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[bryant]

After much internal debate, I've finished my top twenty movie list. In order of preference, even. The up-to-date list is here (cool site, by the by) but if you're too lazy to click through:

1. Magnolia
2. Days of Being Wild
3. Brazil
4. Casablanca
5. City of God
6. Bullet in the Head
7. Miller's Crossing
8. Crash
9. Breakfast at Tiffany's
10. Ronin
11. Blue Velvet
12. Goodfellas
13. The General
14. Dead Man
15. Full Metal Jacket
16. The Incredibles
17. Taxi Driver
18. Peking Opera Blues
19. Glengarry Glen Ross
20. The Grifters

Yeah, I like genre movies. Possibly I like guy movies too; be your own judge. Yes, Miller's Crossing is the best Coen Brothers movie. I don't know if Days of Being Wild is the best Wong Kar Wai movie, but it's the best one I've seen -- I understand that In the Mood for Love may supercede it when I finally see that, though. Crash is the best Cronenberg movie because it's the best cast he's ever had, although Videodrome is a very close #2.

There are indeed a lot of movies I haven't seen.

Comments

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Thank God I've found you. The other person in North America who thinks Miller's Crossing is the best Coen Bros movie. Criminally underseen/underrated/underranked.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Oh, everybody knows Miller's Crossing is the best Coen Brothers movie.

But Ronin in the top twenty? Interesting choice.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Clearly I need to lock you in a room with the Fargo people, the Raising Arizona people, and the Big Lebowski people.

[head58.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Miller's but I need to. I detested Fargo, found Lebowski to be just meh, turned off Barton Fink 20 minutes in, and adored Raising Arizona the first 20 or 30 times, but it's kind of worn out on my from repeated viewings and quotings (much like Holy Grail).

I need to make up my own list, but it will be surprisingly shallow. Grosse Point Blank, Empire Strikes Back and Chasing Amy will likely be the top 3 though.

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

I'll be over in the room with the Hudsucker Proxy people.

I mean, I've watched Miller's Crossing, and I flat out don't get it how people could like it. It's got a lot of solid moments in it, but a ton of it is just filled with swaths of starkly unenjoyable storytelling, for me.

I like some style and rhythm in my quirky. Miller's certainly has that Coen style going, but its rhythm is somewhere between abstract jazz and stuttering syncopation for me. Too experimental for me to enjoy.

I'm trying to remember some signature scenes for me here...

The most indelibly unenjoyable scene for me has lost a lot of the remembered context since I last saw it ... someone getting beaten or shot to death while a mentally challenged individual sat in a chair and screamed his head off. Yeah, I'll take a pass on it.

The "I'm your chum but I'm going to have to beat the crap out of you while you're tied to a chair" bit and gunplay set to Danny Boy -- that stuff wasn't bad. But it didn't keep me.

[bryant]

You know, it's just a really, really strong movie. The cast is of a quality that one rarely, rarely finds in a pure action movie -- the only other example I can think of would be Heat. De Niro in both? No coincidence. But in Ronin you also get Stellan Skarsgard and Jonathan Pryce, plus a pair of very talented action movie actors in Sean Bean and Jean Reno. And I have a hard time rating the car chases as anything but the best car chases of all time.

But when you get right down to it, it's just that I have watched Ronin more times than, probably, any other movie I've ever seen.

[kniedzw.livejournal.com]

Interesting. For pure action, I still think Die Hard trumps most of my other favorites, simply because it so radically redefined the genre and managed to do so with such style and panache.

[bryant]

Die Hard is indeed very good.

[olofd.livejournal.com]

It's good to see that someone rates Ronin this high. It is a very good movie. I'll also add that the script is nice; I like the fact that there are so many things unanswered at the end of the movie.