FictionIsntReal

I was a Warner Bros partisan as a kid, who disliked Disney cartoons for being dull & much less funny. Toy Story seemed like just another Disney movie, just with computer animation, so I avoided subsequent Pixar films (although my family brought me along to see Up years later). I had thought that separated me from the rest of my generation, who seem to have such attachment to many Pixar films (at least with Harry Potter I read up through Goblet of Fire, even if I also only saw the first movie). I see that others are dissenting here, so I suppose I'm not alone (with Amy) in not being that impressed by the original Toy Story. Also, toys are indeed inanimate objects. It's fine to mutilate them, put them back together, blow them up, etc. Spike Jonze had the best take on Pixar-esque objects (such as their iconic lamp) in this commercial:

Don't know what the next regular episode will be.

You talk about George R. R. Martin leaving the writing of the tv show Game of Thrones to others, but he wrote an episode for each of the first four seasons.

I think Silence of the Lambs is a higher quality film on the whole, because Manhunter is flawed (the song at the very end is awful), but Manhunter is my personal preference. I'll get into some of that below. I think they're both excellent performances with different purposes. Brian Cox's version is supposed to have an impact, but then he goes away and is only of minor importance in the film. This makes sense, as he's a supporting character. In SIlence of the Lambs, he's still a supporting character and doesn't have that much more screentime, but he's the most memorable part of the film for most people. He just blows the viewer away, and Hopkins tremendous performance is a big part of that. He got hammier in Hannibal & Bret Ratner's Red Dragon, but we shouldn't let that tar his (bigger than Cox, but not bad) performance in Silence. It was category fraud that he won Best Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor, because within the story he's clearly a supporting character, with Clarice as the lead and Buffalo Bill as her antagonist. I prefer Manhunter for giving us Francis Dolarhyde as a person and not just the Red Dragon persona, whereas Jaime Gumb is a rather thin presence leaving with just his grotesque kidnapper persona. Him being a relatively thin antagonist is part of why people remember Lecter more. And if we were watching the story of Lecter vs Chilton that might be fair, but that's not this film. Incidentally, Chilton doesn't leave anything in Lecter's cell in the book. Lecter just obtains it himself somehow and smuggles it to his new prison via his mouth (which nobody is willing to check). Siskel greatly preferred Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer to Silence of the Lambs. It aims much more for gritty realism and is much less audience pleasing than Silence, which is part of why it was never as successful. If you have the stomach for movies like Silence of the Lambs & Seven, I recommend checking that out and comparing it to other movie serial killers. You definitely won't think of Henry as an awesome character who should hook up with the female lead (which is unfortunately the route Thomas Harris himself took with his next book). As long as we're discussing Thomas Harris, his first novel, Black Sunday, is atypical in that there's no Hannibal Lecter or serial killers. Lander the deranged Vietnam P.O.W did remind me a bit of Dolarhyde though and his memories of growing up in the south seemed personal to Harris. Tom Clancy basically stole the premise of Palestinian terrorists attacking the Super Bowl, although my understanding is the film adaptation of that changed things.

My parents had the vinyl LP of the music here, so soon after the AFI released their 97 list it was one of the first I sought ought. I didn't see Singin in the Rain until many years later, and I agree with others who say WSS is the more cohesive film. That's because Singin in the Rain is a jukebox musical. But I think it's a better film, with WSS just being a particularly distinctive riff on Romeo & Juliet.

It's simply not true that European immigrants were considered non-white. The very first Congress passed a naturalization act reserved for "free white persons of good moral character", which Europeans always passed. We had a explicit racial caste system, and Europeans were always officially categorized as white. Chicanos could be categorized differently depending on the time & place, but not European immigrants. Fox & Guglielmo's paper "Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–1945" goes into more detail on this.

I also prefer Holy Grail to Life of Brian for that reason. I had thought that when Amy had them face off for The Canon that the latter won, but checking wikipedia I see that the original prevailed. And there was much rejoicing!

