BBC Culture's 100 Greatest American Films

A really strange list: the top 10 reads like the AFI list, but then deeper into it are some great, offbeat classics: Heaven's Gate (#98), The Shanghai Gesture (#72), Letter from an Unknown Woman (#43) etc.

But... Forrest Gump?

Letter from an Unknown Woman isn't that odd a choice; it came in at 154th on Sight and Sound in 2012, for instance. It's usually not that high up but it's definitely up there.

[quote="Altair"]BBC Culture's 100 Greatest American Films


53. Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, 1975)
This seems to be the only documentary on the list. Probably an error. They've heard so much about it, that they decided to put it on the list.

It should be noted that to make the list, the BBC polled 62 international film critics, asking them for their top 10s Sight and Sound style (though they were ranked with corresponding point values), including Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Where's Michael Mann to name-drop Henry James again?

Any idea what has happened to David Thomson? I enjoyed his articles for The New Republic, but suddenly he was gone. I haven't heard his opinion of films by filmmakers he likes like Inherent Vice, Under the Skin etc.

I heard he vanished in a gaseous cloud of his own pomposity...

Any chance he's strictly writing books these days? Looking at Amazon, I see he published Why Acting Matters earlier this year an has another title called How to Watch a Movie coming out next month.

Jesus Christ, it never ends with that guy.

From the publisher's description:
Nothing like talking down to your readership, I guess. Sometimes maybe but "often"?
What? This sentence is reminiscent of some of what I've read of Thomson's writing: ornate statements that sound important but say little. Earlier this year I tried reading his The Whole Equation and got partway through chapter 2 before giving up (and giving the book away). The convoluted sentences that conveyed very little information quickly got to be too much to take. And when writing about something like the casting couch, a film historian should separate fact from rumor and innuendo and show that some actual research has been done. Instead we get repeated musings about, er, "swallowing" and a disgusting aside about the supposed origins of lip gloss. If I wanted to read a sordid blend of fact and fiction, Kenneth Anger already covered it a hundred times better and more entertainingly than that.

The LA Times blurb used by the publisher calling him "the greatest living film historian" is pretty funny given the context: the review it comes from (of Have You Seen...) starts out: Oh, surely. Then the next sentence is: Even though the reviewer is extremely sympathetic to Thomson, he ends up concluding that the book is often extremely frustrating and padded out to fill a thousand pages.

He had a dreadful column on actors in the Independent on Sunday in which he seemed to show more interest in box-office grosses than mundane things like technique.

It doesn't take long to find a clunker line in a Thomson piece; here, in his review of Gone Girl and The Blue Room, it's the very first one:

"Here are two films about murder and marriage—do they go together like a horse and carriage?"

Is David Thomson the one who lusted after Nicole Kidman quite famously?

Infamously. He obsesses about her nude scenes for pages but anticipates the inevitable "hideous" wake-up-screaming moment when she ages out of the "nymph" phase of her career and becomes an adult (somewhere around the age of 40 by his estimation) but assures his readers that "this book was conceived and composed while she was still hot and hittable."

It's been reported that Condé Nast has purchased Pitchfork.

As you may remember, the Dissolve was actually a Pitchfork-owned and operated site. Perhaps there's a connection between its closure and this sale?

I mean if a company is trying to sell itself, it will, pardon the crude language, shed "unnecessary" fat.

That's what I figure - at the time, they were likely in negotiations, and unless they were doing something that defied common sense, dropping The Dissolve was probably done to help the sale.

Who are some of the critics and film writers you respect most? Whose reviews do you look forward to reading when a new film that looks interesting comes out?

I've commented on OutlawVern's website for 2-3 years now. I don't read every single thing he reviews, and the kinds of films he's more known for reviewing aren't totally my cup of tea (he's published a book about Steven Seagal's work), but of the films I've seen I liked what he's had to say about them.

I like Mark Kermode a bit too, mostly in his banter with Simon Mayo.

Given that Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian has been giving out five stars like confetti recently, best not to rely on his word too often anymore.

This is stupid. Sometimes outliers occur. This may be an outlier year for him in terms of five star reviews.

Rex Reed 10 Best of 2015

This has got to be one of the safest, most boilerplate lists I have ever seen. http://observer.com/2015/12/rex-reed-th ... s-of-2015/