UKC

What would the great unwashed of UKC consider as ground breaking movies, and why?

In reply to The Lemming: I'm just going to list movies, the reasons for most are "Just because I said so"!

Fritz Langs Metroplis
Todd Brownings Freaks
Anything by Kubrick
Jaws
Blade runner
Kids
Most of the Dogma 95 films
Breakfast at Tiffanys
Blade, the first movie, not really the sequals, that was a massive kick in the balls for nearly all the previous comic book adaptations and actually enabled grown up comic book adaptations.
The Godfather
There's too many to mention. I'm over thinking now. I'll come back when my mind has slowed down.

In reply to tspoon1981:

Even "Eyes wide shut"?

In reply to The Lemming:

The matrix: redefined fight scenes for me.

In reply to zebidee:

Meh, I'll let it slide

In reply to colin8ll: Second that. But alot of that came from crouching tiger didnt it?

Blair witch project - my reasoning, it started (albeit delayed start) the "filmed on a camcorder" style films of which there are now many.

The Exorcist must be up there.

and to finish off ill give an honourable mention to Star Wars as it set the bench mark of awesomeness.

In reply to The Lemming:

Abyss for the cgi? Unless anything nicked in before it?

In reply to cap'nChino:
The Matrix was shot and released before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
But the fight choreography (in both films) was nothing new.

In reply to Mike_Watson_99:

Films had CGI before The Abyss. The Abyss raised the bar massively, but Flight of the Navigator and Willow used morphing effects.

In reply to The Lemming:

The seventh seal - a film that question the existance and purpose of god, humanity and so many aspects of the human condition.


Also

Thin Red Line - i think it changed the war film genre, as it showed it is possible to have a beautifull war movie as well as one that questions the horror of war. There are scenes in that film so vividly set which are like suckign up life, the last images from in front of your eyes before you close them forever. I thought that film was groundbraking.

In reply to The Lemming: wasn't "Cannibal Holocaust" the first found footage film?

A family story
King Kong (33' not the remake)
Se7en
Taxi driver
Nosferatu
Dr Strangelove
Toy story
Akira
Most of Tarintinos films
The wickerman
Fantasia, its just incredible.
Dark Crystal
The wickerman, even if we can never see it as it was intednded to be.

There really are too many movies

In reply to The Lemming:

Trainspotting

Pulp Fiction

In reply to The Lemming:

Tron - no film before it was like it, Explaining computers on the big screen = ground breaking

In reply to The Lemming: The Matrix was landmark in many ways.

First to use stop motion photography. Music was kick arse. Fight scenes were brilliant. Conceptually very good (if flawed from a plot line point of view.)

I was pretty much blown away seeing it.


2001 defined how a space movie SHOULD be.

Gattaca because it was just so terribly stylish you felt it ought to be wearing a hat.

In reply to The Lemming:

I'm not just after lists of films, but rather why people think that the films are ground breaking.

In reply to The Lemming: Seven Samurai by Kurosawa. Multi layered scenes. Hitchcock's build up of suspense. Among others. And yes, one is unwashed..

In reply to The Lemming:

Women in Love (first ginger fanny on screen)

Battleship Potemkin (first example of runaway baby carriage on steps).

In reply to The Lemming:

Citizen Kane for its use of low angled shots and deep focus

In reply to The Lemming: For sheer shoock value, Baise Moi.......


Made my eyes pop out that's for sure. Thought I was going to be watching some arthouse cinema!

In reply to The Lemming:
Annie Hall is widely regarded as having begun the 'rom-com' genre. I'm not sure if that's really a good thing, but the film itself is a masterpiece and probably Woody Allen's greatest achievement.

In reply to kate8:

Such an awesome film ... You can be sitting watching it thinking "this is pretty good & really well shot" ... Then you remember it was made in 1941!

In reply to The Lemming:

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I have not even seen it but it proved you could make a major feature film with international stars in English, with no sets at all. It didn't do well, but it proved a point.

In reply to Blue Straggler: Sky captain is stunning visually.

Mr Lemming, I'm sorry for my lists and lack of reasons.

Daywatch and Nightw*tch, they're visually incredible, and I think the first huge Russian blockbuster.

20th Century boys, and amazing comic book adaptation, huge in visuals and scope, its mindblowingly good and often goes under the radar on topics like this.

In reply to The Lemming:

Surprised that either Apocalypse now or Platoon haven't been mentioned yet.

The former is probably the more ground breaking...if only for the task that was it's making!

In reply to The Lemming:

And of course Snow White and the Seven Dwarves!

In reply to The Lemming:

Behind the green door

In reply to The Lemming: Sad to say it but The Birth of a Nation. It had many advances in how filming was done.

