your top ten films (?)

jed_

Well-known member
an impossible task, i know but the film board is rather slow moving so maybe this will gove it a kickstart.

here's me top ten (haha 13 now - i've already cheated) for right now, off the top of my head and in no particular order (except my number one which really is my favourite film of all time) it's not an ultimate:

1. Safe (Todd Haynes)..... i really wonder if K-punk has any thoughts on this film?
2. The Elephant Man or Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)
3. Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)
4. The Imitation of life (Douglas Sirk)
5. Barry Lyndon or 2001 (Kubrick)
6. Quiz Show (Robert Redford)
7. Come and See (Elem Klimov)
8. My Dinner with Andre (Louis Malle)
9. Pierrot le Fou or Bande A Part (Godard)
10. Code Unknown (Michael Haneke)
 
My list today might be:

1. Stalker (Tarkovsky)
2. La Maman et la Putain (Eustache)
3. Il Deserto Rosso (Antonioni)
4. Pi (Aranofsky)
5. The Falls (Greenaway)
6. Performance (Cammell and Roeg)
7. Accident (Losey)
8. The Tempest (Jarman)
9. Magnolia (Anderson)
10. La Dolce Vita (Felini)
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
here's my provisional top fifteen -- and i'll cheat even more by listing more than one film by same director

(and i know there's stuff i like better than some of the stuff i list -- so i reserve right to revise)

1 - Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago (David Lean, director)
2 - The Leopard and Death in Venice (Visconti, director)
3 - Blow Up and L'Avventura (Antonioni, director)
4 - Amores Pores (Alexandros Gonzalez Innaritu, director)
5 - City of God (Fernando Meirelles, director)
6 - Godfather I and II
7 - Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby (Polanski, director)
8 - Talk to Her (Almodovar, director)
9 - Dreamlife of Angels (Erick Zonca, director)
10 - Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, director)
11 - Un Coeur en Hivre and Nelly & Monseur Arnaud (Claude Sautet, director)
12 - Chocolat and I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis, director)
13 - The Terrorist (Santosh Sivan, director)
14 - Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, director)
15 - The Exorcist
 
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Melmoth

Bruxist
1. Elephant (Alan Clark)
2. La Jetee (Chris Marker)
3. Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer)
4. L'Avventura (Antonioni)
5. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini)
6. Stalker (Tarkovsky)
7. Beau Travail (Clair Denis)
8. 10 (Abbas Kiarostami)
9. Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke)
10. Dogville (Lars von Trier)
 

owen

Well-known member
right, this is totally subjective, off top of head, in no particular order, subject to frequent change (and probably a v boring hipster list)....but i do agree more film posts would be nice....right then

-Daisies (Vera Chytilova)
-Sans Soleil (Chris Marker)
-O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson)
-Fallen Angels (Wong kar Wai)
-Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (Russ Meyer)
-A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger)
-Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson)- for honesty's sake, but i do genuinely think its a bit of a masterpiece
-Masculin Feminin (Jean Luc Godard)
-The Wicker Man (christ, i can't even remember who directed it...)
-Kuhle Wampe (Slatan Dudow)
 

h-crimm

Well-known member
owen! is daisies your top favourite of all time on this temporary and highly changeable list?? :)

i'm curious about that movie, i havent seen it yet...
two friends of mine went to see it in oxford when i was lost somewhere not answering my phone cos i didnt have one

one of them found it intensely exciting liberating feminist revolution goodness

the other said it was offensive titilation antifeminist fake politics hackneyed badness


so clearly i need to see it, but i'd be interested in a third opinion
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
ah!

Monthy Python and the research for the Holy Grail (monthy pyton)
Mullholland Drive (lynch)
Modern Times (chaplin)
The dead zone (cronemberg)
Arrrapaoh (squallor)
Ordet (dreyer)
The Party (Edwards)
L'eclisse (Antonioni)
Teorema e Porcile (Pasolini)
Violent Cop (kitano)
2001 (kubrick)
Totò a Colori (steno)

and a thousand others.....!
 
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Buick6

too punk to drunk
After Hours (Scorsese)
The Public enemy (Wellman)
Once Upon a Time in the West (Leone)
Le Diable Problement (Bresson)
Le Mepris (Godard)
Videodrome (Cronenberg)
Stranger than Paradise (Jarmusch)
Johnny Guitar (Nicolas Ray)
Aguirre: Wrath of God (Herzog)
Body Double (DePalma)
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
With no apologies for occasionally trashy selections. Less a list of what I think the greatest films of all time are (although a few of these would qualify); more like ten that I think are wonderful and will always enjoy watching.

