Kubrick and Kurosawa: The Favorite Film That Doesn't Exist

What is the favorite film: Kubrick, Kurosawa and an eternal tie

What is the best film of all time? The question seems like a dessert-table topic and works as a personality test. Asked to a broad group of fans, it does not return a title: it returns a list of nearly a hundred names in which Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Luis García Berlanga and, without the slightest embarrassment, Torrente 3 coexist. There is no winner. What there is, however, is a handful of titles that reappear with an insistence that no longer seems like coincidence, and an even more repeated pattern: the majority refuses to stick with just one favorite film.

2001: A Space Odyssey, the film that splits the audience in two

Few films divide as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey. For some, it is the peak of Kubrick and an object that can be revisited endlessly: “I can spend hours watching it and always find something I hadn’t seen before,” summarizes one of its supporters. For others, it is a stinker: slow, incomprehensible and with too many lights at the end. There is even someone who uses it as a social filter: if you can’t stand it, they say, it won’t last more than five minutes of conversation.

The clash reached the filmography. An intervention placed it as the worst of his last six films; the reply was immediate and numerical: after 2001 he shot five, not six. And he came with the argument that usually closes these squabbles: whoever doesn’t understand the use of the camera, classical music or the role of HAL 9000 is not facing a bad film, but a director who doesn’t interest them. For the stubborn, moreover, a didactic resource is shared that attempts to explain the film scene by scene.

The canon almost nobody disputes: The Godfather, Blade Runner and Pulp Fiction

There is a band of titles about which there is hardly any friction. The three installments of The Godfather. Blade Runner, cited with two distinct functions, dystopia and aesthetic reference. Apocalypse Now, Casablanca or the Back to the Future trilogy.

Once Upon a Time in America is defended with an argument that goes beyond the cinematic: it is very long —and therefore seen less than one would like—, but it deals with friendship, the passage of time, wasted lives and old age, and leaves a melancholy that weighs on every review.

And there is Pulp Fiction, vindicated as “a true narrative marvel”: enormous script, relentless pace, circular structure, the best performance by Samuel L. Jackson and already emblematic characters, from the hitman Vincent Vega to the man who solves dirty problems. Its place in any list seems untouchable.

Why does so many people not know how to choose just one film?

Because the question forces you to compare a war drama with a high school comedy. This is the argument of those who resist: choosing just one is impossible when what is valued changes with age, with the day’s mood and with the desire to rewatch something. From there come the most useful and least solemn answers, those that admit that there are titles that hold up more for a specific scene than for the whole.

From Kurosawa to Berlanga: the list of those who do dare to choose

Here comes the densest block. Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Charles Chaplin, with The Kid cited as their best work. Cinema Paradiso. To Be or Not to Be. The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Ikiru, by Akira Kurosawa, the latter cited among the most moving ever shot. Casablanca. The Escape, by Jacques Becker. The 400 Blows. Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel, by Buñuel. Plácido, The Executioner and Welcome Mr. Marshall, by Berlanga. Death Among the Flowers, Fargo and Barton Fink. Until He Came to His Hour. And, with delay and a certain reproach to others, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

In that same line appear Twelve Angry Men, defined as a masterpiece, and Paths of Glory, one of the best war films ever shot. The reader’s eternal complaint also sneaks in: there is an adaptation dismissed with a nothing to do with the book that summarizes the anger of half the internet.

Action, thriller and unpretentious cinema

The other extreme weighs as much as the canon. Die Hard, Gladiator, Conan the Barbarian, Memento, Gattaca, They Live and Toxic Avenger, the latter cited with the warning that its remake arrives with another cast. Torrente 3, Cateto a babor, The Albanian Escape, without shame. And, relying on affectionate memory, titles that nobody would put in a serious canon: Barbie, Miccionan Girls, Very Legal Blonde.

Furthermore, a block of thrillers circulates that withstand constant revisions: Training Day, Heat, Collateral, Strange Days, Seven and The Silence of the Lambs, with The Big Kahuna sneaking in through the back door and described as a secret masterpiece. The most repeated message is that of someone who reappears with an old film and praises it again after the nth viewing.

In the end, the question does not measure cinema. It measures biography. Whoever answers Torrente 3 at twenty usually continues to answer Torrente 3 at forty, and with more conviction. Searching for a consensus here is like looking for parking in August: someone finds it, but not by the method.