Actually, this was not a great year for me doing things that weren’t related to finishing and defending my thesis, so there’s undoubtedly tons of stuff missing (I don’t think I read a single 2010 book, for example). Even at the best of times, too, my tastes are not so deep or idiosyncratic that my lists are dramatically different from what you might find from sites that do this kind of thing for a living. I always feel a little self-conscious about just putting together a list that looks like pretty much every other list on the internet, but in a slightly different order. So this year, I’ll try to tackle some of my more personal disappointments and discoveries of 2010.

And if you are an opinionated geek like me, please leave a comment and let me know what you liked and what I missed.

FILM

the usual suspects: True Grit, Winter’s Bone, The White Ribbon, Inception and Toy Story 3? All great, but Un Prophet is probably my favourite film of 2010. I haven’t seen The Social Network, Mother or Black Swan yet, but I’m guessing I’ll like them just fine when I do.

surprises: I’ve become moderately obsessed with Exit Through the Gift Shop, despite having zero interest in seeing it when I initially heard the premise and saw a couple of lukewarm reviews. But its wry take on both the gallery art and street art worlds and the bizarre twists in the story really stuck with me.

disappointments: I absolutely love both the Scott Pilgrim comics and Edgar Wright, so putting them together should have been awesome, right? Furthermore Wright’s Spaced is awesome in exactly the same way that Scott Pilgrim is awesome. Unfortunately, after a promising first act, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World becomes an exhausting series of CGI battles. Wright’s amazing pop-culture imagination keeps it (just barely) from becoming tedious, but the end result really lacks the heart that the books have. Not a bad movie, but I wanted so much more. Also, Shutter Island, which may or may not be a bad movie, but it’s mostly just forgettable when it’s not ludicrous.

new to me: Man, the 1970s New Hollywood just keeps delivering. This year I saw The Friends of Eddie Coyle from 1973, which is just fantastic and quite possibly my favourite Robert Mitchum role. “This life’s hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid!”

Also, Nicolas Winding Refn: Bronson, Valhalla Rising, the Pusher trilogy — he has yet to make a real masterpiece, but he’s a fascinating filmmaker.

TELEVISION

best new series: Louie C. K.’s quasi-autobiographical Louie is stunning: hilarious, poignant, honest and vulgar. A little bit like the best of 1970s Woody Allen (back when he was groundbreaking and relevant), but using the funny to uncover nuggets of painful and beautiful truth in the everyday.

still awesome: Breaking Bad is the greatest show on TV and this past season was probably the best yet. Parks and Recreation, The Venture Bros., Peep Show and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia all push, in different ways, what can be done under the constraints of a half-hour comedy.

new to me: This year I plowed through entire run of The Shield. It sometimes falls into cop-show cliches in the early seasons, but as a thriller about the rise and fall of the anti-hero cop Vic Mackie and his always-five-steps-ahead scheming, it’s hard to beat.

disappointments: As a zombie movie fan, I had such high hopes for The Walking Dead. The pilot was okay. The Office continued its slide into rote sitcom mediocrity. I still haven’t been able to get into Mad Men, but maybe I’ll give it another shot in 2011.

MUSIC

new albums from old bands: I didn’t spend much time looking for new music in 2010, so the best new albums I heard were from bands I already know and like. Four Tet’s There Is Love in You and Caribou’s Swim satisfied my indie-electronica appetite. The Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs and The National’s High Violet are beautiful albums, but I’ve finally been forced to accept the fact that these bands might not have the sense of irony I’ve always superimposed onto them. Also good: Frightened Rabbit, Beach House, Wavves and LCD Soundsystem.

back catalog: The huge Ninja Tune XX is far and away the best compilation I’ve heard in ages. I have it shuffled into my playlist and now all kinds of random gems from 20 years worth of dub and IDM just keep popping up. In 2010 I also spent some time diving into the Aphex Twin/AFX/etc back catalog of old semi-obscure EPs thinking “how good could it really be?” Pretty goddam good, it turns out.

disappointments: Blonde Redhead is one of my very favourite bands and after four incredible albums in a row and a three-and-a-half year break, I was pretty stoked for Penny Sparkle. Which I listened to all the way through twice and then deleted from my iPhone.

