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Rome (2005)
The best historical series ever made. Best drama series ever made. Best "buddy" series ever made.
The best historical series ever made. Takes generally fewer liberties with history than comparable costume dramas like "The Tudors" or "Reign" or "Vikings" or "The Last Kingdom". Sticks very closely to the historical timeline, and since it involves many major figures from history, that's difficult to do.
We don't know much about the early history of Octavian and what we know may be fake (he ruled the world for a while and censored a lot) but we do know that Brutus' mother did not die in the fashion the series presents...that's the only serious historical contradiction. As for who fathered Cleopatra's child, well who knows, she was desperate to have Caesar and Rome believe he had got her pregnant, making sure she was already pregnant before seducing him is one way to make that occur.
Best drama series ever made. And not only for that reason above, but especially for the way the women drive history. Something not seen until recently in historical dramas (like "The White Queen" and "Black Sails" and "Reign").
Best "buddy" series ever made. The Pullo/Vorenus relationship is one of the most poignant and best developed ever in any medium. It's better than Kirk and Spock and McCoy, who never really get beyond their innately different personalities to change each other (until the Star Trek movies, where they do).
Teen Titans Go! (2013)
get a life, fanbois, this show is great
Ahem, I had to rank this 9 out of 10 and was tempted to go 10 as I laugh out loud at pretty much every episode, and that just doesn't happen to me with other cartoons.
This has a mix of grossness, teenage stupidity, puppy love romance, and bros hanging out that will appeal to anyone who remembers Ren & Stimpy.
If you think the Teen Titans characters are somehow being "ruined" or that the show is "deplorable" for poking fun at the absurd premise of a superhero team living in a tower headquarters... please get a life and do not soil IMDb with your non-ratings. This show has to be seen for its own merits not compared with the "drama" of the old Teen Titans or the comics. These are just not those characters. For one thing (spoiler!) they die in a lot of these 10 minute episodes with no bogus attempt at an explanation of how they came back for the next. This is Roadrunner / Wile E. Coyote stuff, this is not JLU or Flashpoint or etc.
If you loved Uncle Scrooge as much as you loved Batman... loved Ren & Stimpy as much as My Neighbor Totoro... you should love the Teen Titans GO! If you do not then please to refrain from the troll postings.
Kadosh (1999)
an empathic view inside a very controlled world
I don't read this film as a simple condemnation of the ultra-orthodox or the treatment of women in some of those communities. The male lead is an extremely empathic character who one cannot but sympathize with as his life is slowly (spoiler!) destroyed by the dictates of his faith - as conveyed by his absolute spiritual leader. The sweet marriage of two people who are very hard not to love, torn apart simply by that faith's dictate that a marriage must bear children, and the contrast with hollow dutiful insincere marriages, even the one the male lead is forced into with a stunning younger woman, makes the viewer ache for this pair to be free of the tyranny. But they're kept in it by their own conditioning, their own inability to question. The minimal but erotic contact with the secular Israeli society is compelling but it doesn't really make either world look that appealing.
Is this typical of ultra-orthodox lives? I very much doubt it. Does it have something to say about faith and belief and the purpose of marriage and love? Absolutely.
I think sympathetic portrayals of genuinely spiritual marriages in film are rare and often the depth of the bond is only hinted at (the scenes between Jessica Lange and Liam Neeson in Rob Roy come to mind). Here it is all there, and mostly in looks, in touches, in movements, and how the couple meets the dictates of their faith while simultaneously genuinely loving each other. It's a tightrope act, though, which ends in a fall - not their own, but after literally being pushed off that tightrope by a bullying "spiritual" leader whose faith is nothing compared to their own. The insincere formulaic ritualistic panic of some of the characters is almost comical. And again contrasts with the sincerity of the couple at the core of the story.
The second time I saw this film, I wept at the beauty of the way they touched and loved each other in the beginning, knowing what would happen to them. I was surprised I could watch it all the way through a second time, so clearly are the emotions portrayed.
This is close to being a masterpiece. I do not think there will be a film made that will portray a deeply religious couple and the way their faith and love can clash, anywhere, as well as this one does. Name one, if you can.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
talking dolls do not make a worthy species!
What can I say, other than, Doctor Zaius is one of the great antiheroes or antagonists. He's not a villain. He's just not. Pay attention.
