Tag: raging bull

The 10 Best Movies Ever Made

kane


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.
Continue reading The 10 Best Movies Ever Made

Netflix Longies #2 (Thunder Soul, 26 Years: The Dewey Bozella Story, Rolling Thunder, Mobsters, Batman: The Movie)

If you don’t know what Netflix Longies is, go read the first paragraph of Netflix Longies #1. I don’t feel like having to write it out again or copy and paste it or whatever. Anyway, here we go:

thunder

Thunder Soul (2010) | Dir. Mark Landsman | 83 min.

I’m big into soul and R&B and funk and whatnot. Earth Wind & Fire, Frankie Beverly, Blue Magic, The Stylistics, Tavares, The Commodores—the list goes on. That’s the kind of music I was raised on, instead of Raffi or Barney or whatever. And there’s a channel on Time Warner Cable, in the MusicChoice section, called R&B Classics (channel 608 in NYC) and pretty much every night I’m listening to that while working on my laptop. It’s just calming as all hell.
Continue reading Netflix Longies #2 (Thunder Soul, 26 Years: The Dewey Bozella Story, Rolling Thunder, Mobsters, Batman: The Movie)

10 Movies Nobody Has Seen (Because Nobody Cares About Them)

under


Sometime in the year 2000, I went to the movies, and I don’t even remember what I ended up seeing because one of the previews left such a profound mark on me that what followed has been erased from my memory.  The preview was for Under the Tuscan Sun, and when it came on all I could think was, ”who the fuck would ever want to see this movie?”.  That moment crystalized my understanding of the irrelevant.

The movies on this list are not famously bad like Plan 9 From Outer Space.  And they’re not notorious flops like Ishtar and Bonfire of the Vanities.  In fact, there’s nothing remotely memorable about them.  They just sort of exist, but it’s hard to believe they do, because nobody talks about them.  In a way, they’re much worse than awesomely bad triumphs like The Room and Troll 2, because those movies at least found an audience.  These movies are so wholly uninteresting in every way that they aren’t even worth making fun of.

If you’ve seen any of the following movies, please let me know.  You’ll be the first person ever to have seen them, and will be given an award as their respective patient zero.
Continue reading 10 Movies Nobody Has Seen (Because Nobody Cares About Them)

The 10 Nicest Movies Ever Made (If These Movies Don’t Make You Cry, You Have a Black Heart)

1083_019971.jpg

Field of Dreams. The undisputed king, for sure. But here’s ten other great ones.

It was a really tricky thing putting this together because they’re ranked on niceness, not goodness.  Number two and number five are the best movies on the list.  But they aren’t the nicest.

Niceness is even harder to define than coolness.  Niceness is a warm and fuzzy feeling that a lot of art can generate.  Probably the most popular example would be Norman Rockwell paintings. Niceness, like coolness, taps into our primal brains somewhere.  We’re wired to feel it because it connects us to each other.  But the problem with niceness is that it borders so heavily on cheese.  Cheese done right is transcendent.  But cheese done wrong is, well, cheesy.
Continue reading The 10 Nicest Movies Ever Made (If These Movies Don’t Make You Cry, You Have a Black Heart)

A Rebuttal to a Rebuttal: Favorite Equals Best, or, Why Back To The Future is Better Than The Godfather

donkey


John,

I’ve been interested in movies for as long as I can remember.  The story I tell is that Jurassic Park started it all.  It certainly didn’t hurt, but movies had definitely been on my mind for way longer than that.  And my parents and grandparents were both movie buffs, so when the AFI released their ill-conceived 100 Best Movies of the First 100 Years of Movies, it was the talk of our family for an entire Thanksgiving dinner.  I was ten or twelve at the time.  By the time I was fifteen, I had seen 92 of the movies listed.
Continue reading A Rebuttal to a Rebuttal: Favorite Equals Best, or, Why Back To The Future is Better Than The Godfather