That time again. Yey.

Note: I noticed that since this has been written over a quite a long period of time, my tenses kept changing. I did try to fix it, but I’m not sure I was able to.

What Is This?

So, back in the day, in the halcyon days of 2005, I decided to make a list of my favorite movies. The idea from the beginning was that I’m going to make this list in order to be able to do it again in the future to be able to analyze my evolution as a movie fan. Little math tells you that this is the fifth time I’m doing this. The two latest versions (2015 and 2020) are on this blog, while the earlier ones are now gone from the Internet. Well, I have the lists, but not the texts linked to them.

You might be thinking to yourself something along the lines of “what a nerd” and yes, that is true. I’m definitely not discounting that. But I’m a true old school nerd, who is willing to do the work just to figure something out. This is doing that work.

This Year’s Theme

In order not to repeat myself (as plenty of movies on it are not going to change from list to list), I decided to take a point of view again even if I sort of missed with the genre theory approach last time. This time the theme is feminism or feminist theory. Specifically from the intersectional feminist perspective. I do have to note that I am a white cis straight atheist male with decent income and good education, just so you know (in case you didn’t). Still, this is a learning process for me (as writing always should be). Hopefully, you’ll learn with me. I would, however, like to make it clear that I am not trying to talk on anyone’s behalf. I am not trying to tell women or any other group how to feel or interpret any of these movies or any individual moment, character or theme in these movies.

What is intersectional feminism anyhow? It’s the idea that gender or sex is not the only way people can be discriminated against. (Almost) Everyone is in some way being oppressed based on whatever reference groups they fall into. This can be based on skin color, perceived race, religion, nationality, class or caste, sexuality, disabilities, ethnicity, even things like height, weight and so forth. I might as well call this the Woke Edition.

So, I tried to analyze the films based on this. How well or badly do they handle these topics? Now, again, I can’t really be sure I can do this well enough, but again, we are all learning. I’ll try to focus on women just because I want to keep each entry at a maintainable length. I think I might have overdone it just a little bit last time, but we’ll see what happens this time.

One of the things I learn early on, and I would assume this is something that is widely understood and practiced within the field of feminist film analysis or any other media analysis for that matter, is that there is a difference between what the movie is explicitly saying and what the authors are implicitly saying. What often happens in media, especially older media, is that womanhood is a special trait for the character and often characters are not female unless there is a specific need for them to be female (they are mothers, love interests or similar). The Boys is an excellent example of this. In the comics, there are plenty of female characters, but they are all female only when female genitalia is required (with the expection of the actual Female, who is female in order to subvert the trope of the Chick in superhero groups). The TV series based on the comics has tried to find a better balance on this by changing the gender of some of the characters, when the gender is not necessary to be what it was in the comics based on their role in the story. This should tell you something about the differences in the attitudes of the people behind these projects and thus tells you implicitly something about the status of women in society. Men are seen as the default and women as something different from the default.

But of course, The Boys does also have a lot to say about the role of women in society. For example, Starlight, a new female arrival in the primary superhero group of the series, is taken sexual advantage of by the male members in both versions, although the culprit is different. So, the writers had an understanding and an interest in exploring their topic from a faminist point of view as well.

The way to approach this subject is often going to be hierarchies, their justification and their health. So, basically just a very leftist way of looking at these movies, although I guess calling this leftist sort of implies an economic perspective, but I try not to go there too much.

Did I learn during process? Yes. I’m not sure how much, but yes, I am now aware of topics I wasn’t before. I guess this would be more obvious, if I had written the entries in order, but since I didn’t, my journey here is less obvious and might seem uneven. At some point I started to think more and more about the various archetypal roles for women in mythology, but I wasn’t able to integrate that as well as I would have liked. I do think I have some good points here and there, but as a teacher, I keep thinking about the real experts here. Am I just a student trying to fill out the page to finish the assignment or am I actually contributing to something? Probably the former, to be honest. If nothing else, this can be a little bit of evidence on what kind of blindspots someone like me can have.

Honestly, there was more than a few moments when writing the descriptions for these movies I hoped I had chosen auteur theory or something instead. Anyhow, the point is to challenge myself, so that’s what I’m going to do. On the other hand, many of these movies are from directors I don’t really know much about, so I would probably run into similar problems.

I should also note that I made the draft version of the list first and chose the theme after that. I did not want the theme to affect the list. In a way it would be interesting to make the list again from this particular point of view, but alas, that will not happen.

Other Points

Otherwise, this is a long process for me. I started this two years ago. I watched a lot of movies (I have a list of all the movies I have on DVD or BluRay and I cut that to around 300, which I watched), made a lot of changes to the order, obviously wrote quite a bit and I made my own software for handling all of this. It does take time.

As always, I will go through the movies in ten parts, starting with 19 and moving down 2 each time until there’s only 1 left. This works because of a maths. (The difference between a^2 and (a-1)^2 is a+a-1, so in the first part a=10, so it’s a+a-1=19 and so forth.)

