Thursday, December 22, 2016

If the film community selected a top 200 English language films in 2016 (scribble edition)

While working a call center job, I decided to use my free time to make a list of what I would predict would be the top 200 English-language films if a number of expert film critics and consumer revoted in the year 2016. Yes, I'm sure if you were working in a call center you would do a crossword puzzle/word search or your nails but when you're a certified film obsessive this is what you do.
Rather than retype the results, I will repost it in its original chicken scratch form. The cutoff year is 2010.

Some of my points of reference, recent EW polls, Empire Magazine's latest polls and IMDB have placed more of a premium on sci-fi films and downplayed the pervasiveness of musicals. The resurgence of the cerebral sci-fi film w the successes of "Martian" "Gravity" and "Arrival" certainly have helped this trend as well as the receiving of "Star Wars" as not a complete disaster. 

Only the most recognizable musicals like "Sound of Music" "West Side Story" and "Singing in the Rain" make my top 100 with "Meet me in St Louis" clocking in at 102 and that could be wishful thinking on my part. It's a very significant film historically and even "La La Land" takes some cues from it, but for some audiences, it still might be overly quaint. Astaire and Rogers are still relevant but I would imagine significant vote splitting among their eight collaborations together. Similarly, vote splitting would dilute the consistently even filmographies of Preston Surges and Douglas Dirk so that there would be no clear winners. 

Similarly, a new class of Western is more en vogue these days that would align more with Peckinpah, the Coens and Tarantino than the classic Ford prototype. Namely, more violence which is why "Magnificent Seven" "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (particularly for the buddy humor angle) would all move up while "Shane" and "Stagecoach" fall out of the top 100.

It's also worth noting that films that champion political truth of satirize the falsity of our medical government landscape such as "All the President's Men", "Network", "Reds" (commonly regarded as the directorial masterwork of the overtly political Warren Beatty) and "The Conversation."
Feel free to comment on my list if you can make out the handwriting.

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