Another 100 pictures, another bundle of spurious reasoning

Well, everyone else seems to be doing it, wrestling with it, whatever. Everyone seems to be attempting a definitive personal 100 of late. So, even later to the party, here's a British voice added to the mix.

For me, I think I struggled a little about 2 years ago when the moment to compile such a list suddenly hit, the opportunity to spend the necessary time constructing it arose and a momentary lapse of self-consciousness compelled me to be honest about what can often descend into a canonical parrot routine. In truth it didn't take long and I took the Schickel/Corliss route of simply noting down pictures I liked and admired, eventually whittling down that list from about 200+ to where it stands now. And there was my list. It's changed a few times in the interim and I've lost a couple of things along the way and chipped in several more.

I only let myself be led by one criteria: don't let it read like a list of perceived popular quality of the sort devised by Channel 4 viewers or readers of Empire whose frame of reference extends to few places north of 1969 and even fewer where they talk in subtitles and where Kurosawa seems the single touchstone of that foreignness worth aligning to.

God forbid 'Life Is Beautiful' is held up as a latter day example of quality either.

My relationship with these lists is touchy at best. I pour enthusiastically over Sight & Sound's bi-decadal pronouncements, often rewarded with a list by Takeshi Miike or Danny Cannon or Kim Newman that sparkles gemlike with a Darkman or a Jacob's Ladder or a Let's Scare Jessica To Death amongst the expected Bergman, Hitchcock and Renoir. But more often the popu-lists of less devout publications rile the elitist in me. Not that I'm that much of a movie fascist -- alright, there's some of that there, but since I count pictures by Anthony Hickox and Douglas Sirk amongst my personal pantheon, I guess I mostly absolve myself in the practical portion of the test. My issue is this: if you declare yourself committed enough to get to the point of qualitatively ranking films you'd better bring more than a 1st 2nd or 3rd placing at the pub film quiz to the table. Harsh, certainly. But true. To goad yourself into creating a list of any number of best pictures/songs/books indicates that you've thought enough about your love of movies/tunes/words that you feel capable of doing something so divisive and frustrating in the first place.

To illustrate my deeply pedantic and supercilious point, there's the first 10% of an Empire list from 1999 compiled by the readers of the magazine.

1. Star Wars
2. Jaws
3. The Empire Strikes Back
4. The Shawshank Redemption
5. Goodfellas
6. Pulp Fiction
7. The Godfather
8. Saving Private Ryan
9. Schindler's List
10. Titanic

(FYI: Life Is Beautiful comes in at #93.)

(FYI 2.0: 2003 yielded something better as it seemed the magazine had gained no new readers, simply the same crowd who'd simply grown up more and discovered Fight Club. A fine picture which found itself falling behind The Lord Of The Rings, now "the best picture ever made", apparently according to this new poll. I like Jackson's three pictures well enough, the whole complete entity is in my Top 100, but it's nowhere near the actual top.)

And I mean, come on. Star Wars is a picture saved by John Williams, a little imagination and buckets of youthful exuberance. It barely qualifies as a great story, let alone the greatest film ever made. It's fine, fine entertainment, but as Richard Dyer argues in a book of the same name, films are rarely "Only Entertainment" (nor are they "only intellectual exercises", "only mighty polemics" or "only subtle examinations of human behaviours". They can be all or nothing of these, but greatness doesn't rest on a single one of those virtues and nothing else).

Look, I'm a terrible reader. It's the bane of my life. I know I should read more fiction, but to my shame, the spines on those copies of Dickens, Camus and Waugh bought in a moment of committed optimism remain mostly unbroken. I am a shitty, shitty reader. And I wouldn't dream of compiling a list of what I consider my favourite books. It'd be grossly disingenuous. More than that, a total swizz. And a posturing one at that. Imagine if I supposed thus:

1. Gone With The Wind
2. Dracula
3. Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire
4. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
5. The Stand
6. Catcher In The Rye
7. The Firm
8. Breakfast At Tiffany's
9. something by Paulo Coelho
10. The Lord Of The Rings


Pretty strong stuff, eh? For a 12 year old maybe. (I'll say now that I've only actually read 3 1/2 of that list, probably less than many 12 years olds today have but my point still stands...shakily maybe, but stands all the same)

And the crux of my thesis here? It's not even an annoyance that someone, somewhere truly feels those 10 pictures at the peak of Empire's list are the greatest ever made. That's fine. I love that someone has 10 pictures which make them impassioned enough to declare their love for them in so public and declamatory a fashion. But you get the feeling there's not much more depth to their viewing habits if -- as in the 1999 Empire 'Best List' -- Austin Powers International Man Of Mystery and Armageddon a) appear on anyone's list of 100 best films, and b) appear atop Unforgiven, Once Upon A Time In America and Annie Hall. It just strikes me as an immensely limited sphere of interest in pictures as a 100 year old medium if they really are convinced that those titles are the 10, 25, 50 or 100 greatest pictures you've ever seen. Bravo, readers of Empire (Britain's "Best Film Magazine"), bravo.

