After the Credits With Nick and Pat Episode 33

13

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Holy shit this is a big episode! We recorded it as two  separate episodes but it got spliced together so now we have a two hour long episode! This is crazy. This one is Nick and Pat going over our lists of top 10 favorite directors. Now, this is not a list of the objective best but rather their favorites that inform them as writers and filmmakers. So dig in and get to it and if you have different opinions (spoiler alert: you will) let them know down in the comments and leave your lists  as well. Let’s get a friendly debate going!

13 Comments


  1. So, I’m just, like, the regular kind of movie nerd and not steeped in the rare vapors of The Industry, so these are just the directors that I think consistently make movies that are both pretty objectively
    good and also that I like enough to watch multiple times. I did a little bit of data analysis on my media library to generate this list, but I weighted the final tally heavily on a gut-check reaction to the actual films, basically a scale from “would watch this again right now” to “please don’t make me watch this again ever”. This is what came out of that.

    1. Steven Spielberg – Surprise, surprise. He belongs here, I ain’t mad. You guys covered it. It’s Spielberg, he’s made a million movies, most of them are good, a lot of them are great, more than one are literal seminal films that sometimes presage the direction of the industry for years to come.
    2. Quentin Tarantino – Spielberg crushed it on quantity at good-to-great quality, but Tarantino killed it on quality alone. You mentioned all the things, I agree, everyone should agree, we’re all on the same page, Tarantino is the Leonard Bernstein of violence.
    3. John McTiernan – Look, here’s the thing. Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, The Thomas Crown Affair remake, Predator, Last Action Hero and one of my favorites that I normally take a lot of shit for, The 13th Warrior. Even Medicine Man was pretty watchable. He makes good movies.
    4. Peter Jackson – Middle Earth, y’all. Whatever. King Kong was also pretty good, honestly.
    5. Justin Lin – So fast. So furious. Also, I love that Better Luck Tomorrow is like a gestational world seed for both his Fast movies and Annapolis. I wish he’d slipped a BLT trick into Star Trek also. What if he did and we just don’t know… Why don’t interviewers ask the hard questions?
    6. Kevin Smith – Haters gonna hate, I even liked Jersey Girl. You heard me. Yoga Hosers was a real nightmare though. I can give a lot of slack to Kevin Smith but it was real bad. I agree that the Askewniverse world turns on the writing but I don’t feel like there’s a better Mallrats in some alternate universe because some other director made it, so I’m stickin’ with ‘ol Kev.
    7. Tim Burton – TIM. FUCKING. BURTON. How did neither of you monsters remember Tim Burton? You may know him from Batman? Big Fish? Edward Scissorhands? BEETLEJUICE PERHAPS? Mars Attacks?! Pee-wee’s Big Adventure?!! Look deep inside and ask yourself why this happened and feel bad. Tim Burton made Americans look at goth all the time and like it. He made goth cool. That is not easy, that is very hard.
    8. Ron Howard – Look, it’s Ron Howard. E’erbody wanna give ‘ol Richie Cunningham the side-eye, but he puts on a great movie. Apollo 13. A Beautiful Mind. Rush. Backdraft. And I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, but Audrey Tautou was in it so there might be some lingering Amélie bias in there I guess. Whatever, I’m owning it. Ron Howard, dammit.
    9. Chris Columbus – RECOGNIZE. Harry Potter, Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, Adventures in Babysitting, come on. Bicentennial Man, hell, even Pixels was mildly watchable in that “I can’t believe someone tried to tap into video game nostalgia so soon after Wreck-It Ralph” kind of way. He makes a feel good movie, you literally feel good after you watch them.
    10. Barry Sonnenfeld – I actually surprised myself on this one, but I’m just gonna say The Addams Family and everybody’s gonna start nodding along, but also Get Shorty and the Men in Black franchise and frankly I enjoy Wild Wild West so there.

    Notable runners up that I don’t think you guys mentioned:
    Ivan Reitman, John Landis, Tony Scott, Bryan Singer, John Woo, Jon Favreau, and Shawn Levy on the strength of Night at the Museum alone.

