Watch the 100 greatest films

(1956)
I actually like this film a lot, other than a slight lapse of understanding. Are the pod people supposed to be killing and replacing their victims? In which case, why does thingy turn into one just by falling asleep when there’s no pod nearby, and what becomes of her body?
Still, I’m prepared to be charitable, although K, I fear, will be much less forgiving.

the good the bad and the ugly!

FINALLY!

It was very weird to watch it thinking that so many things which are now cliche were new at the time (e.g.the shifting eye sequence at the end, the soundtrack), but surprisingly satisfactory nonetheless!

Over the Christmas break we watched lord of the rings, which, alas only counts as one film on the top 100 list!
I slept half way through all three, naturally.

Of much higher importance, however, is the news that we’ve just watched Children of Men, which is not on the top 100 list, but should be. I urge you all to go and track it down! Brilliant! The sort of film that makes me want to find more films like it, even though it means risking an awful lot of bad films along the way.

So now I have two truly excellent films to go in my cinematic repository: children of men, and Aguirre, wrath of God.

to progress with this goal, honest, but the problem is I go for a bath and come back to find K is half way through Iron Man or something. The other day I only narrowly avoided watching the incredible hulk!! :0 And all the while, the good the bad and the ugly remains sitting on my hard disk like a lonesome ugly duckling….

The Princess Bride last night. Surely that counts?

I had marked this up as next to watch on the list. Have just realised that where I thought it said 1.5 hours, it actually says 15.
Now, I’m only doing this film-related goal malarky as a means of convincing myself that cinema is not the festering den of squalid, gratuitous tedium that too many modern Hollywood experiences have led me to believe. I think that, so early on in my odyssee, a film comprising almost two thirds of an entire day might be pushing it a bit. Good god, even if I sat down and watched all three extended versions of LOTR back to back, it wouldn’t take as long as this one, and we all know what the chances of my sitting down and watching all three extended versions of LOTR back to back are. About the same as my not having just eaten a cinnamon bagel when, in fact, I just did. That is to say, mathematically zero.
I see that Finding Nemo is also on the list, so maybe I’ll skip the rest of the Bs and just watch that instead.

The final Final definitively final cut.

Liked this film very much! I like the original Noir films, so this was right up my (incessently rained upon) street. Worryingly, we’re probably not far off that kind of distopian streetscape ourselves. Some of the graphics look a bit dated now, but somehow that only adds to its charm. Wish more films spent less on peripheral graphics and more on the atmosphere of the universe we’re supposed to be suspending disbelief of. Also, can’t get over the fact that Harrison Ford was so young and handsome! I just can’t help thinking of him as perpetually rugged and middleaged.

I might even watch it again!

If they’re all this good, the other 97 are going to fly by!

Brilliant! Brilliant! _{Leaps around the room in glee at having found such a brilliant film} Not that my glee is in any sense appropriate in the context of the film itself, but oh, it was brilliant!

It sounds stupid, but the thing I loved most of all was the lack of any “hey, this is dangerous music, do you hear me? There’s an arrow on its way any minute!” and “these people are feeling oppressed by the river, in case you hand’t noticed” soundtrack. The only music was this sort of ethereallyish chanting-y stuff every now and then when they were going in procession, and the brilliantly incongruous man on the pan pipes.
You just know that if they remade it now they would never allow the sound of water flowing gently and splashing against the raft to be heard for such long periods of time.

I loved the minimalism of it, the way everything was stripped down to the bare minimum to emphasise that that’s what the story was, after all: a dwindling to minimum, on every level.

I think it would take a brave director nowadays to risk coupling the film’s lack of real “plot” with an expanse of unchanging scenary, and the same limited cast of characters, hardly speaking, left drifting without any avant garde camera shots or flashbacks or anything like that to keep the audience’s interest.
But of course, it’s Herzog who has the last laugh, because I was utterly gripped.
It’s only when the final, sweeping camera shots swoop back over the raft that you realise how restrained Herzog has been throughout the descent with his unintrusive shooting; it makes for a brilliant contrast to show you how far down they have gone. He takes you down with him so skillfully and gradually that nothing seems out of place other than the ridiculous incongruousies of the Spanish themselves.
God, it’s brilliant!
A masterpiece of understatement!

I think it might just be the best film I’ve ever seen!

those bastions of film knowledge, Time Magazine. Mainly because it’s the first international list that google threw at me.
I’m tired of having conversation after conversation along the lines of
Mystery conversationalist: have you seen film X
Me: no
Mystery conversationalist: you mean you’ve never seen film x?
Me: I think that’s what I just said, yes.
Mystery conversationalist: What about film Y?
Me: no.
Mystery conversationalist: what about films z, za, a, ac, d, fg, h, hhh, j, and s the fifteenth?
Me: hmmm…no.

When browsing the list I was pleased to see that most of them were pre-1990. This afforded me the twin satisfactions of (a) thinking that I might actually enjoy watching some of them in their ye olde worlde editing glory _{what’s that, a shot, lasting, uninterrupted, for more than one minute; a director who credits the audience with possessing an attention span slightly higher than that of an ADHD goldfish?} and (b)feeling justified in my scorn for modern cinema.

Yesterday, don’t you know, we watched Citizen Kane, and it was jolly different from what I’d been expecting. For some reason, I’d got it into my head that it was a dystopian epic along the lines of 1984. Maybe I’d subconsciously shortened Orson Welles to Orwell, who knows. Anyway, it was a good choice with which to begin my epic journey into film knowledgableness, and an interesting study on how cinematography can enhance a story (as oppose to just working to disguise a weak plot and poor performances). The lighting was fascinating, especially because we were actually granted the luxury of being able to observe it develop within a scene rather than just being jolted from one rush to another for no discernible reason at all.
Hurrah for cinema! _{said in syutably 1940s BBC English}

not sure what list I’d use, but always getting the feeling there’s a lot of classics out there which i’ve never seen . . . can’t call myslef a true film buff til I’ve done this! :)