Listosaurus Rex

For the second time in three years, Roger Ebert has gone against the grain of film critic and not given us a straightforward, ranked top ten list of movies for the year.  His reasoning?  There are too many good ones to pick just ten.  He also has written many times through they years about how he’s not a big fan of ranking movies.  So we have a set of unranked favorites from the year.  Here are his twenty picks, alphabetically:

Ballast
The Band’s Visit
Che
Chop Shop
The Dark Knight
Doubt
The Fall
Frost/Nixon
Frozen Friver
Happy-Go-Lucky
Iron Man
Milk
Rachel Getting Married
The Reader
Revolutionary Road
Shotgun Stories
Slumdog Millionaire
Synecdoche, New York
W.
Wall-E

Interestingly, I’ve noticed at least one movie on this list (Wall-E) that didn’t get four stars, only three and a half.  This is certainly not a complaint, as I love Wall-E and I hope all of its year-end love will help in the Oscars race for years to come; it is wondered whether, with the right push, it could become the second and animated movie and first since the Animated Movie award was introduced to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

That Wall-E was included is especially strange because some of his four-star reviews of the year (In Bruges, Lakeview Terrace) weren’t included as part of the twenty.

If I have a criticism with the list, it is that it’s coming out so early, and before a few of the Oscar hopefuls come out.  Movie studios tend to load the end of December with releases of artful, award-hopeful movies to have them fresh on people’s mind as the big awards are dolled out.  It’s not just a matter of respect, it’s a matter of money: an obscure film will get a lot more ticket sales if it gets nominated.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had much opportunity to get out so far this year, so I haven’t seen too many of 2008’s movies.  This list includes the favorites of the ones I’ve seen (Dark Knight, Wall-E) and some of the ones I most want to see (Frost/Nixon, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire).  Of these, I know W. got mostly mixed reviews, and Happy-Go-Lucky’s were only midly positive.  Most of these seem to be well-accepted by most, too.

It’s always fun to see movies ranked, but I respect Ebert’s choice not to.  Perhaps the days of his traditional Top 10 lists are at an end.  Ebert’s untraditional format is sort of refreshing given the ADHD, list-obsessed nature of many sites and news.  And though I love lists (obviously), it’s pretty cool to see something a little bit less hyperactive, more thoughtful.

Or maybe I just love everything Ebert writes and puts together.  It could be that too.

Nice, LifeHacker!

The website/blog, which is a haven for DIY-techie types of people, has put together a ranking of its most popular top ten lists of the 2008.

I don’t use the web-site too much, except for the occasional software advice.  However, these lists are worth a quick browse through.  You can pick out the ones that look interesting.

My favorites are the lists of Obscure Google Tricks, Underhyped Apps, and Easy Ways to Look Sharp.  Who doesn’t want to look sharp, after all?

The list is a part of the big Best of 2008 series of features.  It’s not even my favorite feature — I like the software overviews more.  But it was a list of lists; how could I not make a post about it here?

Magazines, TV shows, and authors have attempted it, but nothing has done it better than IMDb.com, aka the Internet Movie Database: collecting the opinions of movie fans and crunching their votes into a top movies list.

IMDb allows anyone to make an account on the web-site and give any movie a rating out of ten points (ten being the best, one being the worst). The site then tallies all of the total votes using a tricky little formula and gets out a list of the top 250 movies according to fans.  Here is the top ten, as of midnight on December 14, 2008. and their ratings on the site:

1. The Shawshank Redemption - 9.1 (out of 10)
2. The Godfather - 9.1
3. The Godfather, Part II - 9.0
4. The Dark Knight - 8.9
5. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - 8.9
6. Pulp Fiction - 8.9
7. Schindler’s List - 8.8
8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - 8.8
9. The Empire Strikes Back - 8.8
10. 12 Angry Men - 8.8

The list wisely weights movies’ rankings with regards to how many votes the movie has received: for example, a movie that has a 8.8 rating with 1,000 votes will be weighted worse than a a movie with a 8.5 ranking and 250,000 votes.  The more votes a movie gets, the more stable it is, and the more likely it is to climb up into the Top 250 list.

