days later, and by ’89, a year later, I read it. The experience of taking “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and then doing “Goodfellas” was so extraordinarily exhausting and pummeling, in a way, fighting very strong arguments and discussions. Really, it was around the world. By the time I did “Goodfellas,” I had promised the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to be in a film of his called “Dreams.” He wanted me to play van Gogh.

 

I was 15 days over schedule on “Goodfellas.” The studio was furious. My cameraman left because he had another picture to do. Somebody else came in. We were just scurrying to finish, and Kurosawa was waiting for me in Japan. He was 82 years old, and he had just finished the majority of the shooting, and he had only my scene to shoot, and he was waiting. It was very nerve-racking. Within two days after shooting that film, we flew to Tokyo, and then to Hokkaido, and while I was there I read the book. Actually finished it on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

 

When I’d look at my managers, and my agents, and say, “I really want to make this film.” They’d go in. They’d inquire where it stood at that moment in time, and they’d come back in horror, and say, “Well, this person has to get this, and the amount of money against it,” back and forth, and, finally, there were a number of people who really worked it out.  But it took many years to try to understand or feel comfortable with how to visualize the picture, and how to deal with the last sequences of the film. The last sequences. Not just the confrontation at the end, but the epilogue.

 

Q: Right. Now, you said that it took you a while to understand the heart of the book. How would you describe the heart of the book?

 

Well, I think it's the depth of faith. It’s the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. The vehicle that one takes towards faith, which can be very helpful—the institution of the church, the sacraments—this all can be very, but ultimately it has to be yourself, and you have to find it. You have to find that faith, or you have to find a relationship with Jesus with yourself, really, because ultimately that’s the one you face. Yeah. He is, but it doesn’t negate, in my mind, those who choose to have, I should say, lived a life according to the rules of an institution, [like] the institution of the Catholic Church, or however one proceeds in their life with their own beliefs, but ultimately they can’t do it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. That’s the problem. And the invitation, and it keeps calling you. It keeps calling you, and it’s in the other people around you. It's the people closest to you. This is what it is, and you suddenly get slapped in the face by it, and say, “Wake up.” You know?

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"On one level, the tension in the film is governed by an ecclesial ambivalence in the era of post-colonialism: is Christian evangelization a kind of violence to the very understanding of enculturation? That question eventually faces the two Jesuits, Frs. Sebastiao Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe as they set out to find their mentor, Fr. Dante Ferreira, in Japan in 1633. Refusing to believe that his teacher has apostatized, Rodrigues clings not only to that ideal but to an image of Christ he has prayed with and which becomes a recurrent vision throughout the film. It is the image of Christ, as well as the construction of Ferreira as an ideal, that is continually at risk throughout the film. While Japanese Christians are compelled into desecration of sacred Christian images by Inoue, the Grand Inquisitor, Rodrigues must come to terms with his illusions of Christ in the face of human suffering. In confronting Ferreira, Rodrigues learns that the older Jesuit apostatized not because his life was in danger, but because other Christians were screaming in agony upside down over a torture pit filled with excrement. Eventually, Rodrigues would follow his mentor on the same path and apostatize for the same reason, violating the sacred image of Christ himself for the sake of charity. In Ferreira’s mind, Japan is a “swamp” where Christianity, even during the days of St. Francis Xavier, could not take root; it was all an illusion. In the end, he tells Rodrigues, they are not martyrs to Christ but to Rodrigues himself and his own Christian ideals and teachings. As the Inquisitor says to Rodrigues, “the price for your glory is their suffering.”

 

 

The film goes to great length to disclose the ambivalence of signs and images and how difficult it is to trust them. We want to identify Kichijiro as a Judas figure who seemingly betrays his family, friends, and the Christianity he knows but then he remains steadfast in the end. Rodrigues sees the flight of an eagle as a sign from God that they are headed on the right path, only to see they are being spied on. A young Japanese couple understands paradise as what is happening now, only to be disabused of such a notion by Fr. Garupe and the horrible death they must endure. In the end, Rodrigues must deconstruct himself as a Catholic priest for the sake of the very charity which remains at the root of Christian faith. These equivocal signs suggest the plurality of meaning available to the interpreter, free from an essentialist point of view. The way of negativity, the pathway of silence, seems to be the only sign that is incapable of being invested with the aura of illusion. At the same time, however, the spectator must face the most ambivalent image of all: the cross. While Rodrigues moves away from a traditional ecclesial portrait of the suffering Christ, he himself begins to look more and more like the portrait of Jesus throughout the film, with his long, entangled hair and emaciated face mirroring the suffering Christ. He clings only to a tiny handmade representation of the crucifix, which he puts in his clothes in the course of the film and which his Japanese wife secretly puts in his hands at the end of the film, just before he is cremated in the Buddhist custom. The only “ecclesial image” we are left with is the apostate Rodrigues himself, imago Dei, and the imprint of the God who “emptied himself, taking the form of slave” (Philippians 2:7), completely divesting himself from the power of divinity. Yet this image itself is annihilated into smoke. Charlie Cappa becomes an image of the Crucified in the streets, but maintained the symbolic wounds of Christ. Rodrigues is reduced to silence without a trace.

 

In the end, Silence is something of a return to the beginning: salvation is found not in the sacred place of the Church and its penances, but in the streets, with Charlie Cappa and striving for salvation among the sacred people of God. As Scorsese would say in an interview in 2013, “I don’t know if I any longer accept the idea of an inherent sinfulness in human nature. I think in the process of living, we may need redemption just from being who we are. But the idea of original sin, that we are already guilty to begin with, is obviously in the films I make and in who I am.”"

- Guerric DeBone, Scorsese and Religion

 

Public Opinion

 

For me, Silence is less of a movie and more of a meditative experience. I come back to elements, lines, imagery, sounds, and ideas present throughout the film and constantly find that I come upon a spiritual revelation. The film and the novel have paired together to be an essential part of my personal religious canon. I cannot even begin to touch on all of the aspects of the film in a short write-up but I can highlight a few elements on how the film has become so personal to me (and may even supplant Raiders as my favorite film at some point in time, as I let it sit longer).

