Nick's Flick Picks: The Blog
The Website that Went Up a Hill and, Ten Years Later, Came Down a Mountain
Updated, Dec. 30: And at long last... it's a wrap!
Original, Nov. 28: Wow. Even I didn't expect to be this productive. When I decided a week ago to update the Favorites Countdown, a project that's been gestating on my site for literally ten years, I was responding to a few prompts. I've been pushing through one more essay for my job, having submitted three already in the last six months, and finding that my prose was getting more abstruse and congested. (Trust me, my editors agreed.) Writing more for the site usually coaches me back to less fussy, more avid self-expression. I wanted more new content to show to anyone dropping in from my new gig at Film Comment, or from one I hope to start soon at Sight & Sound. I was reluctant to show my face to Jonathan Storey, whom I'll finally meet this week, and who sent me a hand-written letter from the UK well over a year ago imploring me to wrap up this loose end. I couldn't even bear to show my face to myself if I actually let the project take more than a decade. Having written eight new entries inside of a week, I'm suddenly in striking distance of that goal.
Some time ago, I'd posted a version of the new entry on Junebug, hoping it might help me finish if I just wrote up the movies as I re-screened them, rather than honoring their order on the list. But that seemed confusing, and didn't work, anyway. Now that the revised entry is posted, the remaining 17 are all relative surprises, though I admit I'm curious: since several of you have been sweet enough to follow the site for years, how much of what's coming do you think you've deduced? I sometimes feel I talk about the same movies all the time, regardless of context, so I'm curious if I've tipped my hand more than I realize.
I'll also fess up that these last 17 films were all, at some point, in the endlessly shuffled Top 10, where any of them could still be plausible. The "ranking" aspect of this list is silly even by ranking standards, especially given the codicil that I'm omitting all the movies on my re-energized Top 100. (To keep from bewildering everybody, I'm going to pause on updates there while I finish the updates here.) There's no question that any list of my favorite-favorite movies would include The Piano, When Harry Met Sally..., Safe, Morvern Callar, Aliens, Harlan County USA, and several other movies you'll eventually find on that other roster, which pretends to disentangle aesthetic merit from personal bias. So, probably none of the next and final 17 Favorites are the movies I name first when pressed at parties for my desert-island trove. At the same time, I'd definitely want all of them on that desert island, #17 as much as #1.
The last thing to stipulate, given how long I've taken, is that I haven't altered the titles on the Favorites countdown to include any movies released after 2005, when I got going. A year or two into the saga, during the first Dormant Period, I shuffled a few out (still archived at the bottom of the sidebar scroll) and some new ones in, including Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Junebug, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, all quite new at the time. There is one more Favorite of comparable vintage still to come, and one more fugitive from the former Top 100 list that moved over here when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind migrated in the opposite direction. By all rights, several movies from my last decade of moviegoing should be here: Margaret, Prodigal Sons, Sleeping Beauty, Fish Tank, Deep Water, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and The Heat all spring to mind as likely contenders. But lest anyone wonder, I wanted to give you the feature you've been awaiting all this time, not some weird Blade Runner/New World amalgam of the original, the rough cut, and the changes I now wish I'd administered all along.
So, without further ado—but also with protracted, belabored surfeits of ado, which I thank you so much for indulging—here are the final 17 movies I hope you'll take to your hearts as I have to mine, if you haven't already... and I hope, too, that you'll keep sharing reactions and personal pets in the Comments!
1. Pola X (1999, dir. Leos Carax)
2. Velvet Goldmine (1998, dir. Todd Haynes)
3. The Way We Were (1973, dir. Sydney Pollack)
4. The Portrait of a Lady (1996, dir. Jane Campion)
5. Dog Day Afternoon (1975, dir. Sidney Lumet)
6. Frances (1982, dir. Graeme Clifford)
7. The Bridges of Madison County (1995, dir. Clint Eastwood)
8. 11'09"01 (2002, dirs. Miscellaneous)
9. Ocean's Eleven (2001, dir. Steven Soderbergh)
10. Grizzly Man (2005, dir. Werner Herzog)
11. Cape Fear (1991, dir. Martin Scorsese)
12. The China Syndrome (1979, dir. James Bridges)
13. Strange Days (1995, dir. Kathryn Bigelow)
14. Blackboards (2000, dir. Samira Makhmalbaf)
15. The Cell (2000, dir. Tarsem Singh)
16. You Can Count on Me (2000, dir. Kenneth Lonergan)
17. demonlover (2002, dir. Olivier Assayas)
18. Junebug (2005, dir. Phil Morrison)
19. Crash (1996, dir. David Cronenberg)
20. Walking and Talking (1996, dir. Nicole Holofcener)
21. Eyes Wide Shut (1999, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
22. Opening Night (1977, dir. John Cassavetes)
23. Blonde Venus (1932, dir. Josef von Sternberg)
24. Beau travail (1999, dir. Claire Denis)
25. Naked Lunch (1991, dir. David Cronenberg)
Labels: Favorites, Hallelujah, Site Features
posted by NicksFlickPicks at 2:00 PM
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