The Best American Film Of All Time Is

Jason_McCullough · February 2, 2004, 6:43pm

The movie that could only be made in America?

Birth of a Nation.

Jonathan_Blow · February 3, 2004, 2:09pm

Not only the greatest American film, but the greatest film ever made, is Mulholland Drive. This fact is irrefutable, because if you try to refute it, you’re wrong.

madkevin · February 3, 2004, 2:43pm

Not only the greatest American film, but the greatest film ever made, is Mulholland Drive. This fact is irrefutable, because if you try to refute it, you’re wrong.

That’s amazingly hard to argue.

Kevin “I Think” Cogliano

Angelina Jolie Pic

Jason_McMaster · February 3, 2004, 3:45pm

Ok, so I should expand my list some:

Millers Crossing: I think this may be my favorite movie

Strangelove: If not Millers Crossing, then it’s this one

Rushmore/Tenenbaums/Bottle Rocket (all AWESOME): it’s really hard for me to choose between Rushmore and the Tenenbaums

Being There: a really great one that I didnt think of

Requiem for a Dream: very American

Raiders of the Lost Ark

That’s all I can think of right now

Mike_Cathcart · February 3, 2004, 3:54pm

I don’t refute it, but it’s wrong. Bill got the right answer with the second reply, why are we still going on about this?

Midnight_Son · February 3, 2004, 4:34pm

A few years back, 100 professional feeelm critics voted Citizen Kane the best American film ever. I’m with the pros on this.

CindySue22 · February 3, 2004, 6:16pm

Plan 9 from Outer Space

How many of you have actually seen it?

Jason_McMaster · February 3, 2004, 6:25pm

I have it on VHS

Funkman · February 3, 2004, 8:04pm

A few years back, 100 professional feeelm critics voted Citizen Kane the best American film ever. I’m with the pros on this.

Yeah… the American Film Institute decided that it was the best American Movie of all time. Of course the irony of this is, Orson Welles one approximately zero Oscars in his career.

They threw him one honorary one, much like Hitchcock, right at the end of his career.

Dave_Markell · February 3, 2004, 9:03pm

Glad someone besides me remembers this underappreciated gem.

chet · February 4, 2004, 12:57am

I go back to goodfellas. I can’t think of a second of wasted screen time in that movie. Maybe not the deepest movie or going to keep you thinking when you walk away, but that is the tightest movie ever made. And right up there, Jaws. I think I have watched it 5,000 times and enjoyed it each time.

As for Strangeglove, wouldn’t that be a british film?

But really my vote would go for American Movie. It is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - chasing the american dream, without so much fear and not very much loathing except for that smart ass fruity brother.

Chet

Fussbett · February 4, 2004, 2:00am

madkevin:

My choice? Two-Lane Blacktop. Reasons:

It’s a road movie. Along with comic books and jazz music, there’s no more quintessentially American movie idiom than the road movie*. Two-Lane Blacktop takes the expanse of the road and strains it through a strangely Beckettian sensibility - the road as existentialism, if you will. Monte Hellman (the director) also manages to make the endless vistas of the road seem claustrophobic. By doing so, he taps into the weird paradox at the heart of car culture: cars are a symbol of freedom, but you can only drive them on predetermined paths. That’s a pretty heady mental place for what is essentially a B-movie.

Warren Oates is in it. Not the best Warren Oates role - that would go to the Monte Hellman movie he made after this one: Cockfighter - but Oates is mesmerising just the same. A consummate bullshit artist for whom talking is the only way he seems to be able to reassure himself that he’s alive, Oates gives us a portrayal of a huckster as purely American as The Music Man.

It’s about nothing. Well, sort of. The movie sets itself up as a conflict between James Taylor (it’s worth the entire movie just to hear Taylor’s bizarre delivery of the word motherfucker) and Warren Oates, who are ostensibly supposed to be cross-country racing each other for the pink slips on their cars. But at some undefined point, the characters sort of forget all about it; the conflict isn’t so much unresolved as it is ignored. Slowly, the movie transforms itself from a movie about a subculture (in this case, car racers) to one about obsessions; as such, it moves from the specific to the universal. And that, my friends, is the mark of great art.

4) A great ending. Which, if you haven’t seen it, I won’t give away. But the final scene is pure iconographic film-making at it’s best.

Vincent Gallo told us to like it. Two-Lane Blacktop being the cool handshake amongst the young and hip filmnerd crowd.

madkevin · February 4, 2004, 7:19am

Can you prove it didn’t happen?

Kevin “Criswell” Cogliano

YAMAHA RBX6JM

Jason_McMaster · February 5, 2004, 6:20am

It’s hard to call it a movie, in a way, since it’s more of a documentary but I’m gonna throw Crumb out there.

tinke · February 5, 2004, 6:30am

I throw in a couple of choices for an American film, whatever that is supposed to mean: Requiem for a Dream and American Beauty. Bowling for Columbine is supposed to be quite American, right?

Bob_Violence · February 5, 2004, 3:47pm

Except for all the German and Canadian money that financed it.