The Movie Forums Top 100 of All-Time Refresh: Countdown

It isn’t so much as in “retrospect” about Alien that makes it a decent film as opposed to a great film, so much as I one described it to my brother as Jaws in space. Which I don’t know if I coined that or not, as I think I read another describing it as such.

It is definitely full of atmosphere (*snicker*) and has a a unique style but outside of Ripley, the other characters were ill defined.

Good film, falls short of being great. But I do recognize it’s place in history and understand others who feel differently

Re: the bolded part, it's obviously okay if that makes the film have a lesser impact to you, but can I hold that against the film if it wasn't the filmmaker's goal? I mean, I don't think Alien aims to be a deep character study, but for whatever little time we spend with this characters, I think it does a great job of exposition and letting us know who they are without reading us a dossier on each.


EDIT: Hadn't read that Rodent had already addressed this way better than I did.

That's correct, it is I.

Hard to believe it took Scott this long to get in, but he eventually did. Obviously thid means Gladiator has no shot. Scorsese finally joins the multiples, though this should'vehappened much earlier since we still haven't found Goodfellas or The Departed (or even The Last Waltz yet.

IV

• Alfred Hitchcock: North By Northwest (57), Rear Window (40), Psycho (27), Vertigo (19)

III

• James Cameron: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (71), The Terminator (56), Aliens (37)
• Steven Spielberg: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (89), Saving Private Ryan (83), Schindler's List (41)

II

• Akira Kurosawa: Ikiru (95), Seven Samurai (26)
• Andrej Tarkovsky: Andrej Rublev (67), Stalker (25)
• Billy Wilder: The Apartment (84), Sunset Boulevard (53)
• Coen Brothers: No Country for Old Men (51), The Big Lebowski (18)
• David Fincher: Fight Club (52), Se7en (49)
• John Carpenter: Halloween (44), The Thing (20)
• Martin Scorsese: Raging Bull (49), Taxi Driver (14)
• Milos Forman: Amadeus (50), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (33)
• Paul Thomas Anderson: Magnolia (74), There Will Be Blood (60)
• Peter Jackson: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (42), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (28)
• Robert Zemeckis: Forrest Gump (65), Back to the Future (34)
• Roman Polanski: Rosemary's Baby (91), Chinatown (17)
• Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in the West (31), The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (23)
• Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange (32), The Shining (21)
• Victor Fleming: Gone with the Wind (55), The Wizard of Oz (36)

The Big Lebowski isn't their best film, but it was well-acted, fun to watch and quite twisty. I'd say it's their fourth best.

Taxi Driver has three great acts, but acts two and three practically forget most of what made act one so good, including the side-character development. 9.5. Alien does not make that act structure mistake, although the slightest bit of extra character development (though it was still pretty good development) would have allowed the cast of the first film to rival the sequel's cast and possibly make it a better movie. 9.9/10. Otherwise, I absolutely adore it. Let me be kiddy and say it was the first rated-R movie I ever bought (bought the whole trilogy).

TAXI DRIVER: Never have I so instictively pushed back against a movie on first viewing. I had wanted to see it for ages, and when I finally did, it had a griminess and a lethargy in purpose that I wasn't expecting. I had heard about its controversial violence, and had been expecting some kind of slickly paced, exciting, surreal urban nightmare. Instead, I found a film that, while I certainly didn't identify with the behavior or morality of its title character, I recognized his world much too well. It felt aimless. Boring. Lonely. Frustrated. And, once again, aimless. The only things that seemed to anchor him to the planet were awkward attempts at socializing, and ultimately, acts of empty vigilantism. I hated it. I think subconsciously I felt the film was accusing me, as well as a number of my friends, of being destined to fall into the same trap of reaching out for some kind of, any kind of purpose, even if it was no good for anybody. I didn't even want to be associated with such a thing.

It was only years later, that I was long enough removed from directly relating (and being terrified) of relating to such a man, that I could see how observantly human Scorsese was with this film. The film is a poem to all of the souls who become lost in urban sprawl. That can't keep up and drown. Who probably never had much to offer in the first place, but to just keep on plugging away and living for some...reason. It's a terribly despairing film. It's unbearably lonely. Few moments in cinema have so perfectly captured an empty life as Travis Bickle using his foot to slowly tilt his television stand further and further back until it eventually hits the floor and explodes. Because a day has to be filled up with something, after all. So why not that.

Why not, is of course the dangerous question that lurks in the movies underbelly. What is there to lose. This film give us a vantage point of a headspace none of us want to stay in for long. I know I sure didn't. And ultimately offers both an empathetic lifeline to these similarly miserable souls of the world, and a warning to any of us who encounter them one evening on a darkened street. It's an extraordinary complicated film, both morally and empathetically, and challenges us to watch the kind of story that is playing out in many dimly lit windows all over the world. Some might say such lives are not deserving of having such a cinematic masterpiece devoted to them, and there are fair arguments to think so. But as a person who believes as much of the world needs to be documented through the arts as possible, from humanities greatest triumphs to the least inspiring of do-nothing lives, Taxi Driver is essential.

Getting less likely we’ll see another Capra film appear and that makes me sad face 😞

Yeah, no hint this time guys. There's just no way, I can be super vague and it's just gonna be way too obvious. Probably did one too many given how many people easily got the last one.

Yeah, no hint this time guys. There's just no way, I can be super vague and it's just gonna be way too obvious. Probably did one too many given how many people easily got the last one.

Most Biblical movies were long If I Recall.

seen A Clockwork Orange. In all honesty, the movie was weird and silly

If Yoda isn't doing a hint, I'll do one

Translucent duck, paramecium stuck.
A dollar for a foot, your life for a holler.
Rows of cars that fly asunder, far from thunder.
The chick was hot, that you can say.
But anything else save it for another day.

Ah, Rinko Kikuchi. Kumiko could hunt my treasure any day.
Umm...you all should probably ignore that.