How can you dislike this thing? Linda Harrison also is a wonderful understated presence, especially her first appearance where she balks at Charlton Heston, then... leans forward to *sniff* him! It's terrific.
It has all the charm and ritual of a medieval action film and all the thought of science fiction at its best. The sequels lack, but, the first film really had something.
Don't watch the remake. It just doesn't have anywhere near the guts.
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
the best presentation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's best work
Yes, "the Academy Awards forgot to list" Carl Anderson "as one of the lost actors of 2003," but isn't that fitting? Judas isn't recognized as the hero of the story, despite giving up more than anyone else in it... he suffers the condemnation for carrying out God's inevitable will, in Christian concepts of the story anyway. From a Jewish or Muslim perspective he's just getting a good Rabbi or Prophet crucified, and that's probably damnation. The story isn't taking sides on this issue.
It is a credible historical presentation despite its rock opera format. It's easily Andrew Lloyd Webber's best work.
There's a lot to recommend this "hippie" version over some later ones.Jewison's decision to use Shakespeare-like staging with modern props may be influenced by his exposure to Stratford, Ontario's Shakespearean presentations. They're a Southern Ontario institution like himself. It should be said that Jewison's not Jewish, he's a Methodist (Jewison says people make that mistake a lot). Jewison's deep political empathies play throughout this story, which clearly echoes the modern Holy Land - coming as it did in 1973 at the tail end of the Israeli-Arab wars, and at the height of the New Age re-examination of Jesus as a human being. I think it plays well as an authentic retelling of its time, including the highly staged piece at the end where Anderson's voice is featured again. It can't age, because, it really does say both "First Century" and "hippie era", and it does what needs to be done to emphasize what is similar about those times: unaccountable authority resisted by people intent on adopting a more peaceful way of life which echoes traditions and morality more ancient than any they can be taught using any ritual.
This film belongs on a very short list of those that portray religious lives and sacrifices in an emotionally deep and rigorous way, one that doesn't simply present the religious believer as a cartoon to admire (wow you're brave - glad I'm not you!). The passion is strongly felt.
Because it's specifically a *Christian* passion, it's wholly appropriate that the secular Romans, the shallow Herod, are presented as uncaring, unaware or unwilling to stand up to the scheming Pharisees. The story resembles that of the later Gospels in blaming the Pharisees, not the Romans. This is thought by some scholars to reflect the post-70AD reality when the Temple was destroyed and Christianity sought converts among Romans not Jews: in which circumstances, emphasizing the Romans' attempts to find and apply justice and their political inability to stand up to the Pharisees, made more sense than painting them as sole villains. Scholars comment often on the Sanhedrin procedures being wholly discarded in Jesus' "case", and much is made of the trial being held at night, and the unanimous condemnation, which in proper "unanimity minus one" Sanhedrin rules is an acquittal for failure to field a proper defense. Webber doesn't make so much of this but the "trial" is obviously a set up, and the Pharisees obviously political players (though not wholly unsympathetic, they think they are saving their state from a Roman crackdown). Musically, the Pharisee's four-part debate is one of the highlights of the film (I'm biased, I sang the bass part myself on stage once).
But the highlight of the film version is Carl Anderson's solos. Make sure you see this film with a great sound system, even if you have to rent it.
If you buy the soundtrack, the film version soundtrack is the best one.
(pardon what may be spoilers in the above, but if anyone can spoil the Jesus story for you... well OK maybe they can, if you've never been exposed to any Christian stories at all, if so this is a great way to learn)
Kundun (1997)
see it for yourself, and remain open to the possibilities
Personally I don't understand some of the comments here. The scene where (spoiler!) the Dalai Lama absorbs the horrific news that some Chinese soldiers made children kill their own parents, though it lasts, only seconds. When I say absorbs, I mean it: the news goes through him like a knife in the guts, and through any attentive viewer's guts also. I fail to see how anyone can say "it never comes close to the emotional heights", there or in the "sky funeral" where his father is fed to the vultures. To call this "empty symbolism, and some wooden acting" is just to abhor Buddhist teaching itself, which emphasize calm and ritual to remain calm (only). "How could something so interesting at the same time create such ennui?" Easy. Because it's putting you in that state.
