vote for the best Oscar-winning Best Pictures of all time

You Can't Take It With You is a seminal stage comedy, but Capra and his writers basically threw out the last third for one of their most simplistic Big Business jeremiads.

I've cooled on Some Like It Hot over the years tho it's still a lark, but Wilder thought The Apartment was a makeup for SLIH losing to Ben-Hur. But I think the only other Wilder comedy that approaches The Apartment in sophistication is A Foreign Affair.

Eric, Russell def for Cuckoo!

cuckoo's nest was probably the third Best Pic I saw in a theater (after Oliver! and The Sting) but I haven't seen it in years, it's a much more sanitized rebel story than the psych-sprawl of the novel, and Big Nurse is basically a misogynist's straw woman (yeah, coming from a gyrophobe like me).

She creeps me the fuck out, in part because she never hisses or even raises her voice. She's every colorless school nurse who gave you an aspirin but wouldn't excusing your lateness for your next class.

Best Years is one of the only completely defensible BPs in history

I agree, Eric, but I rarely read an intelligent defense.

- Pungent dialogue
- Ambivalent treatment of women (Eastwood the director seems himself confused about the whores: are they victims or instigators?)
- Munny's transformation from flu-ridden sadsack to the merciless psycho killer. It bothered me when I first saw it, but no longer.
- Excellent perfs by Freeman, Hackman (another deserved Oscar), and all the prostitutes, even by the cute one who gets cut up.

I actually like Shakespeare in Love quite a lot, but, predictably, I was an English major.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer um slays SOTL.

ah, and we part ways again...

Explain.

x-post

I don't see this at all. To me he's more like post-70s Nicholson - a caricature that's the same every time.

Hmmm. There's an argument to be made that, whichever of the killers in SOTL you're talking about, you're misreading them, but I suppose it's neither here nor there if you simply don't like the movie. In any case it was certainly Demme's last good one.

Gene Hackman is one of my all-time favorite actors.

don't read too much into this, i made it in 3 minutes

the apartment i like because of its britlleness, and how much it hates.

My ten (first half for real, second half a little devil's advocate):

01. Sunrise
02. All About Eve
03. How Green Was My Valley
04. Annie Hall
05. The Best Years of Our Lives
06. Titanic
07. The French Connection
08. Ordinary People
09. Million Dollar Baby
10. Driving Miss Daisy

Foster is what give SOTL its reason for being; Hopkins isn't scary or believable, he's just a pro at not blinking.