In reply to The Lemming:
Tremors - there was a lot of ground broken in that movie!

In reply to The Lemming:

Steven Seagal has never made a bad film

In reply to Game of Conkers: Starred in plenty though

In reply to Game of Conkers:

True ... but he's never made a good one either.

In reply to Blue Straggler:

Yup but its the only one I could think of that made an impression on me.

Some timelines, some interesting stuff there - http://www.stikkymedia.com/articles/a-history-of-cgi-in-movies &
http://bit.ly/eNyxFA (wikpedia, stupid forum doesnt allow the url)

In reply to Game of Conkers:

I think you must gave redefined 'bad'

In reply to The Lemming:

Das Boot.

In reply to Padraig:

They barely break the surface of the WATER in that, let alone any ground!

In reply to Mike_Watson_99:

Nice links, especially the one which remembers "Looker" - I dimly remember seeing this on a Wednesday night on BBC2, circa 1989! It had a really bad side premise involving a gun that "freezes time" for the victim iirc. More ill-conceived Crichton nonsense. Susan Dey's body scan was memorable.

In reply to tspoon1981:


Are Dogville and Mandalay Dogma 95? Jam packed full of content, presented with ruthless clarity in a completely original style (AFAIK). Masterpieces.

In reply to The Lemming:

Too many!!

May already have been mentioned but for me Schindler's List stands alone as the pinnacle of film-making, sheer brutality and beauty.

Star Wars - for bringing about surround sound & for introducing Jedi to the world

Lawnmower Man was on another level for CGI at the time.

Angel-a is sublime if you like that kinda thing

The Hurt Locker - gritty and no other war film quite like it

In reply to jolivague:

How was Angel-A "ground-breaking" though?

In reply to Jon Stewart: Dogville is a Lars Von Trier film, and he's probably most associated with Dogme, but I don't believe it follows the rules.

http://cinetext.philo.at/reports/dogme_ct.html

Check out Julien Donkeyboy, the idiots, Mitune, Lovers.

Larry Clarks films are also in a weird, post dogme subgenre, really gritty realism but they don't follow the rules. They're brutal to watch, but amazing all the more for it.

Todd Solondz is quite a refreshing director, was it happiness with the fact and fiction halves? I don't know whether its ground breaking though.

In reply to tspoon1981:

Cheers. I found Happiness unbearable yet compelling. Welcome to the Dollhouse not quite so unsettling, but still very uncomfortable. Definitely good films, but not stuff I would watch again.

I'm quite a fan of Neil La Bute, but I don't think I'd call his stuff groundbreaking. That said, I can't think of anything that touches Your Friends and Neighbours excruciatingly dark social comedy.

Most Werner Herzog films, although nobody tends to follow the ground that they broke.

David Lynch must be in with a shout - my money is on Blue Velvet bringing truly dark and adult themes into the near-mainstream

In reply to Blue Straggler: I'd have The Straight story as my favourite David Lynch film, and personally, I think groundbreakingly slow, beautifully shot, and proved that road movies don't have to be about fast cars, finding oneself or loose women. Although I am partial to movies containing any of those three.

In reply to The Lemming: Walkabout was pretty ground breaking for my 13 year old self...

In reply to The Lemming: Oh, The Believer, its an incredible film, its not really groundbreaking, but it deserves more people to have seen it.

In reply to The Lemming:

Nobody mention Bourne Identity?

If it wasn't for this film we'd be stuck with Rodger Moore wannabes in 007.

However I can't stand any gritty TV or movies where the director goes with the hand cam wobble. Feep the shot feking still, please.

In reply to The Lemming:

Nobody

Don't be so ridiculous! Are you saying there was never a non-Roger-Moore-style spy/agent caper before The Bourne Identity? How did Bourne break any new ground? It was a very well made second adaptation of some high-end pulp fiction from the 1970s. No more, no less.

In reply to tspoon1981:

Wim Wenders proved all of the above before The Straight Story (admittedly sometimes there was a loose woman and sometimes someone finding oneself!)

I like The Straight Story. I don't feel it broke ground that Paris, Texas had not broken though.

Not many horror films on this thread. Blair Witch, I guess - not sure I spotted much else in the genre.

In reply to Blue Straggler: George A Romeros social commentary/zombie flicks? Cannibal holocaust as the first found footage film?

In reply to The Lemming:

A Bout de Souffle proved that you can translate "energy" to film, take two relatively unknown actors, shoot guerilla-style on 35mm b&w film, and capture the attention of the world despite not being in the English language. I'm not a great fan of the film but I can acknowledge its influence.

