Use this forum to make note of films that didn't make the first cut this year. This should be mistakes and oversights, not voting disagreements. We can use it as a precursor to next year's revisions (which will probably follow a different process, since we'll already have the '04 list).

HERE is what I have so far, with a few notes. I've added in suggestions from off-site sources critiquing the list, too.

• 1984
• 28 Days Later
• A Clockwork Orange
• About A Boy
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• American History X
• Apocalypse Now (redux)
• Ben-Hur
• Blue Velvet
• Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo bom ("Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring")
• Brazil
• Bruce Almighty
• Buchanan Rides Alone
• Chocolat
• Citizen Kane
• Contact
• Cool Hand Luke
• Crazy/Beautiful
• Dead Poets Society
• Decision At Sundown
• Devil's Playground (Amish documentary)
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
• Donnie Darko (eliminated in 1st round 2004)
• Edward Scissorhands
• Elmer Gantry
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Fiddler on the Roof
• Fried Green Tomatoes
• Ghost Dog
• Ghost in the Shell
• Gosford Park
• Gymkata
• Halloween H20
• Hannah and Her Sisters
• Hellraiser V: Inferno
• High Noon
• High Plains Drifter
• Hoosiers
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Kristin Lavransdatter
• Kundun
• Legends of the Fall
• Levity
• Light Sleeper
• Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run)
• Manhattan
• Mean Streets
• Medicine Man
• Midnight Madness
• Moulin Rouge
• My Voyage to Italy
• O Brother Where Art Thou
• Oh God!
• Once Bitten
• Ordinary People
• Pale Rider
• Persona
• Phone Booth (eliminated in 1st round 2004)
• Pi
• Powder
• Pulp Fiction
• Princess Mononoke
• Quiz Show
• Raging Bull (eliminated in 1st round 2004)
• Ran (eliminated in 1st round 2004)
• Ride The High Country
• Romeo + Juliet
• Rushmore
• Se7en
• Shadlowlands (BBC) (eliminated in 1st round 2004)
• Shane
• Shoe Shine
• Simon Birch
• Spider
• Spirited Away
• Stromboli (eliminated in first round 2004)
• Taxi Driver
• The Best Years of Our Lives
• The Big Lebowski
• The Color Purple
• The Deer Hunter
• The Devil's Playground
• The Exorcist
• The Fisher King
• The Godfather Trilogy
• The Green Mile
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney)
• The Jericho Mile
• The Keep
• The Last Supper
• The Lord of the Flies
• The Outlaw Josey Wales
• The Philadelphia Story
• The Quarrel
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• The Sound of Music
• The Spitfire Grill
• The Ten Commandments
• To End All Wars
• Twelve Monkeys
• Van Helsing
• Wandafuru raifu [After life]
• What Dreams May Come
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

PLUS: Kurosawa Shakespeare adaptations, more Fellini, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Godfrey Reggio, Marx Brothers, Wes Anderson, Coen Bros.

Next up: A thread on what should be eliminated!

Like I noted in another thread - Donnie Darko.

Crazy/Beautiful
The Philadelphia Story
The Godfather I,II,III You'd expect me to say this, nevertheless these are great statements of how one can delude one's self into thinking that depravity is just something we can work to rid ourselves of with the right mission statement or business plan.

Alan and others think westerns are neglected. Two of Budd Boetticher's that I have seen would fit well in this context:
Decision At Sundown Great meditation on the futility of revenge for its own sake.
Buchanan Rides Alone Grace, mercy, justice, revenge, and making peace with the past. This flick is a little different.
Ride The High Country This is pre-"screw the producers and backers" Peckinpah. Strong, rigid moral code runs up against cutting corners with old age staring us in the face. Nothing else like it.

Dead Poets Society (we need a smiley for shaking head in amazement)

High Noon?

If people are feeling a Western deficit, and we're still talking "spiritually significant," I reckon SHANE oughta at least be up for consideration.

