Rushfield Babylon

On March 9, 2012 I posted the below.  I found myself vilified, excoriated, criticized, nearly stoned to death and pointed at like a circus freak as a result.

In one hour, I will be proven right.

I do not accept your apology.

Here was the original post:

This is what the winners lof the first six seasons of American Idol looked like:

Then something changed and this is what the winners of the following four seasons looked like:

Give you one guess which of the below will be the winner of this season of American Idol:

Prepare yourself for weeks when we can all be shocked and heartbroken and incomprehending as one by one the every contestant who is not Phillip Phillips is mysteriously eliminated.

There are many out there in Idol Nation who are already saying, no, no, no.  It’s not going to happen a fifth time.  This is a woman’s year for sure.  "It’s not going to happen a fifth time" is the clinical definition of insanity.

The tweenage dictators of American Idol will have blood on their hands. 

This week Roger Ebert revealed his all time ten best films list, preparing for the once a decade Sight and Sound of the world’s best movies.  Although he is not part of the Sight and Sound poll, Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny was inspired by Ebert’s list to post his own list of the best films. And now I have been inspired by McWeeny’s being inspired by Ebert to post mine.

Making this list has been perhaps the greatest challenge of my career.  I got it down to a top 50 pretty quickly, but having to choose just ten of those, and keep 40 films that I could watch over and over forever off the list was like being waterboarded   continuously for the past day and a half.  And I don’t know anyone who could survive that.

The big question looming over the list is: is this a list of my favorite films or the films I think are the best?  And its perhaps surprising how often the two were not the same.  I wrote yesterday about the Apocalypse/Godfather conundrum. And in musicals for instance, I think Singing in the Rain is a perfect, flawless, wonderful, genius film, and Meet Me in St. Louis is in places, a mess and very clunky.  But all the same, I like Meet Me better.  No movie has ever taken a story of a family moving and turned it into such intense, heartbreaking tragedy. If you don’t break down in tears during the Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas scene you need to take yourself straight to the hospital and tell them that something is very wrong with your heart.

In the end, I sort of compromised. I ruthlessly weeded out of the list any movies that I respect but I don’t personally love.  I decided I’m under no obligation to put Citizen Kane on my list as much as I acknowledge it’s greatness technically. (For me, the themes in that film are so heavy handed, the schoolboy Big Ideas are writ so large that what was once powerful just feel transparent and obvious.)   I didn’t put on a token silent film because looking into my heart, there isn’t a silent film I feel that way about, for right or wrong. Weeding out the venerable but unloved, I took the leap to declare that my favorites are in fact the best.  Everything on the list I can make a case it deserves to be there and I was not just in a weird mood when I watched it.

Finally, I solved the problem of having to pick just ten by refusing to do so.  I have listed the first ten, but the list of 20-some right below there really are indistinguishable from the top ten.  From #’s 6 - 33, they all score somewhere between 9.827 and 9.814. If the wind blew a little differently, any of them could’ve been on the top ten.

The Ten Best Apocalypse Now Battle of Algiers Bridge on the River Kwai  Casablanca Duck Soup Fast Times at Ridgemont High 8 ½ Jaws North By Northwest She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Just Below That All About Eve, All That Jazz, All the President’s Men, Animal House,Barry Lyndon, Best of Youth, Bicycle Thieves, Bringing up Baby, The Conformist, Diabolique, Dont Look Now,The Exorcist, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, The Graduate, Hunchback of Notre Dame, King of Comedy, Meet Me in St. Louis,Nashville, Persona, Rosemary’s Baby, Seven Samauri, Singing in the Rain,Smile, Sunset Blvd, Taxi Driver, The Third Man Honorable Mentions Fitzcarraldo, Guys and Dolls, Last Summer, Last Year at Marienbad, Napoleon, Some Like it Hot, Streetcar Named Desire, Bride of Frankenstein, Peeping Tom, Cleopatra, The Big Clock, The Godfather, Shampoo, Do the Right Thing, The Last Picture Show, Masculin Feminine, Rules of the Game, It Happened One Night, Lady From Shanghai, Oldboy, Ring-U An American In Paris, A Place in the Sun, Love and Death. Brazil, The Tenant, Wages of Fear, The Wild Bunch, Sorcerer, In the Mood For Love, Alien, Three Colors, Trainspotting, Wizard of Oz, The Lady Eve. Magnolia, Manhattan, Shot in the Dark, Melancholia, Goldfinger, In a Lonely Place, Le Samauri, Dr. Strangelove, Marriage of Maria Braun, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. Tokyo Story, Jules et Jim, The African Queen , Ninotchka. Red River, Best Years of Our Lives , L'aaventura