@BellaConfusione is right about Algiers. Fantastic film Groundbreaking.
And Army of Shadows has consistently slipped through my fingers…never seen it. On my watchlist now…
Robert Wise also directed The Sand Pebbles, a film I will also try to get in this conversation as well.
I also think that may have been McQueen’s finest performance.
AHEM SIR.
Look man, mine were all claimed, and I wanted to post some linkzzz
That makes no sense!
and I just realised I have to put Enemy At The Gates in the list too. I forgot how awesome that was, especially the river landing and suicide charge and the bomber/dept store scene.
Yeah, @JonRowe, I’ll let the Clint Eastwood thing go by, but you better account for yourself on The Reader.
I so hated that movie, so I am ribbing you, but I’m also really curious about anybody whose opinions I value (you would fall in that category, of course) liking that movie. I just recall sitting in the theater and being thoroughly frustrated and angered.
Help!
-xtien
Without knowing what you disliked about the movie, I enjoyed the film immensely, I felt it had a lot to say about how much we know people, and how our own secret shames (her illiteracy, his sexual relationship with her) and how he does nothing to help her when given the chance, because he is ashamed of his involvement with her, and how that might affect his life. Even though the time they had together was sweet and blissfully ignorant to her past. She could have done the right thing and left the prison, and he could have done the right thing by explaining her illiteracy to the tribunal.
Ebert’s review is going to articulate my feelings about the movie better than I ever could
Many of the critics of “The Reader” seem to believe it is all about Hanna’s shameful secret. No, not her past as a Nazi guard. The earlier secret that she essentially became a guard to conceal. Others think the movie is an excuse for soft-core porn disguised as a sermon. Still others say it asks us to pity Hanna. Some complain we don’t need yet another “Holocaust movie.” None of them think the movie may have anything to say about them. I believe the movie may be demonstrating a fact of human nature: Most people, most of the time, all over the world, choose to go along. We vote with the tribe.
What would we have done during the rise of Hitler? If we had been Jews, we would have fled or been killed. But if we were one of the rest of the Germans? Can we guess, on the basis of how most white Americans, from the North and South, knew about racial discrimination but didn’t go out on a limb to oppose it? Philip Roth’s great novel The Plot Against America imagines a Nazi takeover here. It is painfully thought-provoking and probably not unfair. “The Reader” suggests that many people are like Michael and Hanna, and possess secrets that we would do shameful things to conceal.
I guess I enjoyed how thought provoking the film was, and it was masterfully acted by Winslet and Fiennes, whom I both adore.
Thank you for that thoughtful reply. I will definitely read that review and give this more thought and reply to you tonight. I will have a late meeting, but I will reply.
-xtien
Love to hear it. I guess my experience of the film is probably also colored by the fact that I knew the big reveal ahead of time, and knowing that ahead of time likely allowed me to focus more on other aspects of the film.
My “review” from 2009
I wonder if you were the counterpart to Tom’s theater escapades?
I might go with these four as well.
Thin Red line
Cross Of Iron
Apocalypse now
Maybe Midnight Clear or Paths of Glory
That one has slowly climbed the ladder for me for 20 years. Performances, Cinematography, Themes, History (the portrayal of combat on Guadalcanal). It, not Badlands, is his masterpiece. Oh, and the score. The Score…
Agree, Thin Red Line score might be one of the best ever.
The score is, I believe, Zimmers’s best work.
I sorta bounced off the film when I first saw it… a weird mix of an art film set on Guadalcanal. It’s grown on me through the years,
“What difference do you think you can make, one man in all this madness?”
Same here. Now its in my “Top 4”.
This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we might’ve known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?
I think this gets a re-viewing this weekend…
Thin Red Line, that’s the one where Woody Harrelson gets his ass blown off by a grenade? Yeah I like that one too.
No love for Braveheart ?
Freeeeeedom!
I love that movie. It must be my most watched movie ever, 10+ times. On the other hand, I normaly watch a movie once and never look back.
Not really a top-4 list anymore, so here’s another one worth watching if you enjoy a good old-fashioned charge:
Actually a fairly even-handed take on the debacle which resulted in one of the great war poems of all time:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
klj, jn ,.