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AV Club - The 100 best films of the decade (so far)
- Thread starter C-Drive
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What is it about Boyhood that makes everybody praise it? I seriously need to know. I love Linklater, Before Sunrise is one of my favorite movies. But Boyhood is in my opinion a pretty mediocre movie with an amazing 12 year in real life lifespan that makes the movie pretty unique.
And why is there no Django and Birdman? I dont care but this list is seriously lacking.
And why is there no Django and Birdman? I dont care but this list is seriously lacking.
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
Very, very true. That's one of the very best scenes in the movie, and the single most important key to understanding it. Eliza was, in many respects, a deeper, wiser character than Patsy, but the role wasn't quite as showy, which I think is why she was not honored come awards season. I won't complain, as Nyongo WAS fantastic, but still, I really think that Oduye and Fassbender gave the two most standout performances.
curlyfriski
Banned
Wow they actually included Goodbye to Language 3D.
Giamatti is amazing in that film as well. His character is so cruel and ruthless but pragmatic and businesslike at the same time.
This has just reminded me just how bad movies have been this decade, or how little essential cinema there's been. Social Network's one of the few from the list to me that feels interesting, still relevant, and somewhat essential. A lot of these are discardable or not even the best in the filmmakers catalogue. Budapest, Before Midnight (which i still really liked). I guess at least Linklater has continued to make films that feel like they matter. Really hope the back half of the decade is better for movies.
Spoony Bob
Member
Came here to post this. I was let down it wasn't on the list. Easily one of my favorite movies after watching it late last year.
Lys Skygge
Member
I agree with The Master. One of my absolute favorite movies 
It's definitely in my top 5.
Spring Breakers
Boyhood
Frances Ha
Moonrise Kingdom
Magic Mike
curlyfriski
Banned
No Princess Kaguya? Fuck this shit
can't believe that got snubbed. so good.
Arthr2ShdsJcksn
Banned
Sure, as well as Nicholas and Alexandria, Sounder, Elmer Gantry, Room at the Top, Decision Before Dawn, King Solomon's Mines, A Touch of Class, Lenny, and A Soldier's Story.
Jeffolation
Banned
Surprised to see The Master so high yet Inherent Vice not making the list at all. Shame True Grit didn't make it on there, I liked it more than Inside Llewyn Davis.
PassiveObserver
Member
A Separation should be #1 but I can't hate on this list. Got a lot of stuff I need to catch up on.
Heh, exactly.
I'd say a lot assert their artistic quality (btw I used the "hold" phrasing off you, so these quotation marks are odd); movies about the creative process frequently leave room for a reflexive reading where the movie itself stands in for the work the subject does. I mean, we're talking about Birdman in here. Examples are all over.
Anyway, Boyhood is factually not straightforward in terms of editing and narrative structure. it's replete with ellipses and hanging plot points that do not belong in a traditional coming of age story. And I said it doesn't find its setting inherently profound. By that I meant that, while American Beauty tells you the banal is deep but doesn't make a convincing case and is shallow the way you describe, Boyhood is shaped cannily so that capturing an everyday life illustrates how children form personal ideologies in line with/in contrast to the actions and thoughts of those around them.
The way you describe movies that are "profound because they're not profound" basically seems to encompass movies I quite enjoy like Blissfully Yours or Funny Ha Ha though, so perhaps we just differ
I think that reputation will give it a better chance of persisting than if it had merely been a lauded but unseen release-- particularly if Lonergan's upcoming movie does well and keeps him the the collective consciousness.
I don't think so. There are certainly facets that suggest Scott should go the original way at the end, but ultimately I've found
Knives' portrayal to make sense with her telling Scott to go--she realizes she was obsessed with him and is much better off being friends with him, he recognizes he and Knives can be good friends, Ramona and Scott (who had real romantic, not platonic chemistry) get together to try again and maybe not succeed.
I'm curious, how many of these have you actually seen?
LEGO snubbed again??? This list is -
Wait, Boyhood and no Birdman. All is right in the world, never mind.
It's more likely Boyhood will be up there with Citizen Kane and Saving Private Ryan as "What the fuck was the Academy thinking?"
Wait, Boyhood and no Birdman. All is right in the world, never mind.
