Which--or at Least How Many--of Sight and Sound's Top 50 Films Have You Not Seen?

love a lot of the films people are taking shots at itt. the searchers is fantastic, one of the most visually striking and flat-out entertaining westerns i've ever seen. i prefer bande a part to breathless, but the latter's still pretty damn great. la dolce vita is kind of exhausting, but that's clearly the point, and it's so spectacular, strange and colorful that my attention never wandered.

satantango is a chore though.

I saw Rules of the Game a couple years ago. Good movie, but it didn't wow me or anything.

Just looked at the upcoming screenings at the Siskel Film Center and the Music Box, and now I'm excited to catch Celine and Julie Go Boating in a couple of weeks.

I try not to fetishize first screenings of anything, because a lot of my favorite movies were "meh" on first watch.

This is a good point -- I'm too hardwired to follow surface-level plot/text, and don't get into subtext, context and interesting technique until repeat viewings, though I'm trying to train myself to be a better film-watcher.

I only became comparatively "meh" on Tokyo Story when I saw some of Ozu's other variations and liked them more.

I saw Rules of the Game a couple years ago. Good movie, but it didn't wow me or anything.

Exactly my reaction, I can't see what I'm missing.

I'll take Early Summer over both TS and Late Spring, although I confess to using Wiki to remember which is which.

love a lot of the films people are taking shots at itt

Down low.

satantango is a chore though.

Too slow.

I've had films sneak up me over time, of course, but I do carry around in my head the overwhelming experience of certain first-screenings in my life: Taxi Driver, the two Godfathers back-to-back, the three Apus in a row, Raging Bull, On the Waterfront, Crumb, a few others.

Late Spring is my pick, along with its reboot An Autumn Afternoon. Equinox Flower was another I remember liking a whole lot.

Of the 49 I've seen, by far the one that leaves me cold is Le Mépris. Bad marriage on the Rivieria, zzzzzzzzzzz.

And after 2 viewings of Celine and Julie Go Boating, done with it as well.

and The End of Summer.

As for The Rules of the Game it wears its mastery lightly, so I can see how on first glance it's amiable enough.

This is a good point -- I'm too hardwired to follow surface-level plot/text, and don't get into subtext, context and interesting technique until repeat viewings, though I'm trying to train myself to be a better film-watcher.

My problem is that I so rarely watch things more than once -- I'm sure films I shrugged at would gain something upon repeat viewings, but there are too many movies that I haven't seen at all to catch up with. To preemptively answer clemenza, I'm not a Paulista, just a pragmatist.

I think Paulistas are the Libertarian wing of the Paulettes.

And Armond is a member of the Tea Pauly.

pauly vous paulette?

Paulista!: the legendary unreleased 4-disc concept album about film criticism by The Clash.

what would P.K. have voted for besides The Godfather and The Manchurian Candidate? Is there any record of her participating in '62-92?

Pretty sure she eschewed participation, but surely Nashville and Last Tango would be joined by Shoeshine and Intolerance.

Maybe Rules of the Game too. Can't quite remember if that got the treatment.

she loved L'avventura and Joan of Arc.

A bunch of us made some guesses on the Kael thread a year or two ago. Other than that one cage-match of a film-critics circle she belonged to, I don't think she ever dealt in awards or lists of any kind ever.

The thing that makes the "too many movies" problem manageable is that the contemporary American films that are lauded by the MSM are worse than ever, so you can skip most of those.

Sarris always participated (this time I don't know); Kauffmann did in '72 and I think maybe '82, then dropped out; Simon, never.

Well, Simon couldn't actually come up with 10 movies he even liked, so much loved.

he liked a lot of Bergman.

if Simon doesn't concentrate hard enough he can't help but imagine Barbra Streisand's nose in every movie.

Actually, he did compile a favourites list at the beginning of one of his first two collections...I'm willing to make the trip downstairs to retrieve it, if anybody cares enough.

