Few Sequels Are As Amazing As The Captivating The Godfather: Part II

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #38
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #31 (Tied witb Taxi Driver)   

For years, I've heard the usual picks of when people say best sequels; The Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, and of course, The Godfather: Part II. That 1974 Francis Ford Coppola has been held up as the paragon of sequel filmmaking for decades now and getting to actually watch it for the first time totally made me realize why The Godfather: Part II is held up in such high stature in discussions of cinema. This thing not only manages to surpass the quality of its already incredible predecessor but it also does a remarkable job of enhancing the world established by the first movie by lending a sweeping mythic quality to the Corleone crime syndicate.

The Godfather Doesn't Just Live Up To 45 Years Worth Of Hype, It Exceeds It

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #37
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #21 (Tied with L'Avventura and Contempt)   

In 1979, director Francis Ford Coppola would unleash a realistic drama called Apocalypse Now that emphasized the realistic emotional and mental turmoil experienced by soldiers dropped into Vietnam. Coppola dove right into a war that had grown bigger than any human being could imagine and dared to imagine what it must be like to live, to breathe, to exist in the midst of all that carnage. Seven years prior, this same guy was responsible for a minuscule indie you may have heard of entitled The Godfather that applied the same thought process of pondering what it's really like to live a life of pervasive violence to the world of mobsters.

Go Down The Scenic Route In The Enchantingly Unique And Abstract Mulholland Drive

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #36
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #28                                                                                                                                                                                
SPOILERS AHEAD

Well, if anyone thought Blue Velvet, with its plot that hinges on a human ear in a field and Dennis Hopper's crazed baddie, was too weird, Mulholland Drive is not gonna be the movie for you. I would have really loved to see this movie in its theatrical release, as I'm pretty sure audiences would have been left bamboozled at best and likely asking movie theater attendees for their money back in an angry fashion. Me? My main reaction once Mulholland Drive was one of being impressed by what an absorbing experience David Lynch had concocted, even if I needed to do a little reading up on Wikipedia afterwards to fully figure out what was going on in this movies final scene.

Au Hasard Balthazar Is A Boldly Grim Cinematic Experience

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #35
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #16                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            One of the biggest no-no's in the world of cinema is hurting animals. Kill all the people you like (so long as they ain't kids) but hurting an innocent animal? You've gone too far. That's a really understandable phenomenon to me because animals are awesome and the sight of seeing an innocent creature with less capabilities than a human being experiencing pain just feels icky. That's why I've never been big on hunting and that's why movies have typically eschewed showing animals in dire pain, though there are exceptions of course. Satantango decided to just abuse a poor cat in one of its worst and most pointless scenes while Old Yeller is famous for its climax that results in the demise of the titular canine.

Trying To Review A Movie As Phenomenal As Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans Is Daunting, But Lemme Give It A Try!

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #34
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #5

Well ladies and gents, this is my 1,500th post on Land Of The Nerds!!! And what better movie to serve as the centerpiece of such a momentous article than Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, a movie so phenomenal I want to bypass all other formal introductions so I can get to singing the praises of it all the more quickly. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans is the kind of movie that, the moment it's finished, leaves me wanting to go outside and imitate George Bailey at the end of It's A Wonderful Life by telling every person I see in a hysterically giddy fashion about the amazing imagery I just witnessed!

Man (With A Movie Camera)! I Feel Like A Woman!

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #33
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #8

In the early days of cinema, everything you could with a camera was revolutionary. The works of folks like Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers may seem quaint now, but at the time, they were changing how art could be made forever. Film was such a new artform at that point that the very act of filming anything was rightly considered something tantamount to an act of Biblical proportions. By the time 1929 rolled around, cinema had advanced notably since the 1890-1900 era, but there was still much to be done and experimented with when it came to the art of filmmaking. There was still plenty of artistic terrains yet to be charted in the realm of cinema.

"Here Comes The General!" "This Should Be Fun!"

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #32
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #34

Me and my love for classic silent movies have already had plenty of experiences with one Mr. Charlie Chaplin while the phenomenal motion picture Safety Last! allowed me the chance to be introduced to Harold Lloyd, another titan of this era of filmmaking. But despite my intense affection for this particular decade of movies, there's one major star from the age of classic silent movies that I have not been exposed to; the one and only Buster Keaton! Yep, somehow Keaton and his numerous massively influential features have passed me by over the year, though that changed for the better recently when I finally saw  Keaton's 1926 feature The General!

