#afitop100

So, with The Gold Rush I come to the end of my AFI Top 100 challenge. After originally challenging myself to do it in 50 days, that quickly failed and it soon became years. It’s been 6 years and I've finally finished. I saw some exceptional films, some that really surprised me, some that I’d been meaning to watch for a long time, and only a few that I didn't like. Being 2017, they might do another revision to the list so I'll get a chance to watch some more movies. 

Here a few of the movies that surprised me:

-Film 38 - “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” 1927 - This was a beautiful representation of German Expressionism in film. As I said, because of this it seems unfair to call it a great American film, but nonetheless it was beautiful and compelling and all around a great film. 

-Film 33 - “Intolerance” 1916 - I thought this would be a struggle due to its length, but I ended up loving it. It had so many female protagonists and such high, particularly the Mountain girl.

-Film 41 - “Apocalypse Now” 1979 - This was another one I thought I might not enjoy. I expected, like most war films, especially Vietnam films, that this would be draining and depressing. Instead it was poignant and thoughtful and compelling. I loved it. 

-Film 24 - “Bringing Up Baby” 1938 - This was a sheer delight. Sadly, the screwball comedy is a genre that isn’t really seen these days and I think it should make a comeback. But in the meantime, we can watch Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant doing an excellent job in this farcical film. 

Since it took me so long to finish this challenge, its interesting to see how my opinions of particular films have changed over the years, and how my viewing of some films now has warranted different reactions to how I imagine I would have viewed them 6 years ago. In particular, All About Eve is one that at the time, I didn’t think was that great. On later reflection and an increased knowledge of film and film history, I think that it is now one of my top films out of this list, especially because of Bette Davis’ exceptional performance. On a different note, I think had I watched the couple of Robert Altman films on this list, in my initial run 6 years ago, I wouldn’t have had as great an issue with them as I do now. 

That alone has probably been one of the best parts about doing this challenge, I  have a record of how my opinions have changed as I’ve aged, and just generally I have a record of what movies I watched and what I thought of them (an invaluable record considering I can barely remember what happened in some of the earlier films I watched). I think moving forward, I’ll try and do another film challenge like this. It forces me to watch significant movies that I otherwise might not have watched, and often introduced me to some of my favourite films. 

You just can't beat Charlie Chaplin. This was fun, I love physical comedy and like his other films this was another great example of physical comedy at its best. There's a lot of emotion in Chaplin’s tramp character and you really connected with him in this film, particularly when he was stood up by the women at the dance hall. It was touching and sweet and downright funny. I still think Modern Times is my favourite of the Chaplin films I’ve seen, but this is a close second. 

Verdict: Another beautiful Chaplin film.

So, I've come to the conclusion that I do not like Robert Altman films. I couldn't stand this movie. I can recognise the importance of this filmmaking style in film history and how it may have influenced later films, but I hated watching this. In large part because I find this movie (much like M.A.S.H) pretty sexist. Sure, this is probably more a sign of the times than an essential part of the film itself, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Probably the only part that I didn't mind was Opal. She was pretty hilarious travelling around Nashville for her documentary. Other than that, there was no real story and a lot of country music, which I'm also not a fan of. This movie just doesn't age well. Is it an important film? Sure, but I don't ever want to watch this or anything like it again.

Verdict: I can't stand Robert Altman and this is no exception.

There were a lot of cool cars being driven by cool kids in high school; Mustang Mach 1’s, BMW Series 5’s and Mazda MX-5’s. Sure, they weren’t technically their cars, but they became their identity. Popped polo’s and slim-fit khaki’s traced with a fresh iron were just as much their identity, even if they also weren’t technically their clothes. These bi-products of early Brooks Brother’s fashion and Abercrombie & Fitch roughness would work on ingraining themselves in these factors of cool by lingering as long as humanly possible in these symbols that would later assist in inventing the term “Netflix and Chill”.

From behind the windshield of the Dodge Caravan that would unfortunately define me, along with the Incubus ‘Make Yourself’ CD that spun on repeat in an attempt to mask my inherent softness, I would observe these propped up pre-fuck boys and their donated cool. Why couldn’t my parents have sprung a modern day muscle car on me upon realizing I wouldn’t be gifted the powers of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on my sixteenth birthday?

