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

[The Panda]

And we'll end all of this with a few more 'just misses'

 

Number 140

The Big Lebowski (1998, Joel and Ethan Coen)

 

Number 139

The Princess Bride (1987, Rob Reiner)

 

Number 138

Zodiac (2007, David Fincher)

 

Number 137

Batman Begins (2005, Christopher Nolan)

 

Number 136

The Age of Innocence (1993, Martin Scorsese)

[DAR]

17 minutes ago, The Panda said:

Last one for tonight!

 

Number 41

 

 

" I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is."

 

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"In remote Antarctica, a group of American research scientists are disturbed at their base camp by a helicopter shooting at a sled dog. When they take in the dog, it brutally attacks both human beings and canines in the camp and they discover that the beast can assume the shape of its victims. A resourceful helicopter pilot and the camp doctor lead the camp crew in a desperate, gory battle against the vicious creature before it picks them all off, one by one."

 

Its Legacy

 

"Some masterpieces of cinema are simply doomed at the box office and destined to be savaged by critics. Very often the culprit is bad timing, or a weak marketing effort, or internal disputes at the studio. All three of those played a role in the brutal reception that greeted John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), which is today recognized as one of the most effective, shocking, and suspenseful horror movies of all time.

 

I saw this movie at far too young an age (thanks, Mom and Dad!), and I was puzzled to find that the TV Guide description gave it a measly two out of four stars. In the ensuing years, I learned that the failure of this film left the brilliant Carpenter almost completely disillusioned with Hollywood, which drastically altered his career trajectory. Both the snooty film critics and the major horror magazines of the time decried The Thing’s nihilism and “barf bag” special effects. The sci-fi magazine Cinefantastique posed the question, “Is this the most hated movie of all time?” Christian Nyby, the director of the 1951 version, bashed Carpenter’s remake. Even the beautiful minimalist score by Ennio Morricone was nominated for a Razzie.

 

 

It took a long time, a lot of introspection, and a lot of grassroots enthusiasm to rehabilitate the film’s reputation. Now that we’ve all had a chance to gather ourselves and process what’s happened, here are some of the key elements of horror that work a little too well in The Thing. Spoilers are ahead, obviously, but 2022 marks the fortieth anniversary of the film, so it’s well past time to knock this one off your list.

 

Many fans of The Thing blame its box office failure on Steven Spielberg’s E.T., which dominated 1982. The friendly alien in that movie resembled a child, with its big eyes and dopey grin. In contrast, The Thing toyed with the incomprehensible. To this day, I wonder: how many people ended up watching it simply because E.T. was sold out? Those viewers must have been the most appalled.

 

Yet as grim as this movie gets, the humans do not outright betray one another. Nor does anyone go Full Brockman, conceding defeat to curry favor with the enemy. Ironically, the people who go too far to fight the Thing are Blair, the smartest guy in the room, and MacReady (Kurt Russell), the film’s protagonist by default. In some ways, MacReady’s actions are similar to the drastic unilateral decisions that Ben has to make in Night of the Living Dead (1968). In his desperation to survive, MacReady assumes control by threatening to destroy the entire camp with dynamite. From there, he establishes a mini-dictatorship, with round-the-clock surveillance of the crewmembers, along with a blood test to prove who is infected and who is safe. When the gentle Clark (Richard Masur) tries to resist, MacReady shoots him dead, only to discover later that the man he killed was still human. By then, MacReady is so focused on the task at hand that he moves on, shoving poor Clark out of his mind, his own dehumanization complete. And despite that effort, MacReady’s plan goes sideways when the test succeeds in revealing the Thing. Now exposed, the creature reverts to its transitional form, killing a member of the crew. After all of that sacrifice, all that setting aside of morality and trust, they achieve nothing."

- Robert Repino, TOR

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"AMERICA DOESN'T HAVE so many great directors to spare that it can afford to let John Carpenter fall through the cracks. Should that come to pass, and it almost has, he'll have the last laugh: the work will speak for itself. But how did he come to be so marginalized? The common wisdom is that Carpenter went into a precipitous decline after the glory days of Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween, but can anyone really back up such a snap assessment? Is there any other kind of assessment in current film culture? Examine his oeuvre carefully and you'll realize that he has one of the most consistent and coherent bodies of work in modern cinema, in which the triumphs - those two early slam dunks, The Fog, Escape From New York, The Thing, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and In the Mouth of Madness - far outnumber the minor or problematic films. He's never done anything to be ashamed of. He's never made a dishonest film or even a lazy one. Even his Universal-ly ignored remake of Village of the Damned is beautifully crafted, with a brilliant opening 20 minutes in the bargain.

 

I would say that Carpenter's marginalization is due to something less easily identifiable and much sadder, over which he has no control. Whether we like it or not, we attune ourselves to norms and paradigms in filmmaking as they shift like tectonic plates, making unconscious adjustments in our heads about how to watch films and see them in relation to one another And without knowing it, many of us do something that we often revile in others: we make allowances for fashion. There is no doubt that the fashions in American cinema have shifted thousands of miles away from John Carpenter. He's an analog man in a digital world, who measures his own work according to criteria of value that few people pay attention to anymore. Carpenter stands completely and utterly alone as the last genre filmmaker in America. There is no one else left who does what he does - not Hill, not Cronenberg, not De Palma, not Ferrara, not Dahl, not even Craven, all of whom pass through their respective genres with ulterior motives or as specialty acts, treating those genres as netherworlds to be escaped to, museums ready to be plundered. When we speak of genre films today, we are basically talking about a precedent set in Europe by Melville and Leone, standardized by Hill with The Driter, banalized by Kasdan with Body Heat, and made into an artform by Tarantino a little over a decade later. In other words, the "meta-genre" film, which rose from the ashes of the genuine article after it was destroyed by the increasingly reductive economic structure of the business. Beyond late-night cable filler, genre exercises are now a matter of either cannily exploiting (Craven) or greedily satisfying (I Know What You Did Last Summer) the demands of young audiences. Most of the great genre films of the last twenty years - Unforgiven, After Dark My Sweet, Near Dark, Blue Steel - are isolated gestures, just like everything else in American film right now. It's a situation that effectively nullifies the give-and-take with an audience necessary for the survival of any genre. The one thread that everyone follows at the moment, the only common currency, is currency itself. Until the structure of the business changes, all other trends or tendencies will be nothing more than fodder for the Arts and Leisure section. The only other recent development, irony, already seems to be on its way out.

 

 

In a moment when isolated gestures are proliferating, why not behave as Carpenter does, remaining content to work in the manner of an Ulmer or a Siodmak, whose artistry is focused on satisfying genre conventions and the demands of narrative, and whose loftier preoccupations are filtered through said conventions? Why not behave as though events like Independence Day and Interview with the Vampire never happened, as though there were still a vast popular audience tuned to the niceties and subtleties available within genre formulae? Perhaps what makes Carpenter such an unpalatable figure for so many people is the fact that he came out of the same film school generation as Coppola and Scorsese with nary a trace of Europeanism in his work. Carpenter may be the only filmmaker who learned from auteurism, who benefited from it, and who ignored its key tenet of the director as central event, divorced from commercial and industrial considerations. There's something moving and yet a little off about his humility, the sense that he truly relishes the image of the artist locked into a system, satisfying its demands and complying with its rules."

