Cronopio

If there were a separate Canon for perfect, gentle, quiet films for young children, I'd say no. But there is only one Canon for all categories, so I'm gonna say yes - a soft, whispered, gentle yes. My six-year-old, however, told me to vote no, because "it's unfair to Totoro." But what does he know?

I love, love, love, love, this movie. Going in totally biased.

Re-Animator v. The Brood

"They Live" is why B-Movies were invented, it's fun, original, and it uses the action to dramatize its clearly obvious message. It's also a perfect time-capsule, reflective of the culture of the times, without being irrelevant today. Does it belong in the canon? I guess it depends on whether you think a legendary but imperfect, cult B-Movie deserves inclusion. I don't see a compelling reason why it shouldn't.

Suspiria

There are some great aughts horror films - like everything that's been mentioned here - and I'd like to add the Australian horror film "The Loved Ones" as an example of a great re-invention of the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" way of doing horror, by way of "Sixteen Candles". A few years back, the French film "Inside" also got a lot of well-deserved attention.

This is my six-year-old's second favorite movie (after My Neighbor Totoro) - I don't know if I could vote no.

John Carpenter is all out of bubblegum.

I would say a classic B-Movie like Edgar G. Ulmer's "Detour", Ida Lupino's "Hitch Hiker" or Jacques Torneur "Cat People" are definitely worthy of canon consideration, as well as many seminal horror movies like "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre".

I'll admit that I went into this with a certain bias, as "Some Like It Hot" was one of the greatest movie-going experiences of my life - I saw a scratchy old print of the film in 1984 in a small town in Mexico, in a cinema packed with a completely unsophisticated audience that laughed uproariously from beginning to end. Still, I tried to give "Gentleman Prefer Blondes" its due, and although I found it to be a fine movie, with some great (one might even say "iconic") moments, it didn't really come together as well as "Some Like it Hot". On its own, I might have voted yes, but against the Wilder film, no chance.

Back when I was subtitling films in Latin America, I had to translate this movie, which means I became completely sick of it - so I was surprised to find myself actually enjoying it this time around. ¿Quién es Keyser Soze?

How is this even a contest?

Maybe the Working Girl episode?

"Magnolia" vs. Altman's "Short Cuts"

I love this film, and I watch it every two years. Definitely worth a discussion.

I feel this is a film that diminishes with repeat viewings. I'll watch it with my 12 year old and let him decide.

"A Man For All Seasons" is a great film with a conservative heart. I think The Dark Knight is considered conservative because you have that "ends justify the means" approach to crime fighting, which you also find in "Dirty Harry" (maybe a canon-worthy conservative film as well?) - Batman tortures and engages in illegal surveillance whilst fighting an anarchist. In "The Dark Knight Rises" Nolan presents us with a world in which when you take away the police and the industrialists, the world descends into a chaotic reign of terror.

I saw the film twice when it came out in 1991, because I went back to see what it was that I was missing – I had found it to be didactic, manipulative, and poorly made. My opinion didn't change on that second viewing, or when I saw it again this weekend. The directing felt uninspired and the camera-work was downright shoddy. For every good moment in the script, there was another one of such heavy-handed didacticism that the film seemed to collapse under its good intentions. The film I wished I was watching was a film about the young Furious Styles, fathering a child at 17, going to Vietnam, coming home and fighting to find his way in a society that is rigged against him – I want to see how that kid became that man. I would watch that film. It would be magnificent. Though the specific setting was something not seen much in films at that point, even back then you could compare it to films about impoverished youths living in risky neighborhoods, like Los Olvidados, Pixote, and Mamma Roma, and Boyz N The Hood just came up short both by comparison and on its own merits. This episode was a tough listen for me. Even though I agreed with Devin, I think he overplayed his hand. And I understand what Amy is saying, about the virtues of a young filmmaker who has something to say and goes out and makes a film, even if his technique isn't developed. The thing is, there is a film made by a young African American director who was still in film school and had a burning desire to tell a story and portray a marginalized group of people, a film set in south central and made on a budget, a film that is heartbreaking and poetic despite its shortcomings. But that film isn't "Boyz N The Hood", it's Charles Burnett's "Killer of Sheep".

I agree, and I didn't set out to cross-reference, I was just listening to older episodes because I'm a pretty new listener. This jumped out at me because Devin was so adamant in stating his philosophy of criticism when he said that the death of the artist is the only way you can approach criticism (a statement I agree with) that you kind of expect him to really mean it. If not, it's just unfair to Amy.