Journey To Italy Is A Quietly Tragic Romantic Drama NOT A Concert Movie About Journey Performing In Italy As I Thought

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #31
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #12

We have plenty of movies about people falling in love, with the subgenre thriving because of people of all genders getting to live vicariously through the characters on-screen engaging in a perfect romance they know can't possibly exist in the real world. There's plenty of those movies I like but I also tend to gravitate heavily towards movies with more realistic depictions of romance, specifically, one's that show people in either romantic partnerships or marriages that are crumbling and how that deteriorating relationship affects both people. That's why Richard Linklater's Before Midnight is so excellent, among many many other reasons!

Jean Luc-Godard's Contempt Is An Oddly Thin And Mean-Spirited Movie in The Man's Filmography

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #30
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #12

Well hello Jean-Luc Godard, we meet again. After watching Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema recently for this series of reviews, I was intrigued to follow up that incredibly avant-garde experience with something more a bit closer to a conventional drama with his 1963 film Contempt, something I learned after watching the movie was actually quite autobiographical in nature. Turns out, Godard made the movie in response to the troubles he was having with his wife at the time, a woman he would divorce by 1965. That's interesting to learn though it still can't quite make me raise my not so positive opinion on Contempt.

Properly Maintaining Its Light Tone Is Not One Of The Stronger Suits Of The Mostly Pleasant L'Atalante

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #29
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #12

It can be tough sometimes to review classical movies through a millennial prism, only because not everything from older movies is going to hold up. Pieces of dialogue and actions now considered to be unacceptable in our modern society may have once been deemed fine as rain to do in even the most serious circumstances. You can even see this phenomenon in films made as late as the 2000's; there's plenty of gay panic jokes or gags that are incredibly demeaning towards the LGBTQA community in plenty of supposedly light-hearted comedies. Times change, but art is always stuck in the era in which it was made which means the vast majority of cinema, for instance, may carry over aspects from certain eras that seem unsavory in today's world.

Shoah Is A Devastating Look At Past Atrocities Through Riveting Present-Day Testimonies

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #28
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #29 (tied with Stalker)

I've been pondering how exactly to start this review, since it's difficult to figure out an introduction that would be proper for a review of the 1985 documentary Shoah. Us critics tend to label a lot of movies as "important" to the point of the word losing its original intended meaning, but Shoah truly is a motion picture more than worthy of being dubbed as an important piece of art. Here is an entire movie dedicated to chronicling video interviews with many individuals involved in some way shape or form with the Holocaust, one of the deadliest genocides to ever be committed on this planet that transpired in the early 1940's.

Histoire(s) du Cinema Is An Academic Exercise That's Frequently Incoherent

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #27
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #48 (tied with The Battle Of Algiers)

Looks like I'm gonna have to adjust my reviewing procedures in order to properly tackle Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema. Just five minutes into this extended movie (which is broken up into eight individual segments), it was apparent I couldn't use the same reviewing barometers I used for, say, Going In Style recently. This isn't a conventional narrative film, but that's true of a lot of Godard's work. Histoire(s) du Cinema goes even further and isn't even trying to be like Godard's more abstract and unconventional dramas, it's basically an exercise in exploring the past of cinema in incredibly avant-garde ways that's mostly been made for himself and film academics.

Ugetsu Shows The Price We Pay For Too Much Escapism

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #26
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #50 (tied with City Lights and La Jetee)

Over here in America, we've been taking a fancy to remaking American fairy tale movies (which are typically based on folklore from other countries because what don't we steal from other places and claim as our own?) that have a strong nostalgic connection with general audiences with the likes of Beauty And The Beast and Cinderella. Back in 1953, director Kenji Mizoguchi undertook a similar task of reconfiguring well-known stories into a new cinematic incarnation though, in his case, he was handling two 18th century stories penned by Ueda Akinari that would make up the groundwork for the motion picture known as Ugetsu.

In The World Of La Jetee, Time Travel Can't Solve Everything

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #25
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #50 (tied with City Lights and Ugetsu)

And now it's time for the only short film on the Sight & Sound Greatest 50 Films List, La Jetee. This one's a French short film from director Chris Marker, one that uses high-concept notions of time travel to probe into universal human experiences, just like all of the great time travel movies such as Back To The Future, Looper, The Terminator and NOT Hot Tub Time Machine 2. This one's use of time travel hews closer to the likes of the Terminator movies in terms of tone and setting though due to it utilizing time travel in a post-apocalyptic setting where hope has become scarce and time travel is seen as a last hope to help the human race.

