VOTE: TDOS Cabin by the Lake Movie Draft Playoffs - Round 1A

[VF21]

Voting in round 1 will consist of two parts. Everyone is eligible to vote in each part. You will vote for your favorite from each pair listed.

Rankings determined by votes of draft participants are:
1. Jespher
2. Capt. Factorial
3. Warhawk
4. Sluggah
5. Padrino
6. R2D2
7. Double-K
8. Hrboild
9. King-Da-Yah
10. VF21
11. Lowenherz
12. HndsmCelt
13. Foxfire
14. Joker
15.whitechocolate
16. Turgenev

In Part A, you will be voting on the following matchups:

1. Jespher v. 16 Turgenev
9. King-Da-Yah v. 8 Hrdboild
12. HndsmCelt v. 5. Padrino
13. Foxfire v. 4. Sluggah

You vote for one favorite PER PAIR as shown in the poll above. In this poll, you CAN vote for yourself. Movie lists with links to their write-ups are posted below.

REMINDER: Because of the way this poll will have to be arranged, you will be required to make multiple votes. The vote will have to be public so I can keep track of whether anyone makes a double-vote. Pay attention to whom you are voting for: because of the way the multiple vote factors in, it’s possible to accidentally vote for both parties in a given matchup. I am including this in the OP with enough advanced notice so that everybody will be aware of what could happen. If, for some reason, you do happen to accidentally vote for both parties in a matchup, PM me before the voting deadline to advise me of the mistake and let me know whom you meant to vote for, and I will correct your vote. Any double votes I have not been advised of by the voting deadline will be considered invalid, and not counted.

 

[VF21]

1. Jespher
1. The Princess Bride - 1987
2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail - 1975
3. Memento - 2000
4. Gattaca - 1997
5. Valerian and the City of 1,000 Planets - 2017
6. Ocean's Eleven - 2001
7. The Sound of Music - 1965
8. The Matrix - 1999
9. Good Will Hunting - 1997
10. The Royal Tenenbaums - 2001
11. Big Hero 6 - 2014
12. Serenity - 2005
13. The Gods Must Be Crazy - 1980

16. Turgenev
1. Stranger than Paradise - 1984
2. Paris, Texas - 1984
3. Pina - 2011
4. Midnight Cowboy - 1969
5. Once Were Warriors - 1994
6. Two Hands - 1999
7. Grizzly Man - 2005
8. La Grande Bellezza - 2013
9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - 1988
10. The Motorcycle Diaries - 2004
11. Control - 2007
12. The Panic in Needle Park - 1971
13. Venus - 2006

9. King-Da-Yah
1. The Empire Strikes Back - 1980
2. The Maltese Falcon - 1941
3. The Sandlot - 1993
4. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - 1969
5. Rocky - 1976
6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 2014
7. The Godfather Part II - 1974
8. The Departed - 2006
9. GoodFellas - 1990
10. Mrs. Doubtfire - 1993
11. Jaws - 1975
12. Incredibles 2 - 2018
13. Singing in the Rain - 1952

8. hrdboild
1. Blade Runner - 1982
2. Lawrence of Arabia - 1962
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - 2001
4. Once Upon a Time in the West - 1968
5. Bullitt - 1968
6. Hard Boiled - 1992
7. Se7en - 1995
8. Saving Private Ryan - 1998
9. Sorceror - 1977
10. The Place Beyond the Pines - 2012
11. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World - 2003
12. Days of Heaven - 1978
13. Romancing the Stone - 1984

 

[VF21]

12. HndsmCelt
1. The Big Lebowski - 1998
2. Citizen Kane - 1941
3. Guardians of the Galaxy - 2014
4. Taxi Driver - 1976
5. Full Metal Jacket - 1987
6. Pan's Labyrinth - 2006
7. Chocolat - 2000
8. The Conversation - 1974
9. The Fisher King - 1991
10. Wings of Desire - 1987
11. Babette's Feast - 1985
12. Sunset Boulevard - 1950
13. Touch of Evil - 1958

5. Padrino
1. Blade Runner 2049 - 2017
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey - 1968
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind - 1977
4. Brazil - 1985
5. Ex Machina - 2015
6. Jurassic Park - 1993
7. Mad Max: Fury Road - 2015
8. Moon - 2009
9. Arrival - 2016
10. Star Wars: The Last Jedi - 2017
11. Looper - 2012
12. Annihilation - 2018
13. Metropolis - 1927

13. foxfire
1. Young Frankenstein - 1974
2. The Wizard of Oz - 1939
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Extended Edition - 2002
4. Spaceballs - 1987
5 .Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - 2017
6. Home Alone - 1990
7. The Karate Kid - 1984
8. The Lion King - 1994
9. Brotherhood of the Wolf (Le Pacte de Loups) - 2001
10. So I Married An Axe Murderer - 1993
11. Avatar - 2009
12. Dumb and Dumber - 1995
13. Fool's Gold - 2008

4. Sluggah
1. Alien - 1979
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark - 1981
3. Die Hard - 1988
4. No Country for Old Men - 2007
5. Drive - 2011
6. Titanic - 1997
7. The Goonies - 1985
8. Sunshine - 2007
9. Heat - 1995
10. American Beauty - 1999
11. True Romance - 1992
12. One Day of Life - 1950
13. Heathers - 1988

 

[Capt. Factorial]

Man, my top three lists (that were not myself, of course!) were all in this bracket, and two of them facing each other! It's a guarantee that one of my favorite lists is going to go out in the first round. Ugh.

 

[VF21]

Man, my top three lists (that were not myself, of course!) were all in this bracket, and two of them facing each other! It's a guarantee that one of my favorite lists is going to go out in the first round. Ugh.

