Michael Elliott

My vote for the greatest film goes back and forth but for the past 2 or 3 years it's been ON THE WATERFRONT. At one time RAGING BULL was #1 followed by BRIDE but I didn't watch BULL for a few years so I slipped it down to #3 and moved BRIDE to #2 and WATERFRONT at #1. Still with me?

After watching BULL again, I now put it at #2 with WATERFRONT at #1, BRIDE at #3 and 12 ANGRY MEN at #4. I haven't taken the time to think out the rest but some candidates would be: THE GENERAL, SUNRISE, CITY LIGHTS, KANE and PSYCHO. There are many others I'd have to consider as well. THE OX BOW INCIDENT would probably make my list since it's the greatest film I've ever seen that doesn't have the reputation it deserves. With my recent viewing of THE CAMERAMAN, it might make the list and remove one of the Chaplin's, probably MODERN TIMES.



As we've discussed, I usually keep my "greatest" list and "favorites" list seperate. My favorite movie of all time is ANNIE HALL and other things like PLAN 9, FRANK MEETS THE WOLF MAN, THE WOLF MAN, MANHATTAN, nearly any John Carradine plus all those Lugosi Monogram films. I mean, hell, I've watched BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA more times than CITIZEN KANE. Kubrick is one of my favorite filmmakers and I love his films but I need to be in the right mood for them so they don't get as many viewings as something like THE APE MAN, which is just a favorite of mine.

Re: LAST TANGO IN PARIS

I pretty much agree with what Mario said but I think the performance is so great that I can overlook the flaws. The biggest flaw is EVERYTHING with the boyfriend, which is just boring and really stops the film in its tracks. I use to not enjoy the woman but on my last viewing, I think she does a fine job. The jail house scene in RAGING BULL and the coffin scene in LAST TANGO are the greatest examples of pure acting IMO.

Mario, I'm not sure if you've read Brando's bio but he said he quite acting because he gave too much in his performance in TANGO. He said the method acting and putting himself through that pain made he never want to act again or at least in nothing as serious. He also mentions a scene that was cut from the film. At one point he was suppose to stand nude in front of the camera with a hard on but it was so cold in the apartment he couldn't get it up. He said he tried everything for a couple hours but he couldn't "rise up" so they simply didn't shoot the scene. He said this was his most embarrassing moment of his career.

I also agree with Mario when it comes to why Hepburn won the Oscar, although I still think her performance was great. THE SPENCER TRACY LEGACY and KATHARINE HEPBURN: ALL ABOUT ME both feature Hepburn saying the same thing. As for the film, sorry but it's a four star film to me. I think the story still holds up very well today and once again, you've got my opinion of the third greatest actor delivering an incredible final performance. The final speech is right on the mark and as I said earlier in this thread with Tracy in THE HARD GUY, it's really amazing how much power he could bring to a film. I've got 7 unwatched Tracy films here so I can't wait to dig into them especially one called THE SEVENTH CROSS. I also think the Hepburn/Tracy lineup is near flawless. WOMAN OF THE YEAR would be my favorite followed by GUESS, ADAM'S RIB and then WITHOUT LOVE, which I found very underrated. PAT AND MIKE is decent but both actors have better films to see first.

I'm actually quite upset with myself for not checking these Bergman films out earlier because after WS, I jumped most of his films to the top of my Netflix list. PERSONA, CRIES AND WHISPERS and another one I can't think of at the moment. I've had FANNY AND ALEXANDER: CRITERION here since Christmas but haven't sat down to watch it yet. Hopefully I'll be off work this weekend. You should really check out that documentary on the WS disc because it's really shocking to see how much he talks about his personal life. Even with only seeing one Bergman film, it's was easy to tell how much he put into these films.

As for DRACULA, the film has no atmosphere after you've seen the wonderful Spanish version. Browning, IMO, couldn't direct a sound film to save his life and I'm also talking about THE DEVIL DOLL, FREAKS and MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. He's one of my favorite silent director's and THE UNKNOWN is one of the greatest horror films ever made IMO. When Weaver said a couple cast members said they didn't remember Browning directing them then I realized he didn't. These sound films have nothing visually like the early silents and you can go back to his first film, 1914's BY THE SUN'S RAYS, an early short with Lon Chaney.

