A Tale of Two Film Lists

I thought I'd be nice and post something on here, even this close to the election, that's not political for a change.

Now you people who have been reading this blog for a while now (and both of you know who you are) know that I have a thing about lists. Doesn't matter what kind. You could post a list of the best left-handed Latvian baseball pitchers and I could find fault with it. But the fact is that most lists, and especially most cultural lists, are just pathetic. The people involved don't put enough thought into them, they just reel off the first things they can think of (which means the last things they've seen and/or read) and the end result is invariably lame.

Well, Empire Magazine has proven this thesis right yet again. They recently published a list of what they consider to be The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.

Take a look at just the top 50:

1. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
3. Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
4. Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994)
5. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
6. GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
7. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
8. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)
9. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
10. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)
11. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
12. The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960)
13. Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
14. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
15. The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
16. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
17. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
18. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
19. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
20. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
21. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
22. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977)
23. Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
24. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)
25. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1967)
26. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
27. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
28. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
29. Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
30. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
31. Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939)
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)
33. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
34. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)
35. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)
36. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969)
37. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
38. Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
39. The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski, 1999)
40. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
41. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
42. Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
43. The Big Lebowski (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1998)
44. Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
45. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
46. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
47. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
48. This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
49. Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1987)
50. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Gives you a pretty good sense of who reads Empire Magazine, doesn't it? A bunch of retarded fanboys badly in need of girlfriends would be my guess.

Empire Magazine's list is a joke, but I recently stumbled over another list that isn't. Cahiers du Cinema (whose readers presumably aren't the same retarded fanboys who read Empire) published a list of what they call The 100 Most Beautiful Films in the World.

Here's their list:

Citizen Kane - Orson Welles
The Night of the Hunter - Charles Laughton
The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) - Jean Renoir
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (L’Aurore) - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
L’Atalante - Jean Vigo
M - Fritz Lang
Singin’ in the Rain - Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
Vertigo - Alfred Hitchcock
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) - Marcel Carné
The Searchers - John Ford
Greed - Erich von Stroheim
Rio Bravo - Howard Hawks
To Be or Not to Be - Ernst Lubitsch
Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu
Contempt (Le Mépris) - Jean-Luc Godard
Tales of Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) - Kenji Mizoguchi
City Lights - Charlie Chaplin
The General - Buster Keaton
Nosferatu the Vampire - Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
The Music Room - Satyajit Ray
Freaks - Tod Browning
Johnny Guitar - Nicholas Ray
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) - Jean Eustache
The Great Dictator - Charlie Chaplin
The Leopard (Le Guépard) - Luchino Visconti
Hiroshima, Mon Amour - Alain Resnais
Pandora's Box - G.W. Pabst
North by Northwest - Alfred Hitchcock
Pickpocket - Robert Bresson
Casque d’or - Jacques Becker
The Barefoot Contessa - Joseph Mankiewitz
Moonfleet - Fritz Lang
The Earrings of Madame de… - Max Ophüls
Le Plaisir - Max Ophüls
The Deer Hunter - Michael Cimino
L'Avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni
Battleship Potemkin - Sergei M. Eisenstein
Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock
Ivan the Terrible - Sergei M. Eisenstein
The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola
Touch of Evil - Orson Welles
The Wind - Victor Sjöström
2001: A Space Odyssey - Stanley Kubrick
Fanny and Alexander - Ingmar Bergman
The Crowd - King Vidor
8 1/2 - Federico Fellini
La Jetée - Chris Marker
Pierrot le Fou - Jean-Luc Godard
Le Roman d’un tricheur - Sacha Guitry
Amarcord - Federico Fellini
La Belle et la Bête - Jean Cocteau
Some Like It Hot - Billy Wilder
Some Came Running - Vincente Minnelli
Gertrud - Carl Theodor Dreyer
King Kong - Ernst Shoedsack & Merian J. Cooper
Laura - Otto Preminger
The Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa
The 400 Blows - François Truffaut
La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini
The Dead - John Huston
Trouble in Paradise - Ernst Lubitsch
It’s a Wonderful Life - Frank Capra
Monsieur Verdoux - Charlie Chaplin
The Passion of Joan of Arc - Carl Theodor Dreyer
À bout de souffle - Jean-Luc Godard
Apocalypse Now - Francis Ford Coppola
Barry Lyndon - Stanley Kubrick
La Grande Illusion - Jean Renoir
Intolerance - David Wark Griffith
Partie de campagne - Jean Renoir
Playtime - Jacques Tati
Rome, Open City - Roberto Rossellini
Senso - Luchino Visconti
Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin
Van Gogh - Maurice Pialat
An Affair to Remember - Leo McCarey
Andrei Rublev - Andrei Tarkovsky
The Scarlet Empress - Joseph von Sternberg
Sansho the Bailiff - Kenji Mizoguchi
Talk to Her - Pedro Almodóvar
The Party - Blake Edwards
Tabu - F.W. Murnau
The Bandwagon - Vincente Minnelli
A Star Is Born - George Cukor
M. Hulot’s Holiday - Jacques Tati
America, America - Elia Kazan
El - Luis Buñuel
Kiss Me Deadly - Robert Aldrich
Once Upon a Time in America - Sergio Leone
Le Jour se lève - Marcel Carné
Letter from an Unknown Woman - Max Ophüls
Lola - Jacques Demy
Manhattan - Woody Allen
Mulholland Dr. - David Lynch
Ma nuit chez Maud - Eric Rohmer
Nuit et Brouillard - Alain Resnais
The Gold Rush - Charlie Chaplin
Scarface - Howard Hawks
Bicycle Thieves - Vittorio de Sica
Napoléon - Abel Gance

Now, I'm not going to say that I agree with every film on this list (I don't), but it's intellectually respectable. Which is more than you can say about the Empire Magazine list. In fact, if you wanted to know more about film, you could do a lot worse than plow your way through ther Cahiers du Cinema list.