Mr Minio's Top 300 (2021 ed.)

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Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
120. War and Peace (1966) dir. Sergei Bondarchuk



119. Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott



118. Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) dir. Panos Cosmatos



117. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) dir. Stanley Kubrick



116. Twisted Pair (2018) dir. Neil Breen



115. The Apartment (1960) dir. Billy Wilder



114. Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) dir. Haruki Kadokawa



113. Ernest & Celestine (2012) dir. Benjamin Renner / Vincent Patar / Stéphane Aubier



112. Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) dir. Jean-Luc Godard



111. Arrebato (1979) dir. Iván Zulueta

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.



Victim of The Night


118. Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) dir. Panos Cosmatos



Wow, you shocked me with this one. Huge disappointment for me. Beautiful but the narrative fell completely apart or at least resolved in an extremely unsatisfying way.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Watching From Morn to Midnight again because I don't remember it that well, but it's so trippy I don't know why.
Ecce Homo.
Out of all the "bad" movies I've seen, Starcrash may actually be the worst.
Blasphemy! It's better than Star Wars!
Man, I was flat-out blown-away by this movie.
Just when I thought there might actually be some potential there...
Wow, you shocked me with this one. Huge disappointment for me.
Astral shapes chip your brain by opening the fourth chakra. Wake up! Each frequency is a 2D triangle, but a 3D pyramid. By opening the third eye and pouring orgone over the pyramids, the transcendent energy of the world is sucked into the vortex of time hovering above the horizon. Open your third eye and you will see beyond the horizon.




Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
110. The Grand Illusion (1937) dir. Jean Renoir



109. The Return (2003) dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev



108. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) dir. Víctor Erice



107. The Arch (1969) dir. Cecile Tong Shu-Shuen



106. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) dir. Sergio Leone



105. Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) dir. Michael Curtiz



104. 12 Angry Men (1957) dir. Sidney Lumet



103. Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) dir. Lav Diaz



102. Olympia (1938) dir. Leni Riefenstahl



101. Pictures of the Old World (1972) dir. Dušan Hanák




68/200

I've tipped over a third!



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
On Cinema Or Why There Will Be No Write-Ups

Have the Write-Ups Already Started? What a spoiler! Through 200 titles I stuck to the rule of 'show, don't tell', so now, when opening my mouth for the first time, I feel like The Jazz Singer saying 'you ain't heard nothin' yet'. But you have, although you heard a different song, played a different instrument, attended different concerts. That's why I fear that my words will have no meaning to you. I'm not a good writer. I'm not as distinguished a cinephile as some of you think. I don't know much about film. I just watch a lot of movies and try to find more and more films that will move me, that will become personal, that will be relatable, or quite contrary: films that won't be relatable, but films that will offer just a simple way out, escapism.

It's terrifying how I can't even utter a single word about some of my favorite movies, and how I could write a book about others. But then I try to write that book, and what I get is something too personal to publish. Something that I feel only I will understand. Something that perhaps should not be shared. There are some personal things you do not share with others. And I feel the same when asked to talk about some films, fearing I will be exposed. I want to keep some privacy and stay away from the gawkers, no matter how much I respect them.

When talking about our favorites, we don't just have to share the films, but also describe our relationship with them. But more often than not, asking why you love a particular film feels like asking why you love a particular person. The reasons, even if masterfully laid out by a skilled writer, are just a drop in the ocean of our subconsciousness. What moves us, what amazes us, what gives us joy is so deeply ingrained into our very selves, that one might think that a picture, even a single picture, might be a more adequate way of presenting a film than thousands of words. So will words always fail? Is our relationship with our favorite films simply indescribable? But film speaks directly to the heart, therefore the heart should be able to talk directly about film!

Film has always been a part of my life, even though it took me a long time to realize that. When I was a boy of five, I would watch a film, and then watch it again, and again. Flabbergasted at what I initially thought was a perfect recreation of the film every time it broadcast, I asked my mom how come they always manage to recreate it so perfectly. Cinema is not theatre, you see. When I was six I had that ridiculous theory that old films were black and white because the entire world used to be black and white and then somebody decided to color it to humor themselves. Werckmeister Harmonies is my favorite film of all-time and it's always been since August 2011 when I watched it for the first time. Werckmeister Harmonies is the film that made me a cinephile. If this is not good enough a reason to place it as number one, then nothing is. Cinema, very much like us, is an ever-evolving organism that used to be written in silver but now is reduced to a series of ones and zeros. Whatever was alive is dead now. But binary tableaux can be made vivant when a ray of light enters a pupil and goes to the heart. Werckmeister Harmonies has been a favorite for so long that it seems absurd to replace it with anything else, even though I could easily do that and not feel bad about it. I've discovered a few films worthy of number one spot ever since, and sometimes I feel like some other film is taking that number one spot. Hell, you can love many films and not be frowned upon. That's the difference between cinema and relationships.