 

 

At its heart, Silence tackles the central question that torments anyone who believes in any sort of God. Where is God in all of the suffering of the world? Why is this God silent? And among others delves into thorny themes of faithful apostacy, Christian obsession with martyrdom, and the colonizing elements of missionary work from white Europeans. The film also firmly plants itself into a historically true setting within the Tokugawa Shonugate. I won't go into it, but you can read about Kakure Kirishitan, or 'hidden Christians', in this era in Japan. It's an absolutely fascinating historical subject to read.

 

“When words do not suffice, when they are incapable of communicating what is experienced at the affective level, then we are fully engaged in loving.”

- Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent

 

Father Rodrigues is faced with an impossible dilemma for a devote Catholic priest who had dedicated his life to his faith. He can let his parish suffer persecution, or apostatize. Rodrigues is fully prepared to suffer for the God he devoted his life to. But can he let others suffer because of his faith? It takes the full arc of the film and sitting in silence for Rodrigues to realize the truth that his faith teaches. Perhaps even Rodrigues cannot hear God because he cannot understand what God is saying until the final act of the film. That Christ of Rodrigues' religion was born into the suffering of men and to carry it with them. God is not silent when the suffering seems to go unanswered, but is with the Japanese and Rodrigues in their suffering.

 

This message feels particularly striking in that it seems anti-thetical to how the loudest of Christians in America, evangelicals, tend to practice their religion. They practice a faith that is bent towards trampling on others in order to achieve their aims of political power over the world, in an attempt to realize religious order as they see it. The pivotal reflection from Endo's novel and Scorsese's film is the opposite. Rodrigues needs to lay down his hubris and ambitions of glory to evangelize, because of the pain and harm that it's causing to the people around him. In doing so, it may even seem as though Rodrigues loses his faith. But not so, he perhaps realizes it even more fully. He exchanges the grandeur for silence to better bring about his God's intent for the people around him.

- @The Panda

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

silence

""

- da vinci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (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), 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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#80 Fanboy Ranking, #46 Cinema Ranking

#56 Old Farts Ranking, #51 Damn Kids Ranking

#22 Ambassador Ranking, #71 All-American Ranking

#17 Cartoon Ranking, #71 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Now this is a great Scorsese film! Somewhat redeems the inclusion of The Departed 

[Potiki]

18 minutes ago, The Panda said:

 

#17 Cartoon Ranking

 

 

Silence is an anime now?

[WrathOfHan]

27 minutes ago, The Panda said:

OH MY FUCKING GOD, WE DID IT! WE DID IT! 

 

The movie is bringing me to tears again just listening to the ambient soundtrack and reading through sources

 

Number 62

 

 

"It was in the silence that I heard Your voice."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors.

 

 

But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ. Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life.

 

Jesuits both fictional and real did  this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love.

 

In the end, “Silence” is about love. Or maybe loves. Father Rodrigues’s and Father Garupe’s love for their old mentor, Father Ferreira. The three Jesuits’ love for the Japanese people. Father Rodrigues’s intense love for Jesus Christ. Most of all, Jesus’s love for him, for his brother Jesuits, for the people of Japan and for all of humanity. Understand love and you will understand “Silence.”"

- Fr. James Martin, Religious Consultant for Silence

 

From the Filmmaker

 

""Q: You spent a lot of time going to Church or going to Mass?

 

Scorsese: Yes. In the church, and going to Mass.

 

Q: By yourself?

 

Scorsese: By myself. My family wasn’t very religious that way, but I just found comfort there because the streets were pretty rough, and having the severe asthma, I was told I couldn’t do anything. If you’re told that repeatedly, and you have enough breathing problems, and you really believe it—I always think of Teddy Roosevelt as an example, who had severe asthma, but he fought it—but my parents in the mid to late ‘40s, uneducated and working class, they just didn’t know what to do. They just knew I couldn’t breathe. This was from three years old on, and so I was more or less protected because of that. But when you’re in the street you’re not really protected. There’s a testing all the time: tougher kids, younger kids, and then you try to make sense of it all. You try to make sense of the dynamic of the family. What a family means. What a family unit is. The extended family: The aunts and uncles, my grandmother and grandfather in 241 Elizabeth St., my grandmother and grandfather in Queens, my mother’s side of the family, the Cappa side, her brothers and sisters. Some of them were still living in the neighborhood on Prince Street and on Lafayette. So, it was like a living organism, and the church was the center.

 

It was also the center for every group that was there. Mainly it was all working-class people trying to live a decent life. It was very dirty; they were tenements, but it wasn’t as dirty as it was when they were born there. Elizabeth Street at the turn-of-the-century was noted in New York as the highest rate of infant mortality, and that was because of cholera and all these diseases. They finally found a way to maintain the buildings where they lived, and I still can smell the bleach that was used to scrub the halls. My mother and everybody scrubbing the halls on the weekend, the windows, everything to keep it clean and to protect the family. And there was an underworld element that was there that was brought over from the old world.

 

 

Q: When did you run across the Silence book?

 

I had gotten involved with Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ. I wanted to make that. By 1988 when that was finally made, and it was about to be released, there was a great deal of an uproar, and we had to show the film, what was the film at that moment anyway, to different religious groups to show what it was rather than arguing about it without having seen it. One of the people there was Archbishop Paul Moore of New York, Episcopal, and he came to a little meeting afterwards at a small dinner we had. He felt that the film, as he said, was “Christologically correct.” He told us many stories. He was a very interesting man.

 

He said, “I’m going to send you a book.” And he described some of the stories in the book, and he described the confrontation, the choices, the concept of apostasy and faith. I received the book a few days later, and by ’89, a year later, I read it. The experience of taking “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and then doing “Goodfellas” was so extraordinarily exhausting and pummeling, in a way, fighting very strong arguments and discussions. Really, it was around the world. By the time I did “Goodfellas,” I had promised the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to be in a film of his called “Dreams.” He wanted me to play van Gogh.

