Movies

Hey Eric, I'm going to check out some of those SciFi movies that I haven't seen. Just curious if you've watched the tv shows Continuum, Orphan Black and Humans? I liked (like) all three of those.

Just watched Primer and holy crap, my head is going to explode. It makes Inception seem like a kid's movie.  I need to watch it about 10 more times.

Another sci-fi show I cannot recommend highly enough is Black Mirror. There are only 6 episodes over 2 'seasons' and they're each self contained. Sorry, I'm turning this into a sci-fi thread.

For some reason Continuum has escaped my attention; Netflix tells me that it's a series I should watch at some point. Orphan Black is probably at the top of my list of TV shows to check out (ahead of Breaking Bad, even), but I've made a conscious decision not to watch any new TV until I get an advance on the books I'm working on (before next season starts, I hope!). Humans I've heard very good things about, too.

I've heard huge raves about Black Mirror as well.

Two and a half things I especially love about Primer, the first of which is actually something you can talk about without spoiling anything. In the very first scene, when  the four engineers are sitting around talking technically, the wife pops in and out of the room more than once. The experienced viewer says, OK, she'll ask the guys what they're up to, so we can get a credible infodump. I mean, that's screenwriting 101 -- if you need an expository lump, put a naïve person credibly in the scene who will ask for the information that the viewer needs to know. But of course, she never asks, because IRL, engineer's wives do not ask for explanations!

And this devotion to realism (SPOILER NOW) has its best moment when one of the characters asks "What's the one thing you can reverse in a Feynman diagram and not change anything?" and the other doesn't answer. Because they both know!

But this is the thing I love most: most movies like this have a moment (usually about two-thirds of the way through, but sometimes at the very end) when something is revealed and you go, "Oh my God, I think I understand this!" The equivalent moment in Primer is "Oh, my God, no human being could possibly follow this on just one viewing!" ... when we are told that the machines can be folded up and put inside another machine. That's the single wildest idea in the history of that sci-fi trope.

I have Primer currently ranked as my 41st favorite film of all time. But Shane Carruth's followup film, Upstream Color, is 4th. It's at least as mind-scrambling and ten times as beautiful.

Well, this is the ranking as of two years ago, with films seen subsequently inserted. The lower down you go, the more likely it is that my opinion has changed a bit ... * is a film I've seen just once and is an especially tentative ranking.

This is, importantly, a ranking of my favorites, not what I think is the best. I don't believe you can do the latter, so I don't try. The actual list goes on quite a bit further, but these are all the films I didn't hesitate to give a 10 to at IMDB.

Rnk List
1 The Lord of the Rings (Extended Edition Trilogy) (Jackson, 2001-3)
2 Donnie Darko (Director’s Cut) (Kelly, R., 2001 / '04)
3 Memento (Nolan, 2001)
4 Upstream Color (Carruth, 2013)
5 *Fanny and Alexander (full version) (Bergman, 1982)
6 The Frisco Kid (Aldrich, 1979)
7 A Separation (Farhadi, 2011)
8 Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)
9 O Lucky Man! (Anderson, L., 1973)
10 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
11 Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
12 The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)
13 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Kubrick, 1964)
14 The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1959)
15 The Fall (Singh, 2008)
16 The Great Beauty (Sorrentino, 2013)
17 On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954)
18 Interstellar (Nolan, 2014)
19 Winter’s Bone (Granik, 2010)
20 Inception (Nolan, 2010)
21 Blade Runner (Scott, R., 1982)
22 The Prestige (Nolan, 2006)
23 Network (Lumet, 1976)
24 Boyhood (Linklater, 2014)
25 Sunset Blvd. (Wilder, 1950)
26 *Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 1954)
27 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
28 The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957)
29 In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2001)
30 La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960)
31 *The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1967)
32 Singin’ in the Rain (Donen/Kelly, G., 1952)
33 Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
34 Cloud Atlas (Wachowski, A. & L./ Tykwer, 2012)
35 *Children of Paradise (Carne, 1945)
36 Koyaanisqatsi (Reggio, 1983)
37 Manhattan (Allen, 1979)
38 Lawrence of Arabia (Lean, 1962)
39 Forbidden Planet (Wilcox, 1956)
40 Lars and the Real Girl (Gillespie, 2007)
41 Primer (Carruth, 2004)
42 *The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928)
43 Hugo (Scorsese, 2011)
44 Gattaca (Niccol, 1997)
45 Young Frankenstein (Brooks, M., 1974)
46 Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
47 Annie Hall (Allen, 1977)
48 Once (Carney, 2007)
49 *The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
50 *Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2002)
51 Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942)
52 The General (Keaton/Bruckman, 1927)
53 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)
54 If… (Anderson, L., 1968)
55 Greenberg (Baumbach, 2010)
56 *Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)
57 Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
58 Before Sunrise  / Sunset / Midnight (Linklater, 1995-2013)
59 *Angels in America (Nichols, M., 2003)
60 *8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
61 *Nashville (Altman, 1975)
62 Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring (Kim, 2004)
63 The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, 1999)
64 Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994)
65 Talk to Her (Almodovar, 2002)
66 *Man Facing Southeast (Subiela, 1987)
67 The Red Shoes (Powell/Presburger, 1948)
68 The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013)
69 In Bruges (McDonagh, 2008)
70 The Graduate (Nichols, M., 1967)
71 The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
72 *The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953)
73 Secretary (Shainberg, 2002)
74 *The Apartment (Wilder, 1960)
75 *Prince of the City (TV Director's Cut) (Lumet, 1981)
76 *Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch, 1932)
77 *Raging Bull (Scorsese, 1980)
78 Milk (Van Sant, 2008)
79 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977)
80 Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, P., 2002)
81 Amelie (Jeunet, 2001)
82 *Once Upon a Time in America (Leone, 1984)
83 *The Philadelphia Story (Cukor, 1940)
84 Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1999)
85 Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983)
86 *Pather Panchali (Ray, 1958)
87 Quatermass and the Pit  (Baker, R., 1968)
88 *L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934)
89 *Margaret (Lonergan, 2011)
90 *Henry Fool (Hartley, 1998)
91 Sideways (Payne, 2004)
92 *Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey, 1937)
93 Avatar (Cameron, 2009)
94 That Thing You Do (Hanks, 1996)
95 Ran (Kurosawa, 1985)
96 *Hoop Dreams (James, 1994)
97 In the Company of Men (LaBute, 1997)
98 This is Spinal Tap (Reiner, 1984)
99 *Mysteries of Lisbon (Ruiz, 2011)
100 The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962)
101 The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)
102 *Poetry (Lee, C., 2011)
103 Face/Off (Woo, 1997)
104 *Frequencies (Fisher, 2014)
105 Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)
106 Half Nelson (Fleck, 2006)
107 The Lives of Others (Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2007)
108 *Love Exposure (Sono, 2011)
109 The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003)
110 *Mr. Nobody (Van Dormael, 2013)
111 Serenity (Whedon, 2005)
112 No Country for Old Men (Coen & Coen, 2007)
113 *Red Desert (Antonioni, 1965)


