The Best Movie Directors of All Time
This should not be a popularity contest or a trendy one. It's like an achievement award. One cannot just say someone is a greatest director by one movie or an Oscar, but rather, from how many movies that have been awesome they have made. Having read several sites that have arbitarily listed current directors like Coens or Nolan merely because one or more movies were good, doesn't make them the best ever. Also they appear to be all men in this list, but there are probably some great women directions I cannot think us just not.
1. Alfred Hitchcock
2. Martin Scorsese
3. Francis Ford Coppela
4. Orson Welles
5. Ingmar Bergman
6. Charlie Chaplin
7. Oliver Stone
8. John Ford
9. Stanley Kubrick
10. Fritz Lang
11. Hayao Miyasaki
12. Billy Wilder
13. Ridley Scott
14. Brian DePalma
15. Buster Keaton
16. Steven Spielberg
17. Woody Allen
18. Akira Kurosawa
19. Roman Polanski
20. Mike Nichols
21. Cecil B. DeMille
22. David Lynch
23. George R. Romero
24. Mel Brooks
25. Robert Altman
26. Jean Luc Godard
27. Frederico Fallini
28. Howard Hawks
29. John Huston
30. D. W. Griffith
31. Frank Capra
32. Peter Jackson
33. Christopher Nolan
34. Ron Howard
35. James Cameron
36. Quentin Tarantino
37. Robert Rodriquez
38. Guillermo Del Toro
39. Sam Raimi
40. Alphonso Cuaron
41. Clint Eastwood
42. Harrison Ford
43. Joel Coen
44. Ethan Coen
45. John Waters
46. Robert Zemekis
47. Michael Kurtiz
48. William Wyler
49. John Cassavetes
50. David Lean
51. Terrence Malik
52. Sam Peckinpah
53. Eila Kazan
54. George Cukor
55. Otto Preminger
56. Arthur Penn
57. Preston Sturges
58. Joseph Mankeiwizch
59. Ernest Lubitsch
60. George Lucas
61. Spike Lee
63. Dan Ackroyd
Also many of these directors are still living but some of the unusual names are dead. I haven't seen all of the movies they have directed and might be missing something.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
The Myths of 2012
The Myths of 2012, The Post!
The world is not going to end on the winter solstice of December 2012 because there is not one shred of truth to any of the fabrications surrounding the sensational fantasy and ad campaigns of a 2010 movie, and several ridiculous shows on the History Channel. Frankly it is galling that the History channel has become the fantasy channel. but that is another topic.
Since the time of ancient days up to the ramblings of Nostradamus, people have thought the end was coming, and then there was Y2K, which didn't do anything. Nostradamus was a quack, a charlatan false prophet who would make up vague gloom and doom stories long before anyone knew of such things, and thus was called a prophet years later. He did not predict anything. What he did was make fantasies, but when he duped people that wasn't good. He allegedly predicted 2012, Hitler, Napoleon and some others, and according to a later disproven Berkley study in hysteria, 9/11/2001.
First of all, he did not predict Hilter. It is the other way around. Adolph Shicklegruuber was his name and he loved reading Nostradamus and other cult figures. He renamed himself after the conqueror in the story.
Oh, but he mentions Waterloo and Napoleon. No he does not! A waterloo is merely a place that existed in his time, and in Napoleon's also, and the name Napoleon doesn't really appear in the quatranes at all. If it did, it's likely Napoleon too read his story and decided to have his battle in the location in the story.
The guy predicting 9/11 at Berkley later came out and said it was an experiment in paranoia and it worked. He stole his stanzas from The Lord of the Rings. Well if you're going to rip off someone, why not Tolkien? Ha.
Armageddon is often used for doomsday in Western culture, but actually in near eastern middle east culture it is little more than a flat valley in the Gideon plateau near Israel. It's just a place. Maybe there could be a battle there someday, but it will not likely lead to the end of the world.
The Mayans made a calendar that allegedly ends in 2012, except that Western (Spain actually) people got a hold of the last of their stuff and have been misreading it using Roman dating. This immediately invalidates the whole Mayan thing. Talk to a descendant of Meso-America and they will look at you funny. They had no telescopes and could not tell the stars unless observed from the Earth, so there is no way they could have figured out when certain things aligned. It was all a guess to them. They were able to make their sun related calendar more accurate than the lunar related ones we use today, but they did not predict doomsday. The Western interpretation is just wrong. That galactic alignment stuff is merely the passing of the winter sostice, which happens every winter on December 21-23. Furthermore, the gravity of the galaxy exerts very little pull on the solar system. It would not cause any damage to the Earth.
