movie tally

[calimac]

Despite quite recently declaring proudly my complete ignorance of the popular culture of the 21st century, I was intrigued by this list of the top films of that century so far. (There's supposed to be 100, but it lists 25.) Well, perhaps many of them are not so popular.

I've seen 12 of these 25, almost exactly half, and I'm pleased to say that I enjoyed 9 of them. (Of the other 3, one I found so boring I turned it off, one I just dislike the lead actor, and one I thought a piece of pretentious crap. But none of those were what I suspect are the two most controversial films on the list, Mulholland Drive and Lost in Translation, both of which impressed me quite a bit. No, the piece of pretentious crap was There Will Be Blood.

But though I liked the nine movies, and think they're good movies, only one or two would I consider as among my own favorite films, and what I consider the best new movie I've seen in this time period, Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, isn't on the 25. I hope it's somewhere else down the full list.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'd go for "best," but I certainly thought Much Ado was an admirable work.

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

If one pokes around in the article the link to the full list of 100 is there: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160819-the-21st-centurys-100-greatest-films -- sorry, no can "Ado."

[andrewducker]

I felt largely that way about There Will Be Blood. Which seemed to think it had a message, but I know not what it was.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What I wrote about it at the time was:

There Will Be Blood - If this is a great film, I'd rather be a philistine. So obsessed with itself as a showcase for Great Acting that it forgets to be coherent or even make much sense. Many otherwise enthusiastic reviewers have called the final scene a grotesque miscalculation, but for me the entire film was like that. For one thing, that final scene is a deliberate counterpoint to earlier scenes which were just as stupid. (If you want to know what happens without having to watch the movie, see these spoilers.) The best thing about this movie is the score (alas, it did not get an Oscar nomination), much of which sounds like Giacinto Scelsi. Wild!

[(Anonymous)]

This list depresses me by reminding me how few films I've seen in the past fifteen years (as opposed to the fifteen that preceded them): just 25 of the top 102 (three films are tied for the last spot) and far fewer foreign-language films than I'd like. (That said, one of my favorite movies of the century is foreign and not on the list: The Son's Room, a 2001 work from Italy directed by Nanni Moretti.) Of the listed films I've seen, the ones I liked least were The Royal Tenenbaums and Moulin Rouge, both of which I found annoying, as opposed to a few others that were merely boring to me. I've never seen There Will Be Blood or any other of Paul Thomas Anderson's most acclaimed films, but I did enjoy his Punch-Drunk Love (2002 and not on the list), which is generally considered a minor item.

-MTD/neb

[(Anonymous)]

Here's a point that may interest you: of the 177 individual critics' lists of ten films each, only three include an entry from one of Peter Jackson's Tolkien-inspired trilogies: two picked The Fellowship of the Ring and one listed The Return of the King. Surprisingly to me, none of those three people was Frodo Franchise author Kristin Thompson, a participant in this poll. However, she did vote for There Will Be Blood! (She also selected two films that I might have chosen, one of which made the collective top 102 and one which did not: Moonrise Kingdom and Gravity, respectively).

-MTD/neb

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've only seen 3 of Kristin's films, and had mixed feelings about the other two.

Of the remaining 77 on the big list, I've seen 13, and only 5 of them did I definitely like. That's not a good enough percentage to encourage me. Another 5 I thought were OK, and 3 of them were seriously flawed. Interestingly, those 3 were also the only cartoons on the list.

Of the 5 films I liked, one of them was seen by perhaps nobody besides me except for snooty critics. But I thought it excellent. It was called Margaret.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

Not to be pedantic, but the year 2000 is not part of the 21st century.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Very pedantic.

1) It's 99% accurate. That should be good enough.

2) What name would you suggest, then, for the century of years beginning with "20"?

3) Although there was no Year Zero, there was no Year One either; in fact, all the years before about 300 or so are retroactively numbered. We've renamed past eras before; there'd be nothing aside from a little nomenclature issue to prevent us inserting a Year Zero and shifting all the B.C. dates over by one. (Actually we'd need two Years Zero.) If we did that, would that finally silence the pedants?

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I'd still call it "21st century" but I'd begin with the year 2001.

