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

it's fun to argue about the poll

FUN VS ENLIGHTENMENT

The two are not mutually exclusive, you know--I would think someone familiar with Sullivan's Travels (not to mention a million other things) would know that.

as with The General and Keaton, Playtime is in many ways Tati's most atypical film.

shit, clemenza, that's my point! Going down a list of 50 and 100 is overly circumscribed fun.

as is having 2 nearly identical presidential candidates...

You need a shock collar that zaps you when you get off the thread topic, Morbs.

Well, you've lost me. When they post individual ballots online, I'll be pouring over them and making note of things that intrigue me. If someone who lists Nashville and The 400 Blows also lists some documentary from the 1970s I've never heard of, that will catch my eye, and if I stumble over that film at the video store I go to, I'll pick it up. If this compromises some idealized world that you and Bogdanovich hold dear, so be it.

I'm sure u Canadians pour maple syrup on those lists, mmmm.

Individual ballots still more valuable than some aggregate of differing methodologies evened out.

Learn something new every day--I think I've been incorrectly using pour/pore in that context my whole life.

Eric, dead white males do very well in opera, too.

Individual ballots still more valuable than some aggregate of differing methodologies evened out.

No one ever argues against that and yet you (the royal "you") still say it over and over.

Morbs, so no year-end list for yoU?

the non-film nerds that i've spoken to about this poll ALWAYS say something like "I've never heard of any of them" - sometimes apologetically, sometimes angrily. so i wld like to think that a small number of ppl might just be intrigued enough to check out TOKYO STORY or whatever for the very first time - mission accomplished.

Eric: people here don't have to say it -- most of the Great Unwashed consulting this list are only gonna look at the group ranking.

(and think Ozau and Kurosawa are the only Japanese directors)

Mizoguchi is on there.

most of the Great Unwashed consulting this list are only gonna look at the group ranking.

Do you have polling numbers on that claim?

"The Great Unwashed"?--not that I don't have my own pockets of snobbishness, but that's a really unattractive thing to say. (Maybe it was meant ironically, I don't know.)

I thought I've made it clear that I am a misanthrope.

hardcore cineasts are more likely to be unwashed than the rest of the population but i don't have poling figures to back that up.

Cinemaniacs, specifically

clemenza: "always with a little humor"

I thought I've made it clear that I am a misanthrope.

Really, tho, how's that working out for you?

lol, jed_

Hard to say til I'm reincarnated.

unrecognized by S&S:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODjDz_6SWik

re the Great Unwashed:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/29346.html

always dug that version of 'scrooge.'

I watched and enjoyed Man with a Movie Camera the other day because it was on this list so thanks Sight and Sound voters, I guess

despite all the problems with lists like these, it was lists like these that got teenage me into really watching movies in the first place. They made me seek out stuff rather than just renting whatever they happened to have at the local video club or watching whatever was on tv. Really made me appreciate all this dead white male culture that existed before my time rather than restricting myself to alive white male culture like most of the people I knew.

i knew a guy once who worked himself dutifully through AFI's top 100, a film at a time, reporting cheerfully on his progress the whole way. now he's educated! or is he.

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Friday, August 10, 2012 4:27 PM (3 hours ago

i set out to do this as a teenager when the list first came out! i remember being so thrilled that 'kane' -- my fave film at the time -- topped the list. sadly, i never actually finished the list, and kind of lost heart when they redid the list a few years back and threw stuff like 'fellowship of the ring' in there.

somebody on Sl4nt picked Fellowship

haha i did a ballot for a top whatever of 2000-10 for i think it was stylus (but stylus folded well before 2010 so it may just have been for the private amusement of ex-stylusers) and my aggressive #1 was the extended edition of lotr as one giant 12-hour movie DON'T EVEN REGRET IT (altho wouldn't necessarily repeat it)

u r banned from all future polls, and Poland.

I first heard of L'atalante and The Rules of the Game by seeing them on the '92 S&S list, so, yeah, they worked for me as a young man.

