Anyone tired of Godfather being #1?

LOL, yes. At this point I'm like, look, if other people can't see how brilliant [insert favorite movie here] is, that's their loss.

Yeah, chicken biryani would like a word with you.

If you had mentioned chicken makhani, I might have conceded your point.

My only problem with Stairway to Heaven is that I was forced to hear it over and over again by every boombox toting guy in my neighborhood.



I came to appreciate the beauty of Page's guitar solo years later when I went through a classic rock phase.

That's more the fault of society than the song. Overplay rarely ruins a song for him.

Oh I totally blame society!

Led Zeppelin - The Best Cover Band in history

That's both an intuitive and rewarding way to see the older films; and to see how they compare with other films from their era.

Citizen Kane (1941) is possibly the best example. The screenplay, the cinematography, the music score-- were all totally fresh and completely innovative at the time. It held the no. 1 spot for over 50 years. There is not likely a single filmmaker who hasn't copied the techniques or have been inspired by Welles' stunning picture.

So the tendency while currently watching Kane at 80 years old is to think: what's so original about this film? Because everything in that film has been copied over and over hundreds of thousands of times. But yet at its opening it was a sensation, with gushing reports from major newspapers that weren't apart of the Hearst empire.

A music similarity would be Stravinsky's 1913 Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). There was not, or hardly has been, a single symphonic or other serious music composer who has not borrowed or have used elements of Stravinsky's masterpiece-- even up to today.

I agree with Aron Copland who said that "Le Sacre" was the chief composition of the 20th Century. I believe one could say the same about Citizen Kane.

The Godfather is not at the top of most major movies list:

1) IMDB it's 2nd
2) Sign and Sound Poll it is usually around the top 15 but not first
3) Movie Forums top movies list it's 2nd behind 2001: A Space Odyssey
4) AFI 2007 list of top american movies it was rated 2nd
5) But, on the Japanese magazine Kinema Junpo it was rated 1st among foreign movies


But, it appears The Godfather would rank first if you average all the top movies lists. I re-watched this movie recently and I can easily see why: everything about it is pitch perfect. It's indeed one of the best executed movies ever. I personally don't like gangster movies but I loved the first two Godfathers. Thats why they are gangster movies that transcend the genre.

Same tempo and instrument does not equal immediate knock off. If that's the case, we can say all trap artists are cover artists. Btw, Zep already won Spirit's suit twice.

It is very hard to get this across to people. You can't simply judge a film by "the standard" when the film is the creator of the standard. This is the problem with strictly evaluating a film from the seat of one's pants, inductively, just tasting with one's cinematic taste-buds, and not understanding that the creation of a new dish or cooking technique might be part of the evaluation, perhaps moreso than your familiarity with the flavor. Everything is a thing of it's time. If you are to really judge Kane, you should careful watch a large sample of the films made before it and other films made that year.



It can be hard to get through the looking glass, but it is possible to have a partial fusion of horizons (as Gadamer calls it) with the past. For just a small example, I didn't really appreciate just how good 60's television was until I started doing fan edits of the original Star Trek. It was only then that I realized that there was no fat on the bone. The camera angles were right (blocking actors in 4:3 is a real trick, but they had it down to a science and very often Trek will have three people in the frame talking), the dialogue advanced the plot, the audience was shown neither too much nor too little. Televisions were smaller. Color was new. Suddenly, I realized that these people making what I thought was bland television were master craftsmen. And when you calibrate yourself for moral and political sensibilities (for what could be said and shown at the time) of the time, your realize that they were doing it quite well (for their time and place). If you can calibrate yourself to the old taste palate, there is a whole world of content waiting to be enjoyed. But you can't simply get there by viewing it with modern eyes and expectations. You have to do a little work to read Beowulf, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare, and guess what? You have to do a little work for old movies too.

The verdict offers a legal, and not a moral conclusion.



Don't forget about all those other songs.

A: I never said they didn't plagiarizer at all, but I'm sick of the Stairway debate. For 52 years the world's been going in circles over it. They were caught before Stairway, anyway. People use real plagiarism to justify faint similarities, and it's honestly incredibly childish. Unless one can prove that four LOTR-inspired Englishmen who grew up around acoustic music in their childhoods just somehow magically never heard any others songs in that tempo, or that instrument, or both throughout their entire lives.


B: Spirit had their second chance after several decades to prove it, and they wasted it. If their argument was good enough, it would be.


C: Like I said, this is all going in circles. The world can scream it forever, but nothing's going to get changed. But if Zeppelin has to pay charges for a similarity, then all money made off of trap, dance-pop, any EDM genre, and BLUES IN GENERAL should be given to the original creators or the first people who got their hands on some sort of copyright in the first place. It's never gonna get fully resolved so let's please, for the love of God, JUST GET OVER IT.

Nothing says "I'm over it," like a sub-pointed response and an all caps conclusion.



They're a band with a halo and an asterisk or two. When people shine the halo, others will point to the asterisk. Most of us will achieve neither.

Because they've apparently got nothing better to do, or more fulfilling to discuss, like the mindsets and beliefs behind certain movies, movie opinions and movie moralities, and how it applies to society. But if we're going to discuss anything, why not discuss things that haven't been resolved to the best of society's abilities already? The best anyone can hope for in Spirit's situation failed them twice in the best way anybody could hope for: the courthouse. In other words, this is one of those things nobody can do anything about. So to keep complaining about it and coming back to it for anybody, as if just posting Taurus again like half the nerds on the internet apparently haven't heard the comparison before, especially on forums like this, is basically resurrecting a dead fan riot.


On a place like this, there's more room for discussion concerning the world's perceptions of number 1 movies, and which users are being honest and which ones are being tools. The most interesting discussion we've had in a long time was the discussion about the potential political mindset behind Jeanne Dielman's position at the top of the new BFI Sight and Sound poll, which was a very interesting read. We can only hope to recreate that level of interest in a thread discussing The Godfather, as we could if the movie in question was 2001 or Citizen Kane or even Star Wars. But this Spirit discussion has been done for the last fifty years and we're all back to square one, and why? Simple. Because the only people who could do anything about it, the legal system, clearly decided it wasn't worth the hassle. eI'm here to have legitimate discussions about art on a more cerebral ground than that. Even RYM didn't stoop to this until the second lawsuit, and they gave it up after the Spirit supporters didn't get what they wanted.


If we're going to defend anything concerning freedom of speech, it should be more responsible to discuss something that hasn't already been put to silence by the highest powers possible, as if spouting the same complaint over the last 50 years would do anything.

Dude, it's all good. I'm just being a smartass and pointing to the asterisk.

Well Said... That's what I told Corax about Alex Baldwin being found innocent Poor Corax

We just had a discussion where Corax was writing short responses while the other poster was the one writing long responses. That's a first.

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I guess it depends on how your average them together. The statement caused me to check the TheyShootPictures top 1000 which is supposed to be a (weighted) aggregate of other lists (pretty sure the S&S poll is weighted heavily there. Actually, someone told me they aggregate all of the past S&S polls in there as well. Kane sitting at the top for 50 years probably doesn't hurt it there), and there The Godfather comes in at number 6.

My sole consolation is that I don't bear the ignominy of having said that I am "glad" that the man who killed his employee by recklessly handling a gun won't face criminal justice.