The Press Box - Sean Fennessey on Covering Movies, Sight and Sound, and the State of the Top 10 List

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Bryan is joined by The Ringer's Sean Fennessey to discuss his approach to covering movies in the year 2022. They dive into media critics' top 10 year-end lists, discuss how lists reflect the current culture, weigh in on the journalistic shift towards list-making, and wrap things up with thoughts on Sight and Sound. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Sean Fennessey Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Pressbox final edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. We are joined today by the host of the Big Picture podcast, a guy you're always seeing at the movies. My friend, it's Sean Fennessey. Welcome to the press box, Sean. Hi, Brian. Happy to be back. Love to talk about lists and year-end list making.

So thanks for having me. I want to do a little check-in on lists. because you released your top 10 movies of the year, earlier this month of the Big Pick. Come for the list, stay for the Top Gun Maverick versus Nope, angst between you and your co-hosts. I listened to your pod,

and then it looked over at the top 10 lists of the New York Times movie critics. And I realized there were movies on there that I had not only not seen, but in some cases never heard of. That little flashback to reading Jay Hoberman at the Village Voices of a young New York journalist. So let's start here. In the world of listmaking we live in,

what's the role these days of the year-end critics' top 10 list? Well, it depends on the critic, right? Some critics see listmaking as a completely evangelical recommendation-style machine to say, I've seen everything, and there are some things that I don't need to tell you you should see, like Top Gun Maverick. For me, for example, I don't feel that way. If I have a a spiritual experience at Top Gun Maverick, I'm content to put it on my list. But many people don't see that as a necessary function of these things. They say discovery is critical in your work as a critic. And so I'm going to make a list of more obscure titles and try to help shed some light on maybe filmmakers or studios that are doing something that is emotional or impressive.

how good faith that is relative to taste and what the mission is at this stage in history is really interesting because it's a lot easier for all living humans to share their top 10 lists in a way that it wasn't 20, 30, 40 years ago. So I don't know if it's necessarily at a crisis point, but it was interesting to watch,

for example, the reaction to A.O. Scott's top 10 list at the New York Times because it became a kind of political football once he put it out in the world. where do you find yourself coming down as you make your list? What do you see as the mission you're pursuing? Well, and what I'm doing on the pod right now, I don't define as like the pure act of criticism.

We certainly do criticism on the show, but I'm not applying necessarily the same intellectual rigor that someone like A.O. Scott is when he's reviewing films. And for me personally, I have been making lists since I was nine years old of my favorite things. I can remember being sent out of class to sit outside at my desk after acting up in school. And what I would do during those times

is I would just list my favorite Marvel Comics characters. I would list my favorite short stops in baseball. You know, I always had a mind like that. I was always a kind of desperate to kind of categorize and file my thoughts on things. But on the big picture,

I'm just making a list of my favorite things. This is not like a, this is not a scroll handed down from the god of movie podcasting to say these are the good movies and you must all acknowledge, that my opinion is right. I kind of prefer if you disagree. And I like, I do try to put some editorial consideration into a list, which is to say, I want to provoke, I want to try to interrogate

why something has been assumed to be the best thing. But sometimes they're just acts of personal reflection. You know, last year my favorite film was Liquor's Pizza, the year before that, my favorite film was Mank. Those are two films from my favorite directors, David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson. Jordan Peel has emerged in the last five years as one of my favorite filmmakers. The things that those filmmakers are focused on are also my fascinations. So I don't have to work too hard to locate what my favorite movies are. But I also don't feel maybe a sense of responsibility that someone like a New York Times critic might to say, oh, I have this incredible bully pulpit and I have to share with the world, this undiscovered gem that comes from a part of

the world that maybe people don't think of as a mecca of filmmaking. So it's, for me, it's simultaneously very selfish and very honest what I'm trying to do. I ran into this when we were making our lists of media movies the other day, which is disentangling, what are my favorite movies? And what do I want people to think are my favorite movies? How do you find yourself navigating that when you make one of these lists? Well, I think if you're trying to look at the totality of achievement in a movie, that can sometimes blind you to the emotional feeling that you had. When we did the episode about the best movies of this year recently, I kept saying that the films that I identified were the films that made me go, wow.