PODCASTS

continuing favourites: I probably spent more time in 2010 listening to podcasts than watching TV and movies and listening to music combined. The ones I most look forward to vary, but Filmspotting and Stuff You Should Know are always at the top of the list. I’m also a regular listener of The Bugle, Planet Money, This American Life, The History of Rome, CBC Radio 3, The R3-30, Radiolab and Quirks and Quarks.

best new podcast: While there are still occasional hilarious episodes, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier’s SModcast has mostly devolved from a witty (if crude) weekly chat, to Smith getting stoned and giggling at his own dirty jokes for an hour. But the spin-off Tell ‘Em Steve-Dave — which has no Smith but is instead a group of friends who all work or hang out at his comic store in New Jersey — has more than made up for it. It’s amateurish, rambling and obsessive, but that’s part of the charm. It’s like catching up every week with a group of goofy, oddball friends who don’t realize how weird they really are.

disappointments: While the brilliant ones are brilliant, the vast majority of podcasts are so crummy, I can never get too excited about one until I’ve heard a few episodes. I will say, though, that 2010 seems to be the year a lot of people who aren’t me got excited about podcasts by comedians interviewing other comedians and actors. I’d rather stick rusty knitting needles in my ears.

Twenty slots, twenty-five films. How did I do it? Simple, I cheated.

1. No Country for Old Men (2007). About halfway through my first viewing, I knew this was one of the best movies I’d ever seen, technically and thematically. Three or four rewatchings later, I still find new things to admire and think about. Dammit, I want to watch it again right now!
2. Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), Brand Upon the Brain (2006) and My Winnipeg (2008). I don’t think individually any of these three Guy Maddin films would place this high (though My Winnipeg would make the top ten — it’s a straight-up masterpiece), but as a group, they make up a kind of alternate-universe cinema that branched off from our timeline circa 1928 but kept developing for another 80 years, and became something strange and pretty damn entertaining.
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Funny, original and endlessly clever, this film reaches for emotions no other film has, and succeeds. I love the holy living fuck out of this movie.
4. Grizzly Man (2005). Werner Herzog uses the vast amount of footage shot by Timothy Treadwell to tell not only the story of Treadwell’s life and death, but to give the most clear and profound presentation of his own ideas about nature, folly and filmmaking to date. The end result is a kind of conversation between two slightly-unhinged philosopher filmmakers, one living and one dead.
5. Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). Easily my two favourite straight-up comedies of the decade. Also marks the strongest big-screen debuts of the decade, by writer/director Edgar Wright and writer/actor Simon Pegg, who wring humour and pathos out of the most unexpected places.
6. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) Eli: “I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.” Royal: “Me, too. Me, too.” Yeah. Me, too.
7. Oldboy (2003). I can’t argue that it’s a perfect film, but it packs so many brilliant scenes and ideas into its running time that really, who cares? This would make my list for the hammer fight alone. Or the squid-eating scene. Or the rooftop freedom-in-a-suitcase scene.
8. Inglourious Basterds (2009). I truly do not understand why the critical response was only mildly positive instead of enthusiastic. I predict that in ten years, conventional wisdom will place this alongside Pulp Fiction, and nobody except a few contrarians and haters will bat an eyelid.
9. 3-Iron (2004). South Korean movie about two lovers who never speak, not to each other and not to anyone else. Probably the gentlest, most joyful film imaginable about loneliness and nihilism.
10. WALL·E (2008). Aside from Cars, every Pixar film has been either great or a masterpiece, but I give WALL·E mad props for it’s silent first half : the cinematic equivalent setting the bar even higher than usual and then vaulting over the mofo blindfolded just to show they could.
11. The Dark Knight (2008). The first real “graphic novel” movie, as opposed to a “comic book” movie gets right everything I still enjoy about superhero funnybooks — an utter unwillingness to condescend, a deep love and respect for the mythology, and a good half-dozen Crowning Moments of Awesome, all built on a framework of black-and-grey morality.
12. Mulholland Dr. (2001)
13. Zodiac (2007)
14. Children of Men (2006). The politics are so heavy-handed it could have been a Red Dawn for liberals, but it’s so goddamn passionate and articulate that it never devolves into eyerolling territory.
15. American Psycho (2000)
16. The Fountain (2006). Even liking this movie seems to set me apart from pretty much everyone else, and I’m not sure how well it will stand up to repeat viewings, but I walked out of the theatre absolutely loving it, and thinking it is possibly the most beautiful movie I’d ever seen. Since then, it has only grown in my mind.
17. Battle Royale (2000). “So a classroom full of Japanese schoolkids are put on an island and forced to fight until only one is left alive. But it’s way better than it sounds!” Trying to convince people to watch this ends up being either a really, really hard sell, or a disturbingly easy one.
18. Donnie Darko (2001). Richard Kelly’s embarrassing commentary tracks, “director’s cut” and subsequent work have convinced me this is a kind of accidental masterpiece, more subtle, mysterious and poignant than he ever intended. But hey, that’s art for ya.
19. Spirited Away (2001)
20. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). The eleven purest hours of cinema I ever expect to see.



