Jinn's 100 Films of the 2010s

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I’d add that ZDT either sidesteps being propaganda or at the very least muddies it due to the reveal that...

WARNING: spoilers below
they already had all the pertinent information they gained from torture due to previous intel and didn’t need to torture to get it.


Really sucks the air out of it being justifiable and necessary, though admittedly, doesn’t touch on it being ineffective to the degree it probably should.

Still a fantastic movie.



Good call on Scruggs. I formally request a mini-list of your segment rankings (when you have time).
I'd be curious to see this too.

I really dug the film and loved how each segment widely varied in terms of humor and tone, while essentially carrying the same message and to a certain extent, depth.
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59. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011, dir. Takashi Miike)





Miike's remake of the Kobayashi samurai classic isn't a visually startling (I did not see the 3D version, btw), but more profound as a character study. Miike is an extraordinary and prolific director who can be stylistically all over the place, and can easily fall right off the sylistic map (Yakuza Apolcalypse - holy horny toads!), but I chose this as his most affecting and powerful film.


HM: Miike's 13 Assassins from the same year, roughly a retread of Seven Samurai, is nearly as impresssive, and probably a lot more fun for casual viewers.
I'm a huge fan of Kobayashi's version, but I'm open to check this out. I'll take this placement as an endorsement.



The info about bin Laden's courier was shown given by someone who had been tortured but was being 'good cop'd afterward. That's an essential stage of the EIT playbook. The film omits all of the internal agency debate over torture that we now know occured frequently, even in the interrogation rooms. In short, it normalizes the practice.


I don't want to derail the thread anymore than it is, but there's a lot of information that will help anyone make up their own mind on the subject.



I see that you were a fan of Meek's Cutoff and The Ballad of Buster Scraggs and their deconstruction of the Western. What are your thoughts of Slow West?



Good call on Scruggs. I formally request a mini-list of your segment rankings (when you have time).
Not sure if I can because they differ so widely in tone. They're more like branches on a tree. "Mortal Remains" is the crown, Waits' "Canyon" the roots, and maybe "Meal Ticket" is a rotten bough.


What are your thoughts of Slow West?
It was fine, not quite enough to get on the list.



57. Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)





Refn's stylish neo-noir seems custom-built to recharge the 'style over substance vs. style = substance' debate. I think this film firmly sits in the latter, a pulpy exercise that requires little additional subtext, and still a more entertaining film than his more complicated concoctions of style and ambition, Only God Forgives and Neon Demon, although Refn is also one of the more singular filmmakers today who's always worth watching.


So is Drive really better than Parasite though? What was I thinking of? Albert Brooks maybe? These aren't all hard-and-fast rankings.



56. Gravity (2013, dir. Alfonso Cuaron)





One of the few mega-FX IMAX experiences that managed to live up to the immersive hype. It helps that the 3D is focused on depth and scale rather than blurry popping pyrotechnics, immersion within the frame rather than without. More fundamentally it works as a moving character drama - maybe even the female analogue to something like Ad Astra - with Sandra Bullock (an actress that I haven't been typically impressed with) holding down a strong central performance admirably. A true triumph of will.



The trick is not minding
57. Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)





Refn's stylish neo-noir seems custom-built to recharge the 'style over substance vs. style = substance' debate. I think this film firmly sits in the latter, a pulpy exercise that requires little additional subtext, and still a more entertaining film than his more complicated concoctions of style and ambition, Only God Forgives and Neon Demon, although Refn is also one of the more singular filmmakers today who's always worth watching.


So is Drive really better than Parasite though? What was I thinking of? Albert Brooks maybe? These aren't all hard-and-fast rankings.
I really loved Drive. Neon Demon was good, and haven’t seen Only God Forgives yet.



55. Eighth Grade (2018, dir. Bo Burnham)





Most modern American films about "these kids" are full of ersatz self-flattering attempts at fleekness (?, I dunno, I've only heard the term used by desperately cool parents), full of sitcom-worthy sass and spunk and pitifully obsessed with the relevance of dank social memes. So it's completely refreshing to see a film that subverts such a need for relevance by framing all of that as precisely what it is: youth marketing gimmicks that most kids, thankfully, can see through as easily as all of the other toothless reassurances they didn't ask to hear. This is the only recent youth-oriented film that I can think of that treated the specific influence of social media in a mature and realistic way that isn't afraid of alienating an overly tech-defensive audience. Instead it treats social media as yet another, and more complex, set of challenges and social expectations. The film keeps its focus on what's real - the insecure Kayla (Elsie Fisher) - and her frustrating quest for confidence and validation.



See, I felt like Sicario stood out from so many other military thrillers because it had Villeneuve (and Del Toro). The space he allowed everything to have, the quite moments, the wide and medium shots, the slower pace of editing, and really giving his actors a lot of room to breathe made the film stand out to me. I missed seeing it for a while because I assumed it would be just what it appeared to be but I felt Villeneuve actually elevated the whole damn genre with that film. I compare it to Zero Dark Thirty, another military thriller that could have been so rote in the hands of someone who is skillful but not an artist.
I respect that, but for the reasons I've stated, I just don't think Villeneuve's direction suited Sicario very well, or that Del Toro's character added that much; sorry. I guess I feel similarly about it as Jinn does to Zero Dark Thirty, in the sense that there was one scene (the extradition sequence) that particularly engaged me, while the rest of it felt pretty potboiler-y otherwise. I am with you on ZDT though, as I'd place it alongside the other big Z (Zodiac) as one of the 21st century's best Procedural Thrillers to date.
Haven't seen that one yet, but I've been very hit or miss on Taylor Sheridan.
So have I, but I'd say that it's very good, and my favorite out of Sheridan's "Frontier Trilogy" as the best-directed, and most engaging overall of the bunch.



or that Del Toro's character added that much; sorry.
Without de Toro, the film would be a lot less interesting.



