And so I’m going to follow the advice of the great Kristin Thompson, who in a post at her blog in March on the topic of Best Of lists suggested abandoning the repetitive reassertions of the canon that inevitably result from consensus-based polls like Sight & Sound‘s in favor an approach more like that of the National Film Registry: I could keep that trend going, with ever longer and more tedious lists (1500!, 2000!, 5000!), or I could try something new. Every year, my Best Lists have gotten bigger and bigger, culminating last year, when I spent a month or so creating a Top 1000 list, an inherently ridiculous task that was as fun as it is absurd. With the release of the latest Sight & Sound poll this week, and Labor Day Weekend, the time of year I traditionally create a new Best of All-Time, fast approaching, lists have been on my mind. Of course that shouldn’t be a surprise, as these are many of my favorite films, and one of the ways I define that inescapably vague term “favorite film” is by how long I’ve lived with them, not simply in terms of rewatchability (though several of these I’ve seen many, many times), but in how over time these particular movies have come to define what I think cinema is, what it should be, and what it can be. Not because there are films ranked highly that I no longer think are any good (though there are a couple of slight embarrassments), but rather at how many of the films that I ranked highly then continue to occupy the top spots on the lists I’ve made more recently (I have four here at The End: a Top 150 from 2008, a Top 250 from 2009, a Top 600 from 2010 and a Top 1000 from 2011). But still, looking back on it fourteen years later, I can help but be a little surprised at it. And also like all lists, it’s notable as much for its omissions as for what it includes. So, like all lists, it’s a snapshot of a particular person at a particular time. #Laurel and hardy films ranked movie#It also shows the influence of my pre-film studies reading: I’d spent the previous year and a half reading every movie book I could get my hands on, working my way up from Leonard Maltin, Roger Ebert and VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever to Pauline Kael, François Truffaut and Jonathan Rosenbaum, along with scholarly books on Orson Welles (James Naremore), Akira Kurosawa (Donald Richie), Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut as well as David Sterritt) and Martin Scorsese (Lawrence Friedman). The list is reflective of the lack of viewing options I had as a young moviegoer in the cinema wasteland that was Spokane in the mid-90s, possibly (hopefully) the last time in history that a person’s geographic location was a major limiting factor in what films they could see. That was the year I moved to Seattle (a couple blocks away from the Best Video Store in the World) and watching movies became the thing I did for school and work instead of the thing I did instead of school or work. Anyway, here’s a stab at what my Sight & Sound ballot would look like right now, in no particular order:Ī while back I rescued from the hard drive of a now 20 year old computer, a list of the Best Movies Ever that I put together back in the summer of 1998. That said, I’m inevitably leaving out a ton anyway (Ozu, Hou, Sternberg, and Renoir, for starters. With my Top 100, it’s not a big deal if, for example, no Powell & Pressburger film is in the top ten because they’re well represented with four in the top 100, but I can’t imagine a Top Ten without them. Being limited to only ten movies rather than 100, or 1000, I want the list to be as representative as possible of cinema as I see it and love it, and so I’m creating some arbitrary restrictions (one film per director, genre, era etc). I realize I never actually created my own hypothetical ballot, which should be somewhat different from the Top Ten of the last big list I put together. It’s today’s easiest way to get lost on the internet. You can click on any film title and see who voted for it, as well as search by director, year, country or whatever. All the critics’ ballots for the 2012 Sight & Sound poll went online today, along with a Top 250 films.
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