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great_badir -> RE: great badir's top 150 films (6/2/2006 9:03:46 AM)
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Thanks for the good comments. adamdavidsmith - don't get me wrong, I like Rings and Shawshank but, like Star Wars, they really don't reflect the stuff that really makes me tick. I just want to take a little side-step from this for a moment (don't worry mods, and anyone else following me - the list will continue after this interlude) - Halfway through Werner Herzog's rather good Grizzly Man on Saturday night, I was struck with the realisation of how futile lists really are because for every film you include, you later remember another ten that could have been included just as easily - whilst looking through the coming week's TV schedule, I noticed that The Station Agent was showing on one of the Sky Cinema channels and I immediately thought "I should've put that in!!". Then, last week, I was watching a program about the Challenger shuttle disaster and, during one slo-mo shot of the crew walking to their terrible fate, I didn't think "those poor guys" as I should have done, but I instead thought of Kaufman's The Right Stuff - how can a top 150 be without The Right Stuff!?!?!?!? (I haven't, as it happens, added either one of them). And when you think of those other choices you could have made, you then you go off on tangents and start to think on individual terms - director, genre, actor etc etc. To take Herzog as an example, I have only a small handful of Herzog (one of my favourite directors) films on this list and, again during Grizzly Man, I realised that out of the fifty odd films (and counting) he's made, at least twenty of them more than deserve a placing in any top fifty and at least ten of those are masterpieces, running the full gamut from short, to documentary, to TV movie and feature films. Of course, a list made up of Herzog films and little else will only make for interesting reading if you're a Herzog fan, but it's a good illustration of the point i'm making. The other thing to note here is your mood at the time of watching - for every high-brow inclusion, one mood-swing later there may be something else you want to watch that couldn't be any more different. I mean, who's to say that if I wasn't in the mood for, say, Les Yeux Sans Visage, that the film I go for would be Deuce Bigelow or some such! To put it another way, ALL film fans always have those moments when their hand hovers over Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, before shrugging their shoulders and heading straight for The Magnificent Seven instead. Of the (probably) tens of thousands of films i've seen (more a sad confession to the hours i've spent glued to the screen, than a boast of prowess) in 23-odd years of film watching, coming up with 150 of what I consider to be the best was HARD. My top 10 has always been fairly stable and made up of films that have been up there pretty much since I saw them, so that was easy. But then thinking of 140 others??? As I said at the beginning of the thread, the list originally existed as a top 100 in another forum. Since then, i've seen a lot of new films, re-watched a lot of older films and formed new opinions about films I wasn't sure about and, as such, one's opinions are bound to change and, comparing this 150 to the old 100 it's obvious to me that i've moved a fair amount of stuff around. If I was to complete this by the end of this week (which I won't) and decided to do it all over again in a couple of week's time, i'm sure it won't be the same. At the end of the day, lists are merely self-serving ephemera and (If i'm honest) somewhat show-offy. However, it is always good to know that someone reading all this (as in Jack's Rage's case) will go and seek out something they might not have previously considered seeing. But still the fact remains that lists are very individual and far from an accurate picture of one person's real opinions. So, on that note, may the list continue!!!!!!!!!!
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