The All-Time List Discussion Thread (Decade Project Vol. 3)

[swo17]

Lists are due one month from today. I'll start taking them by PM from now until the deadline. As a reminder, only films from the master list are eligible.

[TMDaines]

I'll be the first to admit I didn't get Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse at all. Opening scene got me interested, but after that I was raising an eyebrow throughout. The acting was atrocious, plot was mindboggling, but at least the costumes caught the eye.

Granted, the crummy VHS rip on an iPad Pro on an airplane isn't exactly the best viewing conditions, but it wasn't as if I was ever distracted.

However, at least I saw A Page of Madness on the same trip. Now this was something! Excellent opening montage, followed by an extremely ambituously edited narrative, which will surely deliver on multiple viewings. This should be a must watch for all and would make for a wonderful edition from a top Blu-ray label.

[swo17]

Three lists in, and you will never guess which director currently has two films in the top 5.

[Tommaso]

Spielberg? McCarey?

[knives]

I'm assuming nobody votes like me so not von Sternberg.

[swo17]

Some crazy vote splitting going on too--there are several directors with three or more films receiving votes but none of them in common.

[domino harvey]

Three lists in, and you will never guess which director currently has two films in the top 5.

Doctors hate him!

[swo17]

And you will definitely never guess the current #2 pick. I'm guessing that some of you haven't even seen it.

I just want you all to know that I'm getting chills tabulating your lists.

[domino harvey]

Even though I have a copy of every remaining unseen film, my enthusiasm for completing this task kind of disappeared once I really started thinking about how arbitrary it is and the sheer number of films I had no interest in seeing, saw, and was completely right in my assumptions about. I'll probably end up topping out at having seen 90% of the total list by the time submissions are due, and I'll be volunteering my entire Top 50 and a list of the films I didn't see after voting closes and results are available, just in the interest of full disclosure.

[knives]

Yeah, I sort of exhausted myself (with about 60 left unseen) when I ran out of films that I could easily pick up on DVD.

[swo17]

I've seen every film.

[domino harvey]

Real talk: how different was your Top 50 from when you started to when you finished filling in the gaps? Mine didn't change at all and I watched over 200 films for this project (keeping in mind that I started months before this thread started)! Even though some of those were quite good, it was an astonishingly low rate of return on my investment

[knives]

I managed to get one added on and who knows what the other 60 may have held. Though I'm a lot more sympathetic to some of the angels this thread ran than you.

[swo17]

Real talk: how different was your Top 50 from when you started to when you finished filling in the gaps? Mine didn't change at all and I watched over 200 films for this project (keeping in mind that I started months before this thread started)! Even though some of those were quite good, it was an astonishingly low rate of return on my investment

I can't answer your question. I actually saw them all during the individual decades projects, because as I was tabulating, I would make sure to fit in anything last minute that had scored that highly. What I can say is that there are probably around 10 films on my list that I discovered for the first time during this last round of the lists projects.

Anyway, you should send me your list of unseen films and I can tell you if I think any of them might be up your alley.

[DarkImbecile]

Christ, compiling this is difficult.

The bigger problem I'm running into while trying to put a list together is not so much how many I've seen - only a little more than half, and only 30 or so specifically for this project <sad trombone> - but more how long ago or how many times I've seen a given film relative to the others. I've only seen The Apartment and Melancholia once apiece, but the former was nearly two decades ago and the latter was six months ago; do I doubt my recollection of Wilder's film as superior because my tastes have evolved so much in the interim? I've seen A Woman Under the Influence once and Psycho a dozen times, so I can recall nearly every beat of the latter, for better or worse, and only parts of scenes from the former; do I trust my initial impulse that Cassavetes' film is the better of the two?

Clearly the only reasonable solution is to quit my job and rewatch everything and as many new titles as I can to make this as accurate as humanly possible.

[jindianajonz]

Real talk: how different was your Top 50 from when you started to when you finished filling in the gaps? Mine didn't change at all and I watched over 200 films for this project (keeping in mind that I started months before this thread started)! Even though some of those were quite good, it was an astonishingly low rate of return on my investment

Even if they didn't make the cut for this project, did you at least find some that could contend for decade or genre projects?

