Criticism of all stripes, the personal essay, the feuilleton, and the knock-knock joke are all dead as Dillinger: this is a given. But for those of us whose sole desire is to be “in the arts” without having to produce art, lecture, or remove our house-slippers, there is still one boom industry: List-making!
Kids these days love their lists, and why shouldn’t they? They’re like expertise in an easy-to-swallow capsule form! In olden times, if you were to going to learn something about anything outside of official school culture, you’d have to hack your way through overgrown, vine-choked pathways into the pop past. You would, perhaps, speak with enthusiasm about “A Warm Place” off The Downward Spiral, and some forbiddingly cool elder within earshot would patiently-if-condescendingly inform you that it was “A total Eno rip-off,” and you would feign knowing what that meant, then go to the public library and then, after a bit of trial-and-error with the spelling, search the CD collection for “Eno,” blindly hoping for the best in what you pick out, possibly consulting the wholly worthless Rolling Stone Album Guide for reference, which would inform you that the very best Black Flag album was by far inferior to the very worst George Harrison solo album.
It was an endless gauntlet of risked rejection which in turn enforced a sort of social natural selection, ensuring that only the dedicated would persevere, and allowing those who had persevered to interact under the assumption of an us vs. them shared set of passions and swimming-upstream hardships.
Well, now you little turds can Google “100 Essential Albums of the ‘70s” or whatever, do an afternoon’s worth of downloading safely hidden away from those once-awe-inducing-but-since-deposed cultural gatekeepers, video and record store clerks, and bluff “hip” well enough to b.s. your way into getting blown by the Art History major of your choice. (One offshoot of this all-access development is that those whose self-identities are wrapped-up in ahead-of-the-curve hip have headed off, loaded for bear, into the hills of crate-digging OOP obscurantism, forming communes where they eke out an existence overpraising justly-neglected garbage.)
Good on you, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to offer you any shortcuts. In this spirit, I offer the Bombast’s List of Worthless Top 10 Lists.
Top 10 Movies I Have, Despite No Particular Fondness for Any of Them, Inexplicably Seen Hundreds if Not Thousands of Times
- Beastmaster (Don Coscarelli, 1992)
- Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986)
- Eating Raoul (Paul Bartel, 1982)
- Young Guns (Christopher Cain, 1988)
- Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (James Signorelli, 1988)
- Drop Dead Fred (Ate de Jong, 1991)
- Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
- National Lampoon’s European Vacation (Amy Heckerling, 1985)
- Stripes (Ivan Reitman, 1981)
Top 10 Things That Shouldn’t Appear in a Film Review, Ever
- “Like a jazz solo…”
- “bat-shit crazy”
- “…avoids the ‘big scenes’…”
- “patiently-observed”
- “filmic”
- “beautifully-lensed”
- “As the story unfolds at a whirring pace whose tremors flow like the seamless pulses in a sleek, percussive symphony, watching the movie feels like lying back after the meat loaf and mashed potatoes and being spoon-fed gourmet ice cream while the wind whistles in your ears.”
- TK
- TK
- TK
Top 10 Movies That Comedy Central Has Played the Shit Out Of
- Earth Girls are Easy (Julien Temple, 1988)
- Glitch! (Nico Mastorakis, 1976)
- PCU (Hart Bochner, 1994)
- Soul Man (Steve Miner, 1986)
- Wasn’t there one with Michael Ontkean in a ski lodge? (Dunno)
- Real Genius (Martha Coolidge, 1985)
- Pizza Man (J.F. Lawton, 1991)
- Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (J.F. Lawton, 1989)
- Car 54 Where Are You? (1994, Bill Fishman)
- Somebody told me they play Waiting… (Rob McKittrick, 2003) a lot now. So, I guess that.
Top 10 Filmmakers Overdue For Complete Career Retrospectives With Freshly-Restored 35mm Prints Or 4K Digital Projections
- Nico Mastorakis
- Barry Mahon
- Larry Buchanan
- S.F. Brownrigg
- Al Adamson
- Michael and Roberta Findlay
- Bertrand Blier
- Ron Ormond
- Duke Mitchell
Top 10 Strangest Movies to Engage in Furtive Sexual Activity While Watching
- Le diable, probablement (Robert Bresson, 1977)
- The Bohemian Girl (Hal Roach, 1935)
- Fantastic Planet (Rene Laloux, 1973)
- Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
- Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, 2007)
- Counsellor at Law (William Wyler, 1933)
- Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)
- The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994)
- Badlands (Terence Malick, 1973)
- TK
Top 10 Proposed Movies That Never Got Made and Don’t Exist So You Can’t Watch ‘Em, Chump
- Jerry Lewis’s The Catcher in the Rye
- Robert Bresson’s Book of Genesis/ Leo McCarey’s Adam and Eve
- Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Jesus
- Sam Peckinpah’s Castaway
- Frank Tashlin’s May This House Be Safe From Tigers
- Roberto Rossellini’s Untitled American Founding Fathers Historical Film
- Michael Powell’s The Tempest
- Sam Fuller’s The Lusty Days
- Jacques Rivette’s Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Leslie Caron/ Maurice Pialat version)
- Howard Hawks’s When It’s Hot, Play it Cool
Top 10 Film Lines That Should Be Quoted For Humorous Effect More Often
- “It’s been such a long time since I made love to a woman I didn’t feel
inferior to.” –Richard Jordan, Interiors
