Cinema Basement

A ranking by Brooks Rich Now we come to the other end of the Best Picture spectrum. There are different ways to judge these films. Some are just downright awful in my opinion. Others are fine but did not deserve over other films. Best Pictures should be big, have a feeling of grandeur and importance. So here are the worst films to win Best Picture. 20. Gone With the Wind (1939) Controversy right out of the gate. It might be not be the worst film of all time but Gone With the Wind is an endless maudlin film that won Best Picture over a truly deserving timeless classic, The Wizard of Oz. The films lower on the list may not be technically awful but they won over something more deserving. I personally can't stand Gone With the Wind, it never ends it seems, but I understand that some people like it and it might have it's place. But over Wizard of Oz? Come on. Gone With the Wind goes down as one of those big crowd pleasers of the time that hasn't aged well. 19.  Argo ...

A review by Brooks Rich I am shocked that this film isn't as well remembered as it should be. This is the last great film from legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, made in 1997 before Coppola forgot who he was and tried too hard to recapture his glory from the '70s. Here he makes a fantastic and well thought out legal thriller, based on John Grisham's novel of the same name. Matt Damon plays Rudy Baylor, a young law school graduate who ends up at a shady law firm in a bad part of Memphis, Tennessee. Together with failed lawyer Deck Shifflet, played by Danny DeVito, they sue a medical insurance company called Great Benefit, who denied a young man coverage for a bone marrow transplant that would have saved his life. During the course of the trial they go up against slimy and arrogant litigator Leo F. Drummond, played wonderfully by Jon Voight, who thinks he has an easy win against these two inexperienced lawyers. The Rainmaker isn't just a great legal film, but ...

A ranking by Brooks Rich Here they are. The ten best films to ever win Best Pictures. These are not only the best to win the award but are also some of the greatest films ever made.  10. The Hurt Locker (2009) The Hurt Locker works kind of the same way as The Deer Hunter. It is film about the effects of war on men and how it's hard to leave the war behind when you come home. Instead of the Vietnam War the war in question is the Iraq War. The film follows a platoon of men who dispose bombs on the streets of Baghdad. Not only is the film a painful look at the cost of war, but it's also an edge of your seat thriller. Director Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win Best Director for this film, brilliantly shoots the scenes of the bombs being defused with tension. There is no soundtrack. No overly composed Hollywood score. It's just the sounds of the men breathing and the quiet streets of Baghdad.  9. Schindler's List (1993) This is the best ...

A ranking by Brooks Rich So a note as I start this list. For the most part the Oscars are bullshit. It's a game of politics and popularity, more often than not, rather than of talent. Go through the listing of every film to win Best Picture and you'll probably shrug at most of them. "Yeah sure, that film is fine, but  best  picture?" you'll ask yourself. That's a majority of them. But we here at Cinema Basement want to look at the absolute best films to win Best Picture and the absolute worst films to win Best Picture. We'll start with the  Best  so we have films to act as a standard against which the films picked as the  Worst  could be measured. A quick side note: Ridley Scott is delayed till May because these lists kind of took over and were much harder to compile and rank than I thought they would be, especially the list of the  Worst .  But let's not start off negative. Let's rank the twenty best films to win...

An editorial by Brooks Rich The terrorists have seized whatever location they attacked. The hero is currently hiding somewhere, waiting for the right moment to strike. The terrorist leader then contacts whoever is in charge away from the location and lists their demands. More often than not they contact a situation room somewhere that is full of high ranking officials, usually military. I call these rooms "the room full of Admirals" and they were prevalent a lot in '90s action cinema, especially in Die Hard clones. My favorite comes from Under Siege. You can see a picture of the room below. The room full of Admirals is both an ally to the hero, often in the first two acts, and a danger to the hero in the third act. For example, in Under Siege the room is for the most part working with Casey Ryback to regain control of the seized battleship. But in the third act they send in an airstrike to destroy the ship and prevent the launch of a nuclear missile. Ryback of cou...

A review by Brooks Rich We're kicking off Ridley Scott month with a forgotten film of his that gets unfairly maligned. Consider this the makeup for me missing forgotten film Friday yesterday. Black Rain might not be on the same level of those legendary Scott films like Alien and Blade Runner. But Black Rain is a fun and slick '80s crime thriller about a pair of American cops traveling to Japan and taking on the Yakuza. Michael Douglas and Andy Garcia play Nick and Charlie, two New York cops who travel to Osaka to hand off a Yakuza heavyweight they captured in New York to the Osaka police. When they are duped into giving the man away, they tag along with the Osaka police to try and recapture him. That's all I want to say for the plot as there's a big twist about halfway through the film that you won't see coming. The film is kind of known for this twist. I wish I could discuss it but it would be wrong of me to spoil it. But the film takes on this completely fee...

We covered Tony Scott so now we get to his brother Ridley. I am a huge fan of Ridley Scott of course and he has made some of my all time favorite movies. When Ridley Scott hits big, he makes legendary cinema, like Alien and Blade Runner. But when he misses they can be notorious disasters and bombs, like A Good Year and Legend. We'll be covering the hits and misses and breaking down truly one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Tony probably had the more consistent filmography but Ridley has the legendary films. Please enjoy this month long exploration of the films of Ridley Scott.