 

I was 15 days over schedule on “Goodfellas.” The studio was furious. My cameraman left because he had another picture to do. Somebody else came in. We were just scurrying to finish, and Kurosawa was waiting for me in Japan. He was 82 years old, and he had just finished the majority of the shooting, and he had only my scene to shoot, and he was waiting. It was very nerve-racking. Within two days after shooting that film, we flew to Tokyo, and then to Hokkaido, and while I was there I read the book. Actually finished it on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

 

When I’d look at my managers, and my agents, and say, “I really want to make this film.” They’d go in. They’d inquire where it stood at that moment in time, and they’d come back in horror, and say, “Well, this person has to get this, and the amount of money against it,” back and forth, and, finally, there were a number of people who really worked it out.  But it took many years to try to understand or feel comfortable with how to visualize the picture, and how to deal with the last sequences of the film. The last sequences. Not just the confrontation at the end, but the epilogue.

 

Q: Right. Now, you said that it took you a while to understand the heart of the book. How would you describe the heart of the book?

 

Well, I think it's the depth of faith. It’s the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. The vehicle that one takes towards faith, which can be very helpful—the institution of the church, the sacraments—this all can be very, but ultimately it has to be yourself, and you have to find it. You have to find that faith, or you have to find a relationship with Jesus with yourself, really, because ultimately that’s the one you face. Yeah. He is, but it doesn’t negate, in my mind, those who choose to have, I should say, lived a life according to the rules of an institution, [like] the institution of the Catholic Church, or however one proceeds in their life with their own beliefs, but ultimately they can’t do it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. That’s the problem. And the invitation, and it keeps calling you. It keeps calling you, and it’s in the other people around you. It's the people closest to you. This is what it is, and you suddenly get slapped in the face by it, and say, “Wake up.” You know?

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"On one level, the tension in the film is governed by an ecclesial ambivalence in the era of post-colonialism: is Christian evangelization a kind of violence to the very understanding of enculturation? That question eventually faces the two Jesuits, Frs. Sebastiao Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe as they set out to find their mentor, Fr. Dante Ferreira, in Japan in 1633. Refusing to believe that his teacher has apostatized, Rodrigues clings not only to that ideal but to an image of Christ he has prayed with and which becomes a recurrent vision throughout the film. It is the image of Christ, as well as the construction of Ferreira as an ideal, that is continually at risk throughout the film. While Japanese Christians are compelled into desecration of sacred Christian images by Inoue, the Grand Inquisitor, Rodrigues must come to terms with his illusions of Christ in the face of human suffering. In confronting Ferreira, Rodrigues learns that the older Jesuit apostatized not because his life was in danger, but because other Christians were screaming in agony upside down over a torture pit filled with excrement. Eventually, Rodrigues would follow his mentor on the same path and apostatize for the same reason, violating the sacred image of Christ himself for the sake of charity. In Ferreira’s mind, Japan is a “swamp” where Christianity, even during the days of St. Francis Xavier, could not take root; it was all an illusion. In the end, he tells Rodrigues, they are not martyrs to Christ but to Rodrigues himself and his own Christian ideals and teachings. As the Inquisitor says to Rodrigues, “the price for your glory is their suffering.”

 

 

The film goes to great length to disclose the ambivalence of signs and images and how difficult it is to trust them. We want to identify Kichijiro as a Judas figure who seemingly betrays his family, friends, and the Christianity he knows but then he remains steadfast in the end. Rodrigues sees the flight of an eagle as a sign from God that they are headed on the right path, only to see they are being spied on. A young Japanese couple understands paradise as what is happening now, only to be disabused of such a notion by Fr. Garupe and the horrible death they must endure. In the end, Rodrigues must deconstruct himself as a Catholic priest for the sake of the very charity which remains at the root of Christian faith. These equivocal signs suggest the plurality of meaning available to the interpreter, free from an essentialist point of view. The way of negativity, the pathway of silence, seems to be the only sign that is incapable of being invested with the aura of illusion. At the same time, however, the spectator must face the most ambivalent image of all: the cross. While Rodrigues moves away from a traditional ecclesial portrait of the suffering Christ, he himself begins to look more and more like the portrait of Jesus throughout the film, with his long, entangled hair and emaciated face mirroring the suffering Christ. He clings only to a tiny handmade representation of the crucifix, which he puts in his clothes in the course of the film and which his Japanese wife secretly puts in his hands at the end of the film, just before he is cremated in the Buddhist custom. The only “ecclesial image” we are left with is the apostate Rodrigues himself, imago Dei, and the imprint of the God who “emptied himself, taking the form of slave” (Philippians 2:7), completely divesting himself from the power of divinity. Yet this image itself is annihilated into smoke. Charlie Cappa becomes an image of the Crucified in the streets, but maintained the symbolic wounds of Christ. Rodrigues is reduced to silence without a trace.

 

In the end, Silence is something of a return to the beginning: salvation is found not in the sacred place of the Church and its penances, but in the streets, with Charlie Cappa and striving for salvation among the sacred people of God. As Scorsese would say in an interview in 2013, “I don’t know if I any longer accept the idea of an inherent sinfulness in human nature. I think in the process of living, we may need redemption just from being who we are. But the idea of original sin, that we are already guilty to begin with, is obviously in the films I make and in who I am.”"

- Guerric DeBone, Scorsese and Religion

 

Public Opinion

 

For me, Silence is less of a movie and more of a meditative experience. I come back to elements, lines, imagery, sounds, and ideas present throughout the film and constantly find that I come upon a spiritual revelation. The film and the novel have paired together to be an essential part of my personal religious canon. I cannot even begin to touch on all of the aspects of the film in a short write-up but I can highlight a few elements on how the film has become so personal to me (and may even supplant Raiders as my favorite film at some point in time, as I let it sit longer).

 

 

At its heart, Silence tackles the central question that torments anyone who believes in any sort of God. Where is God in all of the suffering of the world? Why is this God silent? And among others delves into thorny themes of faithful apostacy, Christian obsession with martyrdom, and the colonizing elements of missionary work from white Europeans. The film also firmly plants itself into a historically true setting within the Tokugawa Shonugate. I won't go into it, but you can read about Kakure Kirishitan, or 'hidden Christians', in this era in Japan. It's an absolutely fascinating historical subject to read.

