AFI Top 100
Mostly because everyone cares what movies I watch and therefore would like nothing more than to read about it on the ‘net, but partly because I just do whatever Corey does, I present this list:
(Seen It, Tried to watch it, haven’t):
- “Citizen Kane,” 1941.
- “The Godfather,” 1972.
- “Casablanca,” 1942.
- “Raging Bull,” 1980.
- “Singin’ in the Rain,” 1952. (I was too young to see the point in watching a guy sing and dance while someone sprayed water on him with a hose)
- “Gone With the Wind,” 1939.
- “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1962.
- “Schindler’s List,” 1993.
- “Vertigo,” 1958.
- “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939.
- “City Lights,” 1931.
- “The Searchers,” 1956.
- “Star Wars,” 1977.
- “Psycho,” 1960. (Fell asleep… I’m not kidding)
- “2001: A Space Odyssey,” 1968.
- “Sunset Blvd.”, 1950.
- “The Graduate,” 1967.
- “The General,” 1927.
- “On the Waterfront,” 1954.
- “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1946.
- “Chinatown,” 1974.
- “Some Like It Hot,” 1959.
- “The Grapes of Wrath,” 1940.
- “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” 1982.
- “To Kill a Mockingbird,” 1962.
- “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” 1939.
- “High Noon,” 1952.
- “All About Eve,” 1950.
- “Double Indemnity,” 1944.
- “Apocalypse Now,” 1979.
- “The Maltese Falcon,” 1941.
- “The Godfather Part II,” 1974.
- “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” 1975.
- “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” 1937.
- “Annie Hall,” 1977.
- “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” 1957.
- “The Best Years of Our Lives,” 1946.
- “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” 1948.
- “Dr. Strangelove,” 1964. (Rented it 2x and had to return it before I had a chance to watch it)
- “The Sound of Music,” 1965.
- “King Kong,” 1933. (I’m sorry, it’s just a big ape… this seems like B-movie Sci-Fi whenever I try to watch it)
- “Bonnie and Clyde,” 1967.
- “Midnight Cowboy,” 1969.
- “The Philadelphia Story,” 1940.
- “Shane,” 1953.
- “It Happened One Night,” 1934.
- “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1951.
- “Rear Window,” 1954.
- “Intolerance,” 1916.
- “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” 2001.
- “West Side Story,” 1961.
- “Taxi Driver,” 1976.
- “The Deer Hunter,” 1978.
- “M-A-S-H,” 1970.
- “North by Northwest,” 1959.
- “Jaws,” 1975.
- “Rocky,” 1976.
- “The Gold Rush,” 1925.
- “Nashville,” 1975.
- “Duck Soup,” 1933.
- “Sullivan’s Travels,” 1941.
- “American Graffiti,” 1973.
- “Cabaret,” 1972.
- “Network,” 1976.
- “The African Queen,” 1951.
- “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” 1981.
- “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, 1966.
- “Unforgiven,” 1992. (I’ve seen the second half of this like 3x)
- “Tootsie,” 1982.
- “A Clockwork Orange,” 1971.
- “Saving Private Ryan,” 1998.
- “The Shawshank Redemption,” 1994. (Top 100… really?)
- “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” 1969.
- “The Silence of the Lambs,” 1991.
- “In the Heat of the Night,” 1967.
- “Forrest Gump,” 1994. (More bizarre than Shawshank.. what happened in ‘94?)
- “All the President’s Men,” 1976.
- “Modern Times,” 1936.
- “The Wild Bunch,” 1969.
- “The Apartment, 1960.
- “Spartacus,” 1960.
- “Sunrise,” 1927.
- “Titanic,” 1997. (Was dragged kicking and screaming by SO. Broke up a few months later.)
- “Easy Rider,” 1969.
- “A Night at the Opera,” 1935.
- “Platoon,” 1986. (I liked Full Metal Jacket better)
- “12 Angry Men,” 1957. (Saw a remake ;-)
- “Bringing Up Baby,” 1938.
- “The Sixth Sense,” 1999.
- “Swing Time,” 1936.
- “Sophie’s Choice,” 1982.
- “Goodfellas,” 1990. (This is on TV all the time, but I can never commit to watching all of it for some reason)
- “The French Connection,” 1971.
- “Pulp Fiction,” 1994.
- “The Last Picture Show,” 1971.
- “Do the Right Thing,” 1989.
