Time Out Top Ten Worst Directors List

erm, are you insane?

ah xpost

Is that an euphemism?

(this thread will pain anthony deeply when he reads it!!)

it's still monstrous mark!

Aw. But Andrew, he'll make it up to you on "Jersey Girl," where you'll see J.Lo *and* Ben Affleck together again!

sure, it's got a grebt 'father, are you sure she's the supreme being' line... but someone's gotta take a stand. my list wd have had spielberg, besson, bay, moodysson...

i re-watched 'nikita' recently. that's how scientific i can roll.

that's 3 classics right there

i can't stand kevin smith, but penny marshall;)? they're definitely putting down people who have at least tried something different

'28 days later' is no classic -- but it is far from the worst film evah, jeez.

i dunno, pete, it's an odd one to get worked up about. 'lilya 4 evah' is 28 times worse.

mcg got my vote, but in a sense he is a pioneer.

McG should be on the list by virtue of his name alone.

Once again -- Besson...?!?!?

I can't see Welles tolerating Godard much after Breathless -- he was weaned on a certain tradition that JLG never heeded.

didn't see Best Films Written By Actors feetch

The Welles-Bogdanovich book is a gold mine of insights and expanded remarks on filmmakers; best, I get the impression that Welles wasn't familiar with most of the directors' work and just made up some mellifluous shit.

that wd be very much in character, tho his criticism of Antonioni jibes with Kael's.

there's more of that in the bognaovich book iirc "the scene is over. call cut already,"

Would love to hear him on, like, Hou or Tsai. "The scene hasn't even started! Why are you filming?"

he calls Buñuel the "most supremely religious director" in the history of cinema or some such thing, which is otm. ("What a superb person he must be! Everyone loves him!").

On the other hand, he scoffed at the existence of a certain director named Mizoguchi.

he was directed by Pasolini, I imagine he followed some of the new European directors.

i get the impression that before a certain point (when dedicated art-house movie theatres began to run euro films as they came out) that you saw eurofilms in whole festivals-worth (ditto japanese etc): i can easily imagine OW taking in a whole bunch of em when the fad for them first hit the US, getting bored very quickly, and not bothering with a second bite

of course this theory depends on him being in the US at the relevant time, which he probably wasn't

("getting bored very quickly" <-- but this applies wherever he was, and whenever)

Welles admitted in the Bogda book that during film festivals he had "a lot of time to kill."

you had art cinemas in NY in the '20s–'30s, though i can't remember reading of OW's tastes in those years. japanese movies not really on the agenda till a while later tho. imagine him seeing them in between lunches at venice by then.

I remember this from an old Book of Lists and was able to find it online:

Orson Welles's Favorite Films (circa 1952):

1.City Lights (Chaplin)
2.Greed (von Stroheim)
3.Intolerance (Griffith)
4.Nanook of the North (Flaherty)
5.Shoe Shine (De Sica)
6.Potemkin (Eisenstein)
7.La Femme du Boulanger (Pagnol)
8.Grand Illusion (Renoir)
9.Stagecoach (Ford)
10.Our Daily Bread (Vidor)

'pretty standard stuff really'

Here's the page--there are a lot of directors' lists from '52, which I guess was the first Sight & Sound poll.

http://www.listology.com/dgeiser13/story/recommendations-directors-favorite-films

http://www.cinescene.com/reviews/images/chimes15.jpg

"I could eat this Kevin Smith kid under the goddamn table"

From context, Welles' comments on Godard seem to be from 1970. It happens in the Bogdanovich book right after the two of them are watching Welles' two appearances on the Dick Cavett Show. At one point Bogdanovich asks him who his least favorite American director is, and Welles' response is: "censored" in brackets. Doesn't say who censored it; could've been either person, the way they collaborated on the book.

you had art cinemas in NY in the '20s–'30s: sure, but "art cinema" meant something else before sound, and foreign-made movies didn't have the same kind of language-barrier -- there was a palpable post-war shift among the US cognoscenti to valuing "world cinema" over hollywood, it wasn't a smoothly running permanent feature, and the screening market presumably reflected this

also of course welles valued a lot of elements in american film -- or haha mankiewicz did *kaelzing* -- that the post-war europhiles tended to scorn

i like godard, and he has an interesting approach to sound (i saw king lear athe london film festival yay me] but he could NOT have made his name in radio drama

the welles in 1952 one is from brussels, which sort of prompted the S&S poll.

elia kazan picks four pagnol films; dmytryk picks one; he and wilder also go 'grande illusion' with welles.