As for Bela, I love the guy but when it comes to him playing Dracula I'll always remember him in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. I also prefer RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE over the 1931 film.

IMDB Reviews

Joe Karlosi

Now that you've told us your choice of top films, what are the actors again? I'm pretty sure Marlon Brando is your #1, but who is the second - is it DeNiro?


I have at least one Hepburn/Tracy film poised in my queue for the next shipment!


Well, I'd say the opening 15 minutes, at least, are dripping with atmosphere. And the Spanish version isn't so wonderful once you lose Lugosi!


I've seen all the above films so far except DEVIL DOLL, and I have to agree that THE UNKNOWN was the best directed Browning movie I've seen so far.


I was going to bring this up. David Manners, who died only fairly recently, said he never recalled being directed by Browning, but actually Karl Freund! Since Freund directed THE MUMMY (which, to me is just as slow as DRACULA after the first 10 or 15 minutes) I wonder!

Haggai

I've only seen the movie once, in a theater about 5 or 6 years ago, but I actually really enjoyed the subplot with the boyfriend. I thought it was a very funny caricature of the creative/pretentious Euro filmmaker set that Bertolucci was very much a part of. The character might have been based more on Truffaut than on anyone else, but perhaps I'm thinking that because it was played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, who was famous for starring in Truffaut's "Antoine Doinel" films.



Lots of great Bergman out there. There was a festival of his films in the DC area last summer, and I went to several of them. One that particularly blew me away was The Naked Night (also known as Sawdust and Tinsel, I think in the UK), which was an early film of his, from '53. I guess it hasn't been preserved too well over the years, since the print that was shown at the National Gallery of Art wasn't very good (as opposed to a few other great prints they showed, particularly The Virgin Spring, which was mind-blowingly perfect, maybe the best 35-mm print I've ever seen of any film). Hopefully it'll be restored in a nice DVD sometime. The Naked Night might be considered a sort of "hidden gem" in the Bergman ouvre, as I suspect that it hasn't been all that widely seen.

Films watched in 2007 | 2006 | 2005

george kaplan

This rarely happens to me, but I just saw a movie I'm on the fence about - Vanilla Sky.

Usually it's a simple matter when I'm done watching a film to give it a or a , because either I clearly want to see the film again (and immediately add it to my to-buy list), or I have zero desire to do so. But every once in a while there's a film like this where I just can't decide. I kept going back and forth while watching it - I'd get into it, and then it'd do something that made no sense and pissed me off and my opinion would change. Now if the ending had been Blow-Upish, then this would be a no-brainer. But this actually had a clear ending that made sense and put all the film into context. I just can't decide if it's a film that I'd enjoy rewatching or not. I'm giving it a tentative since I'm not immediately going to go out and buy it, but I'm going to ruminate a bit, and I might change it to a in a few days.

"Movies should be like amusement parks. People should go to them to have fun." - Billy Wilder

"Subtitles good. Hollywood bad." - Tarzan, Sight & Sound 2012 voter.

"My films are not slices of life, they are pieces of cake." - Alfred Hitchcock

"My great humility is just one of the many reasons that I am vastly superior to everyone else." - Ramrod Clerk

Joe Karlosi

Too bad there isn't a "sideways" thumb option

SteveGon

The Grudge (2004)

Viewed 2/14/2005 (first viewing)

American remake of the Japanese horror hit Ju-On. It's a creepy ghost story with a couple of decent scares, but Sarah Michelle Gellar is a rather ineffectual lead (not that she has much to do). No better or worse than the original.

out of


The Village (2004)

Viewed 2/14/2005 (first viewing)

M. Night Shyamalan's fourth outing caught a lot of flak, but I enjoyed it more than most. Difficult to discuss without spoiling it. Underrated.

out of

Recently viewed films:

Loves of the Living Dead **
The Supernaturals **
Noctem **
O.C. Babes and the Slasher of Zombietown Bomb!
The Vanguard **