And much as it may appear that way, this is not a snobbery against the mainstream entertainment that's laudably present on many similar, but more well-rounded lists. Jaws is a fine picture. The Empire Strikes Back is as sharp blockbuster as any I think of. The Shawshank Redemption is lovely and Pulp Fiction is formally brilliant. But I find it hard to believe anyone that loves film so much as to make a list devoted to it would not seek out the films which inspired the exceptionally cineliterate filmmakers behind these ultimately derivative modern touchstones. If they did they would find in those pictures a skill and resonance that has made them evergreen rather than simply enticing to a newly media ultrasavvy generation. How else to explain The Matrix being held up as a zenith of tricksy screenwriting and invention and Howard Hawks nowhere to be seen on the list.

There's nothing wrong with having Star Wars in your Top 10 pictures of all time either. The one list I have read which was, to all intents and purposes, most aligned to the similarly well rolling-eyeballed AFI list this past year is Roger Corman's in the 2002 Sight & Sound poll:

1. Battleship Potemkin
2. Citizen Kane
3. The Seventh Seal
4. Lawrence of Arabia
5. The Godfather
6. The Grapes of Wrath
7. Shane
8. On the Waterfront
9. Star Wars
10. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

There you go. Star Wars at #9. But it's sandwiched between Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront And Robert Wiene's and The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. To me, that's an important signifier. I figure Roger Corman has contributed enough to film history to be taken at his word when declares, for him and on his terms, that these are the best pictures he's ever seen. I am in no doubt he's seen 1000s. Hell, he made as many as that. The (moderate) diversity in his selections indicates it's not just about simple spectacle. There's an appreciation of the history -- and not just the immediate gratification -- of pictures there.

Critic and writer Kim Newman (whose own -- subtitle-free, I notice, not that that's an indicator of quality -- list comprised of:

1. Apocalypse Now
2. Blue Velvet
3. A Canterbury Tale
4. Citizen Kane
5. Inferno
6. The King of Comedy
7. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
8. Notorious
9. The Shining
10. To Have and Have Not)

has said that he's not entirely trusting of anyone that doesn't have at least one oddity in their personal pantheon. I have to agree. For me, the truly diverse viewer, whether it's Jim Hoberman and Flaming Creatures or Stuart Gordon and Behind The Green Door, marks themselves out by these idiosyncrasies.

Not because they have to be different, but because I think we can all agree there's more to cinema than safe nostalgia, hulking crowd-pleasers and perceived establishment bastions. That's what got Paul Schrader and the AFI into hot water to varying degress. And it's ultimatly the sheer obviousness of many so called Best Lists that galls. Welcome newcomers to film fanaticism will probably use these scrawls as their personal compass on the cinematic journey, just as I have done in the past. You learn from those more experienced. And if there aren't honestly penned options, then how will these lists ever change? They'll pass down from film consuming generation to film downloading generation (oooh, incisive!). Some magisterial pictures really do deserve to remain lauded. Sometimes, however, the emperor has no new clothes.

So, to place my hat in the ring, the following are my 100 very favourite pictures. It's not a perfect list yet. There are a host of pictures I expect to challenge the status quo in due course. I have much Dryer and Ozu and Bresson, Altman and Ashby and Melville and Fuller still to get to on my vast 'to watch' pile. It's also in simple alpahbetical order. Yes that's a cop out. For now. Ranking it is the next arduous task. But as it stands now, this is a pretty good indicator of me -- elitist, contradictory, arrogant and hypocritical me, of course. But there you go, I'm passionate.

I want to take each film as it comes and go into what it is about it that makes it so special to me. I'm half expecting this very process to exorcise a few titles that snuck onto the list through some misguided fidelity to the perceived wisdom which I rail against above. I'll hold my hands up and shoot each one through the head with zero qualms if I have to. It's all a learning curve for me.

That 100.

