Old Movie List Discovered: Provokes Mild Embarrassment, Rethinking of Life

A while back I rescued from the hard drive of a now 20 year old computer, a list of the Best Movies Ever that I put together back in the summer of 1998.  That was the year I moved to Seattle (a couple blocks away from the Best Video Store in the World) and watching movies became the thing I did for school and work instead of the thing I did instead of school or work.  The list is reflective of the lack of viewing options I had as a young moviegoer in the cinema wasteland that was Spokane in the mid-90s, possibly (hopefully) the last time in history that a person's geographic location was a major limiting factor in what films they could see.  It also shows the influence of my pre-film studies reading: I'd spent the previous year and a half reading every movie book I could get my hands on, working my way up from Leonard Maltin, Roger Ebert and VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever to Pauline Kael, François Truffaut and Jonathan Rosenbaum, along with scholarly books on Orson Welles (James Naremore), Akira Kurosawa (Donald Richie), Alfred Hitchcock (Truffaut as well as David Sterritt) and Martin Scorsese (Lawrence Friedman).

So, like all lists, it's a snapshot of a particular person at a particular time.  And also like all lists, it's notable as much for its omissions as for what it includes.  But still, looking back on it fourteen years later, I can help but be a little surprised at it.  Not because there are films ranked highly that I no longer think are any good (though there are a couple of slight embarrassments), but rather at how many of the films that I ranked highly then continue to occupy the top spots on the lists I've made more recently (I have four here at The End: a Top 150 from 2008, a Top 250 from 2009, a Top 600 from 2010 and a Top 1000 from 2011).  Of course that shouldn't be a surprise, as these are many of my favorite films, and one of the ways I define that inescapably vague term "favorite film" is by how long I've lived with them, not simply in terms of rewatchability (though several of these I've seen many, many times), but in how over time these particular movies have come to define what I think cinema is, what it should be, and what it can be.

With the release of the latest Sight & Sound poll this week, and Labor Day Weekend, the time of year I traditionally create a new Best of All-Time, fast approaching, lists have been on my mind.  Every year, my Best Lists have gotten bigger and bigger, culminating last year, when I spent a month or so creating a Top 1000 list, an inherently ridiculous task that was as fun as it is absurd.  I could keep that trend going, with ever longer and more tedious lists (1500!, 2000!, 5000!), or I could try something new.  And so I'm going to follow the advice of the great Kristin Thompson, who in a post at her blog in March on the topic of Best Of lists suggested abandoning the repetitive reassertions of the canon that inevitably result from consensus-based polls like Sight & Sound's in favor an approach more like that of the National Film Registry:

I think this business of polls and lists for the greatest films of all times would be much more interesting if each film could only appear once. Having gained the honor of being on the list, each title could be retired, and a whole new set concocted ten years later. The point of such lists, if there is one, is presumably to introduce people who are interested in good films to new ones they may not have seen or even known about.

And so I'm going to create a The End of Cinema Hall of Fame, inducting a few movies each year and writing about them along the way.  Sometime soon, I'll name 25 films, then spend the next year writing about them every two weeks or so until it's time to name the next class.  I'm not going to rank them, instead I'll just go along with the assumption that all Hall of Famers are equally canonical.  I haven't decided what, if any, criteria I'm going to use: just naming my Top 25 films as of that moment or maybe using a quota system (Best film noir, Best Western, Best French movie, etc) or perhaps some kind of a combination of the two.  Rest assured, it'll be arbitrary.

As a warm-up, here's my recently unearthed1998 Top 200 Movies of All-Time List:


1   Manhattan
2   Casablanca
3   Seven Samurai
4   Annie Hall
5   Citizen Kane
6   Miller's Crossing
7   Ran
8   Singin' in the Rain
9   The Birds
10   Mean Streets
11   Lawrence of Arabia
12   The Rules of the Game
13   The Empire Strikes Back
14   Psycho
15   L. A. Story
16   Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
17   The Philadelphia Story
18   The Godfather Part II
19   It's a Wonderful Life
20   Goodfellas
21   The Wizard of Oz
22   Rashomon
23   Do the Right Thing
24   On the Waterfront
25   Taxi Driver
26   Three Colors: Blue
27   The Lion in Winter
28   The Mission (Joffe)
29   The Godfather
30   Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind
31   Star Wars
32   Pulp Fiction
33   Kiss Me Deadly
34   North by Northwest
35   The Manchurian Candidate
36   Duck Soup
37   American Graffiti
38   Six Degrees of Separation
39   Harvey
40   Throne of Blood
41   The Big Sleep
42   Touch of Evil
43   Schindler's List
44   Amadeus
45   Sanjuro
46   8 1/2
47   Raging Bull
48   The Red Shoes
49   Children of Paradise
50   Crimes and Misdemeanors