They made me go like, how did they do that? Or I didn't know you could do that. Or I'm so immersed in the world. And that doesn't only mean spectacle. That doesn't only mean kind of big top filmmaking, although there are a couple of examples of that. But like one of the films that was on my list this year was all the beauty in the bloodshed, which was this new Laura Poitrous documentary about Nan Golden,

the photographer and artist, and her activism. that's not, it's a movie that really does not have a lot to do with Top Gun Maverick in terms of the world of Hollywood spectacle. But I didn't pick that movie because I was like, what I need to do is have like a low key quiet film that not a lot of people have seen or I need to have a documentary. It was just, I had a really profound viewing experience watching the movie. And it was not at all what I expected. And so it kind of took my breath away as I was watching it. So to me, it wasn't about the achievement about, of that movie. It was about how that movie made me feel. and so I'm trying to not let what you just described get in the way of my feelings.

Now, as I look back on the list that I made when I was younger, when I was a little bit more desperate to be understood as a serious person, I probably was straining and craning my neck to say like, hey, you know, just so you know, I did see that film from that South Korean filmmaker. You know, I did actually see that Senegalese drama that no one is talking about right now. As I get older, I'm getting even more comfortable in my skin. But whether or not that's the right thing to do, I think it's like an interesting. interesting subject to discuss, like whether or not what A.O. Scott, for example, did is actually the path that someone with a platform should take is complex because you open yourself up to a degree

of criticism, but then you also shine a light on someone who hasn't had a light shined upon them before or not, at least not in that way. And then they get incredible opportunity and then they can go on and make something that they previously couldn't have made. So I don't think I wield that kind of power, but I think that other critics do in the world. And so the way that they do that, I think can be profound. This is the other mental gymnastics I find myself falling into in addition to how will people perceive me if I put this at number three, this, and number four is how will I look back at this list in five or 10 years? So I'm not only trying to gauge my experience right now, 2022 in the moment, but thinking of future me or future someone else looking back at me in

2022, do you find yourself in that whirlpool as well? I've definitely thought about it. I'm I, but honestly, who cares? You know, no one's thinking about you more than you. I know, but it's easy to say who cares. But come on. We all tweet. We're all worried about what people think of us, right? We're in our own heads.

So I've been making personal lists of my 50 to 100 favorite movies that I, you know, have maintained since 2011. I started making a list when I was really, when I got really active about movie going in my adult. and I was going to see hundreds of movies a year. And I look back on those now, and in some cases, I can't understand why I put certain movies on certain lists. And in other cases, I think they're like a really fascinating reflection of who I was at that time. And I'm kind of proud of what they were, or at least like, it's interesting to go back and

look at them. But I'm like the only person going back to look at them. You know what I mean? I mean, unless I do something truly extraordinary with my life, which I won't, you know, like no one's going to give a shit. And so what they are is they're just, they're time capsules. They're my version of a diary entry. I've never, I've never kept a journal, but these are my journals. And these are the, these show how I spent a lot of my kind of professional creative time. And I like that they change. I like that my opinions change. I'm a big rewatcher too. I like to revisit, you know, on the big picture we do all these movie drafts. We're always going back to various years and looking at what the year in film was. And so it's fun to say, like, why did I like Green Room so much in 2014? Why did that movie, resonate so deeply with me in a way that maybe it wouldn't resonate with me now. So, and I'm not saying that I do or don't resonate with Green Room at this point.

It's more just like, that's an example of something recently that I was thinking about, about how much it, I was intoxicated by a movie. And I think that there's no gathering place for all of these lists. You know, there's no place that everyone goes to and says, like, well, here was the guy who was good and here was the woman who was bad. So you just got to go with what makes you feel good. ultimately. Do you remember what number one was in 2011, your first list? Oh, gosh, I don't. I don't. I'd have to think about that for a second. And I did it because I had three free hours on a plane and I wrote a weird

blog post on Tumblr and then I started doing that every year writing this kind of semi-confessional blog post about like what these movies meant to me personally. And then not with the expectation that I would be doing the thing that I'm doing now at the ringer, but it definitely has informed where I took a lot of the show and how I talk about movies and my like emotional relationship to them, which I wonder, and I think that more people now have an emotional relationship to their listmaking than the idea of the,

