Our Top Five Favorite Films Featuring Ensemble Casts

The Top Five Podcast

Well, happy Late Hump Day - or it might even be Thursday by the time this gets posted. Regardless - Annie and I had a very busy Memorial Day Weekend, cranking out shows for y'all and trying to get ahead of the game while she's in Europe with the fam.

As for me - it's "Summertime" at the day job, so I'm doing as much as I can to catch up and put summer projects into motion. I mean...nothing says "summer" like summer projects, summer movies...and Ensemble Casts.

Well, almost nothing.

I really did love what Wikipedia had to say about Ensemble Casts:

"In a dramatic production, an ensemble cast is one that comprises many principal actors and performers who are typically assigned roughly equal amounts of screen time. The term is also used interchangeably to refer to a production (typically film) with a large cast or a cast with several prominent performers.

Ensemble casts in film were introduced as early as September 1916, with D. W. Griffith's silent epic film Intolerance, featuring four separate though parallel plots. The film follows the lives of several characters over hundreds of years, across different cultures and time periods. The unification of different plot lines and character arcs is a key characteristic of ensemble casting in film; whether it is a location, event, or an overarching theme that ties the film and characters together.

Films that feature ensembles tend to emphasize the interconnectivity of the characters, even when the characters are strangers to one another. The interconnectivity is often shown to the audience through examples of the "six degrees of separation" theory and allows them to navigate through plot lines using cognitive mapping. Examples of this method, where the six degrees of separation are evident in films with an ensemble cast, are in productions such as Love Actually, Crash, and Babel, which all have strong underlying themes interwoven within the plots that unify each film.

Hollywood movies with ensemble casts tend to use numerous actors of high renown and/or prestige, instead of one or two "big stars" and a lesser-known supporting cast.[citation needed] Filmmakers known for their use of ensemble casts include Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Paul Thomas Anderson among others."

And so, with that bit of borrowing from Wikipedia, it looks like y'all WILL get this episode on Wednesday evening. ENJOY!!!