And thirty more! You lucky, lucky people!

21. Encounters at the End of the World (2007)
22. Ghost World (2001)
23. Lost in Translation (2003)
24. The New World (2005)
25. The Incredibles (2004)
26. Capturing The Friedmans (2003)
27. Songs from the Second Floor (2000)
28. The Departed (2006)
29. Primer (2004)
30. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring (2003)
31. Adaptation (2002)
32. City of God (2002)
33. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)
34. Synecdoche, New York (2008)
35. Fog of War (2003)
36. Let the Right One In (2008)
37. Man on Wire (2008)
38. Requiem for a Dream (2000)
39. The Proposition (2005)
40. A History of Violence (2005)
41. Clerks II (2006)
42. The Hurt Locker (2009)
43. Together (2000)
44. Twilight Samurai (2002)
45. Wendy and Lucy (2008)
46. Collateral (2004)
47. A Serious Man (2009)
48. Serenity (2005)
49. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
50. Last Life in the Universe (2003)

And a few more I considered, but ultimately cut from the top 50. I really spent an embarrassing amount of time on this whole thing.

4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days (2007)
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
American Splendor (2003)
Amélie (2001)
Apocalypto (2006)
Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner (2001)
Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans (2009)
Before Sunset (2004)
Brick (2005)
Caché (2005)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005)
The Descent (2005)
The Fall (2006)
Ghost Dog (2000)
Ichi the Killer (2001)
In The Mood For Love (2000)
Into the Wild (2007)
Iron Man (2008)
Juno (2007)
The King of Kong (2007)
Knocked Up (2007)
Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Memento (2000)
Miami Vice (2006)
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
Once (2006)
The Orphanage (2007)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Rescue Dawn (2006)
School of Rock (2003)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
The Wrestler (2008)
Yi Yi (2000)

Apparently, a whole lot of people find the long opening sequence, which follows Carl and Ellie from childhood to Ellie’s death, quite moving. I know I’ll probably forever be in a minority on this, but it really didn’t have much impact on me. Part of that is definitely my own temperament — I’m not a sniffling at the movies kind of guy, or even an “it’s getting dusty in here” kind of guy (to quote Adam and Matty). But some movies do get to me. Just not this one.

Now, just so we’re on the same page, I do admire the scene. In fact, I think as pure cinema, it’s brilliant — we know these characters and their lives, and there’s not an ounce of fat. But it’s maybe too simple for subtlety. The scrapbook and the tickets in the picnic basket are just a bit much. They didn’t sneak up on me, they told me what to feel, and that breaks the spell.

There also seems to be a feeling that the scene is more impressive for being in an animated Disney film, but I’m really not a fan of grading on a curve (plus, there’s always Bambi’s mom). The thing is, with a Pixar film, I don’t really think about the fact that I’m watching an animated film, or a quote-unquote kid’s film, and I don’t feel that’s what they aspire to be compared to (well, maybe Cars does). But the thing is, I’ve already seen Love Story and Terms of Endearment and find them cloying.

I think WALL-E is a much better and less conventional film than Up, but it has the calculated tear-jerker scene when WALL-E is damaged. That scene also doesn’t really work for me, because I’ve seen it so many times in other films: of course WALL-E is going to come back to life and remember EVE. Duh. The scenes that get me the most are the montage of WALL-E looking after EVE when she shuts down, and the zero-G space dance. I’m not even sure I could articulate why they choke me up, and I’m kind of afraid that if I could, they wouldn’t.

