The World's Top Forty Directors

Hey Hondo...who is Reece Gratton? I'm not gonna fight with you on your choices, (to each his own and all of that), but what is with Twin Peaks as David Lynch's best work? It isn't even a movie. Maybe my love for the Elephant Man drives me to say this, but isn't Twin Peaks overshadowed by some of Lynch's feature films? (Maybe I'm in a confrontational mood...sorry if I'm coming off mean everybody. I don't mean to be...)

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"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" - Howard Beale

Beale, are those really your favourite Billy Wilder films? If so, no worries, I respect peoples choices... but Double Idemnity? Sunset Blvd? The Apartment? What about those?

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"I know a man who was born with his heart on the outside. Every man's worst fear, he also had heavy hands. he couldn't touch his lovers face, he couldn't hold a baby." - Buck 65

Have you seen Witness for the Prosecution? Stalag 17? They are wonderful movies. Among his best. Sure, Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd are also in that group, but for me, the best Wilder films are those I listed. I find them more entertaining than the rest...they are among my favorite films ever.

You might ask why I chose Blood Simple and The Big Lebowski as the besy Joel Coen movies? Millers Crossing, Fargo, Batron Fink...all are Coen classics, but for me, Blood Simple and The Big Lebowski are his best.

Me,

I havent seen The Elephant Man or Dune or Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart OR The Straight Story so my opinion may be a bit.... Wrong

But i admire Lynch as a director and i admire his films and i can see how they are well made.. But i dont really............ "Like them" Watching them makes me frustrated and at them end of them i feel unforfilled, "Twin Peaks" is the only work of his that captured me and i enjoyed.


Not at all,

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It's a god-awful small affair, To the girl with, the mousy hair, But her mummy is yelling "No", and her daddy has told her to go, But her friend is nowhere to be seen, Now she walks through her sunken dream, To the seat with the clearest view, And she's hooked to the silver screen, But the film is a saddening bore, For she's lived it ten times or more...

Thats perfectly cool. I was just wondering...I myself haven't seen Twin Peaks, so it may very well be Lynch's best work.

Have a very cool day Reece!

I have to disagree as well, his screenwriting skills are top notch, but as a director, he is just average. I can't recall and stunning shots or sequences that made me double take at the directing skills in use. Since his stuff is mostly satire, the dialogue and concepts behind the films are what shine in his films. Standing Smith up against Lynch/Gilliam/Burton or any of the directors that create amazing shots or sequences (the final few minutes of Brazil are forever etched in my mind) and his skills pale very quickly.

and I am a HUGE smith fan!

_S

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I just want to pipe in, seeing as you are talking about my favorite director and all I feel Mulholland drive is Lynch's masterwork. A culmination of all his previous works. I recommend it highly.

[quote=The Silver Bullet]A panel of UK critics working for The Guardian

The Guardian? Isn't that the rag Lord Littlejohn (he of BskyB and the very amusing The Sun) takes a pop at every other day? Heh! 'Tis no wonder then that David Cronenberg is so far down the list...!!!

John. [No, not "little" ]

In regards to the Kevin Smith debate Kong was recently stunned when he watched the trailer for his upcoming Jersey Girl. The camera actually moved, and for Smith that is pretty damn rare. Of course, the movie looks pretty generic in all other respects.

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Kong's Reviews:
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Hmmm... I must have missed the Kevin Smith debate. Anyway, I don't think it is necessary to have the camera moving around all over the place to make the movie interesting. One of my favourite swedish directors, Roy Andersson, makes his scenes almost paintings only the characters are moving around and stuff like that. But, sure, Kevin Smith isn't exactly the most daring and innovating director of the modern age.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

I agree with that. Though, when a good director has a mostly unmoving camera, he knows how to create a wonderful frame... Jarmusch is a good example. Kevin Smith deals mostly in dialogue, as does Woody Allen... though Allen seems to always be raising the bar of cinema, with his interesting frame choices. Well, at least he used to.

Smith is still learning his craft (as is every director), but he is just pretty far down the learning ladder.

Which of his films have you seen? (I only know of two, and I haven't seen either...but...I have heard some awesome things about Songs From The Second Floor.)

He hasn't done that many. He makes advertising commercials mostly.