you know, ivory tower gatekeepery style lists that have, like, have dominated our lives, like from our adolescence and that, you know, that Jay Hoberman feeling that you described earlier, in the show, I feel like that has

kind of ended, you know? Like, there are a handful of critics who I always want to know what their list is. Like, I always want to know what Justin Chang's list is. I love reading Justin in the LA Times. I think he has such an acute sense of the shape of contemporary filmmaking. And he always surprises me with one or two things.

So I think, and those things are very rarely like discoveries. It's not a movie I haven't heard of. It's just I haven't seen the movie through his eyes. And I love to see it through his eyes. And so I think it has a, a lot of value in that respect, too. It's not just this kind of like highfalutin, nose turned up thing. It's about better understanding what the year in movies was or the year in books or the year, whatever the list might reflect. And when you can collect a bunch of these for a critic,

it's fascinating. I think me and a whole bunch of other people and I suspect you too, to be able to go back when you could read Roger Ebert's reviews in real time online and then go back and be like, oh, here was Roger trying to make sense of the movies in 1968 and 1969 in real time and being like, I just saw the Godfather. What do I do with that? this. It's fascinating when you can have that kind of scope because you really do feel like you're in somebody's mind and you do see their taste change over the years. Yeah, one of the things that's fascinating about Ebert is just like how often he was right. Like occasionally he's wrong, but he so many times, he was, he at least had a sense of a moment in movie history that he was

able to reflect. Now, whether you like the review, whether you thought the star rating was fair, or whatever, you can quibble with anything like that. But it's, it's, there is no universal truth in, in, in, in movie watching or in any form of criticism, but there are a couple of indisputable facts, you know, and he was, he was usually on the, on the right side of those facts. That's hard to do. I'm not really as interested in that because I think in a time of more idiosyncrasy in our taste, it's okay to be on the other side or as long as you have a kind of rationale, as long as you've thought through why something doesn't work. I'm trying to think of an interesting example of this. A couple of movies this

year that have been very widely celebrated that did pretty good business that you're going to find on a lot of lists, but also have strong detractors are nope and everything everywhere all at once. Those are very divisive mainstream movies that have lots of genre elements that have very idiosyncratic filmmakers behind them that have very big ideas baked into their execution, but are also very entertaining. But there are movies that for a lot of people, it's hard to get on their wavelength. Maybe they're a little too twy, maybe they're a little too obtuse in their storytelling. And so

we find ourselves at this interesting time where like every day is a culture war and sometimes that culture war is something that is actually like a little scary in the world. And sometimes it's just here's why everything everywhere at once sucks or is amazing. And so it's funny to watch something like that come along. Like Top Gun Maverick, that's just not a very interesting

object of discussion because it is exactly what it says it is on the label. And it's more successful at doing the thing that it says it's going to do than almost anything that's happened in the last few years of movies. But it's not really that dynamic of piece of art. It's like, it's just awesome. And getting upset about it or digging into its material benefits is less compelling to me than saying,

well, why is no number one on my list and everything ever all at once isn't even on mine? When I had similar experiences at both of them. And where does one diverge and the other one? doesn't. There's just a little bit more meat on the bone of conversations like that. I feel even the good top gun reviews when we're along the lines of, I didn't have to think anything. It was just awesome. And I had a great time. I didn't worry about things. Yeah, I mean, my co-host on the big picture, Amanda Dobbins, you know, always talks about going to the movies for a sense of escapism. And that's true for a lot of people with a lot of forms of popular culture

these days, especially in the days of like high COVID, you know, the deep pandemic times. People were basically just looking to be distracted or taken away. And so I think something like that is very powerful. I don't discount it. I too like to be taken away from my life sometimes. But what I really want personally is that blend of desperately trying to entertain a mainstream audience, a big audience of people, while also Trojan horsing as many concepts and ideas. That's the reason why appeal is so enticing to me as a filmmaker, because he wants to reach