Knife in the Water showed that you could do a location shoot on water with just three characters, in b&w and in Polish, and capture the attention of the world.

In reply to The Lemming:

Visitor Q broke new ground in many ways, man with dick stuck in corpse just one of them.

In reply to tspoon1981:

Not been reading properly. I disagree with Cannibal Holocaust - it MAY have been the first, but The Blair Witch Project was the first to be noticed by anyone beyond the obsessive fans of a niche genre. I think The Blair Witch Project was one of the two most important American films of the 1990s - Reservoir Dogs being the other (as RD reminded people for the first time in decades that taut storytelling and dialogue could be the absolute centrepiece of a film, more important than big stars, zeitgeisty "topical themes", special effects or big-name directors putting egotistical signature shots into their films. Hard to remember it 20 years on, but it was incredibly impactful at a time when popular American cinema was getting a bit flabby)

In reply to Blue Straggler: I'd agree with Blair witch, and how much it influenced the horror genre after its release, it just wasn't the first, even if most of the original films were a pile of pish, and banned/withdrawn.

In reply to tspoon1981:

In my book, "first" does not automatically mean "ground-breaking". YMMV

In reply to Blue Straggler: I'd agree and kind of disagree, it would depend how much, if at all, the original idea had played a part in the inception of the "new" idea.

What's YMMV? I'm not down with the new speak. I am trying to develop my ghetto patois, but all I get is funny looks.

In reply to tspoon1981:

You Make Me Vomit?

In reply to winhill: urban dictionary to the rescue. Your Mileage may vary.

I'm a bit disappointed I don't make people vomit though.

In reply to The Lemming: Deathrace 2000.

The first film to have a man with a false hand shaped like a hand grenade. Just in case you weren't sure it was an explosive device.

In reply to The Lemming:

Inception. An incredible film with way less cgi than you'd think. The floating hallway fight scene was done with wires and a hallway on hydraulics. Christopher Nolan is one of the best directors working today, in my humble opinion.
Also The Dark Knight. No reasons needed.

In reply to The Lemming:

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America: Who'd have thought a puerile cartoon could be so funny.

Team America: Puppets you say? And there's a sex scene?!

Lord of the Rings: All three. Don't think there's anything that hasn't been done before, but the epic'ness of it all.

Batman Begins: Or an earlier film I've forgotten that takes a sequel/prequel and completely changes the style of film than the previous (and makes it better IMO). Like latest Bond films or Star Trek movie.

In reply to richyfenn:

I hasten to retract the "..and makes it better IMO" statement from the Star Trek reference. They are all great, the new one is great in a different way

In reply to Dannycrimper:

Huge amounts of time in publicity segments for Inception were given over to wittering on about how it had less CGI than Christopher Nolan wanted you to think. There is nothing ground-breaking about rotating sets!

In reply to The Lemming:

Earthquake! and 2012 both have some pretty spectacular Ground breaking scenes.

In reply to The Lemming:Eisenstein - as without Montage, film as we know it would be very linear indeed.

Carol reeds 1949 film - the third man, defines film noir and is outstanding in the genre

David lynch - surrealism, a movie analists sore head!

A few post vietnam moves including, apocalpse now, platoon and a personal favorite, full metal jacket all challenge the madness of war.

Junet - city of lost children and delicatessen shgoe galic flair

Kieœlowski- Three colours trilogy - observational

IMHO the documentary is often overtlooked

One day in September by Kevin McDonald, which won a well deserved oscar, is up there with the best. Insitutional contraints were overcome and the film borrowed from the thriller genre to be entertaining. He was given assistance fron Arthur Cohn who was instramental in producing a superb exploration of the terrible events that took place as the Black September group used the Olympics of 72 as a platform to air their political views. Its not judgemental but a wonderful and well balance piece.

In reply to Fly Fifer:
"Eisenstein" is a ground-breaking film is it?


How does The Third Man define "film noir"? I don't think it particularly follows any tropes of the film noir genre!

Which David Lynch film was actually ground-breaking?

If challenging the madness of war is the thing that is ground-breaking, there were many films made before the Vietnam war started, that do this. Hell, before the Second World War. See Lewis Milestone's "All Quite on the Western Front"


How were those films in any way ground-breaking?

Overlooked apart from having had its own category in the Oscars for quite some time, eh?

Oh!


Are you sure you're not just using this thread to show the world that you watch things other than superhero movies?

(oh and PLEASE punctuate )

In reply to The Lemming:

Mary Poppins, first (big) use of footage combined with animation.

In reply to The Lemming: Testament of Dr. Mabuse by Fritz Lang, Shoah by Claude Lannzmann and just to lighten the mood a bit Lenningrad Cowboys go America by Kaurismacki.