There are some wonderful movies in the imdb top 250. But why is Leon one of them?

Forrest Gump -> ROFFLICIOUS!

(Opinion as fact! It must be true because I feel that way!)

Not to me, at any rate. It's pretty much pornographic and seems unnecessary about 80% of the time.

xpost the Daily Mail, isn't that noted heterosexual Baz Bamigboye?

Welcome to the manga world.

This is very OTM!

Shawshank Redemption
It's nice, but the second best of all time? No way.

Pulp Fiction
A nice exercise in cool with little content.

Memento
There's little there except the gimmick, though the gimmick is admittedly interesting.

Fight Club
Kinda ruined by the twist, the first two acts are great but the third one not so.

American Beauty
I might've liked it if it was an unpretentious middle age crisis comedy, but "deep" parts were just silly.

Taxi Driver
Never got the point.

American History X
Ruined by the incredibly hammy and melodramatic ending.

Der Untergang
It might be historically accurate, but there's nothing to relate to. Yeah, Hitler was crazy, but despite its promise this film added little more to understanding him.

Requiem for Dream
This film is basically just "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" with a gorgeous coating.

Saving Private Ryan
The soldiers teeth were way too white and shiny.

Sin City
Too much stuff in one film results in awful pacing. They should've filmed just the first book.

2001: Space Odyssey
Pretentious mumbo jumbo.

La Vita è bella
First half was much better than the second.

Forrest Gump
Conservatice propaganda.

Batman Begins
Batman Returns was better.

ergo bad film

Return of the King, worst of the three, ranks so high
Brazil, which is like Internet fanboy catnip, ranks so low Idi i smotri aka Come and See, makes an appearance
Godard and Tarkvosky are absent

X-POST

Oldboy ONLY at 123? Disgraceful! We're talking about the GREATEST FILM EVER MADE here, guys...

fight club is brilliant, incidentally. it's probably fashionable to be a contrarian and knock it but that film did more for me than almost every other i've seen.

and brazil being amazing is obv. less obv. is twelve monkeys, which i consider brazil's equal.

I haven't seen Fight Club in something like 5 years so I'm almost nervous about going back to it considering I liked it so much. Tom Scharpling had a pretty funny vendetta against it on a recent episode of Best Show, though.

WHERE IS BEING JOHN MALKOVITCH and WHERE IS SPIRITED AWAY and WHERE IS THE LION KING etc.

agree about sin city being quite bad. it left absolutely no imprint upon me whatsoever and i have no desire to return to it now.

god, my taste is so mainstream student-indie :-(

Point Blank
Le Samourai
Branded to Kill

Films I wish were on there and come on I got a "C" in film studies and even I know about this shit:

Nashville
Blood Simple
Get Carter
A Hard Day's Night

oh, and before i re-check the list, The Big Lebowski had better be in the top 75.

What am I missing if I absolutely refuse to see Shrek?

Why is being manipulative seen as a bad thing in films? All films are manipulative, and the better they are at manipulating your emotions or tricking you into thinking a certain way so you'll be surprised by the twist, the better the film. Surely?

Boogie Nights seconded as great, of course. The scene in the big street with the minimal 'tolling bell' soundtrack, the beating of Dirk, and the restaurant murder, incredible.

what's the stupid half of oldboy?

xp the surrogate family dynamics, the shift from film to video and how it diminishes Horner's artistic vision and trends towards more overt misogyny, plus how it basically acts as a bizarro version of the classic Hollywood Rising Star Meets His Downfall storyline, that doesn't explore anything interesting?

xpost i think that's all pretty shallow and it doesn't get any deeper than the description you gave

Well, that's, just, like... your opinion, man.

Point Blank
Le Samourai
Branded to Kill

There are plenty of non-blockbuster movies in the top 250:

Downfall (45)
Wages of Fear (114)
Oldboy (123)
Battle Of Algiers (149)
Out of the Past (196)
Graveyard of the Fireflies (202)
Rififi (205)
Coma and See (227)
La Haine (232)
Wings of Desire (234)
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) (239)

What's also interesting is how this list is driven by DVD releases. Does anyone think Rififi or The Battle of Algiers would be here if they weren't in the Criterion Collection? I'd like to see The Conformist float into this list sometime next year, now that it's finally out on DVD.

Also interesting: no Renoir.

acquire one (1) sense of humor.

chan-wook park's best is still 'jsa'!

I like Oldboy, but I agree it's overpraised. The first 20 minutes are as perfect as movie-making gets, the score is fantastic, and the ending packs a nice wallop (even if you see it coming a mile away), but as a whole it doesn't hang together as tightly as it could. Sometimes I just get tired from the plot gears grinding. The follow-up Lady Vengeance is half as shrill and all the better for it.

acquire one (sniggering, stoner-style) sense of humor.

-- Michael (polyphoni...), December 15th, 2006.

Also, Criterion has a reputation and people are willing to check out a movie they've never heard of just because it's a Criterion. They've elevated the profiles of a lot of films that were footnotes in film history merely by making them widely available. I mean, The Battle of Algiers was on the new release wall of my Hollywood Video, that's some pretty happening shelf space for a lefty piece of agitprop about a country most Americans couldn't find with a globe and a flashlight.

Surprised that Full Metal Jacket barely breaks the Top 100 - is it really less popular than A Clockwork Orange?

-- nathan explosion (natepatri...), December 15th, 2006.

OTM

;_;

wtf?

Pulp Fiction
A nice exercise in cool with little content

wrong. sure, it's perfectly possible to love the movie and utterly fail to get the content. and maybe that's a failure of the film. but is it a greater failure than if the content were more obvious (it is pretty in your face if you can see it) and no one saw it? 'cool' is a key to the content, in fact. as it was in reservoir dogs (where it was *the* key).

Why does Casablanca earn so much love? It's cute, and Bogie's Bogie (read: awesome), and I like the ending with the Vichy official. But all told it's not as good as 90% of the 'classic' movies I've seen from that era

uh, it's got some words in it? and at least another actor or two?

Surprised that Full Metal Jacket barely breaks the Top 100 - is it really less popular than A Clockwork Orange?

of course. one is a kult klassik, and the other a genred semi-obscurity.

OTM!

Leon is great too, most of the films in the list deserve their position - whats with this thread?

It's the Internet Movie Database, gabbneb.

actually, it's a little tighter than that

(x-post)

I would think, in order, you have the fave of young Mitchum fanboys, Eric Rohmer blandified, (OK, no explanation for The Best Years of Our Lives OR Anatomy of a Murder), journalism majors & journalists, the consensus masterpiece among hardcore Buster fans.