IMDb’s Top 250 features movies that have received 300k+ votes, so it is a pretty strong sampling of users’ opinions. The list has even received mention from some highly esteemed critics, a pretty cool feat for something that is little more than a souped up online poll.

One common concern is that people will vote for controversial movies either a 10 or a 1 in an attempt to get the movie to a different ranking.  IMDb, however, claims to have an algorithm to separate out the regular and real voters from ballot stuffers.

The tricky area about the list is what exactly the list is composed of.  Is it a list ranking the 250 “best” movies?  The most popular movies?

I think the most accurate phrasing is that the IMDb Top 250 is a ranking of the most beloved movies by the site’s users. It is not an attempt to be a concensus at what is great, nor what is most widely viewed or known, but what movies the fans as a whole hold highest on average.

Another common, and very valid, criticism of the movie:  Since the internet skews towards young users — and the average user on IMDb is probably between 18 and 25, I’d say — the list tends very strongly towards recent movies.  It’s not unheard of for new movies to rocket onto the list within days of being released, before sinking as the crowd less eager to see the movie watches it.

Still, you’ll see a couple movies each year settle at pretty resepctable spots.  The Dark Knight still sits at an astonishing #4 on the list (even peaking at the top spot!), while WALL·E is also absurdly high at #34.  Yet dozens of classics aren’t even on the list.

The greatest part about this list is that it constantly changes and updates itself just from users watching and rating movies.

One of my goals in life is to see all of the movies on this (and I know someone who claims to have seen every one as of a couple of months ago — props, 2mas), so the list has taken a special place in my heart as a resource of quality, entertaining, beloved movies to hunt down. It’s honestly more useful than some list from some academic critic or something because it’s put together by people looking for movies with generally the perspective that I am: as emotive, engaging entertainment and storytelling.  It’s the people’s opinion I care about, and that’s why IMDb’s Top 250 works so well.

Truly one of my favorite lists on the Internet.  Extremely informative, always changing, and built by the people.

Time Magazine has outdone itself and brought you a whopping FIFTY top ten lists to recap 2008.  Wowza.

Here are topics covered:

Albums

Animal Stories

Awkward Moments

Best Biz Deals

Best Performances

Breakups

Buzzwords

Campaign Gaffes

Campaign Video Moments

Children’s Books

Crime Stories

Editorial Cartoons

Election Photos

Fashion Moments

Fashion Faux Pas

Fiction Books

Financial Collapses

Fleeting Celebrities

Food Trends

Gadgets

Green Ideas

iPhone Apps

Late Night Jokes

Magazine Covers

Medical Breakthroughs

Movies

Museum Exhibits

News Stories

Non-fiction Books

Oddball News Stories

Olympic Moments

Open Mike Moments

Outrageous Earmarks

Photos

Plays and Musicals

Political Lines

Quotes

Religion Stories

Scandals

Scientific Discoveries

Songs

Sports Moments

T-shirt Worthy Slogans

TV Ads

TV Episodes

TV Series

Underreported Stories

Video Games

Viral Videos

Worst Biz Deals

Each one of the ten entries for each of these fifty categories has a little paragraph or two to accompany it.

This is almost bewildering for me.  It’s just about too much to process.  Of course, I devoured the ones important to me (Albums, Movies, TV Series, Video Games, Sports Moments, etc.), but most I only had time to give a cursory glance.  It doesn’t help that you have to click through to a new page for each item of each list.  I wouldn’t mind having a few of these lists scrapped and had a new and improved interface implemented.

 Top 10 Outrageous Earmarks?  Top 10 Breakups?  I dunno if these should be mixed in with the big hitters.  But, hey, if a magazine is going to go all-out on something, at least it’s something easy to read, organized, and logical, like lists!

Overall, though, I would NOT recommend this list set for two reasons: 1) Dark Knight not mentioned as one of the top 10 movies of the year. 2) The Office not mentioned as one of the top 10 TV shows of the year. WTF!?!

Just kidding, these are definitely worth a look.  Pick out the ones that look most interesting you and you’ll probably get a lot out of it.

 Piero Scaruffi is, I’ve gathered, an academic and historian on film, music, and philosophy. I know very little about him, though I’m considering picking up his acclaimed history of rock book (in spite of its famous claims that the Beatles are overrated and bad).  So I googled the guy and found his web-site, which includes a section of film critiques and rankings.