Babs has a new film at Christmas. Maybe he'll blog about it. xp

wow, I've only seen one of those movies

guessing which one could be a poll

xposts and Liza Minelli's eyes and (lack of) jawline

I think Paulistas are the Libertarian wing of the Paulettes.

Haha, OK: proving my point that I'm not one.

In the introduction to his first collection Simon got pissy because Kael included The Lady Eve in her list of great American movies; it was merely "sound, solid entertainment...nothing to sneeze at," he wrote.

Confusing Paulettes with Paulistas is probably a sign of good mental health.

from a John Simon blog post on tennis in June. He is... the same.

Being a fan, for me, is definitely tinged with sexuality where women players are concerned. Steffi Graf was the great tennis star of my younger days, but all I could summon up for her was respect. Perhaps her nose was too big. She definitely lacked charm, though she clearly had intelligence. But Hingis had both. Lacking a powerful serve, the Achilles heel of many a female player, was certainly also Hingis’s, although she also lacked the brute force of certain current players, e.g. Serena Williams—and a good thing too....

But women’s tennis today is full of conspicuous athletes, and very poor lookers. Just try to feel sexual about Kvitova or Azarenka, let alone Kuznetsova. I would as soon dine on goat excrement. There is today only one woman player about whom I have strong feelings, Julia Goerges. She is beautiful and gifted, and has a terrific serve (125 miles), but not quite great. One rarely sees her on television, being German rather than American. If only she could be black or at least butch, but no such luck.

http://photoshopcontest.com/images/fullsize/84382039498619fe3bb45697d4bfc8fbe8ef12f166654.jpg

I hope I can keep my mind off eating goat shit when I'm 87.

TS: Christgau vs Simon, which critic is the most creepy?

By absolutely no popular demand whatsoever, John Simon's pantheon circa 1967 (from Private Screenings): Smiles of a Summer Night, Les Enfants du Paradis, Forbidden Games, Kanal, The Rules of the Game, The White Sheik, I Vitelloni, L'avventura, The Seven Samurai, The Naked Night, and, a sop to the rubes, Citizen Kane. Films I associate him with from subsequent books: Badlands, Swept Away, Melvin and Howard...I'd have to check back; he didn't go overboard very often.

Back to Rules of the Game... Kael put it well when she said that the thrill of this film is that it seems to unfold right in front of you. It's so spontaneous and alive that its formal perfection is dazzling to see. For me it's also about the perfect arrangement of the final scenes, from the furious energy of the party to the grace and melancholy of the ending.

the movie takes its cue from Dalio and the maid's performance: smiling, flustered, unable to be serious for a moment.

Effervescence isn't incredibly high up on my list of qualities I seek in movies, but Rules does it so impressively that, yes, it's clearly one of the all-time greats.

I have seen 37 of them. These I haven't seen:

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
L’Atalante
Au hasard Balthazar
Persona
Le Mépris
Ordet
Shoah
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
Sátántangó
Journey to Italy
Gertrud
Histoire(s) du cinéma
Ugetsu monogatari

pretty stoked to have seen exactly half!

I just biked to the library and picked up Singin in the Rain, Au Hasard, Stalker, Citizen Kane, and L'Avventura (and also Carrie, Andrei Rublev, Ma Vie En Rose, Streetcar Named Desire, and Feuillade's Fantômas). We'll see how many I can watch before they're due back in a week.

I think the only Ozu I've seen is Good Morning and I loved it so much; I don't know if anything else can top it.

Also, Who Are You, Polly Magoo? Is better than anything Godard ever wanked out.

My number went down by one this morning --
http://archive.org/details/ChelovekskinoapparatomManWithAMovieCamera

39

OK, I just realized my number is 30 because I am dummmmm -- one of the films I'd seen, but only knew it by its English title. Durrr.

Rented out Shoah today, so, with resolve, coffee, and another three weeks of vacation, I'll be down to seven. I'm going to knock them off my list one by one, like Jeanne Moreau in The Bride Wore Black.