Your Top 20 Films of All-Time (As of 2024) Movie • Page 13

im a part one over part two but the difference in quality is indeed just splitting hairs. i think part one works more as a story about michael's rise from outsider kid brother to running the family whereas in part 2 that character is already fully formed but the charm of one is watching al pacino acting his ass off in his biggest opportunity to date and sort of taking on the same arc as michael in his acting career, because by the time 2 comes pacino much like michael is fully formed and gives what is probably the better objective performance but just a tad less interesting to watch than the first for me

 

Something that always gets me is how much his eyes are sunk in. It was just two years between the two films but Pacino/Michael feel like such older, more tired people. Michael doesn't seem to enjoy a second of all of his power and money, whereas you saw the Don trying to get out of meetings to attend Connie's wedding and he got to die playing with his grandchild in the garden. The Pentangeli/Fredo/Kay strikes against him, so close to one another, just break his humanity. He purposely makes a show of coming into the room during his own mothers' wake, embracing Fredo just to play the long game and wear down his guard.

In a bigger sense, there is also the criticism of the children of powerful people and how they fail to capture the humanity and respect that their fathers had cultivated. Because Michael knows he is perceived as a child, and even worse the backup child after Sonny, he has to overstep those conceptions in a way Vito never did.

The two films are arguably the greatest works in American cinema. Citizen Kane gets more praise but it is a harder sell to a modern audience. The same goes for Casablanca. The Godfather is the rare thing that can appeal across that spectrum of people, all taking different things from it. It is up there with other American contributions to society like Louis Armstrong or The Great Gatsby or KFC.

 

3. AU HASARD BALTHAZAR
DIRECTED BY: ROBERT BRESSON

It is easy to look at a human being and get a sense of what they are feeling. The complexities of the human face cuts across race and gender, national origin and religion, introvert or extrovert. The eyes tell it all; when we are in pain, we can feel empathy, and when they display joy, we can feel our own mood rise. It is why we can communicate even beyond language barriers, why we can look at something as removed as a picture and know what the people must have been feeling. We extend these ideas to animals, as we have spent thousands of years domesticating them, personifying them, and molding them. The joy of a dog upon the return of their owner or the disinterest of a cat is very evident. Can a donkey represent the whole of human suffering, though? Can a donkey die for our sins?

The premise itself is laughable if it was played as anything less than completely solemn. The donkey, like many work animals, is constantly used and traded and discarded and forgotten, all while dutifully completing their task. What is the reward? At best, these animals may be humanely euthanized to end their pain, but more likely it is excruciating pain until a quick end. There is no retirement, no golden years, no tokens of appreciation. They exist for our ends, and little thought it given to their inside feelings or outlook.



Marie: You see our names carved on this bench, our games with Balthazar. But I don't see a thing. I've no more tenderness, no heart, no feelings. Your words don't affect me anymore. Our vows of love, our childhood promises, were in a world of make-believe, not reality. Reality is different.

The donkey Balthazar finds his life constantly intersecting with Marie, who suffers horribly at the hands of men who treat her like an object. The parallels between the objectification of women and the life of a farm animal are clear, but Bresson is suggesting much more about both. Their grace and their willingness to forgive is undeserved by their tormenters, and when Balthazar is left to die, alone, he gets a moment of true peace. It is a better ending than the various scoundrels and criminals that have hurt Marie and Balthazar will ever get.

 

It’d be so funny if the next one is like Shrek 2

 

Freddy Got Fingered

 

Truly one of the options in my head for that post

 

Put some respect on Freddy Got Fingered, it got the Criterion treatment last month (not a joke)

 

MacGruber and Walk Hard were closer to making it, but Freddy Got Fingered has a lot to admire.

 

Freddy Got Fingered would probably make my top 100.

 

Aside from Airplane!, Office Space and Beavis and Butthead Do America are probably my favorite American comedies. When Mike Judge is on, he is on

 

Every single on of these movies would definitely crack my top 25 comedies and most of them would crack my top 15

 

Mulholland Drive tomorrow

 

I like Zoolander, Office Space, and Walk Hard

need to see Macgruber

 

Daddy, would you like some sausage?

 

I'mthebackwardsmanthebackwardsman, Icanrunbackwardsfastasyoucan

 

hot rod and the other guys are my comedy favs. airplane and office space are also up there

 

Bottoms is a modern classic

 

I quite literally do/say this every day in front of my kids.

 

good lord this sounds somber and poignant

 

2. LA DOLCE VITA
DIRECTED BY: FEDERICO FELLINI

There have been many films about the emptiness of excess. It often comes off as patronizing, like an attempt to tell the poor and the working class that they should not lament their station because the ones who are really suffering are the rich who have so much stuff and so much free time that they cannot make meaningful connections. While it is true that the pursuit of surface pleasures and gratification can lead to emptiness when the thrills and moments are over, the reality is that everyone experiences these emptiness in a society of relative safety and overabundance; the end of the pursuit of food and shelter leads us to question everything, from our inherited systems of faith to the operation of government to our own sexuality to even the meaning of the bonds of friend and family.

Postwar Italy, and Italy still to this day, is at an enormous divide; while Vittorio De Sica showed an Italy struggling to survive, the Italy of Fellini is full of decadence, elaborate parties, a lack of accountability, and considerable wealth. No one seems to have kids, everyone is willing to stay up late, and people seem to appear and disappear without regard to distance. Marcello is overcome by the garish lifestyle while also thinkin he can just turn it off like a switch and go home at the end of the last show or party or event. This is a character who has sex with a woman, goes home to his wife to see her needing medical treatment, and then calling the first woman while his wife is being treated. He knows the expectations and behaviors of a pious good Catholic man, but like the helicopter pilot who is distracted while flying the Jesus statue by women in bikinis, the temptations corrupt all.



Marcello Rubini : A man who agrees to live like this is a finished man, he's nothing but a worm! I don't believe in your aggressive, sticky, maternal love! I don't want it, I have no use for it! This isn't love, it's brutalization!

By the end, when he is literally riding a woman like an animal and pillow feathers have covered the entire room, the bill is due; daylight is rising and the real world is back. His last interactions, with the young waitress who happens to see the partiers on the beach, is an acknowledgement of the chance to break the chain; when they cannot hear each other across the waves, Marcello literally throws his hands up in the air and surrenders. He knows the cycles will continue anyway and the answers are not really there. When his friend Steiner commits suicide despite seeming to have it all, it puts him in the position of having to question everything, only to realize there is no truth. The title literally refers to "the sweet life", but like utopia, there is a dark underbelly within the suggestion of these realities.

 

TV list starts Friday.

 

At least 2 of our top 5 overlap and 4 of our top 10. I really need to get a beer with Morrissey one day

 

Just don’t wear jeans

 

Where do you live?