It's more likely Boyhood will be up there with Citizen Kane and Saving Private Ryan as "What the fuck was the Academy thinking?"
War Peaceman
You're a big guy.
Really good list besides Spring Breakers. I'd swap in Four Lions for that (and maybe Magic Mike for Submarine, but I'm ok without that).
Yeah, its shit.
btw, you don't need a rating to tell something is shit, but there you go!
I haven't watched The Master, maybe I should!!
No good? I was planning on watching it soon, sounded interesting.
Delta Assault
Member
I could see it on a list of the 100 best films starring former MMA fighters...
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
When I said "hold", I was talking about the film's champions, not the film itself. The people I've seen praising Boyhood the most profusely have been people who come from a similar milieu it portrays and have some level of nostalgia for it, in the same way that American Beauty was most lauded by jaded suburbanites who resented its flaws and limitations.
It's about as straightforward as I could imagine a movie about 12 years in a boy's life being - age 5, then age 6, then age 7, and so on. I applaud the movie for eliding some of the traditional points focused on in such films, but the problem comes in when you don't introduce much else of note to replace the things you elide. Ozu was an artist who intelligently elided the most melodramatic and shallowly emotional parts of the stories he told and substituted them with poetic imagery and with scenes showing smaller moments that core more deeply into the complexities and contradictions of his characters. "Boyhood" elides some of the typical cliche moments, but it replaces them with moments that are, for the most part, all surface. There's a 7 or so minute scene where Mason talks with a girl from his class as they walk down an alley, and they don't really say anything particularly memorable to develop either of their characters, and all you really get from the scene is exposition about where Mason is at that point in his life and a fairly banal, overlong depiction of the dull little moments that adolescence is so often composed of. There's a scene where the kids are sitting around bullshitting in an unfinished house, and all you really get from it is that kids are bullshitters. There's a scene where you just watch kids getting their copies of Harry Potter from a bookstore, a scene where he stares at a dead bird, etc.
There are moments of the film that are effective. It's a good choice for the film not to show the mom's second boyfriend in an alcoholic rage. You "get" that she's fallen into the same basic pattern, and there's no need to dwell on it. It's a good choice for the movie to not show Mason breaking up with his girlfriend, since that doesn't really matter as much as the inevitability of it happening. But for everything the film does that's effective, there's probably 5-10 scenes that go nowhere, have little depth (either in the moment or in the greater aggregate of the whole film), and are fairly rote in the way they are shot and written.
Sure, there is what you described - you see what surrounds the kid as he grows, and you see what he ends up keeping, what falls away. You have the well-done arcs of Arquette and Hawke. But in the end, the overall posit of the movie - that life has no narrative nor point, that it is primarily composed of small, seemingly inconsequential moments that stick rather than the typical big moments - is something that can be gleaned in the first 45 minutes or so. After that, it's just scene after scene. It's not "slow", exactly, for the episodes are mostly short and diverse enough that the whole thing never quite settles into a rut, but it never cores into anything to any significant extent. He gets called a fag at one point, his mom is reading to him, he's visiting a college with his girlfriend. It's "realistic", in a shallow kind of way, but it's mired in the main actor's increasingly stiff and wooden performance and the generic shallowness that Mason is composed of at an almost atomic level.
The movie has plenty of good parts, but one has to ask if the story, such as it is, would really work or attract any interest in the absence of the central hook that got it made in the first place. It's very neat to see people age before your eyes in such a compressed span of time, but outside of that initial pang of emotional resonance (double for me, since I grew up in the milieu the film depicts), does it have much else to offer? A little, yes, but not nearly as much as its reputation might suggest.
Edit: "Saving Private Ryan" is more "what the fuck was anyone thinking calling this shit good?". "The Thin Red line" is the movie from that year whose lack of recognition by the Academy will befuddle film enthusiasts.
Blech -- seriously? "Videogame References: The Movie" got picked over the likes of Wes Anderson, David Fincher, and Scorcesse? Over even competent geeked out action flicks like The Raid or The Avengers?
I could understand this if Scott Pilgrim had come out last week, but man that junk has really not aged well.
Arthr2ShdsJcksn
Banned
No, don't take my inclusion of those as bad movies, just ones that have been nominated that don't really get talked about very much.
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