(As I remember them, not order of merit):

Memento
Batman
Rear Window
Good Bye, Lenin!
Dogma
Amateur
All about Eve
Withnail & I
Citizen Kane
Moulin Rouge!
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
owen said:
-O Lucky Man! (Lindsay Anderson)
I saw this with a bunch of friends on a whim when we were about 17 or 18, just picking it out of the bargain weeklies at the video shop. We thought it was hilarious - absolutely ridiculous, laughably "70s", etc. We all did lots of laughing at it all, including the musical interludes.

But yeah, we were teenagers. I'd love to know more about it now, cos I have a feeling I might really like it now. Isn't it all some sort of anti-capitalist trip? I'd love to hear further comments on it.
 

owen

Well-known member
daisies (well you did ask)

actually, mr h crimm, it's top of my unshifting, objective list (or it would be if i had one)....and here's why

what i love about it is it's amiguity, in part- it can be read as feminist and anti-feminist, consumerist and stalinist-apologist, anti-consumerist and anti-socialist etc....actually if anything i'd call it situationist- not cos of any actual influence (doubt there was much debord read in prague in '66) but because of a palpable joy in chaos and play....

fuck it, what i really love about it is that it's an incredibly exhilerating film- such an awesome amount of special effects and touches that i find utterly breathtaking....the train sequences, where the colours bleed and everything speeds up are like the cinematic equiv of a noise factory track or something, and it's full of dancing, music, destruction and other v punkthings while not being remotely macho...it's an astonishingly intoxicating film...and you can get it on video in the UK so SEEK IT OUT!

oh and if anyone has any other vera chytilova films please please private message me, i have money....sometimes

anyway these lists need comments i think, would be more fun (and then rambler could then explain what he sees in moulin rouge!
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
Melmoth said:
9. Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke)

saw this film last year -- very powerful -- seems like an allegory for our times -- what's the meaning? a civilization's loss of its will to live?
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
think i'll have to take notes on everyone's list -- for future dvd rentals

lots of stuff i've never heard of, let alone seen
 

bruno

est malade
easy..

la dentelliere (claude goretta, 1977) tragic
grave of the fireflies (takahata isao, 1988) tragic
shogun assassin (robert houston, 1980) violent
sans soleil (chris marker, 1982) hypnotic
top secret! (abrahams+zucker, 1984) funny
r.o.t.o.r. (cullen blaine, 1989) funny
woman in the dunes (teshigahara hiroshi, 1964) hypnotic
to live and die in l.a. (william friedkin, 1984) sordid
l'eclisse (michelangelo antonioni, 1962) hypnotic
cat people (jacques tourneur, 1942) gorgeous, twilight film

and for revealing nastassja kinski to my 11yo brain
cat people (paul schrader, 1982)
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
owen said:
oh and i'll say why i like o lucky man soon if you like
Yes please.

Having posted on this directly before going to bed I then had dreams I met Dominic and we talked about Jean Cocteau films!??! What the...? I often have dreams about strangers, though.

Here's something along the lines of the Rambler's approach, but with comments as suggested:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I'm sure everyone knows this. My friends tell me Adaptation is much better, but this was more soppy, and, truth be know, I think more than with music I want movies to move me. Endlessly entertaining, IMO.

The Conversation - My favourite Coppola flick, my favourite Gene Hackman flick. I love these paranoid post-McCarthy, post-Watergate US movies. The character of Harry Caul fascinates me no end, and what sound nerd couldn't love the amazing sound work in this?

Passion Fish - A John Sayles drama about a soap actress who loses the use of her legs in an accident and returns to her family home in the South. Soorrrta selfish bitch comes good, but I found it really moving in some way I can't explain, and it's not like a major redemption story.

The Night of The Hunter - The dream like sequences, the weird shifts in pace / tone / genre (?), etc... it makes me think of what people like about Beat Takeshi (I'd go with the obvious - Hana Bi - btw). That scene where the kids have fled and are floating down the river, singing the song, and all the soundstage shots of animals coming to listen.. *tokes on the universe* Jesus.