Another absolutely priceless source is the ranking of films according to critics, film scholars, directors, etc. at TheyShootPictures.com.  They have a top 1000 and, even better, a top 1000 for the 21st century.

Top 10 films that are on their list but not on the IMDB Top 250:

1. Tokyo Story
2. The Rules of the Game
3. Sunrise
4. The Searchers
5. Battleship Potemkin
6. Breathless
7. The Passion of Joan of Arc
8. L'Atalante
9. The Man with a Movie Camera
10. Andrei Rublev


Hmm ... except for The Searchers, they're all foreign, silent, or both.

And the top 10 IMDB films that aren't in their top 250, with their rank (counting all of the LOTR movies as one, and skipping over The Empire Strikes Back since Star Wars is included):

1. The Shawshank Redemption (419)
2. The Dark Knight (---)
3. 12 Angry Men (603)
4. Schindler's List (276)
5. The Lord of the Rings (683 but probably quite a bit higher if the votes were combined, as they should be)
6. Fight Club (497)
7. Forrest Gump (560)
8. Inception (---)
9. The Matrix (340)
10. City of God (605)

I have to hand it to the critics here: the first list has four or five of my favorite films of all time (2, 4, 7, 8, and to a lesser extent 5) while the second list has only two (5 and 8). OTOH, when the critics miss, they miss big.

And here's a list of all the films that are in both their top 250 and the IMDB Top 250, listed by the sum of their rankings.

1 Godfather, The
2 Godfather Part II, The
3 Seven Samurai
4 Apocalypse Now
4 City Lights
6 Psycho
7 Citizen Kane
8 Vertigo
8 Casablanca
10 Rear Window
11 Modern Times
12 Once Upon a Time in the West
13 Sunset Blvd.
14 2001: A Space Odyssey
15 Taxi Driver
16 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
16 GoodFellas
18 Pulp Fiction
19 Bicycle Thieves
20 Singin' in the Rain
21 Lawrence of Arabia
22 It's a Wonderful Life
23 Rashomon
24 M
25 North by Northwest
25 Star Wars
27 Raging Bull
28 Some Like it Hot
29 Metropolis
30 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The
31 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
32 Third Man, The
33 Apartment, The
34 Shining, The
35 Blade Runner
35 Chinatown
35 Clockwork Orange, A
38 General, The
39 Once Upon a Time in America
40 Gold Rush, The
41 Wild Strawberries
42 Persona
42 400 Blows, The
44 Seventh Seal, The
45 Alien
46 8 1/2
47 Touch of Evil
48 All About Eve
49 Great Dictator, The
50 Double Indemnity
51 Ikiru
52 Raiders of the Lost Ark
53 Stalker
54 Spirited Away
55 Gone with the Wind
56 Paths of Glory
57 Barry Lyndon
57 Fanny and Alexander
59 Battle of Algiers, The
60 Dolce vita, La
61 Night of the Hunter, The
62 On the Waterfront
63 Annie Hall
64 Ran
65 Wizard of Oz, The
66 Strada, La
67 Jaws
68 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The
69 Deer Hunter, The
70 Grapes of Wrath, The
71 Notorious
72 My Neighbor Totoro
73 Big Lebowski, The
74 Best Years of Our Lives, The
75 Fargo
76 Wages of Fear, The
77 Samourai, Le
78 Solaris
79 Underground

Directors with multiple films:

6 Kubrick
5 Hitchcock
4 Bergman, Chaplin, Kurosawa, Wilder
3 Coppola, Fellini, Leone, Scorsese
2 Coen Brothers, Fleming, Lang, Miyazaki, R. Scott, Spielberg, Tarkovsky, Welles

Here's my personal favorite 35 science fiction films, more or less ...

