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

(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.

Don't get the love for Big Fish or even worse the Fountain.

Wendy and Lucy also struck me as frankly kind of minor, but tremendously cute dog so. . .

can we just focus on the real top 100 list, guys, thanks

Hey start posting more shit to argue about and we'll argue about it ;)

let me get some coffee and i'll commence to more revealin

Since ten of us compiled the Slant list, I think everyone who voted could pick at least ten we are not fond of on the 100.

morbs:

probably the first two Whale films = ?

let me get some coffee and i'll commence to more revealin

the weekend felt longer than usual...

hey i saw revanche this morning

did Whale do Son of Frankenstein? I can never remember.

*taps toe impatiently*

Revanche is worth seeing, but I don't get the extreme love at all.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/Munich2005.jpg

I thought it was pretty great. More entertaining than I was expecting. I was expecting a lot of brooding and moral agonizing, and there was a little of that, but much more spy-movie thriller action. I liked how he kind of explored all the shades of moral grey by testing the audience's ability & willingness to accept "collateral damage". Ie., is the mission still just if it requires killing innocent little girls? What if the innocent little girl is spared but the hot newlywed bride gets blinded? And so on.

― o. nate

The first third was brilliant: a weary and destroyed Golda Meier ordering the kidnappings; the dinner-table conversations of the crew. The second third, with that marvelous actor who played Papa showikng Eric Bana to his country estate, was like the work of, I dunno, Eric Rohmer or minor Jean Renoir: scintillating country-house drama. Excellent.

The final third was a disaster. A crushing disappointment.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

its amazing to me how many people get stuck on the final sex scene, triumphantly trotting out the old "but he wasn't even there" chestnut as if their laser vision has discovered a hugely egregious continuity error that also escaped spielberg and his hundreds of crew members.

bana is flashing on munich in this intimate moment (nevermind that he's seeing it as it happened; it'd be too difficult to show us his imagined version without incurring confusion) because spielberg wants to show us two things:

1) for the individual embroiled in it, revenge by terrorism has no logical beginning and no end. although bana has no direct connection to the events at munich, it nonetheless puts a machine in motion that will consume him, just as future terrorists will be consumed in the act of retaliating against his actions. the fact that bana wasn't even at munich is a critical component to him being haunted by it.

2) 'home' is as much about piece of mind and security as physical location (part of a larger statement about the counterintuitiveness of endangering family to fight for land)

― mark p

count me among the fierce partisans for this film; best of 05 for the time being... Mr Amblin's best since at least Empire of the Sun. I can't remember the last time a scene got to me the way Mathieu Kassovitz's "Jews are righteous. We don't do this" did.

― Dr Morbius

Spielberg & Kushner's Munich '72 / Israeli vengeance film

#55

Munich
Steven Spielberg
2005
United States
(319 points, 15 votes)

I've made my peace with OrgasmaBana.

i thought that was some sort of morbsian nickname for obama for a moment

omg BIG FISH and THE FOUNTAIN
o_O

So low. So very low.

But surprised it's here at all in a way.

Shocked it doesn't have a few #1 votes, tho.

I guess I should get around to seeing Munich one of these days... but... hate.. Spielberg... so... much

where were you a few days ago?

Of sufficient complexity that the morons in Knocked Up didn't get it.

also, has Ciaran Hinds gotten a good part since this? Totally wasted in Milkshake.

(I'm pretty sure you can't blame me or Eric for those fountainfish)

Hinds made a great Julius Caesar.

That may have been pre-Munich, though.

I guess I should get around to seeing Munich one of these days... but... hate.. Spielberg... so... much

Really? Hadn't noticed.

Hinds quality in this 3 minutes in Miami Vice.

Munich line in Knocked Up made me laughed. I voted for both of those films.

Shakey Mo needs some of Seth Rogen's weed

"also, has Ciaran Hinds gotten a good part since this?"

I'm sure he's done something great on brit television.

The dude from kings and queens is good in Munich as the snotty jealous kid, and I liked him here more than in kings and queens, but it could be because I don't know French.

Love when he calls himself "intellectually promiscuous."

ya the munich thing in knocked up was, like, a joke iirc

anyway, it's about time i re-screened munich. loved it on first viewing, am pretty sure it will have aged well.

munich is pretty dope and i think i appreciate its moral quandaries a little more ever since i took this fairly intensive pre-wedding course on judaism, but there are still a few touches to the film i think are false (super-minor directorial flourishes more than anything), and the execution of the sex scene is iffy at best, but it deserves a spot up in here.

xxpost I think it was one of those truthy jokes, tho, like Ashton and Sean making out in Dude, Where's My Car?

Eric Bana wears sweat very well too.

never saw Rome, Hinds is in the H Potter finale.

Just from an "image" POV, this was a ballsy film for Spielberg to make -- Tony Kushnerized take on Israeli vengeance that got the AIPAC crowd mega-pissed at him, after he'd become their poster boy with Schindler's List and his attendant sponsorship of Holocaust-related cultural projects.