*
Blade Runner is far from being one of the best science fiction films ever made. It is an evocative portrait of a city and impressive on technical grounds (and as a futurist cyberpunk vision), but the story and themes, while workable, are far from spectacular.
*
Twin Peaks is mostly a rather mediocre soap opera, and this is even if I generously ignore the significant problems and weak arcs that plagued the second season (or the entire season if one prefers). One can almost count on one hand the surreal touches or exchanges that are worthwhile; the show is mostly like a far less interesting and interminably prolonged
Blue Velvet.
- The Empire Strikes Back is not the best Star Wars movie.
I wouldn't call this blasphemy provided you think the best Star Wars movie is the original film. Consider Jedi the best film and you're skirting heresy, opt for one of the prequels and you're definitely in apostasy territory.
- Alien 3 is not the worst Alien movie.
Like
Dennis I've not actually seen any Alien movies past the second one... but I haven't exactly heard stellar praise for
Alien: Resurrection the
Alien versus Predator films. Actually I'd hear those three films more trashed then I do 3, by and large. I think this is a fairly safe position unless you try to suggest one of the first two films is the worst in the franchise.
- The Wrath of Khan is not the worst Star Trek movie.
Uh... it'd be blasphemy to suggest it
is the worst, truly? This is a perplexing statement, unless you have arrived from a coven of Khan-hating Trekkies.
Batman can only be interesting again if Bruce Wayne is permanently removed from the equation.
*shrug* I don't care enough, but I'd disagree all the same as I enjoyed
The Dark Knight (unless this is a discussion of the character as he stands in comics). Wayne, like Batman himself, is pretty flexible - he's a billionaire motivated by him being an orphan to crime. It's an archetype that fits the concept well and I don't see any reason it needs to be thrown out.
Star Trek V was awesome. (And Star Trek XIII was a can of condensed awful.)
I think I need to get my staking kit...
Bergman's Seventh Seal is pretty cool until precisely the part where a guy hides in a tree from Death, at which point it begins to suck robustly.
Bergman's best films are his chamber dramas, honestly, though Seventh Seal is pretty great.
The mathematical relationship between Soderbergh's Solaris and Tarkovsky's Solaris is best expressed in negative numbers, to wit: Solaris (2002) is -4 times better than Solaris (1972), because giving Solaris (1972) a rating on this side of zero would indicate that it was a film as such, and not the Red October Camera Factory in Moscow making sure their products could actually reproduce images.
Your math is wrong. Clearly Tarkovsky's Solaris exists as a Platonic Form (because why use math when I can use philosophy?), while Sodebergh's film is debased by the impurities of the material world and ergo cannot be compared.
Oh, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis was well-intentioned yet deeply boring. In fairness, I didn't watch the one with the Queen soundtrack.
This is double blasphemy. Blasphemy for suggesting that Lang's film is not a work of genius, and also blasphemy for suggesting the Queen soundtrack is an improvement over (presumably) Huppertz's fantastic symphonic score.
Not sure how geekery is supposed to deal with such things, but I suggest virtual stoning.
No, I actually agree. Tarkovsky's Solaris is a Platonic ideal: inhuman and nonexistent. Yes, I still need to try to watch it again.
And to be clear, it has nothing to do with silent films in general, which can be pretty great, but Metropolis really just kind of drags itself by its own self-important metaphors to its conclusion.