Star Trek (may 8). The only Trek that ever really connected with me was the original series and Wrath of Khan. I’m kind of skeptical of this one, which looks more like big budget outer-space action than the retarded-brilliant overacting and social commentary I dig, but let’s face it — it’ll be fun just to see a crop of new actors doing their takes on familiar characters. Plus, it’s been getting huge buzz, and when has pre-release internet buzz of a highly anticipated film ever been wrong before? Never, that’s when.

Up (may 29). I’m not one of those people that thinks Pixar can do no wrong (and if you are, you need to watch Cars again in the cold light of day). And the trailer… did not blow me away. But I’m fully prepared to have my expectations wildly exceeded in every way imaginable. Nay, I expect it. Deliver.

The Hurt Locker (june 26). The first Iraq war movie I actually want to see.

Public Enemies (july 1). Despite having Johnny Depp and Christian Bale starring and Michael Mann directing, I was on the fence about this 1930s gangster movie, half-suspecting it would be the kind of gauzy, set-designed period piece that I find annoying. And then I saw the trailer, and now I think my previous opinion is that of an idiot douchebag.

Brüno (jul 10). Sasha Baron-Cohen’s followup to Borat, featuring the titular gay Austrian fashion reporter. And a freaked-out Ron Paul. I always liked the Bruno character on Ali G, probably because the fashionistas and homophobes he went after seemed like such deserving targets.

Funny People (july 31). My faith in Judd Apatow is so strong, I’m even excited to see him direct a film about a dying comedian played by Adam Sandler. I just hope Apatow doesn’t turn this into sentimental Oscar bait, ’cause as much as I love him, I can kind of see him doing that one day.

District 9 (august 14). I don’t actually know much about it, but the trailer is intriguing and it’s produced by Peter Jackson, who I suspect may just have his pick of projects these days.

Inglourious Basterds (august 21). There was never any doubt that I was going to see Tarantino’s campy, gory WWII film, but every detail I hear just makes me more intrigued. Brad Pitt leading a squad of badass Jews behind enemy lines to collect Nazi scalps? Yes, please! Maggie Cheung as a French movie theater owner? In a sequence shot like a Nouvelle Vague film? Oui! Eli Roth directing a Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film? Well, who else would you get to do it? Mike Myers as a British general? Okay, I’m going have to assume you know what you’re doing, Quentin. Plus, the trailer alone pissed off one of The Guardian’s crew of pompous, self-righteous film critics, so it’s got that going for it.

And after the summer, there’s quite a list of films I’m interested in, including: This Side of the Truth, Ashcliffe, A Serious Man, Where the Wild Things Are, The Fantastic Mr Fox, The Road, Sherlock Holmes, Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Satisfaction, Big Fan and Thirst. All in due time.

• Patton Oswalt (who should just go ahead and crown himself the king of 30-something comic-book nerds) hasn’t seen Watchmen yet, but he thinks you should. He also thinks you should watch more TV.
• The AV Club’s Tasha Robinson compares the book to the film, and comes away loving both. Though I do disagree with her take on the film’s ending, which I like more the more I think about it.
• Roger Ebert makes Watchmen the focus of one of his patented brilliant, rambling essays, talking about the metaphysics of Dr Manhattan.
• And finally, Saturday Morning Watchmen! It’s short, but awesome and funny and a little creepy! Kind of like me.

And so, in that spirit, I sat down this evening and did a little counter-programming: putting together a little list of the “prestige-season” movies I want to check out. As usual, I’m a total auteur groupie. Finding out a director I like has a new and promising film gets me way more excited than who’s in it, or even what it’s about. Though I also follow the buzz from the Toronto Film Festival and Cannes, just to be enervated by the rush of being swept up in new hype cycles.