It's not a difficult decision for me at all between Duck Soup & A Night at the Opera (which I watched last month). Focusing on anybody other than the Marx brothers in a Marx brothers movie is just foolish. I got bored whenever there was a focus on the opera singing couple, and I found myself fast-forwarding through the songs. I also think the attempt to make the Marx brothers good guys who help out the good people at the expense of the bad is foolish. They're anarchic by nature. The reason the antagonist is trying to whip Harpo is because Harpo was screwing things up for him rather than acting as his assistant. And the brothers actually knock him unconscious repeatedly. They're like Bugs Bunny, gleefully amoral and out to humiliate everyone around them.

After I saw this movie, I decided it was my favorite of all time. I wouldn't say that now, but there wasn't any specific movie that dethroned it. I still like it a whole lot better than some other movies on this list like The Graduate & Last Picture Show, but I can also see an argument that the 100 best American movies doesn't need 5 from Spielberg or quite that many war movies (although I'd note that the share of ALL stories persisted through time, going back long before the advent of film, is probably at least as weighted with war as the AFI's list). Spielberg absolutely thinks God was against the Nazi forces. Both Raiders of the Lost Ark & Last Crusade make that explicit! I also disagree that the opening is irrelevant to the rest of the film. Ryan is not our protagonist, Tom Hanks' character is, and his squad are the supporting characters. The opening puts them through a trial by fire in which many die, in an operation famous enough that the audience knows its importance. To then put that fire-forged squad into a strategically irrelevant mission to remove some guy so he won't have to face the danger we just saw makes for a contrast. Throughout the rest of the film those guys are going to be thinking about what they've been through together and that Ryan was spared (and what he will be spared from then on).

This is one of the most overrated movies I can recall seeing. I suppose the directing/editing are more interesting than Last Picture Show (which had few redeeming qualities), but Benjamin is a boring character that I can't get invested in. The later Ebert strikes me as correct, and I have to conclude the film was so popular simply because people went deranged in the late 60s. I can't think of any other explanation for why Altman's M*A*S*H was more successful than Nichols' Catch-22 (which is also far better than this film). I'd like to thank you for those Nichols & May clips. because they were also more entertaining than this movie. Amy mentions that Hoffman sometimes sounds like a robot when talking to Mrs. Robinson. Another critic writes "Today, we might call Benjamin an Aspergery nerd, a depressive, and an obsessive-compulsive stalker" (suggesting that he drew from his experiences working in a mental hospital, as he did when making Rain Man), but I don't know if anyone was grasping toward that back then. People did talk about a "generation gap", which was news to Nichols, who claims that never occurred to him while he was making the film. People above are talking about sexual assault, but this isn't really an example of that. He's an adult and he voluntarily participates in it, even if he rejects her initial overtures.

The movie I enjoyed the most in 2018 was Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds, but that had its festival debut in 2017 so I suppose it doesn't count. I don't know if it's the "best" film, so that might be First Reformed, even if it's not as enjoyable. And Taxi Driver will probably occupy its spot on any future AFI list, but that doesn't mean it's not a great movie! I think I prefer Lynn Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin (containing the most pure evil I've seen outside a horror film) to You Were Never Really Here, but that was a unique variant on a familiar sort of story, even if it doesn't complicate the protagonist like Taxi Driver did. I think I might still prefer Winter's Bone to Leave No Trace because I'm un-hip enough to like some genre elements and dialogue, but Granik's latest is still a great film in its own right and I hope she gets to continue making more like those. I also don't think I like Annihilation as much as the simplicity of Ex Machina, but I enjoyed it a good deal as well. I know there's many readings that can be made of the film, but I didn't find the ending a triumphant "overcoming of the self". And that's fine! Ex Machina wasn't written to have a happy ending either... I was surprised how much I agreed with Amy on this. I don't share the politics of Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley is actually a card-carrying communist, not merely some western European style mainstream socialist), but I thought it was a great film. BlacKkKlansman felt like watered down Spike Lee compared to something as unique as Chi-Raq. I was surprised Mission: Impossible - Fallout & Black Panther managed to get so high up in the critics list, as neither seemed comparable to most of the films there. But then I really only like De Palma's Mission: Impossible movie which avoided a lot of the James Bond nonsense the series has since embraced, and I'm not really interested in the MCU. I dug Chloe Zhao's The Rider, so I thought it's worth noting that she's been hired to direct an Immortals movie for Marvel. I would have preferred if she'd gotten something like Coogler's Creed, which balanced a larger budget with a certain amount of freedom to continue in his own style rather than some producer-driven house style. I also don't see why people lump A Quiet Place in with "elevated horror" titles. It's a creature feature with a high concept executed decently, but it's nowhere near Hereditary. I also didn't find Buster Scruggs quite so depressing. It's really just the third (my last favorite) which is miserable all the way through. The first two are comedies in which scoundrels get their just deserts (if somewhat late). All Gold Canyon had a happy ending, even if the holes he dug are ugly. And Oregon Trail segment has some sadness in it, but it isn't cynical. I suppose it's something like the flip side of All Gold Canyon. It will probably go down as minor Coen brothers, which is still better than most movies. I think Fargo should have stayed on the list.

