Author: Greg DeLiso

The 10 Best Movies Ever Made

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The cinematic powers-that-be tend to decree that Citizen Kane is the best movie ever made, or sometimes Raging Bull.  I don’t have a problem with that appraisal.  It’s fun.  Lists are fun—they expose people to cool movies they may not have heard of, and cause debates over who’s the most badass horror villain from the 80s, or what the best movies for libertarians are.

However, what is annoying is that whenever these movie freemasons decide that Vertigo is the third-best movie of all time or something, it causes all the opinion-scavenging cinephiles-in-training to rant their little hearts out about how The Rules of the Game or whatever really deserves to be ranked third-best. These lists also do a good job of tricking people into thinking The Godfather is artistically superior to Back to the Future, which is ridiculous.
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My Uncle Gary, The Bargain Bin Junkie

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My dad has four brothers; the oldest, Gary, was born in 1951.  Gary was a hippie for a while, and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater (probably on acid, shh).  He’s a blue collar intellectual, a salt-of-the-earth fellow who knows about cars and Greek philosophy and cooking and political theory and electrical stuff.  Gary worked at a newspaper in Port Huron, Michigan for 25 years and then retired.  In 1985, his left index finger was severed in half by some machine.  When he removed his work glove he felt something dangling which felt like a string, and later he asked the doctor what it was, only to receive the reply, “that was your tendon, it had been pulled out”.  (That detail has no relevance to anything—I just wanted to make you shiver.)
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An Interview With Mike Jacobs, Director of ‘Audience of One’

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Audience of One (2007)

If you follow my posts at all, you’ve probably noticed that I’m fascinated by cinema vérité.  In fact, someone once told me that I used the word ‘vérité’ too many times in one of my pieces. Well fuck that.  What else are you supposed to call it?  Anyway, the concept is interesting to me: you tell a story by just filming people in their daily lives.  How do you know when to stop shooting?  Or start, even?  How much does your observation have an effect on what’s happening?  (I have a theory that Mark Borchardt finished Coven BECAUSE he was being followed by Chris Smith’s camera in American Movie).

Vérité is one of the most naked modes of storytelling.  You’re out there without a script or even an outline, you shoot on instinct and rely on your wits and intuition to build the story in your head, only to stitch it together later in your editing suite.

I was fortunate to sit down with Mike Jacobs, whose documentary, Audience of One, is one of the most fluid, interesting, and hilarious examples of cinema vérité ever made. It’s about a pentecostal pastor, Richard Gazowsky, who receives a message from God that he has to make the biggest science fiction epic of all time, telling the story of Joseph. He then embarks on this lofty pursuit with the help of his congregation, and of course, their donations. As one might assume, they run into many, many ups and downs along the way.
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The 50/50 Rule: How To Watch Movies

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I’ve tried to write this essay a million times.  In fact, I was trying to write this essay since before Cody and I even started this site.  I’m still not exactly sure why it’s been so hard, but I think it has something to do with the inherent difficulty in explaining paradoxes—in this case, the paradox of knowing a movie is gonna bad before you’ve even seen it, but also knowing that it could, technically, be good, but also knowing that it will be bad.

Every movie is a product on a shelf.  And the job of the people selling the movie is to try to convince you that it’ll be good.  But they almost always do a terrible job.  It’s not their fault, really.  I mean, how can one capture the depth and complexity of Big in three minutes?  The social security number joke just wouldn’t play in the context of a trailer.  So the powers that be are forced to not only tell you the premise, but also give you some universally funny moments that entice you to see it.  This is why the least funny scenes are in the trailer, and why stupid people laugh at these scenes like Pavlov’s dogs.
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In Defense of ‘Save The Cat’

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Steve Wiebe: one of the greatest heroes in cinema.

Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen The King of Kong (what is wrong with you?) see it before reading.

I saw The King of Kong five times in the theater, which is a record for me (I only saw Jurassic Park four times).  I saw it the night it opened at the AMC in Times Square, and the theater was about half full, which is pretty impressive for a limited release documentary.
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