Total Film's 100 Greatest Directors Ever: 1. Alfred Hitchcock

I think it was ten and twenty years.

Von Stroheim wasn't necessarily wrong, either.

 

The Apartment is perfect, dammit. For me the Wilder Holy Trinity is Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment.

Wilder, to me, is the quintessential Hays Code writer--the master of saying-it-without-saying-it. He's the best dialogue writer (maybe the best writer period) in the history of Hollywood. The man could do cynical without OVERdoing cynical, and he could create subtext like nobody's business.

I've seen almost every one of his films from his debut, The Major and the Minor, to One, Two, Three (having missed Five Graves to Cairo, which will be on TCM soon, The Emperor Waltz, A Foreign Affair, and Love in the Afternoon) and they're all great movies, hardly dated (if at all) and masterfully constructed. You can watch them and forget they were made over fifty years ago.

Having said that, I don't much like Some Like It Hot. Maybe it's because the "men-in-drag" bit has been done by every bad sitcom, but the premise of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis pretending to be women wears thin rather quickly. A nice supporting cast (Joe E. Brown in particular) and an endearing performance by Marilyn Monroe keep it afloat, but for my tastes it's way too over-the-top. I think The Seven Year Itch is a much better sex comedy.

Billy Wilder definitely makes my top 10 list of directors.

 

The cynicism of Sunset Boulevard is, as you suggest, perfectly calibrated. It's one of the reasons I like "Bad Santa" and "Ravenous," lesser movies that in any case owe something to the greatness of Wilder in their mastery of a fine cynical tone.

 

Wilder made a mistake with "Ace in the Hole"...it was *too* cynical for the audience and failed at the box office. I think I know why Wilder fell victim to such self-loathing, but that's another story. After that movie, he took care to always sugar the pill a bit, which he does in "The Apartment". Lemmon is essentially a pimp, and he and MacLaine make a creepy couple indeed. Query: why would a big businessman need this guy's apartment for his trysts? It opens him up to blackmail, among other problems, besides being an unpleasant place for anything. I hate pathos, and this is the movie in which Lemmon starts to demonstrate it to the detriment of his career. YMMV.

 

For some reason the Apartment feels really dated to me, while some of Wilder's other work, set even earlier, does not. Ace in the Hole, Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 all made earlier, feel fresh and stand the test of time better. Weird.

 

Pimping to help your career seems to be a Wilder obsession: it turns up again in "Kiss Me, Stupid". Always in a benign way, of course. Makes you wonder about Billy's early career a bit.

 

12 Quentin Tarantino

The motormouth

?Movies are my religion and God is my patron.? Lord Quentin of Video Archives went to film school in his lounge, then unleashed the most intoxicating one-two punch in film history: Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It made him cult hero, geek genius and superstar. Tarantino slips into debauch mode in between films, shoring up experiences that filter into his movies (Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof). As a director, he?s monstrously gifted; as a writer, he?s a genius, consuming pop culture to weave his intricate dialogue spell."

Picture perfect Reservoir Dogs. From Sundance to superstardom.

Do I like Tarantino? Yes. Is this rating monstrously high? Yes.

 

You put five random movie fans in a room, and there is guaranteed to be at least one that hates Quentin Tarantino

Personally, Tarantino is my favorite director. To me, QT is the anti-hack director. I think that he's one of the few directors that is proud of every single scene that he has ever shot. #12 is definitely not too high a ranking, IMO.

 

Pulp Fiction. Inglorious Basterds. All that needs to be said.

 

Reservoir Dogs is a masterpiece and one of the best debuts I've ever seen. Pulp Fiction is poppier, pulpier and more fun without being appreciably worse. Jackie Brown is odd and strange but has moments.

I confess, I kind of checked out of Tarantino land after that one. I haven't seen anything he's done since Jackie Brown, for no particular reason except I just haven't.

 

You should check out Inglourious Basterds. It's pretty great.

 

Hating Tarantino used to be "fashionable"; in some circles it still is. Now that Tarantino has proven himself over
and over again, saying that you hate Tarantino, in most social situations, will just get you one of these...

 

I think his movies are overanalyzed, but I love his style. Reservoir Dogs is my favorite of his films.

 

I will chalk this up to me simply not getting it, but I've never agreed with the hype about Tarantino's films. He has some interesting ideas and there are somethings I dig, but overall I always feel myself just either bored watching his movies or left feeling let down. I wouldn't say I outright hate his films, I guess they simply don't click with with me the way they do so many others and I am left scratching my head, wondering what it is they see that apparently I am missing.

 

I'm an unabashed fan of Tarantino's work. I find [most of] his films and screenplays brilliant, genre-bending, dynamic tours-de-force. Dogs and Pulp are note-perfect, five-star masterpieces IMHO. As the critic quoted by Zaz wrote: "the most intoxicating one-two punch in film history". Cheers and beers to that!

Some flaws exist here and there in QT's oeuvre; Jackie Brown I think is his weakest movie, simply because it's not as gripping as his others... though overall I think it's a fine, deftly made, four-star film.

