Friday 18 May 2007

Friday

Marcel Berlins wrote an interesting article in theguardian on Wednesday. He was reacting strongly to the 'greatest foreign films of all time', as voted for by readers of his paper. I hadn't heard about this enterprise, but as soon as I saw the results I reacted along similar lines to Marcel. Pan's Labyrinth was voted in at number nine. Marcel believed, as I do, that this was absurd. People were only putting it there because they'd seen it recently, and he thought no such list should include films made in the last ten years. What Marcel didn't say, though, is what he actually thought of the film. I'm presuming, because he didn't say it, that he thought it was a good film, but just not yet ready to be included in lists. I, of course, would go one step further and say this film should never be included in lists - whether in ten, twenty, or thirty years. It's just not that good a movie. We did agree on one thing, though, and that was our mutual dislike of the sickly Amelie, which readers had put at number two. Incredible. At number one was Cinema Paradiso. I haven't seen this film, but even theguardian's cinema critics thought this was a terrible choice. Nevertheless, when you go down the top twenty, the good ones do start appearing. Although it is strange that the film Halliwell's thought was the best of all time, Tokyo Story, was only at number eleven! (N.B. at number ten was Gordon Brown.)

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