Best Movies of All Time
Everett (6)You like us, you really like us. You also hate us. Anyway, you click on us, which is the surest way a website has of measuring interest in its content. Thousands of readers have written in to cheer or challenge our selections, and thousands more have voted for their own favorites. The response simply underscores Richard and my long held belief that everybody has two jobs: his own and movie critic.
The idea was to assemble 100 estimable films since TIME began, with the March 3, 1923 issue. Later, each of us was asked to contribute five items in sidebars called Great Performances (acting), Guilty Pleasures (trash treasures) and Top Scores (soundtracks). Essentially, though, a century of movies from 82 years. That shouldn be hard: pick a picture for each year, with 18 slots left for honorable mentions.
Not so simple, in fact, for we faced a couple of complications. The first was that two of us were to agree on the selections; and, though my admiration for Schickel is hardly bounded, and he probably doesn mind me, no two critics will agree on all, or even most, great films. The other is the onus of the list making process. It a truism that a list like this takes either an hour (go with your initial inspirations) or a month (weigh every film with Solomonic probity). Our effort clocked in at about four months, off and on. And the clock is still running.
canada goose black friday sale Why do the list? I guess Josh and Mark and Jim Kelly, our peerless leader, hoped to sharpen the profile of the website, and indirectly the magazine. (Mission accomplished.) Our genial PR mavens saw some benefits in media exposure. (Schickel and I, in our first joint TV appearance after 25 years sharing the TIME film critic gig, gassed with Charlie Rose last week.) It possible that someone involved with the enterprise wanted to make canada goose outlet toronto money. Not I, of course. As a TIME staff member, I write for the website pro bono, or rather pro ego. Or, honestly, for the fun of it. That how this TIME 100 started for me, and how it ended. canada goose black friday sale
Canada Goose Parka I feel one of my grand gender generalizations coming on, and I can resist it, so here goes. Guys canada goose outlet boston love to make lists. The assembling and codifying of useless information speaks to our inner math nerd, our canada goose outlet houston rampant nostalgiast. Girls can play Little canada goose outlet woodbury League baseball now, but the kid in the stands keeping the box score, and tallying individual achievements into season slugging percentages, is very likely to be a boy. Turning our pastimes into numbers is a way not only of quantifying but also of justifying them. They acquire an atomic weight; to rank them is to give them solidity, meaning. Canada Goose Parka
As a kid I would study the major league batting averages in the Sunday paper more assiduously than any school subject, and I kept box scores of the games our neighborhood team played. Sometimes I devised imaginary box scores too. I know what you thinking: he must have been a lonely child. Actually, I wasn I had a loving, indulgent family. But around the nation, countless other kids, more canada goose outlet in uk talented or preoccupied than I, were doing the canada goose outlet in vancouver same thing, bending the MLB numbers, reconfiguring the figures. Eventually they would form a group, the Society for American Baseball Research, SABR for short. One of their group, Bill James, coined the term SABRmetrics to describe the grown up, boy like study of those numbers. The statistics they canada goose outlet online uk produced, and the inferences they made from those stats, would enrich the game and change the way it was played. So there.
As with baseball, so with favorite movies, TV shows, comics. One of my youthful heroes was Fred Von Bernewitz, a Maryland boy not much older than I was. Checklist, a compilation of every story in each of the dozen or so Trend comic books (Vault of Horror, Weird Science, Mad, etc.) that EC published from 1950 to 1954. Bless his innocent obsession. fan addicts that our love was not a waste of time. I mean, how could it be, if so many other shared it? A half century later, with the hardcover, much expanded edition of the Checklist still in print (under the title Tales of Terror! The EC Companion), Von Bernewitz labor of adolescent love is easy to celebrate as trash art pedantry. Back then, though, applying the rudimentary scholarship of list making to comics was as radical as Brando first movie mumble, or the scream of Little Richard on Tall Sally. too was a teenage listmaker. I saw a lot of movies and, at year end, picked my favorites. I recently dug up my Top Five of 1959: The Seventh Seal, Some Like It Hot, North By Northwest, Rio Bravo and Imitation of Life. Looking at this quintet, I marvel at the maturity of my youthful tastes or do I curse my lifelong canada goose outlet toronto address adolescence? since, 46 years later, I nominated all five for the TIME 100. The point is that listmaking is a first step to an informed enthusiasm. Juggling, sifting, thinking about the best films leads to measured judgments, the plundering of film histories, a nascent critical acuity. That how a hobby becomes a craft, sometimes a career. Just add verbs and thoughts.