I agree that "like "Baraka" and "Koyaanisqatsi", the devices of the film maker are important as the script" and that the film is "not attempting to glorify the life of an extraordinary man but instead presents a balanced look at a complex country and a complex religion. Instead of making the Dalai Lhama out to be a saint he presents him as the humble but very human man he is, caught up in the struggle for his country and his religious freedom from the Chinese in the only way that his principles and religion will allow." and that "this movie is not just about one man, but about the pain of all mankind and the way to transcend the pain and sin of ours in a very buddhist direction." To say that "at its heart it is also a cold, detached and distanced view" may be a compliment. The very hot story requires a very cool treatment.
Is it "passionless"? I doubt it. It does "give the audience a cultural experience- to try to convey a religious state of mind through the use of the camera and the sound track. To get us in to the Buddhist mental state it must sacrifice in the script and drama departments" if by those one means action and conflict. The main conflict is the political one, and it is played out in stages, especially the sequence of generals starting off with reasonable explanations of why the Communists had to rise, ending up with blank repeated orders - each lower in rank. Yes it had the "best cinematography and best music", Phillip Glass outdid himself and he clearly understood the passion that lives within Buddhism. If you feel this film is passionless, close your eyes a while. Or get the soundtrack itself and play it in the dark. Really.
I agree that "Kundun" is "up there with the screen's greatest biographies (Lawrence of Arabia, Ghandi, Out of Africa)" but since it is about a great Buddhist it would do a disservice not to "separate itself from the emotion, from the humanity". If it "ends up failing miserably to convey the horror experienced by the Tibetan people", fine. If someone was "as emotionally involved in this film as I would have been in a PBS documentary on insects", then, consider, having compassion for insects, as the boy who will become the Dalai Lama demonstrates in one of the most compelling early scenes. "Kundun, in my opinion, needs to be viewed as a cinematic (audio-visual) exploration of the Tibetan spirituality and the cycles of existence - birth, death, reincarnation".
It is no contradiction to see it as "a huge, beautifully and intricately decorated gift box which, when I opened it, proved to be empty. "But your Box is the gift-- isn't it beautiful?" Well sure it is... but you could have put SOMETHING inside it." Why? Religion is itself the box.
I agree that "in twenty years time Kundun will be recognised as one of the top ten films ever produced in motion picture history". I empathize with the fellow "watching this movie hours after finding my girlfriend with her new man and being the last to know the relationship was over,I completely broke down almost on every chapter" - ah, exactly the point. I saw it with a woman I had asked to marry me several times (she said no), her son who was about ten, and a good friend of ours who had been in jail in India and meditated with the Dalai Lama when he visited. I think it was the last significant thing I did with these three people. I can no longer separate my love for them from my love for this film. I think I learned its lesson. Attachment is not the point of living well.
The beautifully wrapped box will always be empty - and that is wonderful.
Angela Anaconda (1999)
sixth best adult cartoon
I'd say this cartoon is up there in the same category with South Park (unbeatable), The Simpsons (incomparable), Family Guy and American Dad (indistinguishable and count as one) and King of the Hill (so sincere and ironic and realistic despite its often absurd premises it can't be left off the list). It's more juvenile than the others and has more use of repetition, and the bad animation is part of the joke (a tradition going back at least to Jay Ward and Roger Ramjet and Underdog and those) so no complaining about that. The lead character, Angela, is hilarious and sympathetic, very much a Pippi Longstocking, whom I am sure she's modelled on. The side characters except for Nanette Manoir and the teacher are more forgettable. The rivalry between Angela and Nanette is absurd but remains pretty amusing. Grossness isn't up there with Ren and Stimpy but sometimes gets to that category.
Lucky Girl (2001)
a flatly realistic portrayal of gambling addiction and smart kids' vulnerability
I don't see how you could like Elisha Cuthbert and not want to see this.
Don't read any further unless you hate Cuthbert and wouldn't see it if you didn't like great stories. "Cuthbert won the 2001 Gemini (Canadian television awards) for best actress in a dramatic program or mini-series and Sherry Miller, who plays her mother, won the Gemini for best supporting actress." Both well deserved. This was among the best Canadian made-for-TV movies I've seen - up there with "Human Cargo", "Prairie Giant", "Trudeau", all of which had big budgets and over four hours to tell their great stories, and drew on true life stranger than fiction).
