The Movie Forums Top 100 of All-Time Refresh: Countdown

@Citizen Rules Almost certainly the latter

If the Seventh Seal didn’t make it and any Marvel movie made it (even the decent Iron Man and GOTG) I will be very disappointed.

What’s a movie in the old list you don’t think deserved to be there ?

The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)
Imdb

Date Watched: 05/13/2020
Cinema or Home: Home
Reason For Watching: 22nd MoFo Hall of Fame
Rewatch: Yes.


This film was released in theaters in the spring of my senior year of high school. My friends and classmates absolutely raved about it. So I watched it.

With its slick costumes, Sci-Fi premise, slow-motion stunts, characters with names like "Neo," "Trinity," "Cypher," and "Morpheus," and a soundtrack that features the likes of Prodigy, Rage Against the Machine, Massive Attack, and Rob Zombie, The Matrix came off to me then as tryhard "hey, look how edgy I am!" bulls***. I could not understand what the hell everyone else loved about it. Twenty-one years later, it has left me with that same impression.

There is nothing that I liked about this. Not one damn thing. It's too slick. It's too stylized. It's too cold. It's got so much expositional dialogue that it might as well have had a narrator. And all that green tint just made me think of the scum I had to clean out of my family's fish ponds every summer. I didn't give a rat's ass about any of these characters, I didn't give a rat's ass about the story, and the closest thing to emotion it brought out in me was boredom. Absolute, utter boredom.

Technically they all "deserve" to be there because they got enough points, but if I could remove one from the list it would be The Matrix.

BTW, one of the movies we'll see later this week is, if my query is correct, the only film on the countdown that has NO reviews of it. So if one of you figures out what it is and writes a review of it, the link for that one will link directly to it.

Happy hunting.

Hey, one of mine hit right from the top (or is it the bottom). I had Terry Gilliam's Brazil on my list at number nineteen. That accounts for only seven if its 69 points, but that was good enough to propel it onto the list. Brazil is one of those movies, like Citizen Kane and Apocalypse Now, where the behind-the-scenes story is as interesting as the finished film, which may in fact elevate it even higher than its purely artistic merits. In Brazil's case Gilliam's fights - some of them public - with the studio came not during shooting but after the production was completed, over the cut of the film and its release. Happily Gilliam's version has survived and thrived, thanks in large part to The Criterion Collection.

I managed to see Brazil during its brief theatrical run and many times on television and on VHS, including a trippy viewing of the "Happy Ending" cut on local TV late at night that inspired me to read and re-read Jack Matthews' 1987 book The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut. I wondered if Gilliam's true vision would ever be seen. The day the Criterion LaserDisc boxed set was released was a memorable one for me. I spent a glorious dozen hours or so obsessively pouring over the film itself and then the amazing wealth of extras.

It just had to be on my list of Top 25 movies. Even without my 27B/6 paperwork.

HOLDEN'S LIST
19. Brazil (#100)

Oh shnizzle pop. Suspiria.

I probably will, just being a tiny bit lazy about it at first while I probably imagine a technological/automated solution and then decide it's too elaborate and do it by hand in the end anyway.

Is that asterisk typographical? colon uppercase d2.

Oh that is a contender for my all time number 1 😡 and an 11/10 in my book !

I was being generous with the 1 out of 5.

Here's my hint for what #98 will be:

Kevin James, Shopping Center, Security Guard