I must go outside the five-year range, but will start from the bottom up: The Darjeeling Limited is a defnitie, as Anderson is on the Criterion hull for the long haul. Criterion SERIOUSLY needs to get John Sayles into its catalogue, perhaps with Lone Star or Eight Men Out. More recently, there’s Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and There Will be Blood. Then there’s Boogie Nights, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Fargo, Blood Simple (Still no Coen Brothers in the collection, Hmmmm), Badlands (More Malick, please), Cinema Paradiso, Schindler’s List, Blade Runner, Minority Report, Brokeback Mountain, Chinatown, Hearts of Darkness (one of the best documentaries ever about filmmaking), La Dolce Vita (Why Criterion hasn’t gotten this gem fron Federico Fellini is beyond me), and the list goes on. It would have been nice to see a Criterion edition of Eraserhead, but David Lynch, being the reclusive, eccentric freak he is turned it down. He prefers people just watch the movie and judge from themselves. Supplement shluplements, he says!
It was definitely overhyped and overrated. I thought Batman Begins was far superior and had a better storyline. Heath Ledger was brilliant, but it was no Ennis Del Mar. I must admit, I enjoyed Dark Knight much more on the second viewing. Aaron Eckhart’s performance was great. Iron Man was much better, though. That film deserved the hype it got, and Robert Downey’s performance as Tony Stark outshined Ledger’s Joker, in my mind.
Donnie Darko, The Player, Brokeback Mountain, Badlands, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Blade Runner, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Lone Star, Eight Men Out, Chinatown, The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, All About Eve, El Mariachi, Leaving Las Vegas, Shogun Assassin, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Samuel Fuller’s Park Row, Rocky, Network, Natural Born Killers, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Blair Witch Project, La Dolce Vita, Rosemary’s Baby, Schindler’s List, The Wild Bunch
People who don’t understand this movie haven’t seen it enough times. This film is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of a new generation. When 2001 opened, few understood it or appreciated it, then, after seeing it over and over again, the brilliance started to show, and all soon realized that Stanley Kubrick was decades ahead of his time. Same goes for Donnie Darko. If you could get past the quantam physics/surrealistic element of the film, you can see, quite clearly, the underlying, multilayered messages about individuality, conformity hyprocrisy and the sacrifices we must all deal with at some point in our lives, whether young or old, to reconcile our differences and the hardships we face. That’s it! That’s Donnie Darko, in a nutshell. Riddle is solved!
Michael Mann, plain and simple, is a master of the cops and robbers genre, developing a style all his own characterized by vibrant, shimmering nocturnal cityscapes, taut scripts and compelling characterizations. Collateral and Heat are equal in excellence, but each stand out in their own right.
Tarantino is a hack who peaked with Pulp Fiction. He loves the sound of his own voice, he thinks he can write dialogue when really all it is ranting in 4-letter words. He’s obviously a racist, judging from his often racist dialogue, and he’s very pretentious. Every film he has made since Pulp Fiction has been a half-assed emulation of old Kung Fu movies, old car chase movies, old gangster movies and old blaxploitation movies. Very little originality comes from his work. If I sat down and watched 200 movies over one weekend, I can pull a scene from each one, tweek them a little and put them into script form and have what Tanrantino usually has.
Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Overlord, Thin Red Line and the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan (the rest of the film blows and can be scrapped), Das Boot, Army of Shadows
The Michael Bay films are far more deserving of the Criterion treatment than Chasing Amy, a contrived, melodramatic piece of crap with a bunch of 20-something pseudo hipsters into the usual pseudo-hip coffee and comic book, bisexual quagmire. Arrrrgh! Kevin Smith is no Woody Allen. As a matter of fact, where the hell is Woody Allen in the Criterion Collection? I guess that’s another topic. I personally hated “Harder They Come” and “Samurai: Musashi Miyamoto.”
Natural Born Killers, which is also a major contender for the Criterion treatment. Psycho ranks up there as well (Martin Scorcese paid homage to the opening title sequence in Goodfellas).