- “Blade Runner,” 1982.
- “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” 1942.
- “Toy Story,” 1995.
- “Ben-Hur,” 1959.
It’s funny how mine seem to come in clumps. I’m proud to say that I’ve seen all of the top 10 except the chic flicks like “Gone With the Wind”, “Singin’ in the Rain”, and…. “Raging Bull”? Yeah… no explanation for that one.
Overall score: 55%, but 70% of the top 10. I’m actually surprised, because I don’t watch movies that much. My overlap with Corey is just 23%, which is totally bizarre since we grew up around the same time so we automatically have overlap for things like Star Wars, E.T. and that curse of our generation: Titanic.
Anyway, that gives me some good ideas for movies to rent, particularly Raging Bull.
Security and the Culture of Fear
So, CBS managed to get their hands on the “No Fly” list. It has 44,000 unique names (quick: if there are 44,000 terrorists out there, can you really believe that fighting “them” in Iraq means there aren’t any left in the US?), some of which are so ridiculously common that undoubtedly they cover thousands of innocent would-be travellers.
Of course, none of this should be a surprise to anyone. The efficacy of a name-based “No Fly” list has beeen questioned by security experts from the day it was first implement. There are so many ways it is a bad idea it’s hard to know where to start: terrorists aren’t exactly stupid enough to operate under a known alias, if they are you should be able to catch them fairly quickly, what are the odds that you know someone is intending a terrorist attack while on a plane without having a more precise fix on their identity than their name, names don’t map to a single person, and then there’s the fact that the list is so widely distributed that they have to keep a lot of names off the list to avoid tipping off targets that they are on their trail.
Given my own name, I’m intensely aware of the problems with name-based identification. I still remember being “Christophe cinque” in my high school French class because there were 6 Christophe’s in the class (representing about 1/4 of the class). At that same school there was another student with the same first and last name as me (and to add to the problem we had about the same size and build, similar physical traits, our dad’s worked for the same company, etc.). This was in a school with less than 500 students. I’ve had similar problems whenever dealing with bureaucracies of managing more than a few hundred people.
This problem is magnified by the fact that certain cultures tend to have limited name space. For example, in Arab culture (bets that there are a lot of Arab names on that list?) most of the population’s first names are drawn from a very small set of names of religious and cultural figures, with an even smaller subset being the most common. As a consequence Arabs are sometimes uniquely identified by citing their family tree (“ibin X ibin Y…”). Combine that with last names being common because families are often large, and you quickly discover that with perhaps 1,000 names you could probably cover a majority of the Arab population (this probably explains how the names of 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers are on the list).
Now, one could argue that maybe the security checks are more sophisticated than the public is aware of. Maybe if they get a hit on a list that just means the TSA calls up the FBI, sends an ID number or a photo, and clears a person quickly and quietly. Even better, since these days you have to provide an ID number just to buy a ticket, these hits could be prescreened. The only problem is that CBS found 12 people named “Ralph Johnson” who are detained “almost every time they fly”. Here’s a thought: if he’s cleared to fly one time, perhaps this particular Ralph Johnson should be cleared to fly subsequent times, particularly if a new terrorist “Ralph Johnson” has yet to be identified.
The truth that we all know is that a lot of the security measures that have been instituted since the 9/11 attacks, particularly those related to air travel, serve more to instill the public with confidence about their safety rather than to provide a real security benefit. Building up the public’s confidence has been necessary because politicians and the media have been self-servingly fanning the flames of the public’s fear rather than appealing to reason. The end result is unreasonable fear and unreasonable security protocols that if anything harm public safety by increasing paranoia without providing any practical security benefit.
The government isn’t the only source of this “all show and no go” approach to security. I’ve seen news reports raising the panic flag over the realitively easy access contractors have to small quantities of cesium, freaking out of “terrorism futures” markets, and playing to xenophobia by trumpeting how US ports will be run by a UAE-based conglomerate. Appealing to the public’s irrational fears is good business, regardless of whether you are a politician tyring to convince people that only you can protect them, a news outlet trying to get eyeballs, or Roger Corman. At least in the latter case the audience knows going in that it’s just a fantasy.
It’s time for everyone in the theatre to stand up and tell the people shouting fire to shut up. We simply don’t have the resources to be waste on feel good measures that accomplish little if not nothing. Security is a business that requires the same cold and calculating process that is employed by those most successful in overcoming it.