a lot of people. he wants to use classical genre elements of the kinds of movies movies that I love. He's just got so much on his mind and he's trying to shoehorn so many deeper thoughts about the way that we live,

about who we are, about the division between us, about what brings us together that I'm just constantly going to celebrate a filmmaker like that. Flashback with me a couple of decades when Roger Ebert roamed the earth. I feel in those days

the year-in top 10 list had a particular sort of feeling to it, a particular place, which it was, you've read the reviews from a critic all year long. The critic has done the hard work. You, the reader, have done the hard work. And then the top 10 list was almost the dessert. Here we go. It's a December thing. It's an end of the year thing. Now we have lists all year long. We don't have to wait until December, until the New York Times arts section gets really thick. Do you think that has? changed the way we think of these things at all?

Yeah, I mean, on the big picture, at the six-month mark, we do the best movies of the year so far. And that's usually one of the more listened to episodes of the year because people have gone through six months of the year and they're like, what should I watch? I think there's a constant demand for tell me what to engage with in a way that like a review maybe doesn't necessarily satisfy. They want a list. They want to have five options when they go home, Like the a la carte lifestyle in 2022 is so powerful and so demanding on people that criticism more than ever is service journalism. It used to feel that way. It used to feel like, well, I opened up Newsday and what does Gene Seymour think about blank?

What does he think about the New Ang Lee movie? I'll read his three-star review and my mom will decide whether or not we're going to go see this movie at the Cinema Art Center in Huntington Station. Now, one, you can find 500 reviews. It's not just the newspaper that you open up every day. You can read every review on the planet four days before the movie opens. Two, you can pick and choose your favorite critics in a much more profound way. But also, I'm not sure that people still have favorite critics. I think they have favorite personalities, favorite voices, favorite podcasts they listen to,

favorite YouTubers that they watch, talk about movies. but criticism still feels like this kind of old guard concept, whereas the kind of personality podcaster experience feels very separate and distinct from that. And in podcasting and in YouTube and in frankly, in editorial written format, list making is just an easier sell. It's just easier to get people to engage with that. And so I think that that accounts for what you're describing. It's like making a list of the five coolest science fiction movies of the year so far in May

is more likely to get engagement. than one deep considered review of a small science fiction film that most people won't see. I totally feel that as somebody who went to wirecutter this week and was like, what is the wallet I need? What is the wallet I can tell my mom to buy for me for Christmas? I don't have time to have long considerations of lots of wallets. I need a wallet. I mean, this is like a much bigger conversation that I think is really interesting around

the way that media has evolved in the last 10 years of you and I have had it privately many times. I mean, look at the emergent, successful media companies of the last five or ten years. I mean, they're companies that have mastered listmaking and bite-sized information delivery or have mastered, you know, look at what we do at the ringer with our draft guides, with our various special builds, look at the rise of a company like Axios, look at what, you know, semaphore is trying to do. Like, these are companies that have realized that our fractured minds need dynamic, fast-moving, informational tablets fed to us in micro amounts. And lists are the original fast-moving micro-tablets

of information. So pause on that for a second, because where does the list boom start? I was talking with Shoemaker about this, the modern list boom. So we have critics doing it like once a year. But I was trying to think of sources. I thought of vulture, you know, every time there's a Batman movie, Batman movies ranked. That was certainly a thing. I think of our boss who was like, I'm going to put NBA players into a pantheon. And then when Dirk Novitsky wins a title, I'm going to move him to a different place on the pantheon. Do you have other data points in that?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of, I think sports is really critical to this. I think if you think about baseball prospectus, prospectless draft, getting interested in draft prospects in sports, which really kind of emerged in the 1980s in a big way and the rise of the Mill Kuyper Juniors of the world. I think fantasy sports also in particular,

the idea of kind of ranking players and buying those. those, you know, those guides, the physical copies of those guides in the late 90s and early 2000s, that drove a lot of interest in the idea of the kind of mega list. For me personally, the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Films in the late 90s. Dude, 1990. If I'm not mistaken. I mean, that was, first of all, an awesome special in a time where there weren't tons of