A number of film scholars have noted that women were more prominent in the silent era than under the studio system, which strikes people as contrary to a monotonic Whiggish notion of historical progress. It can be argued that this was part of a backlash against the first wave of feminism which occurred after it was blamed for Prohibition (James Thurber was particularly prominent as a commenter on the battle-of-the-sexes at that time). Billy Wilder wasn't in Hollywood during the silent era, but when he came over there was a receptive audience for mocking a prominent actress of that time uppity enough to give orders to a man. Part of the reason many people don't remember that aspect of the silent-era is that it's attitudes toward gender were sometimes tied up in notions like the "defense of white womanhood" depicted in The Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind (the latter is admittedly not silent or even black & white). Just nine years after Sunset Boulevard came the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, made into a film a few years later and eventually mandatory classroom reading for many children, teaching them about false rape accusations as one of the tools of bigotry in our unjust society. Susan Brownmiller of "Against Our Will" was then reacting against that stereotype she'd been taught. And perhaps such cycles of cultural reaction will repeat forever, long after Weinstein is gone.

I was extremely disappointed in this, the most overrated movie I can recall seeing in a very long time. I don't see what others value in it, as I was bored & uninterested in the characters & their boring town for most of it. I guess I never got into the teen sex comedies attributed to this (though this wasn't funny enough to qualify as a comedy), but I'm able to see the merit in Lady Bird & Stand By Me (even if I would consider them more good than great). French Connection still stands as a titanic film in my book, but this is just the black & white period film Bogdanovich did before getting it right with Paper Moon. My first reaction when seeing it was to compare it to American Graffiti (due to all the music & driving), which could be considered a more minor work preceding Star Wars, but then I also think that's overrated. I think that of The Graduate too, but at least there's some interesting direction in some sequences. I also didn't think the film sympathized that much with Cybill Shepherd's character. There's a little bit of her relationship with her mom where she see how she might turn out that way, but she still seems like arguably more of a misogynist's idea of a woman than Sonny's first girlfriend. Like Amy, I didn't pick up any hints that the coach was gay, and just had to read about it on wikipedia. I initially thought his wife might have some medical problem (something the audience might care about!), but we never get any follow-up on why she's going to the doctor and she doesn't seem to deteriorate. I also read about Jeff Bridges being cast because it would contrast with his jerk of a character, but his jerkdom mostly seems limited to that one scene where he fights with Sonny. He's a more interesting actor than Timothy Bottoms, so it's a shame he wasn't the lead. I initially thought Billy was Sonny's brother, but the way everyone kept referring to him as his friend made me think perhaps that wasn't the case. I didn't have a clear sense of who they were related to, which might have contributed to my lack of enjoyment.

John Ford actually made a spiritual sequel about captives "rescued" from Indians who didn't want to return to white civilization, "Two Rode Together". However, it was a failure and he regarded it as one of his worst movies. I would think that Stagecoach is the prototypical western, while The Searchers is an attempt to add some complexity to the genre. I agree that the originally scripted ending would have been significantly better than the one we got, where it's just "surprise, he doesn't kill her".

