Picked Flicks: The Halfway Point

So we've made it through the first half of my Picked Flicks, the awkwardly named but fervently admired movies that I am proud to endorse as personal pets, even if none of them is quite Citizen Kane. Again, the Top 100 is about admiration, even though I do love almost all of those films; the Picked Flicks, from which the Top 100 titles are purposely excluded, are about love—even though, as you've hopefully gleaned from my write-ups, love often stands on the shoulders of some kind of admiration. It's all academic, and more than that, it's all extremely silly. But you know, it makes me feel good to write about good movies, which are often the hardest ones to characterize and the easiest ones to take for granted. I appreciate your following along—humoring me, really—thus far.

As we head into the top half, things will start to change a bit, mostly insofar as the films will skew even more contemporary. From #51 to #100, I included 14 films produced before I was born, which already isn't much, but on the top half of the countdown, there are only six (roughly, since it's hard to quantify the ties). It probably stands to reason that favorite movies are often formative ones, and for every movie-lover I know, these are often the movies that got us started on the theater-going habit, or which lit up before our eyes just as the addiction was really taking hold. In my case, this means that the 1990s play an inordinately strong role in what's coming. As much as I worship The Wind and Camille and The Seventh Seal and Mothlight, they aren't what I pop into the DVD or VCR for comfort, company, cheer, or obsessive revisitings....and those are the movies this list means to honor.

Coming up soon, then, in the next block of ten, give or take my constant rejiggering: two Best Picture winners (#46 and #50), two past presidents (#47), three punctures in the wall between real and reel life (including #42, #48, and #49), an impostor (also #50), a foreign war (#44), a short-order duo (#45), a sister doin' it for herself (#41), and a century-old monster that shows no signs of shrinking any time soon (#43). Any guesses, either for this bracket or for what's up top?