MoFo All Time 100: Ideas and Suggestions

Vote with your heart not your head I say.

Regardless, Chyp, my heart will go on.....

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

Scenarios can help;
"going to deserted island/quarantine/prison for life and you can only bring 25 dvds/blurays".
"all films will be destroyed, you can only save 25." etc.

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Entertainment Log
Letterboxd profile

my list is just gonna be the 25 movies i like more than every other movie and i'd encourage others to do the same. a compiled list of a group of cinephiles favorite films is probably a better metric for determining what is actually the "best" film than a bunch of people each trying to apply their own standard for what they view to be "objectively" the best, which is likely to be just a regurgitation of what places like AFI, TSPDT, etc. consider to be quality anyway, and that would be pretty boring because those lists already exist. i would much rather see more personal picks like quills make it. of course, more "objective" measures of quality can and should factor into one's estimation of a movie (citizen kane and the godfather both absolutely rule) but i wouldn't let it override your actual feelings towards the movie if you're debating between that and a movie you love that some would consider lesser. if a movie is doing something that makes you love it, then it might as well be as good as citizen kane.

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letterboxd
criticker

I admire the craft of movies with my brain.

I love movies with my heart.

I would have a blast making the latter, and it would be what I would consider the best movies. Because what are the best movies if they aren't the movies you like the best? As soon as you start bumping things up your list because they are critically acclaimed, you're turning yourself into some sort of critical aggregate. That already exists, and it's called Rotten Tomatoes.

And of course craft and love are blended to a degree. Masterful communication (craft) of an idea is what makes some films so powerful.

If I had to be stuck on an island with only 100 movies for the next 5 years, I am not taking Taxi Driver, but I'm sure as heck bringing along Predators. And yes, that's "Predators" with an "s". The sequel. The one with Topher Grace.



(Also, keep in mind that personal idiosyncrasies will cancel each other out. I am 100% serious that Hellbound is one of my favorite movies of all time, but is anyone else going to rank it or vote for it? Nope. But I also love the more "critically safe" film Brief Encounter, something that I could see many more people voting for.)

~*~shifty eyes~*~

Heh, yeah. I mean, who would put The 'burbs on their top 100 list.

~*~shifty eyes~*~

This

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Everyone's all "just put what you like" while I'm over here banging my head against a wall explaining that the possible meanings of "like" is the whole thing to begin with.

But yes, people should make up their own minds, ideally by sampling the rationales posted in this thread, thinking about what they want the list to say about us as a group, and then coming to their own conclusion.

So if we continue this discussion, will you continue to bang your head? Asking for a friend 👀

All this talk of "be true to yourself" and "follow your heart" is a bit nauseating TBH. We can all recognise quality when we see it, that's why we joined a film forum. I love Flash Gordon but if I put it at number one on my list I'd expect to be insta-banned and rightly so.

^blasphemy! The soundtrack alone should merit a top 30, at least.

I think that people can use any metric that they want for "best".

I just think it's not a good thing when people start thinking "I really love XYZ, but ABC is considered by other people to be better, so maybe I should bump ABC up my list."

I mean, whatever your personal metric for best is--whether that is all technical merit or some immeasurable "je ne sais quoi"--that should guide your list. Not what other people think. It took me a while to get over what other people might think of my favorites, but isn't it kind of a waste of time pretending that you love Citizen Kane if your heart really belongs to Hot Fuzz?

Plus, I think that this is why you see a lot of top lists that look the same. Not that some films don't necessarily deserve to be on most great films lists. But I often feel like I'm just reading the same 50 titles over and over, maybe in a slightly different order. There's rarely anything to discover or surprise or delight me in most top lists. I do think that they are very helpful for someone starting out in film watching.

I'm not putting down the idea of making a top 100 list at all--just to be clear. But I think it will be more meaningful and interesting if people genuinely vote what they love. The top might be very predictable, but there could be some neat stuff down in the bottom 50.

I'm not saying that people should feel pressured into choosing films that are widely regarded as masterpieces over their own personal favourites but rather that we can all internally recognise the difference between films that we enjoy because they're easy to watch comfort food and films that we enjoy because they are of exceptional high quality, complex, innovative, profound, etc etc. By all means include some of the former in the list (I will be) but it should be weighted towards the latter otherwise we risk trivializing what should be a celebration of our most beloved masterpieces of cinema.

I very much agree with this. Also, there’s arguably always an element of refining one’s taste and coming to appreciate the ‘masterpieces’ (not all of them indiscriminately, but at least some, bearing in mind this is the best cinema has to offer).

My list is going to be the 25 movies I love most regardless of their level of "complexity," "profundity," or "innovation." I just have to decide which 25 those will be.

Generally acknowledged "masterpieces" (I hate that word and have only ever applied it to one movie) will be scarce or absent from my ballot because I dislike a lot of the ones I've seen and the ones I don't dislike probably won't rank in my top 25. I see absolutely no reason to try to skew this list to look like every other top 100 movies list ever made. That's just boring.

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Somebody better vote for Citizen Kane as it's become the du jour film to knock

Agreed...I pray NOT to see the usual & boring choices of Tarantino and Scorsese dominate the list. Geez their films are on all the other list anyway.

That somebody won't be me.

Most of my favorite safe bonafide classics anyways so I’m covered. Maybe a few here and there that might raise a few eyebrows.
No Tarantino films, no Phoenix films, nothing after 2000

I genuinely find Hennenlotter's Brain Damage to be a profound film. It currently has a 6.6/10 rating on IMDb, and a lot of people think it's just a dumb gross out movie whose most memorable attribute is an outrageous blow-job joke. But I watch it and it moves me. I can't quite explain why. I cried at the end the first time I watched it. It is easily one of my top 100 films. It makes me feel ways that certain classics/"masterpieces" just don't. To me, it is complex and it is profound.

Why should we weigh our votes toward certain movies? Why is it better to love something on technical merit than to love something because it comforts you?

I don't think that seeing "comfort food" movies on a list trivializes film. If anything, I think it celebrates the diversity of what film can be and what it can mean to people.

Citizen Kane is a strong film on many levels and I enjoyed it. It's not a top 100 film for me. I have read many reviews/articles about it, and I totally understand why it consistently lands on top lists. I have very few criticisms of it, except to say that I watched it once (or maybe twice?) and have never felt the desire to watch it again. I don't hold on to scenes from it the way that I will suddenly remember a sequence from Brief Encounter or The Last Wave. There are films that embed themselves in my mind and Citizen Kane just isn't one of those for me.

I do think that any time something is lauded as "the best", it will naturally attract some hate. I think that's a little silly. Then again, even the idea of "the best movie" is pretty silly. Films are art. That's like trying to pick the best painting or the best song. There are so many people in the world with such different minds and emotions and experiences. You can't just bundle everyone together and decide the best of any type of art.

I would have thought it's obvious why it's better to recognise high quality films rather than low quality films. It's the same when evaluating anything in life.


If we were doing a list of top 100 football players I would expect to see the same few names near the top of the list. That's not boring it's just the nature of "Top 100" lists. The fun lies in seeing which order the top players are ranked.


If we were doing a list of the top 100 works of art I would include the Sistine Chapel but not the drawing my young daughter did at school, despite it being of personal importance to me. One of those is a breathtaking masterpiece of utter genius. The other, regardless of how much I might like it, is rubbish.


Ultimately we just have a different perspective on what the list should be and that's fine. It would be boring if everyone approached it the same way.