I found myself drawn to a few lists (I’m a total sucker for them) in two British mainstream film magazines recently, thought they’d make good discussion starters.
The 60 Best Looking Films Ever: The order is messed up and they only seem to pick one film per director, but it’s got a fair few of my favourites in there. Nice idea though, anyone want to throw in their thoughts on what they’ve missed off? I think Andrei Rublev should have been in there, or at least something from Tarkovsky (I’ve only seen that to be honest, but I imagine his other work also looks stunning).
The 100 Best Films of World Cinema: A pretty tall order knocking up a list like this, but I was surprised to see one or two titles in there that I haven’t heard of (mainly African ones, I have very little knowledge of films from that continent). The order is a joke though, Infernal Affairs for example is stupidly high (it shouldn’t even be there in my opinion) and a lot of the films listed are obvious crossover success titles, but again it’d be interesting to hear people’s thoughts.
10 Coolest Movie Premakes: This one’s just a bit of fun really, a bunch of trailers for modern films rehashed from clips of old films.
I went through the entire Empire world cinema list yesterday. The order is indeed jokes (Breathless at 75?! Persona at 71?! 8 1/2 at 62?!) and I spotted an embarrassing number of grammatical and factual errors. Some of the choices are a tad predictable (Breathless and Band of Outsiders are the only two Godards I saw, and I was not the least bit surprised by the top two picks), but on the other hand, I liked that they at least tried to mix some high-brow films (e.g. the two Tarkovsky picks) in with the more popular choices.
But as flawed as it is, it’s still kinda fun to look through it, see what made the cut and be reminded of some of the great films of world cinema.
Sites that make me load 100 pages to read a top 100 list really piss me off. Fucking assholes.
The 60 Best Looking Films list was a fun read (though I concur with Jonathan about forcing you to click through each individual entry – that may be the last time I put up with that). Having The Third Man that low seemed a bit ridiculous, but I won’t quibble with placings. It is too bad that they restrict it to one entry per director, but it’s great to see “Young Girls Of Rochefort”, “The Red Shoes”, “Ran” and “The Assassination Of Jesse James”.
Some that spring to mind:
Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari
Passion Of Joan Of Arc
Man With A Movie Camera
M
Vampyr
Beauty And The Beast (or anything by Cocteau)
Any of Val Lewton’s 40s horrors (“Cat People” or “I Walked With A Zombie” in particular)
Ugetsu
Kwaidan
Playtime
Wages Of Fear
Bigger Than Life
Night Of The Demon
Black Orpheus
Last Year At Marienbad (there’s no excuse really for leaving this off)
Black Sunday
L’Avventura
I Am Cuba
Black Sabbath
Magnolia
Songs From The Second Floor
Werckmeister Harmonies
Yeah the ‘one film per page’ thing is a pain in the arse, especially with lists of 100 but I had fun flicking through these.
For the record, THE FALL is absolutely stunning to behold.
“For the record, THE FALL is absolutely stunning to behold.”
Visually, it is…Story and acting wise, it is the complete opposite.