Post-2010s list, what should the next countdown be?

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I mean, I can't make a better argument for "no technical restrictions" than this.

I can understand the concerns, but trolling is pretty minimal with these things. It went pretty well with the Comedies list, all things considered. If people have weird ideas about what qualifies, I kind of want that represented. Or at least, I like that "problem" a lot more than the problem of people not being able to make those determinations themselves.
Yeah I understand but I'd have a little bit of a problem with neo noir inclusions meaning that a film like Oldboy (as amazing as it is) would go up against The Maltese Falcon. Which is basically Holden's Point. Which is why Noir should be noir. But then that leaves too smaller pool of films:

So 'War' it is.



As has been said before, true eligibility will be an issue for most of the options we've thrown out; noir, war, romance, crime... and most of those options will also include the "niche" issue, with not everybody willing to do noir/crime or musicals/romance. The best option is to focus on the "what" now, and then worry about the "how".

I think the three initial options sound good for a poll, with maybe Sports and Biopics thrown in?
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I think, ideally, people would use the fact that it's a Noir list to specifically weight their options based on how much they fit the brief, so to speak. I know not everyone does that. For example, one person's Comedy ballot might be "the best films that are also comedies," whereas another's might be "the films that are the best as comedies" (this is more the way I go). It's a subtle distinction but an important one.

Generally, though, I tend to think with significant participation (and bumping the list down to 50), a lot of that gets weeded out naturally through scale.



War were declared.

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Yeah, for people who care about such things, War figures to get the most participation (and probably has less possibility of heated disagreement) of the options proposed.



I also have an idea of revisiting the decade lists without simply juggling the exact same titles. Best Performances.

I am sure Yoda could tweak his list mechanism to vote not for a movie but one or more performances within a movie. You would get some of the exact same movies represented, of course. Great movies usually contain great performances. But it would also allow us to highlight great performances in OK films that you might not otherwise vote for and also to highlight the kinds of performances that things like The Oscars tend to overlook. If you want to vote for Robin Williams' voice performance in Aladdin or one of Andy Serkis' motion-capture performances, this would be your chance. And you could certainly vote for more than one performance from a film. If you wanted to vote for Daniel-Day Lewis and Paul Dano from There Will Be Blood, go ahead!

The thought came to be during the MoFo Top 100 of the 2000s. The movie Sexy Beast is an OK Noir-ish little Brit flick, probably wasn't going to be in contention of cracking many people's ballots. BUT, if you ask for the best performances of that decade Ben Kingsley's wonderfully monstrous Don Logan from Sexy Beast leaps right out as a top contender. The movie itself, little chance of making the collective, but the performance...heck yeah!

Logistically I think the ballots would need to be different. Having seen how these questions of Best Performance are generally answered here and other message boards there is a HUGE male bias. Partially because so many American films are centered around male characters. No need to divide between lead and supporting but maybe each ballot has the Top 20 male and Top 20 female performances and the lists are presented in parallel? Two male and two female reveals each day, essentially get a Top 200 for each decade? Or do 50 Male and 50 Female?

Details to be worked out, but it would be a different angle on the decade lists.
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Re: performances. I'm sure I can do it, but to be clear, it would be a significant amount of work. Work I'm willing to do, but just in case that matters.

Also, more to the point, I had a thought the other day about maybe doing some kind of bracket/tournament/something where we put various Oscar winners against each other, to determine not just the best performances of a given year, but of a given decade, and so on. I'm not sure how I'd want to do this yet, and it might require more work than the above, but it would also maybe be more interesting/comprehensive, and maybe become a new sort of thing in its own right (brackets where things face off against each other).

None of this is imminent, mind you, and I was going to keep the idea quiet, but Holden's idea necessitates that I least mention it, in case that makes anyone more OR less likely to want to do that via countdown.



Yeah I understand but I'd have a little bit of a problem with neo noir inclusions meaning that a film like Oldboy (as amazing as it is) would go up against The Maltese Falcon. Which is basically Holden's Point. Which is why Noir should be noir. But then that leaves too smaller pool of films.
I don't think the size of the eligible film pool for Classic Film Noir is the problem. It's that if you tell MoFo at large that only these two-hundred and sixty-seven titles from 1939-1953 are eligible there will only be fifteen or twenty of us who participate. That's a thread, not a MoFo List.



I know you could get much more site-wide participation for "Crime Films" or "Thrillers" that include Noir under their blankets and then you don't have to worry about is it Noir or Neo Noir or whatever. Most of those titles would be eligible as they usually are either crime flicks or thrillers, by broad definition. But Noir is a specific genre, even if it is one that is eternally debated, and to call our list Film Noir when by any kind of objective standard only thirty percent or less of the titles in it would qualify is pointless.

