This new AFI top 100 films list should probably be beneath my notice, but it pisses me off so much I just have to say my piece. First, the existence of cultural hierarchies is probably inevitable but their codification in numbered lists is entirely avoidable and always inane, whether E! is rating the 100 hottest bods or eggheads are rating philosophers or scientists. What, for instance, could it possibly mean that one of the LOTR movies is one notch better than West Side Story? Could it really be that they are almost, just not quite, of exactly equal value? This sort of quantification is moronic no matter who is doing the counting. (I'll tip my hand here: if I'm holding DVDs of each, I'm way more likely to pop in West Side Story.)

More significant, though, this list speaks by exclusion to say what a "movie" is: very little silent, nothing shorter than feature length, nothing avant-garde or experimental, no documentaries, few films that would make anyone uncomfortable (Kubrick excepted, of course, but he's an Artist), and lots of movies that boomers remember fondly from repeat viewings upon their release, revival, or regular TV broadcast. The taste in evidence here is not simply "good" but good according to a certain group of film-goers. There are very few films aimed specifically at women, children or young people, poor and immigrant audiences, and racial and ethnic minorities. The list reflects the power and privilege of those who created it. It also reflects their bourgeois liberalism, ridding us finally of the weight of The Birth of a Nation, once thought to be the greatest film ever made and now no longer in the top 100--not even as good as Tootsie or Star Wars or, gasp, The Sound of Music! So many of these films are the sort that massage the aspirational do-gooder values of blue-stater upper-crusties, movies that advertise the virtue of the movies, their function to promote progressive middle-class mores. I have in mind here films like 12 Angry Men and On The Waterfront, In the Heat of the Night and The Best Years of our Lives, Schindler's List and Network: Films of Social Significance. But, please! If positive messages were the key criterion in valuing art, then a zillion earnest poems would be the betters of the likes of Griffith, whose value has certainly been overrated but not by as much as this list implies. This sort of list fatally excludes what Manny Farber called "termite art" (see this nice gloss on the topic by Girish): movies people love that aren't embraced by official culture, movies with an underground sensibility, movies that are honest and true without being earnest or moralizing.

Perhaps what rankles me most, though, is that this list reflects a generational bias, including lots of sentimental boomer favorites like It's a Wonderful Life, The Graduate, The Wizard of Oz, and anything starring Humphrey Bogart. I wonder how it will look upon revision a decade or two hence. Will Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Dirty Dancing edge out To Kill a Mockingbird and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? I wouldn't mind if they did. Then it will be up to a new generation of upstarts to get all huffy about those damn Gen X'ers with their Slacker and their Nirvana making like they invented post-adolescent alienation.

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Now for the part you were expecting: here are some films I would put on this list instead of all the earnest message movies and boomer nostalgia trips. Hypocrisy, I know, to object to lists only to propose entries for my own. I don't think these are better in any objective sense than the ones chosen for the AFI's list. I just like mine better; this is about my taste, not my imperious pronouncement of what is or is not a great film.

Hitchcock is the top of the heap of American filmmakers and it would not be inappropriate to have several more of his films here. I would start with Shadow of a Doubt for sure.

Welles: my favorite is not Kane but Touch of Evil. Kane is show-offy and the main character is put at too great a distance from the audience. I get that this is the point of the film, but I find the good/bad man represented in Hank Quinlan to be more interesting, and I admire Touch of Evil's surrealistic qualities.

Ford: I prefer My Darling Clementine to The Searchers. The representation of the Indians in The Searchers still makes me cringe, and Max Steiner's score always seems schmaltzy to me, especially when it repeats the main theme in the minor key. I also don't think this kind of list can do without Stagecoach. While we're at it, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are each better than perhaps 90 or 95 of the films on this list.

Hawks: the five most outstanding are Scarface, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo. All five should be on this list ahead of Bringing Up Baby, which is also wonderful. Howard Hawks is one of my big faves.

There are several incredibly major directors not represented in this list. The ones that strike me as most egregious from the sound era alone are Josef Von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, and David Lynch (I grant that the AFI top 100 will never do justice to the silents). This list needs Blonde Venus, You Only Live Once, Trouble in Paradise, Meet Me in St. Louis, Rebel Without a Cause, Magnificent Obsession, and Blue Velvet--at the very least. Meet Me in St. Louis would be on my all-time top ten. Minnelli's The Band Wagon is pretty essential, too, and as a self-reflexive 1950s Technicolor MGM musical is every bit as great as Singin' in the Rain.

