Edward Copeland on Film

Sorry, but "Raiders," "Blade Runner," "Jaws," "Star Wars V," and "Alien" are not five of the top ten films of all time. I'm surprised more than two of them made the top hundred. With all due respect, the list is silly.

- John Farmer
 

Believe it or not, it could have been even worse. Many great films such as Children of Paradise didn't even make the original 500+ possibilities but recent films such as Hot Fuzz and Talladega Nights did.
 

it has most of the essential classics, but it is by no means silly. it's actually pretty unique when you look past the movies that make every list.

do you know PERSONALLY what the top ten films of all time are John Farmer? enlighten us, please...
 

The problem with this list is that there were 51 male contributors and only 4 female contributors to the list. This is not a list of greatest movies but a list of movies men like. I looked at the top 10 and knew immediately it was another “male” list. Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Strangelove, Godfather…snore! The Internet Movie Database suffers from this same skewed demographic when looking at movie ratings.
 

While less than half of my choices made the final list, I think it's also wrong to try to force some sort of quota by gender, ethnicity, etc. The sad truth is that female directors have not had the opportunities until recently that they deserved, but it doesn't make a lot of the greatest films less great because their directors had penises. As time goes on with women getting more and more jobs behind the camera, I imagine that will change, but films such as Casablanca, Citizen Kane and Dr. Strangelove always will deserve a spot.
 

I was not referring to the sex of the directors but the sex of the “participants” who voted on the movies. Lists like these always result in heated discussions about what was included and what wasn’t. For me, an avid female movie watcher, these discussions must include gender. Only four women participated in making this list. You acknowledge the inequity when is comes to female directors in Hollywood and yet give little value to my opinion that this is a male list of films.
 

I misunderstood you, though I was distracted by you referring to Citizen Kane, Casablanca and the like as bores, because those top many a female critic's list as well.
 

Part of what's fun about having a new list is arguing about it. I tend to agree there is a male bias in the selections, though I don't think you should have to gender-balance the participants to come up with a better list. An even bigger imbalance I see is the grade inflation that some movies of the last 30 years have received, especially the action and sci-fi flicks. Some of them are highly entertaining and especially well-done (though some are not), but I just would never rank them among the best films ever. It's hard to compare films from different eras, and the hardest films of all to judge are those we might have seen when we were of a certain age (and may have had a more limited view of the movies). They may have knocked our socks off at the time, and they may rightly remain favorites as we get older. The real test of where they rank, however, will be time. What will people think in the future?

There's something else that feels off about the list that's a little harder for me to put my finger on. Part of it is a bias toward certain genres, but it's more than that too. Even within the sci-fi films, I can't understand how "2001" ranks behind "Alien," "Blade Runner," and even "Star Wars." Kubrick provides an awe-inspiring experience like nothing else in the history of films, and the others provide a good deal of imagination and a lot of well-done thrills. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not the same thing. (Fwiw, I'd have put "The Matrix" ahead of the latter three also.) Ultimately, the greatness of a film isn't determined by the quality of the craftsmanship or the cleverness of the story. There needs to be something else, and imo some of the movies on the list just don't have enough of it.

- John Farmer
 

There definitely was a fanboy tilt to the whole list. It's easy to think something that's fresh in your mind is better than it is, that's why I always impose my own 10-year limit on it. I think the gender imbalance could have been addressed if more people had taken the opportunity to participate in the final voting. I know I promoted it here and others did on other sites as well.
 

I’m sorry for the snore comment. It was uncalled for and hostile. However, it was not directed at the movies themselves but their continued appearance in the top ten. I agree with John there is something "off" with this list.
 

girodet...

that's my problem with the list too.
it's so obviously a list made by young men.

tarantino, hitchcock, spielberg, genre loving, godfather loving.

i mean you know you're in trouble with you have something like 90 movies from the 90s for the initial finalists lists and that doesn't include THE PIANO

say what?

and this final list omits female protagonists as spectacularly great as ALL ABOUT EVE or PERSONA.

argh! but then anything that can read feminine did poorly: musicals, melodramas, almodovar ;) etc...
 

i didn't get a chance to get my final list in, but maybe that's just as well, as this end result is downright embarrassing.

No Godard, Bergman, or Kieslowski pretty much makes this a joke, which is really a shame.
 

The end result certainly left a lot to be desired, but I guess I feared even worse results based on what made the first cut. I was just relieved that the top three films didn't end up all being Lord of the Rings movies.
 

Can I ask what the point might be? This list is not demonstrably different than any other list culled from online poll results, and in fact only seems to reinforce a canon which already appears to be immobile to change. Barring of course a hugely successful, critically "respected" film such as the aforementioned Lord of the Rings pictures.

We reach a point where such lists and polls verge on a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which the need for some sort of ranking is more important than a discussion of cinema. It will be argued that such lists are fodder for discussion, but when the list is the same as all that have come before it, what is the fucking point?

This is indefensible, as are all such polls at this juncture. The Godfather/Dr. Strangelove/Citizen Kane holding down the top 3? Fantastic. Expose me to some new music too. Do people rate the Beatles/Dylan/Hendrix highly as well? I need to know. Then we can discuss the ramifications of such reductive bullshit.
 

The one thing I think that would have made this better is more participation. The one factor that makes it better than AFI is only that it didn't have the xenophobic view that only American films could play, not that many foreign got their due in the end results. Yes, I admit that I have a compulsion about lists, as do many others. If, ideally, a list prompts someone to seek out films they might not otherwise look at, that alone would be worth it. This one was handicapped by its small voter pool and emphasis on recent titles. It's not surprising that the same films score highly on most lists. It's not out of reflexive voting for them, it's because they truly are great. To disregard a list because it doesn't list "different things" is like saying "Screw Shakespeare, I only want to hear about plays written in my lifetime."
 

Wow.

I've actually never been more ashamed in my life to be a straight white American 30-year-old male. :(