canadian goose jacket Can the choices Schickel canada goose outlet kokemuksia and I made have the shelf life of the Von Bernewitz checklist? Probably not; this is just one of what must be a hundred 100 best films lists. Does film criticism have an equivalent to SABRmetrics cinemetrics? Not really. You can calibrate genius. There are no Win Scores, no Favorite Toy, for movies and their makers. Many readers would say that Schickel and I have no greater claim than anyone else to impose our crotchets on you. Doesn everyone see a lot of movies and, gradually, amass some all time preferences? Sure. canadian goose jacket
canada goose coats But, pardon me, we better. Our claims to expertise: 1. a combined 80 years (yikes!) writing about films; 2. even more years going back to our movie mad youths as consumers, lovers and analyzers of this art entertainment business hybrid; and 3. a magazine, TIME, that has generously underwritten our cinephilia for, respectively, 32 and 25 years. Our employment is our diploma. canada goose coats
canada goose clearance sale Still and all, list of favorites like the All TIME 100 Movies is just that: a banquet, a groaning board of our fondest prejudices. You all invited to devour the food, or throw it at us. canada goose clearance sale
cheap Canada Goose There are 101 ways to choose 100 of anything. But I participated only in this century selection, so I tell you what I did. cheap Canada Goose
First it like a game: I throwing a party who should be on the guest list? My idea was to invite different sorts for a richer mix. Highbrows and no brows, the solemn and the frivolous, embracing many genres (musical, western) and canada goose outlet eu forms (short films, experimental, documentaries). I want the Marx Brothers to co exist with a Robert Bresson nano drama. And Indian family melodramas to rub shoulders with 70s porno. An eight decade, international melange.
canada goose coats on sale Then it research. I re viewed many of the films under consideration. I looked at the IMDb list of the top 250 films, as voted on by the site members. I dipped once more into Roger Ebert two volumes called The Great Movies, which contain some very thoughtful journalism on the subject. I also took a long browse through the stacks of that moldy old library of film trivia, my brain. The result was about 120 movies, leaving some wiggle room for negotiation. Richard the First (Schickel) had already compiled a list of 116 favorites. Neither of us knew the other preferences until we finished this initial round. After this double blind taste test, the serious work began on the All TIME 100 Movies. canada goose coats on sale
Canada Goose Jackets Finally, then, it like a marriage the intimate exchange of opinions and passions, the business of collating, collaborating and compromising. Once, twice, three times 100: Schickel list, my list, our list. Canada Goose Jackets
Canada Goose online For movie critics, deciding which films are best is an anecdotal way of debating first principles. It theoretical and, toward the end of the process, it personal. Schickel and I were the co captains of a lifeboat, with some of our favorites clinging to the sides, and we had to determine whose stiff fingers to pry off, which noble films to send into the sea of anonymity. Canada Goose online
buy canada goose jacket One buy canada goose uk of the great, not guilty, canada goose outlet uk sale pleasures of this exercise was to spend lots of quality schmoozing time on the canada goose outlet uk fake phone, through e mail and frequently in person with my colleague canada goose outlet nyc on the other coast. But whereas I do all my work for TIME, the magazine and website, he is a busy busy freelance: writing books, contributing a book review column to the Los Angeles Times and cobbling up feature length documentaries on top auteurs, most recently Woody Allen, Charles Chaplin and Martin Scorsese. (He has a documentary on science fiction films, Watch the Skies, premiering Tuesday, July 6, on Turner Classic Movies.) He a one man film critical conglomerate, a grand resource of probing, sensible thought. buy canada goose jacket
Canada Goose sale My bibliography isn nearly as long as Schickel but my will is as strong, So we had a few debates. He snorted at some of my selections (notably, The Fly); I yawned at some of his. He thought I was too much the China hand and Bolly woosiast; I rankled at the inclusion of nearly every film noir melodrama ever made. I argued that, with A Streetcar Named Desire representing Marlon Brando and director Elia Kazan, the presence of the Kazan Brando On the Waterfront was redundant; he trumped my nagging by citing Waterfront in the Great Performances and Top Scores sections. (I used the sidebars to introduce favorite films, performances and music not covered in the prime TIME 100.) Canada Goose sale
Over the months of discussion, I learned many things not least that Schickel, whom everyone at TIME calls Dick, prefers to be known as Richard. (Hence my frequent use here of his surname, to avoid reader confusion.) And the debate never degenerated into rancor. Schickel and I knew we were playing a game; we did our research; and we still married. and Talk to Her. Note that, as we approach the present day, agreement gets rarer. We had 10 coincidental selections in the 1940s, exactly as many as we did in the four and a half decades from 1960 to today. That mirrors a consensus on classic Canada Goose Outlet films, especially classics from Hollywood, and a fragmenting of taste ever since.