Actually, I'm not impressed by the list. Or any list that includes the new Mad Max movie as one of the best movies in recent times. It's not as good as any of the three Mel Gibson Mad Max movies, but I guess that's the topic of a different conversation.

My pick for the best movie of the 21st century, so far, is the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men. By far.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

As a former mathematics student, I'd be prepared to say that your idea about two years zero is inconsistent with standard number systems, and probably cannot be made the basis of any consistent alternate system. If you view "B.C." and "A.D." as the verbal equivalent of "-" and "+", then 0 B.C. and 0 A.D. would be -0 and +0. But those are the same number, and that necessarily follows from 0 being the additive identity: No matter how many zeroes you add to a given number, or subtract from it, it's still the same number.

Your basic proposal, without that added oddity, is perfectly possible. It would only require that we either renumber the current year from 2016 to 2015, and all the other years Anno Domini likewise; or change the date of the Battle of Marathon from 490 B.C. to 489 B.C., and all the other ancient historical dates likewise; and then teach everyone that older historical works have the dates a year off. In other words, it would be a massive inconvenience, worse than the change from Julian to Gregorian, which only applied forward and not backward! Imagine having to tell all those schoolkids that when a certain document says "In Congress assembled, July 4, 1776," it means July 4, 1775. . . .

I think it's too much trouble.

But if you don't change the convention, we have an established convention under which the span of a "century" is well defined. Why pretend that something is consistent with that convention when it isn't?

You ask what name we should have for the century of years beginning with "20". I think you have just given the name in asking the question! And why stop at just the hundred years from 2000 through 2099, and the hundred years from 2001 through 2100? I think 1949 was a pretty important year, as it was the year of my birth; why shouldn't we have a special name for the century of years from 1949 through 2048? When you admit the possibility of two different centennia both having special designators, you might as well accept that all possible centennia can have them.

Historically, of course, the whole thing originates in the ancient world not having a concept of "zero." So they couldn't say "the year Zero of the Lord." They could either have the first year after He was incarnate, or the "first" year before that (looking in the opposite direction on the timeline). It's the same thing that gave us "on the third day he rose," which used to perplex me, because the death was on Friday and the resurrection was on Sunday, and there are only two days from Friday to Sunday. But if you go "Friday, Saturday, Sunday," you get three days. . . .

But there's a deeper confusion here: Numbering years treats them as if they were countable objects; but in fact they are measurable intervals. The ancient world didn't always distinguish these clearly, and that's part of where the ambiguity comes from.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of disingenuous argumentation here.

In the first place, I specified that adding Year Zero would involve renumbering the BCs, not the ADs. But you mock the proposal by arguing how inconvenient it would be to renumber the ADs.1776 AD has a real existence, because it was called that at the time, in a way that 490 BC doesn't. You won't find a document from the Battle of Marathon reading 490 BC. Scholars have retroactively renamed post-hoc-named things before. It's been done with fossil hominids, and I believe it's been done with geological ages. So it could be done.

But discussing the inconvenience is a disingenuous argumentation, because I didn't ask if it was practical, I asked how you would react if it was done. Both you and Rich avoided that. I find that telling.

You say the span of a century has an established value. But it doesn't. We still use Julian dates for pre-Gregorian events, so bang goes the established span of a century at that transition. And even under Gregorian, every fourth century is a day longer than the others. You may say "what's a day?" but you've abdicated the argument if you do. What's a year? Only 1% of a century. And if you don't brush it off that way, you'd be logically forced to spend 3 out of every 4 New Year's saying "It's not really the new year until 6 AM/noon/6 PM." If instead, you celebrate with the rest of us, you're just watching the odometer turn. Which is exactly what we were doing on a year-numbering scale when 1999 became 2000.

It's particularly disingenuous to ask why not a special name for the century beginning 1949. Because that's only significant to people born in 1949. If you're not totally clueless, you will have observed that the entire Western world, except only a few pedantic nerds, thinks 2000 a more subjectively significant beginning of a century than 2001. Which is why the paper chose 2000 to begin its current century in the first place.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Of course I prefer centuries that begin in years ending in 1. But I didn't see the point in bringing that up, as I could not reasonably expect that you would give any weight to my personal tastes.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You're perfectly free to personally prefer centuries beginning at any date you choose. All you need acknowledge is that everyone else prefers something else.