Death of cinema, weekend edition

There’s a brand new NYT attempt to talk cinema & start conversation on a boring summer day! Top 100 21st c. movies. A return to glamour & classification, the pre-woke culture talk. Nonsense. At least there’s the appearance that nothing has changed, there is no improvement in the judgment of whoever is asking & answering these survey questions. Liberalism as “culture” is dead. Here’s the NYT top 10:

10. The Social Network (David Fincher)
9. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
8. Get Out (Jordan Peele)
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
6. No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)
5. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
4. In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
2. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
1. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

Of these, only In The Mood For Love & Mulholland Dr. are certain to belong on a top 10 list.

Of the other eight, only two of the directors belong in the top 10: The Coen Bros. & Miyazaki, perhaps with other movies like O Brother Where Art Thou (#76), the consensus choice, or Burn After Reading (not on the list), for the Coen Bros., The Wind Rises (not on the list), for Miyazaki.

Of the other six directors listed, none belongs at the top.

The top should include names like Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others, #48), Zhang Yimou (Hero would be the consensus choice, but others could be candidates, from House of Flying Daggers to Shadow—but none of Zhang’s movies made the list), & Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty—none of his movies made the list either). Terrence Malick, another acknowledged master, does appear, but his Tree of Life is at #79.

Park Chan-wook should be in the top 20 if not 10, but Oldboy only appears at #43. John Woo’s epic Red Cliff does not appear at all, nor does any Johnnie To movie, instead we get a very indifferent Ang Lee movie, Brokeback Mountain (#17), after a good, but not remarkable movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (#16). A class of critics that cannot tell who the major working artists are is too corrupt to be worth educating…

What’s even funnier is that of these less-than-masterly six directors, the list does not even include their best 21st c. movies! Paul Thomas Anderson’s best would be Inherent Vice, (not on the list), David Fincher’s, Zodiac (ranked #19), Bong Joon Ho’s, Memories of Murder (ranked #99)! As for Michel Gondry, who is most injured by giving him such praise, Science of Sleep (not on the list) might be the better work.

As for the last two, radical chic race chicanery—Get Out or Moonlight—is beneath notice.

I attract attention to this failure to suggest the most impressive or beautiful movies because it goes against the implicit principle of the list, which is that artists are rare & the best artists dominate. Accordingly, there are five Nolan movies on the list, four by Paul Thomas Anderson & the Coen Bros, three by Quentin Tarantino & David Fincher, two by Bong Joon-ho. There are thirteen directors with multiple entries, adding to 37 movies out of the 100, more than a third. The other 63 entries are 63 different artists. The better way to remake the list is to think about the major directors & their best movies.

Obviously, there are no movies by women if you judge by the directors suggested on the list: Bigelow, Gerwig, Sophia Coppola. As Steve Sailer says, these women are noticeable for being born to or having married better artists than themselves, which is more love of art than the NYT can summon. Other female directors on the list are 2020s slightly demented feminists, so this is not a victory for the gynaikocracy. We are commanded to obey it or even believe in it, but I’m not sure I could recommend a 21st c. movie by a woman that makes the top 100. I admire some of Agnieszka Holland’s work, but, needless to say, she didn’t make the NYT list. The one respected director who did is Agnes Varda, toward the bottom, but not, say, Claire Denis…

What’s glaringly missing from the list, on account of all the feminism of the times, is war movies & comedies. If you think about taste in relation to all the other human concerns, this is the thing that should alarm you.

Director Denis Villeneuve has multiple movies better than these “top ten directors” & is trying to save cinema in the 21st c. Moreover, studios & audiences like him. Unfortunately, these days every part of the liberal elite is more than a little suicidal, so he only got recognition for Arrival (#29) instead of his ambitious Dune. That’s what we might call artsy feminism, which is also one of the principles implicit in the top 100 list. Another man attempting to save cinema is Zack Snyder—none of his movies made the list. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina should also be on the list—another man doing sci-fi—yet is also missing. So also is Jeff Nichols, whose Mud is one of the better recent American films. Taylor Sheridan is also missing, another noteworthy artist who happens to suffer from a concern for manliness.

But there are other difficulties that arise when it comes to making such a list. Some remarkable directors have to be excluded or their contribution minimized. Woody Allen (maybe Small Time Crooks?), Brian De Palma (The Black Dahlia?), Oliver Stone, & Francis Ford Coppola might miss the list, even though they’ve made movies in the 21st c., simply because they messed up their own careers; so with Bertolucci in Europe. Scorsese is represented by The Departed (#31), a remarkable movie, & Wolf of Wall St. (#20), a mediocre movie that could not reasonably be added to a top 100 list. Spielberg is represented by Minority Report (#94). Clint Eastwood is absent (Gran Torino?), as is Whit Stillman (Damsels in Distress), as is Tim Burton, as is David Mamet (Redbelt). Partly, this is explained by these men doing their best work before the turn of the millennium, but part of it is simply rejection of old artists in favor of younger peddlers of fashionable nonsense.

But what is still worse, European masters like Jean-Luc Godard (Goodbye to Language), Andrzej Wajda (Katyn) & Wim Wenders (The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez) are completely excluded from the top 100 for no good reason. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man documentary appears at #98, but it should have been Cave of Forgotten Dreams instead. Eric Rohmer was very old by the turn of the millennium so perhaps his last few movies are not fit for a top 100. But there is no Russian director on the list whatsoever (Konchalovsky?) nor anyone from Central Europe (Hrebejk, Pawlikowksi, Petzold?). This is one of the noticeable changes to liberal taste obvious: Indifference to Europe. There are only 14 movies from Europe, none in the top 25, but half are very recent gay-race-feminism stories. There are also four movies by English directors, one about Auschwitz & three vaguely feminist stories largely devoid of artistic merit. In short, American liberals now dominate European cinema ideologically.

Of course, conservatives are still dead culturally, so there’s no way yet to rescue all the American, European, or Asian gems of cinema from the disdain that has turned into forgetfulness.