That reminds of me of a classic Crooked Timber post in which they noted that the John Birch Society had a surprisingly accurate conception of what some elements of the US government were up to. "The Bircher view is made up of real events, but it’s got the wrong background music playing behind it, like one of those joke film trailers". wrecks is right about Burgess vs Kubrick on the 21st chapter. Burgess deliberately wrote the novel in three sections of 7 chapters each, and the whole point of the last one is that Alex is now an adult and has moved on from his youthful wildness. I read it before I saw the movie, as a highschool assignment. Unlike the Catholic Burgess, I was an ultra-Calvinist fundamentalist, who believed that most people are predestined to be damned rather than endowed with free will to choose to be good. I thought Alex should simply be executed for committing murder, and that removing his ability to cause further harm would at least be a decent substitute. By his actions he lost any right to make choices of the sort known to harm others. So I was irritated that in the last chapter he simply grew out of it rather than receiving more punishment for reverting back to his old ways after the treatment was unfortunately undone. Many years later, I'm now an atheist but still find the concept of free-will philosophically incoherent. I've also read Mark Kleiman on how excessively long prison sentences have diminishing marginal returns, in part because crime is a young man's game and many people do grow out of it. So maybe Burgess had a point, but someone as bad as Alex (and committing such severe crimes at such a young age is a predictor of being a serious baddie as an adult) is still someone I think should be removed from society rather than waiting around in hopes he'll change of his own volition. On the subject of how one perceives this sort of material, there's a british street punk band named Cock Sparrer* who did at least one performance for tv in droog getup (though nowhere near as Orange-obsessed as some other punk bands), and whose song "Riot Squad" always made me think of Alex's friends who shifted from criminal to cop. And the song does contain the same thing happening, but it was only after I actually read the lyrics that I realized that it was not intended to be a critique of the police for hiring such thugs, but instead was from the perspective of an unrepentant civilian hooligan mocking their old friend for being subject to rules & constraints in his (state-sanctioned) violence. I can still enjoy the song, but it seems more dumb & immature. *A mispronounciation of "cockney sparrow", which is rhyming slang for "best friend" so old I haven't been able to find the original rhyme. So if any of you are cockney etymologists, feel free to chime in.

I agree with the Onion's version of Meryl Streep: this is a mediocre movie that contains a great Meryl Streep performance. The whole Stingo character seems an unfortunate remnant of the origins of the story as a book, where a largely passive narrator can just fade into the background as an observer. Peter MacNichol has had some very good performances, but Stingo isn't one of them. I'm glad that Cameron H is around to remind people of the deeper themes of the movie, but those are easy to overlook because the film spends so much of its runtime in this more lackluster mode. Not as annoying as when the Not a Cast podcasters used the term to refer to Littlefinger, a literal pimp who is able to wreak havoc because a powerful woman loves him far more than she does her husband.

I don't think Lovett's comparison to Trump works, because Smith doesn't campaign on a platform of shaking things up (like the "reformer" demanded by the populace, whom the governor chooses Smith instead of). Instead he's more like a Rex Tillerson, someone who never sought ought any kind of public office and only served because he was asked to (despite knowing virtually nothing about his job and not being particularly good at it). He even got undermined by the people who appointed him! I really liked how Senator Paine is depicted as being a mostly decent person who has made compromises for what he sees as the greater good. Smith's filibuster fails to achieve the aims it was intended for, so it all comes down to Paine having that shred of decency (foreshadowed earlier) which means he can't stomach the lowest depths of what he's signed on to.

This used to be on all the time at my grandfather's house. But he also frequently watched Murphy's War, and it was easy for me to confuse the two as a kid. It seemed a solid enough movie as far as I recall, but it's been a long time since I saw it. There was a sequel made to True Grit titled Rooster Cogburn. It wasn't based on any Charles Portis novel, but instead seemed to be inspired by The African Queen. It even has Katherine Hepburn as a pious spinster on a boat filled with explosives alongside a drunk! It's just old John Wayne instead of Bogart.

