The very-excellent Criterion Collection has posted a top 10 list of many notable filmmakers choosing their favorite Criterion discs. Yeah, it’s self-promotion masked as content, but everyone has to admit the collection is pretty fucking impressive and worth discussing almost all of the time. We decided to post the top 5 of Diablo Cody, plus her 10th pick, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” just cause and maybe cause we just finished reading, “Jennifer’s Body,” her follow-up script to “Juno,” and we kinda love it.
Her entire list can be read here. Other interesting lists with good picks include Steve Buscemi‘s, “Brick” director Rian Johnson‘s, actor/musician /coolcat John Lurie‘s, Canadian outre filmmaker Guy Maddin, autistic-like director Nicolas Roeg, comedian Patton Oswalt and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, aka MCA (which we posted on The Playlist months ago, but we can’t seem to find, oh well). Enjoy.
1. Do the Right Thing – Spike Lee
Diablo says: Heat rises off this film. Everything about it is hot: the iconic eye-searing color palette, the characters’ respective tempers, and, of course, Lee’s hyper-stylized, sweltering Bed-Stuy simulacrum. But there ain’t nothing sluggish about it.
2. Written on the Wind
Douglas Sirk – An oily, sexy, ridiculous melodrama that once seen is never forgotten. Lauren Bacall seethes, and Dorothy Malone is scrumptious as a platinum-haired nympho who just wants to get out of Hadley.
3. Schizopolis -Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh’s most personal—and certainly most eccentric—film. Totally balls-out and unapologetic. This kind of movie is really, really hard to get made these days.
4. Sid & Nancy – Alex Cox
I first saw this in 1995, when I was seventeen. My boyfriend actually left the room because it was too intense; he apparently couldn’t stomach the potent cocktail of Chloe Webb’s screeching and Gary Oldman’s rheumy-eyed menace. Even though the movie was set in a time we couldn’t remember, it mirrored our teen zeitgeist in a lot of ways. We’d just made it through the second wave of punk.
5. Gimme Shelter -David Maysles, Albert Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin
This is documentary in the purest sense: a document. It’s real and sickening, and it feels dirty to watch. And yet there’s something weirdly redemptive about the fact that the Maysles were there. They caught it, they bronzed it like a shoe, and it can’t ever be diminished.
10. The Royal Tenenbaums -Wes Anderson
This entire movie could have been about the friction between Danny Glover and Gene Hackman and it still would have been amazing. Look past the production design and darling costumes if you can; the story is oak solid behind those oxblood walls.
