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

i was irritated by 'no country'.. it was SO violent, but ultimately, you have.. the west + coin flips + terminator guy with weird haircut who goes around killing everybody, and it adds up to... ??

mine is bourne ultimatum at 5 but since the other two got in i'd say 'fantastic mr. fox' at 10

no country was alright. i'd have cut tommy lee jones monologues out, seemed unnecessary. idk. ambivalent about this story, I think maybe it was short on ideas.

― kicker conspiracy (b. favre ha ha) (daria-g), Thursday, February 11, 2010 4:17 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i kinda agree with this but it being an adaptation makes me second-guess my impression of the story and wonder if the way it was told in the book would resonate with me more. but then, reading The Road left me with no desire to read any other McCarthy books so i'll probably never know.

by "neatly" I mean according to traditional narrative conventions

it adds up to a meditation on mortality and humanity's helplessness before it

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Here's a fun, non-spoilerizing question: what are everyone's highest ranking movies that they're positive aren't going to make it into the top ten? Mine is To Be And To Have at #4.

Mine is Songs from the Second Floor at #1. But only one movie in my top 10 placed here, and that was Happy-Go-Lucky.

'mythic' how? i'm serious. for this to work, i feel like there has to be more to it than that.

They just seem like cardboard cut-outs or meta references to other things, in a knowing "aren't we all so clever" kinda way that I really don't feel like participating in.

That's what i don't get. Absence of sympathy (and my earlier post was flippant) for a character doesn't mean the absence has to be replaced with meta stuff, it's just absent. I think what I liked about Plainview was this slow-burning messianic-ness, where just seeing it (in plain view) was enough, there didn't need to be any sympathy or hatred or awe. It just was itself.

Bardem's character in NCFOM has a similar quality just less manic. Morbius's quote about him being a ghost - i like that, cos i always get annoyed when he ambles off after the car crash.

southern gothic iirc

Okay, I guess I've weeded out Huckabees and Bourne Ultimatum as the two surefire top 10 movies that clearly aren't going to make it at this point. It's just super weird to me that neither one showed up in the top 100, though.

(also the seminal/most critical McCarthy work, imho, is Blood Meridien which is as close to GREAT AMERICAN EPIC as he's ever gonna get)

way preferred A Serious Man to NCFOM. Spirited Away is wonderful, deserved to do as ridiculously well as it did. Only doing this poll did I realise how much animation I like.

re: Orson Welles, how do you feel about Unicron the round, planet-sized robot that eats planets in Transformers being a meta-reference to Welles (well probably more a direct reference to his girth at the time)?

everybody else seemed to be playing by pretty quotidian rules though

― 鬼の手 (Edward III), Thursday, February 11, 2010 9:20 PM (8 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

bardem is kind of like omar in the wire in that sense. (i don't think either of them cross the line to characters who literally don't belong in this universe)

Huckabees really bugged the shit out of me except for Marky Mark.

Intolerable Cruelty is better than nearly all the comedies this poll has named.

Blood Meridian is probably unfilmable though.

what are everyone's highest ranking movies that they're positive aren't going to make it into the top ten?

The Aristocrats, my #2.

Had Eureka @ #4 but figured that was a long, long shot.

xp Philip: I didn't see the Transformers movie, so I have no opinion on it.

Intolerable Cruelty is better than nearly all the comedies this poll has named.

The only funny thing in that whole movie was when someone asked the waitress for baby field greens.

I have no idea what the top 2 will be but I don't think Paranoid Park (#4 iirc) and Milk (#2 or #3) will place. Unless they already have and I missed it in this tl;dr thread.

those trying to read *too* deep into ncfom are doing it wrong. it's basically an almost completely astonishing genre thriller with some mysterious underpinnings that lend it a little more weight and a take on the arbitrariness of life and death and chance that makes it slightly more interesting than it would have been, and a dope monologue at the end from TLJ which--to me--is meant to be somewhat spiritual and reassuring about his own inevitable death, and though it might sound like a mess it just comes together nicely. but make no mistake, first and foremost it's a thriller and a chase film (chigurh knows where his quarry is because of a transmitter, iirc.)

it didn't say anything to me on the subject of mortality. maybe it could've, but this chigurh dude was working for somebody, wasn't he? trying to recover cash? my sense is just that there's a fundamental clash between death coming to these people as inevitable and brought by some terrifying mythic figure vs. oh hey they got involved with some shady criminals who hire people to kill people, that might happen.

