My Five Top Favorite Films:
Apocalypse Now
Brazil
A Clockwork Orange
Dr. Strangelove
2001: A Space Odyssey
Other Favorite Films:
Alice In Wonderland (Disney Version)
Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Alien
Aliens
All That Jazz
Altered States
American Beauty
An American Werewolf In London
Annie Hall
Being John Malkovich
The Birds
Blade Runner
Blue Velvet
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Dirty Harry
The Deer Hunter
Dumbo
The Elephant Man
Empire Strikes Back
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Exorcist
Eyes Wide Shut
Fantasia
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fight Club
The Fly (1986)
Forrest Gump
The French Connection
Full Metal Jacket
The Godfather I & II
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Goodfellas
Halloween
Hellraiser
Hero
The Howling
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Jacob's Ladder
Jaws
Jurassic Park
Kill Bill, I & II
Little Big Man
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Mary Poppins
M*A*S*H
Mulholland Drive
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Pianist
Phenomena (Dario Argento's)
The Producers
Pulp Fiction
Psycho
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raging Bull
Ran
The Ring
Rocky
The Royal Tenenbaums
Saving Private Ryan
Schindler's List
The Shining
Star Wars
The Sting
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The Thing (John Carpenter's)
Taxi Driver
Yellow Submarine
Wizard of Oz
25th Hour
Universally acclaimed films that I acknowledge are great but not a huge fan of:
All The President's Men
Barry Lyndon
Bonnie and Clyde
Boogie Nights
Bridge Over River Kwai
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Casablanca
Chinatown
Citizen Kane
Dances With Wolves
Easy Rider
ET - The Extra Terrestrial
Fargo
Gone With The Wind
The Graduate
It's A Wonderful Life
King Kong
Lawrence of Arabia
The Longest Day
Midnight Cowboy
Notorious
Paths of Glory
Platoon
Rebel Without A Cause
Saturday Night Fever
Seven Sumurai
Silence of the Lambs
Singing In The Rain
Sound Of Music
Spartacus
The Terminator
Titanic
West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
Films That Are Not Great But I Have Guilty Pleasure In:
Aladdin (Disney Version)
Austin Powers Movies
Back To The Future
Bend It Like Beckham
Blade
Bruce Lee's Kung Fu Flicks
Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Irwin Allen's Disaster Movies
Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Flicks
Jet Li's Kung Fu Flicks
James Bond Movies
Japan's Monster Movies (Eg. Godzilla)
Jean Claude Van Damme's Action Flicks
Kirk Russell's Early Disney Movies
The Matrix Series
The Muppet Movie
Sinbad and Eye of the Tiger
SpiderMan 2
Super Man Movies
Stephen Chow's Hong Kong Films
The Mummy movies by Stephen Sommers
Underworld
The Wiz
Favorite Directors:
Cohen Brothers
David Lynch
Francis Ford Coppola
Martin Scorsese
Quentin Tarantino
Sergio Leone
Stanley Kubrick
Steven Spielberg
Terry Gilliam
William Friedkin
Woody Allen
Zhang Yimou
Universally Acclaimed Directors Who I Acknowledge As Great But Not A Huge Fan Of:
Akira Kurosawa
Alfred Hitchcock
Bernardo Bertolucci
Billy Wilder
David Lean
Don Siegel
John Cassavetes
John Huston
John Schlesinger
Mike Nichols
Ridley Scott
Robert Altman
Sam Peckingpah
Sidney Lumet
Sidney Pollack
Spike Lee
Directors Who Are Good But Never Great:
Adrian Lyne
Alan Parker
Brian DiPalma
Chris Columbus
John Avildsen
John Badham
Michael Mann
Philip Kaufman
Richard Attenborough
Rob Reiner
Robert Benton
Robert Redford
Robert Zemeckis
Tony Scott
Directors Who Can Potentially Be Great:
Ang Lee
Alexander Payne
Christopher Nolan
Cameron Crowe
David Fincher
Guy Ritchie
Jim Jarmusch (Some say he is already great)
M. Night Shyamalan
Paul Thomas Anderson
Shari Springer Berman
Steven Soderbergh (He's a big maybe: read my feelings about him below)
Terry Zwigoff
Wes Anderson
Directors I CAN'T stand:
John Hughes
John Woo
Michael Bay
Oliver Stone
Roberto Benigni
Ron Howard
Wayne Wang
Great Directors Whose Films I Shamefully Haven't Seen Yet:
Edward Yang
Frederico Fellini
Francois Truffaut
Fritz Lang (I have Metropolis DVD that I never watch!)
