The (Now-Overrated) ILX Top 100 Films of the 2000s Poll Results

call me old fashioned!

old fashioned!

In the heat of the moment, I found those aliens kind of annoying, but thinking it over

Grrrrrrrrrrr

can't believe i was kung fu hustle's only #1 vote. you guys mightn't hate fun, but it's obviously way down your list of priorities.

not chairman of any football clubs either, but tbh i can see where you'd actually mistake me for that guy at least, jol out etc.

Jibe, I know Spielberg doesn't make it terribly clear (which is why I was mostly just puzzled by the ending of AI at first), but consider for a moment what those "aliens" actually were.

aliens!

They looked like aliens! But yeah, I see what they were I guess, but it was just too tempting to call them aliens.
Also, the first time we see David, I couldn't help but think it was ET I was seeing (white background and you just see a shape). But I haven't seen ET in a looong time so memory may be broke. I guess I just had aliens on my mind all the time.

I know at least a couple smart ppl who had no idea the "aliens" were descendants of Earth-made robots.

Deric, Twilight Zone: The Movie was almost 30 years ago. Let go. You don't think I've ever seen Hook or Jurassic Park 2, do you?

i really hated AI when i saw it, really hated it, but all the love it's gotten over the years makes me feel like i should revisit.

It's funny there's probably posts from me from 2001 trying to defend AI, and I'm happy to see that it's reputation has finally started to turn around, if just a little.

That final scence = tonal contradictions so strong it's almost vibrating. Maybe SS is not in CONTROL of what's going on, but what's going on is such a clusterfuck of dense emotional desperation and hopelessness and just a little hope to put an edge on the whole thing. ending with Blue Fairy is obv more "satisfying" but the ending we get almost pushes you into complete disorientation, including the movie and SS as well. And i think that moment, that uncanny FEELING, places the end of the movie far beyond just a well-orchestrated piece of film "craft" and close to what I might timidly call "art."

and the mess of the whole thing, the logical problems and poor music choices and all that...the ending sorta makes what passes for most criticism sorta beside the point to me. if you can't see the power of THAT then yeah maybe a john williams score or jude law being jude lawish is gonna bother you.

i should say that the final scenes place you in such a suffocating grasp of total narcissism (inadequate but the only word i can think of) and the utter emptiness of what happens to be our most basic and infantile desires...the CULMINATION of a desire that seems to be the driving force of our desire to be at all not being "satisfying"...then that eerie feeling you get (or at least I get) at the end of AI is the uncanniness of your own self-awareness, being alienated from yourself and your own desires. like a long hallway filled with facsimiles of yourself, realizing you're a "robot" etc....

i dare say Kubrick would have made the ending arresting, in some way, but the film had lost me for so long before that that i honestly couldn't care less by that point.

It strikes me now that another way to talk about the ending is to say that it's like taking the experience of the "uncanny valley" we feel with simulated humans and getting that feeling while observing YOURSELF.

That is, possibily seeing yourself as a contingent object of the world, a part of the world but not its foundation, no longer an empowered humanist subject.

In 2001 I was working at a language school in Italy. In the week before the Easter break it was decided to give the kids/teenagers who had afternoon lessons a treat: they got to see 'A.I.' on DVD. As one of the teachers supervising this I saw the film twice on consecutive days. It struck me as quite a disturbing/depressing film to show children (assuming they could actually work out what was going on, seeing as it was in English). So several months later, when it got to their next treat, we decided to show them a comedy and somebody decided on 'Something About Mary'. Quite soon after that started (probably as Ben Stiller was being carried into the ambulance to a chorus of 'He was masturbating!') I remembered that it was probably even less appropriate.

I just watched Happy Go Lucky. The amount of emotional reactions I felt myself going through w/r/t the characters was pretty overwhelming. I really like Eddie Marsden as an actor, and the lead character was amazing.

I recently saw "Twilight Zone: The Movie" again on cable for the first time in probably 15 years, and Spielberg's segment bothered me a lot less for some reason. Familiarity, maybe? I don't know, it just seemed better constructed than I remembered.

Morbs, you should give JP2 a whirl, if only because it's unusually brutal and sadistic for a Spielberg movie. IMO, anyway. The character deaths onscreen are a great deal more graphic than those in the first movie, and there are a lot more of them. Seems like a tryout for the relentless grimness of WOTW.

