Top 50 - Introductory comments and those who just missed the cut

I heard some time ago that in my new capacity as a real film journalist (tm) I would have to make a top 50 of all time. This threw me into a panic. I can never even come up with a best of favorite movie, let alone 50. Also, I felt like I just hadn't seen enough movies to qualify to even make such a list. In preparation, I looked up the top 50 movies I had seen from the top 100 at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? and I had to go up to movie #178 to find 50 I had seen.

I did start on it though, and today I impulsively started numbering along my long list, and decided this would be it: the list I'll count down from now on. Of course, this is a top 50 strictly as of today, Wednesday August 15th; ask me tomorrow, and the list will be different. But it would be similar, and I'll stick to the list as it is now.

I'll go through the 50 through 11 in groups of five, with short comments, and the top 10 I'll go through one by one, post by post. Afterwards I'll post the full list with some statistics, and some justifications as to why some films you might expect are not there.

Some criteria: one important one was whether I would want to watch it right now. This means that movies I admired but found unpleasant or harsh will not be here. Also, the top movie might have been any other in my top 10, but the one I chose is one I'm certain will still be in my top 10 ten years from now (oh, the suspense...).

To start: the bottom of the long list, the films that might have made it, the runners up, just to give you a taste:

- Masculin/Feminin (Godard, 1966)
- Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996)
- The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940)
- The African Queen (Huston, 1951)
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell, 2001)
- The Dreamers (Bertolucci, 2003)
- The Piano (Campion, 1993)
- L.A. Confidential (Hanson, 1997)
- Say Anything (Crowe, 1989)
- 8 1/2 (Fellini, 1963)
- The Big Heat (Lang, 1953)
- Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969)
- Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg)
- Atame (Almodovar, 1990)
- Gun Crazy (Lewis, 1949)


So, these did not make it...stay tuned to find out which ones did.