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

DLH do you remember the rest of your list? i like the 'lotr' films well enough but i'd rather reread the books than revisit them.

despite all the problems with lists like these, it was lists like these that got teenage me into really watching movies in the first place

On one of the S&S threads, possibly this one, I posted about how much discovering the '72 list (five or so years later) affected me as a teenager.

i am Not A Fan of the lotr books. (altho i was v much as a kid.) only sense in which i feel remorse for the ranking is in that it may be the fault of people like me that the hobbit, a book featuring dwarves named "ori" "dori" and "nori", is now a three-film epic shot entirely in instant-replay-o-vision. (this is the one i know i'll rather return to the book for.)

i don't remember the rest of the list but i'm sure i'd change everything on it now. i think mulholland dr was, safely, #2? honestly i might put inland empire above it now, for its... purity. and for the "there was a chemical factory in this town... puttin that shit in the air, so you couldn't think straight" monologue. i may have listed perfume, a very silly and often boring movie saved by dustin hoffman, john hurt, and the courage of its convictions. i think russian ark was on there; in my defense this wasn't mindless OMG ALL ONE SHOT, it was mindless OMG RUSSIA. still love that movie tho.

i should probably give 'mulholland dr.' another shot. i disliked it intensely but it seems like the ilx consensus favorite from the last decade-ish.

Morbs, so no year-end list for yoU?

Not a published one. I am not going to spend 3 months "catching up" on Bellflower-level dreck for the privilege.

Also if I am going to be an invalid for a few more months, I'm going to watch what I please.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f7/Monkey_shines.jpg/220px-Monkey_shines.jpg

might get to Showgirls this weekend

oh dear.

Aw, and I just swore off ILX, Facebook and email for the rest of August. Damn.

Missed this earlier, but EW's OG thinks critics need to get over themselves if they think Vertigo is better than Kane and, more specifically, if they choose Mulholland Dr. over Blue Velvet. Reads a bit like Armond without the appetite for destruction:

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/08/07/the-sight-and-sound-poll-is-full-of-it/

"The twisting and undermining of narrative is, to me, a cinematic ploy of diminishing returns. Yet it’s one that a critical establishment addicted to the one-hand-clapping thrill of deconstruction now reveres."

Actually the entire paragraph is pretty stunning in its stubborn wrongness:

Yet Lynch, who was profoundly influenced by Vertigo (and also by Kenneth Anger), upped the ante on the most stylized, formalist side of what Hitchcock brought off in Vertigo when he transformed the plot of Mulholland Drive into a labyrinth that you enter without quite coming out of. The twisting and undermining of narrative is, to me, a cinematic ploy of diminishing returns. Yet it’s one that a critical establishment addicted to the one-hand-clapping thrill of deconstruction now reveres. There’s even a trendy leftist bias to it: In the blockbuster franchise era, straightforward storytelling is seen in some quarters as a tool of the corporation — a way to keep the public narcotized. Whereas a movie that dares to pull the rug out from under its own storyline is a fearless act of art that is “showing you a new way of seeing.” (In truth, it’s probably showing you a new way of looking at your watch in the dark.) It’s according to this way of thinking that Lynch’s three-hour-long Eraserhead-meets-public-access avant dud Inland Empire is a masterpiece — and Mulholland Drive, with its pretzel-logic hermetic dream games, is a superior movie to the visionary yet lushly comprehensible Blue Velvet. But then, maybe that’s why the new Sight & Sound poll gives me a touch of vertigo. When I look at the choices on this list, I feel as if it’s critics who are losing their grip on the popular imagination. And, as a result, are falling.

I think he's otm about Blue Velvet's cultural impact, but wrong that it's better than Mulholland Drive. I agree that you couldn't have the second without the first, but that doesn't keep the second from being more amazing. Lynch had a lot of time to think and mess around between those two movies, and he learned a lot.

And thinking that "the twisting and undermining of narrative" is what Mulholland Drive or Vertigo are about seems like the ultimate kind of formalism. The effect of those movies is not in their narratives.

