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The Best Films of the Half-Decade (2010 - 2014): General Voting Thread


Chaos

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Just saw the project this afternoon.  I plan on submitting my ballot later today.  2010-2012 was the height of my film watching but unfortunately the last couple years life had gotten really busy and I couldn't see as many as I would've liked.

 

Well, you have plenty of time to catch some other things if you want to. We have at least a month, although, I could be pushing it back a bit further. February is shaping up to be a busy month.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Also, at some point, I would appreciate if Caley, Rippa, Hollinger, or anyone else that has manned these things as to what their best practices are on scoring methodology.

 

It was always real simple - and my scoring came from Paco who got it from Hollinger

 

Whatever the size of your ballot (50, 100, whatever) - #1 gets that many points and then just work down from there

You could technically weight the Top 5 picks (like #1 vote would get a 10 point bonus or something) but that is a little bit extra work. It tends to be a little better to weight the Top picks if you have a lot of ballots since that rewards someone viewing something highly but not horribly skewing the final results.

 

Then in the end results - 100 points would be the starting threshold for inclusion on final list (though I tended to also add anything that got say a Top 3 vote). That is a little harder to decide until after you see the results

 

Do give me a rough idea of what your timeline is going to be because I want to announce my next massive project (since I am crazy) but I don't want to crush this.

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Also, at some point, I would appreciate if Caley, Rippa, Hollinger, or anyone else that has manned these things as to what their best practices are on scoring methodology.

 

It was always real simple - and my scoring came from Paco who got it from Hollinger

 

Whatever the size of your ballot (50, 100, whatever) - #1 gets that many points and then just work down from there

You could technically weight the Top 5 picks (like #1 vote would get a 10 point bonus or something) but that is a little bit extra work. It tends to be a little better to weight the Top picks if you have a lot of ballots since that rewards someone viewing something highly but not horribly skewing the final results.

 

Then in the end results - 100 points would be the starting threshold for inclusion on final list (though I tended to also add anything that got say a Top 3 vote). That is a little harder to decide until after you see the results

 

Do give me a rough idea of what your timeline is going to be because I want to announce my next massive project (since I am crazy) but I don't want to crush this.

 

 

My schedule will probably not allow for me to get my own ballot done this month, but i'm hoping Mid-March and have everything mostly announced by early April.

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Good, there's still several I wanna see too (and I'm done with it now, but I picked the WORST time to get hooked into a Breaking Bad supermarathon).

The Warrior's Way: no. The filmmaker (a film school teacher who'd never made a movie before or since) basically wanted this to be "Zack Snyder's Shanghai Noon", but instead came up with something that looks more like the bastard child of Wild Wild West and Ninja Assassin, directed by Chris Columbus while trying to pretend he's Jean-Pierre Jeunet. There's nothing wrong with the basic plot of "an Asian swordsman (country unspecified, but the film's made by Koreans) defies his warrior clan by refusing to murder an infant princess from a rival clan, and he takes the baby and escapes to a wacky town full of colorful misfits in the American Old West". Well, nothing wrong with it besides being a grab-bag of different cliches being superglued together; but still, the real problem isn't the material, it's the execution.

The rookie director is terrible at shooting fight scenes, relying way too hard on CGI and slow motion; but he's even worse with the actors. Despite having a perfectly serviceable cast, everyone is turning in some of the absolute worst line readings you've ever heard in your life. Okay, I wasn't exactly expecting anything great from Tony Cox, who has been uniformly shitty in every movie I ever had the misfortune to watch him in; but Geoffrey fuckin' Rush is made to look equally clownish and talentless, which is just pathetic if not outright rage-inducing. I mean, if you thought Rush was half-assing it in the Pirates sequels, watch THIS shit and see just how good those films look in comparison. The only person who comes out of the whole thing looking good is poor Danny Huston (despite spending half the movie wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask), who manages to have a fun interpretation on his terribly generic villain, as is per usual by "Danny Huston is the villain in a shitty action movie" standards.

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Watched

 

White Bird in a Blizzard: which started okay but I feel like it revealed too much in the wrap-up. Shailene Woodley plays a teenager whose mom (Eva Green, just 12 years older than Woodley) disappears one day without warning.  She goes off to college, returns home to her dad for a visit, and suddenly decides to perform her own investigation into the disappearance.  Woodley is good, Christopher Meloni is good as her father, but Eva Green feels like she was coached to play the mother as someone out of a 1950s melodrama and while the performance is fine, it feels totally out of place in a modern film, like the actors are acting in one type of film while she acts in another.

