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

Seems like progressing from loving North By Northwest to loving Vertigo is what goes with the river of life's current.

I've become less anguished with age.

Talking of which, not Taxi Driver so far.

I don't mind running an all-time poll as soon as I can come up with something better than Schmight and Schmound.

Spite and pwnd

Spite & Stanned

Anyway.

I could just as soon put LE RAYON VERT on mine too, Alba

sorry

Chronologically:

Duck Amuck (Jones 1953)
Yojimbo (Kurosawa 1961)
PlayTime (Tati 1967)
Repo Man (Cox 1984)
Home Alone (Columbus 1990)
Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (Mamet 1996)
The Prince of Egypt (Wells/Hickner/Chapman 1998)
The Matrix (Wachowski/Wachowski 1999)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki 2001)
Lady Bird (Gerwig 2017)

Etre et avoir (Philibert, 2002)

The final fillum cut from my own list, but I'd probably wedge it in there somewhere if this wasn't all just for pretend.

Women In Revolt (Morrissey)
Come and See (Klimov)
Safe (Haynes)
Andrei Rublev(Tarkovsky)
Syndromes and A Century (Weerasthakul)
Quiz Show (Redford)
La Jetee (Marker)
Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)
Days of Heaven (Malick)
The Elephant Man (Lynch)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
Code Unknown (Haneake)

Quiz Show hell yeah

+ Beau Travail (Denis)

& delete Days of heaven, I suppose.

yeah Silby!

A canonical Jewish movie imo

“I’m acquainted with rugelach.”
“How’d a guy like you get in to Harvard?”

amazing scriptwriting throughout that one.

Etre et avoir--liked it a lot, great ending (a career in teaching punctuated with a sigh), but I thought the teacher was a little too idealized; he was the perfect teacher anyone who's done it rarely is.

- What's the special?

- It's the Reuben.

- The Reuben sandwich is the only entirely invented sandwich. Won the National Sandwich contest two years ago.

-A salient point.

-Who invented it?

-Uh, Reuben kay, at a poker game in Omaha.

- I knew there was a ''k'' in Nebraska.

-Unfortunately they have the sandwich here, but, uh, they don't seem to have any Reubens.

Touche.

I love that you love it, ALS.

Oh, Jesus, I just realized -- we watched your show.

the green ray / LE RAYON VERT... needs a US release. I understand there is a lovely Region 2 boxset. it's a beautiful film. what is the hold up? only Rohmer in print in the US is the Six Moral Tales set (and that's only recently back in print).

ok but maybe just one drawing from the critics & directors 2012 pool

L'AVVENTURA
PLAYTIME
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
NASHVILLE
CHINATOWN
VERTIGO
PERSONA
CLOSE-UP
TAXI DRIVER
THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

eliminating all cinema before 1960 or 1970 seems to be a thing; not cool, if it mattered

A ballot without one movie from the 20s or 30s is suspicious. As is a ballot without one movie from after 1980.

If you made a list of your favourite albums, how many Dylan/Beatles/Velvet Underground/Chuck Berry/Creedence Clearwater/Neil Young albums would be on there? If there weren't any, would your list therefore become suspicious?

Yes.

I don't get that. That's the mindset that produces these horribly rote greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists.

Oh, you meant if my list didn't have any of those on it, not yours. In that case, the answer is obviously no.

You're dodging the question artfully and humorously. If the answer is, "Things should be done this way--by everybody else, not me," then okay, I'm guilty of that too sometimes.

Is the suspicion that the listmaker failed to engage with those works at all or that, having engaged, they weren't strongly compelled to include them among their wafer-thin ten-item list of the all-time greatest films among the 849,291,193 films in existence?

I haven't looked at everyone's lists, but if the lists of a couple of acquaintances under 30 I've seen on Twitter are any indication, I'd question their devotion to film if only one film in twenty is international.

Exactly what I wanted to say. In 1970 or whenever, I can maybe see John Simon or somebody superciliously assuming that the absence of such films indicates someone never having seen them. Which is irrelevant anyway, but if such things bother you, whatever. In 2020, start with the assumption that everybody's seen everything, or at least as much as they choose to...(xpost)That really pushes a button with me. "Devotion to film"?--jesus. Please explain what that means. I've been watching films for 50+ years, have a degree in film, have contributed to film magazines, and have zero international films in my Top 10. Am I not sufficiently devoted?

(I meant that OL's post was exactly what I wanted to say.)

