Match Cut Madness 3: Best of the 00s

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-18-2021, 05:26 PM

Round 1 is now closed. Here are MC's results:

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**Philip J. Fry** · 08-18-2021, 05:31 PM

Quoting DFA1979 (view post)

I've seen a lot of great movies in empty theaters by myself. People in this country often hate reading subtitles which is silly. One of the things I like about The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs is that every season he picks some foreign movies to showcase even though people still complain about having to read subtitles.

Yeah, unfortunately that's something that happens in general. Even in a place like here (Mexico) where you had to get used to subtitles, theaters have gone more out of the way to pander to people who don't like them, preferring to dub everything, often with awful results.

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-18-2021, 05:44 PM

Dogtooth saved by dreamdead at the buzzer!

**Yxklyx** · 08-18-2021, 06:05 PM

I should have put my extra vote for AI.

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-18-2021, 10:34 PM

Voting for Round Two is now open! Vote now by posting in this thread or sending me a PM.

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

The Smoldering Aftermath of Round 1

With more upsets (8) than any other round in MC Madness history, the massive destruction of Round 1 has left Madness 3.0 a fetid and hopeless wasteland from which MC can only pray to recover. If you feel like blaming/thanking someone, the posters who went with the underdog most frequently (while voting in over half the match-ups) were Dukefrukem (65% of the time), Yxklyx (56%), and Skitch (50%). Leave some iconoclasm for the rest of us, you agents of chaos!

With its unanimous, humiliating victory over Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive has now logged the most dominant single-round performance in MC Madness history (even more so than Goodfellas vs. There's Something About Mary if you can believe it). With 1 seeds There Will Be Blood, The Dark Knight, and to some extent Eternal Sunshine looking vulnerable in Round 1, it's David Lynch who now appears to be setting the pace. And don't sleep on Amelie, which likewise humiliated Terrence Malick's New World and now matches up with a demoralized There Will Be Blood.

Now let's check in with the ten directors who started with multiple movies:

-- Round 1 couldn't have gone any worse for Wes Anderson, who lost all three of his match-ups and is now out of the tournament.
-- Steven Spielberg lost two movies and is now out (though it should be noted A.I. put up a hell of a fight against 1 seed There Will Be Blood, and Minority Report was comfortably leading until Oldboy's heroic last-moment comeback).
-- Brad Bird, Ang Lee, and the Coens lost one movie a piece but are still alive and (varying degrees of) well.
-- Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfonso Cuaron, Andrew Stanton, and Quentin Tarantino all managed to escape the gauntlet unscathed. Each had an "uh-oh" moment along the way except for Cuaron, who was at every moment in control of his match-ups. Keep your eye on him.
-- Haters ready your ink and quill: With The Dark Knight, The Prestige, and Memento advancing, Christopher Nolan now has the most movies in the tournament. Some may argue he had easy match-ups in Round 1 -- rest assured Round 2 will be no cakewalk as he takes on A Serious Man, Zodiac, and In the Mood for Love.

Which movies will make it through Round 2 and advance to the Sweet Sixteen? Find out when voting closes in five days!

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-18-2021, 10:52 PM

Congratulations to Baby Doll and Peng for having movies they suggested in the Play-In Round make it through the round one gauntlet.

Baby Doll: Dogtooth
Peng: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring

These posters will receive one extra vote if their movie makes it to the Sweet Sixteen. The extra vote can then be redeemed for any match-up, in any remaining round of Madness 3.

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-18-2021, 11:13 PM

It's time to check in with transmogrifier's Sweet Sixteen predictions!

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Show Spoiler

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**Lazlo** · 08-18-2021, 11:22 PM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**Mr. McGibblets** · 08-18-2021, 11:37 PM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Can't vote)

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi (can't vote)

**Yxklyx** · 08-18-2021, 11:48 PM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**Ezee E** · 08-18-2021, 11:56 PM

lol at HUMILATION

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**dreamdead** · 08-18-2021, 11:59 PM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-19-2021, 12:25 AM

HUMILIATION = When BLOWOUT doesn't tell the whole story. Like a 42-3 NFL game, it isn't fun to watch no matter who you're rooting for.

**Philip J. Fry** · 08-19-2021, 12:30 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy

**quido8_5** · 08-19-2021, 12:55 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**Spun Lepton** · 08-19-2021, 01:11 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man

**baby doll** · 08-19-2021, 01:43 AM

No Country for Old Men > Requiem for a Dream. For all its pretentious guff, the Coens' neo-western has style while Aronofsky's Reefer Madness update only has a battery of expressionistic effects.

Dogtooth > Kill Bill, Vol. 1 [and Vol. 2]. A satisfying whole vs. a grab bag of set pieces that never amount to very much.

25th Hour > Almost Famous. Characters vs. amusing clichés.

Spirited Away > Punch-Drunk Love. Story vs. sequences.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind > Finding Nemo. A great movie vs. a cute one.

Mulholland Dr. > Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lynch at his best vs. Ang Lee at his best.

Before Sunset > Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring. A tour de force of acting and directing vs. self-orientalizing guff.

There Will Be Blood > Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain. I'm tempted to vote against Anderson's film to protest the reflexive assumption that "dark," male-centred movies are automatically more serious and artistic than light, female-centred movies (see every Christopher Nolan movie), but at the end of the day, if I had to pick of these movies to see again, I'd opt for Anderson's, as it has a bit more mystery to it.

In the Mood for Love > Memento. An enduring classic that needs to be seen more than once vs. a cleverly constructed neo-noir exercise that loses most of its appeal on second viewing.

Zodiac > The Prestige. A pretty good, if long and morbid, serial killer movie vs. visual monotony.

