This graphical breakdown of career director arcs over on Into the Abyss is pretty damn fantastic. What author Todd Miro did was compile all the Rotten Tomatoes scores for all the movies made by a director and then chart those critical rankings on a line graph to show how well each director’s flicks were received over time.
Pretty simple
Head over to his original post to see the graphs for Scorsese, the Cohen Brothers, Tarantino, David Fincher, Ridley Scott, William Friedkin and the Wachowski Brothers. All are muy neato.
But the three that were the most interesting to me were the three most extreme charts: M. Night Shyamalan (the initial subject of the discussion), Stanley Kubrick and Francis Ford Coppola. Honestly, it pains me to even write those three names in the same sentence, but it makes for a nice comparison when you compare M. Night’s 1929-stock-market-looking graph next to Kubrick’s unassailable career of acclaim next to Coppola’s inconsistency.
Ultimately, however, even though Coppola has made some hot garbage in his day, he will likely always remain in my top five of all time just on the strength of there being no more impressive four-movie run in cinematic history than The Godfather, The Conversation (which I honestly don’t even really like), The Godfather II and Apocalyspe Now. There might be three of the best ten films ever in there. Just unreal.
Along similar lines, good luck to any actor who ever wants to have a cleaner, more perfect IMDB page than John Cazale. Nice resume, buddy.