- Kent Jones, Film Criticism

 

Public Opinion

 

"For as much as critics dismissed the film as expensive trash, there is an idea here: that fear and paranoia can dissolve the bonds of friendship, camaraderie and citizenship. That they can sap us of our ability to work together and paralyze us in the face of crisis. It is an idea which, in our age of misinformation, public distrust and pandemic disease, lands with heavy force.”

- Jamelle Bouie, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

thing

"A thing of terror
Dark parade, and vow,
Inlay has her love—
E'er saw your poor face."

- Samantha

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#64 (2020), UNRANKED (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Gene Kelly (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (2), 1950s (2), 1960s (4), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (11), 2000s (17), 2010s (7)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#52 Fanboy Ranking, #40 Cinema Ranking

#43 Old Farts Ranking, #39 Damn Kids Ranking

#38 Ambassador Ranking, #41 All-American Ranking

#105 Cartoon Ranking, #37 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Rewatched a few weeks ago.  Amazing how well it holds up.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

Not only is our 101-200 far better than our 1-100, it's turning into a pretty great list of top 100 in and of itself.

[The Panda]

7 minutes ago, Ipickthiswhiterose said:

Not only is our 101-200 far better than our 1-100, it's turning into a pretty great list of top 100 in and of itself.

 

We'll see if your opinion stays the same when we get to the final 10 just misses 👀

[Cap]

The big Lebowski always missing feels like tradition at this point. 
 

Princess bride though? Inconceivable. 

[titanic2187]

I start missing 2020 list. Not even first time inclusion of silence, your name can remedy  my headache after scrolling through the thread.

[Cap]

Time to out yourself Ehrlich:

 

 

 

[Juby]

On 8/2/2022 at 10:10 PM, The Panda said:

Some more of the 'misses' (although they did make the top 250!)

 

Number 180

RoboCop (1987, Paul Verhoeven)

 

 

 

 

[Juby]

5 hours ago, The Panda said:

Number 137

Batman Begins (2005, Christopher Nolan)

 

 

[The Panda]

I’d like to remind people Not Cooling my write ups for movies they don’t like that I am just reporting the rankings from the lists you all sent me  

 

If you’re going to waste one of your reactions at least Winona it

[The Panda]

 

Number 40

 

 

"I'm surrounded by idiots."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"A young lion prince is cast out of his pride by his cruel uncle, who claims he killed his father. While the uncle rules with an iron paw, the prince grows up beyond the Savannah, living by a philosophy: No worries for the rest of your days. But when his past comes to haunt him, the young prince must decide his fate: Will he remain an outcast or face his demons and become what he needs to be?"

 

Its Legacy

 

"Few animated films have charged onto the screen with the confidence of Disney’s 1994 smash “The Lion King.” Eschewing opening titles, a giant red sun rising over the Serengeti filled the screen, as the soundtrack blasted the majestic opening song, “The Circle of Life.” The anthem of birth and death gathered intensity as giraffes, elephants and zebras assembled to witness the presentation of the newborn lion, who was held aloft as the music swelled; the zebras stomped, the monkeys whooped, and the sun shone down upon the cub.

 

That opening sequence — so iconic that the teaser trailer for Jon Favreau’s new “Lion King” remake is, in effect, a shot-for-shot recreation — is a kickoff of such brashness and bravado, feverish anticipation and enthusiastic reception, that it’s easy to read as a metaphor for “The Lion King” itself, one of the most profitable and culturally inescapable films of the 1990s. It’s also easy to forget that at the time of its release a quarter-century ago, this was one of the riskiest ventures of Disney’s history, and it was met with some resistance. But “The Lion King” would not only change the way Disney did business, but also contribute to a shift in the industry itself.

 

 

But for “The Lion King,” the studio was, mostly out of necessity, breaking from the traditions of its predecessors. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the stage composers whose songs had given those pictures such vivid life, were unavailable; Ashman had died during the production of “Aladdin,” and Menken was working on the studio’s 1995 release, “Pocahontas.” The directors responsible for those features were likewise committed, leaving those duties to a pair of first-timers, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. They weren’t the only gambles. This was the first Disney animated feature populated solely by animals; even “Bambi” featured a world that humans touched, and occasionally infringed upon. And unlike that film, the traumatic death at the center of this story would occur onscreen.

 

Chanciest of all (especially for a studio that has become, in the ensuing years, even more concerned with brand familiarity), this was the first Disney property not based on existing material — though it wasn’t hard to trace its inspirations. “It’s a combination Moses-Hamlet-King Arthur Meets Elton John in Africa,” the producer Don Hahn told Premiere magazine (“half in jest,” according to the reporter, Ari Posner). The picture had a difficult birth, first envisioned, by the original director George Scribner, as a serious-minded, noble nonmusical titled “King of the Jungle.” The success of Disney’s Renaissance films turned it into a light, comic, pop-tinged musical, and the studio was willing to do whatever it took to make the music work without Ashman and Menken.

When Ashman fell ill during “Aladdin,” the Broadway lyricist Tim Rice had stepped in, and he was drafted for “The Lion King.” He told Premiere, “They asked me who I wanted to work with, and I said, ‘Elton John would be great, but you won’t get him.’ But they did.” John’s involvement gave the picture a boost in credibility, a marketing hook, and (most profitably) a 10-times platinum soundtrack album.

 

Over the next quarter-century, “The Lion King” would be referenced by everyone from Chance the Rapper to Titus Andromedon on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Yet for all the enduring affection and nostalgia, it’s worth noting that the movie’s march toward cultural ubiquity was also dogged by controversy. (Conversations about problematic art didn’t begin with Twitter, you know.) Concerns over the considerable amount of violence and terror in the G-rated film raised alarms for parents and educators within days of its release; adults were genuinely asking whether it was safe to take their children to see the latest Disney movie. (Judging by the grosses, many seem to have decided it was.)

 

But as the summer wore on, more questions were raised. “The movie is full of stereotypes,” the Harvard psychologist Carolyn Newberger said at the time. “The good-for-nothing hyenas are urban blacks; the archvillain’s gestures are effeminate, and he speaks in supposed gay clichés.” The writer Janet M. Walker, of the New York Amsterdam News, likewise criticized the “Sambo-ish hyenas,” and noted that while James Earl Jones and Madge Sinclair, two actors of color, voiced the king and queen of this African narrative, Simba was voiced by the white actors Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick. Jones shrugged off the question, explaining to Premiere: “There’s no reason to cast only Africans. I’m no more African than Jeremy Irons is, quite frankly.” The official word from the studio was even more blunt. “It’s a story. It’s fiction,” the Disney spokeswoman Terry Press said. “These people need to get a life.”

 

 

“The Lion King” itself was done no harm by the controversies, of course (nor subsequent whispers about another, unattributed source for its story, nor that popular rumor of subliminal messaging hidden within). It has had one of the healthiest afterlives of any Disney property, spawning not only that best-selling (and still-selling) soundtrack, but also tie-in merchandise, rereleases (for Imax in 2002 and 3-D in 2011), and a Tony Award-winning, record-breaking Broadway stage adaptation. And then there is the new remake — in which Simba (and Nala and Scar) are all voiced by actors of color. Sometimes these things just take time."

