Well, I'm back. Vacations usually throw me off, undoing all my routines, and this one did more than most, thanks to some odd hours and rather unusual burst of enthusiasm for old book hunting. Today went a long ways toward getting me back to my movie geek ways: A Werner Herzog triple feature - all about strangers in strange lands - which might describe every single film he's ever made. Most of them, these strangers take a voyage through a hostile land, hated and pursued by the natives of the land, and the land itself - when the voyage is less literal (as in Kasper Hauser), the voyage is supplied through dreams and stories. Rescue Dawn, then, fits his career as well as any of them. It may not be up to his masterpieces (17 and 32 below; also 66), but it works, nonetheless.
Meanwhile: I see more Best Films Ever lists are going around - inspired, I see, by Cinema Fusion. It takes a lot less than that to get me to post a list. I admit this may not exactly correlate with my American list, but that's okay. This is all fairly approximate, though I'm prone to fretting the top 20-30.... It is, though, a fair attempt at listing 100 films in order, as of this week. I didn't make a lot of rules for myself - feature length, and I dropped the 2000's films: Two were definitely making the cut - Inland Empire (probably in the 50s) and Yi Yi (low 70s) - the next 3 or 4 hover around the end of the list. I figured I'm better off giving them time. That's it. The top ten hasn't really changed for 7-8 years, and most of it goes back 10 or so - the Godard film has changed a couple times; Ozu slipped in in the late 90s... I sometimes wonder if it's just habit, listing the same films like that: if so, I'd probably reorder the top 5 as: McCabe - M - Early Summer - Mr. Smith - Rules...
1) It's a Wonderful Life - 1946 - Capra, Frank - USA
2) M - 1931 - Lang, Fritz - Germany
3) Rules of the Game - 1939 - Renoir, Jean - France
4) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - 1939 - Capra, Frank - USA
5) McCabe and Mrs Miller - 1971 - Altman, Robert - USA
6) Early Summer - 1951 - Ozu Yasujiro - Japan
7) My Life to Live - 1963 - Godard, Jean-Luc - France
8) General, the - 1925 - Keaton & Bruckman - USA
9) Vertigo - 1958 - Hitchcock, Alfred - USA
10) Maltese Falcon - 1940 - Huston, John - USA
11) Duck Soup - 1933 - McCarey, Leo - USA
12) Seven Samurai - 1955 - Kurosawa, Akira - Japan
13) Pornographers - 1966 - Imamura, Shohei - Japan
14) City of Sadness - 1989 - Hou Hsiao Hsien - China Taiwan
15) Late Spring - 1949 - Ozu Yasujiro - Japan
16) His Girl Friday - 1940 - Hawks, Howard - USA
17) Aguirre Wrath of God - 1973 - Herzog, Werner - Germany
18) Gospel According to Matthew - 1964 - Pasolini, Pier Paolo - Italy
19) Blue Velvet - 1986 - Lynch, David - USA
20) High and Low - 1963 - Kurosawa, Akira - Japan
21) Playtime - 1967 - Tati, Jacques - France
22) Ugetsu - 1953 - Mizoguchi Kenji - Japan
23) Woman Under the Influence - 1974 - Cassavetes, John - USA
24) Touch of Evil - 1958 - Welles, Orson - USA
25) Nosferatu - 1922 - Murnau, FW - Germany
26) Nashville - 1975 - Altman, Robert - USA
27) Searchers - 1956 - Ford, John - USA
28) Tokyo Story - 1953 - Ozu Yasujiro - Japan
29) Rear Window - 1954 - Hitchcock, Alfred - USA
30) Sun's Burial - 1960 - Oshima Nagasi - Japan
31) Pierrot Le Fou - 1965 - Godard, Jean-Luc - France
32) Every Man for Himself and God Against All - 1975 - Herzog, Warner - Germany
33) Pather Panchali - 1955 - Ray, Satyajit - India
34) Insect Woman - 1963 - Imamura Shohei - Japan
35) Big Sleep (Released Version) - 1946 - Hawks, Howard - USA
36) Alphaville - 1965 - Godard, Jean-Luc - France
37) Breathless - 1959 - Godard, Jean-Luc - France
38) Killer of Sheep - 1977 - Burnett, Charles - USA
39) Night of the Hunter - 1955 - Laughton, Charles - USA
40) Rushmore - 1998 - Anderson, Wes - USA
41) Bride of Frankenstein - 1935 - Whale, James - USA
42) Fort Apache - 1948 - Ford, John - USA
43) I Was Born But... - 1932 - Ozu Yasujiro - Japan
44) Late Chrysanthemums - 1954 - Naruse Mikio - Japan
45) Breaking the Waves - 1996 - von Trier, Lars - Denmark
46) Citizen Kane - 1940 - Welles, Orson - USA
47) Sweet Smell of Success - 1959 - McKendrick, Alexander - USA
48) Elephant Man - 1980 - Lynch, David - USA
49) Gold Rush - 1925 - Chaplin, Charlie - USA
50) Rebel without a Cause - 1955 - Ray, Nicholas - USA
51) Celine and Julie Go Boating - 1973 - Rivette, Jacques - France
52) Ivan the Terrible I - 1941 - Eisenstein, Sergei - USSR
53) Frankenstein - 1931 - Whale, James - USA
54) Imitation of Life - 1959 - Sirk, Douglas - USA
55) Killing of a Chinese Bookie - 1976 - Cassavetes, John - USA
