A Personal Journey with The Gunslinger45 through the Movies: A Top 50+

I couldn't read everything -- it was too much to read. But nice thread. Definitely.

Okay list, but no surprises in the end. Nice to see Stalker, Lynch, The Road and Japanese flicks. I predicted number one, so I am the new soothsayer of the forums. Take that Psychic Isaac!

Two questions:
1. Have you ever seen Werckmeister Harmonies?
2. Why didn't you include my masterpiece short as number one? xDDD

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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.

1. Minio I have yet to see Werckmeister Harmonies.

2. Your masterpiece short is my number 1 in Bizarro world. lol

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Fear and Loathing in MoFo... The Gunslinger 45's Top 50 Favorite Films

In the 10 Ring: Gunslinger45's reviews

Statistics:

Time for some stats! Keep in mind I only kept stats for my Top 50 and not for the Honorable Mentions. I did this because I put the finishing touches on this project the day before I posted it and I did not feel like doing extra work to add to look up awards and such for the honorable mentions.

Decade of Release

40’s: 2
50’s: 8
60’s: 4
70’s: 8
80’s: 10
90’s: 6
2000’s: 8
2010’s: 4


Best Years:

1984: 2 in the Top 5
2008: 3 Top 50


By Rating:

R: 24
PG-13: 4
PG: 10
G: 2
Not Rated: 10

By Major Studios:

Paramount: 8
Warner Brothers: 8
MGM: 4
Universal: 3
20th Century Fox: 3
Columbia: 2
United Artists: 2
Toho: 2
Daiei: 2
Various at 1 a piece

Genre:

Action: 13
Comedy: 10
Drama: 9
Thriller: 7
Horror: 5
Sci-Fi: 3
War: 1
Romance: 1
Western: 1


By Country:

USA: 41
Japan: 5
Russia: 1
Canada: 1
Italy: 1
Australia: 1


Rotten Tomato Rating:

Certified Fresh: 35
Fresh: 11
Rotten: 3
No Rating: 1


Awards and Recognitions:

AFI Top 100 Movies: 10
AFI Top 100 Comedies: 3
Empire Top 500 Movies: 29
Empire Top 100 World Cinema: 4
2012 Sight and Sound Critic Top 250 Poll: 15
2012 Sight and Sound Director Top 100 Poll: 11
Oscars: 39
BAFTAs: 22
Golden Globes: 11
Saturn Awards: 12
Golden Lions: 1
Silver Lions: 3
Palme d’Ors: 2
National Film Registry: 17

Nostromo here is that list ya wanted.

1. Taxi Driver:
2. Blue Velvet:
3. Red Dawn:
4. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:
5. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:
6. Apocalypse Now:
7. Seven Samurai:
8. Clerks II:
9. The Avengers:
10. It’s a Wonderful Life:
11. Stalker:
12. The Boondock Saints:
13. Clerks:
14. Vice Squad:
15. Gran Torino:
16. Hobo with a Shotgun:
17. Rashomon:
18. Blazing Saddles:
19. The Producers:
20. Eraserhead:
21. Casablanca:
22. Dirty Harry:
23. Dawn of the Dead:
24. Jaws:
25. Goodfellas:
26. The Dark Knight:
27. A Fistful of Dollars:
28. Team America: World Police:
29. Tokyo Story:
30. Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
31. The Wolf of Wall Street:
32. The Hunt for Red October:
33. The Road:
34. Book of Eli:
35. Ben-Hur:
36. Tropic Thunder:
37. Die Hard:
38. Night of the Living Dead:
39. The Road Warrior
40. Vertigo:
41. Serenity:
42. The Ten Commandments:
43. Evil Dead II:
44. The King of Comedy:
45. Mulholland Drive:
46. Empire Strikes Back:
47. Raiders of the Lost Ark:
48. Dogma:
49. Ikiru:
50. Sansho the Bailiff:


Honorable Mentions:

Art House/ Foreign

The Passion of Joan of Arc:
2001 A Space Odyssey:
M:
The Battle of Algiers:
Man Bites Dog: 1992
La Haine:


Fun with VHS

Superman:
Ghostbusters
Back to the Future
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
The Land Before Time:
The Great Muppet Caper
King Kong vs Godzilla


Tales from Blockbuster Video

The Wolf Man
Tremors
Bram Stoker’s Dracula:
Army of Darkness:
Halloween :
The Exorcist:


Honorable mentions: The beginning aka Disney movies

Sleeping Beauty:
The Little Mermaid:
Beauty and the Beast:
Aladdin:
The Princess and the Frog:
Frozen:


Exploitation and Cult Films

Death Wish:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show:
Coffy:
The Toxic Avenger:
Escape from New York:
Pink Flamingos:

Let’s all Go Out to the Movies

LOTR Trilogy
Independence Day
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
Drive Angry
Gravity

Good Lord, Gunslinger. With those statistics, you're becoming worse than Rodent.