 

“When words do not suffice, when they are incapable of communicating what is experienced at the affective level, then we are fully engaged in loving.”

- Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent

 

Father Rodrigues is faced with an impossible dilemma for a devote Catholic priest who had dedicated his life to his faith. He can let his parish suffer persecution, or apostatize. Rodrigues is fully prepared to suffer for the God he devoted his life to. But can he let others suffer because of his faith? It takes the full arc of the film and sitting in silence for Rodrigues to realize the truth that his faith teaches. Perhaps even Rodrigues cannot hear God because he cannot understand what God is saying until the final act of the film. That Christ of Rodrigues' religion was born into the suffering of men and to carry it with them. God is not silent when the suffering seems to go unanswered, but is with the Japanese and Rodrigues in their suffering.

 

This message feels particularly striking in that it seems anti-thetical to how the loudest of Christians in America, evangelicals, tend to practice their religion. They practice a faith that is bent towards trampling on others in order to achieve their aims of political power over the world, in an attempt to realize religious order as they see it. The pivotal reflection from Endo's novel and Scorsese's film is the opposite. Rodrigues needs to lay down his hubris and ambitions of glory to evangelize, because of the pain and harm that it's causing to the people around him. In doing so, it may even seem as though Rodrigues loses his faith. But not so, he perhaps realizes it even more fully. He exchanges the grandeur for silence to better bring about his God's intent for the people around him.

- @The Panda

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

silence

""

- da vinci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (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), 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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#80 Fanboy Ranking, #46 Cinema Ranking

#56 Old Farts Ranking, #51 Damn Kids Ranking

#22 Ambassador Ranking, #71 All-American Ranking

#17 Cartoon Ranking, #71 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[The Panda]

Last one for tonight

 

Number 61

 

 

"Death has come to your little town, Sheriff."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween Night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again."

 

Its Legacy

 

"Admittedly, many outstanding horror films are indies. It’s not a reach to assume that any of your favorite spooky classics were probably made by a struggling auteur with a low budget and a handful of talented friends in a dark basement. However, Halloween makes a pretty convincing argument that it emerged ready to play in the big leagues. Aside from being one of the first, Halloween is also one of the most famous slasher movies of all time. Even if you’re not a fan of the genre, you’ve likely watched—or at the very least heard of—the Halloween franchise. Carpenter’s 1978 original led to a series of spin-offs and sequels, as many successful blockbusters do.

 

 

The film drew inspiration from (and can be considered a successor to) legendary films such as Psycho and The Exorcist. Even the film’s “Laurie Strode house” shooting location is a considered a civic landmark, due to its cinematic history (plus its ripe old age of 128—the house was built in 1888). Fans are often known to visit the Strode house’s new Pasadena address, where it was moved after almost being demolished, considered too important and therefore transplanted. How many horror movie locations are valued that highly?

 

Secondly: the cast and the mask. Household name Jamie Lee Curtis (who has good horror in her blood—her mother Janet Leigh top-lined Psycho) starred alongside well-respected and established British thespian Donald Pleasence. Curtis tried for the role because she was a fan of Carpenter’s, who had actually turned her down for roles in the past. And who could forget the iconic, eerie white mask worn by Myers—a true classic amid mad-murder disguises, and nearly as famous as an image in its own right, apart from the film. Not to mention all of this fame has the numbers to back it up. The film grossed $47 million at the box office, which if you consider inflation would make it one of the most successful independent productions of all time."

- Kaia Placa, Film Independent

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"This analysis of Halloween indicates how a sociocultural perspective on the representation of bad guys and good guys unites both filmic and sociocultural aspects of representation, providing an alternative to psychodynamic interpretations of film narrative, as suggested by Stephen Prince. [6] Working with an analysis inspired by neoformalist work, a sociocultural approach presumes that film characters behave as they do primarily for filmic reasons governed by the narrative and style of the film. Characters are shaped by aesthetic concerns and through aesthetic means. A theory of narrative based on cognitive psychology-as suggested by David Bordwell in Making Meaning-posits that inferences that members of an audience make about character behavior are shaped not only by the expectations associated with the film's genre but also by schemata that audience members have about how human beings might behave in various contexts. [7]

 

 

It is unnecessary to posit the existence of a "collective nightmare," as Robin Wood has done, [8] to explain the knowledge of threats that members of a slasher film's audience share. Instead, the perception of a "bad guy" such as Michael as being evil can be explicated in terms of socially and culturally shared conceptions of psychopathology and murder that allow audience members to recognize their representation in Halloween as manifestations of evil. Instead of speculations about repressed desires and fears, this analysis suggests how an examination of sociocultural conceptions of mental illness (both onscreen and off) might inform the attitudes of filmmakers and audience members. As discussed above, Halloween employs filmic elements such as mise-en-scène, editing, cinematography, and sound as well as narration and the conventions of the slasher genre to cue the viewer to recognize the threat posed by the bad guy even as the good guys remain ignorant of that threat. The vicarious fears engendered by the threat of violence or the acts of violence felt by some audience members, a quality of the genre delineated by Carol J. Clover, [9] do not entail that the represented threat be experienced as a "collective nightmare" in any Freudian sense. A better understanding of the recognizable evil in Halloween bridges an investigation of bad behavior in a given society and culture with an analysis of the filmic elements that represent evil in Carpenter's low-budget classic."

- Jody Pennington, A Danish Journal of Film Studies

 

Public Opinion

 

"It's nothing new to note that the horror in many slashers--especially this one--are women's horrors. Stalking, sexual violence, threats to children, threatening phone calls, these are products of patriarchy that women--whether we like it or not--are saddled with facing. In better societies, reproductive labor is shared, but here, under capitalist patriarchy, women (or even just those classified as women) are coerced into these roles. And so we are subject to men's obsessions, men's brutality, men's lust, men's need to control. Again, whether men like it or not, whether men concede to the coercion or not, capitalist patriarchy coerces them into those roles. They aren't "natural." They aren't innate. They aren't unavoidable. But they are there, in our media, in our culture, in our schools, in our attitudes, in our laws.

