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

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/etienne_saint/24hourparty.jpg

OK, make sure you sit no where near the front and eat very lightly before the show. Lot of it is made on like a handheld camera so its very shaky - a la Blair Witch. I had to excuse myself twice to go throw up in the bathroom... And I had Cambodian hot&sour soup for lunch so it was particularly nasty and burned on the way up.

otherwise, it was aiight.

― phil-two

The thing is that 24HPP is not a sturdy, coherent genre piece - it's a silly, liberty-taking mess which works because it cheekily presumes that something of interest to a few fanboys can be made fascinating to anyone who watches it (it doesn't always succeed at this because I like a presumption). It doesn't approach the 'dark still heart' because Peter Saville's sleeves have already illustrated the d.s.h. better than anything else could, I think.

― Tom (Groke)

I would have hated the film if it had been all mythic Curtis wandering wordlessly around concrete multi-story car parks: desolation comes in much more diverse and interesting packages than that. I like the fact that there was all this blokeyness going on in direct contrast to the noises and feelings in the music (until the Mondays, at least). One of the points of the film is the Monday's resolution of that conflict.

― Tim

24 Hour Party People

#38

24 Hour Party People
Michael Winterbottom
2002
United Kingdom
(418.5 points, 24 votes)

ayo!

liked this film a lot. i'm curious as to if the "it'll be on the dvd" joke was delivered on on the dvd?

this movie really nails the breaking-the-fourth-wall stuff so hard

xpost it was

that's a pretty big jump in # of votes

beautiful phil-two comment there

It was. and that scene was in the deleted scenes on the DVD. This just barely missed my ballot, but I opted to keep Tristram Shandy instead.

a serious man is a contender for best coen film I think, I loved it. hoping someone will theorize about the intro.

I'm thinking that might be the only Bourne - everyone who likes the trilogy likes all three, diluting the Bourne vote (unless a lot of people were willing to put all of them on their ballot)

Ace. Didn't expect this to place at all, let alone so highly. This freewheeling, pisstaking approach to a rock biopic is so refreshing - makes Ray and Walk the Line seem even more stolid.

u mean A Cock and Bull Story of course, gukbe

oh i guess Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is the US title

i think everything that worked in this movie didn't in tristram shandy

A while back in a previous household I noticed my DVD collection had dwindled somewhat and over time it halved in size. My only guess is that a friend of a friend of a flatmate might have been helping his or herself, but it was impossible and already too late to keep track of what was missing. Among the best ones were 24hrPP, a real pleasure to watch. Funny and inspiring, even if I'd only been vaguely aware of the Madchester scene when it happened.

this movie really nails the breaking-the-fourth-wall stuff so hard

toilet walls really flimsy amirite

think the two are only superficially similar. no one is really playing themselves in 24 hr party people and the two step in and out of conventional narrative in v different ways

Cock and Bull Story worked for me as well, just as a Coogan/Brydon comedy, but I couldn't make any claims to greatness there

This movie sucks because it didn't magically make every copy of Corbijn's Closer disappear.

so can understand why someone would like one not the other. me, i like em both. xp to myself

does anyone still rate 'in this world'?

On the other hand, I don't really think I understood A Serious Man at all.

This movie sucks because it didn't magically make every copy of Corbijn's Closer disappear.

― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 9 February 2010 19:13 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

haha, i didn't enjoy closer much either.

I would have hated the film if it had been all mythic Curtis wandering wordlessly around concrete multi-story car parks: desolation comes in much more diverse and interesting packages than that

This is a fitting comment, considering Control turned out to be exactly what Tim says, and this definitely made it a worse film than 24HPP. I think the irreverence and the non-idol worshipping made 24HPP one of the best music biopics/histories I've ever seen, and that's quite a feat considering I don't really care about the music/scene it was depicting at all, besides the house bits.

I believe 24 Hour Party People fell at number 41 or 42 on my ballot and sadly got the axe. Great, fun film, though.

(xxxx-post, hahaha)

9/40 of mine in!

I like Control as a companion piece. 24 Hour Party People is Tony Wilson's movie - chaotic, boastful, irreverent, idiosyncratic - in which context Ian Curtis seems more daft (and creepy) than tragic. Control is more about 70s Manchester as Curtis perceived it - grim, oppressive, small - and gives him the more conventional biopic deal. I prefer 24HPP but it's nice to get two such different angles on the same story, coming out within a few years of each other.

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It's a mesmerizing movie but Cronenberg is really playing both sides of the violence coin. It's not just that the movie is explicitly violent but in a number of scenes (especially when the son beats up the bully) there's the typical action/thriller treatment of violence-as-catharsis. I think Sympathy for Mr. Vengenance deals with a number of the same ideas (and is equally pornographically violent) in a more compelling (not necessarily better) manner.

― C0L1N B

I agree with Rosenbaum, who said (in a review that apparently isn't online yet) that the shots of bloody faces don't dwell on the gore in a fetishistic way but linger on them just long enough to convey the real-life consequences of shooting someone in the head.