51   Kagemusha
52   Dangerous Liaisons
53   The English Patient
54   Quiz Show
55   Unforgiven
56   Hannah and Her Sisters
57   Jaws
58   Platoon
59   Patton
60   The Seachers
61   Boogie Nights
62   Broadcast News
63   Out of the Past
64   Vertigo
65   Blood Simple
66   Seven
67   All About Eve
68   Henry V (Branagh)
69   The Seventh Seal
70   The Graduate
71   Suspicion
72   The Third Man
73   Stranger than Paradise
74   The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
75   The Last of the Mohicans (Mann)
76   Bringing Up Baby
77   The Player
78   Bugsy
79   Trainspotting
80   Yojimbo
81   Rebecca
82   The Maltese Falcon
83   The Shawshank Redemption
84   Brief Encounter
85   Bonnie and Clyde
86   Fantasia
87   Silence of the Lambs
88   JFK
89   Raiders of the Lost Ark
90   Zelig
91   The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail
92   Fargo
93   Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
94   Sleeping Beauty
95   The Age of Innocence
96   Reservoir Dogs
97   High Plains Drifter
98   A Clockwork Orange
99   Laura
100   The Outlaw Josey Wales

101   Stagecoach
102   Day for Night
103   Ugetsu
104   Wings of Desire
105   Swingers
106   The Lady from Shanghai
107   To Have and Have Not
108   Empire of the Sun
109   Three Colors: Red
110   Barton Fink
111   ET:  the Extra Terrestrial
112   Out of Africa
113   Chasing Amy
114   Bull Durham
115   It Happened One Night
116   The Lady Vanishes
117   Double Indemnity
118   Kicking and Screaming
119   Clerks
120   The Thin Man
121   Big Night
122   The Princess Bride
123   Rope
124   Play It Again, Sam
125   The Right Stuff
126   Shadow of a Doubt
127   High and Low
128   Jules and Jim
129   Rear Window
130   The Fisher King
131   Sunset Boulevard
132   Hard Eight
133   The 39 Steps
134   The Last Temptation of Christ
135   Shoot the Piano Player
136   The Awful Truth
137   Le Samourai
138   Chinatown
139   The General
140   Monty Python's the Life of Brian
141   The Asphalt Jungle
142   Z
143   Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
144   Force of Evil
145   Das Boot
146   The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
147   Slacker
148   Point Blank
149   Kundun
150   The Big Lebowski

151   2001: A Space Odyssey
152   When Harry Met Sally. . .
153   Monty Python and the Holy Grail
154   Halloween
155   Notorious
156   The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
157   Steamboat Bill, Jr
158   Kids
159   The Hidden Fortress
160   Top Hat
161   Party Girl
162   She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
163   The Sorrow and the Pity
164   Once Were Warriors
165   Sleeper
166   Marnie
167   Dreams
168   The Purple Rose of Cairo
169   Red River
170   Grand Hotel
171   Blow Out
172   Field of Dreams
173   Shadowlands
174   Nobody's Fool
175   Fort Apache
176   Sullivan's Travels
177   Beautiful Girls
178   Shampoo
179   Rosemary's Baby
180   The Grand Illusion
181   The Ice Storm
182   Brazil
183   The Natural
184   Dazed and Confused
185   The Night of the Hunter
186   In the Company of Men
187   Love and Death
188   Judgement at Nuremburg
189   Nashville
190   Scream
191   Metropolitan
192   Edward Scissorhands
193   The Day the Earth Stood Still
194   The Hustler
195   Night on Earth
196   The Wild Bunch
197   The Magnificent Ambersons
198   Return of the Jedi
199   Afterhours
200   The Secret of NIMH