Anyway, here are the movies I’m most excited about:

• Synecdoche, New York (oct 24). The directoral debut of Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, two of my all-time favourite movies. Advance word is that it’s prickly, hard to connect with, and a walk-out-magnet, all of which makes me want to see it even more.
• Zack & Miri Make a Porno (oct 31). It’s cool these days to hate on Kevin Smith for his cult of personality and continuing anti-style, but fuck it. Even when they’re not very good, the man is making the movies he wants to make, the way he wants to make them. And Clerks II was damn entertaining. So suck it, haters. Advance word from TIFF is very positive, with not a few comparisons to Judd Apatow, so I’m doubly there.
• The Road. (nov 26). Based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition), and starring Viggo Mortensen. Plus, I’m a sucker for grim post-apocalyptic movies, which is probably why I got sucked into seeing Waterworld. Twice. My only question is whether or not to read the novel before seeing the film. That, and how much like killing myself the movie will leave me feeling.
• The Wrestler (dec 19). Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) apparently told Micky Rourke that he had an idea for a movie that would get Rourke an Oscar nomination, and then clinched the deal by telling him, “You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. You can never disrespect me. And you can’t be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can’t pay you.”
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (dec 26). Brad Pitt ages backward! Now that is a high concept I can get behind. David Fincher’s lesser films are still pretty good, and his best are Fight Club and Zodiac, two of the best films of the past decade. So there’s that.
• Frost/Nixon. (dec 26). This is the one movie I’m not seeing for the director (Ron Howard, who I see as more of a competent craftsman than director I get excited about). I’m seeing it because since reading Nixonland, I’ve become mildly obsessed with the character of Richard Milhous. Plus the trailer looks pretty great.

Other movies I’ll be keeping an eye on: W. (Oliver Stone biopic of the president), Rachel Getting Married (Johnathan Demme in Mike Leigh country), How To Lose Friends & Alienate People (for the great Simon Pegg), City Of Ember (I’m not sure what to make of the trailer, but it has Bill Murray and Tim Roth), RocknRolla (I just keep giving Guy Ritchie chances, in the hope that he’s got some spark of talent left), Changeling (Clint Eastwood directing a J. Michael Straczynski-penned historical thriller, starring Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich), Milk (Gus Van Sant film about murdered politician Harvey Milk), Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle film about a street kind in India who wins a game show — I’d be more excited if the advance publicity didn’t make it sound so saccharine), and The Brothers Bloom (con man story from Rian Johnson, who directed Brick, which I didn’t love, but admired a lot).

• Nathan Rabin on Dreamcatcher (it’s the Rushmore ref that makes this a cut-and-save)

The only downside is the schedule. I work 10 to 12 hours a day, and that’s not counting the 45-minute commute each way. I go to the gym two or three nights a week, and out for dinner, movies or concerts a couple of other nights. I typically leave the house at 8 AM and get home at 10 or 11 at night. Saturday is usually spent running errands, and Sunday is my day of rest.

And so, other things have to fall by the wayside a bit. I don’t think I’ve looked at YouTube in a month! A month! And I’m lucky is I see more than one movie a week (though my commute means that I’m reading a ton of books, which is pretty cool, though I have an iPod Touch to watch videos on now). This blog is another victim. I just don’t feel like I have the time or energy for full, thought-out posts. Not that what I write is usually more than “Here’s a cool link. BLANK is cool! (Insert joke here.)” Even so, I do have opinions and I know how much you care about them. But maybe for now, I’ll just do a bit of a random thought dumpage. Let’s try it, shall we?

The new Caribou album, Andorra, is terrific — kind of a wistful sixties psychedelic pop version of Caribou that perfectly fits walking though downtown Vancouver in the fall. I’ve been listening to the entire album pretty much daily. My roommate even liked it so much she blogged about it, too. Actually, 2007 has been a great year for Canadian indie music. Besides Caribou, I’ve been really enjoying the 2007 releases of The New Pornographers, The Arcade Fire, Tegan and Sara, Pink Mountaintops, Champion and You Say Party! We Say Die!. And I’m sure there’s plenty of others I haven’t heard yet.

As I mentioned before, somebody used my credit card to commit several thousand dollars worth of fraud. It’s taken a few calls to the bank, but the damage seems to have been undone — at least the damage against me. I wonder how common this kind of thing is. Somebody is out a lot of money — there’s no way the bank has made anything like the money the lost off my past half-decade of credit-card use.

