So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.

Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting ( Read more... )

So here's the whole thing in a single post. For a different way of looking at it, I've reorganized it chronologically by year.

Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat, Lumiere (1896)

A Trip To The Moon, Melies (1902)

Great Train Robbery, (1903)

Nosferatu, Murnau (1922)

Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein (1925)

Metropolis, Lang (1927)

The General, Keaton (1927 ( Read more... )

Some stuff that didn't readily fit into any of the other associational chains:

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). Still one of the best ensemble films ever made, one of the best representations of the complicated network of urban life ever made, one of the best films about the messiness of racial politics ever made. Spike Lee is a filmmaker ( Read more... )

Wanted to spend some time today doing indpendents and outliers, as well as filling in a few blind spots that I missed earlier.

First up in this list is probably Luis Bunuel + Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929). It's a key document of the Surrealist movement, but really I'm including it for its notorious sliced-eyeball shot, which remains one ( Read more... )

I'm going to try to wrap up this canon-making adventure by Friday, which I'm sure non-cinephile readers of this blog will appreciate.

I thought that today I'd zip through a few of the big genres I hadn't touched on yet. Foremost among these would probably be the Western. John Ford's The Searchers (1956) is generally regarded as one of the best ( Read more... )

Whoops, looking at my friend Darren's own list of 100 films reminded me that when I blitzed past Germany yesterday, I somehow skipped Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987), which is totally essential. Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) is great, too, but Wings of Desire is the one for this list by a comfortable margin, pretty much the key film from re- ( Read more... )

So, OK, time to branch out and get some more non-English-language stuff on this list.

We're going to start off with a quick tour of Europe. From Italy, the director I feel is most important is the great Federico Fellini: it's hard to beat his two masterpieces La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 1/2 (1963). I'm also quite fond of his whacked-out, near- ( Read more... )

So let's move on to comedies.

Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are the two obvious early giants needing acknowledgement. I'm going with Modern Times (1936) as the "canonical" Chaplin and (I'm embarrassed to say this) I haven't really seen enough Keaton to make an educated choice here. I'm picking The General (1927) (co-directed by Keaton and ( Read more... )

So recently my friend Catling posted a request for people to suggest "must-see" movies. There are a number of already-existing ways to approach this project: Jim Emerson's 102-film list, claiming to represent "the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat 'movie-literate,'" is a good one, and if you're looking for ( Read more... )

So the table of contents for this week's New Yorker (Mar 5 cover date) promised that the topic of David Denby's Critic at Large column would be "new non-narrative movies," which any regular reader of this blog must know is something that'll make me perk up and take interest. I was a little bit disappointed to see that the article didn't quite ( Read more... )