I am not devoted to film but mostly because I am a dilettante who spreads himself too thin to claim devotion to any of his innumerable areas of interest. But I do like me some movin' pictures!

That really pushes a button with me. "Devotion to film"?--jesus. Please explain what that means. I've been watching films for 50+ years, have a degree in film, have contributed to film magazines, and have zero international films in my Top 10. Am I not sufficiently devoted?

― clemenza, Thursday, February 27, 2020 9

Ah! I swear I didn't even see your list. But you're the writer from whom I wouldn't expect the total exclusion of those films because of your pedigree, which, yeah, I do find peculiar, in the same way I'd find it peculiar if a rock critic included not one R&B/hip-hop album in a top ten or twenty. We'd still get drinks and talk, though, as I press Dreyer and Ohio Players.

Uh, you have ten international films in your top ten, clemenza

They haven't been excluded--they're just not among my 10 favorite. A few are close, but so what? You're trying to quantify something that can't be quantified. If I move one from just outside the top 10 (or top 20) into the top 10 (or top 20), that's the magical key that changes everything? Suspicion of my devotion is lifted? I'd be a lot more suspicious of one of those some-assembly-required lists under discussion last night. But as I get older, I try not to waste time even doing that--people list what they list.

I probably shouldn't have a drink in my hand in this scenario, Alfred.

Qualification for inclusion in my top ten was extended to films that made me say 'wow' or 'whoa' or 'gee' or left me speechless or made me weep like a newborn infant. There are more than ten of those films, my apologies to those excluded.

This is why I ask the question in the first place. The thing about me and lists and this exercise in particular which seems to me should be self-evident is that what's exciting to me about making this list is how it can be used to communicate the crucial bigness of the medium, how many movements, genres, eras its explored in just 125 or so years. To do that in only 10 movies requires, yes, some strategizing.

I have no qualm with doing the entirely rational thing of just instinctively grabbing at the 10 titles that most float your boat. Just as I would assume my opinion that doing so can potentially communicate ossified provincialism is no skin off your nose.

Come and See (Klimov)

I just watched a trailer and this is going to ruin me.

clem, I'm sorry for impugning your tastes, which was not my intention. Like I wrote, I hadn't even seen your list. I had in mind far younger fans for whom films not in English are like eating cauliflower or spinach.

I love list-making because doing so is a mix of instinct, posturing, and calculation. When I participated in P&J I'd on occasion omit favorite albums of the year because I knew they'd place anyway and I wanted to prop up something cool. In my state film critics circle's second ballot I'll form ad hoc coalitions with others to rally behind performances and films we may like a little less than what made our own lists but are way better and less predictable than the consensus picks. This is fun.

(xpost) If you treat your list as a project, then I guess I can see that...I just don't know why you'd want to do that--or even try to do that--in a list of 10 films. People write books when they want to communicate all those things. To me, it's a list of your 10 favourite films, the 10 films you most want to see right now. And how much a list interests me is in inverse proportion to how tied it is to TSPDT's Top 100. If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before. I don't get any sense of the person, and I don't learn anything.

(xpost) Don't worry--I've been impugned before, and will be impugned again.

It's just different for different people, I guess. My ten favorite films definitely aren't the ten films I want to see right now.

I picked ten films I quite like and would happily argue each one is Great if pressed.

I’m def the least knowledgeable “voter” itt so far!

If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before.

This is a valid point: the greatest hits tossed around a bit. But! Lists are educational too. If, say, Chimes at Midnight or French Cancan appear on a list instead of Kane or Rules of the Game, I might, depending on the person, be tempted to give those films a second look.

Anyway, when I look at Eric's list right at the beginning of the thread, it's a very idiosyncratic, interesting list--reminds of the one B. Ruby Rich stuck in the middle of all the Godfather-Nashville-Taxi Driver lists in James Monaco's American Film Now--so I'm not sure what we're arguing about.

And how much a list interests me is in inverse proportion to how tied it is to TSPDT's Top 100. If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before.

On this I agree.

I'm still unclear as to how a mindset that elides Dylan/Beatles/Velvet Underground/Chuck Berry/Creedence Clearwater/Neil Young results in "horribly rote greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists" when those are exactly the artists that used to clog greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists when Rolling Stone was relevant, but I'm fine letting it be.

Sherlock Jr.
Simon of the Desert
Andrei Rublev
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Commando
Cobra
Robocop
John Wick
Paddington 2
Mandy

Mandy I feel is one that we can expect to see creeping into more and more of these lists. Might be in my 11-20.