lists and young people like you and I younger, people like you and I were like, oh, here are the movies I want to see. and here's where Wizard of Oz slots in next to the Godfather and Citton. Yes. And when I saw that special in 98, I'd probably seen 10 of the 100 movies on the list and then I set about to see as many as I could after that. And that really

put me on a path of obsession. I had I liked the Academy Awards. I read Entertainment Weekly. I had already gotten, you know, Tarantino pill. There were a few things that had happened to me that I got excited about movies. But that was something that was like, here is bedrock information. And if you don't acquire this information, you're failing somehow as

an aspirant person. So I think there's like a series of contributing factors that have come along. Now, we're talking about sports and popular culture here. Those are the things that we care about. That's what the ringer represents in many ways. I think there are other examples of it too, though. Like, I think in politics, when you look at polling and the rise of polling and how people, who's winning and who's losing, when you look at like the long list of candidates running for president, especially in the last 10 to 12 years where you'd have like 18 candidates for the Republican nomination for president and everything was kind of a list every day where you'd be like, what are polls?

are saying Ted Cruz is doing relative to Donald Trump, these things, they kind of bleed into our mind and we don't realize that everything is basically this numerical organization of information. That is how we get everything every day. So even like, look at your follower account. Look at how many likes you get on your social media account. Like all of these things contribute to the sort of like who is getting the most numbers and doing the best thing, the quote unquote best thing. We've just become this like hierarchical vision of our day to day life. is how it feels all the time. So what better way to represent that then?

Here's my favorite stuff. I'll give you one other thing. MySpace having a top eight friends. That was a critical thing in the cultural life of young social media users. Now, some people listening to this might have never heard of MySpace. What's MySpace? It might sound like the teletype to them. But I remember that vividly being among a handful of other contributing things like

picking your favorite song on MySpace or your kind of permanent away message on on instant messenger like a handful of things that were like signatures of your taste or your social life or who mattered to you and sending coded messages to the people who are following you about what mattered to you. That's the other thing that lists do is they're these sort of like personality stand-ins. They're like, I'm the kind of person who loves my friend Steve and also loves Citizen Kane. Here's my stuff. So I think that the ability to just express that and communicated, has amplified it beyond a newspaper providing a platform for a critic who has spent the year reviewing films and said that this is more a reflection of self in a digital

world. I love the MySpace poll because that really does feel like moving us as a society toward making a power ranking of everything. Exactly. Everything must be power rank. What are we doing right now other than moving Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis between the one and two spots for the GOP nomination in 2014? What is it? What is that, does it, I feel like you don't have that instinct as much. I feel like you're not as maybe as desperate as somebody like I am to kind of hierarchicalize my life. Well, you know, I think about it with our podcast a lot. And the reason is, if you ask me, Brian, come up with your five best Spielberg movies.

I'd be like, oh, yeah, Raiders, Jaws, how would I do it? No offense to anybody, but I don't feel that way about Jake Tapper. Like, I don't have that strong urge to put him in the one slot or the four slot. It's just different, I think. It just evades. I'd say, like, though I think about the media, I love the study of the media,

but you don't love the makers of it in the same way I would love a filmmaker or love an author. But you do have the same level of expertise and depth of understanding of what makes someone great or what they do in those fields. And if you wanted to do your top 100 sports broadcasters of all time, the people who like listening to you and reading you would eat that up in a,

second because they feel like you know from which you speak. All right now. Number 17, Dan Deirdorf. That's pretty high for Deirdorf. Can we sneak this in before Christmas? Well, okay, so during the pandemic, we shifted some of the programming on the big picture because there were fewer new releases. And it became much more kind of list-centric.

And it was trying to capture, like, what are our 10 favorite erotic thrillers or our 10 favorite courtroom dramas? And my intention there was not to say, this is the definitive list of those things. But just to remind people that things exist or to show them like something that they could get excited about that is out in the world. Yes. And we continue to do that on the show now because it's just another entry point to a conversation. Maybe you're not interested in Don DeLillo's white noise adaptation from Noel Bombach, but you might be interested in a series of films that feel like they're about the end of the world.

