Taika Waititi Ranked

Although it is just plain fun to rank a director's movies, it may also help me think about the director's oeuvre of work as a whole. Comparisons can help me to discover elements of film that I am drawn to, what the director finds value in revealing through their movies and possibly how the director has grown artistically.

Waititi obviously has a love for goofy humor and all of his movies are full of comedy. It's offbeat, often understated, full of visual gags, unusual characters and strange circumstances. One or two of Waititi's movies may be all about the laughs, but most of his movies contain plenty of drama processed through humor.

Many of Waititi's films contain a deep melancholy.…

Many of Waititi's films contain a deep melancholy. Some of this sadness comes from his characters' faults, the pasts they aren't proud of of by how they misbehave as a reaction to their situations in life. Many of his characters struggle to deal with their dreams of how they want to be or how they want their lives to look like. When things don't work out, they behave in ways they know are wrong to others and perpetuate a cycle of hurt.

This cycle of hurt is a theme Waititi often explores. The hurt often stems from family dysfunction and the absence of key loved ones as a result of death or self-imposed isolation. Many of his stories are about children hurt by absent fathers who cannot seem to deal with the death of a loved one.

While Waititi doesn't shy away from these dark themes for humans' capacities to deeply hurt one another, he is also interested in presenting the joy inherent in life, focusing on the simple pleasures that music, hobbies, communal struggles, nature and art of all kinds can provide. One of the ways he conveys this within his movies themselves is by creating modestly whimsical looking films through a highly aesthetic production design and an emphasis on dynamic framing.

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List by Adam Graff Patron

Taika Waititi Ranked