This movie had a small budget. What it did have, was Elisha Cuthbert, whose expressive face dominates the film, and rightfully so, since it's the ebbs and flows of her optimism and despair that we're following as she (spoiler follows!) becomes a gambling addict. The vulnerability of smart kids who think they're invulnerable, the easy links from mildly illegal football pools to more illegal organized house poker parties to taking pills and then hanging out in quite illegal after-hours casinos, were all made without preaching. At each stage you want her to get out and it's hard not to yell "get out!" at the screen, because Cuthbert is never unsympathetic or stupid. She's always almost out of the situation and trying to get wholly out of it, is what gets her in deeper trouble.
I found her parents' behaviour especially effective dramatically and believable. Not only Sherry Miller, who gets the best "mom" part I've seen in any TV movie, and who deals with each situation appropriately and decisively, but the hedge-fund-manager Dad who understands gambling as a process intellectually but isn't there emotionally enough to help his daughter deal with its psychological effects. These are believable suburban parents for a character like Cuthbert's Kaitlin, who's not at all "spoiled" but does feel she's got a lot of rope before she hangs... all of which she uses. The affair with her 22-year-old boyfriend also makes perfect sense - he's a coward when dealing with the loan shark, and also with her, and even with her mother - though he obviously is the one who makes the whole house of cards fall in on the shark in the end.
It's real hard not to cheer when Mom takes down the creepy pornographer who's threatening to "tear her family apart". I like that she goes back specifically to do it. You get a real sense of the mama-bear pushed to the edge to protect her cub. Though technically the loan shark Blair is not the guy who caused her daughter's dilemma (she owns it, completely), he does make a nice side character demonstrating how awful it is to live in Toronto suburbs. Yup, those are your neighbours in Markham, folks. I liked how ordinary the couple was, and how they were obviously turned on by the power they gained over young girls with the loan shark game - obvious sociopaths who make your skin crawl. Just like real suburbs! I rate this a 9 because of what it managed to do on such a low budget - you get RIGHT into the head of a gambling addict and you're THERE with her through the worst of it - becoming a slave of sociopaths in Markham or Surrey or wherever that was.
Felicia's Journey (1999)
exploring a mind controlled by rituals and symbols, and how vulnerable it is to fate
Egoyan's visual skills make this a really wonderful film to watch: The painfully slow pans, worthy of Kurosawa, and detail-filled backgrounds, like Ridley Scott without the overload. Close attention to faces, like Hitchcock or Scorsese. You feel like you know these people and feel the pain they feel, with not much screen time. That's a credit to both the leads, but even the bit players manage to convey a lot with little time.
Unlike some reviewers I find the transformation of the main character, Hoskins (spoiler follows!), quite believable. This is a mind controlled by rituals and symbols, and he already knows that Felicia is not like his other victims, because she came willingly into his house. He seems to regret what he's about to do, and he admits when pressed by the evangelists that he's not a good man, and that he stole her money to keep her close to him. Had she cried out or been rescued by them, it would have been a hackneyed chance ending. Having him open the door, accept the redemption promised by the Christians, and having her stare a long last stare at him before departing, seems to me the perfect ending. She makes a choice rather than panicking, and this seems to render her calm at the epilogue believable and refreshing. Like anyone who's been through a terrible trauma, even (in her mind the abortion is) complicit in one, they learn to re-form their identity around events and cope. He (Hoskins) killed her unborn child as he killed those other women. She was a witness, merely. She does not condemn herself for falling for his lies. Nor even condemn him. He's just a sick thing, best out of the world and on to accepting the redemption of the next, before he can do more harm, before he can recant. All of this makes sense from her (more religious) and his (more desperate) point of view. It's a great ending. I don't know why anyone would consider it rushed, unnatural or whatever. Hoskins' character himself comments on the chance events that cause outcomes to occur very differently. For instance, if Felicia were to turn her head in the pub, she'd see her man. But she doesn't. This alone determines the fate of her child. Or if she were not kicked out of the hostel, she would not have returned to his house. And so on. I don't think a story like this is problematic for ending on yet another turn of fate. In many ways, the story is about exactly that kind of turn, and Hoskins' character seems formed by many such turns himself - mostly wrong ones. Except at the end, where he makes the right choice.
It's almost as if Egoyan is commenting on the fragility of lives led by rituals and symbols, and how chaotic our lives become if we get tied up with those who lose track of empathy as their moral guide. How sad that is. Hoskins' return to his boyhood, in black and white, at his own end, demonstrates how lonely his life has been outside the rituals and symbols of his mother's cooking show. Makes me shudder at child stars.