#79: The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)

There were FAR better movies being made by 1969. This was a shallow movie with little to no heart. I even read that Sam Peckinpah was trying to horrify his audience with all the spaghetti sauce he threw around, but instead they ate it right up and went to the movies to see more blood. Sure, there was some good distance work with cameras, but that doesn't excuse the overall brownness of the movie, alleviated only by a bright blue sky, which actually made the brown more brown. The acting might have been good if the characters were anything I cared about, but there was never any reason to get involved. Pitiful excuse for a Top-100 Film. File this one under: Technical Achievement. Which is hardly so.

Groupings for what these movies really are:

OLD B&W MOVIES
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Swing Time
Bringing Up Baby
A Night at the Opera
Sunrise
Modern Times

TECHNICAL "ACHIEVEMENT" MOVIES
Toy Story
Titanic

SOCIOPOLITICAL "MESSAGE" MOVIES
Ben-Hur (Religion)
Do the Right Thing (Race)
Pulp Fiction (Drugs)
The Last Picture Show (Sex)
The French Connection (Drugs)
Sophie's Choice (Holocaust)
Platoon (Vietnam)
Easy Rider (Drugs)
All the President's Men (Nixon)

REGULAR OLD MOVIES
Blade Runner
Goodfellas
The Sixth Sense
12 Angry Men
Spartacus

So far, out of 22 movies watched, there are only 5 I can come up with for which you don't have to be either 80 years old or a political radical to enjoy. I'd put 3-4 of the "message" movies on my list anyway, but the others had serious help from people more concerned with agendas than movies. I already hate the AFI. Who knows what this will look like by the end.

#78: Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)

Glad that's over. I suppose we could learn something about the ever-changing societal sense of humor, or beauty. I could make comparisons between The Great Depression and what we're experiencing now. Or, I could just talk about being bowlegged. I think I'd rather not talk at all and forget this ever happened. If there was a movie yet that made me want to quit this project, this is it.

#77: All the President's Men (Hoffman, Redford)

Alright, there have been plenty of movies so far on this list that have underwhelmed me or been outright disappointments. This includes the first Alan J. Pakula film I saw, Sophie's Choice. There have also been some very good movies, ones that deserve the accolades they've received. This is a rare movie that does everything a movie is supposed to do, and always with class and excellence.

The casting: Lots of gritty 30+ year-old actors who are not appealing to the eye. Some of them downright ugly, a lot of guys with Bill Hader haircuts. Man, do they really relay the common man and make him real, though.

The cinematography: The French Connection, which was onlyl 5 years earlier, did a hideous job of filming guys walking around. They tacked on an extra 20 minutes of movie time with absolutely nothing interesting. Here, every time someone walked, it was interesting. The shots were great, the way that Hoffman and Redford moved from one place to another always told what they were thinking. Just great.

There is not a drop of action in the movie. It's all dialogue, it's all phone calls and house visits and board meetings and guys sitting around the newsroom with noisy typewriters banging away and people talking. It doesn't need anything else. Everyone does a great job of acting. The lost art of the facial expression is at its finest, with no thought of striking a Brangelina sexy pose ever entering the actors' minds.

Granted, I am counting down, so the movies should be getting better. They really haven't been, though. There's been no real connection between rank and quality. This, though. This is a movie. Great suspense. Great acting all around. Highest marks.

#83: Titanic (Cameron)

This movie won 11 Oscars, mostly for being the most popular movie of all-time among lonely women. The lines are a bit forced at times, which is usually a sign that they're not well-written, The dialogue reminds me of some of Star Wars: Episode I, which bothered me even as I refused to dislike the movie. My co-watcher, a certified Titanic fanatic, was also bothered by the fact that people generally weren't talking like they were actually from that time period.

I like Bill Paxton and am glad he was in there as the salvage man. Seems like a small role for him, but he wasn't that big yet. I had never seen this movie before, but understand why I didn't like Leo DiCaprio back when the movie came out. He wasn't as good of an actor, just popular with the ladies because his character fulfilled their fantasies.

I know I'm more critical of contemporary movies because there's so much great stuff that I've seen that's complex, while it would appear that the movies the AFI chooses are more simplistic and base. This is a good disaster flick with excellent special effects, but like their glorification of Citizen Kane, I think the AFI worships style over substance a little too much, and that style is often the overwrought Big Hollywood Style instead of small art style. Oh well, maybe I'll take all the movies I've seen and make my own list when I'm done.

#82: Sunrise, A Song of Two Humans (1927)

In the quest to be a high-ranking white person, it is important to claim that you want to one day use your Netflix to go through the AFI Top 100. It lets other people know you care about good movies, without actually having to labor through all the difficult films to watch on the list.

It is not important to attempt this feat, only to say that you want to. If you do wind up watching these movies, you get stuck being surprised by a 1927 silent film. The story is at least interesting, the emotions well-conveyed, but nonetheless it is a silent film. Provided you actually continue watching beyond the first minute or two, you realize that half of the movie is a total downer and the other half is full of la-la happy times. It's a remarkable feat for 1927, probably one of the first movies to use wide shots, such as at the carnival, but it's not something that begs the 21st century Netflix enthusiast to take interest. I had a good time with it, but wouldn't have chosen it and will probably never watch it again.

Oh Gawd, I have to break into the unholy trilogy and watch Titanic next.

#81: Spartacus (Kubrick)

I've seen Braveheart. I've seen Gladiator. Now I know that they are essentially unoriginal. Spartacus took me a long time to watch because it's another of those 3-1/2 hour epics and I've been busy doing other things like correctly naming songs in my iTunes library. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen a Kubrick film except for a few minutes of Dr. Strangelove, which didn't leave me with the feeling that Kubrick was anything but weird. Well, he's pretty normal in Spartacus.

Having recently seen Ben-Hur, which is a very similar movie set in a similar period in history, I was impressed a little more with this one, as I guess the AFI also was. Judah Ben-Hur was upper class and got thrust down before returning to prominence, a fall and redemption story with the crucifixion of Jesus thrown in for good measure. Spartacus is a bit more interesting in that he's a slave, a nobody, who doesn't even win his gladiatorial match, yet becomes the leader of a slave revolt and the symbol for all the oppressed. I like how Kirk Douglas is quite mild-mannered in contrast to the sort of characters that Heston plays in many similarly epic movies.

I guess Kubrick's weirdness can be seen through his musical interludes that play with blank screens at the beginning of each act, like you'd normally see in a theatre. Before the opening credits. I look forward to seeing more Kubrick like 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. Well, anyway, that's that. Onward and upward.