I have no camera. I don't have work of my own. I only have the work of others. So to me watching is just like creating. Words are my only weapon but I'm a pacifist. I have a flower in my rifle and a flower in my hand. Yes, I just woke up from a dream of cinema. I crossed Paradise in a dream and I received a flower as proof of my passage. Then I woke up and found this flower in my hand. What more can I say?

Cinema is from another dimension, from another space. And in this spatial continuum sometimes you don't want to get back to reality, so you put on another movie, and then another and another, and before you know it, the day is gone. But you don't regret the way you spent it, because you know it was the best possible way of spending your free time. But film isn't just merely plain escapism. If it were, it would be puny, tiny, skippable. But it's anything but. It's powerful, it's all-encompassing, it's life-changing.

Cinema is truth, and the truth is beyond even the most edited and greatest writers. People are far too concerned with the coherence and fashion of writing, and it's amazing how poor of listeners they become to the voices of the beauty of the image. A film lies behind images, even if 24 FPS is supposed to be 24,000 words per second. I'm a troglodyte and troglodytes can't read. That must be why I like watching flickering images on the screen. Way too often when attempting to talk about an absolute favorite of mine, I realize that this film is so personal to me, that I don't even know how to talk around it, so that you are still given all the reasons why I love it and I keep my privacy. But maybe I'm exaggerating. After all, most of my reasons for loving films are perfectly non-personal.

I don't know what it means to be a cinephile, but I know that films can change a life, and that should be enough. A film can change both present and future, and sometimes even past. A film can suffocate you, overpower you. It can take away your breath, it can stir your emotions, and stay in both your mind and your heart, yes, above all in your heart, long after the ending credits roll. Sometimes it takes some faith, some other time it takes heaps of faith. And cinema is the art of believers, so every cinephile has to believe.

Faith is important. Even atheists believe in something, anything. So it can just as well be film. And then I ponder what makes a film better than another film, seemingly just as great. I'm thinking about The Passion of Joan of Arc. What can you learn from a film that's 92 years old? You can learn a lot. First of all, you can learn how a face, a grimace can change, expressing emotions just as much as the interior of one's body and soul. How a face can transmit sadness and move the hearts of men. Light changes not only the way this very face looks but also the way we look. Changes our perception of film, that is cinema as a whole, by extending our film dictionary with a plethora of new terms, two of them more important than the rest: Light (that of God, of human being, of camera lens penetrating a character, baring her body and soul) and Beauty (often found in tragedy, in pain, in suffering but also in hope and faith). A handful of silent masterpieces were made but none with such ascetic, penetrating insight into the soul of what it really means to be a saint, to be human, to suffer, to stay true to oneself, to live - if not on Earth and in Heaven then on Earth and in cinephiles' hearts.

But all this is just pretentious talk. Dreyer made Falconetti kneel on pea grains to get a believable performance out of her. How does this all make the film a masterpiece?

I'm thinking about August in the Water. 'Ultimate proto-vaporwave seapunk new age teen romance masterpiece' sounds trite. 'Sounds and textures oozing with orgone' doesn't mean anything. The film? Since her drop of blood can make tap water run again, it's essentially her death, or rather reconciliation with Mother Nature, that will make the stone disease go away, and will save the city from drought, people from dying. The idea of chips inside people's brains allowing them to communicate with each other might be just another name for the Internet or a scary mind-control story premise, but such freedom, such power should come from a higher being, and since the girl could talk to dolphins, she understood plants, and all Nature, she in a way became a sort of Messiah, and a connector between God and people. She also had to die, to save all Mankind from turning into stone. People are just travelers, just guests on Earth. Earth is much older than us, and it will be here long after we're gone. Our relation to Earth is just that. Earth is life. Water is life. People who don't need water to live are essentially people who don't need Nature to live, which subsequently means some sort of dystopian horror story. The little earthquakes that happen at least two times throughout the movie seem to be the Earth itself saying "I'm here". It's its message to people, its warning. "You're not my masters, you should serve me, not vice versa". The last couple of minutes fast-forward the boy's entire life after the girl's disappearance. The boy is now an old man with brain disease who starts questioning the entire thing, asking what is real, what is memories and what he made up. I think the ending is absolutely beautiful because to me the ending says: it was all true, and just as I said that I will always be with you any time you want me, here I am. I am a part of you, just like we're all a part of Earth, of nature, of the world that surrounds us, of beauty and love. Here I am - reaching my hands to you. Mother Earth. Your love. Your solace. Embrace me. It's been so many years. You sacrificed your life to study the phenomenon, the unknown, but I've been here all the time. I've been with you. Don't try to understand the mystery of life. Just live it.

