Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

did we ever get a ruling on whether tv movies count before i submit my fake ballot?

You can put a YouTube video on your ballot for all it counts.

if i really did get a ballot the temptation to be silly would be too great

i think if queen of the dammed places we'll know which ilxor to blame

Annie Hall
Fanny and Alexander
Night of the Hunter
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Jackie Brown
Blade Runner
Touch of Evil
Wings of Desire
North By Northwest
Jules and Jim

if i really did get a ballot the temptation to be silly would be too great

Mostly I'd have to make the choice whether to have one token pick or go full-tilt gay. A ballot with one Pink Narcissus is fine. A ballot filled with Boom, Mommie Dearest, Un Chant d'amour, Showgirls and All About Eve is also fine. A ballot with 2 or 3 slots mixed in along with, say, Gertrud, Taste of Cherry and/or Rear Window looks a little weird.

A very big vote will take place in my grade 6 class sometime in the next few weeks. As I always do in conjunction with Welles' birthday (May 6), I showed them the first three minutes of Kane. They were definitely interested--a lot more than they were in MCA's death. I told them about the S&S poll, dramatically announcing that it was voted #1 in 1962, in 1972, etc. So I'll give them a choice soon as to whether they want to watch Kane, Bridge to Terabithia (we read the novel), or Where the Wild Things Are. Bridge will win, but I'm predicting three or four votes for Kane.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-the-sight-and-sound-film-poll-a-tribute-to-roger-ebert-and-his-favorite-films

A friend sent me a link this afternoon where a local critic writes about his first-ever invitation and shares his list. This critic used to write about pop music in the '90s; he's at a newspaper where music writers generally go on to something deemed more important, like film or politics or reality television. He was not a good music writer.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. The Tree of Life
3. In the Mood for Love
4. Vertigo
5. Metropolis
6. Tokyo Story
7. Playtime
8. La dolce vita
9. Apocalypse Now
10. Sunrise

Each pick is accompanied by a brief one-sentence comment.

I know I shouldn't do this, but the truth is--largely based on my memories of him as a music writer--I don't trust this list at all. In the accompanying piece he writes, "'Cue panic,' tweeted British critic Guy Lodge, when he received his own invite. As a fellow Sight & Sound poll virgin, I know exactly how he feels: What if I screw this up?" I guess I should appreciate the self-deprecation, but that's exactly how the list strikes me: "I think this is what you want--do I get a gold star now?" I mean, what does "What if I screw this up?" even mean? How do you screw up what is supposed to be, as I understand it, a list of your favourite films? (It's probably telling that his list is titled "________________'s 10 Greatest Films." You can go around and around forever on the distinction, or whether there is one--and I have.)

as long as The Shawshank Redemption isn't on there, it gets a pass from me.

Well, that's one more ballot in #teamvertigo's favor.

also, 2 votes for newest Malick, too. o_0

(with Ebert's)

i think as a list by and more importantly FOR film critics/academics/passionate laymen/etc yeah it's pretty boring, but that's a decent list for someone newly interested in older or classic films, and at least a few of those would hit home with most people. films like that are good landmarks for finding your way around to a more personal or even idiosyncratic relationship to movies.

Still can't shake my hunch that S&S's big innovation for 2012 is a third list comprised totally of new media votes.

feel like the list after 20 or so is gonna be pretty interesting this time.

I'm doing something I try not to do anymore (i.e., I used to do it), which is to start analyzing someone's motivations for liking/disliking something, rather than just accept what they say at face value. It's also the Kael part of me that I'll probably never shake--she once had a line to the effect that she didn't trust people whose tastes were too exquisite.

she was the proto-internet in many ways

Picking 10 films wouldn't say much about my taste in films, just my taste in symbolism.

ie, it's almost as much a fraud as the presidential election.

was wondering how you were gonna work that in there. nice.