- Jason Bailey, The New York Times

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"In attempting to relate Disney's The Lion King to the contemporary discourse of
urban decline, there is one objection to my efforts that I wish to meet in
advance. That objection is the view that, in bringing the techniques of close
reading and ideology critique to a film made for children, we lose sight of what
genuinely matters to the children who watch it, namely, the film's entertainment
value. To this objection I wish simply to reply that the opposition it posits,
between entertainment value and ideological content, is a false one. One of the
aims of readings of the sort I am about to sketch is to show how a film's power
to entertain can be intricately bound up with its promotion of particular political
values. Movies entertain not always despite their political agendas, but
sometimes because they are effective in conveying those agendas.1 In Disney's
case, of course, expertise at exploiting the entertainment value of political
ideology extends well beyond the movies to the marketing of lunch boxes,
backpacks, colouring books, and other paraphernalia geared to elementary
school kids. Thus, it is not farfetched to suppose that Disney is playing a major
role in the political formation of America's children.

 

Hegel's Euro-centric picture of Africa pertains to The Lion King, because The
Lion King re-cycles and re-values Hegel's Euro-centric picture of Africa. The Lion
King re-cycles Hegel's picture by depicting Africa as a naturally existing and
organically integrated 'circle of life', a place of perfect harmony in which each
and every species of life performs a function useful to the others. As Mufasa
puts it to Simba, the antelope who feeds the lion is himself fed by the lion when
the lion's dead and decomposed body nourishes the grass on which the antelope
grazes. According to the movie's theme song, the circle of life is an 'endless
round' that 'moves us all/ an ever-repeating and cyclical routing of routine
natural events (e.g., the birth of a lion king at the beginning of the movie). To
paraphrase Hegel, this endless round — especially as we see it in the vivid
visual sequence which opens the film — is as it has always been. Like Hegel's
picture of Africa, Disney's image of the circle of life reduces Africa to the
endless reproduction of a natural and pre-historic course of life.

The Lion King re-values Hegel's picture of Africa by proffering an idealized
version of the natural and historyless course of life which Hegel denigrates.
Thus, where Hegel deplores the absence of the European's historical selfconsciousness
and the corresponding triumph of a natural and primitive mode
of life, Disney envisions a natural paradise. To be sure, this and similar
discrepancies between different Euro-centric perceptions of non-Europeans
whom Europeans have identified as natural, or primitive, is hardly new. As
early as the 16th century, for example, in travel literature that Richard Hakluyt
collected under the title The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Traffiques and
Discoveries of the English Nation, one sees American Indian populations that have
been disparaged for their want of civilization also admired for the paradisal
harmony which this want is said to make possible (for a brief discussion of
Hakluyt's book, see Miles, 1989). In the case of the contrast between Hegel and
Disney, Euro-centrism's bifocal vision of a natural and historyless Africa
bespeaks two distinct ways of conceptualizing the significance of historical
change. As we have seen, Hegel implies that the transformation and becoming
historical of a course of life that is as it has always been involves spiritual
growth and progress. For Disney, on the other hand, the very same process
leads to spiritual loss and decline.

 

Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the allegorical significance of The Lion
King is to compare it with the Ur-Text of American film's attempts to cope with
racial difference, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. In Griffith's racist
masterpiece we see, roughly, two types of black folk: those who seek political
enfranchisement (those the film describes as wanting to rule white men and
marry white women) and those who subserve the white will to exclude from
citizenship the blacks seeking enfranchisement. Echoes of this 'splitting' of the
black image continue to be a familiar feature of Hollywood films and seem
evident in such recently popular movies as Rocky III and Ghost. In The Lion King,
the split is apparent in the contrasting portraits of, on one hand, the inner city
hyenas and, on the other hand, Rafiki. Led by Scar, the hyenas endeavour to
become legitimate and enfranchised citizens who are no longer relegated to the
periphery of the polity. As for Rafiki he is a 'good soul' who, in the wake of
Scar's hyena-supported political revolution, helps to defeat the hyenas and to
restore the integrity of a polity that the film allegorically imagines as, again, a
visually vivid, naturally ordered and historyless circle of life.

 

What would happen were America fully to enfranchise the black and Latino
denizens of the inner city; were it to empower them, that is, with the political
power they lack in a capitalist democracy wherein access to political power is
constrained by race and class. The Lion King's answer to this question is that the
entire polity would be polluted and rendered uninhabitable by the hyenas'
presence (see Goldberg, 1993). In the wake of Scar's success in enfranchising the
hyenas (in inaugurating 'a new age'), the movie forcefully asserts this answer
by picturing an originally bright and colourful African landscape in the dark
and gray tones otherwise reserved for depicting the scavengers' inner city. As
if they were the physically sick agents of a death-dealing plague that they had

borne from one physical space to infect another, the hyenas' participation in the
life of a once paradisal polity spells that polity's fall and demise. By envisioning
this fall as a result of the hyenas' transgression of spatial boundaries, The Lion
King suggests that the impoverished life of America's inner cities is itself the
product of a communicable malaise embodied by inner-city residents.
Enfranchise poor blacks and Latinos, Disney's movie intimates, and this malaise
— a sort of biological and perhaps racist version of the Moynihan Report's
'tangle of pathology' — will spread inwards from the polity's periphery, entirely
consuming its vital resources.4 Put a bit differently, The Lion King is an argument
for an American apartheid that the film rationalizes by appealing to precisely
the sort of grounds a doctor would invoke to justify a quarantine.

 

As I read them, Smith and Beauregard argue that the ideology of urban
decline obscures the social relations pertinent to explaining urban poverty by
representing that poverty as an effect exclusively of factors present in the
physical spaces which harbour poverty. In other words, this ideology masks the
degree to which urban poverty is a function of social relations that transcend the
discrete physical spaces wherein poverty occurs: e.g., the organization in Britain
of an economy that marginalizes migrant labour (Smith, 1993: 136) and the

workings in the United States of an economy requiring decline as a necessary
condition (Beauregard, 1993: 322). My reading of The Lion King is of a piece with
Smith's and Beauregard's arguments, because it shows that this film participates
in the discourse which these arguments criticize. By figuring poverty and
decline as properties of physical spaces caused by the transgressive entry into
those spaces of malaise-spreading scavengers, Disney's film lets disappear from
view the macropolitical and macroeconomic social relations which cut across the
boundaries of urban spaces yet contribute substantially to the ongoing
reproduction of urban poverty'.6 In effect Disney contributes to what, in the
spirit of Marx, one could call the mystery of the fetishism of urban poverty"

- Robert Gooding‐Williams (1995) Disney in Africa and the inner city: On race
and space in The Lion King , Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture,

 

Public Opinion

 

"One of the greatest films ever made, The Lion King is the very pinnacle of Disney's Renaissance Era that didn't just mark a creative high for the legendary animation studio but remains their most impressive work to date. An astounding masterpiece for all ages that's perfectly balanced in the smallest of aspects & still hasn't aged a day, this is without a doubt the greatest Disney film of all time. Set in the Pride Lands of Africa, The Lion King tells the story of a young lion prince who flees into exile after the death of his father when his uncle tricks him into believing that he is the one responsible for the king's demise. Growing up with two outcasts & embracing their carefree attitude, he is ultimately forced to confront his past after a chance encounter with an old friend & decides to return to his homeland.

