The MoFo Top 100 of the 2000s Countdown

Inglourious Basterds was my number 21. My second favorite Tarantino, Nazi-central movies are usually hard for me, but this had a LOT of charisma and it always kept me guessing. Although I'd like a little more insight on the Basterds themselves, the ending was in fact "glourious." Haven't seen Children of Men. So far, the only Alfonso Cuaron movies I've seen are Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter 3.

Sent-In Ballot:

#2. Oldboy (22)
#3. Sin City (47)
#5. Requiem for a Dream (26)
#7. Yi Yi (49)
#8. The Departed (19)
#10. Casino Royale (37)
#13. Million Dollar Baby (57)
#15. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (53)
#16. Let the Right One In (29)
#20. Iron Man (83)
#21. Inglourious Basterds (18)
#22. Pirates of the Caribbean (63)
#25. Hot Fuzz (30)

Post-Ballot:

#2. Oldboy (22)
#3. Sin City (47)
#5. Requiem for a Dream (26)
#7. Yi Yi (49)
#8. The Departed (19)
#10. Casino Royale (37)
#12. Snatch (71)
#14. Million Dollar Baby (57)
#16. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (53)
#17. Let the Right One In (29)
#18. Slumdog Millionaire (not placed but it made my new 25)
#19. Monsters, Inc. (74)
#22. Iron Man (83)
#23. Fantastic Mr. Fox (70)
#24. Inglourious Basterds (18)
#25. Pirates of the Caribbean (63)

Seen 47/84

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Inglourious Basterds definitely should be the number one film of @SpelingError. Just on principle.

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Have seen so far: 28 - Inglorious Basterds - The movie was ok, not a favorite of mines though
Have not seen so far: 60

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Moviefan1988's Favorite Movies
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Welcome to the Dance: My Favorite 20 High School Movies
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• Being a Tarantino fan, I saw Inglourious Basterds back then in the theater and couple more times later on the telly. It is generally good but far from his top works. It is quite annoying and obvious how he makes a profit by serving the current political situation, no doubt he'd probably turn the roles under another circumstances. Anyway, Christoph Waltz is superb that's why:
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• Children of Men - I partly saw this movie unintentionally when it came on some TV channel couple of years ago. It is just an action-thriller and nothing more to comment.
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my stats
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Top 100 seen 46/84.
(seen one pointers 3/38 • seen 101-110: 5/10)
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My list:
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4. Snatch [#71.]
5. The Royal Tenenbaums [#35.]
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8. Sideways [#39.]
9. Amores perros [#81.]
10. The Wrestler [#54.]
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12. The Pianist [#31.]
14. The Man Who Wasn't There [#84.]
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"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

So true. At this rate, I'm expecting 8+1 (that's eight on the list plus the one-pointer) of mine to show up. I was quite sure that my #3 and #4 are going to miss, but they're my favorites so they're on my ballot.

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I don't know how much you actually watched, but love it or hate it one thing Children of Men surely is not is an action-thriller. Are you certain which Clive Owen movie you saw a piece of? Was it maybe Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever?

Sorry, forgot to add the first word - Dystopian Action-Thriller.
(some film sites add some more decorations to its description as Sci-Fi etc...)

Dystopian doesn't help the misnomer of "action-thriller". Except for a couple sequences, most notably the bravura sequence in the car, there is almost zero action in it. We can disagree on certain things but if one calls Schindler's List a Musical Comedy that is factually incorrect. Children of Men is not an action anything.

Inglourious Basterds is a pretty good flick. Middle of the pack Tarantino for me but that's still better than most movies out there. Children of Men has always been a favourite of mine and holds up on rewatches - had it at #11.

3. Yi Yi (2000)
4. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
5. City of God (2002)
6. Caché (2005)
9. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
11. Children of Men (2006)
17. Shaun of the Dead (2004)
22. The Aviator (2004)
25. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

Side Note: I almost spelled Inglourious Basterds wrong even though I just read through Chypmunk correcting a couple people.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Not correcting - funning. And I just deleted them anyway in case those involved didn't find it fun. That darn Tarantino eh, a cruel, cruel man

Inglourious Basterds & Children Of Men seen both, didn't care for the 1st, the 2nd was OK.

Also, gotta agree with Holden here re Children of Men. To partly watch Children of Men and then to state it's just an action-thriller and nothing more as though it's a fact is a bit annoying and just wrong.

Chypmunk I'm sure people were fine with your grammer nazie posts...yeah I went there. You didn't have to delete them.

Critics

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Critics thoughts on our #18, Inglourious Basterds...



It currently has an 89% Certified Fresh Tomatometer score among critics, and a 8.3/10 score on IMDb (with 1,400,000 votes).