That's a podcast. You know what I mean? And so I think that that contributes to this too. I really groove on the service journalism part of this with movies and with books. And by the way, to your AFI list, I'll also add the modern. library came out with the list of the top 100 English language novels. And I think it might have also been in 98. It was right around that time. And I remember being like, oh, wow, Ulysses number one, great Gatsby number two. And as somebody who's only going to spend so much

of their life thinking about the great American, great British novel, it was enormously helpful because it's a place to start. And when I think about movies in particular, you talk about that old guard of criticism. Like those people were mad that Siskel and Iber were doing thumbs up or thumbs down whether you should see the movie or not. Like, that was the end. And I was, I was reading some, I was Dan Cois's piece about Top Ten list that he did years ago for the New York Times magazine.

He's like reminding me that critics used to always have this preface to their list every year movie critics saying like, I couldn't possibly put these movies in order. And sometimes they would do the cop out and do the alphabetical order as if it's like, come on, man. You really really? I was found that's so weird. I didn't even think it was cowardly.

I just, it was a mentality that I couldn't understand because didn't you get into criticism because you love the art form and you want to better understand it and you're being guided by your taste and your reaction to things. And so it is, even if it is a scholarly act, an academic act, an act of journalism, it's still an emotional job. It's still a job about better understanding yourself and the work of art that you're seeing in front of you. And so like favorite is a word that I just think is much more critical to this conversation than most people realize.

But not everybody applies it that way. Not everybody can think in those terms. It's not dissimilar from giving out awards in the arts, you know, where there's no, this isn't like giving out the silver slugger award for catchers where you're like, well, this guy had the highest F war. So he should definitely get this weird glove award. But in, in art, we decide where the account. Academy decides or the critics decide or whatever voting body decides, what is the best? It's literally called best picture. It's not called favorite picture by the academy. In alphabetical order. They pick the best. A group of movies I couldn't possibly decide between. A little story for it. I'm reading my University of Texas pay subscription rivals website the other day for all the hot University of Texas recruiting news that an ex-longhorn like myself, Crave. and he's given me the nuggets, the mod, the owner, giving me all I need. And then like number nine in his column is, you know, I love this podcast, the big picture, but they really screwed up the Spielberg list. And I'm like, whoa, whoa.

I want to ask you about that with engagement. Are you amazed that people on Twitter, when they see a list of movies, and let's assume you've thought about it and done it in a really smart and, you know, not trolley kind of way, Are you amazed at how much they will react to any list they see online and offer their own rejoinder to said list? Well, that is definitely part of the strategy, not in a trolley way, but hopefully like an inclusive, like somewhat community-based way. And I try to do all that stuff in good faith with the occasional wrinkle. Amanda and I talk about that often. Like, you have to throw a curveball every once in a while.

It's not good editorial strategy if you don't throw a curveball. the number one piece of feedback that I get whenever we do these kinds of lists though or have these conversations about movies is always why didn't you mention movie X? Yeah. And I'm like, should I just say the name of every movie on every podcast?

There's no way to satisfy that particular complaint and I think that what that represents is twofold. One, the feeling that the listener who sends that feedback has a big emotional relationship to the movie that they've identified and or that feeling of I think I might know a little bit more than this person that I listen to or read. And here's my example of that.

And I was just talking with someone about this. But, you know, I grew up in New York. And to me, the twin towers of broadcasting while riding around to my dad's car were Howard Stern and Mike Francesa. And Chris Russo, the mad dog, of course. But listening to those two guys who were very proud, very opinionated, very confident, sort of ridiculous self-parodies who are also kind of magically endearing to me. And everybody who listened to those shows,

especially Sports Talk Radio in New York, loved feeling like they knew just a little bit more than the person that they were listening to. Even though Mike Francesa, whatever you think of him as a broadcaster or a personality, is like, is an incredible, especially when it comes to football, knows a lot about football,

has had deep conversations of some of the great football minds, but was it kind of like purposefully, even if it felt like he was blissfully unaware, purposefully kind of goading the listener into having an emotional reaction to everything that he was saying. And that was very influential on me. And I don't know if I'm accessing that exact feeling

whenever I'm trying to make something. But it is a strategy of broadcasting. It is a strategy of listmaking. It is a strategy of a kind of cultural criticism. And it's very effective. And if you're able to get people to say something about what you said, you're kind of doing your job.