As I have mentioned before, I belong to several Film Noir centered pages on Facebook and literally at least half the posts are arguments about what does or doesn't count, and at least twice a month some newbie draws derision and ire because they inevitably label or ask if Casablanca is Noir (it definitely is NOT). But for way too many, Film Noir simply means a black and white movie starring Humphrey Bogart.



Yeah, there's an inevitable push-pull between rigor of definition and actual participation levels. There is no "right" answer, but those two things move in roughly opposite directions, and we don't have perfect fine-tuning. Which is to say, maybe a lot of us are cool with a Noir list that is more restrictive that, say, 65 people submit ballots for (as opposed to 85 while being wide open, eligibility-wise), but there's got to be some number where that trade is no longer worthwhile. Obviously 15 would be pointless and not worth doing a countdown for. Maybe 40? 45? It's a real question.

Having a list feel real, and valuable, and emblematic, means striking a weird balance between purity and participation levels. Too far in either direction and there's no reason to do it at all.



I absolutely think this needs to happen and I would be totally down to host it again, but I think it makes more sense to do it next year - ten years after the original.
Just throwing in very broadly that I agree with this, and I like the idea of waiting about a decade to refresh things like this. I like the symmetry, it makes it seem like we're planning this out, as opposed to haphazardly making it up as we all go.



@Siddon had a good post about Noir and Neo Noir distinctions the last time this came up...

Well Film Noir runs from the 1940's-50's, it expanded globally after that. In the 1970's-80's it inspired film makers to redo the genre in color but with darker tones and themes.
Film Noir (literally 'black film" or "black cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Nino Frank in 1946) who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France to theatres during and following World War II, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Laura (1944). A wide range of films reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period, and counter-balanced the optimism of Hollywood's musicals and comedies. Feelings of fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia (displayed through visual styling and low-key lighting) were readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic, hard-boiled, or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir's story conventions were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict, purposelessness and sense of injustice. There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs. The restrictive Production Code (or 'Hays Code') at the time dictated how subjects such as crime and sex could be handled, and promoted more suggestive plots with shadowy and dark elements.
Classic film noir developed during and after World War II, taking advantage of the post-war ambience of anxiety, pessimism, and suspicion. It was a style of low-cost, B-list American films (the bottom of a double feature) that capitalized on advancements in film-making in the 20s and 30s, including synchronized sound, panchromatic (black and white) film stock with better light sensitivity, more compact lighting equipment, and cheaper on-location shoots.
Film noir first evolved in the 1940s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic "Golden Age" period until about 1960 (marked by the 'last' film of the classic film noir era, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958)). Very often, a film noir story was developed around a cynical, hard-hearted, disillusioned male character [e.g., Robert Mitchum, Fred MacMurray, or Humphrey Bogart], stereotypically a fedora-wearing gumshoe detective, who encountered a beautiful but promiscuous, amoral, double-dealing and seductive femme fatale [e.g., Mary Astor, Veronica Lake, Jane Greer, Barbara Stanwyck, or Lana Turner] in an urban setting. The 'killer dame' would often use her feminine wiles and come-hither sexuality to manipulate him into becoming the fall guy - often following a murder. After a betrayal or double-cross, she was frequently destroyed as well, often at the cost of the hero's life. As women during the war period were given new-found independence and better job-earning power in the homeland during the war, they would suffer -- on the screen -- in these films of the 40s.
Or if you prefer videos


Or if you need a list here are the 1,000 Noirs from

'1,000 Noir Films: They Shot Dark Pictures, Didn't They?'

https://www.flickchart.com/Charts.as...st&perpage=250



....but there's got to be some number where that trade is no longer worthwhile. Obviously 15 would be pointless and not worth doing a countdown for. Maybe 40? 45? It's a real question.

Having a list feel real, and valuable, and emblematic, means striking a weird balance between purity and participation levels. Too far in either direction and there's no reason to do it at all.
For reference the pre-1930 countdown managed a Top 50 and that received a mere 30 ballots in total so I'd say the cut-off point is prolly somewhere around that number.



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I think most of the ideas presented here are good, but I think we're going to have to broaden the definitions if we're going to achieve a good level of participation for several of these. I mean, any noir list would be a big struggle for me, but a strict noir list that excludes neo noir or only includes the neo noirs that the hardcore fans deem acceptable? Count me out.

I like the suggestion of romance, though I think we would need to open it up to personal definition ala the Comedies countdown since so many movies contain heavy romantic elements.
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I'm happy with Musicals, War and Noir on the ballot. Musicals is my preference, obviously!


Other things we could consider:
LGBTQ films
Films from particular regions e.g. Asian or European or even more specifically by language e.g. French language films
Favourite Best Picture Winners
Action? Have we done action?
Films not appearing on any other list


Lists worth rebooting:
Animation
Comic Book Movies