Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Hell yeah.

I'm gonna try not to reaction-bomb your thread (which I think I just discovered) but I saw this movie for the first time about 2 years ago and it fairly blew me away. Can't believe I waited so long to see it and yet I'm glad I waited so long to see it so that there are still movies like this out there for me to see.
Aside from how good the film is in every other way, Falconetti just blew my mind. I didn't know there was screen-acting that good that early.

The Passion of Joan is one of the greatest films ever made. It's so sad what happened to Maria Falconetti

Oh, I'll blow your g*ddamn head right off.

I'm pretty sure we can say damn on this forum.

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I believe ******* gets censored though.

This is the movie that convinced me that Altman was an historically great director.
I already liked him a lot and saw him as a bigger deal than any contemporary director I could think of, but this was the one that pushed me over the edge on him.

My personal No.2.
(And that only if you count The Rocky Horror Picture Show which is so its own thing I almost think it should be separate, making P, T No.1.)

It's become something of a cliché for critics and fans alike to point out how the thing that makes Big Trouble in Little China work so well is how it treats nominal all-American action hero protagonist Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) like a bumbling doofus while his ostensible sidekick Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) is the genuinely capable and knowledgable warrior whose search for his kidnapped fiancée (Suzee Pai) is the real driving force behind the film. At the same time, it's impossible to deny that it's a genius move that only helps to distinguish Carpenter's genre-bending kung-fu odyssey in the midst of a decade where American action cinema was largely defined by powerful, hypermasculine, and predominantly white leads. Even leaving that aside, the fact that it's one of his rare shots at doing a comparatively big picture means that he goes all-out in staging not just hyperkinetic scenes of mortal combat but also coming up with all manner of bizarre mythological creatures and designs to colour in the story's mystical adventure framework - there's a Bigfoot-esque monster and a creature covered in eyeballs, but the humanoid villains such as cursed sorcerer Lo Pan (James Hong) or the Raiden-esque Three Storms are themselves great texture for such a journey. Throughout it all, Russell makes for an endearingly naive buffoon that is far removed from the jaded badasses he played in other Carpenter films (and his snappy back-and-forth with Kim Cattrall's feisty activist Gracie Law is also a highlight), making this another peak in Carpenter's impeccable '76-'88 run.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: #43

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Great pick, love BTILC

Already one of my fav top 100 lists on mofo..

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Wong is another director who has been on my radar for about as long as I've been making lists but it's taken me far too long to actually include. Chungking Express may not necessarily be his masterpiece, but it's not for a lack of trying with its bifurcated narrative involving two separate police officers (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung) trying to navigate rough patches in their love lives at the same that they cross paths with potential new love interests (Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong respectively). Beyond that, the specifics vary wildly - Kaneshiro's Officer 223 struggles to move on and latches onto disinterested criminal Lin, while Leung's Officer 663 is oblivious to Wong's growing infatuation that spirals into such bizarre behaviour as sneaking into his apartment to redecorate. They are both different sides of the same coin, covering vast ground in depicting unconventional romance on the bright and smoky streets of Hong Kong (rendered with noirish grain and free-floating movement by Wong's mostly-regular cinematographer Christopher Doyle) and creating a film that you can feel in your heart and lungs. When a film manages to needle-drop the exact same song as many times as this one does with "California Dreamin'" and it never gets old, that's a classic.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: N/A

Nott my favorite Wong, but still really good.

For the longest time, Kevin Smith's Clerks was a major favourite for showing a young me how much could be done when a film was just a bunch of colourful characters hanging around in the same location for a single day. Of course, he does have a reputation for being the kind of filmmaker that cinephiles are meant to grow beyond and part of that is realising that a film like Do the Right Thing accomplishes so much more within the same loose format involving a single day revolving around a small business and the locals who can be found in and around its vicinity. That the business is an Italian-run pizzeria located in a predominantly Black neighbourhood creates an underlying tension that is only exacerbated as the summer heat builds up and people are pushed to their own boiling points as the day wears on. Lee works with a remarkable ensemble of actors to create a richly-observed microcosm in which to unfold his exercise on examining race relations in modern America, not settling for a simplistic polemic by emphasising that all his characters have their own significant flaws and therefore resisting any easy sense of moralising - but on the rare moment where it does go for the jugular, it's never without reason. Even leaving aside the ways in which it crafts such a nuanced narrative, one can't exactly find much fault in how Lee delivers in terms of an indelible experience from its rip-roaring opening credits blasting "Fight the Power" to its momentary digressions that toy with the reality of the film's world without breaking it apart.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: N/A

Do The Right Thing is such a great and powerful film. My favourite of Lee's work (though I've not seen much) but this early Lee (She's Gotta Have It, Skool Daze) was the Lee that I saw and really liked. I saw Malcolm X and Jungle Fever but remember little of them. Both films I'd like to see again just to see what I'm sure I missed and have since learned. 4 Little Girls and Summer Of Sam is where I left Lee though. I've not seen any of his work since then. The former is a good, heartbreaking documentary, the latter not really what I was expecting and fairly hit and miss.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

I'm all over the place when it comes to Lee - I did enjoy his recent one-two punch of Da 5 Bloods and David Byrne's American Utopia, but have also had to contend with the likes of She Hate Me and his Oldboy remake. Still have to see quite a few of his other big/early films, but I find even his duds to be at least a little interesting and worth watching.

Hard not to be a little self-conscious about the comparative lack of significantly older films (read: pre-1960s) on this list, especially when one of the few I have included is a film that came out in 1950 and is already built on the idea that people don't give a damn about older films and especially not the people who made them. Wilder's noirish tale of burnt-out screenwriter Joe GIllis (William Holden) ending up in the employ of eccentric silent-era actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) makes for a sharp indictment of Hollywood's film industry and how it'll hang its older stars out to dry due to the mercurial nature of audience demands (to say nothing of how it treats writers, memorably mocking audiences for thinking that actors make up their lines as they go). At the same time, there's nuance to how it depicts Norma as a tragic figure who is prone to manic outbursts out of long-harboured delusions about a potential comeback. It's enough to ground what is otherwise a pitch-black show business satire, where even weird spectacles such as Norma holding a nighttime funeral for a deceased monkey in her own backyard don't come across as the laughable kind of absurd.

2005 ranking: #87
2013 ranking: N/A

BlacKKKlansman was good too.

I remember liking BlacKkKlansman when I saw it in theatres, but I haven't felt much urge to revisit it and I've read some critiques of it that question its approach to depicting police officers even in the name of thwarting the KKK. I figure I can keep working my way through the ones I haven't seen before I ever get back to it.

I credit Lee with forcing Rosie Perez to occupy a large part of real estate in my young conscience. Decades before anyone had ever thought of living rent-free.

Looks like I've failed to visit this thread for the last 3 months. Whoops.
Unsurprisingly, there's very little overlap in our tastes, but I do really like the effort you've put into the presentation and the explanations of why you appreciate each movie.

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