Top Ten: Webcomics I'm Reading

[Allow me an off cinema moment as a breather from the middle of a constant stream of movies for jury duty at the Nashville Film Festival. Once I'm back next week I'll hit Oscar Predix and Summer Movies full tilt boogie.]

Over a year ago I did a little comic strip riffing on Martha Marcy May Marlene and though I'd originally planned to follow it up with weekly strips, the idea kept morphing. I'm now trying again with little actressexual musings like "Tilda in a Box" and "Jurassic Memory". I hope you're enjoying but I'm doing it for me. I have to go where the muse takes me and lately I've really needed to draw. I search for webcomics semi-regularly and I've noticed there are only a handful of movie-centric ones. Each medium has its inescapable obsessions: TV is littered with cops, lawyers and doctors and Webcomics seem to mostly spin 'round animals & video games.

Do you read any? Past comments suggest that you don't but I remain stubbornly curious. Appropos of nothing other than this current moodswing, I thought I'd sing the praises of ten illustrated story thingies on the web. It's hard to know where the best ones are because they don't get much media coverage... or at least not where I personally know to look.

TEN FAVORITE WEBCOMICS OF THE MOMENT

Runner's Up: Questionable Content, Sandra & Woo, Diesel Sweeties, Hanna is not a Boy's Name, and Poorly Drawn Lines

10 The Fox Sister (Thursdays)
I just started reading this one but the artwork is amazing and the color even more so. The mythical story involves a young Korean girl whose family was killed by a demon fox who then took the form of her big sister. For those who like a little extra resonance there's apparently an undercurrent of commentary on the rise of Christianity in Korea though I haven't gotten that far yet...

9 more after the jump

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Top Ten 1990s

I promised longtime TFE super fan Ryan that I would one day write up a big top ten of the 90s piece although THIS IS NOT IT. This is like those tossed back "shots" of past decades wherein we tell each other our favorites. I'll tell you my ten favorites which are wildly unstable and could be replaced by anything in the "with apologies to" list if I'd ranked on another day. Well, not the top three. I mean... let's not get crazy.

1. The Piano (Jane Campion)
2. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson)
3. Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott)
4. Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson)
5. Beauty & The Beast (Trousdale & Wise)
6. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar)
7. Trois Coleurs Trilogy (Krystof Kzielowski)
8. T2: Judgment Day (James Cameron)
9. Fargo (The Coen Bros)
10. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)

Most of them weren't even nominated for Best Picture. (Sigh). Oscar is so...

With apologies to 15 more. Let's call it a top 25: 
Being John Malkovich, Titanic, [safe], Howards End, The Thin Red Line, Se7en, The Truman Show, Schindler's List, The Silence of the Lambs, Postcards from the Edge, Edward Scissorhands, The Grifters, Waiting for Guffman, Husbands and Wives, and Election.

other "favs" if not all of them as 'respectable':
Death Becomes Her, Babe, Ed Wood, Dead Man Walking, Strictly Ballroom, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, A League of Their Own, Addams Family Values, Bullets Over Broadway, Reality Bites, Queen Margot, Clueless, Romeo + Juliet, My Best Friend's Wedding, Wings of the Dove, Celebration, The Idiots, High Art, Velvet Goldmine, Run Lola Run, My Own Private Idaho, Priest, The Fisher King, Leaving Las Vegas and The Last of the Mohicans.

P.S. After Jurassic Park (best shot tomorrow night!), I promise we'll leave the 90s behind and come back to the now. So get it all out of your system in the comments!

Previous Top Ten Quickies
1930s | 1950s | 1970s | 1980s

Team Top Ten: Best Directors of the 21st Century

Steve McQueen didn't make the list but Fassy still loves him (as do many of our contributors)Amir here, to bring you the first edition of Team Top Ten, a communal list by all of Film Experience’s contributors that will sit in for our regular Tuesday Top Ten list once a month. For our first episode, we’ve decided to rank the best new directors of the 21st century. These are all directors who have made their first film after 2000. (Short films, TV and theatre work didn’t render anyone ineligible. Only feature length fiction and documentary films were considered.)  

I had a blast compiling the 18 lists of our contributors to arrive at the final ten because their submissions were incredibly eclectic and surprising. I’d made a bet with myself that Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame) would top the list, and lo and behold, he failed to make the cut altogether, though by a very fine margin. Korean director Bong Joon Ho was also left off, despite showing up on more than a handful of lists. Jason Reitman, Joshua Marston, Rian Johnson and David Gordon Green all came very close too but this was a tightly contested race, evidenced by the three-way tie for our tenth spot. Overall, 71 directors got at least one vote. We travelled all the way from Japan to Portugal, from Greece to Mexico, via documentaries, comedies and superhero films. We loved stories about Muslim families, gay romances, World War II and the beautifully painted worlds of Sylvain Chomet. What we didn't like very much turned out to be actors-turned-directors, as current Oscar champ Ben Affleck got only a single vote, and George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones failed to manage even that.

