Is 'Eyes Wide Shut' the best of the rest?
Posted Friday, December 4, 2009 at 2:37 PM Central
Last updated Friday, December 4, 2009 at 2:41 PM Central
by John Couture
I admit it.
I like lists.
All sorts of lists. Best movies, best comedies, best short films directed by someone who used to pump gas for a living. If there's a list of movies, I'm there because a list is a good starting point for a discussion.
Note, I said discussion and not argument. I can't help it, I think it goes back to all those years of debate team in high school and college (yes, I'm a geek, but that's another story entirely), but I like to debate anything and everything.
However, if there's one thing that I'm getting tired of debating, it's the "all-time" list of best movies. Whether you're a Citizen Kane, Casablanca or Godfather fan, everyone pretty much agrees that those are the top 3 American movies (if not worldwide, but I digress). In fact, if you were to take 100 random, somewhat film buff people off the street and told them to compile a list of top 100 movies, I bet at least 80% of the movies given as answers would show up on all of the respondents lists.
Well, I don't have to guess, according to Jeffrey M. Anderson over at Cinematical.com, he participated in such a poll and the results were as you would expect. But, the more interesting follow-up to this poll was the next one conducted by "listmaster" Iain Stott.
He took a list of 300 movies that he considered "canon films," or what he referred to as the "accepted classics" and then asked the groups of experts, bloggers and random people off IMDb to vote for up to 100 films that weren't in the canon.
This list of "100 Greatest Films Beyond the Canon" is quite intriguing to say the least. So much so, that I looked through it and immediately found myself agreeing with about half of it and vehemently arguing with the other half. In other words, this was a list of movies that is truly debatable.
You can view the entire list over at his site. Even more importantly, you can see the the canon list of 300 movies no one could vote for and perhaps most enjoyably the complete the complete list of all movies with at least four votes.
The last piece is the most intriguing part because it lists, in order, all 872 movies beyond the canon that received at least four votes. Most lists like these only list the top 100 and you never know which film finished 101st (Hud). First, let me list their top 10 to start off the discussion:
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Mulholland Dr.
- The Killing
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Shadow Of A Doubt
- In The Mood For Love
- The Thin Red Line
- Two-Lane Blacktop
- F For Fake
- Pickup On South Street
OK, so I've seen six of those I believe and to be honest, I can't really complain too much with these or the order. However, I do think we have posthumously given Eyes Wide Shut a pass as it was Stanley Kubrick's last film. And I really enjoy some of the dark horse contenders slotted between 11 and 25 like Groundhog Day (12), Eraserhead (18) and This is Spinal Tap (23).
But ultimately, I'm left scratching my head at the top 100 list. Where's the love for David Fincher? Two of his films (Fight Club and Se7en) would be in my top 10 of the last 50 years. And while Christopher Nolan got his due with Memento, where's the love for The Prestige, which I argue is his finest film?
We could go on and on and I suppose that's the point. Once you get past the "canon," film appreciation becomes what it was always meant to be, a very subjective experience. Everyone likes something different for their own reasons and no one can really tell them otherwise.