I’d add that ZDT either sidesteps being propaganda or at the very least muddies it due to the reveal that...

WARNING: spoilers below
they already had all the pertinent information they gained from torture due to previous intel and didn’t need to torture to get it.


Really sucks the air out of it being justifiable and necessary, though admittedly, doesn’t touch on it being ineffective to the degree it probably should.

Still a fantastic movie.
Yeah; while still a valid criticism on its own, just focusing on ZDT doing things like not placing enough emphasis on the failures of the CIA's torture program feels like cherry-picking to me, in light of the way that the film pulls no punches with how naseous the sight of the waterboarding scene was, which made it particularly uncomfortable to watch in a theater (and was almost as distressing to watch as the actual scenes of terrorism in the film), the naked bloodlust of Kyle Chandler's character ("Do your ****ing jobs; bring me people to kill"), or Maya's obvious drained state at the end, showing a lack of emotional satisfaction on her part, even though she helped get her man. In light of all that, the film's hardly a rah-rah, blemish-free cheerleading of American flexing its imperial power.
57. Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)



Refn's stylish neo-noir seems custom-built to recharge the 'style over substance vs. style = substance' debate. I think this film firmly sits in the latter, a pulpy exercise that requires little additional subtext, and still a more entertaining film than his more complicated concoctions of style and ambition, Only God Forgives and Neon Demon, although Refn is also one of the more singular filmmakers today who's always worth watching.


So is Drive really better than Parasite though? What was I thinking of? Albert Brooks maybe? These aren't all hard-and-fast rankings.
Personally, I can't fall into the "style automatically = substance" camp (because if I did, I would hold a very different opinion about something like Basterds), but I feel that style can enhance substance. So, Drive[/i] would have some amount of substance automatically just because of the way that the relationship between the Driver & Irene develops, but it resonates so much more because Refn directed the hell out of that film in the process. At any rate, I would also place Drive slightly above Parasite, since I felt the latter was a bit too dialogue-heavy in its first half, but that's just nit-picking, since there both 9s for me anyway.



Without de Toro, the film would be a lot less interesting.
Mmm, by a little bit, but not by much, as he would've had to have had a better-developed motivation for that to be the case for me.



54. You Were Never Really Here (2017, dir. Lynne Ramsay)





Forget Joker. This is the true heir of modern Taxi Driver reimaginings. Joe is a broken soul, a victim of briefly glimpsed flashback abuse, who unlike Bickle has learned to discipline his tremendous rage into a profitable life as mob muscle. Thankfully, the film has zero interest in any "life with the mob" glamour. Instead, Joe is wholly devoted to his debilitated mother, and only takes jobs that are morally defensible, ala recovering trafficked children. Like Bickle, Joe feels compelled to find his salvation as a savior for his mutual angels. The film's needle-drop of "Angel Baby" definitely recalls classic Scorsese both directly as a device and in its almost ironic, infantile repurposing, finding untapped compassion and tragedy in its lyrics.



Mmm, by a little bit, but not by much, as he would've had to have had a better-developed motivation for that to be the case for me.
Revenge, Stu. The only motive that matters.



57. Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)





Refn's stylish neo-noir seems custom-built to recharge the 'style over substance vs. style = substance' debate. I think this film firmly sits in the latter, a pulpy exercise that requires little additional subtext, and still a more entertaining film than his more complicated concoctions of style and ambition, Only God Forgives and Neon Demon, although Refn is also one of the more singular filmmakers today who's always worth watching.


So is Drive really better than Parasite though? What was I thinking of? Albert Brooks maybe? These aren't all hard-and-fast rankings.
I would put Drive above Parasite without hesitation.

So you’re probably right to question yourself.



53. Venus in Fur (2013, dir. Roman Polanski)





Polanski is a prickly issue, and by adapting the stage play about the namesake of masochism into nearly an autobiographical indictment of his sexual psyche will either suggest remorse or self-pity. Bold move, either way. How about casting his wife and the Roman lookalike Mathieu Amalric (Polanski's stunt double, if you will)? Nothing subtle there. But few directors, even those who aren't legitimate sex criminals, would be willing to take on David Ives' frank interrogation of convoluted sexual politics.



54. You Were Never Really Here (2017, dir. Lynne Ramsay)





Forget Joker. This is the true heir of modern Taxi Driver reimaginings. Joe is a broken soul, a victim of briefly glimpsed flashback abuse, who unlike Bickle has learned to discipline his tremendous rage into a profitable life as mob muscle. Thankfully, the film has zero interest in any "life with the mob" glamour. Instead, Joe is wholly devoted to his debilitated mother, and only takes jobs that are morally defensible, ala recovering trafficked children. Like Bickle, Joe feels compelled to find his salvation as a savior for his mutual angels. The film's needle-drop of "Angel Baby" definitely recalls classic Scorsese both directly as a device and in its almost ironic, infantile repurposing, finding untapped compassion and tragedy in its lyrics.
Why would I forget Joker if it and You Were Never Really Here make an incredible double feature? That’s like saying forget King of Comedy because of Taxi Driver.



Why would I forget Joker if it and You Were Never Really Here make an incredible double feature?
I'd probably daydream about shooting myself as well.