Welcome to Other People’s Favorite Movies! You’re going to hate it.

Short URL: opfm.cc/intro

Welcome to Other People’s Favorite Movies! You’re going to hate it.

I’ve had this web site in mind for fifteen years, and the full name was originally going to be: “Other People’s Favorite Movies: Saying bad things about The Great Films.” So whatever you think are The Great Films, at some point I would get around to writing about them and suddenly this would not be your favorite web site anymore.

I’m making this site for three purposes:

1. To say bad things about The Great Films.

Here’s what I think: If you look up any list of the “greatest films,” you’re going to get a roundup of the usual suspects. And where there’s groupthink, there’s usually something wrong. There seems to be something about me personally that I am really contrarian about a lot of the movies that the priesthood has made sacred.

A lot of the current movies, too, leave me scratching my head, and when I read the reviews I’m left saying, um, what movie did you see? Most of the movies are bad, and critics have this weird reluctance to be critical.

On top of that, we have an annual ritual where people dress up and give awards to what is almost always the Most Overrated Picture. A lot of times, if we look back at a given year, the real best pictures weren’t even nominated, or — cheat code here — they may have been nominated for best screenplay and nothing else. Meanwhile, do you even remember The English Patient? Do you really care about Argo?

2. To learn stuff.

I wrote about entertainment for a long time, and the goal of movie reviews back then — in fact, for all time prior to the internet — was to review a movie on the release date and give you an idea of whether you should go to the theater and pay, like, $4.50 to see Harold and Kumar. Even better, maybe an article in the newspaper or a magazine could turn you on to something new and cool, like Stranger Than Paradise. What it wasn’t designed to do was, be a record for the future.

I started a culture web site in 1999, and what I started to notice was that people were using the internet in a different way — coming back AFTER seeing the movie to get somebody’s thoughts on what they’d just seen. Maybe even to share their own — the most commented-on movie on our site was David Lynch’s rather confusing Mulholland Drive, and readers showed up for years to post, “Wait, I think it’s like this because of this.” I loved that there was a conversation about a thing people loved that went on forever.

Me, I have a ton to learn, including about “The Great Films.” For example, I’ve only seen one Fellini movie (and it was a bad one that nobody talks about, Satyricon). I’ve never seen The General, Stagecoach or The Seven Samurai. There are films I don’t enjoy, like Breathless, but there are reasons that the film crowd finds them groundbreaking, and there are somewhat opaque films like Wings of Desire that I might get more out of if I delved a little deeper. Plus, there are great films I’ve never heard of, like one I saw in a theater this spring that was absolutely terrific, and only after seeing it I learned it won the foreign-film Oscar and a prize at Cannes in 1970.

So here’s the idea: At least when there’s something to dig deeper on, I’m going to look at a film from the past and spend less time on standard movie-review stuff and either a little or a lot of time on what’s meaningful about it. Is there some research that informs us about it? Does it say something about its times? Should you watch it today? I’ll try to add a little bit of learning to my viewing or re-viewing of the movie, and my hope is, when I’m done writing about it and you’re done reading about it, we will both feel a little bit wiser.

(Footnote: In the long run, maybe there will be ways of expanding this blog into more of a community. That would be ideal.)

3. To celebrate (what I think are) the truly great films

A friend of mine was a voter for the famous Sight and Sound poll, and he told me he was feeling two ways about his ballot. On one hand, he wanted to vote for Citizen Kane and The Godfather and, you know, all The Greats. On the other hand, there was a list of movies he truly loved and he wanted to vote for those too. They had, honestly, no chance of winning. I recommended that he vote for the movies that HE found great.

Adrian Martin makes a really good point in his essay Light My Fire: The Geology and Geography of Film Canons. It is basically: We have this thing called “The Canon,” and the way we get a canon is that they are the movies that the most people AGREED on. They don’t have to be the ones that people loved the most. If you made a list of your own 100 favorite movies right now, and put it next to Sight and Sound or AFI or any other list, there might only be 10 or 20 titles in common. At most!

The Canon is not The Best.

That means, your top 100 is the best for you and my top 100 is the best for me. And I’m going to let you know what they are, and maybe you’ll think I’m off the rails or maybe you’ll discover something new and wonderful. I’m still discovering new and wonderful things too.

The way this blog will work is, every one to two months I’m going to choose a year and look at some of the movies that were “important” from that year, whether at the box office, or among professors and critics, or they won awards, or they’re my own favorites. I think this will bring up an interesting mix of movies. And I’ll write about a bunch of them, and we’ll see what — in this now tragically antiquated medium of blogging — ensues.