Whine, whine, whine. You whined about your draft position, too, and look how that ended up. Aren't you ever happy?

 

[Sluggah]

My top 4 are all in this bracket. Woo group 1a!

 

[LPKingsFan]

Almost all of these were tough calls— what a bracket!

 

[Padrino]

Hello, kf.com! I've returned from abroad in time for the playoffs! This excites me.

Damn, the first bracket had some difficult choices!

 

[King-Da-Yah]

I loved Hrdboiled list. I am with you Capt. Fact, this is like watching cute little penguins do battle...lots of my favorite lists in this group.

 

[VF21]

Wow. Great first round. Quarter finals coming up in just a few.

 

[hrdboild]

Well, I had King-Da-Yah's list #1 in my rankings so you folks sure didn't make things easy for me with this first round matchup! If I was that concerned with the voting I would have made different selections though. If we did this again today I'd probably end up with something completely different just because my favorites at any given moment depend on my mood but I'm very happy with the list I came up with.

Since I'm no longer in competition here I thought it would be fun to do a little write-up on my favorite movie from each person's list. I'll start with the names that have already been eliminated...

Turgenev--

You had by far the most eclectic list so I don't think the low rank or early elimination came as a surprise. A lot of these movies I haven't seen but the ones that I have seen are great so I should probably take your advice and watch all of them! Thank you for taking this as an opportunity to spotlight some lesser seen favorites as I'm always looking for good movies I haven't seen yet. I've got to pick just one movie from your list that I have seen for now though so my pick is going to be The Motorcycle Diaries, a wonderful Spanish language film from 2004 directed by Walter Salles who has gone on to become something of an expert on road-trip movies.

The movie opens with Ernesto Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal) on the verge of graduating from medical school in Argentina but taking some time off to travel the length of South America by motorcycle with his friend Alberto (Rodrigo de la Serna). Along the way they encounter many of the complications you expect -- bad weather, mechanical trouble, not enough money to buy food -- and some others you wouldn't expect. Like any good road trip this is a journey of self discovery and since the Ernesto at the center of the story is, as you may have guessed, a young Che Guevara the self-discovery on display here is mostly socio-political. Our upper middle-class protagonists encounter people along their journey that make them angry at the vast disparity between rich and poor and passionate in their conviction that all of Latin America is one people.

This description makes the film sound very dry and academic and it is slow and contemplative in places but it's also an adventure! Precisely the type of adventure that makes traveling 6,000 miles by motorcycle seem like so much fun that you'll start dreaming about leaving your own world behind to see what you can make of yourself out there on the road. I particularly enjoy how the filmmakers are able to express the joy of meeting and interacting with new people as this is the principle joy of travel for me as well. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll see some incredible sights and meet some wonderful people -- this is a movie that inspires you to see all that is beautiful in the world and get out there and be a part of it. Fantastic choice Turgenev! This is also one of my favorites.

 

[hrdboild]

HndsmCelt--

You've come up with a very respectable list heavy on old classics. What else is there to say really about Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, and Full Metal Jacket? These are timeless classics for a reason -- master filmmakers at the top of the their game inventing new ways to tell stories that have influenced all the generations that followed. You have only two movies here that I haven't seen yet so I have a lot to choose from and of course The Dude Abides, so I'm tempted to follow your lead and pick Lebowski as the cream of the crop but you've also picked one of my favorite movies from the 70s -- Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation -- and this is a movie I can't get enough of!

Gene Hackman as very paranoid freelance surveillance expert Harry Caul is going to break your heart in this movie. We're slowly introduced to him as we witness a conversation between two people in a public office square in San Francisco. Are these people illicit lovers planning a rendezvous? Are they involved in some kind of corporate espionage? Coppola just lets us watch and observe, slowly picking apart their conversation line by line throughout the course of the movie as Harry dissects it in his isolated sound lab. The trouble starts when Harry starts to suspect a murder plot is involved and now the game is afoot because delivering the tapes to his client may make him culpable.

The further down the rabbit hole he goes, the more Harry's own paranoia -- stemming from his intimate familiarity with all the ways technology can be used to spy on people -- starts to unravel his very carefully isolated life. This is story and character dancing together in divine symphony! And speaking of symphonies, the sound design needs to be great to sell this idea and indeed it is masterful! 8 years earlier Michelangelo Antonioni had constructed a Hitchockian suspense thriller called Blow Up around a fashion photographer who becomes enmeshed in a murder mystery using his tools of the trade. Here Coppola takes the same idea and applies it to audio surveillance as the key reveals in the plot mostly occur as Harry sits in his lab scrubbing through the tapes over and over again until he can make out the words. How appropriate that this film was then released in 1974 as news of the Watergate scandal involving President Nixon dominated the papers.

I don't want to give anything away here, but where Harry's journey ultimately takes him is one of the most perfectly rendered final scenes I've ever seen. That closing image and Gene Hackman's whole sad downward spiral as Harry Caul is what I think about when I remember this movie. There's another Anotioni film actually called The Passenger where Jack Nicholson is the character on the run from nefarious forces and his own self-destructive machinations. Both are terrific examples of the type of edgy existentialist fare particularly characteristic of 1970s cinema. I suppose when you've got the end of the Vietnam War, the massacre at the Munich Olympics, the gas crisis, the Watergate scandal, and several high profile serial killers all taking place in the same decade it's no surprise that the cultural response would be complicated stories about characters that are both tortured and self-reflective. Just thinking about The Conversation makes me want to pull it off the shelf and watch it again. And to think Francis Ford Coppola released this movie and Godfather Part II in the same year! Since Coppola's vineyard is almost as famous at this point as his film career I'll complete the analogy and declare that a very good year!