Friday, June 29, 2007

Milles cinema

The Guardian has a list of 1,000 films that they believe 'best sum up the dazzling achievement and variety of the movies.'

As all lists should be, this one is subjective, baffling ( how else do you explain the presence of a very ordinary film such as Back To The Future on the same page as The Big Sleep?) and expansive.

It's fun, but don't start counting just yet; you'll either lose count, or realise when you've reached C (Part 1) that something you passed over in B was actually a film you'd seen but didn't recognise because you were too busy skimming just the titles.

For instance, The Chess Players you pass over, until you remember the Satyajit Ray under the title. Then light bulbs go off in your head. Please note that they don't accord French films with the same treatment: Belle de Jour is still Belle de Jour as is Les Enfants du Paradis. But Fear Eats the Soul is not automatically Angst essen Seele auf and so on.

(I'm exaggerating, of course; many titles are better known in their English avatars and they've sensibly kept to the recognisable ones in most cases).

Shall have to go through the list slowly and count. Many favourites in there.

Via email from Peter

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