The MoFo Top 100 Neo-noir Countdown

I think I'm done now. It's always fun to do this things, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun if it weren't for all of you. Thanks to all of you for voting or just sharing your thoughts here. But especially, thanks to @Citizen Rules for coming up with this crazy idea to do two countdowns at once, something that I admit I wasn't entirely on board with, but that ended up working rather well. Second, always thanks to @Yoda for all the technical stuff, all the backstage talk, and his quick response for the two or three times I messed up Third, thanks to @John-Connor for working out the actors stats and @Holden Pike for his constant grumbl... no, seriously thanks for his backstage advise, for sharing stats, and frequent elbowing when something wasn't quite right. Finally, again, thanks to all of you for making it fun! Now let's party...

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Okay, the last 2 are on my list...

2. Blade Runner - I was only a kid, and coming off a Raiders of the Lost Ark Harrison Ford high when Blade Runner came out. I must say I felt a little lost amongst the film noir sci-fi kind of genre twist this was - being more used to Star Wars type of fare when it came to science fiction. It's taken years of continually increased appreciation to turn that all around for me personally. This is sci-fi for adults instead of kids, and a beautiful introduction to a much bigger audience for Dutch actor Rutger Hauer. It wasn't a huge hit when it came out - but man, time has been especially kind to it's status - and it was honored with a rarely brilliant belated sequel which did the impossible and lived up to the original. I had it at #12 on my list.

1. Chinatown - There's not much left to say about Chinatown - I've seen it plenty of times, and it's another film that I love more now than when I first saw it. I never ended up seeing that follow-up, The Two Jakes - mainly because of it's reputation as a disappointment. Perhaps someone here is a fan of it? Anyway, Chinatown ended up with a #9 spot on my ballot - a kind of scattered one according to this particular countdown, with my favourite, The Conversation, ending up lower down and some of the films I had lower down on my ballot ending up near the top. I only have one more reveal as to a film that didn't show.

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Seen : 75/100
I'd never even heard of : 9/100
Movies that had been on my radar, but I haven't seen yet : 16/100
Films from my list : 21 + 1

#1 - My #9 - Chinatown (1974)
#2 - My #12 - Blade Runner (1982)
#3 - My #20 - L.A. Confidential (1997)
#4 - My #18 - Taxi Driver (1976)
#5 - My #8 - The Long Goodbye (1973)
#6 - My #5 - Se7en (1995)
#8 - My #4 - Memento (2000)
#12 - My #10 - No Country For Old Men (2007)
#13 - My #7 - Blue Velvet (1986)
#14 - My #15 - Drive (2011)
#15 - My #6 - Miller's Crossing (1990)
#16 - My #2 - Reservoir Dogs (1992)
#17 - My #22 - Blow Out (1981)
#21 - My #13 - Nightcrawler (2014)
#27 - My #24 - The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
#28 - My #1 - The Conversation (1974)
#30 - My #23 - Zodiac (2007)
#42 - My #19 - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
#44 - My #21 - Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
#52 - My #11 - Oldboy (2003)
#81 - My #17 - Brick (2005)
#106 - My #16 - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)
DNP - My #3 - Gloria (1980)
DNP - My #14 - Training Day (2001)
DNP - My #25 - Animal Kingdom (2010)

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Training Day - My #14

My bad. Training Day isn't really a neo noir film, but as I'm someone who is all about excuses and not at all happy with owning up to my responsibilities, I have to point out that I did search for neo noirs and Training Day showed up amongst the results. I went and made sure it qualified, and it did (almost everything did.) I really love Training Day - so much so that I blocked out the fact that it probably wouldn't belong here. Not that this didn't stop a number of other films from showing up - but as bad luck would have it not Training Day. Great performance from Denzel, and I'm always happy with Ethan Hawke - great pair up villain/hero-wise. I have to own up to it, which is what I'm doing.

@Thief, well done work!

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My Ballot
▽


1. Angel Heart (1987) [#31]
2. Wild at Heart (1990) [near misses]
3. Jackie Brown (1997) [#18]
4. The Driver (1978) [#79]
5. Le Samouraď (1967) [#7]


6. Red Rock West (1993) [#88]
7. The Hot Spot (1990) [#85]
8. Shallow Grave (1994) [#95]
9. Le Cercle Rouge (1970) [#23]
10. The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) [#27]


11. Reservoir Dogs (1992) [#16]
12. Caché (2005)
13. Sea of Love (1989)
14. Purple Noon (1960) [#94]
15. The Swimming Pool (1969)


16. Thelma & Louise (1991) [#56]
17. Year of the Dragon (1985)
18. Taxi Driver (1976) [#4]
19. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) [#36]
20. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)


21. Mona Lisa (1986) [#78]
22. Blue Velvet (1986) [#13]
23. Hard Eight (1996) [near misses]
24. Pulp Fiction (1994) [#37]
25. Guilty as Sin (1993)
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Others on my radar:
▽
The Ninth Gate (1999) [one-pointers]
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) [#96]
True Romance (1993) [#60]
Thief (1981) [#29]
The Conversation (1974) [#28]
Sin City (2005) [#26]
Fargo (1996) [#11]

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

Great job @Thief! Thank you for all your hard work. Rep this man, people.

So uh, what's next. Apologies if already asked.

Great job citizen and Thief. So great I didn't even give either grief this time!

