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: 61-70
You can find the full list of the top 100 blockbusters since 1972 here, as well as an index for other posts in this series. The westerner is one of the most hallowed figures of American moving images, an icon for film and television alike. His virtues (toughness, persistence, wherewithal) and his faults (prejudice, temper,… Read More Top 100 Blockbusters of the Multiplex Era: Cowboys on a New Frontier
As many of you were, I was inspired by the list released by Empire on Thanksgiving this year. It is, a little cheekily, titled “The 100 Greatest Movies,” and I say cheekily because there’s no way that the people publishing this can possibly imagine that these are, by any standard, the one hundred greatest movies.… Read More Top 100 Blockbusters of the Multiplex Era: Introduction
This is the third piece of a three-part series. First up was a collation and analysis of forty critics’ rankings of Pixar movies, and then a quick digression into my own rankings. This third part is, in my eyes, the most fun. By bothering people I know, entreating people I know to bother people they… Read More Pixar Poll Results
I started this meta-analysis hoping to have somewhere between fifteen and twenty lists to go on. In the end I found forty, because the results kept shifting when I’d enter new data. For the Tarantino analysis, for example, adding more lists would basically just solidify where every movie landed. Here, though, there are multiple pairs… Read More Pixar Meta-Analysis
Tim: This is the story of something that began nine months ago, something that Matt and I conceived, you might say, and now we’re adding a third person to make our duo a trio. I am very proud of this introductory statement, and a little horrified that we’re getting back to the Disney… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #16: Disney/Pixar Rankings Roundup, Part 2 (The One Where We Grill Josh About Frozen II)
Dir. Josh Cooley. Starring Tom Hanks, Annie Potts, Tony Hale Toy Story 4 is like the reverse ship of Theseus. In the original problem, the physical ship rots away and is replaced piece by piece, and the question is primarily whether the naming of the ship, or the spirit of the ship, is what makes… Read More Toy Story 4 (2019)
The landing page, with rationale and links to other posts in this series, can be found here. Toy Story 3 is a movie about death. Towards the end of that picture, the toys are sliding, it seems inexorably, towards an incinerator. They have badly miscalculated the cost-benefit analyis of staying in the attic at Andy’s house, probably… Read More Disney/Pixar Rankings: 1
Tim: Glad to report we’re back for another conversation. Also glad to report that this one may have less structure in mind than any previous conversation we’ve had. (That we’re typing and putting on a blog. I have no doubt this would not even register in real life.) Howdy, Matt. Matt: I’m wondering how many… Read More Baumann and Burch Conversations #8: Trilogies
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 more than 800 films which I considered for the top 450 and my eligibility qualifications, click here.… Read More Better than AFI’s Top 100: 25-21
Seeing Things Secondhand 