DLH do you remember the rest of your list? i like the 'lotr' films well enough but i'd rather reread the books than revisit them.

despite all the problems with lists like these, it was lists like these that got teenage me into really watching movies in the first place

On one of the S&S threads, possibly this one, I posted about how much discovering the '72 list (five or so years later) affected me as a teenager.

i am Not A Fan of the lotr books. (altho i was v much as a kid.) only sense in which i feel remorse for the ranking is in that it may be the fault of people like me that the hobbit, a book featuring dwarves named "ori" "dori" and "nori", is now a three-film epic shot entirely in instant-replay-o-vision. (this is the one i know i'll rather return to the book for.)

i don't remember the rest of the list but i'm sure i'd change everything on it now. i think mulholland dr was, safely, #2? honestly i might put inland empire above it now, for its... purity. and for the "there was a chemical factory in this town... puttin that shit in the air, so you couldn't think straight" monologue. i may have listed perfume, a very silly and often boring movie saved by dustin hoffman, john hurt, and the courage of its convictions. i think russian ark was on there; in my defense this wasn't mindless OMG ALL ONE SHOT, it was mindless OMG RUSSIA. still love that movie tho.

i should probably give 'mulholland dr.' another shot. i disliked it intensely but it seems like the ilx consensus favorite from the last decade-ish.

Morbs, so no year-end list for yoU?

Not a published one. I am not going to spend 3 months "catching up" on Bellflower-level dreck for the privilege.

Also if I am going to be an invalid for a few more months, I'm going to watch what I please.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f7/Monkey_shines.jpg/220px-Monkey_shines.jpg

might get to Showgirls this weekend

oh dear.

Aw, and I just swore off ILX, Facebook and email for the rest of August. Damn.

Missed this earlier, but EW's OG thinks critics need to get over themselves if they think Vertigo is better than Kane and, more specifically, if they choose Mulholland Dr. over Blue Velvet. Reads a bit like Armond without the appetite for destruction:

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/08/07/the-sight-and-sound-poll-is-full-of-it/

"The twisting and undermining of narrative is, to me, a cinematic ploy of diminishing returns. Yet it’s one that a critical establishment addicted to the one-hand-clapping thrill of deconstruction now reveres."

Actually the entire paragraph is pretty stunning in its stubborn wrongness:

Yet Lynch, who was profoundly influenced by Vertigo (and also by Kenneth Anger), upped the ante on the most stylized, formalist side of what Hitchcock brought off in Vertigo when he transformed the plot of Mulholland Drive into a labyrinth that you enter without quite coming out of. The twisting and undermining of narrative is, to me, a cinematic ploy of diminishing returns. Yet it’s one that a critical establishment addicted to the one-hand-clapping thrill of deconstruction now reveres. There’s even a trendy leftist bias to it: In the blockbuster franchise era, straightforward storytelling is seen in some quarters as a tool of the corporation — a way to keep the public narcotized. Whereas a movie that dares to pull the rug out from under its own storyline is a fearless act of art that is “showing you a new way of seeing.” (In truth, it’s probably showing you a new way of looking at your watch in the dark.) It’s according to this way of thinking that Lynch’s three-hour-long Eraserhead-meets-public-access avant dud Inland Empire is a masterpiece — and Mulholland Drive, with its pretzel-logic hermetic dream games, is a superior movie to the visionary yet lushly comprehensible Blue Velvet. But then, maybe that’s why the new Sight & Sound poll gives me a touch of vertigo. When I look at the choices on this list, I feel as if it’s critics who are losing their grip on the popular imagination. And, as a result, are falling.

I think he's otm about Blue Velvet's cultural impact, but wrong that it's better than Mulholland Drive. I agree that you couldn't have the second without the first, but that doesn't keep the second from being more amazing. Lynch had a lot of time to think and mess around between those two movies, and he learned a lot.

And thinking that "the twisting and undermining of narrative" is what Mulholland Drive or Vertigo are about seems like the ultimate kind of formalism. The effect of those movies is not in their narratives.

I don’t buy the notion that the film’s final shot (a desperate James Stewart standing on the balcony of the Mission San Juan Bautista bell-tower chapel, his hands lowering in a slow swoon of despair) is the Greatest Image Of Romantic Loss In Movie History, or anything like that. To me, it’s an overly abrupt and borderline unsatisfying ending; it’s too consciously “poetic” — which Hitchcock, at his greatest, never was.

disagree with this so strongly i can't even believe i'm reading it -- this is probably my vote for the most amazing shot in cinema history.

Re Mulholland: It's not a gimmick if there's a purpose to it beyond gimmickry.

OG's complaint seems just a more luxe edition of the "I don't get it" offense.

"lushly comprehensible," um, OK

i don't even think of it as 'poetic.' one moment you're trapped, along with the characters, in this horrible, impossibly fucked-up situation, and then -- in a single sudden shot -- hitch gives you the only possible way out. and the final shot of stewart standing there on the balcony lasts just long enough for you to take in what's happened, and then it's over.

fwiw I have not seen once in this debate, anywhere, mention of Orson Welles' confession that Rosebud is a 'cheap Freudian gimmick' or some such.