Weekly Discussion: The 21st Century's 100 Greatest Films [via BBC] • Page 3

IMDb Top Rated Movies

 

Ahh, yes, why go with a Best Picture win, a Best Picture nomination, two Best Actor nominations, a Best Actress win, a Best Director win, a Best Director nomination, a Best Original Screenplay win, a Best Adapted Screenplay win, four Best Supporting nominations, etc. etc. etc., when you can get James Franco fumbling his way through a southern dialect and a silver grill and Selena Gomez making her Miley Cyrus identity shift to the chagrin of Disney parents the world over.

Fuckin' mainstream conformists, amirite? Thank goodness there wasn't homogeneous critical praise to make Irreversible lame.

 

The constant commodification of women as benchmarks of private enterprise? I.e. get rich and get puss, bro. The constant bro-fiving (both on-screen and in the audience) when the guys fuck prostitutes. Etc, etc, etc.

I thought I remembered a good Salon article on it, but this Al-Jazeera one will do .

OPINION: The Wolf of Wall Street’s male gaze

 

The film is heavily indicting the men that do that. They are the villains of the plot.

 

even if Irreversible wasnt uninteresting enough especially all these years later, it commits the cardinal sin of being a gimmick

 

Not only that, but its entire premise is based on two shock scenes that are more about repelling the viewer's sensibility than anything else.

 

Oscars don't mean anything.

 

^^^

I mean, if I was supposed to learn anything from you rattling off a bunch of nominations from a largely irrelevant academy...I didn't?
No need to be so mad. You listed a bunch of opinions. Some of us didn't agree with it, and I know I'm not the only one that thinks Spring Breakers is a better film than Sideways. Lighten up.

 

The acting in Spring Breakers is like 8th in line in terms of its greatness

 

Some of these are very strange choices. Like AI is among the bad Spielberg imo.

 

A.I. is one of his top five films.

 

I love that Springbreakers is getting so much love in here. Admittedly I am not a film buff like some in here, but it is quite possibly my favorite movie. Everyone I tell that too in real life thinks I must be joking.

 

Hmmmm maybe I need to re visit it.

What would be your top five personal Spielberg? Just curious.

 

1. Schindler's List
2. Munich
3. Jaws
4. A.I.
5. Bridge of Spies

I have not seen all his work, though. A.I. is certainly the most divisive, and it seems to always come down to how people feel about the ending.

 

Is Bridge of Spies the one that the Coens helped pen? I haven't seen it but that has always piqued my interest

 

It's fantastic.

 

yeah they punched it up

 

I liked Empire of the Sun and Catch Me If You Can a long time ago

 

Spring Breakers is very good

 

where's macgruber

 

Man, people love to talk about lists. This one has a bunch of good movies on it and a bunch of bad ones. A bunch of people are asking why some good movies didn't make it and a bunch of people are asking why some bad movies didn't make it. A bunch of people are asking why some good movies made it and a bunch of people are asking why some bad movies made it. As far as a compiled list of the best films of the century would turn out, what else is there to expect?

It does appear that lists like this can get people talking about movies though, and that's a good thing, as long as it's not "this movie shouldn't be on the list" or "this movie should be on the list" or whatever because that's meaningless.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a scathing indictment on the men it portrays. It marvels at their audacity while simultaneously loathing them. If anyone has any question as to the film's intent, just look at the final shot. Jordan Belfort pretty much gets away with everything and gets to keep being Jordan Belfort. That upset a lot of audience members who wanted the film to directly moralize him by punishing him. But the question that should come out of that is, why wasn't he punished? He was caught, why is he still coasting off all the horrendous shit he did? And in the film's closing scene, we see Jordan speaking as the camera turns to an audience that hangs on his every word, and we literally directly confront exactly why he's able to keep coasting. Because we're literally an audience hanging on his every word, and Scorsese makes us confront that in the most literal, direct way possible. It's a fantastic film.

 

The Wolf of Wall Street is best understood by comparing it to Goodfellas. In that film, we see that there is some form of punishment in the world, but only for the criminals who are not considered part of the elite society. As rich as those guys became, they were always part of a different caste of society. The Wolf of Wall Street teaches us that if you want to be a criminal, the gun is less useful than the stock market license.

 

Leo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill are the villains? Whether it was meant to be satiric, which is what was claimed in retrospect, it certainly doesn't behave as such and the vicariousness of its popularity is undeniable. In no way was the movie the scathing portrait you're portraying it to be. This might have been the article I was thinking of, by the way:

http://www.bustle.com/articles/1076...reet-is-the-years-most-misogynist-blockbuster

 

The audience rooting for the wrong people is addressed directly in the film with the ending, a room full of people paying money to learn Belfort's secrets despite knowing that he has been to prison.

 

Well it isn't really a straight up satire, but the point of the film is that Belfort and his ilk are reprehensible. That's not being claimed in retrospect, it's the point of the film. Yes, they make a lot of what he does look fun and intoxicating, because it is. But it shocks you into the reality of these people when he hits his wife and drunkenly crashes his car trying to steal his child. He continuously puts others in danger to further his own means/avoid trouble, like the yacht scene. It's no accident that the film concludes with Belfort charming a crowd while the FBI agent who caught him rides the subway alone looking miserable. The film is all about where we place our value. The piece you linked to takes issue with how the women are portrayed in the film, mostly as physical objects, status symbols, and avenues for sex, but the film is told through Belfort's eyes. That is how he sees women. I'm sympathetic to representation and the continuous trend of one-dimensional female characters in lauded films, but that is so heavily this film's point. It's a film that literally shows us a mirror (again, that final scene, after everything we've seen, shows us that audience, making us confront ourselves). It's part of the intent of the film that nothing is directly moralized, whether Belfort not being adequately punished or women just being seen through the male gaze, because the film is an indictment not only of Belfort, but of a society that did not adequately punish Belfort or does not see women through any lens but the male gaze. The behavior is all there onscreen, and rather than let us off the hook by moralizing or punishing Belfort onscreen (when again: he wasn't punished in real life), the film points a finger at us as well, and our role in enabling or perpetuating this behavior.