[domino harvey]

That's an interesting question but hard to answer fully since many of the best films I saw were all movies I was familiar with, already interested in, and would have gotten to eventually-- for instance, Paris is Burning would have made my Docs list, but seeing it here only moved it up in the queue. Yellow Earth, the Blue Bird, and Mr Thank You would likely never have been seen by me otherwise and I did like them a lot, so those are clear successes from the process. Though not good enough to make any list, including Decades, I was glad to be forced to see some films by directors who I otherwise disliked, as these too were films I never would have sought out in my own: Syndromes and a Century, Millennium Mambo, Lost Highway were all good films I enjoyed much more than I anticipated based on other experiences with their directors. It works in opposite though: I care for Ozu less than ever after filling in some gaps-- though Tokyo Twilight and Tokyo Story are fine films, I disliked all of his other qualifying pictures. Same for Kurosawa, though I started out far less enamored than I was with Ozu-- only Seven Samurai holds up on this list for me. And I am utterly over Oshima after seeking out the abhorrent unseen titles propped up here. And in the extreme is Love Streams, a film by a director I was already cool on that stunned me in its awfulness-- legitimately my new go-to answer for worst film I've ever seen. I am not exaggerating when I say you could not pay me to sit through it again, as I have never had a more agonizing viewing of anything in my life!

[swo17]

That's all fascinating actually, and I'd hope to hear other people's experiences with this project as well.

P.S. Recognize the sample in this song now?

[knives]

Outside of the Ottinger, which I expected to like but genuinely hated, everything went about as well as expected with little in the way of disastrous films and a lot in the way of middling ones.

[Tommaso]

Gee, I have to speak up for the Ottinger again after two people actively disliked it in such a short time.

As TMDaines points out, the film is only available to most of us (including myself) in an age-old VHS copy, unless you're willing to shell out 80 Euros for the brand new, restored dvd released by the artist herself via her website. I would fully concur with anyone who says that the old VHS doesn't let you fully experience the film due to its technical deficiencies.

However, I had the good luck to have been able to see the new restored version theatrically, and I have to say (again) that I found it completely mindblowing with its dazzling colours, an operatic style which makes someone like Greenaway look like a 'realist' filmmaker, it's 'fetishist' attitude, in short: it's extreme artificiality, which not only explains what Daines calls 'atrocious acting' (I would rather call it extremely 'mannerist') but also perfectly reflects not only the attitude of Wilde's source novel but also the German silent cinema which quite obviously was also an inspiration for this, apart from the 80s new wave styles which it also reflects (like Jarman on acid, if that's even conceivable...). I've never seen anything quite as extreme - and quite as accomplished - in these respects, and I can even understand that it may be a little too much for many people. But I'd only ask that you'd give this film, or similarly all of Ottinger's early works, a second chance if this ever becomes available in a general, affordable edition that does justice to the film's visual qualities.

[knives]

At least in VHS form the problem is not too much, but rather too little with it coming across as dry and just cheaply produced. I really wish I saw the Greenaway or Jarman in the extreme that you did.

[Rayon Vert]

do I doubt my recollection of Wilder's film as superior because my tastes have evolved so much in the interim? (...) Clearly the only reasonable solution is to quit my job and rewatch everything and as many new titles as I can to make this as accurate as humanly possible.

I can't quit my job but, inspired (or driven insane) by doing the Hitchcock rewatches, I'm actually doing something like this right now for those kinds of reasons, with the top 400 or so films on my personal list-of-every-film-I-watch-ranked (started about 10 years ago when I got into films again and seriously developed cinephilia). I've decided to put off watching new (meaning unseen) films for a year to get a sizeable chunk of that done. (And it's really destabilizing doing this because a lot of films I had previously rated extremely high can all of a sudden drop 300 to 500 rankings. On the other hand, I get the satisfaction of seeing those films that still give me the most intense pleasure get their due by shining on those very top echelons.) Unfortunately this means I won't participate in this list because I can't trust my current ranking as it stands. I'll try to part in it when this project comes around again in X amount of years!

[TMDaines]

Gee, I have to speak up for the Ottinger again after two people actively disliked it in such a short time.

As TMDaines points out, the film is only available to most of us (including myself) in an age-old VHS copy, unless you're willing to shell out 80 Euros for the brand new, restored dvd released by the artist herself via her website. I would fully concur with anyone who says that the old VHS doesn't let you fully experience the film due to its technical deficiencies.

However, I had the good luck to have been able to see the new restored version theatrically, and I have to say (again) that I found it completely mindblowing with its dazzling colours, an operatic style which makes someone like Greenaway look like a 'realist' filmmaker, it's 'fetishist' attitude, in short: it's extreme artificiality, which not only explains what Daines calls 'atrocious acting' (I would rather call it extremely 'mannerist') but also perfectly reflects not only the attitude of Wilde's source novel but also the German silent cinema which quite obviously was also an inspiration for this, apart from the 80s new wave styles which it also reflects (like Jarman on acid, if that's even conceivable...). I've never seen anything quite as extreme - and quite as accomplished - in these respects, and I can even understand that it may be a little too much for many people. But I'd only ask that you'd give this film, or similarly all of Ottinger's early works, a second chance if this ever becomes available in a general, affordable edition that does justice to the film's visual qualities.