Well, because my image wasn’t something I could run from. My overweight lethargy and transparent nu-metal image, despite baggy khaki’s and an oversized button-down, were something that I couldn’t hide – I had to own up to it despite the suffocating geek I suppressed within. No matter how many times I had my mom bring me to the local mall’s American Eagle, there was no amount of maroon polo’s and pre-faded jeans that could cover up the Cheetos stained fingers and shamefully forlorn look towards the Hot Topic entrance. This was something I had to own.

So I got a job at Blockbuster.

Now mind you, this was before the concept of working at a video store was “interesting” or “cool”; this was an era of subservient cinema slavery, where discussing film wasn’t as universally embraced, at least not in the suburban whiteness of Connecticut. This was a time where the heavy sighs from illegally parked soccer moms were as prevalent as the late fees they accrued. A time where eye-rolls from senior-citizens looking to rent an already-checked-out Cocoon for the eighth time were as blatantly obvious as the over-crowded DVD rack trying to push M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Village’.

The dress code for such a highly respected and sought-after position was one that I already had experience attempting to hide behind; a navy polo tucked into khaki’s, my American Eagle façade proving a warm-up to the minimum wage job I hoped to embrace. It wasn’t necessarily egregious attire, as there was minimal flare and not an iota of suspenders in sight, yet it was one that highlighted an already maligned position. There was no blending in, fading back behind the romance of the Frank Capra’s or William Holden’s; this was an empty and exposed prom-floor with me alone in the middle, a fresh piece of toilet paper clinging to the bottom of my father’s loaned dress shoes.

Perhaps the corporate heads of Blockbuster realized this complete lack of concealment from the myriad of high school anguish, as we were given 7-free rentals a week. That’s 28 movies a month, and if it’s February, that’s a movie a night for the entire month! Sure, you could surmise that it was profoundly necessary to know our releases, to understand the sub-genres of film in order to better serve suburbia, but that would be looking at things a little too blankly.

The languid conspiracy theorist in me suggests that it was a corporate take-hold of employee turnover, looking to submerge the high school outcast even further into their new after-school job. That the cinema pariah would be content rising to district manager without noticing that they’re now 38 years old and failing to make payments on their Chrysler Lebaron. However, I took these tepid offerings from the powers that be and I began scaling my own escape ladder, tackling the AFI’s 100 Years 100 Movies; a cinematic structure that has remained unclimbed for almost 15 years.

Now it remained untouched for so long, not because of its daunting nature (yes, ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ feels tremendously disconcerting, despite heavyweights such as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’) but because I was fired for deleting a $10 late-fee off my dad’s account. Without the free rentals aiding in my quest to become even more American through the lens of film, I was relegated to driving 6 miles out of town to Dial-M-for-Movies, a hip indie store that resided in the corner of a shopping center with a liquor and grocery store.

Something happened though, in between those passing days of observing the cultural shift in ‘Easy Rider’ and ‘Do the Right Thing’; I went off to a tiny liberal arts college in New Hampshire. There, the idea of cool – cool cars, cool clothes and even cool cinema no longer remained prevalent. Cars were replaced with Birkenstock’s, clothes with thrift store trades and cinema with pot-induced discoveries. In between watching David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ or Fellini’s ‘8 ½’ over crab Rangoon with an intelligent and film obsessed girlfriend, there were countless viewings of F.W. Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ synched to Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’ in a dorm room full of jocks, slackers, geeks and dweebs.

The perception of viewing film and what it meant was completely subverted; no longer were my escapes an alienating process of societal masochism. For once they represented a greater niche that was at once examined and embraced for what it was. Running across the quad to make my Foreign Film class on time might have given me flashbacks to sprinting across the parking lot of my hometowns strip mall, except I had embraced who I was through working at Blockbuster and the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Films of All Time; a list that has so far remained unmarked, 39 of the 100 going unseen and unappreciated.

Looking back, I realize that the high school fraternity of popularity and locker room bravado that clung to their cool cars and clothes acted as a nudge, a catalyst for my own cool. Without sitting in my Dodge Caravan and observing this state of existing, Weezer’s ‘Perfect Situation’ oozing 80’s synth pop-sadness from the speakers, I never would have ultimately seen me for what I was. In doing so, I was able to embrace 100 films that further acted as a catalyst of cinema cool, sending me into other countries of exploration, spending most of my paycheck on Criterion’s collection or obscure martial art flicks that did nothing but allow me to think my fists were snacks.