ILX All-Time Film and Morbsies Poll: RESULTS Thread for ILX's Favorite Movies, Films, Cinema, Flicks & Moving Pictures

Man I wish I could see this in cinema

I recently showed it to a friend who knew nothing about it & so wasn’t expecting the big turn with the reveal of the lover (I even had to hide the dvd box from him), that was fun

His verdict: “that was horrible!”

https://cansesclasseled.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/047-fargo.jpg

47. FARGO (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996, USA) [811.1 points; 10 votes]
S&S: 297 | TSPDT: 196 | BOXD: 151

MORBS SEZ: "the Coens clearly hate most humans -- so far, so good -- but did not consistently express it artfully until the 21st century. Fargo is a smug funny-accent travesty."

as much as i love lebowski & fink, fargo is the only perfect movie
― and what, Tuesday, April 3, 2007 8:33 PM

i've never been able to stay awake through fargo, but there are great parts in there.
― msp, Tuesday, April 3, 2007 11:16 PM

Fargo is their only movie that i think is actually overpraised, good though it is.
― ghost rider, Wednesday, April 4, 2007 9:10 AM

i have never been able to watch fargo, and i have no idea why as everything about it suggests i should love it.
― Amateur Darraghmatics (darraghmac), Saturday, September 12, 2009 6:27 AM

fargo sucks.
― omar little, Thursday, January 17, 2008 3:09 PM

the funniest thing about fargo was all of the characters speaking with that Minnesota accent. even years of watching MST3K can't destroy the sheer joy of hearing people talk like that!
― kurwa mać (Polish for "long life") (Eisbaer), Friday, March 30, 2012 3:42 PM

I really, really like Fargo, but the scene where Buscemi returns to the cabin to find Mrs. Lundegaard shot in the head (SPOILER ALERT) after they've mostly played her abduction for laughs throughout really sucks the wind out of the movie for me and takes it from the realm of "pitch-black comedy" to "unnecessarily mean." I realize that's almost preposterous in light of what happens to Buscemi and Harve Presnell, but the tone of it just gave me sourface.
― jpattzlovevampz 2 hours ago (Phil D.), Friday, March 30, 2012 3:02 PM

is there an animated gif of the fargo sex scene
― marmotwolof, Thursday, April 5, 2007 12:31 AM

it's your star; reach for it.
― Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Thursday, April 5, 2007 12:32 AM

probably the least I've enjoyed a Coens but eh

It doesn't suck, but they did better before and (certainly) afterward. So damn pat. One of my first film reviews, published in my college paper.

Oh I need to dig up my HS Fargo review. I'm sure it's unimpeachable.

yeah this is the coen brothers film I really don't get, still I know I am in the minority in this

probably the least I've enjoyed a Coens but eh

― imago

In a catalog that includes Blood Simple, The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty, and Hail, Caesar!?

I came out of the one time I saw Possession not knowing what the fuck I'd just seen, I'm guessing the next time I watch it I'll be able to appreciate what Żuławski's doing a lot better without having to pick my jaw up off the floor every five minutes. The same director's 'The Third Part of the Night' is another crazed fever dream, haven't seen anything else he's done though.

Wish I'd got around to sending in a ballot for this btw.

Oh yeah, OBWAT sucked. I've enjoyed (if not loved) 3 others you've mentioned tho

It's the only film of theirs I love. Will A Serious Man place?

A Serious Man gets the Morbz boost iirc, prob deserves to place too

It'd be in my 200

Groundhog Day and Back to the Future were both in my list, and Jurassic Park was in my HMs. I'm not nearly as well versed in cinema as many of you but there are still plenty of older and art house films in my list as well. I can explain my reasons for including each of those, and obv I wasn't alone otherwise they wouldn't have placed, but I am curious how folks' poptimist sensibilities in music do and don't translate to other media

Speaking just for myself: I feel like pop music, even at its billion dollar industry height, was always very receptive to magpies, novelties, appropriations of various underground styles, that kind of thing. Trends arrive and fizzle out at a rapid pace (don't really know whether to write in the present or past tense here, lol, I'm so disconnected from the medium's current state). There's an excitement there that to me is totally absent from mainstream cinema which, probably due to the different scale of money involved, trends pretty conservative. I'm more likely to find that kind of crazy momentum in cult cinema - Italian popular cinema of the 60's and 70's, for instance, moves with a similar fast paced, anything goes sensibility, and has the same sort of overlap between ppl with artistic pretensions and gleeful opportunists. Roger Corman is another figure that reminds me of that, like he could have easily been a pop producer jumping from genre to genre in search of that hit.

I'd be surprised if A Serious Man didn't place - it monstered the 2017 Coen Bros. poll. The question is whether this means The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men, both of which came above Fargo there, have yet to place.

There's an interesting Tom Ewing article on Thrill Power that seems relevant to Daniel_rf's point: https://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/6588-poptimist-3/

Also that is a top-tier Morbs comment

If I didn't follow a one-film-per-director rule, Fargo might have been one of my 40 votes.

What fun is being into movies if Kiarostami and Hamaguchi aren’t knocking boots with Spielberg and Daffy Duck?

can we please not use "poptimism" here

and it doesn't exist, fucking stop

Wherever two or three of us are gathered together, there is poptimism.

