People Love These Lists!

There's been a bit of a kerfuffle about Vertigo replacing Citizen Kane as the "greatest" film of all time. It's kind of easy for me to reconcile this as either it's a sign of Citizen Kane needing to be retired (in the same way that we could probably safely remove Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band from the running of greatest albums as it's something of a shoe-in) or it is a sign of Sight and Sound losing their mind as Vertigo is profoundly boring. Then again, I do own it, maybe I should watch it again. . .

Either way, this article came out as a reply to all of that and I realize that it's about time for me to review my current list.

Alien
Blade Runner
Taxi Driver
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
Yojimbo
Seven Samurai
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
The Big Lebowski
Rushmore
Apocalypse Now

Looking at it now, I realize that there's a few titles that bounce in and out of the list, but there's a core set that just stay on. I'm pretty happy with this list. It's better than it was, I think. I mean, I have to feel that way, right?

Then again, lists are inherently kind of silly.

Bronson.

"I had a very bad experience on the plane in from California yesterday. There was a man on the plane, sitting across from me, and they were showing an old Greer Garson movie. He said, Hey, why aren't you in that? The picture was made before I even became an actor. I said, Why aren't you?"
--Charles Bronson.

(via Roger Ebert.)

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

At a film festival, after ''Pat Garrett'' had become the latest of his films to be emasculated by a studio, he was asked if he would ever make a ''pure Peckinpah'' and he replied, ''I did 'Alfredo Garcia' and I did it exactly the way I wanted to. Good or bad, like it or not, that was my film.''

Here Comes a Reasonable Argument!

Prepare to get angry!

You angry yet?

Okay!

We're talking about vidjagames. Not too long ago Roger Ebert started a fire storm among the nerd community by saying that not only were videogames not art, but they could never be art. As a person who has played videogames from the age of five on and has studied art, I can say with some amount of authority-- however shaky it may be-- that the vidjagames ain't aren't. Will they never be art? I don't know. Short of taking the spice poison, I'll never see into the future. There's a pretty good chance they will be. Some day, but not today.

Anyways, here's something he said recently about growing old, art, and videogames:

I didn't want to play a video game. If I should dislike it, I already had a preview of the response awaiting me: I was too old, I was over the hill, I was too aged it "get it." That became the mantra: "Ebert doesn't get it." I disagreed with them about age, which I know more about than most of them, but I had some sympathy about the concept of not "getting it." There are many, many things I believe many members of our society don't "get," but I don't think they're too old or too young to "get" them, only differently evolved.