Full plot revealing spoilers ahoy!

The reveal of the father as the mother's murderer, to me, should have been left out.  The whole central theme of the film that Woodley's character never saw her mother again and keeps expecting her to show up, would be much more heartbreaking if there was some mystery left to it.  Like, if you were pretty sure that she was dead, but there was that 1% chance that she might show up, to me, is sadder, than the reveal that she is very much dead, but because she didn't see her body, she still expects her to show up.

It  was moderately interesting, and I still think Woodley is going to be a massive star, but it's nothing essential.

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Further down the path of "disappointing genre mashups of the old west": y hello thar, Cowboys & Aliens! Honestly, I had expectations for this movie. Yeah, practically nobody seems to have liked it, but they were kinda vague on explaining exactly why. And many of the same people said many similar things about Jon Favreau's previous directorial effort, Iron Man 2, which is still a movie I enjoy very much. Furthermore, consider the deep roster of acting talent in this film, and their even deeper level of quality in projects rather like this one: Paul Dano, Walton Goggins, and Keith Carradine all have completely separate yet completely awesome track records of starring in fucking awesome movies set in the 19th century. I mean, fer fucksakes, those three guys can claim everything from McCabe & Mrs. Miller to There Will Be Blood to Tarantino's recent Chef Boyardee (not-quite-"spaghetti") westerns.

But MAN did the filmmakers drop the ball like a hundred times in a row on this one. Cowboys & Aliens is agonizingly pedestrian, a movie which seems bah-gawd determined to obsessively give us the exact same shit we've seen in a thousand other movies. (If nobody else has called this Wild Wild War of the Worlds, then I'd like to know why not.) The characters are constructed out of the thinnest of all possible cardboard, the action scenes are dull and listless, the special effects look fake and the aliens are the same old slime-n-claws cliche we've seen for almost the past forty years straight, and the overall plot is so goddamned predictable and generic that I actually started to get angry at the giant committee of writers who'd managed to polish this concept into a handful of smooth gravel with none of those pesky rough edges that might offend anyone ever. Sheeyit, they even managed to rip one particular subplot from Battlefield Earth of all fuckin' places, to what should be the everlasting shame of everyone involved. And jesus CHRIST am I SO TIRED of "the outnumbered heroes throw a bomb into the one weak spot of the enemies' giant fortress and then immediately win the entire war" being the ending to every single fucking scifi/action flick that ever gets made anymore.

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Either I'm getting old, or Takeshi Kitano is. Either way, his film Outrage just didn't entertain me nearly as much as his yakuza thrillers of the 90s did back in the day. This one feels particularly joyless and grumpy, kinda like Goodfellas with most of the comedic and character-building scenes cut out. The characters are uniformly a bunch of shallow violent idiots, and not FUN shallow violent idiots, but the sort of egotistical hair-trigger mooks who go around looking for so many fights that it's a true miracle that they've managed to live this long. The movie throws a huge ensemble of random gangsters at us, never tells us practically anything about most of their personalities, and then we spend sixty minutes watching them punching each other followed by an additional thirty minutes of them shooting each other. Towards the end, it turns into such a repetitive marathon of executions that it almost feels like Kitano's darkest joke ever, although I sadly get the feeling that it was all meant quite seriously. Hell, Takeshi himself is barely even in the movie, he basically plays a supporting role and fades into the background more often than not. The only time the film ever springs to life is in the scenes involving a hapless diplomat who is increasingly baffled by the yakuza's insane behavior as they draft him further and further into their schemes; so, naturally, this poor fucker only gets three scenes and then the movie literally forgets about him, he just never shows up again.

Thumbs way down; I expect better from Kitano than this hackish nonsense. It's the least personal, least stylish, most perfunctory and anonymous piece of filmmaking that he's ever produced. It doesn't even make sense on a level of simple narrative logic; what was the end goal of the boss's big conspiracy, to kill every single one of his own employees? How the hell was that supposed to help anyone? I'm told there's a sequel (which seems fucking unlikely considering how this movie ends) but if it's anything like this one, I'mma stay far away from it. This ain't no Sonatine, not by a long shot.