The Way We Approach Christianity Makes Up The Core Of The Magnificent Ordet

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #24
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #19

One of the best parts about going through all these Sight & Sound 50 Greatest Films titles is discovering so many great movies centered around theology. I'm a proud Christian but I've been dismayed that thought-provoking modern-day Christian movies are few and far in between (though Noah and Silence do prove they can exist!). But going through all these movies has allowed me to discover a number of faith-oriented movies I would have likely taken forever to discover otherwise, one's that blow the likes of God's Not Dead and War Room out of the water and then some. As you likely suspect by now, one such film is the 1995 Carl Theodore Dryer movie Ordet.

I'm Starting With The Man In Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #23
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #19

When you create a piece of art, it's difficult to not have a piece of you be imprinted on the project (Though Lord knows there's plenty of instances of films or shows or other forms of art being taken away from the creators by higher-ups), like your Voldemort and the Horcrux you're putting your soul into is some kind of movie or book or what have you. With Andrei Tarkovsky, the two other movies of his that I've seen (Andrei Rublev and Stalker) have recurring filmmaking traits and storytelling elements that already seem to ooze with Tarkovsky's personal quirks and fascinations, but now here comes Mirror, a movie that serves as a deep dive into the man's psyche to a startling and fascinating degree.

"Why Ya Gotta Be Gertrud? Don't You Know I'm Human Too?"

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #22
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #42 (tied with Panter Panchali, Some Like It Hot, Pierrot Le Fou, Playtime and Close-Up)

Just as it can be tricky to keep the flame on a candle lit for an extended period of time, so it is that attempting to keep romantic connections that just aren't clicking going is a similarly futile effort that'll just hurt both parties in the long term despite seeming like an easy band-aid to the whole predicament in the short time. This isn't really an all that complex solution, but it's one that many don't want to embrace since it'll mean they'll experience endless amounts of despair stemming from the end of a relationship they hold near and dear. It's a tough situation to be in and it appears Gertrud, the star of, well, Gertrud, has decided to go for the quick option and just cut things off right away.

Satantango Is Challenging Cinema That Shatters Conventions As Often As It Makes Powerful Imagery

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #21
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #35 (tied with Metropolis, Psycho and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles)

"Pushing the envelope" feels like an ill-suited descriptor for what director Bela Tarr is doing with his filmmaking in Satantango, the dude's practically challenging every convention known in the artform to fit his creative vision. While Satantango is my first time watching a movie from the Hungarian filmmaker, it's obvious this guy has got more ambition in his finger than many other directors have in their entire bodies. Now, to be perfectly frank here, that ambition does result in a movie that's frustrating in some aspects (and outright painful in one extended sequence) but actually becomes quite haunting in a way few movies could hope to be in its best moments. It's a give and take scenario, I suppose, when it comes to Bela Tarr's unique style of filmmaking.

Life Is A Harsher Presence And Pather Panchali Filters That Truth Through Engrossing Writing And Acting

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #20
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #42 (tied with Some Like It Hot, Getrud, Pierrot Le Fou, Playtime and Close-Up)

There isn't much glamor in the way director Satyajit Ray films the living conditions his lead characters in Pather Panchali reside in and that's a key component of why the movie manages to be so enthralling, it feels like we, the audience, are getting a glimpse into an accurate depiction of a way of life foreign to me and many others but all too familiar for the real-life individuals Pather Panchali takes inspiration from. Satyajit Ray is not looking to gussy up the lives of these human beings to make it more palatable or what have you but rather desires to make an accurate depiction that can stand as a testament to their courage and sacrifices in the face of all the hardships of life.

Let's Talk About Stalker, The Movie, Not The Short Lived Ill-Advised CBS Drama

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #19
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #29 (tied with Shoah)

Between Andrei Rublev and now Stalker, my primary impression of Andrei Tarkovsky as a director is that he's a methodical man, a guy who likes to let both his shots and ideas linger for the viewer, letting the larger ramifications of what he's depicting on-screen sink in for the audience and leave them with plenty to ponder once the entire motion picture is finished playing. This slow-burn approach sometimes left me a bit cold in Stalker (though that should be taken less as a major critique of the movie and more on me being sometimes unresponsive to certain slower pieces of storytelling), but there's no denying Tarkovsky has an incredibly evocative way of creating cinema that's both bold and intriguing.