As usual, I don’t give a shit about what I’m supposed to like. This is a list mostly for me. Therefore, you won’t find Star Wars, Godfather, Indiana Jones, very many superhero movies (and the ones you might find won’t be what you expect), Citizen Kane (although it used to be), Vertigo or many of the other movies many might be expecting here, no Scorcese, Tarantino, Nolan, Coppola, Godard or many of the other “important” directors (although Coppola and Scorsese both have made their mark on this list as proponents of cinema, especially world cinema, and Kubrick had a weird change this year, as I dropped his previous movies from the list and added a new one in their stead), but instead you’ll get what has inspired this one middle-aged “gentleman” to watch more movies, ponder about something weird, or to create something myself. This is also very much for the moment. I am not trying to second guess what I’ll like in five years or what I liked five years ago. The point is that I can read back and see what liked back in the day and hopefully see how I’ve grown as a movie fan.

Actually, the list got a lot weirder this time around. There’s still plenty of movies that are widely known, but there is also some very obscure little movies with less than a thousand votes on IMDb, there’s two movies from countries that don’t exist any more, there’s a ballet, there’s three movies from Sweden, there’s two movie from Hungary, there’s a movie that was commissioned for TV, but got too weird, there are movies that were thought to be lost at some point in time, there’s at least ten movies directed by women and one additional one codirected by one, there’s five animations, none of which are Disney or Pixar, but two are used by them for training purposes, and you could argue the lone Jan Svankmajer film is also an animation, and there’s even a horror comedy, but it isn’t Evil Dead. I sort of feel I have finally been able to shed the expectations for such a list. Finally I feel I don’t have to second guess any of my decisions based on how others would interpret them. Yes, that should be obvious, but peer pressure is strong and if you think it doesn’t concern you, you have probably just internalized it.

For reference: I’ve seen maybe around 5000 feature films. I’ve seen almost all movies on various best-of lists, whether they are by professionals or fans. This includes Sight and Sound, AFI, IMDb, those 1001 movies you need to see before you die books (whatever they are called), 366 Weird Movies, various genre lists on Rotten Tomatoes and so forth. I have also seen a bunch of underground movies, and obviously mainstream ones as well.

I don’t have a specific genre I’m into, even if you can probably identify some forms of movies I’m more into than most, but they might be sort of weird, like 1920s German expressionism, revisionist Westerns and movies that are worth watching, even if they aren’t very good (you know, they are just so different from anything else), although movies from that last group aren’t going to be aroundon this list, but weird good movies are going to be plentiful. I guess now that I think about it, I do have a place in my cold, dead heart for horror, which does make more than its fair share of appearances on the list.

There is some recency bias. I guess not only some, because the decades with most movies on the list are (in order) 2010s, 2000s and 1990s with well over half of all these movies being from 1990 onwards. Of course, movies that are somehow linked to my personal experiences and worldviews are going to be of more interest to me, but there are plenty of movies from before 1990 as well.

Otherwise, no shorts, no documentaries and only movies I have a physical copy of. I don’t know how long I can maintain that last rule, but on the other hand, I have also stated that 10 years ago, so I really don’t know. The current trend is that more and more movies that are released get very expensive collector friendly treatments, but I’m not really into that, so my approach to buying movies might change as well.

I will schedule these to be published every other day, so this will take almost three weeks.

… and in case you are wondering, whether I’m taking this way too seriously, I would just like to say that a) being a nerd is fun, b) yes.

PS: I asked ChatGPT to categorize these movies. Admittedly, I should have been more precise, but without further prompts, it found two categories: Western and Drama/Thriller. It put six movies under the Westerns banner, one of which is definitely not and another might be seen as one, if you try hard enough, but probably not. I would definitely not call all the movies in the Drama/Thriller category as such, because there are clear comedies, action movies and so forth. Of course, you can always argue that everything is drama, but if so, then drama is not necessary as a category. It also lost five movies somewhere.

Then I asked ChatGPT to group the movies on the list by theme. These are the groups and how many movies each of them has:

1. Existentialism/Philosophical: 15
2. Dystopian/Futuristic: 4
3. Historical/Epic: 11
4. Social commentary/Critique: 17
5. Psychological Thriller/Horror: 6
6. Surreal/Fantasy: 5
7. Comedy/Satire: 9
8. Coming of Age: 4
9. Romance: 3
10. War/Military: 5
11. Film Noir/Crime: 5
12. Animation: 6
13. Mystery Thriller: 8

You might notice that there’s only 98 movies there. Not only that, but there’s actually several movies that it inserted in there and told me that it wasn’t on my list, but a common example of this theme. These included something called “Alice” in Surreal/Fantasy, which I assume it means to be a version of Alice in Wonderland, but there has been several movies simply titled Alice. I assume it meant Jan Svankmajer’s Neco z Alenky, though, because there is a Jan Svankmajer movie on the list, just not that one. Also, it decided to put many of the movies into several groups (without doing too much analysis, it decided to put one of the movies into five different groups), so it would appear that it just decided to forget many of the movies as well. Actually a total of 42 movies didn’t get into any group.

Finally, Animation is not a theme for most of the movies. You could argue that it is a theme in one of them, or two, if you try really, really hard, but actually two of those six are not animated at all. There’s also animated movies on my list that didn’t make that group. There’s also a movie about the slow death of a sick man in Coming of Age as well as a movie about a duo of two adult men, one of which is close to being elderly, there’s a post-apocalyptic action movie in Historical/Epic (and no, it’s not an epic, as “epic” actually has a definition despite how we tend to use it), and so forth.

I did do some further analysis/making fun of an AI on this, but you’ll have to wait for the postgame to see that.