The polar shift thing is bull. Even if the magnetic poles could dramatically shift, it would not do anything to the continents, unlike in that stupid movie. But it can't and it won't in December. These things happen over hundreds of thousand of years. It would be so gradual we wouldn't even notice at first.
The far out hokum of Niribu is someone's science fantasy story, not reality. The Sumerians allegedly knew of 10 planets because there is a tablet with 10 dots on it somewhere. They also allegedly knew of Niribu, a fantastic Jupiter sized planet with Earth like moons that passes through the inner solar system and would destroy Earth culture, or give rise to other cultures, or genetically change us. Wow, what a mess.
First of all, that Sumerian tablet is being misread. The ancient peoples of the East did not have telescopes and could not see past Saturn with the naked eye. What they were likely seeing were transits of the same 5 planets they could see, and doubled them. Even the Bible made the distinction of the 'morning star' and 'evening star', even though both were just the planet Venus. The Sumarians were the agrarian ancestors of the middle eastern peoples, Babylon and so forth, but they knew nothing of alien lizards called Ananaki and nothing about a planet Nriribu. It's all fantasy. Modern fantasy has been tacked onto this old story, sometimes distastefully by shows like 'Ancient Aliens' on the history channel.
If there was a jovian planet nearing Earth we would have seen it years ago, and all those ridiculous lens flare, Photoshop imagines from YouTube prove nothing. Such a planet would already destroy the orbit of Earth and send it hurling away. This did not happen and it isn't going to happen because there is no planet Niribu. And Sedna is not Niribu. It is a small asteroid planetoid.
Just because many cultures used dragons, lizards, dogs, and cats as visitors from the heavens doesn't mean they're evil and they've come on a giant planet to destroy humanity in 2012. This is total fiction. Like today, people dream up things to explain the world, such as disasters and why they happen, and before science people assumed God did everything for a reason. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, it's chance. It has nothing to do with outside forces, space calendars, or aliens coming down.
We will be here to usher in 2013 as though it was any other year. Hopefully the mentally imbalanced people obsessing over 2012 will have gone away and stopped obsessing. The world is not going to end based on fantasies and myths, and a mix of ideas from all over. If it was that simple, the world would have entered WW3 and been destroyed in the cold war period.
Information revolution could lead to new ideas but we'll have to sift through the idiotic ones first. Unfortunately.
The world is not going to end on the winter solstice of December 2012 because there is not one shred of truth to any of the fabrications surrounding the sensational fantasy and ad campaigns of a 2010 movie, and several ridiculous shows on the History Channel. Frankly it is galling that the History channel has become the fantasy channel. but that is another topic.
Since the time of ancient days up to the ramblings of Nostradamus, people have thought the end was coming, and then there was Y2K, which didn't do anything. Nostradamus was a quack, a charlatan false prophet who would make up vague gloom and doom stories long before anyone knew of such things, and thus was called a prophet years later. He did not predict anything. What he did was make fantasies, but when he duped people that wasn't good. He allegedly predicted 2012, Hitler, Napoleon and some others, and according to a later disproven Berkley study in hysteria, 9/11/2001.
First of all, he did not predict Hilter. It is the other way around. Adolph Shicklegruuber was his name and he loved reading Nostradamus and other cult figures. He renamed himself after the conqueror in the story.
Oh, but he mentions Waterloo and Napoleon. No he does not! A waterloo is merely a place that existed in his time, and in Napoleon's also, and the name Napoleon doesn't really appear in the quatranes at all. If it did, it's likely Napoleon too read his story and decided to have his battle in the location in the story.
The guy predicting 9/11 at Berkley later came out and said it was an experiment in paranoia and it worked. He stole his stanzas from The Lord of the Rings. Well if you're going to rip off someone, why not Tolkien? Ha.
Armageddon is often used for doomsday in Western culture, but actually in near eastern middle east culture it is little more than a flat valley in the Gideon plateau near Israel. It's just a place. Maybe there could be a battle there someday, but it will not likely lead to the end of the world.
The Mayans made a calendar that allegedly ends in 2012, except that Western (Spain actually) people got a hold of the last of their stuff and have been misreading it using Roman dating. This immediately invalidates the whole Mayan thing. Talk to a descendant of Meso-America and they will look at you funny. They had no telescopes and could not tell the stars unless observed from the Earth, so there is no way they could have figured out when certain things aligned. It was all a guess to them. They were able to make their sun related calendar more accurate than the lunar related ones we use today, but they did not predict doomsday. The Western interpretation is just wrong. That galactic alignment stuff is merely the passing of the winter sostice, which happens every winter on December 21-23. Furthermore, the gravity of the galaxy exerts very little pull on the solar system. It would not cause any damage to the Earth.