Down By Law - I should say, having thought I was a big Jim Jarmusch fan, and having watched every one of his movies, I've actually concluded I'm not! Partly its his reputation, though... I don't think he deserves any kind of genius tag at all, and if that wasn't lumped on him I might be more relaxed about his output. Anyway, I do love this one, yeah. The combo of John Lurie, Tom Waits and Robert Benigni rocks my world. Not sure any of them are very believable actors, and it doesn't matter at all. Would've gone with Buick's pick, but no Tom Waits. :p

This Is Spinal Tap - "Big bottoms / Big bottoms / Talk about mudflaps / My girl's got 'em". Yep. Gets really tedious as it goes along, but that's fitting.

Something by the Coens? Haha.. behold my steadfastly middlebrow movie tastes! Not Fargo, I just didn't really get into any of it beyond the two baddies. Yay Steve Buscemi! Maybe The Man Who Wasn't There. Unlike most people I thought the UFO scenes rocked it. Sorry, everyone. :p

The Sweet Hereafter - Heartbreaking stuff about a small town where most all the kids are killed in one go in a bus crash. Atom Egoyan or whoever... I haven't seen it since it was in a film festival in NZ... 97 or 98? I wonder what I would make of it now. I've watched 100s of movies since.

La Haine - What needs to be said about this? Just a simple drama really, about 3 young guys in the slums of Paris and the culture surrounding them.. You either get into it or you don't, another one that friends have always argued me down on, because it's not particularly inventive or anything.


So, to the formal inventiveness pick. I've seen many art movies, from Jodorowksy to Lye to Svankmajer, but I'll stick with my middlebrow selections and go go with Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. I saw it in a big old theatre (the Astor, Melburnians) with a live score and was blown away. Spent the whole time veering wildly between laughing & wooping and boggling at the technical side of it. The sequence where Buster Keaton jumps off things and the scene changes around him while he's in mid-leap! Imagine trying to shoot and edit that in the 20s! And so purposeful too - not just idle mucking about.

Ooh, no room for a Tsui Hark film? Ah well...
 
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michael

Bring out the vacuum
Haha, reading back I can't believe I made a defensive comment about wanting movies to move me and then pulled out the Coppola film most lacking in character sympathy. No wonder that thing sunk between the first couple of Godfather films.

Has everyone seen The Conversation? I really like movies about surveillance and interpreting documented evidence and so on... The Conversation, De Palma's Blow Out (that amazingly trashy ending!! what the fuck?), and Antonioni's Blowup as an influence on both of those. Anyone got any recommendations?
 

arcaNa

Snakes + Ladders
favourites i can remember, right now:

Brazil (T.Gilliam)
La Jetée (Chris Marker)
Don't Look Now (Nic Roeg)
Ratcatcher (L. Ramsay)
The Apple War (Danielson)
La Cité des Enfants Perdus/City of Lost Children (Jeunet & Caro)
Come And See (Klimov)
My Little Sister
Barbarella (Roger Vadim)
Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)

...not an all-time top list, but some of the ones i like (Aronofsky/Pi and Sergio Leone must be on the list aswell)
 

owen

Well-known member
o lucky man

well....as i might have said elsewhere on this board, i've got a bit of a weakness for the sweeping- and this is very consciously an indictment of an entire society, at macro and micro level, from the dossers who virtually lynch mcdowell, to the aristos who shaft him. there are some stunning set-pieces as well, especially the military base bit...i like the sourness and anger of it, a sourness that doesn't preclude all kinds of stylistic perversity (the stuff that probably seems '70s', i guess)

i love the third mick travis film, brittania hospital, but that is a bit of a minority view. to say the least

big up for doing comments, btw!
 

h-crimm

Well-known member
>>>woman in the dunes (teshigahara hiroshi, 1964) hypnotic

oh my dilly! i read the book of this this winter while practically snowed in in chi-town (bleh...)
i cant even begin to imagine what its like on film. surely it must have been sucked down into a soft porn adventure romp?

the book is so intense, every next page he invents a new way of interpretting and humanising or slipping in the features of the sand banks. till youre just waiting fro him to say, till you start making up your own ludicrous obsessive paralells. which makes me think of another film that got mentioned

>>>the conversation

i think i just chanced upon this one night when i was stuck at my parents trying not to wake them up, watchin it with the sound turned down low and hunched really close damaging my eyes.
yeah it is a kind of aural blowup, the repitition is so hypnotic and the calculated ambiguous banality of the conversation itself is sweet.
 
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