I used to think I was whatever's the film equivalent of a rockist snob. Love experimental/avant-garde films, art cinema, classical Hollywood; loathe horror/slasher flicks (smdh at Chainsaw), franchise films, Disney, the New Hollywood, Oscar bait. But I'm a poptimist (I prefer "popist") for comedy and romance. I love Twilight and am fascinated with Hallmark Xmas movies. And one of my favorite films of the year is Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. Oh and I looooove Groundhog Day. So, sure, poptimism absolutely counts for cinema.

The stuff that poptimism was pushing back at - media that these people like is inherently unworthy, these are the acceptable range of emotions to portray, add +50 to the views of these serious people - aren't as strong for film as they were for pop music, but they're not not there. And some of them are calling from inside this house!

Alfred, sorry, I guess I'm ignorant of the connotations and I wasn't around when that word was presumably being used here at an overbearing frequency. I just mean that Spielberg and Kiarostami are indeed knocking boots on my list (Daffy Duck didn't make the cut and I don't think I've seen a Hamaguchi).

For the 3 mainstream examples I gave and threw points to, there's no question that personal associations added to their case for my ballot. I realize that's a different thing from an art v. commerce question. But it feels like a more achievable project to lean into those personal biases rather than to try the futile and presumptuous act of thinking I can control for them.

To endorse popular movies isn't Sanneh-esque "poptimism" -- it's liking movies. That's been the case since the Lumiere bros.

Lavator, I wasn't attacking anyone and apologize for doing so. But I've heard some variant on this argument against me for decades. HUH HUH YOU LIKE BRITNEY SPEARS BUT DON'T READ DEAN KOONTZ. The only answer is: "Dean Koontz sucks, there's better supermarket horror writers."

So I sent a 25 then set to work on the Honourable Mentions, when I got to 23 that shoudld've been top 25 (cus my top two are UNIMPEACHABLE) I just threw everything in the air, deleted what I had written and vowed to not participate any further, no comments in here or nowt.
But I just caved and looked up what I originally sent and it's... pretty good? For something that was spewed off the top of my brain on one drunken evening, at least. Like I recalled I'd missed out any NBCeylan but no, Anatolia is there at 20, I'm glad to see it here. And California Split was my Altman, Pierrot Le fou my Godard, and Touch Of Evil at... 3!? Really? I don't know why, but I respect that choice that whoever I was on May 16th made.
My poptimistulist choices were Midnight Run (not gunna place) and I suppose Predator (actually possible), my personal challopsly choice was Michael Bay's Pain & Gain which cmon no, prolly none of them would've been there May 17th or whenever I sobered up, but fuck it I've decided to stand by all of my choices now, these were definitely the top 25 films of all time at the exact moment I wrote them down.

I voted Mean Girls

possession was my no. 1 :)

xps to Alfred, gotcha, all good. Like I said I'm pretty ignorant on the history of the critical conversation. I may be conflating the retrospective reevaluation of ppl like Hitchcock and Sirk and Capra as auteurs with the original Sanneh critique. I am interested in getting a better understanding of where there is overlap there and what the distinctions are.

I did read Dean Koontz in middle school and even then I remember finding it boring and disappointing compared to Stephen King

Morbs would take the good Capra and Hitchcock or an arid avant-gardist.

or = over

yes, quality trumps categorization here as well as anywhere. that's why i'm here!

i like that morbs was genuinely down with what possession was offering until it ratcheted into the spy movie register during the coda

weren't most of us going crazy over The Lady Eve a couple days ago

xp anyway, Fargo is great but not in my top 5 Coens. I am hoping there will be at least 2 more though starting to get to that point of explicit awareness that each inclusion is bumping something big out

Lavator, don't listen to Soto. Poptimism absolutely exists if only by virtue of him saying it doesn't.

If you view poptimism as a lack of snobbery - an absence rather than a presence - a willingness to view Mad Max on the same terms as Murnau - then maybe it becomes more of a palatable concept here

If we're gunna port over music terminology I want to hear what the Poppy Bush Interzone films are

Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. Probably also Turner & Hooch and Tango & Cash but I never saw them.

Lavator, don't listen to Soto. Poptimism absolutely exists if only by virtue of him saying it doesn't.

― Kevin John Bozelka,

Okay. It does exist.

ok this sounds sick. i might sign up for Metrograph just to see it, since it's available... nowhere else? NV, where did u find it?

sorry i'm late. i have the Bluray

this was very funny and gave great architecture

rockism is not akin to liking old european experimental art movies, because classic rock and its modern imitators are in no way the same as experimental / art music, also there is nothing in music really equivalent to either marvel superhero movies or generic Oscar bait, thank god.

but also, there is an anti-intellectual suspicion about art cinema now which I didn't feel in the 90s (when for example channel 4 would have a week-long Louis Malle season), it's a related dynamic but also a very different one & worth examining if it isn't too depressing.

Rockism is the IMDB chart

So movie rockism is The Shawshank Redemption tunnelling into a human face forever?

This thread is fine but it’s nowhere near the top 100 ILX threads about rockism, sorry.

Surely in this analogy Marveletc is equivalent to imagobait widdlywiddlywoo soulless microtonal rubbish, like "look at the technique involved in this CGI bullshit" to what purpose, I ask ye?

fie upon thee

I kinda play film snob for laughs a bit but tbh the choices on this poll that I roll my eyes at I'm not eye rolling because they're popular movies or whatever

xxp if idk poppy was a cultural phenomenon with as much time, money, attention and reach as marvel, then, no sorry that still doesn't work at all.