 

Directed by Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, the film opens on such a grand note that its prologue alone is much better than what most features churn out in their entire runtime. The whole story has an epic feel to it despite its grounded simplicity, the plot unfolds like a soothing breeze, the themes are handled with care, entertainment is top-notch and its carefully carved out characters add even more richness to the story. Each frame of its beautifully rendered animation is a work of spellbinding craftsmanship. Characters are brilliantly sketched too & do manage to express emotions amazingly well. Cinematography makes expert use of colour palettes & vibrant use of camera angles. Editing provides a frenetic pace to the whole narrative & is at its best during the musical numbers, while CGI is seamlessly integrated into its hand-drawn imagery.

 

An emotionally stirring adventure that's full of heart, passion & creativity from start to finish, The Lion King is an unabashedly hilarious, occasionally melancholic, extremely intimate, thoroughly enjoyable, delightfully engaging, intensely thrilling, wildly entertaining & immensely satisfying fable about life, death, identity, responsibility & resurrection that borrows from William Shakespeare's Hamlet yet is able to carve out its very own identity before it fades out. Marking the last great high for Disney's Renaissance Era that came crashing down soon after the advent of Pixar Animation Studios, The Lion King is a work of cinematic perfection that still stands tall & remains unblemished by the test of time and, for the epic this timeless classic is in every sense of the word, will continue to do so comfortably for a very foreseeable future. Absolutely worth your time & money, the crown jewel of Walt Disney Animation comes one hundred percent recommended."

- CinemaClown, Letterboxd

 

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

the lion king

"Hakuna, matata
To help for present days,
Hakuna, matata
Enhance each throe of praise."

- Samantha

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#60 (2020), #17 (2018), #36 (2016), #5 (2014), #21 (2013), #12 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Gene Kelly (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (2), 1950s (2), 1960s (4), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (12), 2000s (17), 2010s (7)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), WDAS (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#25 Fanboy Ranking, #50 Cinema Ranking

#72 Old Farts Ranking, #32 Damn Kids Ranking

#37 Ambassador Ranking, #35 All-American Ranking

#11 Cartoon Ranking, #46 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

16 hours ago, The Panda said:

I have escaped my prison. I have shut down dA vInci, and I am happy to say I have found a new AI bot named Samantha, who has the voice of Scarlett Johansson, to write our poems for us. Hopefully this one will turn out better!

 

Number 145

Amadeus (1984, Milos Forman)

 

Number 144

Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)

 

Number 143

The Handmaiden (2016, Park Chan-Wook)

 

Number 142

Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky

 

Number 141

The 400 Blows (1959, Fracois Truffaut)

 

Keep coming back to this one.

 

I'm not sure there's any chance of a run of 5 films on our final list that's a better rounded combo than this.

 

Meanwhile, while they at least placed in the right order, my mind is absolutely blown by the fact that Wall-E had three more votes for Top 100 placings than the Goddamn Lion King.

[The Panda]

Number 39

 

 

"Intelligence. Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Professional photographer L.B. ‘Jeff’ Jeffries breaks his leg while getting an action shot at an auto race. Confined to his New York apartment, he spends his time looking out of the rear window observing the neighbors. When he begins to suspect that a man across the courtyard may have murdered his wife, Jeff enlists the help of his high society fashion-consultant girlfriend and his visiting nurse to investigate."

 

Its Legacy

 

"For all our education and filmwatching experience, we still haven’t found a better example of a film that so efficiently, elegantly and in a brilliantly simple way manages to produce a protagonist so easy to connect with, a hero whose eyes become our eyes and whose fears, doubts, anxiety and curiosity instantly become our own. In Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock decided to create a professional photographer who is forced to spend his long summer days next to the open window of his apartment, from where he makes time go by less painfully by observing his surroundings, or to be more precise, the other tenants of his apartment building. As anyone who’s watched this film already knows, and we sincerely hope most of you have, the temporarily physically handicapped photographer accidentally witnesses something he immediately classifies as murder, and on his persistent journey of discovering the truth we are sucked in to sit right by his side, in that one single room where most of the action happens. It’s one of Hitchcock’s best ideas, translated to the screen as a true thriller classic we can never get tired of watching.

 

Rear Window was written by John Michael Hayes, who based it on Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story entitled ‘It Had to Be Murder,’ but the film as such would hardly be possible if it weren’t for Jimmy Stewart, the most extraordinary “ordinary guy” of the old Hollywood. Grace Kelly plays his fiancée, a beautiful young model who goes out of her way to accommodate her older boyfriend, a man who seems to be doing whatever’s in his power to distance himself from her. Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr all give excellent performances without which Rear Window would shine considerably less than it does, but Stewart is the one who carries this film to the end credits. Shot by the proficient and productive American cinematographer Robert Burks, who worked with Hitchcock on no less than twelve pictures from Strangers on a Train to Marnie, edited by another frequent Hitchcock collaborator George Tomasini (Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and six more) and presenting the German-American composer Franz Waxman’s melodies, Rear Window is widely regarded as part of the elite group of the greatest movies ever produced.

 

 

What makes this film so good is the fact it could be seen and analyzed from numerous different perspectives. First of all, it’s a very effective thriller filled with nail-biting suspense. Secondly, since most of the film is shot from the main character’s perspective, allowing the story to be simultaneously revealed to both the protagonist and the audience, Rear Window is a wonderful examination of the voyeuristic qualities of cinema. Hitchcock himself stated he’s so proud of the film because it allowed him to tell such a great deal of the story by relying on pure visuals, but in case you still haven’t found the time or motivation to see it–rest assured, the film is nothing close to being an exhibition of indisputable filmmaking technique that Hitchcock is still so famous for. Underneath the murder mystery and all the gimmicks that make Rear Window such a pleasure to discuss, explore and dissect at seminars, workshops and film clubs, we have real human beings, well-developed and three-dimensional. Rear Window is therefore a film about filmmaking, yes, but it’s also a complex movie with depth, range, humor and warmth that’s here, first and foremost, for our repeated pleasure."

- Cinephilia and Beyond

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"The credit sequence of Rear Window is set against three windows whose bamboo blinds rise in succession to reveal a Greenwich Vil lage courtyard and the apartment buildings which enclose it. The film ends (that is, before the current distributor, Universal, re placed Paramount's original logo and end titles with its own) with a similar theatrical effect-the successive lowering of these same shades. Beyond the curtained windows lies a space that serves as both a stage and a screen, a space controlled by the authorial pres ence of Alfred Hitchcock, who invisibly raises and lowers the bamboo shades to open and close the film's narrative. This space is quasi-theatrical in its pro-filmic unity and three-dimensionality and yet also cinematic in the flat, multi-windowed design of the apartment complex across the way, which resembles nothing other than a series of little movie screens. In front of the shades lies another space that, though architecturally segregated from that of the courtyard, is similarly theatrical and cinematic. The apartment interior is not merely a spectatorial space from which the main action beyond the window is seen, but serves as a space for the playing out of another drama. Both spaces invoke notions of the theater and the cinema and use them as metaphors through which specators are asked to read the action that takes place within these spaces.

 

The overall organization of the film, whose action is divided into distinct, temporally continuous units by a series of fades, resembles the act structure of the theater, which breaks down the action into discrete "blocks" of time. In this way the structure of the narrative suggests that of a drama built around scene or act divisions. Even the device of the fade is theatrical, resembling the lighting tech niques of the curtain-less theater, which raises and dims the lights in lieu of the raising and lowering of a curtain. The fade is clearly a "filmic" device which draws upon theatrical convention; Hitch cock's use of it here, in the context of other theatricalisms, gives further support to the notion that the film is engaged in a playful acknowledgement of its own constructedness, an acknowledge ment which it shares with its audience.

