Your top 5 ("Three sir!") 3 movies

[Animavore]

Why do you have a Christmas Card from him?

[Feck]

Doomsday (2008)
This could be my news Favourite film ...

If you are going to have a city full of post apocalyptic carnage done with style and a sense of humour Set it in Glasgow
There is even a cameo by a can of Tenants
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzOohF1D ... re=related[/youtube]

[Bella Fortuna]

Why do you have a Christmas Card from him?

I wrote once requesting an autograph and that's what he sent!

[hadespussercats]

This is timely, since it's been a topic for much discussion around Strange Castle and environs. I think it very tough to limit to three. However I know definitely what my favourite is, because I have such a love hate relationship with it.

1. The Shining. I will now explain why in tedious detail.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

Kubrick seems to have made a movie which on the face of it seems like a dark farce (something I think all his later movies share) From Jack's daffy duck performance to Shelley's clothing and mannerisms being reflections of goofy (cartoon characters appear a lot in the movie) the whole thing has an air of the absurd about it, even down to the big teddy bear with the eyes that are mirror images of the dials above the bloody elevator. But beneath the overtly cartoonish aspect there are several things going on that I think Kubrick did deliberately to disturb the viewer, without them being conciously aware of it. For example the dead children appear in a corridor that is never seen in the hotel no matter how many times Kubrick maps the place out. The scene with Jack an the zombie chick in the bathtub seems to not be real but a vision of Danny's and of course there is the proliferating and disappearing photographs as well as the moving chairs(in many scenes including the dead girls scene and the bloody elevator) and entrance to the maze moving from the front of the building to the side. Some people have suggested such things are continuity errors. If so there are a lot, too many in fact for someone as obsessive about image as Kubrick I'd say.

There's the whole subtext of the hotel being a place for the elite, placed on an indian burial ground and Jack always being the "muderous" caretaker. This monster character sets about trying to kill a woman and a child and succeeds in killing a black man (a nigger cook as O'Grady has it). In this sense it becomes a horror movie about colonialism and oppression (even having Jack talking about booze being White Man's Burden. Having recently read the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, one of the things that stood out was just how drunk off our asses we were). The hotel manager even mentions them living in the West Wing. I'm stopping because I could go on and on and on.

2. F For Fake. Welles real masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

A fake movie about a faker who faked an expose about an art forger who may or may not have painted some of the classics considered cannon. A profound discussion about about what is art, what can be considered true or false using lots of clever anecdotes, humourous narration and interviews all edited out of context to tell a story that may or may not be true. That his co-producer was an art dealer and that all the characters in it are real people yet we can trust nothing they can say. "I must believe art is true" claims one of the commentators, but is it? It also asks what is more important, the art or the signature. A cheap, slow moving yet utterly compelling magic trick, made years before Banksy did a cover versions of it.

3. It was a toss up between Videodrome and Natural Born Killers, but I'm going with the latter.

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

I'm not Oliver Stone's greatest fan, he usually hammers his points home often and unsubtley, but in this case his bombast is perfect. A movie about The Spectacle, or the Veil of Maya if you're more mystically enclined. Stone took Tatantino's hipster schlock script and turned it into a reflection of the alarmist and sensationalistic assault to the senses that modern media has become. By exaggerating everything to a hysterical degree and by saturating almost every scene with images of sex and death, he turns this into a rod movie where the two protagonists and the viewer are journeying through a dreamlike Hell, only this is not a hallucination, it is the world people strive to be part of, to exist beyond the screen as immortal legends or to have their 15 minutes of fame, or now, to become a topical internet meme. Juxtaposing the underplayed almost naturalistic perfomances of Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis with the ramped up and increasingly insane and vile performances of everyone around them, this is a movie more like Burroughs Naked Lunch than Cronenberg's attempt was.

Edited to add more pretentious bollocks.

I haven't read all your entries yet, but I just wanted to stop and for F for Fake. Great movie!

[hadespussercats]

Goddammit, I can't do it! Too much pressure! AAaaaaaaaa a a a

[HomerJay]

Kurosawa but no mention of Ran? A beautiful film.
Has Apocolypse Now been mentioned?
Blade Runner of course.
Brazil is maybe my most watched.