The polar shift thing is bull. Even if the magnetic poles could dramatically shift, it would not do anything to the continents, unlike in that stupid movie. But it can't and it won't in December. These things happen over hundreds of thousand of years. It would be so gradual we wouldn't even notice at first.
The far out hokum of Niribu is someone's science fantasy story, not reality. The Sumerians allegedly knew of 10 planets because there is a tablet with 10 dots on it somewhere. They also allegedly knew of Niribu, a fantastic Jupiter sized planet with Earth like moons that passes through the inner solar system and would destroy Earth culture, or give rise to other cultures, or genetically change us. Wow, what a mess.
First of all, that Sumerian tablet is being misread. The ancient peoples of the East did not have telescopes and could not see past Saturn with the naked eye. What they were likely seeing were transits of the same 5 planets they could see, and doubled them. Even the Bible made the distinction of the 'morning star' and 'evening star', even though both were just the planet Venus. The Sumarians were the agrarian ancestors of the middle eastern peoples, Babylon and so forth, but they knew nothing of alien lizards called Ananaki and nothing about a planet Nriribu. It's all fantasy. Modern fantasy has been tacked onto this old story, sometimes distastefully by shows like 'Ancient Aliens' on the history channel.
If there was a jovian planet nearing Earth we would have seen it years ago, and all those ridiculous lens flare, Photoshop imagines from YouTube prove nothing. Such a planet would already destroy the orbit of Earth and send it hurling away. This did not happen and it isn't going to happen because there is no planet Niribu. And Sedna is not Niribu. It is a small asteroid planetoid.
Just because many cultures used dragons, lizards, dogs, and cats as visitors from the heavens doesn't mean they're evil and they've come on a giant planet to destroy humanity in 2012. This is total fiction. Like today, people dream up things to explain the world, such as disasters and why they happen, and before science people assumed God did everything for a reason. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, it's chance. It has nothing to do with outside forces, space calendars, or aliens coming down.
We will be here to usher in 2013 as though it was any other year. Hopefully the mentally imbalanced people obsessing over 2012 will have gone away and stopped obsessing. The world is not going to end based on fantasies and myths, and a mix of ideas from all over. If it was that simple, the world would have entered WW3 and been destroyed in the cold war period.
Information revolution could lead to new ideas but we'll have to sift through the idiotic ones first. Unfortunately.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Review: "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is tense 2012 remake
"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" 2011 version R
In Sweden, a head journalist frames the wrong guy in a libelous article and is forced into hiding, where he goes to an island and meets a demented family of despots and former Nazis. At the same time, a mysterious tattooed young adult Goth Punk computer hacker makes her life on the streets through crime and occasional gross favors. While the journalist gets closer to the truth about a 40 year old mystery, the disappearance of a local girl, the rogue girl is raped but gets creative revenge, and then both will meet up, as fate would intervene, so they can solve the case.
The American version of this film is excellent, and not for the faint heart, or for the squeamish. The scenes are as brutal as they are in the Swedish version, if not a bit more so. Even the love scenes are demented and do not elicit anything other than make you want to shower after seeing it. Because this is a late entry movie in 2012, Oscar may love it, but only give it 'adapted screenplay', after all, it is a direct remake of the original, using a similar script and setting.
It is based on the book of the same name, and the English translated version. The rest of the book trilogy has been down in Sweden and will shortly be made into US versions, although since the later two appeared on TV the US versions might actually be raunchier. Hard R rating for a reason. Do not under any circumstance take children to see this.
Review by Adam Browne
In Sweden, a head journalist frames the wrong guy in a libelous article and is forced into hiding, where he goes to an island and meets a demented family of despots and former Nazis. At the same time, a mysterious tattooed young adult Goth Punk computer hacker makes her life on the streets through crime and occasional gross favors. While the journalist gets closer to the truth about a 40 year old mystery, the disappearance of a local girl, the rogue girl is raped but gets creative revenge, and then both will meet up, as fate would intervene, so they can solve the case.
The American version of this film is excellent, and not for the faint heart, or for the squeamish. The scenes are as brutal as they are in the Swedish version, if not a bit more so. Even the love scenes are demented and do not elicit anything other than make you want to shower after seeing it. Because this is a late entry movie in 2012, Oscar may love it, but only give it 'adapted screenplay', after all, it is a direct remake of the original, using a similar script and setting.
It is based on the book of the same name, and the English translated version. The rest of the book trilogy has been down in Sweden and will shortly be made into US versions, although since the later two appeared on TV the US versions might actually be raunchier. Hard R rating for a reason. Do not under any circumstance take children to see this.
Review by Adam Browne
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