You have to watch more foreign cinema.

Go to sleep, Gunslinger. Give the pods a chance to take over your body.

On my to do list

I haven't slept since 2006!

My watchlist consists of 850 titles right now. I remember the times when it was 'only' 300. I add films to watch like a maniac.

I love most movies I have watched here. Though I found a bit too premature to make a new top 50 after just 6-7 months (I guess). My top 100 did not change much over the past 8 months to allow any change (it's mainly because I have been working 60 hours a week and so unable to watch many movies since, I had a long period, from mid 2012 to mid 2013, when I had plenty of free time so I watched over 300 movies and my top 100 changed a lot, now I guess I would maybe add one of two movies in a new top 100 since).

enjoy essentially everything i've seen here. there's quite a few i still need to see & are high up on my to-see list

there's a certain Kubrick film absent tho :P

From my top 50:

USA: 19
Japan: 18
Russia: 4
Italy: 4
Germany: 2
UK: 1
Sweden: 1
Denmark: 1

So far, France didn't make anything that cracked my top 50, I don't really get French cinema. The other countries are well represented though (Brazil didn't show up because my favorite Brazilian film is in the 50's on my top 200 ranking).

it'd be false to say there aren't 'foreign' films that i like, yet honestly, even the foreign movies i enjoy most are crafted with an awareness of western culture... such as Seven Samurai, the Dollar Trilogy, etc.

there are plenty of good movies made outside of America, and plenty with great core messages. though not many outside of the US i've seen that have been made with quite the style of storytelling i enjoy, as far as the total package, that can top my list of favorites

maybe it's not quite as scholarly to say, but i still believe America has produced easily the most quality great movies compared to any other country, as far as i'm concerned

Japan has a lot of good ones too though, mainly from their Toho Studios days

That would be true of most people I would imagine but it would generally come down to how many people actually watch. I used to watch 95% American movies so 95% of the great movies I saw were American.

Now I would say about 30% of the great movies I watch are American - which seems about right because when you take out the crappy horror movies and other stuff I watch, I probably watch about 30%-40% American movies.

There are many excellent directors putting together astounding catalog's of movies that many people would never have even heard of - Tetsuya Nakashima, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Weerasethakul, Lee Chang Dong, Majid Majidi, Shunji Iwai and so on.

Ph, BTW, nice list Gunslinger. Don't think I've seen anyone put as much effort and "love" into a list

i cannot deny this possibility compared to what said above, and it's quite possible i'm being ignorant

i do think the US has done very well in the medium of film tho, historically speaking

That's true. I probably have more non-American films in my top 100 but that would be because there is about 50 years of American cinema where I have watched very little. Hopefully I'll fix that up when we do more decade countdowns

Statistically speaking, US and India have the largest film industries, so most great films made today are probably made in US and India. Japan's film industry declined after the 1950's and now most talent is in manga, anime and drama TV, their current live action film industry is very weak compared to the current US film industry.

I have so many Japanese films in my top 50 because of Miyazaki and his minions in Ghibli (also because of Kurosawa), removing the Ghibli stuff from my top 50 would remove 10 Japanese movies and open space for 8 US movies. So it's a bias in my top 50, my "unbiased" top 50 would have about 27 US movies instead of 19.

Americans also watch more movies than other countries: per capita ticket sales are higher in the US than in Europe, Brazil, China and Japan and so the market for movies is also larger, in other countries popular culture takes other shapes (in Japan currently, much more creative talent is in manga than in film). Also considering the higher per capita income of the US versus India, means that US films have better production values and it clearly shows compared to Indian films and other non-English language films. Contemporary Japanese and Chinese live action films also suffer from low budgets if compared to American films.

So overall, it's true that US is dominant in film, specially live action film (if you consider animation, though, the US is clearly far behind Japan: Japanese output is about 7-8 times larger: in 2006, Japanese cinemas screened 133 animated films, US cinemas screened about 18, I also find that Japanese animation is technically superior to US animation in the same way that US live action is technically superior to non-US live action, in terms of cinematography/special effects/etc). So I watch non-Hollywood stuff mostly for the stuff that the US doesn't actually make, such as slow paced art films such as Tarkovsky's (nothing in the English language is comparable to his films, Sane also cited some other art directors (which I find to be much weaker than Tarkovsky though)) and serious adult animation (which is only made in Japan in large quantities), but considering the stuff Hollywood specializes on they are clearly the dominant force and many if not most great movies in those fields come from the US.