I’m a bit surprised at how many “recent” films there are on the list. That is, in 2012, there was a whole bunch of movies from the 70s, which I assumed reflected the age of the directors. So I was expecting this list to have a whole bunch of 80s directors — like, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, Peter Greenaway and that whole generation — but instead we’re basically jumping ahead 20 years and going for late 90s/early noughties directors instead.
It’s like the 80s is the lost decade in film history.
I haven’t seen any movies by Andrew Yang before… The Sight & Sound poll has been criticised before for only including American, European, Japanese and Hong Kong movies before, so here they take a wild step into the unknown: Taiwan!
It looks like we’re solidly in the mainstream of the “best of” genre, though: It’s a slow moving family drama.
Hey, that’s an original interior decoration idea: Table as lamp.
I like a lot of the shots in this movie — coldly registering at a distance. It’s nice.
All the shots are very calculated, but slightly off-kilter so that it doesn’t look like it’s that calculated.
See? I love that shot, and it’s one that I’ve tried to do myself more than few times, but it’s difficult to get right.
However! I’m not really getting into this film. Yang is obviously inspired by a bunch of really great directors, but the dialogue just feels so artificial. Like… that’s something a kid would say?
Exactly!
This is my kind of movie, and many of the performances are great (especially the kids (when they don’t have any lines to deliver)), but some of the adult male actors are just… there. That, combined with the unconvincing dialogue, constantly pulls me out of the movie.
And there’s so many cliches, like this sad sack without any characteristics we’re supposed to sympathise with — because he’s in love with a girl who already has a boyfriend.
At the bottom of the top 100, you only need nine votes to get in.
On the other hand, it has a 97% tomatometer.
I had planned on the first film for this blog series to be Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (also on a shared #93), but when I double-checked the S&S web site:
It’s not there! Did I hallucinate it? So I went undercover and did some real sleauthi’ (i.e., I checked on the Wayback Machine):
THERE IT IS!!!
There was originally 12 movies on a shared #93, but now there’s only 11, and Throne of Blood is gone. Did they do a re-tallying or something? I can’t see anything else changed on the list except that…
There’s about thirty new movies on the list, and virtually all of them are in the bottom 60. Which isn’t surprising — the bottom half of the list is very unstable, while the top 20 doesn’t really see that many changes. In addition to the new movies, I’m also going to re-watch a handful of films on the old list (where I’ve gotten new, restored editions of the films).
Oh, and I’m skipping some of the new movies that I’ve already seen (and blogged about).
The main point of blogging is so that I can google stuff on my blog instead of having to remember things. Remembering things suck! So this is a normal search for me:
But… what are those results!? “Download File… Pdf Free Copy”? HAS I BEEN HAXORED!?!
No, not really. I just had a DNS A record for new-lars.ingebrigtsen.no that I used during a previous migration of this blog from one host to another, and I had forgotten to remove it. It pointed to an IP address that was now occupied by some kind of spammy web farm (the links didn’t actually lead to John Coltrane Transcriptions, but to some kind of SEO thing).
So I don’t know whether it was a complete coincidence that the IP address was reused this way, or whether SEO spam people search out “dangling” A records and occupy them for some kind of SEO thing — but I’m guessing it’s the former.
I’ve now removed the new-lars DNS entry, so hopefully Google will flush those entries in a while, and self-search becomes pleasant again for me.
