I got this idea from someone over at RT. Post your twenty favorite movies of all time here in no particular order. For movies like Lord of the Rings or the Godfather movies, list your favorite or list them seperately. By the end of March, I'll count up all the movies. The twenty movies that were posted the most will be listed as the TOP TWENTY MOVIES OF ALL TIME. If this goes well, which I hope it will, we will have a pretty good list. Okay, post away, here's my twenty (mine might change over time, because I have so many favorites.
I'm surprised Pulp Fiction hasn't appeared on any of your lists. It's such a great movie, and it won the number one position on that guy's list over at RT, followed closely by 2001.
I like Pulp Fiction a lot too, but if I'd included a Tarantino film, it would have been Jackie Brown.
Pulp Fiction is terrific, but I agree with Night Watchman that Jackie Brown is a more mature, more accomplished picture. Neither is even close to cracking the 20 All-Time Best, though. That's a rather elite, exclusive list.
NW--I nearly placed Third Man on my list. Nice choice, along with Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which is certainly one of my favorites but I can't say I think it ranks as a significant artistic achievement. Vampyr is marvelous, although I much prefer Joan of Arc, which would make my Top Five. I'm obsessed with that movie.
[shame]I haven't seen Joan of Arc yet.[/shame] I'll have to get to it soon.
I almost included Jackie Brown, and sometime during the next couple of days I'll probaby be wishing I'd listed it instead of one of the last three I did choose, along with about thirty other movies. Does anyone else have the same trouble with these kinds of lists that I do?
Does anyone else have the same trouble with these kinds of lists that I do?
Absolutely. It's impossible to give a true list, since my idea of what gives one artwork the edge over another is constantly shifting. Plus, I'm not sure there's a reasonable method for discerning the Top 20 from any others in the Top 50 or 100. (Why can't they be equally important?) Still, there are at least a handful that I'll always consider near the top--Kane, Joan, Pather Panchali, Sherlock, Jr.--and children's games are kinda fun. Lists sometimes help us develop and grasp significant critical distinctions, but mostly they are just playtime.
Man, this is a cruel game. I had to leave off some of my precious babies.
And yeah, this sort of off-the-cuff listmaking means little and doesn't necessarily provoke much debate, but man, it is fun, and it's a great way of seeing how tastes differ and evolve and of realizing (if in a very arbitrary way) the unbounded love we can have for movies.
I agree that Jackie Brown is more mature than Pulp Fiction (and it might be better), but Pulp is one of the big three movies that really got me into movies (the other two being Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Hitchcock's Vertigo). A top 20 list accurately reflecting my taste is impossible to compile, but below I've listed 20 films that I love dearly (allowing for only one film per director and no films released in the past four years).
Some of my picks would be different tomorrow I'm sure.
I agree that Jackie Brown is more mature than Pulp Fiction (and it might be better), but Pulp is one of the big three movies that really got me into movies.
I know where you're coming from; for me, at the time of its release, it just came absolutely out of nowhere. It was like experiencing movies again for the first time.
Nice pick with Something Wild, Michael. You know how much I adore that movie, and I'd say that the kind of first-time love some people felt with Pulp Fiction, I felt with Demme's underrated classic. It nearly made my list, too.
Didn't really put a whole lot of thought into it, just winged twenty of my favorite films off the top of my head. Minus ones like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and Aparajito, they all kind of blur together anyway. My two cent on Pulp Fiction is I love it, that movie is the reason I really began to get into cinema in the first place, so to not include it in my list would be a travesty.