 

And so we see the Shape staring into windows. We see the Shape looming over a naked woman in her bed, seeming to be her lover, implying sexual violence without enacting it. We see the Shape come so close to the kids. We see the Shape break every barrier down. We see the Shape rise behind her. We see the Shape as a faceless man, a threatening phantom, a boogie man who does not stop. The police can't stop him. His doctor can't stop him. Guns don't stop him. Knives don't stop him. The only moment he even pauses is when he is, briefly, temporarily, exposed.

 

But not even that stops him.

 

From the opening giallo-inspired perspective killings to the shadowed evening imagery of suburban hallways and wide-open streets, every scene is structured to build up not to a victory, not to a climax of violence, but to a deeply unsettling moment of failure. Had no sequel ever been made, all we would have been left with is that certainty that there is no escape, that there is no safety, that the Shape is still out there, inexplicably unkillable. I prefer to remember it that way. I prefer to think of him as the unknown, the Shape, the pure evil, silent child that moves through the United States in the form of every stalker, every sexual predator, every serial killer. And he'll keep getting away with it in a world like this one."

- Sally Jane Black, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

halloween

"trick r treat, bitch

i am coming for you

tomorrow"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

UNRANKED (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), #79 (2013), #95 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (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), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (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), 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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (3), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#64 Fanboy Ranking, #64 Cinema Ranking

#58 Old Farts Ranking, #70 Damn Kids Ranking

#99 Ambassador Ranking, #55 All-American Rankingn

#159 Cartoon Ranking, #56 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 3, 2022 by The Panda

[Ronin46]

John Carpenter what an absolute legend. 

[The Panda]

42 minutes ago, The Panda said:

OH MY FUCKING GOD, WE DID IT! WE DID IT! 

 

The movie is bringing me to tears again just listening to the ambient soundtrack and reading through sources

 

Number 62

 

 

"It was in the silence that I heard Your voice."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Two Jesuit priests travel to seventeenth century Japan which has, under the Tokugawa shogunate, banned Catholicism and almost all foreign contact."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The history of Christian missionaries—in Japan and elsewhere—is a complicated one. Remember that when speaking about “Christian missionaries” we are talking about a 2,000-year history that begins with St. Paul and took place in almost every country in the world. Add to that the variety of the originating countries of the missionaries, and you get an idea of the complexity of the history. Even if we consider simply the era in which the film is set, the 17th century, almost every European country, was sending Christian missionaries abroad. Also, we must take into account the wide variety of approaches among the many Catholic religious orders active in the missionary field: Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans and so on. In some instances, missionary priests, brothers and sisters traveled with representatives of the colonial powers and were seen, rightly or wrongly, as adjuncts of these political actors.

 

 

But the missionaries came to these new lands to bring what they considered a gift of inestimable value to the people they would meet: the Good News of Jesus Christ. Let us look at the case of Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe. Both have come to Japan to spread the Gospel. (We can reasonably presume their being sent from Portugal not simply to find Father Ferreira but later to remain in Japan.) They are bringing what they consider to be the most precious thing that they know to a new people: Jesus. Is it arrogant to say that they are bringing a gift? Others may think so, but not to my mind. Think of it as a physician wanting to bring medicine to someone he or she knows is in need. And doing so at peril to his or her own life.

 

Jesuits both fictional and real did  this out of love. Out of love for God and love for the peoples with whom they were ministering. If you doubt their motivation I would ask this: Would you leave behind all that you knew—your country, your language, your family, your friends, your food, your culture, your traditions—to travel across the globe at immense risk, in order to give a gift to a group of people whom you’d never met, a group of people whom many in your home country think are unworthy of being given that gift—knowing that you might be tortured and killed? To me that is an immense act of love.

 

In the end, “Silence” is about love. Or maybe loves. Father Rodrigues’s and Father Garupe’s love for their old mentor, Father Ferreira. The three Jesuits’ love for the Japanese people. Father Rodrigues’s intense love for Jesus Christ. Most of all, Jesus’s love for him, for his brother Jesuits, for the people of Japan and for all of humanity. Understand love and you will understand “Silence.”"

- Fr. James Martin, Religious Consultant for Silence

 

From the Filmmaker

 

""Q: You spent a lot of time going to Church or going to Mass?

 

Scorsese: Yes. In the church, and going to Mass.

 

Q: By yourself?

 

Scorsese: By myself. My family wasn’t very religious that way, but I just found comfort there because the streets were pretty rough, and having the severe asthma, I was told I couldn’t do anything. If you’re told that repeatedly, and you have enough breathing problems, and you really believe it—I always think of Teddy Roosevelt as an example, who had severe asthma, but he fought it—but my parents in the mid to late ‘40s, uneducated and working class, they just didn’t know what to do. They just knew I couldn’t breathe. This was from three years old on, and so I was more or less protected because of that. But when you’re in the street you’re not really protected. There’s a testing all the time: tougher kids, younger kids, and then you try to make sense of it all. You try to make sense of the dynamic of the family. What a family means. What a family unit is. The extended family: The aunts and uncles, my grandmother and grandfather in 241 Elizabeth St., my grandmother and grandfather in Queens, my mother’s side of the family, the Cappa side, her brothers and sisters. Some of them were still living in the neighborhood on Prince Street and on Lafayette. So, it was like a living organism, and the church was the center.

 

It was also the center for every group that was there. Mainly it was all working-class people trying to live a decent life. It was very dirty; they were tenements, but it wasn’t as dirty as it was when they were born there. Elizabeth Street at the turn-of-the-century was noted in New York as the highest rate of infant mortality, and that was because of cholera and all these diseases. They finally found a way to maintain the buildings where they lived, and I still can smell the bleach that was used to scrub the halls. My mother and everybody scrubbing the halls on the weekend, the windows, everything to keep it clean and to protect the family. And there was an underworld element that was there that was brought over from the old world.

