Shhhhh! It's Time to Pick Your Bestavorite Silents!

[MikeBSG]

My list of my 25 favorite non-English language movies.

"The Phantom Carriage" (Sweden, Sjostrom)
"Destiny" (Germany, Lang)
"Metropolis" (Germany, Lang)
"M" (Germany, Lang)
"The Road to Heaven" (Sweden, Sjoberg)
"Ivan the Terrible Part I" (USSR, Eisenstein)
"Children of the Paradise" (France, Carne)
"The Cranes are Flying" (USSR, Kalatozov)
"The Seven Samurai" (Japan, Kurosawa)
"Big Deal on Madonna Street" (Italy, Monicelli)
"Kanal" (Poland, Wadja)
"Wild Strawberries" (Sweden, Bergman)
"Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (USSR, Parajanov)
"Yojimbo" (Japan, Kurosawa)
"Harikiri" (Japan, Kobyashi)
"Coup de Grace" (W. Germany, Schlondorff)
"Augierre the Wrath of God" (W. Germany, Herzog)
"Day for Night" (France, Truffaut)
"Lola" (W. Germany, Fassbinder)
"Mephisto" (Hungary, Szabo)
"Who's Singing Over There?" (Yugoslavia, Sijan)
"Ways in the Night" (Poland, Zanussi)
"In the Still of the Night" (Poland, Chmielewski)
"Burnt by the Sun" (Russia, Mikhailkov)
"Downfall" (Germany, Hirschbiegel)

Yes, I know the Romance languages have been slighted, but I've never studied any of those countries.

[cinemalover]

After today there are just 5 more shopping days to add a list or tinker with your existing list. Thanks again to all who are participating!

Hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend!

[SSO Admins]

Ok, here's my revised list.

1. The Passion of Joan of Arc.
2. The Navigator
3. The Wind
4. Trouble in Paradise
5. The Godfather
6. Scarface (Paul Muni)
7. Broken Blossoms
8. Faust
9. Diary of a Lost Girl
10. The Last Laugh
11. It
12. M
13. Day of Wrath
14. Gold Diggers of 1933
15. The Thief of Baghdad
16. The Seven Samurai
17. The Emperor and the Assassin
18. My Fair Lady
19. The Big Sleep
20. Way Down East
21. The Big Parade
22. The Crowd
23. All Quiet on the Western Front
24. The Docks of New York
25. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

I changed "The General" to "The Navigator" for my Keaton choice.
I replaced "Sunrise" with "Diary of a Lost Girl." That was painful.
Number 11 I changed four times, waffling between "Wings" and "It."
I changed "The Public Enemy" to "The Big Sleep."
I changed "Plan 9 From Outer Space" to "The Docks of New York." Sorry, Ed. You know I love you.
I really, really want to find room for "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" but I don't know where. Damn. I suppose I have four more days.

Note: With the exception of #1, these are not in order.

[Hollis]

Good Morning,

For what it's worth, I've revised my list of my favorite films of all time. I still couldn't whittle it down from 30 to 25. If you're at all interested, the list appears on page 7 of this thread. I hope you all had a good weekend. I almost had a perfect Sunday but my Eagles fell 3 points shy of upsetting the Patriots after being a 25 point underdog going in. C'est la guerre.

As always,

Hollis

[SSO Admins]

I hope you all had a good weekend. I almost had a perfect Sunday but my Eagles fell 3 points shy of upsetting the Patriots after being a 25 point underdog going in. C'est la guerre.

Just be glad you're not from Baltimore.

[jdb1]

Hey, MikeBSG, I was delighted to see Fatal Glass of Beer on your American film list. I was toying with including it in my own list, but I already had W.C. Fields included, and I opted for my favorite Laurel & Hardy short instead.

Fatal Glass was frequently included as a short at an art house in Greenwich Village that I went to when in college (darn - can't remember the name of the theater now - I think it's long closed). So many of my cinephile friends have never seen this short -- too bad, no? I quote W.C. all the time about the Big City:

It ain't a place for women, gal, but pretty men go there.

[MikeBSG]

"Fatal Glass of Beer" is terrific. I love the hysterically weeping Mountie, the endless rounds of "good night" (which seems like a parody of "The Waltons" decades before the fact) and "It ain't a fit night out for man nor beast!"

[melwalton]

Hi, Jon.
Got a chuckle reading about your change from 'The General' to the Navigator' and couldn't help wondering if you tossed and turned over 'The Camerman' or the one where he built the pre-fab house or so many others. Isn't 25 a very small number? ... mel

[melwalton]

Hi, Judith.
Your friends can see 'Fatal Glass of Beer' on LIKETELEVISION. They have other shorts including 'The Dentist' and 'The Golf Specialist'.
.... mel

[SSO Admins]

Hi, Jon.
Got a chuckle reading about your change from 'The General' to the Navigator' and couldn't help wondering if you tossed and turned over 'The Camerman' or the one where he built the pre-fab house or so many others. Isn't 25 a very small number? ... mel

As far as features go, it was definitely between The General and The Navigator.