1) Showgirls
2) Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
3) Plan 9 from Outer Space
4) Ishtar
5) Brother Bear
6) Batman Returns
7) Catwoman
8) The Big Chill
9) Clockstoppers
10) Little Nicky
11) Billy Madison
12) Look Who’s Talking
13) Silent Night, Deadly Night
14) The Fog
15) Yours, Mine and Ours
16) Body of Evidence
17) I Know Who Killed Me
18) House of 1,000 Corpses
19) Every Kate Hudson movie
20) Every Jennifer Aniston movie
The problem with film critics is every one of them has to come off as sounding like a goddamn overly-educated film historian that must use 75-cent words that require the reader to pull out the dictionary after every other word. I can watch a movie and write about it in 500 words or less, comparing and contrasting to other works, linking it to other important historic works and talking about how much I liked or disliked it without confusing the hell out of the reader and leaving them scratching their head half the time. I believe a whole new style of film critiquing needs to kick off in order to save this dying profession. Film critics should write for EVERYBODY, not just the elitist film historians. Journalists are required to write news stories in language that a 5th grader could understand, why should the rules be different for film critics? EVERYONE likes to go to the movies, and the idea is to get more people watching and appreciating these movies, so lets start writing do people can understand.
People like Nabokov here. That’s cool! I recommend his “Lectures on Literature,” compiled from his lectures when he taught at Cornell and Wellesley. Enlightening stuff if you’re also into Kafka, Flaubert, Dickens, Joyce and Austen.
WHICH MOVIES...PUT OUT IN LAST 5 YEARS...DO YOU THINK WILL ONE DAY JOIN THE CRITERION COLLECTION? over 3 years ago
I must go outside the five-year range, but will start from the bottom up: The Darjeeling Limited is a defnitie, as Anderson is on the Criterion hull for the long haul. Criterion SERIOUSLY needs to get John Sayles into its catalogue, perhaps with Lone Star or Eight Men Out. More recently, there’s Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and There Will be Blood. Then there’s Boogie Nights, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Fargo, Blood Simple (Still no Coen Brothers in the collection, Hmmmm), Badlands (More Malick, please), Cinema Paradiso, Schindler’s List, Blade Runner, Minority Report, Brokeback Mountain, Chinatown, Hearts of Darkness (one of the best documentaries ever about filmmaking), La Dolce Vita (Why Criterion hasn’t gotten this gem fron Federico Fellini is beyond me), and the list goes on. It would have been nice to see a Criterion edition of Eraserhead, but David Lynch, being the reclusive, eccentric freak he is turned it down. He prefers people just watch the movie and judge from themselves. Supplement shluplements, he says!
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Does anyone else feel THE DARK KNIGHT is way overrated? over 3 years ago
It was definitely overhyped and overrated. I thought Batman Begins was far superior and had a better storyline. Heath Ledger was brilliant, but it was no Ennis Del Mar. I must admit, I enjoyed Dark Knight much more on the second viewing. Aaron Eckhart’s performance was great. Iron Man was much better, though. That film deserved the hype it got, and Robert Downey’s performance as Tony Stark outshined Ledger’s Joker, in my mind.
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Movies That Should Be In the Criterion Collection over 3 years ago
Donnie Darko, The Player, Brokeback Mountain, Badlands, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Blade Runner, Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Lone Star, Eight Men Out, Chinatown, The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, All About Eve, El Mariachi, Leaving Las Vegas, Shogun Assassin, Master of the Flying Guillotine, Samuel Fuller’s Park Row, Rocky, Network, Natural Born Killers, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Blair Witch Project, La Dolce Vita, Rosemary’s Baby, Schindler’s List, The Wild Bunch
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Thoughts on 'Donnie Darko' over 3 years ago
People who don’t understand this movie haven’t seen it enough times. This film is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of a new generation. When 2001 opened, few understood it or appreciated it, then, after seeing it over and over again, the brilliance started to show, and all soon realized that Stanley Kubrick was decades ahead of his time. Same goes for Donnie Darko. If you could get past the quantam physics/surrealistic element of the film, you can see, quite clearly, the underlying, multilayered messages about individuality, conformity hyprocrisy and the sacrifices we must all deal with at some point in our lives, whether young or old, to reconcile our differences and the hardships we face. That’s it! That’s Donnie Darko, in a nutshell. Riddle is solved!
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Michael Mann over 3 years ago
Michael Mann, plain and simple, is a master of the cops and robbers genre, developing a style all his own characterized by vibrant, shimmering nocturnal cityscapes, taut scripts and compelling characterizations. Collateral and Heat are equal in excellence, but each stand out in their own right.
