Checked out the IMDB Top 250 lately?
The movie website’s list of the movies its readers rank as the best 250 of all time is notoriously suspect, and not just because a cadre of fans makes sure “The Shawshank Redemption” stays on top. The list is heavily tilted toward recentish movies (you have to go all the way down to number 25 to find a movie made earlier than 1950, and it’s “Casablanca”) and toward English-language movies (only two of the top 25 are not in English: “City of God,” in Portuguese and “Seven Samurai” in Japanese), toward action movies (I love Christopher Nolan’s films but two in the top 25 when Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, has zero?) and toward inexplicable choices that must be there because someone organized a group to vote them in (the French “Intouchables,” is supposedly the best French movie ever made. Um, no).
Anyway, I was making my semi-annual hatevisit to the list to see what was on it and it occurred to me to check to se which ones I haven’t seen. Because the list leans toward recent and classic titles, I’ve seen just about everything with only one glaring omission: “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” at number 75. It’s definitely a movie I should have seen and it is quoted and awards-show-clipped so often that I feel like I HAVE seen it. But I’m pretty sure I have not seen it and I promise to fix that. I cannot, however, say the same for “Gone With the Wind,” which comes in at a surprisingly (but I’m fine with it) low 158. In chunks, I have seen most — but I suspect not quite all — of that one.
Want to see what you’ve missed?
http://www.imdb.com/chart/top