Foreman wasn't someone who was merely called a communist by Jack Warner for union organizing. He had been an actual member of the CPUSA. A few years ago, I watched both of them back-to-back, and that was also my view. In both cases the female lead intervenes during the firefight, and while it's more directly lethal in the case of High Noon, that has thematic importance because she's a Quaker. Howard Hawks denounced High Noon for having the sheriff seeking help and had Chance turn down offers of help, but they all wind up helping in the end anyway, and in High Noon sheriff Kane turns down the offers of people he doesn't think are up to it (the difference being they stay out as asked). Considering its political origin, it's surprising that John Carpenter is such a fan of Rio Bravo (Assault on Precinct 13 & Vampires are both said to be his takes on it) I've read "The Tin Star", the short story High Noon is credited as being based on, and it's a superficially similar plot (although with even fewer women, since the Marhsall is a widower) with a radically different theme (the ending with the badge even seems like an intentional subversion of the short story). I had wondered why they changed the name of the protagonist from "Doane" to "Kane" when they kept the names of some minor characters. It's available online, and if you click to my earlier review of the two films you'll find the links there. I get the impression that mid-century America was more enamored of Latin American culture than would be the case later. La Bamba was a big hit, and the most popular show on tv (which codified the multicamera comedy) featured Desi Arnez as Ricky Ricardo. In the same year that Gary Cooper won Best Actor for High Noon, Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn won best Best Supporting for "Viva Zapata!". Later in the decade Disney would have a Zorro tv series. All of John Wayne's wives were Mexicans. Some sociologists wrote "Generations of Exclusion" about trends over time for US hispanics. and one thing they noted was that the older generations often identified as just "Spanish" and not that distinct from the white majority (there was even a legal argument that they should be able to attend whites-only schools for that reason). I'd cite Fox & Guglielmo on that, but that doesn't seem to be available ungated on the web anymore.

I'll see and raise you a cover of "Runnin' Riot" by a Spanish band named Travis Bickle. Poor recording quality, but punk is more about enthusiasm anyway.

De Niro hung out with some soldiers from the Midwest because he thought Travis should sound like them, in keeping with Amy's thoughts that he wasn't from New York. Your theory that he wasn't a veteran at all made me think of De Palma's "Hi, Mom!" (which I've seen and don't recommend), which ends with the deranged Jon Rubin (De Niro) arriving at the aftermath of one of his own actions and complaining that he fought in Vietnam and then has to come home to this, even though the character's previous film (which I admittedly haven't seen) was all about avoiding the draft. This was the first Scorsese film I ever saw, after I'd watched the Godfather and heard Scorsese compared to Coppola. I was disappointed at the time, but came to respect the film more when I took it for what it was rather than what I'd come in expecting. Speaking of which, I think if one Scorsese film should be removed, it's Goodfellas. I think that's a good movie, but the Godfather can represent all the mafia movies, while Taxi Driver is something else and distinctively Schrader.

All these years later, even after enjoying PTA's recent films, I still hate Magnolia's frogs. There are too many PTA movies in the Canon anyway. And since I agree with others that Hot Fuzz is better than Shaun of the Dead, my vote is for Zodiac. A master-craftsman fixated on getting the exact right takes tackles an obsessive pursuit without a Hollywood ending. We complain a lot about CGI in movies today, but Fincher does it right here (at a large scale), where the proof of its effectiveness is how unnoticeable it is.