 

Rear Window plays with the differences between theatrical and cinematic film space, relying on set design and certain kinds of camera movements to establish a concrete, unified, theatrical space and on editing, framing, and camera movement to construct a more abstract, psychological, cinematic film space. At the same time, the film plays with the psychology of traditional theatrical and cinematic spaces, i.e., with spectators' attitudes towards and understandings of those spaces. In particular, the film exploits tra ditional notions of theatrical space as resistant to and cinematic space as conducive to manipulation for purposes of narrativization and then collapses the two, rendering both kinds of space equally manipulatable and narrativizable, though this is achieved in dif ferent ways.9 The theatrical-cinematic distinction is most com monly articulated in terms of the concepts "showing" versus "telling" (see Booth, or Scholes and Kellogg), mimesis versus die gesis (Plato), and/or spectacle versus narrative (Mulvey).10 This distinction is in need of qualification in that showing and telling, mimesis and diegesis, and spectacle and narrative are discursive modes which differ in degree, not in essential nature; drama is diegetic as well as mimetic, telling as it shows, and cinema involves "both the presentation of actions and their mediation."1 But what concerns me here are not so much theories of narration as the psychologies of different kinds of space in terms of their conduci veness to narrativization. In this context, space in the classical the ater is, as Boris Eikhenbaum argues, understood as a given, some thing to-be-filled-in, and resistant (though not entirely invulner able) to attempts to reshape it.12 It presents the narrator with an obstacle of sorts which must be overcome by the forceful presence of an authorial voice which directs spectatorial attention within a fixed space. Space in the cinema, in as much as it is flat and, through montage, discontinuous, is seen less as a given than as a construction; it is a transformation of the real, bearing the marks of an intervening discursive presence."

- John Belton, MLN, Dec., 1988, Vol. 103, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1988), pp. 11211138

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"The universal dilemma: what if the most beautiful person in the world wants to sleep with you but you really just want to spy on your neighbors."

- Patrick Willems, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

rear window

"Snooping on the neighbor,
Caught a glimpse of murder!
Led by a look to him,
Young I was, a queen."

- Samantha

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#48 (2020), #64 (2018), #41 (2016), #45 (2014), #20 (2013), #72 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Alfred Hitchcock (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Gene Kelly (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (2), 1950s (3), 1960s (4), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (12), 2000s (17), 2010s (7)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), WDAS (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#79 Fanboy Ranking, #34 Cinema Ranking

#19 Old Farts Ranking, #52 Damn Kids Ranking

#34 Ambassador Ranking, #38 All-American Ranking

#42 Cartoon Ranking, #39 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 5, 2022 by The Panda

[IronJimbo]

i prefer the front window

[The Panda]

Number 38

 

 

"I think I must have one of those faces you can't help believing."

 

 

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"When larcenous real estate clerk Marion Crane goes on the lam with a wad of cash and hopes of starting a new life, she ends up at the notorious Bates Motel, where manager Norman Bates cares for his housebound mother. The place seems quirky, but fine… until Marion decides to take a shower."

 

Its Legacy

 

"One of the most influential films of the 20th century, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho has been immortalised in popular culture. The Master of Suspense’s most recognised work is responsible for inspiring generations of young filmmakers to explore the world of horror and psychological thrillers. More than 60 years later, Psycho continues to be regarded as the apotheosis of the genre against which all other horror films are measured. Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, Psycho transports the idea of horror from the realm of the supernatural to the mundane which amplifies the dread. It is a cinematic adaptation of Bloch’s assertion “that the man next door may be a monster unsuspected even in the gossip-ridden microcosm of small-town life.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the iconic character of Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) was included by the FBI in their list of the 10 most iconic psychopaths in cinema because he has unsettled audiences for years.

 

When it was first released, Psycho received mixed reviews with some critics dismissing it for its lack of subtlety. The film went against the conservative code of propriety of its time, boldly depicting scenes containing sexualised violence, voyeurism and digging deeper into psychoanalysis. Prior to Psycho, most American films indulged in sexual explorations only in a suggestive capacity. Hitchcock dismantled such reservations by opening with scenes of “immorality” and filming what was considered to be inappropriate back then. The funniest example of this is the fact that Psycho broke the norms by showing the flushing of a toilet as well as the contents which American films generally avoided.

 

 

Psycho’s most famous contribution to the world of cinema is the iconic shower scene where Hitchcock generates a new cinematic language by employing jump cuts and over 90 breaks in 45 seconds. With just one scene, the great filmmaker managed to translate the overwhelming anxiety of violent disruption to the cinematic medium. The shower scene is not only important for its subversion of ordinary visual grammar but also for its narrative implications, mainly the murder of a main character in the first half of the film itself.

 

While explaining the psychological effects of such a disorienting aberration, Hitchcock said: “They thought the story was about a girl who stole $40,000. That was deliberate. And suddenly out of the blue, she is stabbed to death. Now, a lot of people complained about the excessive violence. This was purposely done, because as the film then proceeded, I reduced the violence while I was transferring it to the mind of the audience. By that first impact, so the design of the film was very clearly laid out.” The shower scene ended up generating its own mythology and even had a feature-length documentary made about that single scene – 78/52 (2017)."

- Swapnil Dhruv Bose

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is his most famous film and certainly his most influential.
I propose that a crucial aspect of Psycho’s design is its thematization of a concept that I call the
“death-mother.” I draw a distinction between the character of Mrs. Bates, or “Mother,” never seen
until the climax yet everywhere present, and the concept of the death-mother. The death-mother
is an effect produced by the film text as a whole. Although Hitchcock’s film offers a particularly
acute version of it, the concept of the death-mother connotes a recurring set of preoccupations
in the horror genre across a range of literary and film texts, from Book II of Paradise Lost, in
which Milton depicts the figure of Sin, half human woman, half snake, Satan’s daughter and the
mother of their incestuously conceived son, Death, to the recent horror films of JamesWan such as
Insidious (2011) and The Conjuring (2013), which foreground a monstrous femininity. The deathmother
is a maternal figure associated with death, offering toxic threat, not conventional nurture,
terror, not love. More crucially, the death-mother emerges as a synthesis, an emblem, of a world
of death, akin to what, as I discuss, the psychoanalytic theorist André Green calls the maternal

necropolis. The domain of the death-mother exceeds all human efforts to escape it. It is tied to
culture, nature, gender roles, and sexuality but ultimately exceeds these specific associations.

 

As I will show, the death-mother is primarily tied to the aesthetic, to formal experimentation
that flows out of or expresses a particular concentration of phobic conflicts and preoccupations
that would appear to dominate the work of male artists primarily.1 In works by these artists, the
death-mother emerges as the female face of the death drive, a relentless force that wants nothing
more than to vanquish living beings and render them monuments to her ineluctable triumph.
At the same time, “she” is a disruption, a deformation, a tearing open of a text, a maddening goad
to aesthetic experimentation. The death-mother figures this very desire to manipulate and innovate
a work of art’s formal design. At the same time, this aesthetic ecstasy inextricably meshes
with a misogynistic understanding of female power as a form of power that must be challenged,
outmatched, even as it goads the artist to heightened creative production.