Roger Ebert gave it ★★★★ and said:

"Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he’s the real thing, a director of quixotic delights. "

Meanwhile Jennifer K. Stuller, of Bitch Media, said:

"It wasn't satisfying... Perhaps I'll change my mind. Perhaps I won't. But today I'll simply say that I thought it was inglorious indeed."

As for our MoFo reviewers, @KasperKristensen said:

"Both movies [Inglourious Basterds and the fictional Nation's Pride] are, after all, just about people killing people, who they believe deserve to be killed. And in the sense that Inglourious Basterds is just about killing and violence it doesn’t have much to say. But given that it has so little to say, it says a whole lot. In essence, it becomes a modern parody of an old German propaganda flick."

And @Citizen Rules said:

"Inglourious Basterds had a great look and a good working script but Quentin killed it in post production. Turning the film into kitsch."

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Critics

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Critics thoughts on our #17, Children of Men...



It currently has a 92% Certified Fresh Tomatometer score among critics, and a 7.9/10 score on IMDb (with 486,000 votes).

Roger Ebert gave it ★★★★ and said:

"Cuaron fulfills the promise of futuristic fiction; characters do not wear strange costumes or visit the moon, and the cities are not plastic hallucinations, but look just like today, except tired and shabby. Here is certainly a world ending not with a bang but a whimper, and the film serves as a cautionary warning. The only thing we will have to fear in the future, we learn, is the past itself. Our past. Ourselves."

Meanwhile Nigel Andrews, of Financial Times, said:

"P.D. James's novel must have made more sense than Cuarón's cheerful but incoherent screen adaptation."

As for our MoFo reviewers, @MovieMeditation said:

"I think it cinematically succeeds in delivering something I personally think is both powerful and thought provoking. The ending itself may be a little depressing in some ways, but you could say that it symbolizes hope present in a hopeless world. So however you may view the film and ending, you might see yourself resigning with one side or the other. So in a very simplified explanation, this film can be both hopeful and hopeless – it depends on how you define hope and whom you eventually assign it to…"

And @Yoda said:

"Children of Men is a borderline masterpiece. It is technically brilliant and occasionally funny, but consistently poignant. For all the pessimism on the surface, the film is optimistic at its core. It depicts a world not without hope, but in which hope is dormant, waiting for a spark to ignite it again."

Iderno, being a gramma narzi about the moovie Inglourious Basterds just phelt ...... kinder wrong

Speaking of Grammar Nazis...

Trailers

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Maybe I just live in an Alternate Universe from everybody (or an alternate movie universe since there's no difference). You remember the awesome scene in Pulp Fiction where the Uma Thurman character draws a "square"? I agree it's an awesome scene, but she draws a rectangle which somewhat mitigates the "Coolness Factor".

I don't hold Tarantino in any special regard. In fact, the more I learn about him, the more immature I believe the guy is. I'd rather have you MoFos be in our discussions about Powell/Pressburger, Persona, Alain Resnais, The Tenant, The Innocents, etc. because I believe that Tarantino wants everything to be easily representational, except for perhaps his idiotic changing of his movie's title to somehow make it seem that he's DEEP. HA! C'mon, QT, join MoFo and talk to us. We'll show you deep!

Inglourious Basterds obviously doesn't stand up as a legit war adventure. It's not The Guns of Navarone, The Train, Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, Operation Crossbow, Von Ryan's Express, etc. It just doesn't have that strong a plot, but it does have a hook, a gimmick and a reason to want to watch the thing. The hook is obviously that this guy (Brad Pitt), who stole his name from Aldo Ray, wants scalps of all dead Nazis and wants all living Nazis to wear something which will always identify them as Nazis. Now, this Guy has American Indian "Blood" in him (even if it's not Apache), so the scalp thing makes sense to some people even if it's mostly BS.

Tarantino does seem more obsessed with namedropping Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst, and then he even brings in Oscar winner Emil Jannings to the conclusion. It's unclear what, if anything, Tarantino understands about pre-WWII German cinema and WWII Goebbels propaganda, but since his movie doesn't even take place in any form of reality, it doesn't matter to me. I'd probably say that overall, I gave the film extra points for trying to act like Tarantino knew "anything" about German cinema at all while just faking it to try to make his film better and more "realistic".

I have a few more points to make. Tarantino goes out of his way to have the SS Officer compare King Kong to African slaves and then he has another Officer do the same to try to condemn an African-Frenchman who seems so conducive to the Jewish woman's plot to destroy the Third Reich. On the other hand, the Nazis are quite disturbed that African slave blood helped the U.S. during the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. I find the film very complex politically, but since it's a fantasy, you have to decide for yourself whether that's a strength or a wimpy weakness.

Children of Men is my #16. It has too many iconic scenes to mention here although others have mentioned a few.

My List

1. The Incredibles
5. Ratatouille
7. Downfall
8. Up
10. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
11. Everything Will Be OK
16. Children of Men
19. The Pianist
21. Pride & Prejudice

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