 

 

Q: When did you run across the Silence book?

 

I had gotten involved with Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ. I wanted to make that. By 1988 when that was finally made, and it was about to be released, there was a great deal of an uproar, and we had to show the film, what was the film at that moment anyway, to different religious groups to show what it was rather than arguing about it without having seen it. One of the people there was Archbishop Paul Moore of New York, Episcopal, and he came to a little meeting afterwards at a small dinner we had. He felt that the film, as he said, was “Christologically correct.” He told us many stories. He was a very interesting man.

 

He said, “I’m going to send you a book.” And he described some of the stories in the book, and he described the confrontation, the choices, the concept of apostasy and faith. I received the book a few days later, and by ’89, a year later, I read it. The experience of taking “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and then doing “Goodfellas” was so extraordinarily exhausting and pummeling, in a way, fighting very strong arguments and discussions. Really, it was around the world. By the time I did “Goodfellas,” I had promised the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to be in a film of his called “Dreams.” He wanted me to play van Gogh.

 

I was 15 days over schedule on “Goodfellas.” The studio was furious. My cameraman left because he had another picture to do. Somebody else came in. We were just scurrying to finish, and Kurosawa was waiting for me in Japan. He was 82 years old, and he had just finished the majority of the shooting, and he had only my scene to shoot, and he was waiting. It was very nerve-racking. Within two days after shooting that film, we flew to Tokyo, and then to Hokkaido, and while I was there I read the book. Actually finished it on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto.

 

When I’d look at my managers, and my agents, and say, “I really want to make this film.” They’d go in. They’d inquire where it stood at that moment in time, and they’d come back in horror, and say, “Well, this person has to get this, and the amount of money against it,” back and forth, and, finally, there were a number of people who really worked it out.  But it took many years to try to understand or feel comfortable with how to visualize the picture, and how to deal with the last sequences of the film. The last sequences. Not just the confrontation at the end, but the epilogue.

 

Q: Right. Now, you said that it took you a while to understand the heart of the book. How would you describe the heart of the book?

 

Well, I think it's the depth of faith. It’s the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. The vehicle that one takes towards faith, which can be very helpful—the institution of the church, the sacraments—this all can be very, but ultimately it has to be yourself, and you have to find it. You have to find that faith, or you have to find a relationship with Jesus with yourself, really, because ultimately that’s the one you face. Yeah. He is, but it doesn’t negate, in my mind, those who choose to have, I should say, lived a life according to the rules of an institution, [like] the institution of the Catholic Church, or however one proceeds in their life with their own beliefs, but ultimately they can’t do it for you. You’ve got to do it yourself. That’s the problem. And the invitation, and it keeps calling you. It keeps calling you, and it’s in the other people around you. It's the people closest to you. This is what it is, and you suddenly get slapped in the face by it, and say, “Wake up.” You know?

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"On one level, the tension in the film is governed by an ecclesial ambivalence in the era of post-colonialism: is Christian evangelization a kind of violence to the very understanding of enculturation? That question eventually faces the two Jesuits, Frs. Sebastiao Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe as they set out to find their mentor, Fr. Dante Ferreira, in Japan in 1633. Refusing to believe that his teacher has apostatized, Rodrigues clings not only to that ideal but to an image of Christ he has prayed with and which becomes a recurrent vision throughout the film. It is the image of Christ, as well as the construction of Ferreira as an ideal, that is continually at risk throughout the film. While Japanese Christians are compelled into desecration of sacred Christian images by Inoue, the Grand Inquisitor, Rodrigues must come to terms with his illusions of Christ in the face of human suffering. In confronting Ferreira, Rodrigues learns that the older Jesuit apostatized not because his life was in danger, but because other Christians were screaming in agony upside down over a torture pit filled with excrement. Eventually, Rodrigues would follow his mentor on the same path and apostatize for the same reason, violating the sacred image of Christ himself for the sake of charity. In Ferreira’s mind, Japan is a “swamp” where Christianity, even during the days of St. Francis Xavier, could not take root; it was all an illusion. In the end, he tells Rodrigues, they are not martyrs to Christ but to Rodrigues himself and his own Christian ideals and teachings. As the Inquisitor says to Rodrigues, “the price for your glory is their suffering.”

 

 

The film goes to great length to disclose the ambivalence of signs and images and how difficult it is to trust them. We want to identify Kichijiro as a Judas figure who seemingly betrays his family, friends, and the Christianity he knows but then he remains steadfast in the end. Rodrigues sees the flight of an eagle as a sign from God that they are headed on the right path, only to see they are being spied on. A young Japanese couple understands paradise as what is happening now, only to be disabused of such a notion by Fr. Garupe and the horrible death they must endure. In the end, Rodrigues must deconstruct himself as a Catholic priest for the sake of the very charity which remains at the root of Christian faith. These equivocal signs suggest the plurality of meaning available to the interpreter, free from an essentialist point of view. The way of negativity, the pathway of silence, seems to be the only sign that is incapable of being invested with the aura of illusion. At the same time, however, the spectator must face the most ambivalent image of all: the cross. While Rodrigues moves away from a traditional ecclesial portrait of the suffering Christ, he himself begins to look more and more like the portrait of Jesus throughout the film, with his long, entangled hair and emaciated face mirroring the suffering Christ. He clings only to a tiny handmade representation of the crucifix, which he puts in his clothes in the course of the film and which his Japanese wife secretly puts in his hands at the end of the film, just before he is cremated in the Buddhist custom. The only “ecclesial image” we are left with is the apostate Rodrigues himself, imago Dei, and the imprint of the God who “emptied himself, taking the form of slave” (Philippians 2:7), completely divesting himself from the power of divinity. Yet this image itself is annihilated into smoke. Charlie Cappa becomes an image of the Crucified in the streets, but maintained the symbolic wounds of Christ. Rodrigues is reduced to silence without a trace.