One feature, which was composed by Scaruffi either in 1998 or some time before — the site is ambiguous — contains his list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.”The list contains 100 items, the first 194 (?) ranked, the other 806 seemingly in no particular order. To me, this list encompasses almost everything that’s wrong with film studies as an educational subject and film criticism in general.  

Here are some of the faults with it: first, it’s a list. Now, as we know, I’m a list fiend. But lists are fun. They’re ridiculous. They put logical order and ranking to taste. They are most certainly not scholarly. Scaruffi takes great pride in the fact that his site is scholarly:

 This web site is an online service devoted to the world of culture and entertainment. Unlike other online magazines of this kind, which target mainly the general audience of tv viewers, this web site caters to the upscale audience of “intellectuals” and experts, who are more interested in critical news than in mundane news.      

–Piero Scaruffi, advertising/about page

If his readership is intellectual, why do they need a rigid list?  Any true scholar of art would know that there is no best or worst art.  To attempt to rank the greatness of one piece of art to another’s is a silly side-squabble that is both impossible and a distraction from the point of the art.  If we’re intellectually approaching it as art, why spend time discussing its greatness? Why not discuss the art itself?  

Don’t get me wrong, I love lists about movies. But not lists that rank movies as a cerebral art form. I like lists that rank movies as engrossing, emotive cinematic experiences.  

Other lists that are good are collections of opinions about what the greatest movies are: Sight and Sound is the most respected example, and IMDb is my favorite of these. Statistically mashing people’s opinions on what films are great is different from one critic ranking the greatest pieces of art.

Let’s move on.  Here are Scaruffi’s top ten:

1. Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941)
2. Alfred Hitchcock: North By Northwest (1959)
3. Orson Welles: Touch Of Evil (1958)
4. Roman Polanski: Chinatown (1974)
5. Robert Altman: Nashville (1975)
6. Sam Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch (1969)
7. Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather Part II (1974)
8. Elia Kazan: Splendor In The Grass (1961)
9. John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
10. Lars von Trier: Riget/ Kingdom (1995)

Sorry, folks, Citizen Kane is not the greatest movie to watch today.  It might be the most influential, perhaps one of the most visually interesting, but it is not the single greatest. It’s still a great movie today, but the time-tripping chronology is old hat at this point, and the movies have gotten better at telling stories as time has passed.  (Side note: I will let you know if this is still my opinion after I have seen the movie with Roger Ebert’s legendary commentary.)

North by Northwest at number two? Really? The movie might be worth a second watch for me, but the awkward sexual puns that made up 80% of the script bothered me. Plus, isn’t this more a piece of entertainment than an artful film?  Sure, Hitchcock was famous for making films that seemed like entertainment but really contained great artistic value. But is it reallybetter than Touch of Evil? Better than The Godfather, or Chinatown, or… etc.?

More than anything else, it’s the precision of the ranking that bothers me. If you read any of his film reviews, he rates movies out of ten, but down to a tenth of a point.  This is ludicrous!  There are one hundred possible rankings.  What really separates a 6.7 from a 6.8?  Remember that this isn’t just anyone picking number ratings for a movie, willy-nilly. This is one of the most respected scholars of film!  And he deems it appropriate to quantify art’s value. Down to a number that precisely.  Ridiculous.

You know what, Scaruffi?  I give your list a 3.7.  And your web-site and the rest of your lists, too.  You call Dogma the tenth best film of the ’90s but Schindler’s List the forty-first.  Now, Dogma’s a good movie, three stars probably, but better than Schindler’s List?  Are you sure your “upscale audience” is going to dig that pick?

Does the guy have some keen insights? Yeah. Do his picks probably have more reasoning than I’m seeing? Probably. Does he know more about film than I ever will? Absolutely. 

But learn something from Roger Ebert, Piero Scaruffi.  Cinema is an art of images and emotion and stories.  It’s one thing to develop a keen eye for what makes a film tick, what makes it valuable and memorable. It’s another thing to elevate art to such an intellectual level that it’s no longer fun.

[link to the list]