But I don't really care that much about the environment. Why talk about it, then? Why do I really love August in the Water? Why? Well, don't try to understand the mystery of life. Just live it. Don't try to understand what others love. Find something you love, and love that dearly. And once you found it, stick to it and don't lose it. But I lost it. Does cinema reflect that loss? Do I find solace in film? Is this the great mystery? Am I just a ridiculous man who hopes cinema will heal me? I keep searching and in the meantime let cinema fuel my dreams. I'm not as big as I once thought. "To see is to be.", I thought, but then I met a blind girl and my world collapsed. There are 700 million women in China. 3.9 billion in the world.

But quite indeed As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Retroactively. But indeed. Should I retreat into some silent place and work it all out by myself, I asked. No, the voice said. You should stay here and continue doing what you are doing and work it all out the difficult way. The easy way will save your soul only; the difficult way will save your soul and a few others. So this is your choice: Salvation by yourself, or salvation together with others. If I was a woodcutter, I'd cut. If I was a fire, I'd burn. But I'm a cinephile so I watch films. That's the only thing I can do. And following Godard's logic, even if I might have forgotten how to light the fire, I still know how to tell the story.

Cinema is my benefactor. It taught me to understand love toward other human beings. Take from this text what you will. I tried to condense my entire philosophy on life, love, cinema in this write-up, and to make up for the lack of write-ups next to individual films. This text makes up for them a thousandfold, but I think that only I can fully understand why and how. And only you could understand such a text if you wrote one. Life is a difficult art. Try to live beautifully.



Don't try to understand what others love. Find something you love, and love that dearly.
The one simple concept in a long text I wholeheartedly agree with. If only I could love something other than my dreams.

I also understand the lack of write-ups. Back when I joined here, I wanted to write reviews and thought that improving my writing would somehow improve my experience of cinema. In the long run, I found it to be a chore that only distracted me from the films. More often than not, the words felt empty and didn't reflect how I felt about the films at all.

Oh, and on some other thread, I said you're trolling most of the time. I suppose that's wrong. You just have a role, and playing that role probably has some personal meaning to you. And I understand the need to do that; I rarely reveal my true emotions to anyone, so in a sense, I have a role, too. I just hide behind a different mask.
__________________



132. Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) dir. Wang Bing


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Admittedly, its massive length has kept me away from it, but I plan to watch it after my college semester ends.
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Re: Starcrash, granted I've only seen it via MST3K, but I can't object to the inclusion of a movie where a robot has a southern accent.



120. War and Peace (1966) dir. Sergei Bondarchuk



119. Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott



118. Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) dir. Panos Cosmatos



117. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) dir. Stanley Kubrick



116. Twisted Pair (2018) dir. Neil Breen



115. The Apartment (1960) dir. Billy Wilder



114. Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) dir. Haruki Kadokawa



113. Ernest & Celestine (2012) dir. Benjamin Renner / Vincent Patar / Stéphane Aubier



112. Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998) dir. Jean-Luc Godard



111. Arrebato (1979) dir. Iván Zulueta

loved blade runner. good choice



Victim of The Night
Ecce Homo.
Blasphemy! It's better than Star Wars!
Just when I thought there might actually be some potential there...


Astral shapes chip your brain by opening the fourth chakra. Wake up! Each frequency is a 2D triangle, but a 3D pyramid. By opening the third eye and pouring orgone over the pyramids, the transcendent energy of the world is sucked into the vortex of time hovering above the horizon. Open your third eye and you will see beyond the horizon.

It was lovely and seemed to be going all the places you mention and perhaps more and then it turns into Sunshine.

Lady Snowblood was, I guess, my favorite film I saw in 2019. I recommend it to somebody about once a month.

I'm not sorry I saw Starcrash but man, it is it's whole own level. I mean, I thought Forbidden World was actually totally enjoyable but Starcrash is really something.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
100. Has the Film Already Started? (1951) dir. Maurice Lemaître



99. Inside/Out (1997) dir. Rob Tregenza



98. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) dir. Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger



97. Jump (1965) dir. Tadeusz Konwicki



96. Seconds (1966) dir. John Frankenheimer



95. Daisies (1966) dir. Věra Chytilová



94. Conscience (1968) dir. Volodymyr Denysenko



93. The Wages of Fear (1953) dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot



92. Death in Venice (1971) dir. Luchino Visconti



91. Odd Man Out (1947) dir. Carol Reed




Surprised to see Odd Man Out in the top 100. Thought that was a really great movie, even though the plot has left me already. My lack of intelligence is really jacking up my desire to consume movies.
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