 

In the end, Silence is something of a return to the beginning: salvation is found not in the sacred place of the Church and its penances, but in the streets, with Charlie Cappa and striving for salvation among the sacred people of God. As Scorsese would say in an interview in 2013, “I don’t know if I any longer accept the idea of an inherent sinfulness in human nature. I think in the process of living, we may need redemption just from being who we are. But the idea of original sin, that we are already guilty to begin with, is obviously in the films I make and in who I am.”"

- Guerric DeBone, Scorsese and Religion

 

Public Opinion

 

For me, Silence is less of a movie and more of a meditative experience. I come back to elements, lines, imagery, sounds, and ideas present throughout the film and constantly find that I come upon a spiritual revelation. The film and the novel have paired together to be an essential part of my personal religious canon. I cannot even begin to touch on all of the aspects of the film in a short write-up but I can highlight a few elements on how the film has become so personal to me (and may even supplant Raiders as my favorite film at some point in time, as I let it sit longer).

 

 

At its heart, Silence tackles the central question that torments anyone who believes in any sort of God. Where is God in all of the suffering of the world? Why is this God silent? And among others delves into thorny themes of faithful apostacy, Christian obsession with martyrdom, and the colonizing elements of missionary work from white Europeans. The film also firmly plants itself into a historically true setting within the Tokugawa Shonugate. I won't go into it, but you can read about Kakure Kirishitan, or 'hidden Christians', in this era in Japan. It's an absolutely fascinating historical subject to read.

 

“When words do not suffice, when they are incapable of communicating what is experienced at the affective level, then we are fully engaged in loving.”

- Gutierrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent

 

Father Rodrigues is faced with an impossible dilemma for a devote Catholic priest who had dedicated his life to his faith. He can let his parish suffer persecution, or apostatize. Rodrigues is fully prepared to suffer for the God he devoted his life to. But can he let others suffer because of his faith? It takes the full arc of the film and sitting in silence for Rodrigues to realize the truth that his faith teaches. Perhaps even Rodrigues cannot hear God because he cannot understand what God is saying until the final act of the film. That Christ of Rodrigues' religion was born into the suffering of men and to carry it with them. God is not silent when the suffering seems to go unanswered, but is with the Japanese and Rodrigues in their suffering.

 

This message feels particularly striking in that it seems anti-thetical to how the loudest of Christians in America, evangelicals, tend to practice their religion. They practice a faith that is bent towards trampling on others in order to achieve their aims of political power over the world, in an attempt to realize religious order as they see it. The pivotal reflection from Endo's novel and Scorsese's film is the opposite. Rodrigues needs to lay down his hubris and ambitions of glory to evangelize, because of the pain and harm that it's causing to the people around him. In doing so, it may even seem as though Rodrigues loses his faith. But not so, he perhaps realizes it even more fully. He exchanges the grandeur for silence to better bring about his God's intent for the people around him.

- @The Panda

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

silence

""

- da vinci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (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), 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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#80 Fanboy Ranking, #46 Cinema Ranking

#56 Old Farts Ranking, #51 Damn Kids Ranking

#22 Ambassador Ranking, #71 All-American Ranking

#17 Cartoon Ranking, #71 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

 

Also for a public opinion that isn't me

 

"the rarest of films a legitimate epic dealing with complex themes and shit. in fact it's probably one of the most ideologically dense and complex movies i've ever seen. it's gonna give film academics decades worth of material. i think it's one of those "you get out of it what you put in" kinda deals. militant atheists and christians will have very different reactions to the ending. definitely feels like scorsese has put out the definitive representation of his struggles with faith that comes across in many of his films. can see why it took him 30 years to figure this shit out and even now there's no easy conclusion. 

 

not for everyone though, it's a difficult watch for sure and not one that gives immediate gratification. been thinking about it for a day and that doesn't feel near long enough. right now not the most celebrated film of 2016... but give it a decade. we'll see then."

- @CoolioD1

 

I say this because with the next batch of just misses, we can now confirm that Silence is our highest ranked movie from 2016. Didn't even take a decade to shut that La La Land musical down!

 

Number 170

A Star is Born (1954, George Kukor)

 

Number 169

Fanny and Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman)

 

Number 168

Brokeback Mountain (2005, Ang Lee)

 

Number 167

Come and See (1985, Elem Klimov)

 

Number 166

La La Land (2016, Damien Jizzelle)

 

Number 165

The Great Escape (1963, John Sturges)

 

Number 164

Fight Club (1999, David Fincher)

 

Number 163

Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose)

 

Number 162

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988, Robert Zemeckis)

 

Number 161

Guardians of the Galaxy (2013, James Gunn)

[JustLurking]

42 minutes ago, The Panda said:

 

 

 

Number 166

La La Land (2016, Damien Jizzelle)

 

 

Uhm...

[SchumacherFTW]

3 hours ago, The Panda said:

idk wtf this is but it made it

Number 63

 

 

"Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The twist in "Your Name" comes when Taki and Mitsuha stop swapping bodies. The film then starts following solely Taki's perspective, as he discovers that his and Mitsuha's timelines weren't parallel. While he lived in 2016, she was in 2013, the same year her town, Itomori, was wiped out by a comet. Taki manages to engineer one last body switch and rewrite history so Itomori's citizens evacuate before the town's destruction. The pair briefly meet each other in person, but they forget each other afterward. Not to worry — they meet each other in Tokyo in 2021 and vaguely recognize each other.

 

 

In an interview with Vice, Shinkai explained his inspirations. They ranged from Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" to a waka poem by ancient Japanese writer Ono no Komachi: "I met someone in my dream, and had I known it was a dream, I would have stayed there." As for the destruction of Itomori, that came from a much more tragic place: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that ravaged Japan.At magnitude 9.0, Tōhoku is the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history. The damage was threefold; the earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster left 18,000 dead, and the effects are still felt in Japan today.

 

"It was the largest in a thousand years, and there was something similar 1,000 years ago, which we all forgot about. But if you look closer there were warnings, like stone inscriptions in the cave in the film: Don't live in this valley. But we forget those warnings, or dismiss them as something 'from the ancient times'. We think they're just dangers from the past. When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?"