And Pale Rider too. One follows from the other, but drives home the spiritual responsibility a little more, wher Shane is just a guy good with a gun who rescues the town. Different angle, I would say.

Have not had the time to keep up on this discussion as much as I would like so maybe this has already been discussed and I just missed the posts but. . .

there hasn't been any mention of Moulin Rouge? Am I completely bogus in thinking that it is one of the most spiritually profound movies?

(And this is to give a shout out to all the Indiana people. . .If Field of Dreams can make it why not Hoosiers? One of the best David and Goliath stories and a story of redemption and restoration. . .)

No Levity? :bluehaironend:

That's pretty good, Stef. Still a fan of Whale Rider, are we?

:lsduel:

Hey...no Michael Mann films???

NO MICHAEL MANN FILMS?!?!


I can't be the ony fan of Michael Mann...


....


8O

Hmm, forgot about Insider. I was thinking more The Keep and The Jericho Mile...





Hm. Jericho Mile might not count because it was orginally made for TV...

Well, The Keep was a flop, but I loved the film and now it's got quite a little 'cult following.' Basic synopsis:

In 1942 Romania, a detachment of the German Army (led by Jurgen Prochnow, IIRC) is sent to guard a mysterious Romanian citadel located on a strategic mountain pass. One of the Nazis attempts to prise out one of the silver cross-like icons embedded in the walls throughout the fortress and it gives way into a huge (like HUGE) chamber within--and 'something' is released. A mysterious stranger (Scott Glenn) senses this from his home in Greece and travels to the Keep to confront it. Meanwhile, soldiers are murdered and the SS arrives (led by Gabriel Byrne, again, IIRC) to deal with what is thought to be partisan activity while a Jewish man (Ian McKellen) and his daughter (Alberta Watson) (who are both knowledgable of the keep) are brought in to find out what's really going on...


The Jericho Mile used to be one of the hardest titles to get hold of: I remember at Scarecrow Video in Seattle I had to put down a $1000 hold on my credit card to rent it.

By Chris Kent:

I'd have nominated KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTER if I'd had a chance to see it. Unfortunately, the DVD only became available last month, and I just got hold of it this past weekend.

Definitely one to put on your to-be-viewed list if the "Top 100" list is revised next year, IMO.

Powder.


Go ahead, flame away...but I'm serious.

I just finished my second Apocalypse Now experience, this time the Redux (which i might incidentally note, was a lot like my recent experience with the Tornatore Cinema Paridiso cut, which added some very bland and unnecessary scenes... But that's a discussion for another thread). And my question is this: HOW DID THE TOP 100 MISS THIS FILM? I'm very close to not only admitting that the film is quite spiritual, more so than some that are on the list, but also that this is one of the greatest American films ever made. Period. And that it's certainly Coppola's best. Much better than the nicely done but good for nothing Godfathers. All three of them.

Willard's reflective self-examination in this film is brutal. The first scene alone is more powerful than anything in other films of this type of nature. Americn History X and 28 Days Later were mentioned as films involving similar themes; Andrew referred to them as portrayals "of man's depravity and innately violent tendencies," and that could be a fair place to start here, but it's done so much better here. Sheen is a terror-stricken man who has burrowed down into the blackness that is his soul and has dug up a corpse that is the path he is on. Brando is the towering, overwhelming force of reason, of an evil logic that is carried out to the extreme. He is perhaps the logic of nihilism embodied in one man, as well.

But the film itself is not just another addition to the enormous list of Viet Nam films out there. I wouldn't even say that it's about Viet Nam, and perhaps, just having read Heart of Darkness, i have a little more insight with this screening than i did last time. But as far as Nam goes, i would describe that as the setting of Apocalypse Now, whereas in The Deer Hunter or The Thin Red Line, etc., it can be suggested that the main character is the war itself. Coppola's idea here is to use the war and all of its atrocities to depict something even more horrifying, and that is the obscenity that is the human heart. Especially a heart left without lawful limitations, a heart with no moral restrictions, and one that finds a convenient (and reasonable) method for justifying its wrongfulness.

