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IndependentThoughtAlarm
If you're too lazy to actually read the list, you can just look at this purdy collage that contains pictures of all of them (and some of my favorite directors), courtesy of Matt93: http://i267.photobucket.com/albums/ii293/w0re/Hello.jpg
If you are the literary type, behold the list in old fashioned textular format:
[pre]Top 09 Films[/pre]
01. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry | 2004)
02. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson | 2002)
03. Dogville (Lars Von Trier | 2003)
04. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols | 1966)
05. Le Samoura� (Jean-Pierre Melville | 1967)
06. All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz | 1950)
07. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock | 1958)
08. Annie Hall (Woody Allen | 1977)
09. Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones | 1953)
The list will probably constantly change in rank, but it will probably never decrease in size. It will only increase when I watch a film that I decide to give a 10/10. That will immediately go onto my list. Maybe I'll hit a Top 10, or even a Top 25? I certainly hope so. ]
And for the movies that deserve to be on the list, just not has high as the default ranking would be...they take their spot in line...
[pre]On the Waiting List[/pre]
01. Waking Life (Richard Linklater | 2001)
02. Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright | 2004)
03. The Third Man (Carol Reed | 1949)
04. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black | 2005)
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[pre]Top 25 Lost Episodes[/pre]
01. The Incident (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 5.16 & 5.17)
02. Flashes Before Your Eyes (Damon Lindelof & Drew Goddard | 3.08)
03. There's No Place Like Home (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 4.12 & 4.13)
04. Walkabout (David Fury | 1.04)
05. Greatest Hits (Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz | 3.21)
06. Raised By Another (Lynne E. Litt | 1.10)
07. Lockdown (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 2.17)
08. Deus Ex Machina (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 1.19)
09. Exodus (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 1.23 & 1.24)
10. This Place Is Death (Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz | 5.05)
11. All The Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues (Javier Grillo-Marxuach | 1.11)
12. Through The Looking Glass (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 3.22)
13. Pilot, Part 2 (J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof | 1.02)
14. Ji Yeon (Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz | 4.07)
15. Live Together, Die Alone (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 2.23)
16. The Brig (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 3.19)
17. ? (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 2.21)
18. Two For The Road (Elizabeth Sarnoff & Christina M. Kim | 2.20)
19. Do No Harm (Janet Tamaro | 1.20)
20. Pilot, Part 1 (J.J. Abrams & Damon Lindelof / 1.01)
21. The Other 48 Days (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 2.07)
22. Three Minutes (Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz | 2.22)
23. Because You Left (Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse | 5.01)
24. Expos� (Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz | 3.14)
25. ...In Translation (Javier Grillo-Marxuach & Leonard Dick | 1.17)
[pre]Rankings for 2009[/pre]
01. (500) Days of Summer
02. A Serious Man
03. Zombieland
04. Coraline
05. Moon
06. Up
07. Adventureland
08. Suck
09. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
10. Star Trek
11. Monsters vs. Aliens
12. Extract
13. The Hangover
14. Push
15. The International
16. Public Enemies
17. Watchmen
18. Angels and Demons
[pre]Rankings for 2008[/pre]