I’m still hugely looking forward to my post-PhD trip across Asia in a couple years, but I haven’t had anything particularly insightful to say lately. The part of the route from India to Turkey will be interesting. I will either have to go through Pakistan and Iran, or through the Central Asian republics and Russia. I’ve been reading a bit about both. On the one hand, Iran has better transportation and I culture I’m very interested in. On the other hand, Central Asia has thrilling headgear. But I think the final decision will depend on the state of the region when I get there, c. 2010.

Can you believe 2010 is now the near future? Like, I’m making plans for that year? The mind boggles. I feel all the time like I live in a William Gibson novel.

I’m still on Facebook, though all I ever do is update my status message every couple of days, which I see as kind of a creative exercise. I don’t even read the updates of people on my network very often. However, I still find it kind of fascinating — I think its genius is that it’s the first web page on the internet that is explicitly targeted toward the extroverted majority of human beings. The people who (unlike, say, me) honestly want to know what all their friends got up to last weekend, and who (also unlike me) typically do something with their free time that’s more sociable than watching DVDs or reading comics and books about statistics and economics.

Speaking of books about statistics and economics, I recently read and enjoyed Tyler Cowan’s Discover Your Inner Economist and Nassim Nicholas Taleb even more interesting Fooled by Randomness. Each of these looks at how the authors’ fields (economics and financial mathematics) informs their worldview in subtle and unintuitive ways, complete with amusing anecdotes. While I’d recommend these books in general, I think I personally got a lot out of them because while I’m neither an economist nor a statistician (a shocking revelation, I know), my own research owes a lot to these fields, and I increasingly find myself looking at the world through a haze of utilities and variances. Also, Taleb’s book provides some evidence that it is possible to work on interesting problems in finance, be well paid, and not turn into (or start off as) a boring, status-obsessed asshole.

Wednesday night I saw Tokyo Police Club at The Plaza. The band didn’t even come on until midnight (on a Wednesday night!), and then the sound was pretty awful. Tired and bored from standing around waiting for the show, and disappointed by the shitty mix and always too-hot Plaza venue, we left after about five songs. Enough people were bolting that there was already a fairly long queue for the coat check at that point. Nice try, boys. I don’t know whether it’s the Plaza or TPC to blame, so I blame both.

But the list itself left me unsatisfied. Ultimately, it really did turn out to be nothing more than a predictable ranking of The Foreign Classics Canon. Of the Top 25 films, the most recent is Ran from 1984 — and it was made by Akira Kurosawa, already acknowledged at the time as one of the pantheon. And if you know anything about foreign film as it is presented in film studies courses and Sight and Sound surveys, I’m sure you can name the other 24 — especially if I tell you that all but one or two were made by Great Auteurs. Cahiers du cinéma, you have a lot to answer for.

I guess what disappoints me is that what we really have here is the internet community reinforcing the academy. I mean, the number one film is Rules of the Game, which to my mind is the classic example of the masterpiece that is only judged such due to groupthink (and aided, of course, by the colourful history of the film itself). Don’t get me wrong — it’s a fine and interesting film. But are there actual film buffs out there — actual film fans, I mean, not Film Studies professors and historians — who would in their heart of hearts say it’s their favourite film? Or has the critical (pun intended) mass around the film grown such that it’s just easiest to go with the flow? And I have the same question about a lot of other films on the list. Are there people out there who can watch Contempt and say, “wow, that really speaks to me”? Or do they, like me, struggle to stay awake, admire what Godard accomplished, and quietly resolve not to ever watch it again?

Of course, the problem with these surveys is that the top films don’t actually have to be the favourites of anyone at all. They just has have to place on enough individual lists. Films that are easy to build consensus around will place highly. This will in turn reinforce the consensus on the next list (people love to vote for winners, especially if they think it will make them look smart), and pretty soon you have a canon of nice, safe, uncontroversial films that may well be excellent without particularly speaking to anybody.

I want to see a different kind of list. I want to see an anti-canon. Instead of a poll of 100 films, I want to see a list of a hundred people’s single favourite films that weren’t nominated. I want to see the top 100 films you would never be shown in film school. I want to see the list of peoples’ votes for “respectable” films that should be striken from the canon. I want a list of buried gems. I want to feel that I haven’t seem everything worth seeing, because I know I haven’t. I want a list that stimulates me to think differently and try new movies I wouldn’t ordinarily, movies that fill my withered veins with cinematic blood. Is that so much to ask you people for?