Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

^ good list (jed's)

i like touch of evil because it's so dissonant and jarring, because the pieces don't really fit together. it's lurid, exaggerated, poker-faced funny, strange, campy - some of my favorite qualities in storytelling.

ALSO, totally cheating, 20 more:

night of the hunter
once upon a time in the west
la vie de boheme (kaurismaki!)
valerie & her week of wonders
rashomon
aguirre: the wrath of god
trouble every day
breaking the waves
man with a movie camera
excalibur
last year at marienbad
the three crowns of the sailor (sometimes the best movie ever made)
my winnipeg
repo man
the royal tenebaums
the wayward cloud
lucifer rising
who's afraid of virginia woolf
in the mood for love
and....

cruelly slighting depalma: problem with winging this shit. throw in body double and that's probably the pool of films from which i should be selecting...

putting breaking the waves and man with a movie camera one after another is a sin!

touch of evil is consistently great, there's scarcely any fat in the re-edit(aptly)

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/out-of-the-shadows/Content?oid=897261

i haven't seen the re-edit since it was in the cinemas -- basically coz i like having the music over the opening bit.

the only version I've seen is the re-edit! I probably need to see it again but it seemed to me an above-average thriller with some compelling characters that launched into brilliance towards the end

yeah it's certainly more than that, the camper review is worth reading

if channel 4 did a top 100 things of any description ever, but with good things rather than shit, 'hank quinlan' would be a shoe-in

had a little skim of the review and was all "oh. ok. oops" - the movie will certainly receive another sitting

oh yeah and hank quinlan is never less than great whenever he's onscreen - the bit where he strangles that dude is awesome as well, and his air of attempted insouciance is constantly gripping

are there still any people who haven't been given a film crit salary through corruption/nepotism/blackmail etc who believe welles never made a great film past the age of 26?

it's not as if touch of evil or chimes at midnight are somehow partial or esoteric works of genius, they're transparently great films

hahaha as intimated upthread I'm calling F For Fake as his truly great later movie, but then I am unusual

I only quibbled TOE because the ending did things to me that the rest of the movie didn't - it held me absolutely rapt where the rest had entertained and cajoled me - perhaps that still makes the whole a great, climactic movie

^ yeah, that's the way i see it. TOE's climax rivals that of the third man, and the opening shot is stupendous, but i agree that the material in the middle is quite digressive and even bizarre: campy, self-sabotaging, oddly formed. in the sense that the third man is a triumph from front to back, this makes TOE seem like something of a failure. it's not at all consistent. but if eccentric inconsistency can be seen as a valid formal aesthetic, then TOE succeeds brilliantly on its own terms.

i'd agree that F is for fake and citizen kane are more and better controlled, perhaps even "better movies" in some ultimate sense. but i prefer TOE for personal reasons. and i tend to shoot for the one-by-one thing...

also also: peter greenaway - the falls

Still prefer the pre-1998 version of TOE.

haha and you know - eccentric inconsistency is a MASSIVE draw for me in various art forms including film - so to view it as a smorgasbord of tones and opposing forces will quite probably elevate it for me

the opening shot IS stupendous, it's like the opening shot of Crank in some ways. ha but srsly it's like a computer game starting. ready, set, go! the bomb is aboard. the wheels are in motion.

TOE's climax is better than The Third Man's climax IMO but then I haven't seen TTM in yeeeeears

wtf ppl loving F is for Fake?

think mine includes 'cleo de 5 a 7' and 'point blank'

I could too, on a given day.

nice to see ppl picking things that oh so nearly made my ten - Andrei Rublev, The Hour of the Wolf (my favourite Haneke), The Red and the White.

think the thing i most regret abt my list is not finding any space for a britishes movie - really wanted to put fisher's The Devil Rides Out in there, but the final sequence w the giant spider does drag the movie down. shocked at noodle vague picking the most reactionary Carry On!

films that i'm sorta surprised nobody has voted for so far (unless i've missed em) - The Double Life of Veronique (any Kieslowski? or is he yesterday's man?), Werckmeister Harmonies, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which I personally prefer to Aguirre

considered werckmeister, but would have to see it again. love kaspar hauer, but prefer aguirre. TCM is not a personal favorite and i basically forgot to think about keislowski. and taste of cherry (WTF, me?)

the hanneke you're thinking of is time of the wolf, right? i meant bergman's gothic. time of the wolf is great though - my favorite hanneke, too.