And though I adore the KILL BILL movies with all my bleeding heart, I recognize that they are, how you say, ridiculous.

I rabidly dislike Death Proof; a two-star rating is generous, IMO, for that painfully awful piece of feel-bad cinema. With this one example, I understand what critics mean when they say they want QT's characters to stop blathering. Normally his dialogue is expert and engaging, but here it's just... boring.

Catching up to 2009, Inglorious Basterds deserves its nominations. 'Nuff said.

 

Jackie Brown isn't gripping, it's true. But I read one critic, though I don't recall who, refer to it as decaf Tarantino and that is very insightful. In a weird way, Jackie Brown is fascinating because it's an utterly relaxed film made by a guy who's maybe never been relaxed in his life and certainly never made another movie that could earn that adjective.

 

I agree with your observation. JACKIE BROWN is not nearly as flamboyant as Tarantino's other films, but, in a way,
it validates his authenticity as a writer/director who can do more than fabricate films in the genre he created.

 

It's also the only one of his films based on a pre-existing source, right? I mean, I guess his entire body of work is sort of entirely based on pre-existing sources and very purposely. But it's the only time that he took a novel and adapted it and filmed it, right? I forget, did he do the screenplay adaptation as well as the direction?

So, yes, it is a very out of universe film for him. And it is better than the book, which I recently read.

 

Off the top of my head, I think Tarantino wrote the screenplay adaption in collaboration with Elmore Leonard.
This, in itself, is quite a nod to Tarantino, since Elmore Leonard has had about a dozen of his novels adapted for
film, and with maybe one other exception, Leonard has written the adaptions himself.

Leonard must have been pretty impressed by RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION.

 

No, QT wrote the screenplay himself, adapted from Leonard's novel Rum Punch but without the novelist's help.

All other screenplays by QT are original works, sometimes in collaboration with other writers such as Eric Avery (Dogs and Pulp) or Oliver Stone (NBK, which QT disavows).

 

11 Akira Kurosawa

The samurai master

"Rashômon alerted the world to the riches of Japanese cinema ? and to the tigerish energy of Toshiro Mifune. But it was Seven Samurai, with its bravura action sequences and melancholy, that sealed Akira Kurosawa?s reputation. Yojimbo added a gleeful dose of black comedy, while Ikiru, set in modern-day Tokyo, revealed Kurosawa?s gentler, elegiac side. His love of Shakespeare inspired Throne Of Blood as well as the majestic late Lear adaptation, Ran.

Picture perfect Seven Samurai. Poetry in motion."


This ranking seems a bit--okay, a lot--low.

 

Yes, if you're making a list of the greatest directors of all time, it's - at least for me - hard to imagine Kurosawa not being in the top ten. By his sheer influence on world cinema and great filmmakers like George Lucas, Martin Scorcese and many, many more - he's worthy of the top ten.

 

My favorite film of his is one you don't hear talked about a lot; it's an adaptation of Gorky's The Lower Depths and one of the most horrifyingly bleak films you'll ever see. It lives up to the original play, a play I put just below Shakespeare in terms of sheer artistic quality and emotional resonance. Astonishing ensemble cast and, despite the transplant from Russian tenement to Japanese tenement, Kurosawa keeps the text almost line for line.

In sharp contrast, of course, to Throne of Blood where he jettisoned the entire original text of Macbeth in favor of creating his own particularly haunting and terrifying atmosphere. It's the best adaptation of Macbeth, and not a line of the original.

Seven Samurai and Yojimbo are middle chapters; influenced by early western films and, in turn, major influences of later western films. The Magnificent Seven is nearly entirely great; and it's still not even in the same league with Seven Samurai. That's how good Seven Samurai is. Yojimbo is nearly as good.

Rashomon, generally thought to be his masterwork, is a staggering piece of filmmaking and one of the most influential films ever made for certain. One can see Tarantino's body of work wouldn't even exist without Rashomon and the leaps it made in the way you could tell a single story.

My favorite: The Lower Depths. In my netflix queue as we speak: Kagemusha. Still need to see, Stray Dog, Ikiru, Ran, the one that's . . . something about Redbeard? There's something incredible about Kurosawa; he just sweeps you away. He's one of those rare directors that I feel I could watch every single thing he ever did and love every single minute of it. You forget you're reading subtitles; you forget everything except the experience. And the Kurosawa/Mifune pairing is easily one of the top five director/actor pairings in the history of cinema.

Top ten? Hell, top five. Hell, top four; Fellini, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Kurosawa. That is cinema. You could watch movies by just those four and you'd never even miss any of the other stuff. Well, except comedy.

 

Tuesday, March 23rd is the one hundredth anniversary of Kurosawa's birth.

On that date, TCM will run, I'm not kidding, 24 hours of Kurosawa films, including his directorial debut. In fact they're doing tributes throughout March to Kurosawa, I believe on Tuesdays.

If you're a Kurosawa fan, TCM's the place to be this month.

TCM & Kurosawa