[Incy Wincy]

Charlotte's Web.
James and the Giant Peach
and
Tron.

[Feck]

TRON WTF ?

[Incy Wincy]

TRON WTF ?

CG spiders.

[apophenia]

Kurosawa but no mention of Ran? A beautiful film.
Has Apocolypse Now been mentioned?
Blade Runner of course.
Brazil is maybe my most watched.

I have this theory that all the copies of Ran that are marked as "missing" in library catalogs are due to unfortunate souls taking it home, and upon attempting to watch it, going into full rigor, never to be heard from again.

A gorgeous movie, and some incredible scenes, but my god, the pacing is to die for. Literally.

[Feck]

I have a feeling that most people who talk about Kurosawa would probably drink bottled Baboon piss if it was fashionable to do so .

[Svartalf]

People drinking Tennent's here?

And that guy made the most fantastic Shakespeare movies I have ever seen.

[hadespussercats]

Ah! okay--
The Kurosawa discussion freed this up:
(and this is just for today, because I'm fickle.)
1.
This movie helped make me me. It's not just Merchant/Ivory Edwardian loveliness (though that's part of it.)
Sexuality, class warfare, atheism, hypocrisy, feminism, naked boys in ponds and being transfigured by Italy and love...
"My view is within! Here is where the birds sing! Here is where the sky is blue!"

I could sit across from you at a pub and recite this movie, beginning to end. Don't worry, though-- I probably won't.

2.
I think this was Kurosawa's last movie, and if so, I have to say Good choice, Kurosawa.
A sweet, quiet story about... death. Death and Japan, and lost innocence. Beautiful.

3.
Yes, this is definitely a movie for children, but I was right in the target audience for this one, and it changed my life. The creatures, the gadget-y ways they were made to move, the production design-- I was in awe. That's when I swore I was going to work for Jim Henson when I grew up. Missed that-- he died the day after my birthday, when I was in high school. But I've come pretty damn close, with the work, if not the person.

Anyway, the production and creature design was by Brian Froud, who, along with Alan Lee, published an illustrated book called Faeries http://www.amazon.com/Faeries-Brian-Froud/dp/0553346342-- a book which is one of my all-time favorites. And Alan Lee was the production designer for TLOTR-- his work on those films was also brilliant (whether you liked the adaptation or not, you have to admit the films looked great.) I love finding those links in chains of genius.

Yeah. So. There you have it.

[apophenia]

Picture!




I just watched the youtube videos on the set design for The Shining and I must say I felt like listening to post-modernist professors on acid talking about Dr. Seuss. There are infinitely many more mundane reasons for a set design and filming sequence to come out the way they did in The Shining, from ease of camera placement, camera path (for real intentional design on this, see the extras for Kurosawa's Rashomon about how they filmed the woodcutter's walk in the forest), Kubrick's avowed intention to make the hotel seem massive (more doors!), and simple set construction realities (constructing a borked but filmable set is loads cheaper than attempting to approach realism). The analysts' belief is that the symbolic and spooky effect was the only possible reason for that set design and that's just bollocks. I'll bet if you watched enough 50s and 60s television, you'd find plenty of 'spooky' anomalies there too. Genius? Maybe genius for getting a movie out under budget, instead of bleeding red until your backers mothball your film while a competitor steals your ideas and gets theirs out on time and under budget.

Was Kubrick a genius? Yeah, I'd say so. Was this set design an intentional act of genius? Likely not.

But if you start out with the assumption that everything Kubrick did was genius, you'll find plenty of confirmation, even in his mistakes.

[Schneibster]

Bladerunner makes my list, too. Absolutely groundbreaking; there was nothing like it before it was made. Director's cut only need apply.

Men In Black. Rolling on the floor crying my stomach hurt so bad. You really do have to watch it several times to catch all the gags.

Silverado. My favorite western ever. One of the very few that's not chickenshit about racism.

I can't keep it to three. The fourth is a cult movie, Highlander. Not the other two; just the first one. And the director's cut, please, the ten-year anniversary one.