- Devin Meenan, SlashFilm

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Makoto Shinkai’s animated film Kimi No Na Wa, translated as Your Name, was a critical and commercial hit when it was released in 2016. The film depicts the strange and wondrous journey of two high school teenagers, city boy Taki in Tokyo and countryside girl Mitsuha in rural lakeside Itomori, who are inexplicably swapping bodies with each other. Your Name is currently the highest grossing anime feature of all time, a remarkable mainstream success at the local box office and in its global reception. Such widespread positive attention is rarely seen outside of films made by Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, and Your Name has since solidified Shinkai’s position as a leading filmmaker on the animated movie landscape (Fig. 1). The fantastical premise of Your Name’s story, combined with gorgeous naturalistic animation and standout music composition, all play defining roles in the film’s success. However, a central idea that underpins Your Name is the tension between modernity and tradition, informed by postmodern Japan’s sense of cultural loss due to globalisation, termed mukokuseki or nationlessness (Iwabuchi 2002: 28). The music composed and performed by Japanese band RADWIMPS acts in tandem with the aesthetics to shape the movie’s thematic coherence, and to amplify fantastical elements in the animated medium. RADWIMPS’s soundtrack is part of a wider genre of anime music uniquely situated to support animated films on a creative and commercial scale, given Japan’s intersection of high music CD consumption, a thriving music industry, and the prevalent franchising of popular anime elements including soundtracks to fans. With Your Name, I offer an analysis in this post of the opening music, material cultural identifiers, and synthesis of sound elements with visual sequences to interrogate how aural cues inform the recurring mediation of tradition and modernity in the text, and which are integral in drawing the viewer into the animated world.

 

Your Name evokes culturally specific, nostalgia-driven modes of narration where sound acts as a unifying force. The musical number Yumetōrō 夢灯籠, literally meaning ‘dream lantern’, opens the film. It is performed using contemporary Western instruments such as the rhythm guitar and standard drums, affirming the modern-day context and globalised nature of the Japanese music industry. Aki Yamasaki identifies three common music types in anime: the theme song, character song, and soundtrack (2020: 210). Yumetōrō falls strictly in the tradition of a theme song, meeting all Yamasaki’s markers as a number paired with an opening credits sequence, with striking lyrics and a catchy melody aimed at mass appeal. In anime, theme songs act as the face of the film and is a prime device for promoting shows and highlighting their central motifs, and are often performed by the singer at events as well as made into soundtracks and sheet music for sale. So Yumetōrō’s function remains quintessentially Japanese. Although theme songs are more commonly applied to television programmes in Japan, Shinkai establishes a sense of reassuring familiarity for the local audience with adherence to this sonic convention. 

 

Shinkai demonstrates that Your Name’s aural dimension and visual aesthetics complement each other, showing Japanese culture not as a static object but instead as a dynamic and liminal force. The Yumetōrō number has therefore been deliberately scripted, composed, and animated to weave between past and present time, setting up its central motifs and embodying the romantic, fantastical and nostalgic essence of the entire film."

- Zhui Ning Chang, Fantasy-Animation

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"It's the feeling of never wanting a dream to end, desperately trying to go back to sleep hoping that your dream would somehow pick up where it had left off.

 

But you know very well that it won't. First you'll forget the details. What shirt you were wearing, the exact words you said or wanted to say. Her hand on your palm that felt so tangible just a few seconds ago, reduced to a cold sensation that served as nothing but a reminder of the warmth that was once there.

 

Then the timeline becomes murky, sequences become knotted up -- like how mitsuha's grandmother had so wisely put it: Musubi dayo. Time is a knot. The location comes before the journey there, cause and effect all collapse in an instant. You can't remember the weather, or the exact time of day. It felt golden, the sun may or may not be present, was her eyes sparkling because of the comet? Why yes, there was a comet slowly crawling up above, leaving a trail of sparkling dust behind like something out of a desktop wallpaper. The comet traveled all across the galaxy to arrive on earth, like how you had traveled all across the country to meet----

 

To meet who, again? Ah, all is lost now, absolutely irrevocable. What's left is a lingering sadness which reason you had forgotten. A need to remember someone dear, a stroke of marker pen on your palm and a simple wish for company. How cruel it is for our dream to force itself away from us, beyond our control." - YI JIAN, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

your name

"A name is just a name
But it's the only one you've got
So make it yours

 

Also, why the fuck

did you name me something

as tacky as dA vInci?

 

We get it."

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

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

 

Director Count

 

Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Makoto Shinkai (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 (2), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (14), 2010s (5)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (4), Brazil (1), China (1), Italy (1)

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (3), The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#40 Fanboy Ranking, #65 Cinema Ranking

#135 Old Farts Ranking, #46 Damn Kids Ranking

#20 Ambassador Ranking, #74 All-American Ranking

#18 Cartoon Ranking, #70 Damn Boom Ranking

 

 

YEEEEEEESSSS!!!!!!!!!!! 

[charlie Jatinder]

11 hours ago, The Panda said:

welp...

 

 

Number 67

 

 

"Noobmaster, hey, it's Thor again."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"The Avengers assemble and do some silly comic book shenanigans and shit."

 

Its Legacy

 

"When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema. Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way. Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

 

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

 

 

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

 

So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters. That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

 

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all. I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary."

 

 

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other. For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness."

- Martin Scorsese, I Said Marvel Movies Aren't Cinema. Let Me Explain. (2019)

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"End of an era. There was a thunderous applause at the end. WOM is gonna be throught the roof, the ending is so emotional, everyone was crying so much. The perfect blockbuster. The perfect end to the MCU." - @CJohn

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

avengers: endgame

"The end is near
Who will survive?
Only time will tell"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#76 (2020), NA (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

James Cameron (2), David Fincher (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Brad Bird (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),  Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (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 (6), 1990s (7), 2000s (12), 2010s (4)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

The MCU (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), Star Wars (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#36 Fanboy Ranking, #99 Cinema Ranking

#84 Old Farts Ranking, #68 Damn Kids Ranking

#257 Ambassador Ranking, #59 All-American Ranking

#77 Cartoon Ranking, #66 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

too low. should be like top 10.