Via Kottke here is Sight and Sound’s list of the Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time.

You may start arguing…now.

Here’s a short essay by Pat Jordan on going to the movies when he was a kid:

I was 10 in 1951. Every Saturday morning, my father would give me two dollar bills so I could take two buses from Fairfield into Bridgeport, Conn., where I would go to the Globe movie theater for the kids’ matinee from noon to 5 o’clock. I had to get a bus transfer in Black Rock and wait on a street corner for the next bus, which would drop me off downtown in front of Morrow’s Nut House, “nuts from all over the world.” I then walked four blocks along Main Street, past the stores and shoppers of this big, grimy factory city, until I came to the Globe and a long line of rowdy kids my age waiting to get inside.

After I got my popcorn and Jujyfruits, I searched for a seat in that dark, crowded, noisy theater with its frayed, burgundy-velvet seats and huge, overhead chandeliers like icicles. In the ’20s and ’30s, the Globe was a bustling Vaudeville theater with leering, popeyed, baggy-pants comics and peroxide-blond ecdysiasts. After World War II, the Globe fell on hard times and was reduced to holding kiddie matinees.

I found a seat next to an old man. He was unshaved, smelly, in tattered clothes. It was not unusual to find such bums scattered throughout the theater each week, their heads nodding on their chests, snoring. It was cheaper to buy a 25-cent ticket to the kiddie matinee than it was to pay a buck for a flophouse bed. There were other strange moviegoers, too. Teenage couples high up in the balcony, kissing. And an occasional woman, like my mother, in a flowered dress with shoulder pads, staring at the screen without interest, as if preoccupied with more weighty matters.

Via the most excellent site, Laughing Squid, dig this from Michael Gillette’s Bond Prints.

Via Kottke–man, life is just better because of Kottke, ain’t it?–let’s revisit Fargo, shall we?

Dumb fun from the Eighties. Movie is a quote-factory for nerds of a certain age (guilty).

Also loved the books when I was growing up.

Might be Chase’s best movie.

[Picture by Alex Kittle]

From the wonderful Scouting NY site, here’s Annie Hall (part one).

It lacks a cohesive structure…

Rest in Peace, Frank Pierson.

“At each level you reach, you have to tear up what you have done before, which cost an enormous amount of psychological and emotional energy. That makes the process of screenwriting very, very difficult. And I don’t know any screenplay that I have ever worked on where I did not go through ten to twelve or sometimes sixteen drafts before I showed it to anybody.”

[Quote via The Poor Dancing Girl She Won’t Dance Again]

This is a lousy-looking clip but the movie, Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography, is something you must see.

This looks promising.

From Michael Sragow, here’s Robert Towne on The 39 Steps:

“I think it’s interesting,” he said, “Because most ‘pure’ movie thrillers, especially when you think of Hitchcock, are either fantasies fulfilled or anxieties purged. ‘The 39 Steps’ is one of the few, if not the only one, that does both at the same time. He puts you into this paranoid fantasy of being accused of murder and being shackled to a beautiful girl—of escaping from all kinds of harm, and at the same time trying to save your country, really. A Hitchcock film like ‘Psycho’ is strictly an anxiety purge. ‘The 39 Steps’ gives you that and the fantasy fulfilled. It’s kind of a neat trick, really.”

Film Comment. Peter and Orson talk “movies.”

Clip via Black Book.

A new DVD set of “The Gold Rush” has just been released. It includes a 1942 sound cut of the movie. Cool.

[Photo Credit: Sid Avery]

I’m not much of a fan of Spike Lee as a movie director though his first three movies were events in my life. Watching those movies in the theater–“She’s Got to Have It” at the Quad, “School Daze” and “Do The Right Thing” in Times Square–are experiences I’ll never forget. There was much to recommend in Lee’s early work. Those movies had vitality and humor.

But I haven’t liked one of his feature films  in years (his best work has come in the documentary form).

His new one, however, looks promising:

Sam Adams has a wonderful interview with Bob Balaban over at the A.V. Club.