I don’t buy the notion that the film’s final shot (a desperate James Stewart standing on the balcony of the Mission San Juan Bautista bell-tower chapel, his hands lowering in a slow swoon of despair) is the Greatest Image Of Romantic Loss In Movie History, or anything like that. To me, it’s an overly abrupt and borderline unsatisfying ending; it’s too consciously “poetic” — which Hitchcock, at his greatest, never was.

disagree with this so strongly i can't even believe i'm reading it -- this is probably my vote for the most amazing shot in cinema history.

Re Mulholland: It's not a gimmick if there's a purpose to it beyond gimmickry.

OG's complaint seems just a more luxe edition of the "I don't get it" offense.

"lushly comprehensible," um, OK

i don't even think of it as 'poetic.' one moment you're trapped, along with the characters, in this horrible, impossibly fucked-up situation, and then -- in a single sudden shot -- hitch gives you the only possible way out. and the final shot of stewart standing there on the balcony lasts just long enough for you to take in what's happened, and then it's over.

fwiw I have not seen once in this debate, anywhere, mention of Orson Welles' confession that Rosebud is a 'cheap Freudian gimmick' or some such.

it wasn't so much a 'confession', more a way for welles to distance himself from aspects of mankiewicz's screenplay after the kane/kael kontroversy

I probably should have said 'admission' -- but didn't Welles say "it was my idea, I'm afraid"?

The ending of Vertigo is utterly unsatisfying. The film is set up for a non-ending...that it follows through on that in terms of execution doesn't do anything for me at all: weakest part of the film.

madness

"dollar book Freud," Welles told Boggo.

CK > Vertigo
Mulholland Drive > Blue Velvet

co-sign

Would love to read OG discuss at length about Jeanne Dielman, Satantango and Sans Soleil placing higher than Casablanca.

Oh no wait. Don't want to read that at all.

well, Casablanca is better than Satantango, you just read mine.

Go away.

Anyway, I was talking about how OG could've buttressed his argument that S&S '12 represents an uptick in crix stunting for "difficult" over "lushly comprehensible." Imperfections in personal taste can (and repeatedly have to) be excused.

Man with a Movie Camera shooting up to #8 being the crown jewel of that shift.

as for me, i'm just flummoxed at the continuing love affair b/w movie critics and Fellini's films (esp. 8 1/2). if i had to point to a disconnect b/w elite critical & "mass" critical (for lack of a better term) opinion, it would be to Fellini.

but Fellini's movie is about movies donchasee

it's also boring, overlong, solipsistic and pretentious. it's the movie equivalent a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis record.

people who "can't figure out" Mulholland Drive need to not be film critics

It took me a while to accept that a lot of people see things in Mulholland Drive that I don't. But I think you've also got to accept that some of us (a minority, admittedly) consider it an often silly film.

i find lynch's obsessions tedious, tho MD is at least less overtly misogynistic than some of his other films.

I'm not sure I could stand MD without the silliness!

It took me a while to accept that a lot of people see things in Mulholland Drive that I don't. But I think you've also got to accept that some of us (a minority, admittedly) consider it an often silly film.

― clemenza, Saturday, August 11, 2012 5:56 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SILENCIO!

if i had to point to a disconnect b/w elite critical & "mass" critical (for lack of a better term) opinion, it would be to Fellini.

B-b-b-but Fellini movies were basically crowd-pleasers. He was the Jean-Pierre Jeunet of his era.

SILENCIO!
― Matt Armstrong, Saturday, August 11, 2012 2:45 PM (50 minutes ago)

Don't you fucking look at me! (Now that's a film I love...)

fwiw, clemenza, if you've only seen MD once then it really grew in stature for me on subsequent viewings. i was only so-so about it on my initial viewing.

To be fair, BV has only diminished in stature for me on subsequent viewings. Both of BV and many other Lynch films.

it took a dip for me but i loved it again on my most recent viewing.

I saw Mulholland Drive twice when it came out. But, bowing to the Sight and Sound poll and this thread, I'm going to watch it again tonight.

Fellini inspired an adjective in the dictionaries, guys, and his films did quite well in America.

Felliniistic--I use that all the time.

They've got three of these over at Slate:

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/browbeat/2011/09/29/hugo_chavez_caption_contest/Vertigo1.gif

You forgot to ***SPOILER*** that thing.

There should be a "Spoiler.gif" thread.

Yeah, sorry...hadn't thought about that.