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

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)

well, remember who was intellecutally fellating him in the early seventies

yes but.... he was a bit of a fibber, I've heard

Just because I love L'eclisse more than L'avventura now doesn't mean I'd exclude the latter from my top hundred.

ranked all-time lists are idiotic; there, I said it

Lock thread.

I just think film critics should aspire to being more than music critics who don't hear so well.

didn't know the S&S critics from '62 were music critics in cineaste clothing

i like ranked all-time lists.

I think you should let people play the games they want to play, Morbs.

knock yerself out

'62 critics had half as many films to deal with.

i like ranked all-time lists.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, 30 July 2012 20:36 (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

which are your ten favourite

There's no way to stop it,
No, there's no way to stop it,
If the earth wants to roll around the sun.
You're a fool if you worry.
You're a fool if you worry,
Over anything but little number one.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/07/if-i-had-a-sight-sound-film-ballot/

are there any more Special Projects to come this summer, besides the one I'm 3 weeks late on? Possibly a "Call Me Maybe" lipsync?

I already said by email I would participate in 2022.

Pssssssh, My goal by 2022 is to have a real ballot.

wha, now that you've practically quit?

I've quit caring about the actual criticism. I haven't quit writing it.

< / sarcasm > < / obv >

which are your ten favourite

― , Blogger (schlump), Monday, July 30, 2012 7:58 PM (16 minutes ago)

i posted mine up-thread, probably wouldn't change it much now.

After Death (Bauer, 15)
The Scarlet Empress (Von Sternberg, 34)
L'eclisse (Antonioni, 61)
La Jetee (Marker, 62)
Simon of the Desert (Bunuel, 65)
Weekend (Godard, 67)
Pink Narcissus (Bidgood, 71)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 74)
Satantango (Tarr, 94)
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 95)
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 6:21 AM (2 months ago)

Six of these ended up on my "if I had a ballot" ballot for House, without having even double-checked here first.