Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I thought Gladiator was one of the most boring movies I've ever seen.
And I legitimately wanted to see it and thought I would like it. But good lord was it lifeless

It did plod dully along.

I disliked Gladiator when I watched it back in 2016 or whenever. I revisited it last year as I had a feeling I'd enjoy it more, but surprisingly, my opinion pretty much stayed the same.

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Yeah, it's very big and arch and kinda pretentious to me. Were it not for Ridley Scott just being a good director, I think it could have been genuinely bad.

Gladiator, due to my age, was the first movie of my early adult life where I first realized Oscar winners for best picture aren't necessarily good movies, let alone the best movies. This was the first step over the next few years to realize I should just stop paying attention to the Oscars altogether.


So it has that going for it.


My apologies to the person/people who actually love it.

Pretentious?

I think this may have been the point where I stopped being an Oscar dummy as well. And, yes, it's good to get to the point where we recognize that what the Oscars celebrates has so very little to do with accepting film as this infinitely expressive art form. It wants film to do very specific things, and, um, **** that notion sideways until the end of time

I used to love Gladiator. Then I turned 15.

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San Franciscan lesbian dwarves and their tomato orgies.

I caught some of Gladiator on TV the other night and I think it's enjoyable enough in parts but I never feel like watching the whole thing (it kind of hits a wall after the "my name is Maximus" moment). I keep meaning to get around to watching the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, though.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I always have to wonder which one deserves the edge when making these lists, this or Blade Runner. Both take root in the nascent genre of cyberpunk and spiral out in vastly different (but not too dissimilar) directions - where Ridley Scott stages a moody neo-noir about a detective tracking down artificial humans, Otomo crafts a disaster epic about teenage biker Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki) gradually developing psychic powers to rival that of Akira, a mysterious figure who was responsible for the cataclysmic explosion of Tokyo decades earlier. The bright lights and grimy surfaces of Neo-Tokyo make for an extremely cinematic backdrop against which Tetsuo's teen angst manifests in increasingly destructive ways, beginning with high-speed motorcycle chases and ending with a genuinely apocalyptic instance of stadium-sized body horror. Throughout it all, he's countered by his arrogant best friend Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) and any number of supporting characters (culled from a much more substantial source manga) who each have their own agendas regarding how to deal with Tetsuo and his power. Anxieties about a corrupt society on the brink of collapse make it resonant beyond the obvious parallels to nuclear attack and feed into its ostensible cyberpunk status, as does the overloaded nature of its vast ensemble and tangled narratives giving it a sense of scope even beyond its many scenes of well-drawn destruction. Whether or not Blade Runner will overtake it again by the time I do another one of these lists is ultimately irrelevant - it has a power all its own.

2005 ranking: #21
2013 ranking: #7

Hell yeah.

I really should get around to reading the manga some day, but yeah the movie is pretty high on my list.

I did not foresee Akira coming in at number 2.


I guess the best thing to do is guess some sci-fi classic not yet named (which requires me to have been owing the entire time and then remember everything) as a guess for #1.


So, while I'm pretty sure it's wrong, I'm going to say, Escape from LA.


No, I mean, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

There's a question that's come up on here from time to time about what was the movie that made you love movies. After some consideration, I have ultimately determined that it might well be Apocalypse Now. From the moment that a forest is napalmed to the tune of The Doors' "The End" through to the rain-swept conclusion in the heart of darkness, this proves as indelible a film as any I've seen, one that's weathered the early stages of juvenile cinephilia (look at my first list where this was ranked only a few spots above Team America: World Police) and a perpetual deepening and broadening of my interest in film as an artistic medium. But why this one? Certainly, there's a lot to admire about its surface, that of a burnt-orange odyssey set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War as a simple objective - emotionally fragmented captain Willard (Martin Sheen) must assassinate rogue colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) - becomes a starting point for a journey that goes through then-contemporary commentary on a recently-defeated campaign and into an increasingly atavistic treatise on the human condition and how it relates to that most primal of instincts - conflict. A cast of characters who are varying levels of unhinged because of (or sometimes in spite of) the things they experience during wartime each serve as facets for not just this war but all war, something that has persisted since time immemorial. Does this make Apocalypse Now something close to the ultimate film? Probably not, but not for a lack of trying (especially not in how its infamously troubled production somehow doesn't seem to matter against such a technically accomplished feat of filmmaking). Will I still hold it in quite the same regard a decade from now? Who can say. It's difficult to find any one film that manages to achieve everything a film can and should do within the confines of a single feature, but at the absolute least this one gets closer than most.

2005 ranking: #11
2013 ranking: #3

Congrats on finishing your list, Iro and doing so with a film I both like and admire.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Thank you for all the effort. Your reviews are unlike any other. What a zag at the end. Bravo!

Very good list and great write-ups as well. Are you on Letterboxd?

Yeah.

Very nice list. Added Heathers and Stop Making Sense to my watchlist.

Your #1 and 2 coincidentally takes me back to the summer of 8th grade when an older sibling brought home a tape with both of them on it. I can't say that was a bad summer for movie watching for me.