Interesting, nice argument.

[movielocke]

I wound up with 351 seen, which I culled to 132 seen more than once and 42 seen only once that I still deemed worthy, another round of culls left me with about 112 top contenders and round three of the cutting brought it down to 70, every cut from there was painful, the three I just couldn't fit in (51, 52, 53) were I was born but, a nos amours, and ugetsu.

Tough project to assemble!

[Red Screamer]

I can't believe my only long write-up is for this, but here goes.

Body Double (Brian De Palma 1984)

"There's a man following you"
"I know."
"No, uh...it's not me."


It's been said the cruelest sleight-of-hand Hitchcock ever pulled on the American public was turning a beloved movie star like Jimmy Stewart into a damaged, domineering wretch like Scottie Ferguson. The cruelest and funniest prank De Palma ever pulled was recasting the role of Scottie Ferguson with Craig Wasson. Wasson is to Stewart what Body Double is to Vertigo, and what De Palma's L.A. is to Hitchcock's San Francisco; extreme, superficial, and hard to take seriously versus the organically evocative and strange. 

There are other De Palma movies that recontextualize other people's work, both brilliantly (Carrie as a gender swapped Psycho about the horrors of growing up) and not-so-brilliantly (Dressed to Kill as a brainless Psycho with regressive gender politics), but Body Double is where he takes the idea to its (il)logical conclusion. Which, in this case, is a synthesis of Rear Window & Vertigo, 80s genre movies, pornography, and MTV (life imitates art). In this post-modern stew, De Palma ridicules the influence of MTV and pornography on Hollywood's aesthetics, connecting porn to the outrageous phallic imagery of horror movies and the visceral satisfaction of both shoddily made music videos and expertly crafted genre movies. He goes further, comparing easy-to-please film critics to an unthinking porn audience. De Palma also realizes that in an age of ubiquitous pornography, including voyeur porn, his audience is no longer alienated by one Peeping Tom. So there's scenes of Scully watching someone watch someone, and scenes of other people watching him watch someone. The whole movie works on a similar principle, taking everything that it's remixing one step further, even the already excessive, but it's for a reason, not just for laughs (though there are plenty of those too).

Even his old trick of making Hitchcock's subtext text has real purpose here: by removing any beauty, romance, or mystery from Scottie's obsession in Vertigo, Scully's stalking is driven solely by adolescent lust, becoming more and more pathetic and creepy. Accordingly, there's a recreation of Vertigo's famous mirror shot and spinning camera kiss on a porno set, and the latter is crosscut with a scene from earlier in the film that is itself a porn-y recreation of another originally romantic moment. One of the most painful and emotional scenes in cinema is ironically transformed into juvenile male wish fulfillment. Another aspect of the movie's hilarious takedown of the trope of "nice guy" protagonists is Scully justifying himself by claiming that he's trying to stop a creepier guy from doing exactly what he's doing. And that ridiculous villain is in reality a malicious racial stereotype scapegoated by a rich white man for profit, and is exploited in other ways by Scully as an overblown opposition to make his sleaziness seem excusable by comparison, with De Palma's critique broadly extending to genre conventions that regularly do the same.

If any of these descriptions make Body Double sound didactic, comfortable, or clear-headed, let me say that it's anything but. The movie reflexively implicates itself and its audience at every turn. Watching it is like being on the receiving end of a neverending stream of fuck yous, a sophomoric variation of Godard's style of complete audience alienation that's a perfect fit for the material. But for all of its post-modern pranksterism, the movie is also deliriously fun. I mean, just look at the slicked-back hair and all-leather outfit Wasson is stuck in for the entire second half of the movie. As one of the many with an intense personal connection to Vertigo, this movie really upset me the first time I saw it, so I can't blame anyone else for having a similar response. But on rewatch, I admired its brazen parody ("Scully" and "Scottie" sound similar, the actors physically resemble each other, and there are scenes where I'm pretty sure Wasson is literally doing a Jimmy Stewart impression) and found its commentary on Vertigo and beyond provocative and rewarding. Many viewings later, it's become one of my favorite movies, never failing to elicit from me something like Kael's "tiny hedgehog squeaks and raptures" for The Fury. Body Double is De Palma at his most engaging, somehow simultaneously generous and cruel, delightful and troubling, lucid and ludicrous, academic and moronic. In terms of movies I love that make me hate movies, this is, ironically, second only to Vertigo.


If I do some remarkable catch-up and am able to submit a list, this would be somewhere in the top half.

*Edited for grammar*