The pure metaphor of traveling up the river, the journey that is life, that, left unchecked and unrestricted, plunges one into a brooding wasteland -- this metaphor alone should've put the film in our Top 100.

Just what on earth is a Blade Runner, anyway? Someone needs to justify this.

I wish i would've voted for this film, Coppola's masterpiece. Perhaps next year i will. It was overlooked. I am sad, and i, like Willard, am arriving too late to patch things up.

And - Lovers of Apocalypse Now, i am telling you this as a favor: You must, must, must, must see Hearts of Darkness, the documentary made by Eleanor Coppola. The making of Apocalypse Now was an appalling mess. I don't know of a production where the themes they were searching out in the film were so similar to the actual things happening during the shoot (heart attacks, typhoons, a descent into darkness to bulldoze the soul, etc., etc.)... Get this film and see it NOW. It is a must.

Did i mention that it's a "must" see?

-s.

I wish i'd never even brought it up. You missed the point completely.

-s.

Alan, given stef's use of the indefinite article, I assume he and (M)Leary are simply dealing with the definition of the term "blade runner" and not with the origins of the film by that name.

stef, I can see your point, though I have to say my last experience of this film was tainted by the fact that it was the inferior Redux version that I saw. Then again, I have always said that you can see Francis Ford Coppola's career burn out over the course of this film -- it starts on a fantastic note and is full of fantastic stuff, but the Brando sequence at the end has always underwhelmed me.

OK; thanks. (FWIW, there was some discussion of Apocalypse Now, with many (Ron, Dale, myself included) feeling it wasn't a good fit for the list.)

After discovering the 2004 list from a link on my blog, one of Doug's Masters of Cinema colleagues posted this:

I would have been very happy to include Stromboli, which is indeed one of the most spiritual and most aesthetically intriguing films out there.

Side note: Martin Scorsese's documentary, My Voyage to Italy, is being released on DVD this week, and the Catholic-sensitive Scorsese spends a lot of time covering Rossellini's potent spiritual oeuvre. Rossellini is a favorite of mine, and I'd suggest trying to rent his films before seeing Scorsese's doc, which is full of spoilers, but if that doesn't bother you or if you simply cannot find Rossellini's films, it's really inspirational viewing.

Rats, it's actually being released in early July, not early June.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...&s=dvd&n=507846

Music Fiend Stef, does this answer your question about Blade Runner?

Embarrasingly, I had to imdb Stromboli.

Denizens of the Internet, you have brought me to awareness of the full body of the works of Kieslowski, Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Bergman and, most recently, Bresson, among many others. Why have you not yet done so with Rossellini? J'accuse!

Speaking of Rossellini, is his Acts of the Apostles available in North America at all? I ask because I might be doing a write-up soon on Acts-themed movies, and I know I was pleasantly surprised to discover copies of Rossellini's The Messiah at the library and the local video store a couple years ago.

Very unfortunately, it's not, Peter. I wish it was. The only place I've seen it is at the Catholic diocese in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada--maybe SDG can pull some strings, eh? It's supposed to be great.

Russ--I've been raving about Rossellini for years, man! Go out right now and rent the Image DVD of Open City and be amazed.

Then, hunt, hunt, hunt down Europa '51, The Flowers of St. Francis, Stromboli, Voyage to Italy, and any of his historical TV films, like Blaise Pascal or Socrates, the two I've seen. And Peter's suggestion of The Messiah is a very good one, I like the film a lot. If you find Acts of the Apostles or St. Augustine, I'll pay you.

Some brief capsules by Kehr and Rosenbaum:

Capsule by Dave Kehr
From the Chicago Reader:

Roberto Rossellini's 1949 masterwork. Ingrid Bergman plays a young woman displaced by the war, who marries a young fisherman in order to free herself from an internment camp. But she doesn't fit into his island society, and the more she tries to escape, the more spiritually isolated she feels. Rossellini's technique in this film is thoroughly modern: it could have been made last week, or next year, by Jean-Luc Godard. The island setting is made solid and real, but the landscape still carries a powerful metaphorical force. The ending seems all the more beautiful for being dramatically arbitrary: grace enters Bergman's life at the brink of a volcano. 107 min.


Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

Roberto Rossellini's first filmic encounter with Ingrid Bergman, made in the wilds in 1949 around the same time the neorealist director and the Hollywood star were being denounced in the U.S. Senate for their adulterous romance. Widely regarded as a masterpiece today, the film was so badly mutilated by Howard Hughes's RKO (which added offscreen narration, reshuffled some sequences, and deleted others) that Rossellini sued the studio (and lost). The Italian version, which Rossellini approved, has come out on video, and this rarely screened English-language version is very close to it.

A Lithuanian-born Czech refugee living in an internment camp (Bergman) marries an Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) in order to escape, but she winds up on a bare, impoverished island with an active volcano, where most of the locals regard her with hostility. The film is most modern and remarkable when the camera is alone with Bergman, though Rossellini wisely shows neither the wife nor the husband with full sympathy. Eschewing psychology, the film remains a kind of ambiguous pieta whose religious ending is as controversial as that of Rossellini and Bergman's subsequent Voyage to Italy (though its metaphoric and rhetorical power make it easier to take).

Rossellini's blend of documentary and fiction is as provocative as usual, but it also makes the film choppy and awkward; the English dialogue is often stiff, and Renzo Cesana as a pontificating local priest is almost as clumsy here as in Cyril Endfield's subsequent Try and Get Me! Nor is the brutality of Rossellini's Catholicism to every taste; Eric Rohmer all but praised the film for its lack of affection toward Bergman, yet the film stands or falls on the strength of her emotional performance--and I believe it stands. 107 min.

How have the video rights to his work fallen into such apparent disarray? I hope the Masters of Cinema guys can ride in and rescue his films!

We missed The Devil's Playground. Oh, boy, did we miss The Devil's Playground.

I can't believe THE SPITFIRE GRILL didn't make the list. The themes of grace, mercy, redemption and forgiveness are woven beautifully throughout. Great list otherwise, but is PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE really more "Spiritually Significant" than SPITFIRE? No, no, no!

Spit = Saliva, especially when expectorated; spittle.

Fire = A severe test; a trial or torment.

Grill = What i'd like to do to "Mr. Modok" for using this thread to talk about
The Devil's Playground.

-s.

PS Mark, where were you when we voted on this?!

Now that it's available on DVD, I would definitely nominate To End All Wars.

Yes, definitely Moulin Rouge is an oversight.

Also, what about:
"Wandafuru raifu [After life]" from Hirokazu Koreeda of Japan

"Hellraiser V: Inferno" by Scott Derrickson

Actually, if only it were released, Derrickson's USC thesis film "Love in the Ruins" should be on there, too. One of the best Christian movies ever made. There are perpetual rumors of its production as a feature.

And if you're allowing television...that opens a whole can of worms. Suffice to say, Buffy, Angel, and Six Feet Under would have to be on that list.

I forgot The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney version).

Here is my husband's list (which I agree with wholeheartedly):

Biggest oversight: Contact

Also deserving: "Elmer Gantry", "Jesus Christ Superstar" (70's version), "Mean Streets", "Pi", "Pulp Fiction" and "Se7en". (Plus you've got the wrong version of "Shadowlands". The BBC version is much better.)

Others:
Blue Velvet
A Clockwork Orange
Eyes Wide Shut
Fiddler on the Roof
The Fisher King
Kundun
Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run)
O Brother Where Art Thou
William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet

Please note that I've added an updated list at the top of this thread.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I think Oh, God! should be considered, and definitely Pulp Fiction, which is all about forgiveness and redemption.

: : Wandafuru raifu [After life]
:
: I love, love, love that film. A great choice, and well worth consideration for future
: versions of the list.

Heh. I just happened to re-watch that the other day, cuz it's one of the "memory" movies I'll be talking about at Cornerstone. Definitely one to consider in the future.