Of post-1970s independent film, the only two entries here are Pulp Fiction and Do The Right Thing, and both are stuck in the bottom 10. This suggests that indies have done a bad job of inserting themselves in the canon (or, as detractors have been saying for awhile, that they're not so interesting, really). I especially admire Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes and John Sayles, but I'm not sure where to put them or which of their films belong. Ebert is apoplectic that Fargo is off the list, but of the Coens' films I am easily as fond of The Big Lebowski, and also big on Miller's Crossing and O Brother. Chuck likes Lone Star, and I do too, but something about that film comes across as a bit preachier than the best of Sayles (my fave is Passion Fish). On the topic of independents, I'm no huge fan of Cassavetes, but he is another obvious omission.

Finally, genres that get short shift: the gangster film (nothing from the 30s!), the women's picture/chick flick, horror, B-movies, westerns, broad comedies (e.g., Tashlin, Airplane!, Farrelly bros.), and contemporary-ish action movies like Terminator 2 and The Matrix. I am pleased that Spielberg is represented so well but he gets too many entries; I'd gladly trade his Private Ryan for Stella Dallas or The Exorcist.

(Since I did count: I have seen 87 of the top 100 films. I'm not going to list all the ones I haven't, but I'll tell you the two I feel most ashamed of: Gone With the Wind and Snow White. I know, I know.)

Too bad about The Sopranos. The second part of Season 6 had been almost flawless, with carefully doled out moments of revealing raw emotion and violence arising organically out of the narrative situations. But the finale was an awful disappointment. After jerking our chain for an hour with hints and allusions (the orange and the cat said Godfather to me) and false starts to fill us with dread, after stretching to make banal political points via A.J.'s laughable identity crisis, after squishing Phil Leotardo's head under the wheel of his own vehicle in a move more worthy of splatter films, after cranking the Journey and planting the notion that Meadow might parallel park them all to death, the screen just goes black and the sound cuts out, and that's it for Tony and Carm and Med and A.J. and everyone, dead and alive. Does Tony live or die, does he go to jail? Yeah, one of those. An end but hardly an ending. Not artful but arty, and totally unlike the classic novels to which snooty critics would so often compare the show. The show's comedy is typically darker than black, but now it's at our expense. That's it; like the characters might say, what are you gonna do?

David Remnick in the New Yorker pays tribute to The Sopranos, "the richest achievement in the history of television." I wonder about the extent to which Remnick has canvassed this history. Has he watched all nineteen eps of My So-Called Life? Would he so confidently assert the equivalent for any other form, for a film or a play or a novel or a concerto? Or is it that television is so generally devalued that any outstanding work seems like it could be, unproblematically, best evs?

Battlestar is calling it quits after one more season. Another welcome blow at the infinity model. I really want to like the show again, so I'm looking forward to the final season, the "third act," and not giving up yet despite my strong negative reaction to the ending of the season just past.

Movie Midpoints is a screen capture quiz using the middle frame of each film. I do badly at these things, so I'm glad that it comes with answers. I think I might do better with larger images, but it's still fun.

Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen are interviewed on Fresh Air about Freaks and Geeks and Knocked Up. See also this bunch of interviews etc. in Wired.

TechCrunch sez Facebook is the It website, the new Google: "Much of what we know as 'Web 2.0' will eventually be rebuilt on top of Facebook." The story here is the launch of Facebook Platform, which integrates all kinds of other functionality--Twitter, Last.fm, etc.--into one's Facebook page. Read all about it at the Facebook blog. It seems now that the age barrier is crumbling as old folks flock to the site (e.g., see Jeff Jarvis's gushy thoughts). It's certainly not too late for you, old-timer latecomers.

Jimmy Wales is interviewed by Charlie Rose (beginning around 19:45) about the future of Wikipedia and the way money is made online. He compares Facebook and MySpace around 24-25 min., praising the former. He talks about open source around 27-28, praising Firefox in particular.

And there will soon be 300,000 books published in the USA each year, reports Publishers Weekly. One of these days, among these will be mine. I just signed a contract with Columbia UP for my volume on indie cinema, loosely based on my dissertation. Keep your eyes peeled.