About the aspirin bottle fiasco: I am on Devin's side on this argument, and his point about how it is foolish to go look outside the film for explanations is correct - the bottles are in the film without explanation and you should infer meaning only from the context that the film provides. But I was listening to past episodes and on the "Blade Runner" episode, Devin does just what he derides here. He complains that the title of the film is meaningless because he read an interview with Ridley Scott in which he said that the title came from another novel, and he used it because he thought it was cool. Devin then proceeds to use the exact same reasoning Amy uses regarding the aspirin bottles. It seems a bit hypocritical, or, at best, inconsistent.

Amy likes Paltrow, but not the character.

I think one of the more remarkable things about SEVEN is that you have a director and his collaborators working on a screenplay that is beneath their talents, but they are never condescending to the material. Quite the opposite, they embrace the B-Movie schlock and go all in, fully committed. You never get the sense that anybody here feels like they're slumming it and they achieve a film that rises above the script and achieves some kind of cinematic purity. Regardless of whether the scenes are logical, or have a deeper meaning, as a viewer you are always in the moment, emotionally and physically, the textures are tangible and the revulsion is visceral. For me, Fincher's greatest contribution may be the pacing, achieved in camera and through editing, especially in the last ten minutes of the film where it becomes excruciating. His work here reminds me of Fritz Lang and the way he also elevated B-Movie scripts into works of art through the force of his craft. (And I bet M is an influence on SEVEN) The visuals always get a lot of credit in this film, and rightly so, but the sound design, which didn't get mentioned in the episode because we were discussing aspirin bottles, goes a long way in creating the atmosphere and a sense of the life of the city. I read that the sound designer wrote scenes, hired actors, recorded their voices, and then took those recordings and played them in real locations and re-recorded them to create the conversations of the neighbors in the back-ground. I remember watching this in the movie theater and feeling like I was really in that city, because of the sound work. Without fully disagreeing with Amy about the superficiality of the screenplay, this is an easy yes for me.

Johnny Guitar!

I was born in 1969 and saw this film in the 1970's when I sneaked into a movie theater in Mexico City because I wanted to know why my dad, a dentist, loved it so much. It turns out he loved Olivier's performance. The phrase "Is it safe?" has always been a part of my general pop culture references, and one time when my dad was going to put in a filling he joked "is it safe?" as he moved toward me with his drill (but in his heavy Mexican accent, "ees eet seif?"). None of which is reason to vote it into the canon, but I just thought I'd share my issues with dentists as father figures - I once had a nightmare that Darth Vader was checking out my cavities. I do agree with Devin that films with three of four great sequences are sometimes worthy of being considered. I do not think this is as good a paranoid conspiracy thriller as The Parallax View, and I might have preferred an episode on Polanski's "The Tenant" if we were doing a 1976 film, but I can't deny that this is a film that I've only watched three times in 38 years and it has always stayed with me because of scenes like the car chase where the German and the Jewish man play out their hatred in a road-rage incident, the fight scene in the hotel, the torture scene, the sequence where Babe escapes and they chase him with the car, and the scene where Szell is recognized in the diamond-district. These are all pretty memorable. I think the cinematography by Conrad Hall is great, naturalistic, understated, and some of the shots support Devin's thesis that this is a film that links the past and future in thrillers. There's a shot in the bank vault at the beginning of the film that shows the banker putting the security deposit box in its place, then the camera tracks with his hand, which is holding the key as he gives it back to Szell's brother. It plays like a Hitchcock shot in its style and precision, like an older Hollywood film. And this is intercut with the shot of Babe running by the reservoir. Filmed with a steadicam - still a new invention at the time - the shot has the feel of a newer, grittier New York style of film. And the movie moves back and forth between these styles. For example, the garroting scene in the hotel feels very contemporary, with its handheld camera and brutal, quick editing, but the scene outside the opera where Roy Scheider tells his contact that they are compromised feels like a classic Hitchcock set-up. Ultimately I voted yes because the film has stayed with me, and I think dentists need a film they can root for in the canon. This vote is for my dad.

Watching the film again after many years, I had mixed feelings about it - the staging and framing of the scenes which I remembered as being very astutely executed, seemed diminished and obvious at times, but on the other hand the Western iconography seemed more appropriate than I remembered. I know Amy talked about the cinematography being all about the pretty vistas and the postcard images, but I think it serves the story well to frame such an intimate story within these monumental landscapes because the scenery is quintessentially American and seems to invite freedom, but the characters are trapped and repressed by their circumstances and standing in opposition to conventional ideas of manliness that you associate with this kind of imagery. Sure, the scene where they tell each other that they are not queer could have been filmed under an unassuming tree, or against an unremarkable pile of rocks, but with the valley stretching out before them and the waning light, the moment, which could be completely banal, already hints at the fragility of this paradise they have created for themselves.