Essentially, it's the No Fun List -- or, rather, films which are only fun, and do not take themselves seriously, found no place on the list. Where were the Mel Brooks comedies? Where were Die Hard, Juraissic Park and The Matrix? Why was Raiders of the Lost Ark all the way down at 66? Why were there only two animated films on the list -- Toy Story and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?
For all our hopes about the last decade, only four recent films joined the list -- in order, LOTR, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic and The Sixth Sense. Yeah, once I saw Silence of the Lambs down at 74, I was pretty sure Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind wasn't going to sneak in ahead of it.
And the broadcast itself was sub-par. Too much fandom, not enough insight. If you're going to hail Citizen Kane as the Gratist Film Ever (not that there's anything at all wrong with that), say why, and it's not because of the sled. It's because a ballsy 25-year-old wrote, directed and starred in a movie taking down one of the titans of his age, and did so using every available trick in the cinematic and narrative vocabulary, and then cinematographer Gregg Toland some new tricks like deep focus to explode what filmmaking could do and show. It's an utterly modern film that still surprises every time you see it . . . and all they really talked about was the damn sled. (In ALOTT5MA terms, this show needed fewer Padmas and Heidis, and more Colicchios and Gunns.)
Now, that said, it's a much better list than the one which preceded it a decade ago: silent comedies finally got their due, with Buster Keaton's The General debuting on the list at #18, and Charlie Chaplin's films all rising -- City Lights at 11 (from 76), The Gold Rush at 58 (from 74) and Modern Times, one of my top-three all-time films, inching up to 78 from 81. And several other big leaps reflected the modern revisionist canon -- Raging Bull at 4 (from 24), Vertigo all the way up to 9 (from 61) and John Ford's magnificent The Searchers climbing all the way to 12 from 96. Among the older films which missed the last list but made the cut this time were Nashville (59), Sullivan's Travels (61), Cabaret (63), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (67)and The Shawshank Redemption (72).
Most grievous omission? Might be His Girl Friday, perhaps the best romantic comedy ever. But I'm sure you've got more to say on all this.
e.t.a for AFI voter Carrie Rickey: "These titles are classics for good reason, even though I'm more partial to Coppola's Godfather II, (ranked # 32) and Hitchcock's North by Northwest (ranked #55) than the films by those directors that made the top 10. Still, I scan the lit and ask, Best. Films. Ever.? ...I would say half the films on the top 100 -- Titanic is not one of them -- combine popularity with resonance and universality and would probably get my vote.... But as with most elections, the best candidate might not get nominated. I'm one of the 1500 movie professionals who cast a ballot. There were 400 titles nominated and we each got five write-ins. It rankled that of the 400 that made the nominations cut, only 4.5 were directed by women. I can't remember how many were directed by people of color, but it was even fewer. (One, Do The Right Thing ranked #98 at the final count.) As a point of principle, my write-ins were films directed by women, including Clueless, A League of Their Own and Something's Gotta Give, Mikey & Nicky and Lost in Translation."
e.t.a. deus--Here's the list of the 23 films (via Wikipedia) that made the cut a decade ago, but fell off the list this time:
- All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) (54)
- Amadeus (1984) (53)
- An American in Paris (1951) (68)
- The Birth of a Nation (1915) (44)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) (64)
- Dances With Wolves (1990) (75)
- Doctor Zhivago (1965) (39)
- Fantasia (1940) (58)
- Fargo (1996) (84)
- Frankenstein (1931) (87)
- From Here to Eternity (1953) (52)
- Giant (1956) (82)
- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) (99)
- The Jazz Singer (1927) (90)
- The Manchurian Candidate (1962) (67)
- Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (86)
- My Fair Lady (1964) (91)
- Patton (1970) (89)
- A Place in the Sun (1951) (92)
- Rebel Without a Cause (1955) (59)
- Stagecoach (1939) (63)
- The Third Man (1949) (57)
- Wuthering Heights (1939) (73)
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