I've seen Touch of Evil both pre- and post-restoration, and I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly: the opening shot in the original comes with jazzy music (great) and credits overtop (distracting), while the restoration loses the credits (good) but also, to its detriment, the music? It's been a while--is that right? Anyway, I love it. The De Palma thread has some back-and-forth on Raising Cane; Touch of Evil, for me, is an example of a great director veering off into delirium and making it work brilliantly. I think you could also lose yourself in it with the sound off, even though you'd lose great lines like "You're a mess, honey." And in terms of Welles pondering his own career, it's so much smarter and more moving than F Is for Fake.

the enigma of kaspar hauser is easily herzog's best pre-cage work

i saw the opening scene on tv as a kid and was transfixed by the swaying wheat and pachelbel! so nice to discover later on what it was, and that i hadn't imagined it

easily herzog's best pre-cage work

lol

wtf ppl loving F is for Fake?
― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Monday, September 13, 2010 9:35 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah seriously, it's like repping for Jade as the best Friedkin.

because it's one of the most wonderfully grand, sly and overwhelming depictions of artifice in cinematic history? plus it has the chartres cathedral bit which is proper hairs-on-neck-stand-up material

F is for Fake is fine, but I can't rewatch it like I can Ambersons, TOE, or Chimes of Midnight.

I've seen Touch of Evil both pre- and post-restoration, and I'm not sure if I'm remembering this correctly: the opening shot in the original comes with jazzy music (great) and credits overtop (distracting), while the restoration loses the credits (good) but also, to its detriment, the music? It's been a while--is that right?

Yup. Also: the Grande-Suzie stand-off and the walk across the Mexican border in the first third play out in natural time without cross-cutting. Not an improvement, in my view.

Which may or may not say something about the limitations of the auteur theory. The music was presumably a crass, studio-imposed contrivance. It's great.

lol duh at confusing the bergman and the haneke (they're both horror movies!)

the music may be great but the ambient soundtrack is great also

not sure it matters ~that~ much anyway

Chimes at Midnight srsly handicapped by Keith Baxter and the fly-by-night financing. My three fave Welles remain Othello, Kane, Lady from Shanghai.

man no ambersons?

The first 2/3, yeah. We really don't have his film.

*Keeping fingers crossed that Metropolis guy in Argentina can find some footage*

See, Baxter's terrific; it's Welles who's the trouble.

Truncated Ambersons is better than intact Kane.

eric h = eric hearst

don't wanna know what rosebud equals

shocked at noodle vague picking the most reactionary Carry On!

They're all pretty reactionary :) Convenience just shows it more clearly cos of the contemporary setting, which is one of the reasons I love it + more or less ideal Carry On cast + hugely moving & nostalgic portrayal of a chunk of working class life that's more or less dead dead dead + genuinely sweet unrequited love story between Sid and Joan Sims.

It seems like insanity to put up Ambersons on these lists to me. The ending is atrocious.

Well, it's not Welles' ending at least.

besides, lots of the finished films on this list have more problems than Ambersons.

Fires on the Plain

watched it yesterday - great stuff!

It's a shame that it got butchered and the studio changed the ending, but it's still the film we've got. xpost

Tim Holt is about the least interesting lead actor in a Welles film 'cept maybe the Mr Arkadin guy

I know that Holt's performance is generally considered a major flaw, but I always found him oddly effective. His tentativeness and awkwardness, like he never quite seems to know what's going on around him, fits George Minifer.

so he's Kim Novak Amberson

Which is preferable to Ruth Gordon Anderson.

It seems like insanity to put up Ambersons on these lists to me. The ending is atrocious.

― a cankle of rads (Gukbe), Tuesday, 14 September 2010 16:49 (2 hours ago)

don't watch the ending then

perhaps that's the best approach.

i think most fans (me included) sorta mentally tune out the ending.

my boring, pedestrian list:

Vertigo
Lolita
Mulholland Drive
Alien
Love and Death
Manhattan
Taxi Driver
All About Eve
Fantasia
Rosemary's Baby

Lolita

Which verzh?

Kubrick - I forgot about the other one