ALEX GRANTS FIFTEEN BEST FILMS OF ALL TIME

---

That pontificating,pompous and preening last resort for the politically correct SIGHT & SOUND, the house organ for the mediocre middle-brow British Film Institute in Soho, London, within its last-but-one self-congratulatory issue (August 2002) has yet again indefatigably drawn up its tediously predicable master list of the alleged Ten Best Films Ever Made. And lo and behold it's the usual, same old/same old utterly dull, boring and irrelevant list of yore. © Photo of Alex by Sam North

For two decades Sight & Sound has clung for dear life to all of the most deadening strictures of all prevailing social 'ism's. Feminism, homophilia, multiculturalism,structuralism. For instance, the absurd notion of the nonwhite,nonmale,non-bourgeois,nonsensical The Other. And of course the pathetic fallacy of The Male Gaze. Spooky.

In other words censorship run amok, writ small, savage and sinister.

The mythical Greek robber-baron Procrustes is the sole enervating model for modern p.c. censorship.
Whenever Procrustes's captives or victims failed to fit properly into his particular bed they were either abbreviated, by axe or sword, or elongated, on the rack. One size was supposed to fit all, and to hell with reality.
Actuality is so very inconvenient to all 'isms', which ache for uniformity, always at the expense of the riches of life's passing parade. Official state sanctioned British film kultur is very prone to such knee-jerk propaganda.

So here then are my Fifteen Best Ever Made films that lodged in my memory and imagination.
© Alex Grant - (A former film reviewer for such organs as Variety, Westender, and many more)

In alphabetical order:

Come and See The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz/ The Diary of a Chambermaid (Louis Brunel) El Cid/Man of the West Gohatto Mulholland Drive/Blue Velvet Peeping Tom The Servant Touch of Evil/Chimes at Midnight Vertigo/Psycho The Wild Bunch/The Searchers

(For balance I asked my best female friend what her choices would be. She had been an avid filmmgoer since her teens but prefers colour to black and white movies and has next to no interest in films made more than a decade ago. Although her taste is as idiosyncratic as my own and she loves both French and Scandinavian film especially, her selection for her age group is like quite typical for single independently minded women.

Basic Instinct Dances With Wolves Elizabeth Gladiator The Horse Whisperer Internal Affairs L.A. Confidential The Last of the Mohicans The Lord of the Rings The Matrix Rob Roy The Salton Sea Unfaithful Wuthering Heights (1992) Heat (Michael Mann)

(Hey since we are doing lists here here's mine -Ed )

The General - Buster Keaton The Circus -Charles Chaplin Navigator - (NZ Movie) City of Lost children The Ladykillers Kinds Hearts and Coronets Betty Blue Le Vacance de Monsieur Hulot Girl on a Bridge Double Life of Veronique

If you gave ten people the same task, you'd get ten different lists. that is the beauty of film.
Happy Moviegoing - Ed.


More Reviews

< Back to Index
< Reply to this Article

© Hackwriters 2002
- all rights reserved