The AFI top 100 as Newly Amended

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https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/06/20/...affy-stardust/

Back in 1998, the American Film Institute polled 1,500 people connected with the film industry on their favorite American movies of the previous 100 years. The voters were given a list of 400 nominated American films to choose from and also asked to rank their favorite ten. The resulting list of 100 great movies was released to the public on a televised special in June of that year.

As is the case anytime a group of taste-makers get together to try to quantify what is primarily a subjective topic, there was plenty of…conversation about the films and rankings the AFI had ended up with. And of course that’s part of the idea to begin with. I’m sure it didn’t hurt video rentals and sales for the selected films, either. There was some confusion about what constituted an ‘American’ film for the purposes of the list. Movies like Lawrence of Arabia and A Clockwork Orange struck many onlookers as pretty British. It was later explained that the primary way the AFI was defining an American film was based on the nationality and company affiliation of the producers and producing organizations. That kind of answered most of the questions on the subject, but then someone noticed that this didn’t apply to Carol Reed’s postwar noir The Third Man.

I was one of the people the AFI was targeting I guess, because as soon as the list was released, I printed out a copy and stuck it to my refrigerator to keep track of how many I’d seen as I tried to fill the blank spaces. But life got in the way, and I hadn’t quite polished the 1998 list off by the time the AFI popped up with an updated list just nine years later. The Third Man was gone from the new list, as were favorites like Amadeus, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Manchurian Candidate. But hey, the updated list had added 12 Angry Men, Blade Runner, and Do the Right Thing, so the changes weren’t all bad.

Perhaps because this updated list showed up in 2007, there was a general expectation that a new list would crop up every ten years. So far that hasn’t happened, though. Did the AFI get too many complaints that the previous list hadn’t been given enough time to establish itself or for people like me to devour it completely? Maybe. That said though, I personally feel like enough time has passed and the cultural landscape has maybe changed enough that another update would be pretty interesting.

Last year, film critic Amy Nicholson of Variety magazine and the Canon podcast and comedian Paul Scheer (The League, How Did This Get Made?) teamed up to start a new podcast called Unspooled. The pair watch one of the films from the current AFI top 100 list and then get together to talk about what they saw on what is mostly a weekly basis. Sometimes they love what is obviously already a highly thought of film, but sometimes they come out wondering what the fuss is about. They recently got halfway done with the list and ranked what they’d covered from one to fifty. So far they have Citizen Kane ranked first (surprise, surprise), and Ben-Hur down at fiftieth (sad trombone).

Perhaps more significantly for me personally, I have finally completed watching all 100 of the films on the current AFI list! My best guess is that the first one of these I saw as a kid was The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind, or maybe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There’s no doubt though, that the very last one I saw was Robert Altman’s Nashville, which I took in alongside a friend from college as we dined on Thai food on a recent Friday night.

As I approached this momentous life achievement, it seemed only natural to me that I might eventually create my own version of a top 100 American movies list, using the AFI as a general jumping off point. As it turned out, making this list was a good deal more difficult than I’d initially imagined. Watching the films themselves was pretty time consuming of course, but then trying to sift through all of them and scores more that I’ve seen over the course of my movie-going life to create something close to a legitimate list was a little overwhelming. At some point I had to simply come to terms with the fact that I was going to end up with a list that would necessarily feel a little messy and easily criticized. I guess that’s kind of how the folks at the AFI have felt for the past twenty-plus years.

You’ll find below the list I decided to settle on in preparation for this article. It’s a major fusion of movies I maybe didn’t personally love, but recognize the place they hold in culture and filmmaking and movies I really adore, but recognize that they’re maybe not particularly important in the grand scheme of things. And of course there’s lots more sort of shoved in between. Probably tomorrow I’ll look back and want to change something here, but for right now, this is how I’m feeling. We’re going to start at #100 and move up gradually to my own #1.

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I still think “The Wizard of Oz” needs to be #1.