― jaymc

I loved the film. The acting is certainly not wooden: in the case of Viggo Mortenson, he makes the transitions between cornfed Midwesterner and gangsta like a pro I never expected him to be. Maria Bello quivers and rages with an intensity she's never quite shown before (her greatest moment: the look of disgust she gives Mortenson after their tryst on the stairs). As for William Hurt - well. Talk about a pro. If this had been a play, I would have given him a standing ovation. His ham-on-rye performance summons the pity, terror, and comedy that the film's schematic, over-explicit script (its weakest element) wants us to understand.

― Alfred Soto

as for the sex scenes, i thought they were handled very well... i actually thought they were totally erotic. some douchebag in front of me was taking camera phone pix though and after putting up with it for about 15 seconds i leaned forward in my chair and said in his ear quite loudly, "Put your phone down." apart from that distraction, which well and truly took me out of the movie, i thought the sex scenes were great. maria bello and viggo mortensen are both very sexy, sexual seeming people. i thought that when maria bello said 'we never got a chance to be teenagers together', she didn't mean it to be serious. she meant it as an enigmatic setup to a fantasy that she had always wanted to live out. the sex scene on the stairway is a surprisingly common fantasy among a lot of women. to be raped safely by someone who loves you. this was obviously a little bit removed from that, but it did have the added notion of just being another role playing exercise. i don't know how to get into the mechanics of explaining it, but i've been with girls who have fantasized about that. danger/thrills are sexy to most people.

― firstworldman

The Cronenberg Thread

#37

A History of Violence
David Cronenberg
2005
United States/Canada
(423.5 points, 24 votes)

i was much more moved by 24 hour's treatment, the louie louie gig and the crass, perfect wilson bellringing "hear ye hear ye". plus, you know, laffs. xp

Control was truer to Joy Division's music, 24HPP was truer to the band's personalities. I agree that laffs win.

wait... closer? I thought you meant Control. I didn't mind Closer, but I didn't like Control.

What's "Closer"? They made another Joy Division movie?

http://www.cyber-cinema.com/original/closer.jpg

L-R Ian Curtis, Barney, Hooky and Tony Wilson

closer is the worst movie of all time

Oh yeah, I totally forgot that movie ever existed. Was it any good?

(x-post, haha)

I want to say something about A History of Violence but Alfred's old post pretty much nails it.

history of violence is amazing

yeah alfred's post is great

great opening sequence

those dudes who play the killers at the beginning are pretty great in their small roles, stephen mchattie especially.

I saw it knowing so little about it that I was actually surprised by Viggo's dodgy past. This was before I ruined moviegoing for myself by reading too many reviews and threads.

I'm on-board with both 24HPP and HoV and am glad the latter placed above Eastern Promises. Viggo is a great foil for Cronenberg in both, but HoV just seemed to have more depth to it, it seemed more mythic/fable-like in its construction. only criticism of 24HPP is the handheld action gets kinda nauseating after awhile - but the tone and script and jokes are all A+.

i love love love the scene on the front lawn when you finally find out who viggo is.

Fuuuck yeah to the last three placements, esp ASM

wow i need to watch AHoV again, and this time finish it without being put off by the shitty acting and script? (ie i have obviously misjudged it badly)

really didn't feel the moving camera was a problem in 24 Hour Party People at all. was much more queasy at the sweeping crane-like cgi of stuff like Moulin Rouge.

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It's definitely the film's intention to be controversial, and watching Heath Ledger ride Jake Gyllenhaal bareback will likely cause some people to squirm, but the film unconsciously reassures their prejudices: two queers can't live together cuz they ain't normal and their lives are sad, so let's watch this movie as our good deed of the year.

A more legitimately controversial film would have shown Ennis and Jack having fun fooling around whenever they got away to Brokeback Mountain, but perhaps Lee thought this would have violated Proulx's intentions.

― Alfred Soto

Yup, I saw it last Friday, right after I finished my Christmas shopping. Yeah, you're right, Jack is probably gay: the Mexico scene of courses reinforces this. But I was the one who argued against Chris Cooper's character being gay in American Beauty long after it became apparent that he obviously was (but that was just me wishing the film was more ambiguous than it actually was).

― jaymc

Lotsa dull dull domestic melodrama, and there's hardly any carnality (or eroticism) in it after the spit-lube. The way the next-to-last scene with the daughter panders to the hetero 'mainstream' made me kinda ill. Bet the Best Picture Oscar, and I wonder if Heath will keep up the Novocaine Mouth in his acceptance speech.

Boys with that brand of bizarre, oversized features can crawl in my tent too.

― Dr Morbius

I don't think this was a gay film at all. It was a conventional "women's picture". It has the same appeal to the same audience as A River Runs Through It, The Horse Whisperer etc etc. It's all about hunky, tough yet sensitive guys who don't say much. The buttsex angle is something of a red herring.

Compare/contrast slash fiction, written and read almost exclusively by heterosexual women.

― dream logic

Come Anticipate "Brokeback Mountain" With Me

#36

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee
2005
United States
(425.5 points, 20 votes)

loved HoV until Hurt showed up - can't say i felt the terror or wanted to applaud the comedy of his "ham-on-rye"

never saw BBM lolz