How many of you would shy away from voting for a film just because it's new(ish)? Do you feel that a film needs to gather a little dust and gain a little paunch before you would feel comfortable calling it one of the ten best films ever, or would you be comfortable declaring the all-time greatness of a film that just came out the previous year? I'm just asking in general, not specifically about the film whose title I'm obviously tiptoeing around (Green Lantern).

that is yr most shameless troll evah

i think it was a joke

yeah, i'd be reluctant to throw a brand-newish film on there. i think that's true of most folks. in the 2002 poll there were very few films from the mid-late 1990s on there.

i might vote for a 90s film. maybe even early 00s. last five years just seems iffy for reasons i cant even fully explain/defend.

i'm waiting to see the raven at the local 2nd run theater before i finalize anything.

i am kinda with you in just fliply dismissing that guy's list as sorta boring, clemenza. i think i have made ilx lists and caved to pressure to include some canon titles so it doesn't look like i'm above them/so it looks like i know what i'm talking about.

who was the guy who made the weirdest list ever. i liked that guy. i'd be into including some recent stuff - didn't someone here refer to like millennial antiseptic arthouse, as a genre? that kinda thing. kiarostamis and tsais. there's gotta be some of the like internationally-fetishised breakout new international cinemas picks in the next poll.

calling Kiarostami "antiseptic" is weird, Tsai too given all the stagnant water.

no you're right. i'm just throwing them all in together as ambassadors of new-thoughtful-world-cinemas. i think i read antiseptic as pretty much referring to tsai, though, or at least very delicate & deliberate branches of contemplative new stuff.

I'm pretty sure that Summer Hours would place somewhere in my top fifty, and I've "only" seen it twice. As for Tsai or Hou, any person who's absorbed one of their films is justified in placing one of them on a personal list, if that makes sense.

So who would be on that list?

Tsai
Hou
Kiarostami
Dardennes
Tarr
Haneke
Weerasethakul
Assayas
Jia
Costa
Reygadas
Denis

Definitely Dardennes, Denis, Hou, Tsai, Joe.

Angelopoulos might be timely. I can imagine he would've got some votes in the past. Akerman, Martel. & depending how recent we get, the sorta Eastern contingent of Bilge Ceylan, Puiu, Mungiu.

i didn't love Summer Hours a lot? but I'm slightly blank to Assayas and Ozon &c.

Much more of a Desplechin guy myself. Not that he'd show up on a hypothetical S&S ballot or anything.

who was the guy who made the weirdest list ever

It wasn't Sight and Sound, but in one of James Monaco's handbooks, he surveyed a bunch of writers on the best American film between '68 and '77 or thereabouts. I remember B. Ruby Rich co-compiled a list with somebody, and it had stuff like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Ganja and Hess (way pre-internet, i.e. at a time when those films weren't such a fact of life). Wish I could remember the whole list, it really jumped out from the others.

kiarostami is pretty sui generis, tsai is much more emblematic of the sort of asian "slow cinema" that (used to?) burn a lot of critics up.

tsai seems like a bit of a trend-chaser to me, actually, albeit an accomplished one. long takes? check. new extremity? check. etc.

Someone asked me recently who the best US directors of the last 25-30 years were, and I rather quickly answered Spielberg and Haynes. I suspect they are pigeonholed as too "popcorn" (still) and "academic," respectively, to pop up in many top 10s.

(likely more in this new media subset Eric refers to)

oh i think haynes will turn up

lots of critics still have bias against spielberg, i doubt that will change much this time out and even if it did, there isn't really a consensus favorite. e.t.? raiders? jaws? jurassic park? schindler's fucking list?

I'd say the critical cult around him has mostly centered on ET, Empire of the Sun, AI, and Munich. Maybe Close Encounters too, among the undying Paulettes.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-sight-and-sound-film-poll-jonathan-rosenbaum-on-satantango

Love watching J.Ro walk around and occasionally throw shade at the camera.

http://lumiere.net.nz/index.php/on-the-difficulty-of-film-canons/

Ignaty Vishnevetsky demonstrates his random method and how he ended up with three films from 1981: http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-sight-sound-film-poll-ignatiy-vishnevetsky-on-how-to-make-a-random-top-ten-list?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed

A nice defense of L'avventura (which I, for one, would love to see return to the top 10):

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/great-wide-open-l-avventura

(I mean, given it can't really be L'eclisse.)

i'd absolutely put it in my top 10

I doubt I would put any Antonioni in my top 100, even though I like four or five of his films very much. I felt guilty about this til I read how much Orson Welles disliked his portentousness.

there's this great welles interview where he admits he refuses to see any movie longer than 100 minutes.

that musta been pretty late, he claimed to love The Last Picture Show (118 m)