Which films are slipping out of the canon of 'Best Movies Ever Made'?

Comments · 1K

• KF

  @kfairchild · 1 month ago

  As G. K. Chesterton said, “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”

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• DS

  @dsan05 · 1 month ago

  When does Lawrence of Arabia stop being great? When the earth is swallowed by the sun.

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• IS

  @isaacs3822 · 1 month ago

  I feel like so many lists in the internet age are intentionally controversial as to generate more clicks. They put engagement over legitimacy so it’s hard to take any “greatest ever” lists seriously.<br><br>(Yes I was triggered to see where they have Godfather II 😡)

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• AL

  @alexplorer · 1 month ago

  The weird thing about &quot;American Beauty&quot; is how it covered the same ground (admittedly in its own unique way) as several other 1999 movies, all of which have a theme of white collar workers rebelling against the system:<br>-The Matrix is all about seeing past the veil of an imposed reality, questioning everything, then taking it out on office buildings and guys in suits. &nbsp;(And also has a famous scene in which the protagonist realizes the blonde in red is just a dangerous distraction.)<br>-Fight Club literally has the same scene (albeit with far more bloodshed) of using extortion to get paid to be fired. &nbsp;This is on top of all the other office-based scenes.<br>-Office Space does the same as a comedy: so there&apos;s quiet quitting instead of a violent confrontation (but there is a scheme to walk away with the company&apos;s money), the guys beat up a printer instead of one another, etc., but it has the same happy ending as Fight Club: The office building burns to the ground.<br><br>You could write a book about the parallels among any two or three of those four films. &nbsp;For example, the spiritual/pseudo-religious themes in &quot;Fight Club&quot; and &quot;The Matrix,&quot; depictions of the service industry in Spacey working the drive-thru &quot;American Beauty,&quot; Aniston at TGI AppleTuesday in &quot;Office Space,&quot; or any of the workers in &quot;Fight Club.&quot; &nbsp;The weird thing is that the Academy only recognized &quot;American Beauty.&quot; &nbsp;David Fincher had to wait for the Academy to catch up to his style. &nbsp;(Of course the critics and Academy were never going to recognize a low-brow comedy like &quot;Office Space,&quot; and the Wachowskis were ahead of their time with &quot;The Matrix,&quot; and have since just gone weirder and farther out there in terms of material.)<br><br>Point is: Whether you loved or hated &quot;American Beauty&quot; probably isn&apos;t so much about that movie as which version of the same themes resonated with you, and that might be down to your age when you watched it. &nbsp;If I had been older, maybe &quot;American Beauty,&quot; but I was just out of college in 1999, so I gravitated toward &quot;Fight Club.&quot; &nbsp;A few years earlier I would have leaned &quot;Matrix,&quot; but high-schoolers and stoner freshmen who were into seeing a live version of Beavis &amp; Butthead would have gone for &quot;Office Space,&quot; I&apos;m pretty sure. &nbsp;Sometimes it&apos;s not just the movie; it&apos;s the audience you are when the movie hits you.

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• PC

  @Pcwarmachine · 1 month ago

  And Indiana Jones is not &quot;parodying&apos; those movies. It&apos;s homaging them.

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• JO

  @JonSmith-hk1bq · 2 weeks ago

  I say this without irony. &nbsp;No. &nbsp;It&apos;s the children who are wrong.<br><br>Or more accurately, it&apos;s the new social gatekeepers making new rules five minutes ago, while being blind to the obvious flaws in their own moral character, and retroactively applying these standards that most of the audience didn&apos;t even agree to who are wrong. &nbsp;It&apos;s part of why so few truly great movies are made today. &nbsp;Hardly anyone is interested in the small box of what&apos;s been deemed acceptable and they need to strip mine other people&apos;s work and &quot;fix&quot; them into something less popular and utterly alien.<br><br>At least in the past when there was censorship, most of the creatives were looking for ways to break out of the box. &nbsp;Today it feels like the censorship box is tighter than ever because the creatives are the ones enforcing it.

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• SC

  @Scipio488 · 1 month ago

  All these points are strong and interesting. &nbsp;But the problem is the naivité of the simplistic concept of &quot;greatness&quot;. &nbsp;Like &quot;intelligence&quot; and &quot;happiness&quot;, it&apos;s a broad catch-all that often says more about the values of the person using it than subject it is applied to, which lumps a plethora of qualities (story, message, technique, innovation, etc.) in one package and labels it &quot;greatness&quot;.

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• JO

  @johnf5194 · 1 month ago

  Airplane still holds up IMO. I just watched it last week and was laughing almost the whole time.

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• RU

  @RussMatt73 · 1 month ago

  Ohhhhh nooooo, Godfather Part II dropped to 104 in the poll. I&apos;m not allowed to like it anymore. I&apos;ll have to hide my Bluray in a hole in the yard so they can&apos;t confiscate it.

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• BO

  @bookiester · 1 month ago

  The audience stopped being great.

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• TU

  @TubeViewer-n4o5y · 1 month ago

  Zulu is a masterpiece that doesn&apos;t really seem to affirm anything except that value and honor of both sides

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• JJ

  @jjrbarnett · 1 month ago

  There is some conflating between popular and great.

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