The one where he built the pre-fab house is the short One Week, but I was trying to include only feature length films. There's a quality process currently in vogue in corporate America called Six Sigma. I use that short with my Six Sigma teams because it embodies a lot of the lessons involved -- having all the pieces doesn't mean you have the right answer, you need to be asking the right questions, and you need to look at the big picture lest your house be smashed by a train that you didn't see. It's really appropriate for the process, plus it means I get to show a Keaton film in a meeting at work.

If I had included short films I probably would have gone into mental overload. How can I be expected to choose between One Week, Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Balloonatic... the list just goes on. As it is I'm thinking I should drop The Navigator and replace it with Steamboat Bill, Jr.. Choosing a favorite Keaton is just too hard.

[cinemalover]

Friday is the last day for anyone that still wants to get into the fray. The polls will close at 11:59pm Friday night (Pacific). I will hand tabulate the results over the weekend and should have the top 64 films decided by Monday which will then go into 32 elimination brackets. Be prepared to bring your best arguments for the films you care about. Next week will defintiely be a busy one as you'll have 5 days to vote on each of those 32 brackets before we move on to round 2. And so and so on.

[Hollis]

Good evening,

One last revision and finally I think I'm done. In reviewing the list, only three comedies made the cut. "Arsenic and Old Lace," "The Philadelphia Story" and "It Happened One Night" to my mind stand head and shoulders above almost any other comedies I can think of. I don't think it's any coincidence that the films star names like Grant, Stewart, Hepburn, Gable and Colbert. Movies, more than anything else I know of, prove that in most cases, the whole is truly greater than the sum of it's parts. I'm torn between "Casablanca" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" as my favorite movie of all time (at least to this point) and by extension, the "Best Movie of All Time." My knowledge of film pales by comparison to almost anyone else's that contributes here on a regular basis, but like the man said, "I don't know much about art but I know what I like." Again, my list is on page 7 and I really would like to know what others think of it. I think it compares favorably to the others I've seen, but this is such a subjective exercise that it's probably going to come down to voting for the best of what remains after your own particular choice has been eliminated. But no one can say this hasn't been fun!

p.s. While entertaining, there are no musicals listed. Not "Singin' In the Rain" or "The Music Man." Even "An American in Paris" missed the cut. Comments?

Jon - I can commiserate with you. The Ravens are in the same boat the Eagles are. Taking on water faster than they can bail it out! Well, there's always next year!

As always,

Hollis

[klondike]

Friday is the last day for anyone that still wants to get into the fray. The polls will close at 11:59pm Friday night (Pacific). I will hand tabulate the results over the weekend and should have the top 64 films decided by Monday which will then go into 32 elimination brackets. Be prepared to bring your best arguments for the films you care about. Next week will defintiely be a busy one as you'll have 5 days to vote on each of those 32 brackets before we move on to round 2. And so and so on.

Oh and trust me, the strife of this contest of champions is building in friction & drag; all last night, I tost & turned in my bed, while in the Dreamtime, I rolled from one end of a sooty boxcar to the other, suffering beneath the fists & cudgels of the entire cast of John Sales' Matewan, while Barry Fitzgerald's Michaleen Flynn clucked his tongue in weary reprimand from his seat on a barrel of silver haline, and Marlee Matlin, still dressed for Children of a Lesser God, stood framed in the car's open doorway, her hair whipping in the wind, the central plains of Brazil hurtling by behind her while she signed to me the details of my miserable cinematic betrayals & oversights.

Beware that Big Dark Room, Brothers & Sisters - those creatures from the Light are starting to come off the screen!

[jdb1]

p.s. While entertaining, there are no musicals listed. Not "Singin' In the Rain" or "The Music Man." Even "An American in Paris" missed the cut. Comments?

Ah, Hollis, search your heart. In the great crazy-quilt of entertainment that is cinema, isn't there even one musical that makes you really happy? One you would happily watch over and over, and smile every time?

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts about my own selections, one of the criteria I used was the idea that the films on my list were those I would choose every time, and for which I would pass up opportunities to see others.

[cinemalover]

Singin' in the Rain is the one musical that always scores very high for me. I can watch it over and over and still love it. I watched it with my wife earlier this year and it was the first time she had ever seen it. She's not the biggest classical film buff but she immediately thought that it was one of the best movies she had ever viewed. I am trying to convince her to make up a list of her 25 favorites. She started a list but hasn't made much progress. It may not beat the deadline.