    Fight me!


    1. I love this list. And by love I mean it’s ok. Just kidding, Adam. Thanks a lot for commenting!

      I do wanna say something about Tim Burton. Now, you’re not wrong…mostly. But let me ask you, has any other director ruined his legacy so much with his more recent output? Yes, he’s got some great movies under his belt. But Big Eyes. And Planet of the Apes. Dark Shadows. And then there’s Alice in Wonderland (!!!). Holy fucking shit do I hate this movie. I hate it so much I might give up some of his classics so that one can be erased. I hate it that much. The moment Johnny depp does that awful dance at the end…that was the moment Burton left my mind as an important director. So…yeah, there’s that.

      And again, thanks for listening!!


      1. So the question is can a once great artist be forgiven their latter-ish day sins? I’m gonna challenge the premise. I didn’t see Big Eyes (’14), so I’ll just give you that one, but we got Miss Peregrine’s next so call it even. Planet of the Apes (’01) was a big miss, but then we got Big Fish (’03) which is the total opposite of a big miss. Alice in Wonderland (’10) I agree was a real nightmare and I’m not waving it off for Dark Shadows (’12) (which wasn’t that bad, it just wasn’t that good), but Frankenweenie (’12) was a solid entry in the Tim Burton stable of creepy claymation. So that’s three bad movies that all had redeeming follow-ups. I don’t think you can call that a pattern of failure. Couple that with the fact that from ’88 to ’03 Tim Burton’s House of Great Movies was having a fire sale on instant classics (excepting Apes, obviously), I feel pretty good about my case here. I think the consequences for your totally justified hate of Alice in Wonderland are a little disproportionate to the crime. It’s terrible, but it’s not “erases a career of iconoclastic magic” terrible. Can’t we just blame that one on increasingly-human-dung-heap Johnny Depp? What’s he done in recent memory except be Jack Sparrow? Public Enemies maybe? Into The Woods? It’s slim pickins. Can’t he be the bad guy here and we just let Tim Burton off with a warning?

        Real talk though, if Tim Burton ruins Beetlejuice with this sequel I will be on your side very quickly. You’ll look at where I was and say “Wasn’t there a person there a second ago?” and from right behind you you’re gonna hear me say “Nope, Tim Burton has been a disappointment for years.”


        1. Hahaha deal. And hey, you might have a point about Johnny Depp. His career is a garbage fire right now and it’s possible that he’s bringing Burton down with him. I do indeed hope that Burton proves me wrong. At the end of the day, I love movies so I wanna see some more great movies from the guy. I’ll never (mostly never) root for a guy to fail. Unless his name is Liam Hemsworth.


  2. Thank you a bunch for sharing this with all folks you really recognize what you are talking about! Bookmarked. Kindly also visit my web site =). We will have a hyperlink exchange agreement among us


  3. I’m very happy to find this site. I want to to thank you for ones time just for this wonderful read!! I definitely savored every bit of it and i also have you bookmarked to look at new things on your website.


  5. If some one needs to be updated with newest technologies then he must be go to see this site and be up to date every day.


  8. I just want to tell you that I’m newbie to blogs and absolutely liked you’re web site. Most likely I’m likely to bookmark your site . You surely have excellent writings. Bless you for sharing your webpage.


  9. In this great pattern of things you get a B+ just for effort and hard work. Where you actually confused everybody ended up being on all the specifics. You know, people say, the devil is in the details… And it couldn’t be much more true in this article. Having said that, allow me tell you exactly what did work. The article (parts of it) is certainly quite powerful and this is probably why I am making the effort to opine. I do not really make it a regular habit of doing that. Secondly, whilst I can see a leaps in logic you make, I am definitely not sure of exactly how you seem to connect your details that make the conclusion. For now I will yield to your point but hope in the near future you link your facts much better.


  10. Nice post. I discover something more difficult on diverse blogs everyday. It will always be stimulating to read content off their writers and use a little something at their store. I’d prefer to apply certain with the content in my blog whether you don’t mind. Natually I’ll give you a link for your web weblog. Thanks for sharing.

Leave a Reply