Go to Comment
directors better than tarantino over 3 years ago
Tarantino is a hack who peaked with Pulp Fiction. He loves the sound of his own voice, he thinks he can write dialogue when really all it is ranting in 4-letter words. He’s obviously a racist, judging from his often racist dialogue, and he’s very pretentious. Every film he has made since Pulp Fiction has been a half-assed emulation of old Kung Fu movies, old car chase movies, old gangster movies and old blaxploitation movies. Very little originality comes from his work. If I sat down and watched 200 movies over one weekend, I can pull a scene from each one, tweek them a little and put them into script form and have what Tanrantino usually has.
Go to Comment
Best War Movie(s) over 3 years ago
Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Overlord, Thin Red Line and the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan (the rest of the film blows and can be scrapped), Das Boot, Army of Shadows
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Movies That Should Be In the Criterion Collection over 3 years ago
Another, obvious one: Fargo
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Worst Criterion DVDs over 3 years ago
The Michael Bay films are far more deserving of the Criterion treatment than Chasing Amy, a contrived, melodramatic piece of crap with a bunch of 20-something pseudo hipsters into the usual pseudo-hip coffee and comic book, bisexual quagmire. Arrrrgh! Kevin Smith is no Woody Allen. As a matter of fact, where the hell is Woody Allen in the Criterion Collection? I guess that’s another topic. I personally hated “Harder They Come” and “Samurai: Musashi Miyamoto.”
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Your favorite title sequence over 3 years ago
Natural Born Killers, which is also a major contender for the Criterion treatment. Psycho ranks up there as well (Martin Scorcese paid homage to the opening title sequence in Goodfellas).
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My Top 20 Movies of All Time over 3 years ago
1) Showgirls
2) Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
3) Plan 9 from Outer Space
4) Ishtar
5) Brother Bear
6) Batman Returns
7) Catwoman
8) The Big Chill
9) Clockstoppers
10) Little Nicky
11) Billy Madison
12) Look Who’s Talking
13) Silent Night, Deadly Night
14) The Fog
15) Yours, Mine and Ours
16) Body of Evidence
17) I Know Who Killed Me
18) House of 1,000 Corpses
19) Every Kate Hudson movie
20) Every Jennifer Aniston movie
Go to Comment
Film critics over 3 years ago
The problem with film critics is every one of them has to come off as sounding like a goddamn overly-educated film historian that must use 75-cent words that require the reader to pull out the dictionary after every other word. I can watch a movie and write about it in 500 words or less, comparing and contrasting to other works, linking it to other important historic works and talking about how much I liked or disliked it without confusing the hell out of the reader and leaving them scratching their head half the time. I believe a whole new style of film critiquing needs to kick off in order to save this dying profession. Film critics should write for EVERYBODY, not just the elitist film historians. Journalists are required to write news stories in language that a 5th grader could understand, why should the rules be different for film critics? EVERYONE likes to go to the movies, and the idea is to get more people watching and appreciating these movies, so lets start writing do people can understand.
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Iris effect? Scorsese and Hitchcock over 3 years ago
PT Andseron uses this effect often, as he did in Punch Drunk Love and Magnolia.
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STOP THE LISTS! over 2 years ago
Can someone tell me why this thread is so popular? Are there really this many people hung up on not having list threads?
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STOP THE LISTS! over 2 years ago
ONly one word flashes through my head at this point: “cryptic.” What’s the password, folks?
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STOP THE LISTS! over 2 years ago
Ugh! A flippant thread. Got it!
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Last movie you saw and rate it over 2 years ago
Heist (David Mamet): 7/10
Homicide (David Mamet): 8/10
Last Days of Disco: 6/10
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John Ford over 2 years ago
“How Green Was My Valley” definitely. One of my all-time favorites. Absolutely beautiful film!
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Anyone else excited about the release of Paranormal Activity? over 2 years ago
Been monitoring all the hype on Yahoo. It’s got my curiosity peaked. Sounds like fun.
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STOP THE LISTS! over 2 years ago
People like Nabokov here. That’s cool! I recommend his “Lectures on Literature,” compiled from his lectures when he taught at Cornell and Wellesley. Enlightening stuff if you’re also into Kafka, Flaubert, Dickens, Joyce and Austen.
And Lolita is one of my favorites as well.
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STOP THE LISTS! over 2 years ago
Thanks Zachary! Doestoevsky does it for me, too. That book, and Brothers Karamazov, had profound impacts on me.
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