Zombie Movie Appreciation Thread

Mario Gauci

Since Mike has basically given us here the 12 films he considers to be the greatest ever, I thought I'd oblige by naming mine...only my list is made up of 13 titles:

1. THE OLD DARK HOUSE (James Whale, 1932)/BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (James Whale, 1935) - 3/8
2. THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (Luis Bunuel, 1972) - 4
3. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) - 5
4. HIS GIRL FRIDAY (Howard Hawks, 1940) - 5
5. CITIZEN KANE (Orson Welles, 1941) - 6
6. THE RULES OF THE GAME (Jean Renoir, 1939) - 3
7. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) - 3
8. M (Fritz Lang, 1931) - 5
9. NOSFERATU (F. W. Murnau, 1922) - 4
10. A MAN ESCAPED (Robert Bresson, 1956) - 3
11. SANSHO THE BAILIFF (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954) - 2
12. THE SCARLET EMPRESS (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) - 2

For the benefit of Joe Karlosi, I followed the films' titles by their directors' names, the year of release and the number of times I've watched them (since he obviously expects such thoroughness of me). Besides, since most of the ones he hasn't watched are, thankfully, available on R1 DVD, he may eventually choose to add a few of them to his increasingly impressive Netflix queue. Furthermore, my No. 1 choice(s) should leave no doubt as to where my cinematic tastes lie.

While my list of favorites would include practically all of the titles I've mentioned above, it would necessarily be a lot longer and I opted not to mention any here off the top of my head (unless pressed) in case I leave some of them out. Suffice it to say that my list would look a LOT different than yours, Mike...and Joe's too (given that we've discussed this topic often enough on another Forum).


Re: Last Tango In Paris

As I understand it (but I could be wrong), Jean-Pierre Leaud's character is supposed to have been a caricature of cine-verite` film-makers, which probably stems from a sense of betrayal Bertolucci felt towards his idol, Jean-Luc Godard, who had by that point - TOUT VA BIEN (1972) notwithstanding - completely abandoned mainstream film-making in favor of cinematic essays based on Marxist ideology; the fact that Leaud had by then already appeared in 8 of Godard's films was not lost on Bertolucci, I'm sure.

With regards to Maria Schneider, while I think that Brando's tremendous performance demanded an equally great one from his female counterpart, I too liked her better the second time around. Of particular interest to me is the fact that Schneider (whose father was noted French actor, Daniel Gelin) was Bunuel's second choice - after Isabelle Adjani turned him down! - for the female lead in his last film, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977); she actually did shoot some scenes for the picture but was eventually fired because her drug dependency was getting in the way of her performance.

Mike, I assume that you got that story from Brando's autobiography, "Songs My Mother Taught Me". While I don't have that book, I've read 3 books on Brando which, unfortunately, were published just after TANGO's release...which also goes to show how high a tide of critical and popular renaissance he was riding at the time after a decade of "lesser" pictures. However, that very sequence you describe illustrates all the more clearly what my beef is with the film: sheer pretentiousness, pure and simple. Marco Ferreri must have been close by when they tried to film that because Gerard Depardieu spends most of THE LAST WOMAN (1976) walking butt-naked in his apartment spouting existential philosophy and eventually chops off his honker in despair! Now that's entertainment!


Re: Spencer Tracy

While my favorite of the Tracy/Hepburn collaborations would be ADAM'S RIB (1949), I've watched all of them but Frank Capra's STATE OF THE UNION (1948). Have you watched that one by any chance, Mike? As for THE SEVENTH CROSS (1944), you're in for a treat: unjustly forgotten nowadays, it features a great cast and an excellent, intense performance by Tracy.


Re: Ingmar Bergman

I'm glad that your positive experience with WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957) has led you to seek out more of Bergman's films so soon. As for myself, I've watched all his major films except for SAWDUST AND TINSEL aka THE NAKED NIGHT (1953) and SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973; which, as I said earlier, I should be catching up with soon). Furthermore, I've seen several Bergman interviews by now to know that he's always that direct in his answers.