1. Donnie Darko (Director’s Cut)
2. Upstream Color
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey
4. Inception
5. Blade Runner
6. Interstellar
7. The Prestige
8. Cloud Atlas
9. Forbidden Planet
10. Primer
11. Gattaca
12. Young Frankenstein
13. Metropolis
14. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
15. Man Facing Southeast (unavailable on DVD)
16. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
17. Videodrome
18. Quatermass and the Pit
19. Avatar
20. Frequencies
21. Face/Off
22. Mr. Nobody
23. Serenity
24. Solaris
25. The Congress
26. Open Your Eyes
27. Repo Man
28. Southland Tales
29. Minority Report
30. Children of Men
31. Star Wars / The Empire Strikes Back / Return of the Jedi
32. The Frame
33. V for Vendetta
34. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
35. Dark City

I can't take seriously any list that doesn't include Pan's Labyrinth.

No Magnolia on any of these lists.... Sad day.

I dream of getting my hands on the IMDB voting database and using it to get a better ranking. I never knew Shawshank had support from Christians.

The full 11-hour Lord of the Rings is probably the single greatest achievement in the history of film, and before you dismiss that as an uneducated fanboy opinion, hear this: the film that may top it is the 5 hour version of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. There are lots of embarrassing ratings in the IMDB 250, but those are certainly not one of them.

It's #334 at TheyShootPictures, and if you eliminated movies that have less than 25,000 votes at IMDB (criterion for their top 250), it would very likely be in their version of same.

I have it at something like #114. But I've got Punch-Drunk Love even higher, at #81.

In some deep true sense, there's no such thing as just a film. There are only combinations of a given film and the brains watching them. A film alone has no more meaning than a glassful of sand. It needs a watching brain to acquire meaning.

To assess any film, you have to start with the general critical and audience reception. If that is overwhelmingly positive, and if the proponents can articulate what makes the film great beyond the level of mere passive enjoyment, I think that this establishes the film's greatness as an objective fact. Now, it is often interesting and insightful to look at the reactions of those who disagree, those for whom a film doesn't work. But it's also important to understand that when you're in that minority position, your resistance to the film is not about the film but about you and your brain and your mismatch to the film.

The best critically regarded film of 2002, and one of the 10 most critically acclaimed of the 21st century, was Russian Ark. It's the only film I've ever given up on after 20 minutes because I was bored to the point of excruciation. But I don't deny or disagree that it's a masterpiece of some sort; I would only add the footnote that it doesn't work for people who have zero knowledge of Russian history and fine art (and that critics are overrating it somewhat because even the average movie lover is likely to have less such knowledge than them). More prosaically, The Godfather just misses my personal top 200 films, but that doesn't mean I think it's in any way overrated. That it's my #205 does not mean it shouldn't be the consensus #1. It is in fact very rare that you can point at a film that people think is great and make a rational argument that it actually isn't. (I think I've tried to do it just once: it's my Amazon review of We Need to Talk About Kevin.)

When a film has a range of reactions, and the folks who love it can articulate why it's great per the above, then I think the film is, in one dimension, as great as they think it is, but it has to lose stature in degree to the narrowness of its appeal. I just gave Guy Maddin's new film, The Forbidden Room, a 10 at IMDB, and ranked it 3rd among my films of 2015. But it is obviously going to elicit that reaction from just a very small percentage of viewers.

This sort of thing happens in every art form. Most people think John Coltrane's "Ascension" sounds like noise, but some of us think it's glorious music and would put it in our top 5 desert island disks. You cannot negate my reaction to "Ascension" or LOTR by saying it sounds like noise to you, or that they put you to sleep, and you can especially not argue against my explanation of their greatness with your reaction. Which, again, actually says nothing about the recording or the film, beyond "not everyone likes it"--which we already know.

When you're in the minority on a film, it can be fascinating (both for you and its champions) to figure out why. That's how we learn how films and brains interact. But those conversations only happen when you acknowledge the majority reaction and are interested in introspecting about why you didn't share it.

The reward, BTW, is that you get a better sense of what future films might disappoint you a bit. For instance, I am relatively cool towards not just The Godfather but The Dark Knight, The Prophet, and Sicario--all films that are largely studies of the nature of evil or sociopathy. It just doesn't seem to engage me as much as it does others (a theory I worked out with my godson is that I didn't have anyone who treated me with even a glimmer of meanness or cruelty growing up, so my brain just never got wired to work at understanding people like that).