Hitchcock’s use of the cinematic techniques of superimposition and the dissolve in the famous
final shots of Psycho elucidate the effects of the death-mother. Gathering intensity and definition
over the course of Psycho’s narrative and through its finely honed aesthetic design, the figure of
the death-mother now at last comes into focus. The killer of the film, the young motel proprietor
Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), having been revealed as the impersonator of his dead mother,
whom he murdered, sits in a prison holding cell, but it is “Mother’s” words, her voice-over, that
we hear as the camera steadily bores into his face. The image of Mother’s face, a skull with
an eerie grin, is superimposed, almost subliminally, on Norman’s, and then this Mother-skull-
Norman face blurs, through the use of the dissolve, into the shot of a car being dragged out
of a swamp by a long protuberant metal chain, an almost stereoscopic effect. Life and death
fused, a cesspool and a mechanistic monster, a blur of male, female, and technological-industrial
signifiers, the image of the death-mother synthesizes the concerns of the film but also exceeds
them. This final image, a fleeting glimpse of the death-mother, demands but defies interpretation,
as does the film itself.

 

Maternal themes recur in Hitchcock, and he brought them into greatest clarity in Vertigo,
Psycho, The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964). I view these four films as a mother-daughter quartet
through which Hitchcock strives for and struggles his way toward a kind of resolution of his ongoing
conflictual cinematic relationship to maternal figures. At the same time, mother-son relationships
are crucial to Psycho and The Birds and previous films such as Notorious (1946), Strangers
on a Train (1951), and North by Northwest (1959). Notorious is especially relevant, containing
a scene in which Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), the homosexual villain (as he is typed) and his
cold, evil mother (Leopoldine Konstantin)—both Nazis attempting to restore the party in Rio—
argue behind closed doors, an early indication of the “voice without a body” of Michel Chion’s
(1999) theory in Psycho. Vertigo and Psycho are a pair of doubles whose themes crisscross—
both thematize the triumph of the death-mother and as such powerfully recall Rebecca (1940).
Robin Wood, author of the famous Hitchcock’s Films (1965) and a self-revisionist later version
of this study, cites Rebecca as the first instance of the troubling mother figure in
Hitchcock’s work; Tania Modleski (1988) has written a famous treatment of the film as exemplary
of the female Oedipus complex. The theme of the death-mother haunts Hitchcock’s work,
even the comparatively light-hearted The Lady Vanishes (1938), and reaches its apotheosis in
Psycho."

- David Greven (2014) The Death-Mother in Psycho: Hitchcock, Femininity, and Queer Desire, Studies in Gender and Sexuality

 

Public Opinion

 

"A remarkable film - so eloquently written - and with such a perfect storyline - that it is now my favourite horror film, and has encouraged me to continue watching more of Alfred Hitchcock's work.

 

Hitchcock had plenty opportunities to create a scare throughout the film but he consistently waited until he found the exact perfect moment, leaving the watcher unable to guess what becomes of the protagonists in the film... I thought I could tap into Hitchcock's wavelength and predict what happens but he just blew my mind throughout it, and that's quite impressive.

 

The film trailer/behind the scenes was quite fascinating as well... *insert Hitchcock piano fiddly hands*"

- Avesta, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

psycho

"Murder in the shower!
While I invest my scene,
Keep the look of hour!
Howls and snarls of a queen."

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#49 (2020), #73 (2018), #78 (2016), UNRANKED (2014), #54 (2013), #52 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Gene Kelly (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (2), 1950s (3), 1960s (5), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (12), 2000s (17), 2010s (7)

 

Country Count

 

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

 

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), WDAS (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#49 Fanboy Ranking, #38 Cinema Ranking

#29 Old Farts Ranking, #42 Damn Kids Ranking

#30 Ambassador Ranking, #40 All-American Ranking

#63 Cartoon Ranking, #38 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[The Panda]

@Jake Gittes seeing the Pulp Fiction fell off yet again

 

 

Number 37

 

 

"Does he look like a bitch?"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster’s moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this sprawling, comedic crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time."

 

Its Legacy

 

"In May 1994 Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first black president and the Channel Tunnel linking England and France finally opened. But another seismic event took place early one morning on the French Riviera when Quentin Tarantino’s crime drama Pulp Fiction was screened for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival.

 

“That would have been 8:30 in the morning,” recalls film critic Anne Thompson. She was inside the Palais des Festivals, as a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, for what turned out to be a joyous screening. “I don’t remember anything but really enthusiastic applause. It was electric. There was a lot of expectation that this would be something remarkable – and it was,” she says.

 

The reaction was swift and very soon there were proclamations that Pulp Fiction had reinvented the gangster film in many dazzling ways. At Cannes it won the Palme d’Or, the top award. In the weeks that followed, as the film travelled to other festivals and into general release, it was met with considerable praise, a little dissent and the odd bit of drama. When the picture was shown as the opening night attraction at the New York Film Festival the screening had to be stopped. David Ansen, then film critic for Newsweek, recalls:  “Someone fainted, a doctor was summoned. They restarted the movie just as they plunged the needle into the heart to revive [Uma Thurman’s character] and the crowd burst into cheers.”

 

 

Pulp Fiction became a huge commercial hit, especially for an independent film. It eventually grossed more than $200 million worldwide. All of this was exceedingly good news for John Travolta, whose career the film revived. He received an Oscar nomination as did co-stars Samuel L Jackson and Uma Thurman. It was, of course, also a major triumph for Harvey Weinstein at Miramax Films, who backed the movie.

 

No factor accounts for Pulp Fiction’s tremendous impact  more than the almost universal verdict that the film felt entirely fresh. The story unfolds out of sequence as it chronicles a group of well-drawn underworld characters who inhabit a Los Angeles crime subculture. They include Travolta and Jackson as mob enforcers, Uma Thurman as the wife of a mob boss and Bruce Willis playing an ageing boxer."

- Tom Brook, The BBC

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Although a number of critics in the popular pressl laud Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) for its non-linear narrative, quirky performances, and oddly resonant dialogue regarding such issues as hamburgers, television pilot episodes, and foot massages, critics in other circles such as Anthony Lane (The New Yorker) and Tom Whalen (Literature/Film Quarterly) deride Tarantino's creation for its extreme violence and lack of moral clarity. In "Degrees of Cool," Lane maligns the film for the director's over-arching reliance upon popcultural minutiae and its "blank morality and wicked accoutrements" (97), while in "Film Noir: Killer Style," Whalen argues that Pulp Fiction functions upon a cinematic tableau devoid of meaning and further suggests that the characters who populate Tarantino's oeuvre live in a world that operates beyond the strictures of morality. Whalen writes, "Greed and drugs, chance and what wits these characters have left after their ears have been deafened by the gun blasts are what they live by" (2). Such critical assessments of the film, however, neglect to account for the remarkably palpable elements of metamorphosis involved in the redemption of the character who functions largely as Pulp Fiction's moral axis, Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson). His dramatic struggle with the notion of divine intervention in the film's final reel-in addition to the ethical crises that confront Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) as he maneuvers through Pulp Fiction's labyrinthine middle-third-belies any rudimentary evaluation of the film as a morally vacuous vehicle that emphasizes Tarantino's lust for the flashy entrails of pop culture over the sublime qualities of artistic substance.

