For each movie in the top 100, I’ve written a question to answer. (It would get very, very boring for me to have to write some variation on “boy howdy, you’ll never believe how good this movie is” one hundred more times.) There’s no exact sentence or word count I’m holding myself to here, but… Read More Top 250 American Movies: 11-20
To see the intro to this project, as well as links to other decades, click here. 9) “Go Down, Moses,” from Sullivan’s Travels (1941) Writer-directors throughout movie history are rarely good at just shutting up and letting the work speak for itself, and Sullivan’s Travels is proof that even the best of them can stumble… Read More Listen to America: The 1940s
To see my running list of the hundred greatest movie stars in American film history, click here All stars are listed with a single film which is particularly important, though not exclusively so, to understanding what makes them vital to American movies. 15) Clark Gable / Key film – Gone with the Wind There’s kind of… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars: 11-15
Dir. Michael Curtiz. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains Sometimes, when I feel just aggressively masochistic, I try to narrow down the best scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. This is a fool’s errand, and only fools rush in. On the other hand, I’ve seen Casablanca maybe a dozen times in my life, and I… Read More Casablanca (1943)
The following is from my series of Oscar Best Picture rankings, as well as my strongly worded suggestions for what should have won from among the nominees. For an introduction to the project, click here. For a way to vote on some Oscar-related ideas, click here. If I’ve written a review on any of the… Read More Better than the Oscars: 5-2
In the following talk, Tim and Matt think about what it means for some text to be “perfect.” In lieu of an actual podcast, we type our way through Carl Theodor Dreyer, Prince, Arrested Development, Anton Chekhov, and more. You can find Matt’s work, including an upcoming Top 50 albums of 2017 project, here. Tim:… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations, #1: Perfection
In this episode, Matt and I wind up the Better than AFI’s Top 100 project that has taken up a lot of my time and effort over the past few months. We discuss the poll that thirty-seven (whoo!) different folks voted on; the results are below, next to the corresponding rank of the movie on… Read More Baumann and Burch, Episode 37: You Guys Voted in Seven Spielberg Movies
You thought I’d keep doing this in fives! Ha! As if I wouldn’t drag this out! The following is part of an overview of the top 100 American narrative fiction feature films, from my perspective. For an introduction to the project and an index of other entries in the series, click here. For a list of… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100: 10-8
Seeing Things Secondhand 