Covering film in Toronto
From the category archives:
Brooke and I watched the AFI 100 Years, 100 Songs special on television last night. No real surprises, but I did learn something. I’d always assumed that “New York, New York” was an older song, from the ’40s or ’50s, but it was actually written for Martin Scorsese’s musical flop of the same name in 1977! Yeah, right in the middle of the punk explosion! I was gobsmacked.
In the same vein, where was the Ramones’ “Rock ‘n Roll High School”?
The New York Times has published a list of what they consider the best thousand films ever made. Never mind the audacity. How many have you seen? As of this moment, I’ve seen 224, but there are at least half a dozen that I’ll be seeing in the next month or so. Still, that’s less than a quarter of them!
Lists of Bests compiles all the lists of highly-rated books, films, and music into one place. Best of all, you can use their checklists to keep track of how many you have read, seen, or heard. For the curious, my page is here. It makes me realize how few books I’ve actually read… (via alison)
I mentioned recently how I’d seen a bunch of movies and gave my rating out of 10 for them. Well, for those who didn’t know, the indispensable Internet Movie Database lets you vote on every film in its database, and I’ve been obsessively doing just that for at least 2 years now. I now have 255 films in my vote history, and though I’ve probably seen more films than that, this is a pretty good indication of how many films I’ve seen in the past two years or so. I find it useful to figure out any gaps in my film history knowledge, as well as just being a neat way to contribute to the collective opinion. Here are some neat pieces of trivia (neat for me, anyway!):
I’ve found that people tend to rate recent films much too highly, and I’m not averse to going back and changing my rating after a few months. My criteria are that something that’s well made but not particularly memorable should be no higher than a 6 (ie. most so-called summer blockbusters) and that 10 can be given to a film that’s not necessarily considered a classic by everyone, but that I find myself watching again and again. If you haven’t yet tried out this neat feature of IMDB, you should check it out. Just click “Vote Here” next to the user ratings on any film.
Over the weekend, we watched all 460 minutes of the ten-part series, AFI: 100 Years, 100 Movies. Though I enjoyed it thoroughly, I wished there were a way to talk about each of these great films without giving away the entire plot, including the ending. It will make watching the films I haven’t seen yet a little less enjoyable. By the way, I’ve seen 33 of the top 100, but Brooke has seen 50.
On a related note, our first “Film Club” evening was last Friday, and we watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (number 93 on the AFI Top 100, and number 20 on their list of the Top 100 Comedies). I loved it, even more than Some Like It Hot, which was their top comedy overall and number 14 on the Top 100. It was a fitting tribute to the late great Jack Lemmon, and I’m becoming a huge Billy Wilder fan. Any other Billy Wilder fans out there?