56 Up (2012)

IMDb plot summary: Director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born adults after a 7 year wait. The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
Directed by Michael Apted and Paul Almond.

How it entered my Flickchart:
56 Up > Blow Out
56 Up > RoboCop
56 Up < Citizen Kane
56 Up < Rise of the Guardians
56 Up < The Great Race
56 Up < Hannah and Her Sisters
56 Up < The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
56 Up > The Awful Truth
56 Up < The Basketball Diaries
56 Up < Manhattan Murder Mystery
56 Up < Sneakers
56 Up < Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Final spot: #742 out of 3015.

Graveyard of Honor (2002)

IMDb plot summary: A barkeeper saves a Yakuza boss' life and thus makes his way up in the organization. However his fear of nothing soon causes problems.
Directed by Takashi Miike. Starring Gorô Kishitani, Narimi Arimori, Renji Ishibashi, and Ryôsuke Miki.

After having this on my movie challenge watch list for several years (and then accidentally watching the 1975 version instead), I've finally seen this one. And... meh. Not sure it was worth the wait. The most engaging parts of it by far were the moments that showed the character's depths of drug addiction, but frankly it was hard to care much at all about a character who raped two women in the first 15 minutes of the movie. I was just kind of done seeing him on screen long before he was done being on it, and it was exceptionally difficult to give a crap about what was going on in his life after that. And frankly I just wasn't sure what I was supposed to get out of this film. (It's kind of where I land on a lot of crime and mob films.) It didn't do a lot for me.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Graveyard of Honor < Run Fatboy Run
Graveyard of Honor < On the Waterfront
Graveyard of Honor > Bewitched
Graveyard of Honor < Frozen River
Graveyard of Honor > John Q.
Graveyard of Honor < The Name of the Rose
Graveyard of Honor > Miss Congeniality
Graveyard of Honor < Secondhand Lions
Graveyard of Honor > The Enemy Below
Graveyard of Honor > Airborne
Graveyard of Honor > Empire of the Sun
Final spot: #2509 out of 3014.

Miss Saigon: 25th Anniversary (2016)

IMDb plot summary: A filmed production of the musical 'Miss Saigon' for its 25th anniversary, performed live at London's Prince Edward Theatre, in London's West End.
Directed by Brett Sullivan. Starring Jon Jon Briones, Eva Noblezada, Alistair Brammer, Kwang-Ho Hong, and Tamsin Carroll.

I loved the cast album for this show when I was in high school. As an adult, I definitely recognize that there are some major problems with the show as a whole, but in spite of that I found myself really enjoying this production. I got really immersed into the heightened operatic nature of the big dramatic songs ("This Is the Hour" in particular is incredible). My heart just opened up completely for Kim and, to my surprise, for the Engineer as well -- the underlying tragedy to his largely comedic character really comes through in an incredible performance by Jon Jon Briones. And there really are some phenomenal songs in here.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Miss Saigon > Blow Out
Miss Saigon > The Hudsucker Proxy
Miss Saigon < Citizen Kane
Miss Saigon < 10 Cloverfield Lane
Miss Saigon < The Florida Project
Miss Saigon > Hannah and Her Sisters
Miss Saigon > Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Miss Saigon < Robot and Frank
Miss Saigon < Black Narcissus
Miss Saigon > Hawking
Miss Saigon > The Bells of St. Mary's
Miss Saigon > Crocodile Dundee
Final spot: #676 out of 3013.

Greetings (1968)

IMDb plot summary: An offbeat, episodic film about three friends, Paul, a shy love-seeker, Lloyd, a vibrant conspiracy nut, and Jon, an aspiring filmmaker and peeping tom. The film satirizes free-love, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, and amateur filmmaking. 
Directed by Brian De Palma. Starring Jonathan Warden, Robert De Niro, Gerrit Graham, and Richard Hamilton.

While this is significantly better than De Palma's other 1968 film Murder a la Mod, it's still primarily just following around the most obnoxious, terrible human beings around, and watching them being dull at other people. It feels inescapably like a student film, experimenting with styles more than creating a cohesive piece from beginning to end.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Greetings < Run Fatboy Run
Greetings < On the Waterfront
Greetings < Mr. Mom
Greetings < Detropia
Greetings > The Incredible Journey
Greetings > Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
Greetings < The Lake House
Greetings > The Prince & Me
Greetings < Island in the Sun
Greetings > Carnival Magic
Greetings > 101 Dalmatians (1996)
Greetings > Mockingbird Don't Sing
Final spot: #2854 out of 3012.

Resident Evil (2002)

IMDb plot summary: A special military unit fights a powerful, out-of-control supercomputer and hundreds of scientists who have mutated into flesh-eating creatures after a laboratory accident.
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Starring Milla Jovovich, Eric Mabius, Michelle Rodriguez, and James Purefoy.

Jacob and I have played a couple of the Resident Evil games together so I was very loosely familiar with the series' zombie mythos, which the movie seems to stick to pretty closely. It definitely *feels* like a video game movie, with cut scenes and clearly-defined location-based fights. The monsters are nice and creepy in the games, but the effects in the film aren't nice enough for them to blend in with the real-life people in the scenes. The staging and pacing choices are nice, though, and there are some unsettling scenes in here once the movie finally gets going (it takes what feels like forever to get to the zombies). The characters don't matter even a little bit, so the twist isn't terribly effective, and the movie seems to play fast and loose with its own rules every so often. (I was very confused by the character who was dead and then not actually dead but then suddenly a zombie anyway.) Probably my favorite part, though, was the ending, where the character escapes from where she's been kept only to find that all the zombies have clearly escaped and the world is overrun. It's obviously meant to set it up for more sequels but I like it on its own as a creepy ending to the story. It's a good image.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Resident Evil < Blow Out
Resident Evil > Side Effects
Resident Evil < The Prince and the Pauper (2000)
Resident Evil > Beaches
Resident Evil < War of the Buttons (1994)
Resident Evil > A Dangerous Method
Resident Evil > Hellraiser
Resident Evil > The Amazing Spider-Man
Resident Evil > Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Resident Evil > Horton Hears a Who
Resident Evil < Hollywood Homicide
Final spot: #1979 out of 3011, or 34%.

The Decalogue (1989)

IMDb plot summary: Ten television drama films, each one based on one of the Ten Commandments.
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

This series took me a month and a half to watch, and now I don't quite know what to do with it. I like the theme and how it found creative, not-at-all-obvious ways to explore each theme. I think #5 is probably my favorite. The overall bleak tone started getting to me even with how spread out these are, and I have the same issue here that I do with Kieslowski's Colors trilogy, in that his endings never resonate with me and so I found each piece just slightly disappointing when it finally ended. It's kind of an incredible feat of filmmaking, but I found it often difficult to watch and it will likely be even more difficult to rank.

How it entered my Flickchart:
The Decalogue > Blow Out
The Decalogue < The Lady Vanishes
The Decalogue > Winnie the Pooh
The Decalogue < Kanal
The Decalogue < Lyle, the Kindly Viking
The Decalogue > Is It Fall Yet?
The Decalogue < The Exorcist
The Decalogue < The Magnificent Ambersons
The Decalogue > Paris, Texas
The Decalogue < Sin City
The Decalogue > Sleepers
Final spot: #1073 out of 3010, or 64%.