A Serious Man > The Dark Knight. The Coens at their most mysterious vs. Nolan at his most obvious.

Y tu mamá también > Wall-E. A great, sexy, beautifully acted and directed road movie for grownups vs. an above-average kids' movie whose first half is a lot more inventive and successful than its second.

Inglourious Basterds > Oldboy. Tarantino at his most disciplined vs. Park throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Yi Yi > The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson has a complicated mythology and an army of set decorators and special effects technicians; Yang has novelistic storytelling and mise en scène. Artistry vs. money.

**megladon8** · 08-19-2021, 02:08 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**DFA1979** · 08-19-2021, 02:27 AM

Brokeback Mountain was better than Finding Nemo imo. Oh well at least I got to find out why people love that movie so much.

**DFA1979** · 08-19-2021, 02:27 AM

Quoting Philip J. Fry (view post)

Yeah, unfortunately that's something that happens in general. Even in a place like here (Mexico) where you had to get used to subtitles, theaters have gone more out of the way to pander to people who don't like them, preferring to dub everything, often with awful results.

I meant US but I'm sure it applies elsewhere, too.

**Skitch** · 08-19-2021, 02:49 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream - easy
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous - easy
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead - easy
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - easy
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring - not even close

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy - rewatchability

**Idioteque Stalker** · 08-19-2021, 03:00 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love (OUCH)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo (yawn)
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Before Sunset vs. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (YAWN)

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento (OUCH)
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille (yawn)
The Dark Knight vs. A Serious Man
Wall-E vs. Y Tu Mama Tambien (ouch)
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy (YAWN)
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi (ouch)

**Skitch** · 08-19-2021, 03:06 AM

I was literally typing that as you posted. Sorry, working from the phone here. Yes, the Ring over the YiYi...but as you say....(yawn)

**Ivan Drago** · 08-19-2021, 03:48 AM

No Country for Old Men vs. Requiem for a Dream
Dogtooth vs. Kill Bill Vol. 1
25th Hour vs. Almost Famous
Spirited Away vs. Punch-Drunk Love
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind vs. Finding Nemo
Lost In Translation vs. Shaun of the Dead
Mulholland Drive vs. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

There Will Be Blood vs. Amelie
In the Mood for Love vs. Memento
Zodiac vs. The Prestige
Children of Men vs. Ratatouille
Inglourious Basterds vs. Oldboy
The Fellowship of the Ring vs. Yi Yi

**StuSmallz** · 08-19-2021, 04:57 AM

Quoting baby doll (view post)

When I said The Lord of the Rings trilogy was sexless, I didn't mean to suggest that this was a flaw per se or that adding sex would have automatically improved the quality of the films (although it couldn't have hurt!). To reiterate, my argument is that the sort of ideological tensions one finds in a film like Gone with the Wind--sexual or otherwise--are not present, as far as I can perceive, in Jackson's trilogy. The films could've embodied other ideological contradictions besides the sexual, which I was using merely as an example, but the starkness of the film's moral universe seems to preclude it, and this lack of tension is, in large part, what makes the trilogy so bland.

The problem with trying to read ideological contradictions into the trilogy's depiction of women is twofold: first, women are peripheral to the plot rather than central (as they are in The Cheat, Gone with the Wind, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Basic Instinct, and Jackson's earlier Heavenly Creatures, which had matricidal teen lesbians), and second, while individual characters in the narrative may be uncomfortable with assertive women, the film portrays those women and their actions in unambiguously positive terms. In other words, even if the women transgress the gender norms of Middle Earth, they don't transgress the gender norms of western societies in the early twenty-first century. The films weren't made in a historical vacuum, but they don't strike me as being what Eric Cazdyn would call "films of history"--i.e., films that work through the most fundamental ideological contradictions of their time on the level of their form before a common language exists to speak about these issues. (Significantly, many of Cazdyn's examples centre on the figure of a transgressive woman: A Page of Madness, Sisters of the Gion, In the Realm of the Senses.) Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen clearly has a lot to tell us about Germany in the 1920s, despite being based on a thirteenth-century epic poem, but I'm not convinced that Jackson's film has all that much to tell us about New Zealand in the early 2000s (putting the aside the fact that Lang was a great filmmaker and Jackson isn't).

The fact that none of the women in LOTR are lead characters doesn't cause problems for analyzing their roles in the films, because Arwen, Galadriel and Eowyn still hold a significant presence and impact within the trilogy regardless (and an expanded one when compared to the books to boot), at least as much as male characters like Boromir, Elrond, or Denethor do, and in some cases even moreso, since none of those men were the ones that rescued "the ringbearer" when he was on the verge of death, which would've caused the failure of the quest to destroy the ring before they had even formed the fellowship (and that's without even going into the fact that the movies are all ensemble pieces anyway, so there are no "lead" characters in the trilogy in the first place, male or female).

And as for that second point, the trilogy portraying women being relatively bold or aggressive as an unambiguous positive isn't a problem, because again, given the specific contexts of those examples, why on (Middle) Earth would they not portray that in such terms? Like, when Eowyn slays one of Sauron's top subordinates in Return Of The King in the defense of Middle Earth, what sense would it make for the movie to have trepidation about her doing so just because of her gender? Context is king, and it's not neccessary for every film with a "strong woman" in it to hold a conflicted attitude about them, because doing so would obviously be a regressive portrayal of the gender on the whole, and exactly the sort of thing that art should be criticized for encouraging, regardless of how "interesting" it is to study that in a critical fashion later on.

Thread: Match Cut Madness 3: Best of the 00s

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