In the end, these are the twelve men and women Team Experience considers the best (thus far) of the 21st century crop:

=10. Michel Gondry
Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine, The Sciene of Sleep, Block Party, Be Kind Rewind, etcetera

Gondry's films are shaggy fantasies powered by a boundless imagination. They're more than a little goofy, speaking quirky as if it were a language, and they have an endearing handmade quality, with their maker's fingerprints visible around the rough edges. Bent as they are toward romance and optimism, Gondry's miniature worlds provide a little solace from reality.
- Andreas Stoehr

11 more directors after the jump

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Tues Top Ten: Tarantino's Toes

A dark Cinderella moment in "Inglourious Basterds"Denny, back again after dancing to Chicago this weekend. When Nathaniel was looking for suggestions to kick off Tarantino Week, I immediately suggested a piece (or pieces) called "Tarantino’s Toes," in honor of his position as the world’s foremost foot fetishist. I was half-joking, but the alliteration was simply too much to walk away from. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. How does one even begin to rank the many, many feet Tarantino has filmed? Does one go by the height of the arch? The length? The width?

… Sorry. I just had to run to the sink. I’m better now.

Actually, on re-watch, I found that, while they aren’t always plot devices, Tarantino does actually use feet to illuminate his themes and charact… Sorry. I just can’t take this seriously. We’re talking about FEET for frak’s sake! To wit, being as non-pervy as I possibly can, my completely arbitrary list of...

Tarantino’s Top Ten Toes

Honorable Mention: Mia’s foot massage in Pulp Fiction
We don’t actually see it onscreen, so I didn’t consider it eligible, but Jules’s monologue about the ultimately deadly foot massage that “Tony Rocky Horror” gave to Mia Wallace is pretty killer. That, according to Mia, the foot massage never even happened makes it even more intriguing.

10 O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, Vol. 1
They’re only glimpsed for a split second, but the sight of Lucy Liu’s O-Ren running down a table just before slicing off the head of the one member of the crime council who dissents to her new leadership in one swift, clean cut, is one of the film’s best surprises. And on repeat views, it only gets funnier.

more little piggies after the jump

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Top Ten 1950s

This will be the last top ten off the top of my head whole decade thingies for a bit -- we need to get to real articles but I've been swamped off blog. But these discussions are fun, don't you agree? The 1950s were the first film decade I was obsessed with in that when I was first becoming interested in cinema in the mid 80s, the 50s somehow came to signify MYTHIC CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD to me, though cinema obviously stretched much much further back. So I guess I'll always be kind of attached to this decade when the movies got literally bigger (I do so prefer rectangulars to squares) and the era's stars really defined (at least for me) the concept of "Movie Star". I mean it's hard to argue with LIZ, BRANDO, CLIFT, DEAN, MONROE in all caps.

Which is why GIANT is such a perfect 1950s movie in so many ways even if it doesn't make my top ten

1. Sunset Boulevard
2. Singin' in the Rain
3. A Place in the Sun
4. A Streetcar Named Desire
5. Night of the Hunter
6. All About Eve
7. Some Like it Hot
8. Rear Window
9. Sleeping Beauty
10. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

ask me again tomorrow and maybe i'd vote for: All That Heaven Allows, Ben-Hur, Vertigo, Rebel Without a Cause, Imitation of Life, and A Star is Born
or maybe... Roman Holiday, Strangers on a Train, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Breathless, Giant and From Here to Eternity ... 

What are you favorite 50s films?

Nina Foch & William Holden in "Executive Suite"Here's a few more notes from me on this CINEMASCOPE decade...

childhood favs (not all of them aged well): Brigadoon, Auntie Mame, The King and I, How to Marry a Millionaire, Kiss Me Kate, The Ten Commandments, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

underappreciated these days but that doesn't make them any less awesome: Face in the Crowd, Executive Suite, Black Orpheus, It Should Happen To You, Magnificent Obsession and Written on the Wind

I should probably rewatch: 400 Blows, High Noon, La Strada

I am not a fan of The African Queen, Gigi, or The Country Girl and I'm even cool on An American in Paris despite my beloved Gene Kelly.

Previous Top Ten Quickies
1930s | 1970s | 1980s