Ingmar Bergmann
James Ivory
John Ford
Mira Nair
Kaige Chen
Werner Herzog
Wim Wenders
Wong Kar Wai
Favorite Non Directors:
Charlie Kaufman (screenwriter)
Douglas Trumbull (legendary visual effects pioneer of 2001 and Close Encounters)
Jim Henson
Ray Harryhausen (stop motion animation pioneer)
Rick Baker (legendary makeup artist)
Rob Bottin (make up artist of "The Thing")
Stan Winston (animatronics pioneer)
Tom Savini (makeup artist of horror moves)
Silliest Best Picture Winners (films that should have won in parethenses)
Kramer Vs. Kramer in 1979 (Apocalypse Now)
Oliver in 1968 (2001: A Space Odyssey)
Ordinary People in 1980 (Raging Bull)
Shakespeare in Love in 1998 (Saving Private Ryan)
Favorite Cult Directors
David Cronenberg
George A. Romero
John Waters
Ken Russell
Ralph Bakshi
Tobe Hooper
Wes Craven
Great Films I Haven't Seen Yet And HAVE To See (now why haven't I seen them yet??)
All Quiet In The Western Front
Ben Hur
The Birth of a Nation
The Maltese Falcon
Metropolis
Once Upon A Time In America
On The Waterfront
Rashamon
The Quiet Man
The Searchers
A Streetcar Name Desire
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Touch of Evil
8 1/2
My Pick As The Most Important Filmmaker Of All Time:
Some serious film lovers will laugh at my pick - Walt Disney. But if you do research and read what he did, you will not disagree. Disney always demanded innovation in moviemaking and was breaking barriers left and right; he was an amazing pioneer of film like no other (though many would argue Welles is more influential). He opened the creative floodgates and provided inspiration to many of the greatest filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Kubrick, Spielberg, and Lucas to help transformed cinema. He is unfairly known today as a creator of silly children films; but you have to see real Disney by watching his groundbreaking films such as Snow White, Dumbo, Fantasia, Alice In Wonderland and Mary Poppins. The complete cinematic experience you see in today's movies is mostly derived from Disney's amazing vision he had way back in the 40s with 'Fantasia.' Fantasia was the first to use stereo sound and other cinematic effects. Many of modern films such as '2001' , 'Star Wars', 'Close Encounters', 'ET', etc have Disney elements (yes, not making this up about '2001': go see 'Fantasia' and 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks'). He foresaw the important use of visual effects and was the first to use robots and animatronics (later made famous by Stan Winston and Jim Henson) in films such as "20000 Leagues Under The Sea." Even after he died, his company continued to innovate. For example, computer animation have roots in Disney (eg., Tron was known as the first computer animated film.)
Lucas mainly copied Disney's ideas and created Industrial, Light and Magic, THX Sound, etc.
Today, Disney company represents the worst in mainstream (unless you include the fact that Disney owns Miramax, which made some of the greatest films of the past decade.) I cringe at their current animated films. However, the present doesn't overcome the amazing accomplishments Disney has done in his career.
The Film Maker Who I Love...And Hate At The Same Time
The person is...you're in for a shock...George Lucas! I loved his Star Wars flicks. Seeing Star Wars was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Watched Star Wars over thirty times. Up to a point, I agree he's one of the most important figures in Hollywood history. However, having said that, he basically stole the engineers from the technician team of '2001' and claimed that he revolutionized special effects; in this regard, Douglas Trumbull and Kubrick should have gotten the credit. Lucas's company is worth over billions thanks to Trumbull and Kubrick, whom Lucas barely gave credit. I think this is a big injustice.