buy canada goose jacket cheap There were also five movies on both early lists that didn make the final selection: Potemkin, Scarface, The Miracle of Morgan Creek, Raise the Red Lantern and All About My Mother. All worthy films. What happened? I guess we came to think of Potemkin an great film that lodged in our memories more than in our guts. Raise the Red Lantern I reluctantly dumped in favor of another Gong Li starring Chinese film, Farewell My Concubine, with its explicit approach to Chinese politics and a great performance by Leslie Cheung. As for directors of the other three films, they already had films on the final list though Hawks, Sturges and Almodovar canada goose jacket outlet uk are all as deserving of being multiple film directors on the TIME 100 as Scorsese, Lubitsch, Wilder, Bergman, Stanley Kubrick and Leone. buy canada goose jacket cheap
canada goose deals Ah, Leone. You see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon canada goose outlet winnipeg address a Time in the West consecutive films from the director of spaghetti westerns and ask, Why both? (Perhaps you demand, Why either?) Well, because Schickel preferred the first film, and I love the second, and neither of us would budge. canada goose deals
canada goose clearance A more general question: Why directors? Listen to the conversation Mark Coatney conducted with canada goose outlet seattle Schickel and me, and you learn that, among the strategies Richard the First used in preparing his original list, one was to start with the directors he thought the best, then choose his favorite of their films. Further, he wanted to reward peak official canada goose outlet periods in the careers of great directors. Chaplin, Sternberg, Vidor, Lubitsch, Hawks, De Sica, Kazan, Godard, Scorsese, Allen and Almodovar all are cited for two works within a few years, sometimes consecutive films. Sturges gets three mentions in four years. A director centric selection is one way to go. A film savvy fellow I know said he would have found slots for all six of the films Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. canada goose clearance
I didn work that way. For me, in compiling this list, the films were the thing, not their makers. In the Church of Auteurism, I be sitting in the back pew, sometimes agreeing with the dogma, sometimes whispering heresies. Not an anti auteurist, but a not quite. I a bit like Henry, the hero of Tom Stoppard 1982 play The Real Thing, who is agonizing over his choice of eight Desert Island Discs for a radio show. He knows he is expected to name eight pieces of music he is haunted https://www.getcanadagooseoutlet.ca by his unfashionable, unabashed love for the perkier forms of old pop rock. like Herman Hermits, and the Hollies, and the Everly Brothers, and Brenda Lee, and the Supremes, he says, adding, don mean everything they did. I don like artists. I like singles. I do like directors. But they aren the only artists who make films great. Hence Swing Time for the music and dance, Camille for Greta Garbo brave and merciless performance, and Baby Face for its thrillingly low moral tone. Schickel also had a few non auteur choices, such as Z. McLeod It a Gift.
canada goose store We have favorites, but we didn play favorites reward friends with slots. I put four Chinese films on the list and, as it happens, I have dined congenially (once or twice) with the makers of all those films: King Hu, Chen Kaige, Jackie Chan and Wong Kar wai. But that mostly because I do some reporting along with critiquing for TIME Asia movie stories, and because these filmmakers agreed to have a canada goose outlet toronto location meal with me. (Conversely, I noshed with only two of the Americans on the final 100, Scorsese and Spielberg.) Schickel can fairly say he dines with one of his honorees every night. He put the 2004 restored version of Sam Fuller The Big Red One on his list, and he did the restoration. Nice job too. But it didn make the cut. canada goose store
Canada Goose Outlet Our work wasn over when we finished the 100. We still had the Guilties, the Greats and the Scores, and I did a selection of Short Subjects. Richard and I used these slots as a kind of B list for some of our original favorites. He worked Gun Crazy and Anatomy of a Murder showed up among his five Guilty Pleasures. I managed to get nine of these into subsidiary sections: The Rules of the Game and Awara in Great Performances, Jules and Jim in Soundtracks, Gone With the Wind and School Girl in Guilty Pleasures, some of the animated and experimental films in Selected Short Subjects. And if you wondering why Robert Bresson Mouchette (obviously a Corliss choice) appears on the final list but not on my original one, the answer is: the first time canada goose parka outlet uk around, I forgot! If there a theme to this column, it that we all human, even critics. Canada Goose Outlet
canada goose Of the 33 TIME 100 films before 1950, all but six were from Hollywood. Assessing the so called golden age, we seem to be very Home Team. Murnau, Wyler and Lubitsch), three in Austria (Sternberg, Wilder and Edgar G. Ulmer are all native Viennese), one each in Hungary (Michael Curtiz), France (Jacques Tourneur) and one in Sicily (Capra). Yet except for Wilder, all the German speakers had emigrated during the Weimar years, when Nazism was barely a cyst in Mittel Europe eye. Another word explains the lure of these directors for and to Hollywood: Ufa. movie industry. They had canada goose outlet new york city made films at Ufa because that where the European action was. They came to Hollywood for the same reason except that, there, not Europe but the world was their audience canada goose.