01. Synecdoche, New York
02. Wall�E
03. Slumdog Millionaire
04. Sunshine Cleaning
05. Changeling
06. The Dark Knight
07. Cloverfield
08. The Brothers Bloom
09. Horton Hears A Who
10. Iron Man
11. The Bank Job
12. Charlie Bartlett
13. Get Smart
14. Transsiberian
15. Tropic Thunder
16. Religulous
17. Doubt
18. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
19. In Bruges
20. Speed Racer
21. Burn After Reading
22. Taken
23. Bolt
24. The Incredible Hulk
25. Baby Mama
26. You Don't Mess With The Zohan
27. Is There Anybody There?
28. Hamlet 2
29. Be Kind Rewind
30. Yes Man
31. Eagle Eye
32. Definitely, Maybe
33. Smart People
34. 21
35. Jumper
36. Mad Money
37. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
38. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
39. Mamma Mia
40. Twilight
41. Prom Night
42. Wanted
43. Meet The Spartans
----
[pre]Rankings for 2007[/pre]
01. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
02. Zodiac
03. Across The Universe
04. Juno
05. Eastern Promises
06. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
07. Persepolis
08. Sicko
09. 3:10 To Yuma
10. Hot Fuzz
11. Lars and the Real Girl
12. The Nines
13. Hairspray
14. Son of Rambow
15. There Will Be Blood
16. Disturbia
17. Stardust
18. The Simpsons Movie
19. Shrek The Third
20. Ratatouille
21. Blades of Glory
22. Bee Movie
23. The Bourne Ultimatum
24. 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
25. Michael Clayton
26. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
27. No Country For Old Men
28. National Treasure: Book of Secrets
29. Futurama: Bender's Big Score
30. The Bucket List
31. Rush Hour 3
32. American Gangster
33. Music and Lyrics
34. Evan Almighty
35. Fred Claus
36. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
37. Hot Rod
38. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
39. Charlie Wilson's War
40. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
41. Premonition
42. Fracture
43. Alvin and the Chipmunks
44. Wild Hogs
45. Spider-Man 3
46. Transformers
47. Epic Movie
----
[pre]Rankings for 2006[/pre]
01. The Fall
02. Jesus Camp
03. Once
04. Bobby
05. Scoop
06. Southland Tales
07. Laberinto del fauno, El
08. The Counterfeiters
09. The Hoax
10. Half Nelson
11. Little Miss Sunshine
12. A Scanner Darkly
13. The Prestige
14. Casino Royale
15. Children of Men
16. Snakes on a Plane
17. Paris, Je T'aime
18. An Inconvenient Truth
19. Mission Impossible III
20. The Pursuit of Happyness
21. Inside Man
22. X-Men: The Last Stand
23. The Science of Sleep
24. I Served The King of England
25. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
26. Open Season
27. The Da Vinci Code
28. Stranger Than Fiction
29. Ice Age II: The Meltdown
30. Happy Feet
31. The Illusionist
32. Rocky Balboa
33. She's The Man
34. Scary Movie 4
35. The Break Up
36. The Devil Wears Prada
37. Just My Luck
38. Night at the Museum
39. 16 Blocks
40. Man of the Year
41. Cars
42. Click
43. 300
44. Nacho Libre
Reviews
Public Enemies (2009)
Overlong and ultimately disappointing.
I'll spare you any suspense, here. Simply put, Public Enemies is a major disappointment. There is one aspect that the film has going for it, though, and that is the performances. Johnny Depp is great but, as I've read in other reviews, not exactly irreplaceable. Marion Cotillard is fantastic, but underused. Christian Bale is solid, but pretty forgettable. Unfortunately, everything else about the film proved disappointing.
This is the story of John Dillinger, who robbed banks, broke out of prisons, shot a lot of guns, loved a woman he met and didn't spend much time with, and...not much else. At least, that's what Public Enemies would have you believe. So little actually happens in this film it's a marvel they managed to stretch the running time past an hour and a bit.
A short run through: John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) escapes from a prison. Then he robs a bank. Then he meets Billie (Marion Cotillard), and they fall in love. He robs another bank. Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) wants to catch him. Shootout. Bank robbery. Repeat. He gets shot. How long did that take me, 30 seconds? I'm not saying the film was unnecessary, it was just unnecessarily long. So many scenes could have been cut down or just taken away altogether. The shootout near the middle of the film took so long to get through, that about halfway through it I had completely forgotten what it was they were doing. From that point on, it was nothing but bullets, blood, yelling and a lot of flashes from the guns that nearly blinded me.
The film wasn't exactly a treat for the eyes, either. The look of the film was horribly uneven, split evenly three ways between beautiful, crystal clear shots, amateur student film hand-held, and security camera footage. Either one wouldn't have been awful on its own, but it was just so wildly inconsistent that a good chunk of the time I was too distracted, wondering what had happened to the camera (sometimes between shots in the same scene), to worry about the story.
And like I said above, there's not much story to tell here. I'm sure the man had a very interesting life, but there was no real point to the film. It didn't seem like there was any specific story to tell. Quite simply put, it was merely about John Dillinger. "Well, just what about John Dillinger?", you ask. And I don't have an answer for you. Sorry. Either way, the film didn't highlight Dillinger as a hero or as a villain, and while I don't mind the impartial nature of the film in itself, I had a hard time really caring about what happened to him.