Can't think of any film that broke a whole director/studio like Spirited Away.

I still feel bad for forgetting Eureka, because that movie made a really big impression on me back then, and I should've had it in my top 10. Next time I'm gonna spend more than 0,5 hours assembling my ballot.

I'd love Intolerable Cruelty if I hadn't read an interview where Joel Coen claimed that watching it could cure rheumatoid arthritis.

I think omar is OTM here

Funniest Intolerable Cruelty scene, imo, is the one where the guy with asthma shoots at the people with his inhaler and blows his own brains out with the gun.

Blood Meridian is probably unfilmable though.

agreed but that isn't gonna stop Hollywood from making a shitty version of it tho (apparently)

yeah i kinda agree with this but it being an adaptation makes me second-guess my impression of the story and wonder if the way it was told in the book would resonate with me more.

the book was mostly third person, but the "monologues" were these fairly brief first person chapters and they were totally annoying as hell in the book.

but this chigurh dude was working for somebody, wasn't he? trying to recover cash?

No. Its clear by about halfway through the film that Chigurh has his own motivations (I think this is what Harrelson's lone monologue is all about, right? that Chigurh has "principles")

(i think the monologues worked great in the movie)

well, i don't believe him.

My theory of the day is NCFOM:Fargo::Goodfellas:Mean Streets (more mature filmmaker revisits earlier themes and fashions an all-around tauter, more accomplished bravura piece).

"agreed but that isn't gonna stop Hollywood from making a shitty version of it tho (apparently)"

Ick Todd Field.

I had Songs from the Second Floor at #2

and the reason people die is simply because they have SEEN Chigurh - he's a ghost, the angel of death incarnate, every one who comes across his path dies. I thought this was made really explicit, like, several times!

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Can't think of any film that broke a whole director/studio like Spirited Away.

I thought it was Mononoke that did this? I remember it being the first Miyazaki movie even my non-anime-loving friends were talking about. But if SA was the real breakthrough, that's great, because it's clearly better than Mononoke.

Blood Meridian is probably unfilmable though.

film version of this in the works, right? agreed though. 90% of the power of the book is in the apocalyptic, Old Testament prose. plus shit would need to be NC-17++.

xposts damn this moves fast

(Is anyone in any suspense whatsoever about the top three, at this point?)

(I think this is what Harrelson's lone monologue is all about, right? that Chigurh has "principles")

― Wrinkles, I'll see you on the other side (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, February 11, 2010 3:28 PM (42 seconds ago) Bookmark

yes, which is why he tells brolin that chigurh is gonna kill his wife regardless

I thought it was Totoro.

kelly macdonald is so great in that

it's basically an almost completely astonishing genre thriller

prolly would've been a bit more thrilling for me if chigurh wasn't portrayed as a mythical evil superhuman

I mean, character and performance were ace but it made things kind of boring for me

also you guys are basically saying this was terminator gone western noir

"(Is anyone in any suspense whatsoever about the top three, at this point?)"

Only if they haven't been paying attention.

cf scene where Chigurh goes back to the bank that hired him and kills his "employer" (lolz Mr. Swingline from Office Space) - and then he turns to the low-level flunky. Low-level flunky asks if he's going to kill him and Chigurh says "that depends. Do you see me?"

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he gives brolin a chance to sacrifice himself and save his wife during that phone call and brolin just keeps on running.

film version of this in the works, right? agreed though. 90% of the power of the book is in the apocalyptic, Old Testament prose. plus shit would need to be NC-17++.

yeah. this is a terrible idea. looking forward to the scene where the Judge smashes a newborn baby's head against a rock btw

i dunno, so many great films are based around the notion of someone attempting to escape an exceptionally tenacious pursuer (horror, sci fi, cop films, and so on) that i'm not sure chigurh's superhuman skill is a negative. it's totally thrilling how inventive and batshit he is.