All that grimness countered by gymnastics.

http://www.movieposter.com/posters/archive/main/6/A70-3160

memories of murder is going to be screening at a local cinema in march - going to see it thanks to the praise itt

glad to see the host place on this list (I am also a disgusting savage who did not vote); probably one of the more disturbing movies I've seen. every time I think of it I think of edward III's absolutely great, OTM comment about south korean movies being diminished seventh chords to everybody else's one-note tinkering

Here's the two Armond White reviews of A.I. that Eric mentioned: one, two. I hadn't seen these. I had A.I. in my top 20 because it interesting.

i haven't seen a.i., but a lot of that second link rings true to me

i was kind of baffled by this tho

What they really want is a film that zips by without need for thought or reflection (Memento, Lara Croft, The Fast and the Furious)

were these movies critically acclaimed??

But most critics–Hollywood drones–think good movies are the ones they don’t have to think about.

this is largely otm tho and explains the love for shit like "up in the air" and "avatar" (or at least, people not flogging it for its storyline -- visually i think it's worth the hype, anyway) and, even tho i haven't seen it, i assume "precious"

the fast and the furious is awesome and I would have voted for it had I voted

yeah i love it too! i'm too young to remember how it was received critically. i guess i'm pulling a tuomas here & should just look it up on RT

When a movie flows well without you having to crease your brow over plotlines & motivation then that's often a good thing?

I think the subset of movies where you'll be actively seeking this pace/quality is quite small for many people.

Memento is a pretty crazy example to give in any case.

without you having to crease your brow

If you mean "think," AW would violently disagree. He thinks during Jackass (and I think we all do, tbh).

yeah, but hardly over the plotline in fairness!

What they really want is a film that zips by without need for thought or reflection (Memento, Lara Croft, The Fast and the Furious)

were these movies critically acclaimed??

Memento sure was. Not so much the others.

Lara Croft definitely not. I think some critics enjoyed the B-movie glee of The Fast and the Furious, but 'acclaimed' might go too far.

guys, it's armond white.

i think that moment, that uncanny FEELING, places the end of the movie far beyond just a well-orchestrated piece of film "craft" and close to what I might timidly call "art."

my reservations about the movie aside, i think this is pretty otm. the ending of that movie felt very weird. the whole movie felt very weird, and it stuck with me more than any other spielberg film of the decade. it's a pretty fascinating thing, and there is obviously art (and artistry) in it. what keeps me from thinking it's a "great" movie is that the inconsistencies of tone don't really resolve, there's no throughline of perspective or p.o.v., my feeling at the end is basically, "well, that was interesting but -- so what?" am i really meant to think about what it means "to be human"? because that's not what the movie makes me think about. if anything it makes me think about what it means to have enormous cinematic resources at your disposal and enormous craft and skill in deploying them but not much to actually say.

to me the most apt corollary to AI isn't Pinocchio but maybe Frankenstein, which is also about a child wanting to be loved and fully human.

(probably the first two Whale films rather than Mary Shelley)

I like that analogy.

I totally understand a story, especially an ending, speaking to you and not to critics or a lot of people you know (hey, Cast Away). As it happens, I liked Memento because that's kind of how I feel a lot of the time.

The group’s chair is Armond White, the severe and iconoclastic critic for the New York Press, who opens by giving the room a stern talking-to about the decline of art, morality, literacy, cinema literacy, and journalistic integrity. He makes some disparaging comments about the Internet. No applause. “We are all that stands between the viewer and advertising,” he says. Silence. Well, it’s expecting a lot to ask movie people to applaud critics, even critics who give them awards.

If White seems grouchy, it may be because the narrative of the evening is running away from him. “There are too many awards,” he insists to the crowd. “This one is the real deal.”

"The Jackpot (cashing in on the thrill-seeking curiosity of generations raised on popcorn and plastic) is a reality that today’s politically unconscious movie critics try to disavow when dismissing this brand of entertainment. With inconsistent and arbitrary affectation, they demean defensible movies like Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe as if to deny that what used to be called “mass culture” has, generally, lost its former standards."

xpost Hahaha.

Instead of engaging in another Bash Armond session while we wait for more results, why not look at a new decade poll?

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/feature/best-of-the-aughts-film/216

hmm i could have sworn beau travail and gosford park were both 99. i love the bejesus out of both of those

Beau Travail "was '99," but our criterion was anything that had its first US theater run (of at least one week) in the '00s.

gosford park was 2001

Memento is a pretty crazy example to give in any case

^ this

"Also, the first time we see David, I couldn't help but think it was ET I was seeing (white background and you just see a shape)."

ET makes you feel for a puppet; AI makes you feel indifferent to human actors! Weirdly, Spielberg employed some Kubrick-level coldness in telling Drew Barrymore ET was dead to capture her grief on film.

Revanche and Forty Shades of Blue are on high on my Netflix queue. Guess I'll watch them sooner rather than later.

3 of my top 40 showed up on the Slant #100-81, including an obscure pick of mine!

Grizzly Man was the only one of my top 40 to make the Slant list.