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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Coolest Movie Evah!!!

  
  

Page: 12(3)

 
 
miss wonderstarr
20:48 / 24.02.06
Thus, Potemkin would not be a "cool" movie, because most of the appreciation comes from looking at how it's edited and constructed (or looking at its propagandic aims). If you go into Potemkin for the story alone, you're going to be disappointed, obviously.


I don't think this is true. It wasn't made so it could be appreciated objectively for its editing and approved as effective propaganda. It was made as an exciting, rousing celebration of revolution. I believe it and many of its contemporary films were designed to be screened to illiterate farmers and peasants, to get them feeling the hot righteousness of Bolshevism through the rhythm and collision of images; not people who were going to analyse its shot construction or rub their chins at its intellectualism. Maybe you weren't implying these things, and it's true that a rousing enjoyment of propaganda is still an appreciation of political aims, but it seemed to me you were suggesting the film could only be admired in quite a cold, detached, film-student manner.


I suggest that Battleship Potemkin -- let's rid it of its overtones of the classroom and call it by its more Steven Seagal style (and apparently accurate) name, the Armoured Cruiser Potemkin, is a cool movie. In point:

-- men eating meat with maggots -- includes huge close-up of maggots.

-- sailors are shot in cold blood on the decks, then mutiny and overthrow their officers

-- nursemaid shot in the gut, pram rolls down tons of flights of stairs

-- woman slashed in the eye by a cossack with a sabre.

-- battleship shoots fuck-off cannons at the government buildings on the shore.

-- the stone statues of lions rise up and roar in protest

-- final jawdropping flourish: in a black and white film, a red flag (hand-coloured frame by frame) is hoisted in revolutionary triumph.

This is just the cool bits I remember off the top of my head, but come on; I think even Beavis and Butt-Head could dig all that stuff. There aren't any men in shades (there are women with parasols) but let's not think of this movie as some worthy document. It is an emotionally-loaded rabble-rouser as well as (because it is also) a primer of powerful editing -- that is, it does its job well because the tools are so well used and the sequences are so well put together, but it's meant to be full of "fuck yeah" moments, not just mused over by scholars.
 
 
Jackie Susann
21:01 / 24.02.06
I think I am failing some sort of masculinity test here (and you know how much that sort of thing bothers me), but I really think Bring it on is by far the coolest movie evah!!! Cheerleaders, evil cheerleaders, male cheerleaders (enough said), Sparky Pulastre, race and class conflict, incredible choreography, spirit sticks, spanky pants, queer teens, cheer-ocracy vs cheer-tatorship, Blaque, especially Natina as Jenelope ('Can we beat these Buffys down so I can go home? I'm on curfew, girl'), Eliza Dushku, a genuinely uncertain ending, a mixed gender cheerleader carwash, and the best meet-cute in any teen movie:

Torrance: [Looking at the new kid's Clash t-shirt] Is that your band?
Cliff: The Clash? Uh, no... British punk band, circa 1997-1983, ish, original line-up anyway.
Torrance: How Vintage.

Now that's a girl I'd like to meet, or even marry.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:03 / 24.02.06
I watched Bring it On maybe seven times in a row once on a long-haul flight and I love it to bits, but I would suggest maybe it's "funky" or "awesome" instead of "cool".
 
 
Jackie Susann
22:43 / 24.02.06
Oh come on!

Courtney: Don't play dumb. We're better at it than you.
Whitney: You were having cheer sex with him.

That is funky, awesome, and cool. In fact, it is exactly what TLC were trying to say when they called their genre-redefining 1994 classic album Crazysexycool.
 
 
lekvar
23:08 / 24.02.06
On the subject of Deconstructing Cool:

The common theme in cool movies of the Big Trouble/Diehard/Evil Dead type is that the main character has a goal that he must accomplish, wheter that goal is worthwile or not, and is simply too stubborn (or stupid) to know when to quit.

Ash, Jack Burton and Nada (Roddy Piper in They Live) are buffoons, they are indestructable because they don't know when they've been beaten, so they can't be beaten. The Diehards and On Deadly Grounds are a little more subtle in that they replace the foolishness with characters who are "just regular folks," your average joe who just happens to kick ass through sheer willpower and determination.
 
 
Jackie Susann
23:35 / 24.02.06
By that standard, 24 is cooler than any movie ever made. Don't even pretend it's not.
 
 
c0nstant
19:32 / 25.02.06
I'd subscribe to the above definition of cool (although, I feel, it is incomplete). After all Lola, of Run Lola Run, isn't "hyper-masculinized". She is, however, attempting the near impossible (100,000dm in twenty minutes).

Identification with, or wanting of, the central character's emotional state or "skillz" is another important factor in "cool" movies, I think.

