I may be in the minority, but I love those AFI 100 Years…100 Whatever lists. I mean, I haven’t watched one in years, but those first couple lists, they influenced me a lot. 10 years ago, when I decided I was going to stop seeing shitty new movies and start seeing reliably good old movies. Even before the list came out, I’d bugged my parents to help me make a list of good movies to see, but when it did, I cut out the list from the paper and checked them off as I went.

If not for that list I don’t know if I would have discovered Woody Allen, or Charlie Chaplin, or Orson Welles, or Billy Wilder, or Gene Kelly for that matter. I probably wouldn’t have found Katharine Hepburn, a celebrity role model for the ages if there ever was one. (She wore pants! They called her “box office poison,” so she went back to Broadway. Then, when they wanted to make her play into a movie, she was like “I own the rights, bitches, you have to cast me!” Except she said it much more crisply and New England-ly.) I would have still gotten to know Hitchcock, via my mom, but I don’t know if I would have decided to do a project on him in high school, which led to me reading a bunch of what I later came to know as auteurist criticism of his work. I haven’t really retained the staunch authorship stuff, though it is a useful critical tool, but the work that I read (which included Hitchcock/Truffaut and Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films along with some less good stuff) opened my eyes. It had never occurred to me before I started reading this stuff that movies could be read just like books, that you could find meaning in the framing of shots, in the timing of a cut, in the colour of a dress. I mean, that doesn’t seem like much a revelation now, but when I was 16, it was huge.

Anyway, take that earnest confession as a giant grain of salt when I object to this:

But such lists serve two functions: (1) The television special makes money for the American Film Institute, which is a noble and useful institution, and (2) some kid somewhere is gonna rent “Citizen Kane” and have the same kind of epiphany I had when I first saw it as a teenager. [...] Ah, but there’s the problem: Will they find out about them? Too many younger moviegoers are wasting their precious adolescence frying their brains with vomitoriums posing as slasher movies. A list like the AFI’s can do some good..

Seriously, Roger Ebert? Kids these days need to get away from the torture porn? I’m a nerd and I don’t take myself as typical, but you know, I don’t really think that many college-aged young people can’t appreciate good film. Our generation is the first that really grew up with VCRs (and DVD players and the Criterion Collection and so forth); if anything we have more access and knowledge than earlier generations. Just because a 20 year-old guy (or girl) is more impressed by the opening shot to Fight Club than the burning of Atlanta doesn’t mean he (or she) is a philistine. Maybe they just can’t get past the overt racism and sexism in Gone With the Wind (not that Fight Club doesn’t have its share of covert racism and sexism, but whatever), or the awkward repression that came from making movies under the Hays Code. I don’t know that that’s a bad thing.