Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

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Welcome to the human race...
#62. It's Such A Beautiful Day
(Don Hertzfeldt, 2012)



"The next thing you know you're looking back instead of forward. And now, at the climax of all those years of worry, sleepless nights, and denials, Bill finally finds himself staring his death in the face, surrounded by people he no longer recognizes and feels no closer attachment to than the thousands of relatives who'd come before. And as the sun continues to set, he finally comes to realize the dumb irony in how he had been waiting for this moment his entire life, this stupid awkward moment of death that had invaded and distracted so many days with stress and wasted time."

It's become a cliché of sorts in recent years for Western animation oriented towards adults to deal not just in juvenile humour but also to make its own overly-concerted efforts to engage with the breadth and depth of human emotion (especially the negative ones) as if it has something to prove about the medium having more cinematic merit than being a delivery system for merchandising profits. The success of these efforts will naturally vary and be prone to scrutiny, but I do think that Don Hertzfeldt has consistently proven himself a worthy auteur within the field with his independently-crafted shorts that deal in the absurd, surreal, and downright depressing. Such is the case with this film following the mundane misadventures of a behatted stick figure named Bill, whose boring life take a turn for the worse once his physical and mental wellbeing start to deteriorate in a manner implied to be extremely hereditary. Hertzfeldt blithely narrates his protagonist's many trials in aggressive detail as the simple cartoons explode outwards in discordant frames within frames, turning life into a seemingly relentless barrage of cacophonous nonsense and unsettling imagery while still finding the room for moments that are quiet without being peaceful.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: N/A
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I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



Welcome to the human race...
#61. Fanny and Alexander
(Ingmar Bergman, 1982)



"Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns."

At once a sprawling and lavish epic (both in theatrical and televised formats) that stands out in a career compiled largely of monochromatic little ventures and yet very much a story rooted in the same notions of fate and faith, Fanny and Alexander may well be Bergman's magnum opus. Following one very turbulent year in the life of an affluent family, it centres mainly on the titular children (Bertil Guve and Pernilla Allwin) as their recently-widowed mother (Ewa Froling) marries a local bishop (Jan Malmsjö) and trades the theatrical opulence of their relatives for the pious austerity of a new husband - a narrative clearly in line with fairytales of old as the bishop reveals a cruel authoritarian streak from which the children seek to escape. Perhaps not the deepest of Bergman's works with its "wicked stepfather" plot, it nevertheless remains one of his most evocative as he allows himself to stretch out and develop a rich and varied world in terms of character and setting before tightening it into a starkness worthy of his earlier classics.

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



Out of curiosity, are you referring to the 3 hour version or the mini series?

I've only seen the 3 hour version, which would probably land somewhere in my top 3 Bergman films. I should check out the mini series as well.



Welcome to the human race...
I've seen the theatrical version twice and the television version once. The former is obviously more concise and communicates enough of what makes the whole project good, but the latter finds interesting new ways to expand upon matters without wearing out its welcome.



I often rank It's a Beautiful Day as the greatest animated film ever made, which I've increasingly come to view as a bit of an understatement. It's begun to creep up on me that I probably think it is one of the greatest films I've ever seen, period. Top 30 almost for sure.



It does everything I want from a piece of art. It is frightening, inscrutable, funny, joyous and depressing, all at once. Hertzfeldt feels like he is very much in control of every single element, and yet open enough to the spontaneous act of creation that it seems to be coming straight from the top of his head. Both masterfully composed and seemingly improvised moment to moment. Add to the fact that Hertzfeldt has developed not only a visual style, but a sense of humour and an eye for the weirdly beautiful, that is so uniquely his own it is indistinguishable from anyone else.


And from what I know of him, he's still resisting commodifying his art, or compromising in any way, and he should be seen as a real hero when it comes to the idea of the artist as self contained unit who cannot have his vision bought or sold, reduced or simplified. And yet, as deeply personal his work ultimately is, it still should be easy to relate to by anyone open enough to accept his deeply eccentric vision of what life is and how to survive it. This film is about all of us, whether we want it to be or not.



Welcome to the human race...
#60. Citizen Kane
(Orson Welles, 1941)



"You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in sixty years."

In a way, I guess I have Mank to thank for this. Though I found David Fincher's biopic of the titular screenwriter to be rather mediocre in its own right, it did give me the motivation to revisit Citizen Kane itself as a means of refamiliarising myself with a film whose reputation more than speaks for itself (and in a theatre to boot) only to rediscover how much of said reputation was well and truly warranted. An elemental story of the eponymous newspaper tycoon (Orson Welles) and his journey from rags to riches as recounted by those closest to him, Kane fires on all cylinders - one understandably acknowledges certain degrees of technical innovation such as Gregg Toland's deep focus cinematography or even just how certain sequences are blocked and lit, but so much of it is driven by an ensemble so strong that not even Welles' grandstanding turn is enough to overshadow them. Chief among all is the delightfully acerbic script that finds a mean side to even the most innocent of characters and pressure-cooks them in everything from sensationalist journalism to political scandal, infusing the proceedings with damn near every possible emotion as it finds the uncomfortable humour in a montage showing a crumbling marriage or the tragedy in seeing lifelong partnerships come apart due to the clash between loyalty and integrity. Regardless of whether or not Mank was altogether accurate in its approach to the film's authorship, there's no denying how tightly-written the whole thing proves to be.

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



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
I took my wife to see There Will Be Blood in theatres and she turned to me after the opening 20 minutes and complained that no one was talking. I simply nodded and said, yeah, isn't it great?