Nice work, Thief.
Here's my ballot. I bolded the ones that didn't make it.

1. Fargo
2. High and Low
3. L.A. Confidential
4. Chinatown
5. Le Samourai
6. Blade Runner
7. The French Connection
8. Memories of Murder
9. Memento
10. La Haine
11. Dog Day Afternoon
12. Sonatine
13. To Live and Die in L.A.
14. Blood Simple
15. Blow Out
16. Le Cercle Rouge
17. The Usual Suspects
18. Get Carter (1971)
19. Mona Lisa
20. House of Games
21. Point Blank
22. A Simple Plan
23. Devil in a Blue Dress
24. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
25. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Forgot to say yesterday, for anyone interested, a couple of years ago I was a guest on Best Film Ever podcast where we talked about Blade Runner. Check it out here!

I've only seen 43/100 is that like the lowest score of anyone?

100/100

69/100 seen

I am the greatest movie watching person of all time.

Super busy weekend, so just catching up with everything now.

As any long time MoFo knows, by favorite film of all time is Blade Runner. It's one of the films that I can watch at pretty much any time, and I am in the mood for it. I had the pleasure of seeing the just -released Final Cut at the Coolidge Corner Cinema in Boston, which is sort of an old school theater. I brought all my friends, and we all had a ball watching this fresh new cut in a theater that made it feel like it was 1982 all over again, but with better sound and video quality. This is easily my favorite and most memorable viewing of this film I have ever experienced.



Blade Runner was the first film where I found myself being moved by plight of the antagonists in a very affecting and conflicted way. While Roy Batty is monster, he is a tragic monster, and his search for meaning touches me on a almost deterministic level. He is existential dread personified, and his final scene moves me to tears every time I see it. Sometimes, it not even raining!



Blade Runner's influence cannot be denied. So many subsequent works draw inspiration from or outright steal from the film, it would take me hours to list them all. Its art direction, production design and cinematography were unmatched at the time, and the film contains several of my favorite shots in all of cinema, one of which has been my profile cover here on MoFo since the day the feature was added to the site. I get lost in the film's visuals every time I watch it.







Blade Runner is a tremendous achievement and it pretty much created the entire genre of future noir, or tech noir as it is also referred to. I of course prefer the more ambiguous Director's Cut and Final Cut to the theatrical release, but recommend that people give the theatrical a shot at some point, as it can help answer some of the questions people just seeing the films for the first time might have. Maybe shut it off just as Deckard and Rachel head into the elevator at the end, though.

So, where does this leave the film as far as my ballot? I guess it seems an obvious choice that I would have it all the way at the top, what with it being my favorite film ever, right? I had Blade Runner at #2. As far as total purity of essence in the neo-noir style, there is another film that supersedes Blade Runner, and that film is usually in the second spot on my all-time favorite films list, which I will say a few words about in my next post in this thread.

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Is there opened thread for the next countdown theme?

Not yet.

The runner up in the last poll was Musicals which I assume would include all musicals old and new and animated too. It's the only genre on the MoFo List section that hasn't been done by the MoFo community and has been on the 'next time' for a long while.

For anybody just jonesing for more Neo-Noir beyond the MoFo List, I made a custom list full of titles from the 1990s Neo-Noir Renaissance. I listed them alphabetically but some of my favorites, other than the ones I voted for that made it (The Grifters, One False Move, The Hot Spot, Shallow Grave, Dead Again, and L.A. Confidential) and the couple I voted for that did not make it (After Dark, My Sweet and The Limey) some of my other bigtime favorites are Fresh, Blood & Wine, Lone Star, A Perfect World, and Carlito's Way. A few of the titles that I am frankly shocked did not make the collective because I foolishly thought they were foregone conclusions are The Last Seduction, Out of Sight, Fallen Angels, Devil in a Blue Dress, Payback, and Cop Land. And then just for some oddball, over-the-top, darkly funny takes on the genre that I absolutely adore, check out Blood & Concrete: A Love Story, Miami Blues, and Romeo is Bleeding.

Not a complete and exhaustive list, but the sixty films I listed (I believe eighteen of which are also on the MoFo List) should give anyone who wants it excellent coverage and understanding of Neo-Noir in the 1990s.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

The Last Seduction is one that I still have queued up to see, but just haven't gotten around to yet. I was hoping to get to it before submitting my ballot, and figured that once I missed it, I would certainly have it in my watched column by the end of the countdown. Alas...

The video below is nothing but spoilers, so definitely save it for until after your viewing (and anybody else who hasn't had the pleasure, yet), but The Last Seduction is a fantastic flick. Really and truly the only reason I didn't vote for it was because I figured it was absolutely going to show, probably as high as the Top Thirty and wouldn't have shocked me to see Top Twelve, and therefore did not need my help. I badly miscalculated on that one, obviously. Apparently MoFo - the MoFos who vote, anyway - prefers John Dahl's previous entry Red Rock West. Preferences are preferences, but empirically, critically, and according to Mr. Noir Eddie Muller himself, The Last Seduction is the superior film. And it isn't even close. It is one of the biggest and most embarrassing omissions from our collective MoFo List.

There's a reason it's been "next time" for so long.

We've done three (or 2.5) genres in a row. Time for a decade. 90s Redux! I'm going to campaign and lobby on this. "A vote for the 90s is a vote for freedom (from musicals)!"

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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."

We can do musicals next time.