Lucas didn't just steal from Trumbull and Kubrick. His computer animation ideas were stolen from Disney, whose revolutionary "Tron" was released in 1982.
Lucas also didn't make any great film since American Graffiti and Star Wars. The truth is his list of films isn't that impressive.
Lastly, as Ebert have said, the day that 'Star Wars' was released was the day films died. After 'Star Wars', great artistic directors were told to take a hike and film producers were more interested in making money than making art. The Golden Age of the 70s, considered the greatest era in Hollywood, ended with 'Star Wars.' The effects are still being felt today (most films seem to be made by Xerox machine.)
Greatest Modern Director
Stanley Kubrick. Most of the reknowned directors today, such as Ridley Scott, Lucas, Spielberg, David Lynch and James Cameron were greatly influenced by Kubrick.
His films 'Dr. Strangelove', '2001: A Space Odyssey', and 'Barry Lyndon' introduced revolutionary film techniques that are still being used today. Eg., the battle sequences in "Saving Private Ryan" copied the battle sequence in "Dr. Strangelove." Barry Lyndon introduced natural lighting which is used by 'Amadeus' and other films about nineteenth century. I need not say much about '2001' (read above about George Lucas), whose mind-bloggling shots inside space ships still astound today (eg., pen floating in gravity-less air that is grabbed by a space flight attendant; people walking on walls and ceilings; astronaults floating around).
Just as Orson Welles' film techiques dominated the forties, fifties and sixties, Kubrick's techniques dominated seventies, eighties, nineties and today.
Other great directors who helped shaped modern cinema: Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and William Friedkin, kings of the ultra-realistic documentary-style films which use lot of improvisational acting and overlapping dialogue, techniques that made the characters very believeable. And of course, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who basically created the modern entertainment mainstream film.
The Film Makers Who Were Great At One Point...And Who I Want To Be Great Again
Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino and John Carpenter.
Coppola made some of the greatest films of all time in the 70s ('The Conversation', 'Godfather' films and 'Apocalypse Now.') But since 'One From The Heart', he had made one crap after another. He seems to have totally lost his Midas Touch.
Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" is one of the most beloved movies of all time. But after the colossal failure "Heaven's Gate", he lost his creative powers in Hollywood and never was able to make a great film again. He made a mini-comeback with the underrated "Year of the Dragon" (a film that was unfairly criticized as racist but is probably the most realistic film about America's Chinatowns) and "The Sicilian" in 1987 but totally disappeared after that. I feel if he didn't make the disaster "Heaven's Gate", he would have made many more masterpieces and would have been on the same level as Coppola and Scorsese.
John Carpenter is one of the best from the Hitchcock School of Suspense and made two of the greatest suspense/horror films in 'Halloween' and 'The Thing.' Then he began to believe that every day is Thanksgiving day by creating all turkeys since 1982. A very sad decline.
The other former great directors who haven't done much recently: Sidney Lumet ('Dog Day Afternoon', 'Serpico'), William Friedkin ('The Exorcist', 'The French Connection') and Arthur Penn ('Little Big Man')
Director I Liked In Beginning But Now Getting Kind Of Annoyed
Steven Soderbergh. It seems like he wants to overwhelm us with excess cinematography and other gimmicks instead of concentrating on screenplay. Take 'Traffic' for example. Not a bad film but do you HAVE to overdo those 'Saving Private Ryan' type shots? I got pretty dizzy after a while. Spielberg's, Kubrick's and Zhang Yimou's films have amazing cinematograpy but their cinematography is not dizzying at any means (they mostly have straight steady shots.) Soderbergh seems to be from the school who wants camera movement in every scene when stationary shots are great enough. Soderbergh's a very talented director who needs to limit his need to overwhelm us visually.
Once you look past the great eye candy of his films, you realize that his screenplays are pretty preposterous and not very credible.
Another director who potentially might be like Soderbergh: Paul Thomas Anderson. I only saw one of his films, 'Boogie Nights.' It SEEMS like Anderson also does the same things as Soderbergh. But I'll give him a chance when I watch his other films.