She has yet to forgive me for that night.
__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews



Welcome to the human race...
#59. Aliens
(James Cameron, 1986)



"I say we take off and nuke the whole site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Though I admit I'm having second thoughts about placing it this high (the downside of posting these titles one at a time is that you get more time to think about whether your ranking was "correct"), I do reckon Aliens still warrants considerable attention. One can retroactively see it as a rough draft for the genre-shifting sequel work Cameron would do in Terminator 2 for better and for worse, seeing how it reinvents untrained survivor Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) into an active warrior against the threat of xenomorphs and the last best hope when an entire colony (and the rescue team) falls prey to their ruthless bloodthirst. This does mean that it effectively recycles many of the original's concepts into a "bigger and better" framework (most obviously the contention with a bloody-minded corporation who are frustratingly bureaucratic even without the looming threat of militaristic malfeasance), though it does make enough of its variations on the source material not just in terms of characterisation (swapping from civilian space truckers to military hardasses ends up selling the threat at least as well, if not better) but in terms of narrative (giving Ripley an orphaned child to protect, even if that does skew into a vaguely reductive idea of strong female character as surrogate mother in a way that is literalised in a decidedly inferior director's cut). Of course, taken on its own terms it's a worthy exercise in melding action with horror and infusing it with the kind of elaborate sci-fi world-building that never distracts but manages to make everything about this world feel lived in until death incarnate starts infesting it.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: #85



I never liked Aliens as much as the original (as you can see here), because the series inevitably lost something in going from Giger's truly "alien" production design to those anonymous, FPS-y industrial corridors, along with turning the Xenomorph from an unstoppable monster to endless waves of cannon fodder (as well as removing some of the creature's mystique, as @ThatDarnMKS has mentioned before), but it is still a great movie in its own right, and the best possible result we could've gotten from the series going from Horror to balls-to-the-wall Action, IMO.



Welcome to the human race...
#58. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
(Lam Nai-choi, 1991)



"You got a lot of guts, Oscar!"

Unlike Aliens, I'm not really having second thoughts about sticking this infamously insane exercise in kung-fu ultraviolence over the likes of Citizen Kane. Set in a dystopian 2001 where prisons are run for profit (good thing that would never happen in real life), the recently-incarcerated Ricky (Fan Siu-wong) just wants to do his time quietly but the sheer brutality carried out on the general population by everyone from sadistic inmates to iron-fisted wardens means that he has to spend the whole movie fighting for his life - and fight he does. Riki-Oh turns the human body into a plasticine playground that's just waiting to be damaged and destroyed in all manner of cartoonishly gory ways - whatever fighting skill the rather capable performers display is secondary to the visceral displays of carnage they can wreak upon one another, putting the whole affair closer in tone to The Evil Dead or Braindead than The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Throw in an impressively overwrought English dub (the context in which the above pull-quote occurs has to be seen to be believed) and you have one of the genuine Hong Kong cult classics.

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



Welcome to the human race...
#57. Repo Man
(Alex Cox, 1984)



"Repo man's always intense. Let's get a drink."

For all the films that I do love and appreciate, there are very few that I look at and think to myself, "I wish I'd made that." Repo Man is such a film - the messy debut of a film critic who crafts a kitchen-sink narrative made up of off-beat observational humour, car repossession anecdotes, hardcore punk philosophy (or lack thereof), and bizarre sci-fi tangents. It's everything and nothing all at once, roiling from one mode to another at the drop of the hat with little to carry it beyond momentum and vibes. The individual elements - a suitably eccentric cast of character actors (with Harry Dean Stanton being a consummate professional as the cantankerous mentor to Emilio Estevez's snot-nosed protagonist), Robby Müller's sharp neon-tinged cinematography, a soundtrack riddled with punk rock and surf guitar, weird little bits of production design like the generic consumer goods and Christmas tree air fresheners - are more than capable of accomplishing such a task, aptly furnishing Cox's exercise in capturing the zeitgeist of 1980s America from a decidedly off-kilter angle.

2005 ranking: #24
2013 ranking: #17



"The lights are growing dim Otto. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am."

"That's ********. You're a white suburban punk just like me."

"Yeah, but it still hurts."



Welcome to the human race...
#56. Raging Bull
(Martin Scorsese, 1980)



"You didn't get me down, Ray."

Scorsese does take a fair bit of guff from those who would argue that his tendency to direct films about violent, maladjusted men and the damage they cause others proves emptily voyeuristic at best and toxically valorising at worst - this is a view I find easy to dispute more often than not, but Raging Bull definitely pushes that envelope with its blunt efforts to depict the life and times of boxing champion Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro). Scorsese's health scares inspired him to treat this as what would potentially be his final film and that can be felt in both the tangible filmmaking choices - the texture of black-and-white film sharpening both the frantically gliding attempts to capture La Motta's fighting within the ring and the statically unflinching dramatisations of the violence he inflicts outside it, pointedly soundtracking its more poignant moments with grandiose opera but largely letting the soundtrack consist of the painful sounds of punches and slaps. Throughout it all, De Niro turns in an almost too-dedicated performance tracing La Motta's rise and fall as he alienates and dominates (or occasionally charms) the people around him with his brutishness - it's one thing to see him convincingly punch his way through professional bouts, but something else entirely to see him tearfully screaming and pounding at a concrete wall.

2005 ranking: N/A
2013 ranking: #84



#56. Raging Bull
(Martin Scorsese, 1980)



"You didn't get me down, Ray."

Scorsese does take a fair bit of guff from those who would argue that his tendency to direct films about violent, maladjusted men and the damage they cause others proves emptily voyeuristic at best and toxically valorising at worst
Psssh, have those people even watched his movies? That's like when people claim that he's "weak" with his female characters; c'mon!