#sightandsoundpoll

I am assuming that Sight & Sound's editor (he's Nick James, bitch) has lost my invite in the mail. So here are my picks for the Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time poll. I have seen many but still feel like I have not seen enough. Here goes.

Week End (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-George Clouzot)

The Fallen Idol (1948, Carol Reed)

La Dolce Vita (1960, Federico Fellini)

Jules et Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)

Pather Panchali (1955, Sayijit Ray)

Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)

M (1931, Fritz Lang)

I think there's an obvious thread running through all of these. No overstylized French classics here, though I love many of them. No groundbreaking Griffith films (he wrote the rules, let's move on). No, I'm more interested in the people that broke the rules. While there are a couple of traditional narrative films on there (Withnail and Fallen Idol are here largely on the strength of their screenplays), I am most interested in films that trust the intelligence of their viewers to follow the story. Pather Panchali was made with no professional actors. Pather and Fallen Idol are about children, while M is about a child-killer. Wages of Fear is about men who put a price on their own lives. Both Week End and Jules et Jim use projected words, photographs, and other subversive narrative devices to push the limits of what to expect in a melodrama and romantic comedy, respectively. And Exit is just a bananas documentary which may or may not be real. All of the movies express a personal view of the world and the people in it. Except our hero Wall-E, of course. He's a Chaplineque robot in a post-apocolyptic world. And a cartoon. How can you not love it?