Alfred Hitchcock
Smokey and the Bandit (1977) - D: Hal Needham

No source...something he blurted out once while nodding off in front of the TV?

this is a hitchcock top ten from 1939

John S. Robertson Sentimental Tommy 1921
De Mille Forbidden Fruit 1921
De Mille Saturday Night 1922
Rex Ingram Scaramouche 1923
Maurice Tourneur The Isle of Lost Ships 1923
John S. Robertson The Enchanted Cottage 1924
Charles Chaplin The Gold Rush 1925
E. A. Dupont Variety 1925
Josef von Sternberg The Last Command 1928
Mervyn LeRoy I am a Fugitive… 1932

i don't think he was joking necessarily, but it's kind of perplexing

John S. Robertson Sentimental Tommy 1921 <-- i totally want to see this

he loved j m barrie
more than eisenstein

or murnau

No, I didn't take it a joke, just weird. I was trying to think of who Hitchcock might have liked through the '60s and '70s, and past maybe Kubrick, or something like The Manchurian Candidate, I'm stuck. Hitchcock was just so odd, I don't have a clue. He might have liked Gidget movies.

i don't think masculin-feminin was filmed in sweden was it? some of it definitely wasn't

The "movie within the movie" that the kids go and see was shot in Sweden. Furthermore, this little movie was conceived as a parody/homage to Bergman and IIRC, Through A Glass Darkly.

Adding to the intrigue, back in the Cahiers days, Godard was a big Bergman booster, writing a festival report from Cannes declaring something along the lines of "Bergman now world's best".

He might have liked Gidget movies.

only when she wiped out

barrie is weirder than eisenstein, this doesn't surprise me at all!

I was trying to think of who Hitchcock might have liked through the '60s and '70s, and past maybe Kubrick, or something like The Manchurian Candidate, I'm stuck. Hitchcock was just so odd, I don't have a clue. He might have liked Gidget movies.

In the expanded Hitchcock/Truffaut, Truffaut describes a late 70s meeting wherein Hitch went on about Airport '77, mainly because he thought the concept was interesting and suspenseful.

"And Karen Black--now that girl can act..." That's great--and why I couldn't begin to guess with him.

why would he like kubrick? (ans = he wouldn't, he would be baffled and bored)

i suspect his lists are basically "stuff i could really hitchcock up"

also: SFX in manchurian candidate FAR TOO WELL CARRIED OFF for hitch's tastes

the DeMille love is not surprising... I think it was Dave Kehr who pointed out recently that the Psycho shower rings popping is 'swiped' from a C.B.dM. silent.

"STORY: People and ships trapped in seaweed infested section of the southern Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea"

This is wikipedia's attempt at describing The Isle of Lost Ships. That's NOT A STORY (it's not even a sentence). I'm pretty sure I've actually seen it, albeit round the time Hitch made that list. (I've def seen a b/w thriller about the Sargasso Sea...)

(Does the Sargasso Sea still exist, no one ever mentions it any more?)

iirc correctly the scavengers who live in the (film version of) the sargasso sea walk around on stilts with big wooden "feet"

I think both Hitchcock and Kubrick have been charged with being cold technocrats, so I can see an affinity there. Don't think he'd be baffled or bored by most of the films pre-2001; after that, probably.

and in both cases, a dopey accusation

maaaaaybe pre-lolita

on 'the killing' he'd be all like 'someone's put the reels in the wrong order' imo

reckon he'd allow 'the shining'

(kubrick's 'rebecca')

I think the only way to settle this is we dig up the corpse and hope that it's ready to talk.

he'd hate jack nicholson

haha in kubrick's rebecca there's be zero chemistry pos or neg between mrs danvers and the second mrs de winter, and this would be "the point"

and manderley would not catch fire, it would be consumed by a glacier

Olivier would be shot in isolation in a Manderley as gauche as Burton's Gotham City.

now want to see this even more than "sentimental tommy" <-- which kubrick should also have remade

~opinions~

I remeber seeing that Welles called Kubrick "a giant" (I think this was between Lolita and Strangelove)

"it's a bright dirty world"

ffs "it's a bright guilty world", too too long since i saw it

http://i.imgur.com/6JDWx.jpg

―  (gr8080), Wednesday, August 31, 2011 1:17 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i was on an ondemand menu during a promo for Red State where Kevin Smith was all "buy it, rent it, watch it with your friends, it's gonna be great!" and then did that exact thumbs up pose and i'm like jesus is that what this 'snarky cynical 90s guy' thinks is his thing now? or is he trying to do a 'buddy christ' reference?

seeing the red state trailer made me realize how otm DGG is - because it made me go 'whoa, that almost looks like a real movie' followed by 'look at this, this is all it takes for people to feel like he deserves a gold star'

it is actually a pretty good trailer, though im not gonna see the movie or anything