One you've probably heard of — The Blair Witch Project, a horror movie with a tiny budget that minted a fortune at the box office. I thought it was good but it didn't occur to me that it would continue to have legs among film fans and critics twenty-five years later. Hence it's inclusion here.
The other, Beau Travail, is ostensibly an adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd set in the modern day French Foreign Legion, but it's really pure cinematic revenge for one hundred years of the so-called "male gaze" (defined here) with director Claire Denis doing the gazing and a platoon of hot, sweaty soldiers serving as the object of her camera's lust.
It was voted one of the ten best movies of all-time in the most recent Sight & Sound poll. Personally, I'm not buying it — to me, it's ninety minutes of men ironing shirts — but a lot of people who think they know what they're talking about disagree with me and you should have the opportunity to vote for it.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
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2 comments:
Wow. Rarely have you polled selections from a woeful year.
You have now . . . .
It happens that way sometimes. Sometimes you have years like 1939, 1959 or 1964, where four or five contenders could land in the all-time top 100, and then other years, you struggle to find a movie that deserves any recognition at all.
I will say I liked The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and Toy Story 2 of this year's nominees. Katherine and I were the only two people on the planet Earth who went into The Sixth Sense without any idea what it was about. We'd been living in England where the movie wasn't out yet, came home for a visit, and K's mother said she'd seen it twice and that it starred Bruce Willis. That was so incongruous, we went to the theater immediately. Literally knew nothing about it, not even that it was horror/suspense. Could have been a musical comedy for all we knew. Took us completely by surprise. Very entertaining.
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