56) Long Goodbye - 1973 - Altman, Robert - USA
57) Love Me Tonight - 1932 - Mamoulian, Rouben - USA
58) Night at the Opera - 1935 - Wood, Sam - USA
59) Osaka Elegy - 1936 - Mizoguchi, Kenji - Japan
60) Pigs and Battleships - 1961 - Imamura, Shohei - Japan
61) 400 Blows - 1959 - Truffaut, Francois - France
62) Blue Angel - 1930 - Sternberg, Joseph von - Germany
63) Bringing Up Baby - 1938 - Hawks, Howard - USA
64) The Conversation - 1974 - Coppola, Francis Ford - USA
65) Crimes of M Lange - 1935 - Renoir, Jean - France
66) Doctor Strangelove - 1963 - Kubrick, Stanley - USA
67) Fitzcarraldo - 1982 - Herzog, werner - Germany
68) Mouchette - 1967 - Bresson, Robert - France
69) Germany Year Zero - 1948 - Rossellini, Roberto - Italy
70) Goodbye South, Goodbye - 1996 - Hou Hsiao Hsien - China Taiwan
71) Hard Days Night - 1965 - Lester, Richard - UK
72) Life of Oharu - 1952 - Mizoguchi Kenji - Japan
73) Man Escaped, A - 1956 - Bresson, Robert - France
74) Trouble in Paradise - 1932 - Lubitsch, Ernst - USA
75) When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - 1960 - Naruse Mikio - Japan
76) Wife! Be like a rose! - 1935 - Naruse Mikio - Japan
77) Written on the Wind - 1956 - Sirk, Douglas - USA
78) Man with the Movie Camera - 1928 - Vertov, Dziga - USSR
79) Saint Jack - 1979 - Bogdanovich, Peter - USA
80) Satantango - 1994 - Tarr, Bela - Hungary
81) Some Like it Hot - 1959 - Wilder, Billy - USA
82) Touch of Zen - 1969 - King Hu - China Hong Kong
83) Camera Buff - 1979 - Kieslowski, Krystof - Poland
84) Cleo from 5 to 7 - 1961 - Varda, Agnes - France
85) Fallen Angels - 1995 - Wong Kar wei - China Hong Kong
86) Fires on the Plain - 1959 - Ichikawa Kon - Japan
87) Birth of a Nation - 1915 - Griffith, DW - USA
88) Do the Right thing - 1989 - Lee, Spike - USA
89) Broken Blossoms - 1919 - Griffith, DW - USA
90) Eraserhead - 1977 - Lynch, David - USA
91) Flowers of Shanghai - 1998 - Hou Hsiao Hsien - China Taiwan
92) Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail - 1975 - Jones, Terry & Gilliam, Terry - UK
93) Our Hospitality - 1923 - Keaton, Buster - USA
94) Pickpocket - 1959 - Bresson, Robert - France
95) Ordet - 1957 - Dreyer, Carl Theodor - Denmark
96) Platinum Blonde - 1931 - Capra, Frank - USA
97) Stray Dog - 1949 - Kurosawa Akira - Japan
98) A Man Vanishes - 1967 - Imamura Shohei - Japan
99) White - 1994 - Kieslowski, Krystof - France
100) Chelsea Girls - 1966 - Warhol, Andy - USA
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3 comments:
i was surprised that with the lack of modern american films that rushmore of all of them would make it on your list and so high up.
We also saw -- and enjoyed -- Rescue Dawn, but still felt it wasn't nearly as remarkable as Little Dieter.
Interesting list -- but I have to confess that I find list-making too painful to indulge in much. I find it nearly impossible to list my ten favorite Ozu (or Naruse) films.
If I WERE to pick a favorite Imamura film, it would probably be either Pigs and Battleships or Eijanaika (but really would be almost impossible. Ozu, Naruse, Bunuel and Rivette are all easy -- as I arbitrarily assigned them each an honorary favorite -- respectively, Tokyo Story, Repast, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Pont du Nord. As to Mizoguchi, I think Crucified Lovers has displaced my original favorite Street of Shame (albeit only by a little).
RC - I have the advantage of making the list, but Rushmore seems very logical to me. It seems to me to come out of the Altman/Cassavetes (both well represented on this list) side of the 70s (Demme, Ashby, Michael Ritchie and Elaine May as well) - which I generally prefer to the Scorsese/Coppola, or Spielberg, DePalma, etc. threads... I also think it stands as part of the tradition of comic humanism (with a touch of melancholy) that goes back to Keaton and Chaplin, down through Capra, Ozu and Renoir - and combines it with the formalism of Godard and Imamura (not to mention Ozu, to whom it is a plain homage, with its frontal compositions and 180 degree cuts and so on - complete with stealing jokes from 30s films, if I am not mistaken: "he's the worst student we have" turns up in "Where Now Are Those Dreams of Youth?" I suppose it could be a coincidence, but I doubt it.) It ends up being a very satisfying story, told in a formally exhilarating style - on another week, I might have put it 10 slots higher.
Michael - the truth is, I do sort of the same thing: the top 10-20 films are nasically the best films by my favorite directors, with a few ties - with the rest being one big tie, sort of arranged by whim...
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