Take two: Nearly ten years after the AFI's first 100 Years... 100 Movies countdown, Vertigo (No. 9) and Raging Bull (No. 4) managed to collect enough votes to displace The Graduate (No. 17 now, No. 7 then) and On the Waterfront (No. 19 now, No. 8 then) for ranking in the Top Ten of the new Top 100. But Citizen Kane remains -- as before, and very likely forever -- No. 1. And, hey, you'll get no argument from me over that.Other titles in the upper echelon: The Godfather (No. 2 now, No. 3 then), Casablanca (No. 3/No. 2), Singin' in the Rain (No. 5/No. 10), Gone with the Wind (No. 6/No. 4), Lawrence of Arabia (No. 7/No. 5), Schindler's List (No. 8/No. 9) and The Wizard of Oz (No. 10/No. 6). Safe titles? Maybe. Great titles? Definitely.
David Germain of The Associated Press compares and contrasts the 1998 and 2007 lists here.
3 comments:
Nice to know Scorsese broke into the top ten.
I haven't seen the full list yet, but The Sixth Sense??? Man, 1999 had way better films. Weren't Magnolia or American Beauty even nominated?
Anyhow, I'll probably go over the list tomorrow and bitch some, but at least the top ten is respectable...
Well, don't me started about The Sound of Music (No. 40)...
To put a movie like Raging Bull at number 4 is one of the worst misjudgments I think I've ever seen. How does a poorly written, thematically incoherent movie like this - with a characters that are nothing more than ciphers & a pretentiously self-important mix of eye candy boxing scenes with opera music - rank so high on the list?
Nothing more clearly illustrates the infantilisation of American culture - by which I mean the preference for style over substance & the appearance of profundity - than the elevation of this dreadfully medicore movie to the top ranks. It's deeply depressing.
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