And there is a fine line between provoking purposefully and cruelly and just seeking a kind of relationship with the listener or the reader or what have you. It's a very fine line. Sometimes you walk in deftly. Sometimes you fall right off the tightrope. But I always think of those two people and the way that they really just kept me on the line for hours, desperate to hear what they were going to say next. It's a skill. One last topic before you go. It's the sight and sound list.

people don't know sight and sounds a british movie magazine they come out with a poll every 10 years on the twos as we used to say on new york radio that's right oh 2022 2012 2012 2002 and way back about the best movies of all time polling both directors and critics this just dropped out of the clouds a couple of weeks ago like the creature in nope and i want to ask you what how does the site and sound list play differently in this world we're talking about than it might have 10, 20 years ago? Well, there's a couple of contributing factors. It makes me think a little bit about what has been happening with the Academy Awards for the last 10 years because the Academy expanded its voting base from like 3,000 people to over 10,000 people over the course of the last decade.

And the site and sound list over the course of the last 20 years has expanded from roughly 150 people to now 1,600 people. So you've got a lot more vote. voters. And there was a lot of angst this year because Jean-Dealman was the number one film. This film from Chantal Ackerman, a Belgian filmmaker. And the outcry was like, this is absurd. This feels like an over-correction of what film history has represented in the past, which is often dominated by white men, often living in America or England, English language.

And so there is a sense of correction happening on the list this year, in part because a lot of people are voting. with the idea of the canon in mind. They're not vote... I don't think that most of the people who voted voted for their 10 favorite movies. I think they voted for closer to what we were discussing earlier. These concepts of achievement, these concepts of breakthrough,

these concepts of innovation. What the list is to you, it's a personal act in many ways. And if that act, what's necessary in that act is to identify the most meaningful achievements in movie history. Here's the reason why Citizen Kane was the number one film for 40 years on that list, because it represented this kind of massive breakthrough in a filmmaking style and the conception of movie making. Jean Diehlman is also in its way a massive breakthrough in the idea of the feminist perspective in movies and the idea of durational cinema and what it means to sit

long through what seems like mundane acts to better understand a story and a character. So everything is a reaction to what came before. it. The difference now is that sight and sound was an obscure British film and the people who read that magazine or maybe saw the list posted on a blog spot somewhere could debate it. The idea of film Twitter was

significantly smaller 10 years ago than it is now. And so now it's like it's a bunch of crabs in a barrel and everybody can take a shot. You know like Portrait of a Lady on Fire was number 30. This is a film that came out three years ago and it was ahead of some of the greatest films of the last hundred years.

And so it kind of became a target this year. And it was sort of like, this is what's wrong. I'm strawmaning this conversation, but there were a lot of people who are like, this is what's wrong with this act is this film is too recent and it's too much about trying to show that there are in fact a lot of worthy female filmmakers. Of course there are a lot of worthy female filmmakers. But you're kind of enraging a certain kind of movie bro when you put a movie like that over Goodfellas or what have you. Or like The Godfather Part 2 this year did not make the top 100. I think I might have said on a podcast, The Godfather Part 2 is perhaps the greatest film ever made.

But according to this list, it's actually not even in the top 100. What does that actually mean? I don't know. It just means that those 1,600 people felt like enough people had already said that the Godfather Part 2 is great. So let's talk about some other stuff. Let's talk about parasite. Let's talk about Moonlight.

Let's talk about African cinema. Let's talk about cinema from Southeast Asia. Let's talk about a series. Let's talk about movies that we haven't really talked about enough and make them a part of this canon conversation. My gut is the 10 years from now when they do this poll again. it's going to be a lot different than the one that we saw this year. Because this year, they're going to be able to say,

well, you know what? A female filmmaker did have number one. Maybe we don't have to work as hard to valorize something that had been ignored for a century in world filmmaking. But I don't know. I mean, what value does it have? It's hard to say. I think a lot of people looked at that list and they were just like,