Horror (or perhaps more specifically) Slasher films can be divided into pre & post Scream. Some have blamed it for killing horror with irony and (in the short term) creating a crop of lamer teen movie imitators, but that kind of impact is the result of canonical movies. New Nightmare may be more "meta" (and closer to Cabin in the Woods), but it didn't have the same impact. Speaking of Cabin in the Woods, I don't hate it, but I also think it leans too far into comedy to be horrific (the perfect blend is found in "You're Next"). We start out from the perspective of the technicians, so we're mostly laughing at the predicaments of the kids, but it's not so much that we're afraid when things start going wrong for them. Instead it's funny when a bunch of faceless grunts get killed by a grab bag of every goofy creature they could think of. That grab-bag approach (which can work in an Airplane style comedy, but gone overboard can result in a Friedberg & Seltzer "X Movie") makes it a commentary on horror generally rather than focusing on a specific sub-genre, so it can't be a member of a sub-genre either. An example of a movie which examines the slasher specifically while also loving slasher movies enough to be one is "Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon". It's not as polished as Scream, but I think people who enjoy one will likely enjoy the other, particularly if they want something to more explicitly grapple with the implicit ideas behind the tropes discussed in "Men, Women & Chainsaws". It is sort of like a more lighthearted version of the pitch-black Belgian comedy "Man Bites Dog", but you probably won't feel good after watching that. It seems incorrect to me to refer to Billy as an "incel"*: he's got a pretty cool girlfriend in Sidney, and it's actually a deliberate point (on the part of both the filmmakers and the character) that he deflowers her so she doesn't fit into the virginal "final girl" mold. These two actually don't fit the mold of many previous horror villains who are twisted outsiders. They're reasonably well off and popular (Randy might be popular), but morally defective and enjoying the havoc they wreak. There is a little bit of a sense in which they're returning the slasher to its roots in giallo. Those films were Hitchcockian murder-mysteries in which the mystery took a backseat to the gruesome murders and eventually was discarded to create the simple slasher. Slasher villains were often unkillable and practically inhuman, which is admittedly scarier (and part of the reason The Terminator is sometimes lumped in with them). Craven himself had made a gruesomely disfigured child-murderer back from the dead to haunt dreams in his Nightmare series. Here we begin with the Michael or Jason style mask but end with these suburban Leopold & Loebs. The reveal that it was two killers acting as a team is a good one, as each can be used to prove the other must be innocent under the assumption there's just one. It was admittedly already done in the seminal giallo "Blood & Black Lace", but slashers had reigned long enough for that to work as a surprise again. *Admittedly not as ludicrous as the Not a Cast guys using the term to refer to a character who is literally a pimp and derives much of his power from seducing a married woman away from her husband, particularly when Chett embodies the trope so much better in contrast. One possible complaint about the film is that it gave people a stereotype about the slashers which preceded it which isn't entirely accurate. The final girl being a virgin (which is part of the plot of Cabin in the Woods and the more recent The Final Girls) is an example. In Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis' character might be relatively demure, but there's no indication that teens are being punished for breaking any of the rules laid out by Scream. Michael Myers is just an indecipherable malevolence who kills anyone in his path. Friday the 13th (which I admittedly haven't seen and only heard about) DOES explicitly have a killer punishing camp counselors for screwing around rather than doing their job to save a mentally challenged kid from drowning, but the final girl isn't a virgin and still triumphs in the end. I suppose the different movies got conflated together.

I'll second Night of the Hunter. I think 2001 is a more canonical Kubrick film than Clockwork Orange. Hitchcock was the one pointed out as neglected, and I think for him we can nominate Vertigo. Psycho is another possibility, but I don't want that to run against it because they both belong in the canon. I don't think Kurosawa has been nominated yet, and while there are many samurai films of his that could get in, I would nominate Ikiru. I hesitate to nominate a Tarkovsky film, because my favorite of his is Andrei Rublev and I don't think that would get in. I'm surprised Bicycle Thieves hasn't been nominated, as that's an obvious one. I would also go with 8 1/2 over La Dolce Vita even if the self-reflexive filmmaker thing is done to death by now. Going more modern, I think Charlie Kauffman belongs in, and Synecdoche NY is probably the most Kauffman movie but might have a harder time getting in. Paddy Chayefsky also belongs in, with Network the most obvious nominee.

Perhaps Tommy the album deserves a spot in the musical canon for pioneering the rock opera (definitely not the power chord, as Townshend will always give credit to Link Wray), but I don't think the film does. It's more of a curio, serving as a precursor to music videos rather than something that really works as a feature film. Ken Russell is really more excessive than most, but he's got other excessive films which are more his vision rather than a mixture with Townshend's. I am curious what happened between Amy and MTV. I didn't grow up with cable, so I don't have the same associations with it (and other music video channels).