The love story was easily the most entertaining part of the film. Too bad it didn't show up much. My favorite parts of the film involved Marion Cotillard, and they didn't last long. What a shame. If they had cut down the major shootout or cut out one or two of the bank robbery scenes that were mostly all the same, they could have focused more on that story and I wouldn't have minded the runtime as much.
So, aside from the good performances from just about everyone involved, there's not much to get excited about here. It was overlong, pretty low on plot, and filled to the brim with unnecessary scenes that had left my mind before I had even left the theater. Such a disappointment. It could have been something great, and it just...wasn't.
6/10
Angels & Demons (2009)
Angels & Demons (Ron Howard, 2009)
OK, everyone. Here's how it goes. Robert Langdon is smart. He knows history and symbols. There is a threat against the Vatican. OK? Following me so far? The threat is from the Illuminati, an organization of scientists vowing revenge on the Catholic Church. Alright? They've kidnapped four cardinals who are supposed to be in the running for Pope. Get it? OK, and the sexy scientist Vittoria Vetra is the expert who knows how to manage the bomb they're threatening the Vatican with. Yeah, OK, as long as you understand, we can get on with the movie. But we'll remind you of all of this in about 10 minutes in case you forget.
This may as well have been flashing on the screen for the entirety of Angels & Demons. On the surface, this doesn't seem like the kind of film that would attract brain dead idiots, but it seems that writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman didn't want to take the chance that some mentally challenged 11 year old might get lost in the story. This is my biggest qualm with Angels & Demons, an already mediocre film dragged down to fiery depths of cinematic hell by a completely incompetent script. OK, maybe that's a little extreme, but I couldn't pass up the chance to say "fiery depths of cinematic hell", now could I?
One example of the spoon-feeding nature of the script is the power outage idea. A camera has a live video feed of the bomb, and it's somewhere inside the Vatican. Security decides to turn off select power grids bits at a time so that they could see where to check for the bomb should the camera go dark. This seems easy enough to remember, right? Well, turns out it isn't. Every time the characters are in a room and the lights go out, some side character must remind everyone that security is turning off power at random. They really should have abandoned all hope of a four-walled narrative early on and had Tom Hanks turn to the camera every now and then and say "Alright, so let me get you up to speed here..."
And Robert Langdon. What a great character. Not only does he know everything that could possibly help him in his quest to rescue the four cardinals and stop the terrorist, but he talks about nothing else! I could count on one hand the amount of lines Tom Hanks reads that isn't a historical fact about Italy, the Illuminati, the Catholic Church, or something along the lines of "It should be here!", "We have to go there!", "They must be planning to..." or other cut and paste exclamations.
But it's a good thing that the good guy, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna, is there for guidance. Man, he's such a hero. A real saint. The perfect man for the job. Or, is he? SHOCK! TWIST! Run for the hills, because the suspicious-looking good guy who fits into the plot in nearly no significant way other than to be revealed to secretly have been the mastermind behind the whole plot is...the mastermind behind the whole plot! EEEEKK! But that means that the even more suspicious looking guy who everyone suspects is secretly the villain is...not secretly the villain! Gosh, if only they had given us a chance to figure it out...
Other minor things. Some good, some bad. Good: they got rid of what would have been a ridiculously contrived romantic subplot. The explosion at the end looked pretty. The bad: whose bright idea (pardon the pun) was it to have the light shine into the camera and nearly blind the audience whenever a character is running around with a flashlight? Why is it that two people of Italian origin in Italy, alone, speak English to each other sometimes, but Italian other times? I wouldn't mind if they spoke English the entire time, but the flip-flopping drove me crazy! Don't even get me started on the hilariously obvious and incredibly poorly written (so poorly written it stood out amongst the rest of the poorly written film) speeches about faith vs science. Yeesh.
Really, what a mediocre film. Pretty blandly directed, awful writing, and a phoned-in performance by Tom Hanks. Throw in an incredibly suspenseful "will Robert Langdon die in the middle of the movie?!" scene, a useless female sidekick and no real reason to care what happens to anyone and you can top off what should have been a huge disappointment, but really was just what most of us had expected. Oh, well. They can't all be gems.