Songs From the Second Floor is indeed an awesome film and a very sharp and stylized criticism on contemporary society. I have also seen his breakthrough feature: En kärlekshistoria/A Swedish Love Story from 1970 which is an absolutely wonderful story about love between a boy and a girl in their early teens. That one is not so stylized but more "normal". But I know that allready in that one there isn't much camera movement going on. He dislikes camera movements. I haven't seen the follow up to En kärlekshistoria, Gilliap, but I have seen parts of the short Någonting har hänt ("Something has happened" in english) which is a film about AIDS and that was funded by The Swedish Fund of Health and Welfare to be shown in schools all over Sweden. The film was actually stopped because it was so bleak and negative but it was finally and luckily for us released. Andersson himself thought it was primarily stopped because of what he found out while doing a massive research for the film. I saw a documentary about the director in which he speaks about this theory of his about where the virus is originated and by whom, and it is some really astonishing stuff, I guarantee you. I've also seen parts of his following short, Härlig är jorden/World of Glory from 1991, which was his last work before Songs From the Second Floor. This short is also a bitter criticism on the swedish "Folkhemmet" - and the collapse of "the swedish model". Awesome stuff.

I think you all should check out Andersson's stuff. I think some of it has just been released on DVD.

Funny you bring him up; Kong just got his hands on a screener for Songs From the Second Floor and plans on watching it in the next couple days.

Kong's main complaint about static shots is that it makes the direction often feel very uninspired. This isn't always the case; sometimes it imparts are meditative mood to Kong as a viewer. It just depends. In Smith's case he just has never seemed to care much about direction; Kong sort of thinks that the only reason he bothers directing at all is to prevent someone else from possibly screwing up his scripts.

I understand what you mean and I can't really say anything about it in Smith's case since I stopped watching his movies after Chasing Amy. I used to love that one and Clerks but I found out that I have actually done something as horrible as changed during recent years. So, I don't enjoy his films that much.

However, I often find myself getting really annoyed with directors that cut and move around too much. Sometimes I sit and count the number of cuts between different cams that I would have deleted if I was the director. The more "neat stuff" you have to do with moving cams in unusual angles and editing and special effects and that sort of stuff, the less confidence in yourself as a director I believe you have. Less is more. One director that I have some issues with is Baz Luhrmann. What's his problem?? It's like an eight year old boy who can't sit still. It's a pity because Moulin Rouge! would be a great film instead of a good film with only a third of the cuts.

Just like silence is a really powerful tool sometimes in music making, I think stillness (when it comes to camera movement) is very useful in film.

I look forward to hear what you have to say about Songs From the Second Floor.

Surprisingly, to Kong at least, Kong didn't like it.

It was incredibly pretentious. It's just a collection of absurdities that the viewer can attatch all sorts of metarphic meanings to, but on there own they were just droll and mostly unfunny. There were only a couple of characters that Kong had any interest in, and that appeared to be a couple more than the director.

Even the camera was disinterested.

So many of the lines that were drawn between characters were superficial and obvious.

And it was so damned pretentious!

Ahhhh!!!

Anyhow....

Piddz,

Kong forgot to mention that the same night he saw Songs From the Second Floor he also got to see the screenr for The Triplets of Belleville and it was incredibly fun.

The two films really couldn't be more different in Kong's eyes. The Triplets of Belleville is just filled to capacity with rythm, energy, humor, imagination. The only thing it doesn't have is dialogue (okay, so there are a few lines). Anyways, it was interesting to watch right after SFtSF, and Kong strongly reccomends it to anyone who gets the oppurtunity to view it.

Here's to hoping that it defeats Finding Nemo (a lovely picture) at the Oscars!

Even if I like the film there is nothing in your post I can argue with. But what you feel is a lack of interest to me is a way of portraiting the decline or the failure of the system that the swedish society is based on. That is, among other things, how the "folkhem" (the swedish people as a big family, a model the modern swedish society is built on, to put it very simple) has turned the single individual to an anonymous and unimportant piece in a big machinery. A machinery that has lead to, as opposed to what it was meant to lead to, something cold and a machinery that doesn't run very smoothly anymore. It was a while since I saw it myself, but if I remember it right, there was only one really "important" character who kind of worked like someone who guided us through the movie, the movie being kind of a journey through swedish society.

And the way Andersson makes films, he spends an endless amount of time building sets and backgrounds and experimenting with a huge number of (amateur) actors/actresses for every scene, rehearsing and so on, makes it difficult for him to do this with another medium than the film medium. So when you feel that the camera is disinterested I think you have maybe got it wrong. The camera is not an actor in the play. It's the audience, an eye witness. The scene is allready there. It was finished long before the camera came into the picture and Andersson is only using it to document the scene.

But it is very pretentious, yes.

I responded to this thread on another forum, first of all I hate David Lynch films (monotone dialogue, and way to much pretentious bs), and Terry Gilliam, my favorite director, isn't even on the list so it is extremely hard to take the list seriously

Terry is also one of my favs (then again so is Lynch), and I felt he should be on this list for sure. Films like Brazil and 12 Monkeys clearly show this man's extraordinary skills.

As for Lynch, I love his stuff and Mulholland Drive is one of my favorite, most watched films. I see how his stuff is not for everyone as it is a bit pretentious, but I like it that way