By the way, does anyone else feel that the security guard (the one in the bank) in RLR was the only one who could remember the previous iterations? I'm not sure why I think this, but I'm convinced it's correct.
 
 
matthew.
23:42 / 25.02.06
To add the cool definition,

A total ignorance of the laws of physics. For example, the sequel Transporter 2 [Spoilers Coming At You]

During the climax, teh supercool hero and the villain fight in the cabin of a small plane. Of course the pilot gets accidentally shot in the process and the plane does a spin towards the ocean. When the plane hit the water with its nose, the windshield breaks and water trickles in. The wings break but TEH TRANSPORTER is OKAY!!12!!3!! Really, if the plane had hit the water at that speed, Jason Statham and the plane would have been liquidified.

And the Transporter can dodge fucking bullets, too. That's just plain bad-ass, if not ignorant of the laws of physics.
 
 
Jackie Susann
01:18 / 27.02.06
Okay, by these criteria Bring it on is still winning! Torrance has no experience in choreography, a mostly skeptical, sometimes hostile, certainly demoralised squad behind her and has just found out her boyfriend is cheating on her. After they spend days learning a bought-routine because they don't have time to create on of their own, only to have it go horribly wrong, she still brings it to Nationals with a brilliant, innovative routine. If those aren't impossible odds, I don't know what are.

And okay, maybe they don't exactly break the laws of physics. But many of their maneouvres, including all stunts more than two bodies high, the fly-overs, and the basket-tosses with head-over-heels rotation, are illegal at the high school level according to the National Federation Interscholastic Spirit Association. They break the laws of cheerleading! And that's nothing to sneeze at.

Plus, I know you have underwear up your ass right now, but it still beats the hell out of a shattered skull. Think about it!
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:22 / 27.02.06
You know, the more I think about this, the more I agree with Jackie S. Bring it On features inhuman athleticism, non-comformism, racial tension - it's Lethal Weapon with cheerleaders, really, and as we all know Lethal Weapon was a very cool film the only possible improvement to which would have been more cheerleading. Likewise, the only real improvement to Bring it On would have been the involvement of Gary Busey.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
08:50 / 27.02.06
I second the nomination of Danger Diabolik.
 
 
John Octave
19:47 / 28.02.06
I believe [Potemkin] and many of its contemporary films were designed to be screened to illiterate farmers and peasants, to get them feeling the hot righteousness of Bolshevism through the rhythm and collision of images; not people who were going to analyse its shot construction or rub their chins at its intellectualism.

I was under the impression, though, that Soviet Montage filmmaking died out as a major movement because the message wasn't getting through clearly enough, and that Eisenstein, et al, were accused of making films that required an "intellectual" audience.

In any event, I certainly think Potemkin contains some cool elements outside of the editing, and everything mentioned in kovacs' post certainly qualifies, but I think as a whole movie, it lacks the certain je ne sais quoi of coolness. An "awesomeness" factor, if you will.

Perhaps (and this is going out on a limb with another criterion) the cool movies discussed in this post have a certain amount of triviality? Potemkin, with its imperitive message of revolution and heavy basis in reality, has a certain amount of gravity and seriousness. It pushes the horrors of the real world to the forefront. Buckaroo Banzai, on the other hand, has the world in danger of perishing in a nuclear holocaust, but this real-world danger takes a backseat to skinny pulp hero vs. business-suited aliens. Similarly, violence is treated in a fairly consequence-free way in movies like Transporter 2 so that you can say "That was exciting; I can't wait for the next bit of action", whereas the Odessa Steps massacre is meant to make you go "This is horrible! I wish it would end soon, because this is upsetting to me."

I'm not trying to pick on Badass Ship Potemkin, but I just don't think it's a movie that most of us are likely to curl up with on a Saturday night with a box of Raisinettes.
 
 
John Octave
19:49 / 28.02.06
Also, Danger Diabolik is the only movie I've ever watched on Mystery Science Theatre and thought it was cool on its own merits.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:07 / 28.02.06
You make some interesting points, John Octave.

I was under the impression, though, that Soviet Montage filmmaking died out as a major movement because the message wasn't getting through clearly enough, and that Eisenstein, et al, were accused of making films that required an "intellectual" audience.

I also gained that broad impression, but the people accusing Eisenstein et al of formalism were surely officials of the Stalinist regime who, with hindsight, look a bit philistine and shortsighted for condemning such exciting and influential montage cinema. However, maybe they were right that the message wasn't getting through clearly enough.

I don't personally feel, watching Fuck-off Big Boat Potemkin, that it's at all hard to work out what we're meant to be feeling and thinking, or what's meant to be going on plot-wise.

I think as a whole movie, it lacks the certain je ne sais quoi of coolness. An "awesomeness" factor, if you will.

I agree it has longeurs if you sit through the whole thing. I was really just undertaking an experiment of my own by reclaiming it as cool -- I think it would make a thrilling and awesome twenty-minute best-bits movie now, but I doubt very much it would capture the multiplex crowd at full-length... if that's a criterion of cool.


the Odessa Steps massacre is meant to make you go "This is horrible! I wish it would end soon, because this is upsetting to me."


I would say it's meant to make you go "damn the bourgeois and the blasted Cossacks! viva revolution!"
 
 
miss wonderstarr
07:31 / 01.03.06

Also look how they done the poster just like the one-sheets for "V for Vendetta", a known cool movie. Hence, "Battleship" is cool?!

  
  

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