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Either I'm getting old, or Takeshi Kitano is. Either way, his film Outrage just didn't entertain me nearly as much as his yakuza thrillers of the 90s did back in the day. This one feels particularly joyless and grumpy, kinda like Goodfellas with most of the comedic and character-building scenes cut out. The characters are uniformly a bunch of shallow violent idiots, and not FUN shallow violent idiots, but the sort of egotistical hair-trigger mooks who go around looking for so many fights that it's a true miracle that they've managed to live this long. The movie throws a huge ensemble of random gangsters at us, never tells us practically anything about most of their personalities, and then we spend sixty minutes watching them punching each other followed by an additional thirty minutes of them shooting each other. Towards the end, it turns into such a repetitive marathon of executions that it almost feels like Kitano's darkest joke ever, although I sadly get the feeling that it was all meant quite seriously. Hell, Takeshi himself is barely even in the movie, he basically plays a supporting role and fades into the background more often than not. The only time the film ever springs to life is in the scenes involving a hapless diplomat who is increasingly baffled by the yakuza's insane behavior as they draft him further and further into their schemes; so, naturally, this poor fucker only gets three scenes and then the movie literally forgets about him, he just never shows up again.

Thumbs way down; I expect better from Kitano than this hackish nonsense. It's the least personal, least stylish, most perfunctory and anonymous piece of filmmaking that he's ever produced. It doesn't even make sense on a level of simple narrative logic; what was the end goal of the boss's big conspiracy, to kill every single one of his own employees? How the hell was that supposed to help anyone? I'm told there's a sequel (which seems fucking unlikely considering how this movie ends) but if it's anything like this one, I'mma stay far away from it. This ain't no Sonatine, not by a long shot.

From what I came to understand about this film is that it came after Kitano's series of artier films (Takeshis', Glory to the Filmmaker!, Achilles and the Tortoise) earned mixed reviews and complaints that he should go back to his violent yakuza films, so Kitano basically said that they would get the violentest, yakuzest film yet and made 'Outrage' as a sort of fan-service/eff-you.  Then it was really popular so he was locked into a sequel.  I mostly agree with you here.  I remember a scene early in the film that I think was quite darkly funny that gave me high hopes but by the mid-point I had no idea what was going on, who was trying to kill who, and I didn't really care, really.  Just wanted it to be over.  I see that he's made another film post-Outrage sequel, but it sounds like a Yakuza comedy, like broad comedy (Think 'Getting Any?') so I probably won't bother to seek it out.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm going to post this in both forums and update the main info.  Caley has the 2015 poll going until 3/9 (one week from now). I want to give everyone some padding in-between, so I am going to push out 2 weeks, but I am going to give you until the weekend of that 2 weeks to get it in, so let's say March 27th.


 


Does this sound like a fair date for everyone?


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  • 4 weeks later...

A reminder, everyone: tomorrow (3/27) is the deadline, so get your ballots to Chaos pronto.  

 

I still need to finish mine... damn, it's annoying having to check back and forth between Flickchart (my rule-of-thumb guideline for the list) and Rottentomatoes, since we're using the latter's dates for what officially qualifies as "2010-2014" and all too often the two sites disagree.  

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8 hours ago, Jingus said:

A reminder, everyone: tomorrow (3/27) is the deadline, so get your ballots to Chaos pronto.  

 

I still need to finish mine... damn, it's annoying having to check back and forth between Flickchart (my rule-of-thumb guideline for the list) and Rottentomatoes, since we're using the latter's dates for what officially qualifies as "2010-2014" and all too often the two sites disagree.  

I think the only areas where it's frustrating is really 2010 stuff and maybe some 2014/15 stuff.

I know there's a lot of on the cusp end of decade/beginning of decade stuff.

Personally, I probably won't have my ballot done until at least tomorrow because I want to watch a few more films if I can on this rainy weekend, but we'll see how far I get.

A couple of the ballots I've received have reminded me of stuff I would have forgotten to possibly include on the back half of my list.

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A quick update: I am going to message a couple people just to make sure they didn't want to add to this, as I'd love to have over 10 ballots. If they don't decide to submit one, then I may tally and start posting films as early as this weekend.

 

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3 hours ago, The Z said:

I could maybe send one in tomorrow or Friday, if that's ok?

Please do. In private messaging, I've told people that they could send me something by the end of the weekend, and that'd be fine.

I probably will start developing my format for tallying this weekend. I just have to figure out something that would easily group all of the films into a pivot table.

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