A Night To Remember (1958) Dir: Roy Ward Baker
A Place In The Sun (1951) Dir: George Stevens
All That Heaven Allows (1955) Dir: Douglas Sirk
All The President's Men (1976) Dir: Alan J. Pakula
Annie Hall (1977) Dir: Woody Allen
Asphalt Jungle, The (1950) Dir: John Huston
Band Wagon, The (1953) Dir: Vincente Minnelli
Battle Royale (2002) Dir: Kinji Fukasaku
Beautiful Girls (1996) Dir: Ted Demme
Blob, The (1988) Dir: Chuck Russell
Blood Simple (1984) Dir: Joel Coen/Ethan Coen
Blow Out (1981) Dir: Brian De Palma
Blue Velvet (1986) Dir: David Lynch
Born On The 4th July (1989) Dir: Oliver Stone
Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garicia (1974) Dir: Sam Peckinpah
Bullet In The Head (1990) Dir: John Woo
Carlito's Way (1993) Dir: Brian De Palma
Changeling, The (1980) Dir: Peter Medak
Chinatown (1974) Dir: Roman Polanski
Citizen Kane (1941) Dir: Orsen Welles
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) Dir: Steven Spielberg
Come and See (1985) Dir Elem Klimov
Curse Of The Demon (1957) Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Dark Passage (1947) Dir: Delmer Daves
Dawn Of The Dead (1979) Dir: George A. Romero
Dead Ringers (1988) Dir: David Cronenberg
Deep Red (1975) Dir: Dario Argento
Deer Hunter, The (1978) Dir: Michael Cimino
Deliverance (1972) Dir: John Boorman
Die Hard (1988) Dir: John McTiernan
Don't Look Now (1972) Dir: Nicholas Roeg
Edward Scissorhands (1990) Dir: Tim Burton
Exorcist III, The (1990) Dir: William Peter Blatty
Fly, The (1986) Dir: David Cronenberg
Fog, The (1980) Fir: John Carpenter
French Connection, The (1971) Dir: William Friedkin
Godfather/Godfather Part II, The (1972/1974) Dir: Francis Ford Coppola
Goodfellas (1990) Dir: Martin Scorsese
Grande illusion, La (1937) Dir: Jean Renoir
Groundhog Day (1993) Dir: Harold Ramis
Halloween (1978) Dir: John Carpenter
Hannah And Her Sisters (1986) Dir: Woody Allen
Heat (1995) Dir: Michael Mann
His Girl Friday (1940) Dir: Howard Hawks
Infernal Affairs II (2003) Dir: Andrew Lau/Alan Mak
Inferno (1980) Dir: Dario Argento
Jacob's Ladder (1990) Dir: Adrian Lyne
JFK (1991) Dir: Oliver Stone
Kill Bill - The Whole Bloody Affair (2003/4) Dir: Quentin Tarantino
Killer, The (1989) Dir: John Woo
King Kong (1933) Dir: Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack
Lady Eve, The (1941) Dir: Preston Sturges
Last Embrace, The (1979) Dir: Jonathan Demme
Last Picture Show, The (1971) Dir: Peter Bogdanovich
Le Cercle Rouge (1970) Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
Le Samourai (1967) Dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
Leopard, The (1963) Dir: Luchino Visconti
Long Day Closes, The (1988) Dir: Terence Davies
Manchurian Candidate, The (1962) Dir: John Frankenheimer
Manhattan (1970) Dir: Woody Allen
Marathon Man (1976) Dir: John Schlesinger
Midnight Run (1988) Dir: Martin Brest
Mildred Pierce (1945) Dir: Michael Curtiz
Mission, The (1999) Dir: Johnnie To
Night Of The Hunter (1955) Dir: Charles Laughton
Night Of The Living Dead (1968) Dir: George A. Romero
Oldboy (2003) Dir: Park Chan wook
On The Waterfront (1954) Dir: Elia Kazan
Once Upon A Time In America (1984) Dir: Sergio Leone
Out Of The Past (1947) Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Outlaw Josey Wales, The (1976) Dir: Clint Eastwood
Overlord (1975) Dir: Stuart Cooper
Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973) Dir: Sam Peckinpah
Pickup On South Street (1953) Dir: Sam Fuller
Point Blank (1967) Dir: John Boorman
Prodigal Son, The (1982) Dir: Sammo Hung
Rear Window (1954) Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Red Shoes, The (1948) Dir: Michael Powell
Remains Of The Day, The (1993) Dir: James Ivory
Runaway Train (1985) Dir: Andrei Konchalovsky
Searchers, The (1956) Dir: John Ford
Seven Samurai, The (1954) Dir: Akira Kurosawa
Silence Of The Lambs, The (1990) Dir: Jonathan Demme
Singin' In The Rain (1952) Dir: Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen
Stand By Me (1986) Dir: Rob Reiner
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (1927) Dir: F.W. Murnau
Sunset Boulevard (1950) Dir: Billy Wilder
Suspiria (1977) Dir: Dario Argento
Tae Guk Gi (2004) Dir: Je-gyu Kang
Taxi Driver (1976) Dir: Martin Scorsese
Thing, The (1982) Dir: John Carpenter
Third Man, The (1949) Dir: Carol Reed
This Is Spinal Tap (1984) Dir: Rob Reiner
Tootsie (1982) Dir: Sydney Pollack
True Romance (1993) Dir: Tony Scott
Umberto D (1952) Dir: Vitorio De Sica
Unforgiven (1992) Dir: Clint Eastwood
Vertigo (1958) Dir: Alfred Hitchcock
Waxwork (1988) Dir: Anthony Hickox
Wild Bunch, The (1969) Dir: Sam Peckinpah