Pretend you have a ballot for the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

I like Shane, don't love it, consider it part of film history--it's almost simultaneously a revisionist western itself and the context against which revisionist westerns from The Searchers to the later ones in the '60s and '70s make sense--and it doesn't seem to be particularly out of place on that list. (Philadelphia strikes me as the anomaly.)

> In 2022 there's a new world

and then doesn't list anything that's not ~30 years old

I appreciate him giving us his rationale for adding and subtracting films from previous lists, but that is very much the list of a man who once made a list in 1972.

Lol, exactly

Also, merry Sicilian.

This reads like this guy got divorced by cinema and now cinema won’t let him see the kids

omg

Savage.

lol of course he has to weigh in on fucking Birth of a Nation even though he isn't voting for it.

I want to be on this guy's side, but I also think that the main point of doing these polls every 10 years is to track how tastes change with time. And he's really not selling that.

Yeah I wasn’t trying to be mean, I think his perspective is potentially interesting & would like those reminiscences without the note of sadsack self pity; it’s especially rich because he’s basically like “I guess there’s just no room on this ol’ rock anymore for a guy who votes for vertigo and citizen kane in decadal polls” and come on

I hope they let him vote so he can immediately disappear among all the indistinguishable ballots. You can do it Tony!

Yeah but also...

of course he has to weigh in on fucking Birth of a Nation even though he isn't voting for it

This.

Yeah that sucked & it was a rather cowardly sort of weighing in too

My final film for the 2022 Sight & Sound top ten is Philadelphia. A movie that opens with music by Springsteen and closes with music by Neil Young is a keeper.

He's 84 so the only film that predates him on his list is The General. I have to admit, on my own list, I probably have at least as many films older than me than not, so I can't point fingers about being out of touch with film culture.

I kind of want to defend him too, although "weird" in my original post may suggest otherwise. I found it weird he would publically lobby for a ballot. I hope he gets one, though. "Hey, I founded Film Heritage"--I guess only someone as stuck in that moment (when it comes to film critics) as I am would find that touching. I also wonder if Andrew Sarris's ballot, if he were alive, would be appreciably different.

Here's the Agee piece on Griffith. Only the first two pages are on Birth of a Nation. Their final paragraph:

(Today, The Birth of it Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.)

My final film for the 2022 Sight & Sound top ten is Philadelphia. A movie that opens with music by Springsteen and closes with music by Neil Young is a keeper.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 31, 2021 9:53 AM (forty-eight minutes ago)

"Who could ask for anything more? It's a film for a Philly guy -- and a human being."

I can read between those lines, old man.

Having watched the full, unexpurgated version of Birth of a Nation last year, can I just say fuck DW Griffith, fuck Jim Agee and fuck Tony Macklin.

D. W. Griffith - "Accidental Racist"

What's o_O about BOAN defenders is that it was widely perceived as provocatively racist in *1915*. To be fair, I didn't know that when first getting into film history in the 90s, but it's a fact that has been broadly established by now (even something as popular-history as Longworth's You Must Remember This mentioned it briefly in the most recent series)

The most amazing leap in that Agee piece is that it's supposedly "contemporary abolitionists" who would "cause trouble and misunderstanding" around the film.

To be fair to Agee, they're still doing it to this day, to hear some tell it.

(Disclaimer: I am being facetious there. It's definitely revisionist history to paint Birth of a Nation as some sort of guiltless artifact that in only the last 40 or 50 years or so has been unpacked for its racism.)

Clicked a few of the reviews on the homepage and got a kick out of his two-star assessment of the PBS Hemingway.

The Old Man and the Sea is a profound, personal vision.

But there's little recognition in the documentary of the importance of going beyond the surface into the art.

Androgyny and suicide are more important in the documentary.

Glibness trumps credibility. It is as though the film was made by the tourists on the shore.

Such is Ernest Hemingway in 2021.

The Old Man and The Old Man and the Sea

Happy New “we get a new S&S fill poll this year” Year!

Went to a screening of City Lights this afternoon and was wondering when exactly this thing comes out.

Starting to feel like later than last time, maybe even December

Obviously, please post here when it does; I never check magazines anymore, and--at least where I am--getting one won't be easy.

I mean, some of us might not have to pretend after all:

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/poll-position-kaned

We invited more than a thousand people last time; the ambition is to at least double that number in 2022.

Gonna go on the record in saying 2001 will win this time around.

The callout for ballots dropped today

hope you will be able to get and submit one, we should have someone to represent us here

Eric, I think your and our collective posts in the last two all-time poll threads (directors, films) have been a significant contribution to the discourse about great films, more than any individual reviews I've read in highbrow publications

S&S voters should read them, and you should vote in this poll

You too Alfred

besos

oh lol I think I misread you. I thought I had contributed.

if you haven't already, you should lobby for a S&S ballot! I mean, you have to qualify

as long as you don't make your top ten all Buñuel films, I mean one is enough

2001: A Space Odyssey has ascended over time in the rankings, and was #6 on the 2012 list. It would be surprising for it to suddenly jump to #1, I don't expect it but I would love it if it did.

It seems like the critics only come around to agreeing what the best films of all time are 50 or more years after they are released. I don't see any other films above or below 2001 on that S&S list that are likely to rise in prominence at this point

The window's less than 50 years, I think. 2001 came out in '68, was tied for 11th 24 years later. Mulholland Drive was 28th in 2012, 11 years after release, probably higher this time. If you really go back, L'Avventura was #2 a year after it was released. Obviously, something like that isn't going to happen anymore, but I'd say the window for ranking high today is more like 20-30 years.

What I'm saying is, School of Rock could be really high this time.

I predict Mulholland Drive is gonna crack the top 10.

air bud
air bud 2
michael jackson thriller video
david at the dentist
field of dreams
barely legal #15
citizen kane
bringing up baby
esteban buttez: the first ten posts
goonies

― ice cr?m, Sunday, 12 September 2010 02:47 bookmarkflaglink

I predict Mulholland Drive is gonna crack the top 10

lol we had someone representing us before = me

and look how that turned out

zizek only placed second as troll but i no longer write for S&S

(this isn't actually official and is mainly a consequence of my indolence and detainment elsewhere)

lol we had someone representing us before = me

and look how that turned out