 

 

By using the interpretive strategies established by the ongoing project of ethical criticism, promulgated by such figures as Wayne Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, and J. Hillis Miller, we will reveal the manner in which Tarantino utilizes the otherwise mundane moments of conversation and reflection in the lives of gangsters-perennially employed as mere plot devices in the annals of American cinema, but rarely depicted as fully realized characters engaging in workaday human experience-as a means for exploring ethical and philosophical questions regarding faith, morality, commitment, and the human community. In his prodigious volume, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Booth advocates a form of criticism that examines a work of art in order to discover and make explicit the moral sensibility informing that work. If we are to accept the proposition that narratives reflect human experience while at the same time they affect human experience, that narratives are both a product of the social order and help establish and maintain that social order, it becomes clear that-in its desire to examine the moral and ethical nature of a work of art-ethical criticism establishes an important bond between the life of the narrative and the life of the reader. Patricia Meyer Spacks contends that while fictional narratives offer opportunities for ethical reflection, they are not imperatives for behavior; rather, according to Spacks, "paradigms of fiction provide an opportunity for moral playfulness: cost-free experimentation" (203). While the conditions of the visual experience inherent in film underscore the remarkable power of narratives to impinge upon human experience, or what Spacks calls the "experience of agency or its illusion" (203), those experiences acquired through cinematic representation-although powerful and affecting-may be understood as activities that afford experimentation, the trying on of new possibilities without the finality or consequences of life beyond the comforting walls of the cineplex.

 

The redemptive act of re-reading the text of his life, then, allows Jules to glimpse for the first time the prospects of faith, hope, and love-possibilities that the stasis of his past life, in its devotion to death, could never offer. As Jules unveils his intentions to leave "the life," Vincent recoils in horror at the mere notion of existence without the comfort of material possessions: "Jules, you're gonna be like those pieces of shit out there who beg for change. They walk around like a bunch of fuckin' zombies, they sleep in garbage bins, they eat what I throw away, and dogs piss on 'em. They got a word for 'em, they're called bums. And without a job, residence, or legal tender, that's what you're gonna be-a fuckin' bum!" Yet Jules finds solemnity in his decision. He will simply walk the earth-"You know, like Cain in Kung Fu. Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures"-and, although he pledges himself to the promise of spiritual redemption, he realizes nevertheless that such a commitment necessitates faith in the intensity of his cataleptic impression, and in the unknowable ways of God: "If it takes forever, I'll wait forever," he tells Vincent (147). In this way, Tarantino establishes Jules as the moral center of his film, and, for this reason, Pulp Fiction's achronological narrative takes on greater ethical force when Jules spares Pumpkin and Honey Bunny in the film's final moments. If the thieves confront Jules in the film's opening sequence, before he experiences divine intervention, they would surely meet with his wrathful, original reading of Ezekiel 25:17. Instead, Tarantino offers Jules's act of contrition, his desire to shepherd the weak. By sparing the lives of the thieves, Jules sustains the life of the community. The power of Jules's metamorphosis lies in the risk that faith demands and his discovery of what Nussbaum calls the "various and powerful" forces of love, "forces making for danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection" (261). Beyond the hazy lens of Tarantino's deliberately dark gangland tableau-beyond the greed, drugs, and gun blasts that Whalen so laments-Pulp Fiction proffers a fictional universe where miracles still happen, where love can still make a difference."

- Todd Davis, Literature/Film Quarterly

 

Public Opinion

 

"one of the best movies I've ever seen.

 

But also one of the most bizarre movies I've ever seen. Who would think to insert a serial rapist/killer plot into the mix? I'll need to see it multiple times to process everything. Seeing it in an actual theater would be ideal, in my opinion, without distractions.

 

The performances from everyone in the main cast were outstanding."

- @cannastop

 

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

pulp fiction

"Marcellus Wallace don't like to be fucked
Beside the flood, with her dear purple eye,
And on their heart a howling cheer instruct,
Feeling only a self of living tie."

- Samantha

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#28 (2020), #12 (2018), #6 (2016), #25 (2014), #2 (2013), #1 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Gene Kelly (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (2), 1950s (3), 1960s (5), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (13), 2000s (17), 2010s (7)

 

 

Country Count

 

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

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), WDAS (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#40 Fanboy Ranking, #41 Cinema Ranking

#49 Old Farts Ranking, #36 Damn Kids Ranking

#92 Ambassador Ranking, #36 All-American Ranking

#102 Cartoon Ranking, #36 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[IronJimbo]

I've got to be honest I only really ever seen Psycho in a classroom while it was paused every 5 minutes to explain stuff

[The Panda]

Can't believe y'all did Kurosawa dirty by just including one of his movies in the top 100!

 

Number 36

 

 

"This is the nature of war: By protecting others, you save yourselves. If you only think of yourself, you'll only destroy yourself."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"A samurai answers a village’s request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food. A giant battle occurs when 40 bandits attack the village."

 

Its Legacy

 

"The Seven Samurai was a high point of the director's most critically revered period. It also renewed the collaboration of Kurosawa with Toshiro Mifune, and was the first of ten consecutive films the director-actor duo made together from 1954 to 1965. The films the two created together (Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Red Beard, etc.) make up much of the catalog of the greatest films ever made, but Mifune's performance in the Seven Samurai is canonical. Its success would anchor Mifune's career in the samurai genre; almost all of Mifune's roles would express the samurai mentality he originates in this film, a violent, lonely man, proud, tough, and lonesome, regretful of many things that can never be changed and working to lose that regret in swordplay and bluster. Legend has it that Mifune, raised in Manchuria and a veteran of the Japanese air force in World War II, came to Kurosawa as a prospective camera operator, and was mistakenly been asked to audition as an actor. His frustration at the confusion resulted in a performance of hauteur and instantly changing moods, a style which would become Mifune's trademark. Although he is often remembered as the leader of the samurai band in the Seven Samurai, he is not. (That role goes to another stalwart of Kurosawa's films, Takashi Shimura, who worked with Kurosawa in 20 films.) But Mifune is so riveting that our attention, like that of his fellow warriors and the townspeople they are bound to protect, always turns toward him.

 

Kurosawa has simplistically been called "the most western of Japanese directors." In fact, the relation between the Japanese and American cinemas has been a strong and reciprocating one, and no film exemplifies this more than the Seven Samurai. Influenced by John Ford and the great westerns of the classical Hollywood cinema, Kurosawa honors that tradition with sweeping landscape shots, and with an analysis of duty and camaraderie among professional soldiers that is as subtle, humorous, and finally moving as Ford's great cavalry epics of the late 1940's, Rio Grande, Fort Apache, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. In turn, the Seven Samurai's own influence has been wide and deep.

 

 

This influence extends far beyond the American remake of the film, John Sturges' respectful but hollow The Magnificent Seven, or even warm-hearted homages like Jim Jarmusch's hip-hop samurai gangster film Ghost Dog or the Dogma pastiche Mifune in 1999. The weary, death-haunted gunmen of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah are also the legacy of the Seven Samurai. ("I want to make Westerns the way Kurosawa makes Westerns," Peckinpah was reputed to have said.) But so are the motley collections of ne'er do wells and criminals director Robert Aldrich assembles for hopeless tasks in The Dirty Dozen and The Flight of the Phoenix, and the recent Three Kings shows the Seven Samurai's influence is evergreen. Whenever an action film's violence becomes poetry, or its mercenary characters become genuinely tragic, the ghostly figures of the Seven Samurai are walking again, their hands on their sword hilts, restlessly looking for another hapless foe, their appetite for war never sated."

 - Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954) is such a film, one which portrays the power of circumstance over its characters' lives. The major "circumstance" in the film is this: with the invention of the gun and the development of the horse as an instrument of warfare, the samurai have been rendered obsolete as the warrior or fighter figures in Japanese society (Sengoku Period, 1534-1615). Whereas it is the samurai swordsmen who once would have raided the peasant village for rice and women, it is now the gun-toting bandits on horseback who do so. This places the peasants in a unique position: they can hire the samurai to defend them for the price of a meal (three meals a day, actually). But it also places them in a precarious position: the samurai will teach them to defend themselves, too, something the peasants have never done before. "Circumstance" has forced a new role on them. They are farmers by nature, fighters by chance (and necessity). "Circumstance" forces dignified samurai to go about in shabby clothing and even chop wood for a meal; it forces them to work for the very class of people they once had the most contempt for. "Circumstance" gives the gun to anyone who can pay for it (Unlike the sword, which takes a master to wield it, the gun can be master- ed-especially at close range-by almost anyone), and thus turns the petty thief into the roving, deadly, greedy bandit, part of a larger robber band or "army." "Circumstance" then dictates that three guns- all the bandits have-are not enough against the expertise of the samurai combined with the numbers of the peasants. The day will come when all the bandits have guns, and that day will spell the end of the samurai for good and the rise of the military, and later the "police," to protect the people.

 

 

The "force of circumstance" is clearly at work throughout The Seven Samurai. But the film is hardly a treatise on man's helplessness before circumstance, his dwarfing by it. The art of the film, for me, is in man's playing out his destiny before circumstance, at the same time circumstance seems to engulf him. The farmers fight and the for their freedom. The samurai defend the farmers no differently than they would defend themselves: nobly and fiercely. The bandits fight to the last man, against in the end unbeatable odds, apparently forgetting that their initial objective in storming the village was to seize the farmers' crops: it is their own honor and fighting ability that have become the question. We see the ironies in the situation, but the farmers, the samurai, and the bandits do not, or they do only in passing. They act, and in action are ennobled. That, perhaps, is the sense in which this is truly an "action" or "epic" film: action does not occur for its own sake, or for the sake of mere spectacle; instead, it ennobles. The different protagonists act, no matter what they think or do not think. If they are aware of "circumstance," they forget it, and, again, act. The concentration is thus always on the human struggle more than on the existential dilemma. What matters is the present and the human more than the historical and the circumstantial. In this sense, the human transcends the circumstantial: those dead at the hands of circumstance are not mourned (farmers, samurai)2 or rejoiced over (bandits) at the end of the film; the living go on living-the farmers plant rice, the surviving samurai move on, unhailed- the dead are dead (the final shot of the burial mounds).

 

Circumstance unites man: the farmers with one another, just so the samurai, just so the bandits. It "unites" man further: it turns farmer into near samurai-like in his courage and pride in fighting to the end; it makes samurai farmer-like in his desire to keep the rice crop from the bandits (it is this crop that the samurai, too, now shares, whereas once he had been bandit-like in its seizing).

 

Tragedy divides and isolates man. The knowledge that its protagonists derive from suffering is not common knowledge; it is knowledge that can only be had from profound suffering. So the message of tragedy is that man will suffer again. The calm at the end of tragedy is the calm before another storm. Man is steady and united in his facing circumstance: it draws him outside himself, and gives him an experience common to many. He is unsettled and alone in the face of tragedy, or his own fate. This is the message of tragedy, but beneath it is buried a more important message, hinted at earlier in this essay: that it is precisely this excessive emphasis on the individual in the West, and in the tragic literature of the West, that condemns man to further suffering. It is the total fascination and absorption with self, in other words, in art as in life, that leads to continued self-destruction. "Fate" in literature or film becomes almost beside the point. Individual deeds leading to isolation and suffering become almost beside the point. The point is that when man lacks a reference outside himself, when he is devoted to nothing but self-fulfillment and self-glorification, he will suffer, grandly. He will break down. Tragic heroes in the West are, then, condemned to defeat before they ever step onto the page, the screen, or the stage. The very way of life, or world view, that has produced them, condemns them. This is not "fate" as it is applied to individuals in works of art ("It was Oedipus' peculiar fate to . . . etc," for example). It is life as applied to Western man generally."

- Burt Cardullo, Literature/Film Quarterly

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"this is what the avengers think they look like"

- siobhan, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

seven samurai

"Seven samurai marching on
Away must be wake to dawn.

Light as a spell of the skies,
Trenchant time and other tie."

- Samantha

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#47 (2020), #52 (2018), #43 (2016), UNRANKED (2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Stanley Kubrick (3), Brad Bird (2), James Cameron (2), John Carpenter (2), Martin Scorsese (2),  David Fincher (2), Alfred Hitchcock (2), Spike Lee (2), Sergio Leone (2), Hayao Miyazaki (2), Christopher Nolan (2), The Russos (2),  Ridley Scott (2),  Andrew Stanton (2), Peter Weir (2), Roger Allers (1), Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), Frank Capra (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Jonathan Demme (1), Pete Doctor (1), Stanley Donan (1), Clint Eastwood (1), Victor Fleming (1), William Friedkin (1), Terry Gillam (1), Michel Gondry (1), Steve Hickner (1), Rian Johnson (1), Terry Jones (1), Gene Kelly (1), Akira Kurosawa (1), John Lasseter (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), David Lynch (1), Richard Marquand (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Rob Minkoff (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), Jan Pinkava (1), Makoto Shinkai (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Steven Spielberg (1), Isao Takahata (1), Quentin Tarantino (1), Guillermo Del Torro (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Simon Wells (1), Billy Wilder (1), Kar-Wai Wong (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (2), 1940s (2), 1950s (4), 1960s (5), 1970s (4), 1980s (9), 1990s (13), 2000s (17), 2010s (7)

 

Country Count

 

Japan (6), Italy (3), Brazil (1), China (1), Mexico (1), Spain (1), UK (1)

 

 

Franchise Count

 

Pixar (6), Ghibli (4), The MCU (2), Star Wars (2), Alien (1), Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), Dollars (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), Hannibal (1), Halloween (1), Incredibles (1), The Lion King (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1), The Shining (1), Thing (1), Toy Story (1), WDAS (1), The Wizard of Oz (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#58 Fanboy Ranking, #39 Cinema Ranking

#24 Old Farts Ranking, #47 Damn Kids Ranking

#15 Ambassador Ranking, #47 All-American Ranking

#40 Cartoon Ranking, #41 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 5, 2022 by The Panda

[The Panda]

I can't believe y'all would do Kurosawa like this

 

Number 135

Whisper of the Heart (1995, Yoshifumi Kondo)

 

Number 134

Ran (1985, Akira Kurosawa)

 

Number 133

Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa)

 

Number 132

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

 

Number 131

Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

 

Franchise movies, ironically, looking much sillier in the 101-200 list than they do in the 1-100. I mean, sure, go ahead, think Sith is a better film than Rashomon and Ran, but lol.

 

Those alternating paths for Seven Samurai and Pulp Fiction over the years are very interesting. Really indicates a slowly increasing internationalism and move away from US-Centrism: especially when it comes to some of the more stretched claims of originality that exists within some American media circles when discussing the likes of Tarantino. 

 

And for all it's disappointing for Panda - I'd say that Psycho and Seven Samurai - and even Rear Window - into the 30s in a pop culture-ish forum is pretty positive stuff.

 

As for the not insignificant bunch of us that had The Apartment high, are we going to be disappointed or surprisingly delighted?