I like this part:

AVC: Speaking of great directors, your role in Close Encounters was as translator to the scientist played by François Truffaut, and the sense from your diaries is that you played a similar role offscreen.

BB: It was so much fun. You can only imagine [having] one of your favorite directors be absolutely dependent on you for eight months of shooting. I could speak fairly good French, and he really didn’t like to speak English. He would bring me scripts, I would translate them, and we would have discussions afterward. He didn’t like reading the scripts in English, so I would read them and describe to him what it was, and what was going on. It was great. Truffaut was great with kids, also. At one point—I’m sure I’ve said this in my book, and three or four thousand times already—Truffaut said for him there were literally two things that interested him in all of his movies. That was it. He said life was short—how prescient he was, because he died eight years later. But he said, “I’m never going to have enough time to make all of the movies I want. So I can only make movies about men and women and their relationships, and children and their relationships. That’s it, that’s all that interests me.” That’s everything in the world, but it also rules out a huge amount of things. It mostly rules out anything mechanical. At one point, he was asked to direct Bobby Deerfield, I think. He said, “Too much ‘vroom vroom.’” What he really meant was it wasn’t about men and women falling in love, or children.

Fascinating. To have such a firm grasp on what you want to make movies about and then to do just that.

Head on over to the New York Times and check out Joel Lovell’s fascinating profile of Kennth Lonergan’s thwarted masterpiece:

Think back on the last time you saw Kenneth Lonergan’s 2000 film, “You Can Count On Me.” Do you remember how good it was? The intellectual and emotional complexity of the script? Those remarkable performances by Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney? That scene — to choose one among many — between Terry (Ruffalo) and his 8-year-old nephew, Rudy (Rory Culkin), in which the drunk Terry sits next to Rudy’s bed late at night, smoking a cigarette and telling Rudy why his dad is such a jerk and why the town he lives in sucks so much? (“Fortunately for you, though, your mom is like, the greatest. So you had some bad luck, and you had some good luck.”) It was a modest story of a brother and sister whose parents die when they’re kids and whose lives are blown in different directions and who, years later, come to some almost-peace about what they can and can’t be for each other. But there was such intense realness about it, the way people really talk, the way lives are actually lived, that was unlike anything else on screen, radical almost, in its attention to the genuine messiness of human lives.

You may have wondered why Lonergan never made another movie. Or you may know that he did: a film called “Margaret,” which might be even better than “You Can Count On Me.” The cast included Anna Paquin and Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick. Among its several credited producers were a couple highly respected Hollywood veterans: Scott Rudin and Sydney Pollack. So when Lonergan began shooting the film in 2005, after taking two years to write the screenplay, “Margaret” had a lot going for it. When it was finally released six years later, in late 2011 — after a brutal and bitter editing process; a failed attempt by no less a cinematic eminence than Martin Scorsese to save the project; and the filing of three lawsuits — several serious film people called it a masterpiece. And almost no one saw it.

Beyond the matter of who breached what agreements, though, the question that has loomed over the film is what happened to Lonergan. How did the guy who wrote and directed “You Can Count On Me” — and who, moreover, has been arguably the most important American playwright of the last 20 years — get so lost in the forest of his own film? And if the process was as acrimonious as it is said to have been, what did that do to him, personally and creatively? How does an artist recover from that? Does he recover at all?

I have not seen “Margaret” but loved “You Can Count on Me.” I plan to watch the director’s cut DVD of “Margaret” this summer.

Andrew Sarris, one of our most valued film critics, died yesterday at 83. I was never a great fan of his writing though I admire his book “The American Cinema.” Our good pal, Matt B, was a great admirer of Sarris’ work however, and he was not alone.

Rest in peace.

[Featured Image by Fred R. Conrad/New York Times]

Check out this piece of inspiration from the Swedish artist, Anders Ramsell:

On Friday night, the Film Society at Lincoln Center presents a midnight showing of the greatest concert film ever made. New print too.

Stanley Speaks!

Via Open Culture.

The Manhattan Project by Cameron Michael.

The Manhattan Project HD1080P from Cameron Michael on Vimeo.

This is great.