I don't know any of these movies. And I moved on with my day. I don't think that's good either. So I'm not sure what the answer is. The democratizing part is interesting because you say they democratize the voting body. but then you also democratize the people that can respond to it in real. That's right. Because I remember the 2002 list and I don't think I edited this piece, but I remember

Slate, you know, being like, what are we going to do on the site and sound list? And it was a world of think pieces that were written by these critics. We're talking about this old line critic. Here is my thousand word take on the site and sound list. Okay. So what's interesting about that is they did expand the voting body and the world has become much more democratized in terms of being able to share their opinion. but even amongst the way that the way that they expanded it,

it still had a fairly narrow framework. It was effectively working film critics and scholars. That's who voted. Now, there's also a director's list, and the director's list also voted, and the director's list is different from the critics list. But like, I wasn't invited to vote this year, nor did I expect it to be invited to vote,

because I don't consider myself an active working critic. I talk about movies on a podcast all the time. I see a lot of films. I'm hopefully bringing a sense of intellectual forbearance to all the discussions I have. But this is still a fairly small group of people who have a very similar style of training with a very similar perspective on what is and is not

greatness and meaning in the world of movies. To the 8 billion other people on the planet who might potentially engage with this, their understanding of movies is primarily as entertainment and maybe spectacle. It's not art. They don't think of movies as art, which is okay. But so what purpose does a list like this serve? I mean, it's mostly for pointy-headed people who care about the quote-unquote canon.

It also is nice fodder for conversations like this. I don't, does it really matter, though? I mean, it depends on what you mean by matter, right? Does it mean we can get podcasts out of it? Yeah, or podcast segments out of it. Yeah, we can write more think pieces, get more tweets. I think is a list of leading people to movies that they wouldn't see, you know, There were a lot of movies I had not heard of on that list.

I'm not too pretentious to know. I'm like, Jean Diehlman, what? What's that? Okay, so, but did you want to go and seek it out? Not right away now. So I've noticed on Letterbox, which is a movie logging kind of diary app that I love, that I always evangelized for. Jean Diehlman has been near the top of the most logged, like most popular films ever since

this list was published because a lot of people looked that list and they said, boy, I got to see that. I've never seen that for. Or I got to revisit it. You know, I got to maybe understand why I made the list. And what I haven't seen is the film that is number 78 or number 54 or number 32.

It's like the top 10 conversation to, you know, put a little N cap on this. That is really what is still powerful. It's not, it's still like, okay, so the top 10 is, you know, vertigo and it's citizen cane and it's a handful of films that you might expect. And then if there are one or two insurgents,

we'll locate what those are and we'll spend some time, thinking about those things, but whether or not it's a meaningful snapshot of the 100 most important movies ever made, I don't think any list can really accomplish that. Even your example of the modern libraries list, I can remember one and two as well. I remember one and two quite vividly. After that, I can't really remember that list that well. Yeah, a babb it, you know, somewhere down the left.

Sure, yeah. We could come up with it. Yeah, was Catch 22 on that list? You know? Sure. Must have been. Was it a William Styrin novel? There's a guy,

it must have been one of those, right? Like what was there? All right. John Fantasy, I'm going to work on my unpretentious TV sports commentator countdown right now. Number 49, Don Cricky. Here we go.

Let's do this thing. Thank you so much for coming on the press box. Happy holidays. Go make a list. Thanks, Brian. Happy New Year. It's time for the second weekly edition of David Schumaker Guessers the strained pun headline.

Yeah. Monday's headline about the antics of wild-haired crypto guy Sam Bankman-Fried was Harry Plotter. Today's headline comes from valued listener Abe Brown of the website The Information. That headline itself comes from The Economist. The story David is about a big subject these days, AI, particularly the AI-based online service, chat GPT. seen all the people doing the funny Twitter bits from Chat GPT. Uh-huh. Well, the author of this economist story asked ChatGPT to write something in Shakespearean language.

So we've got Shakespeare and we've got AI. What was the economist's strained pun headline? To be. To be. Is it, am I, to be or bought to be? That's good. But it's good. What if we use the term AI?

Oh, it is AI. I thought I had to avoid it because you said it too many times. AI, AI compare thee to a, no, AI. What if we think of names we use for William Shakespeare? The bard. Oh, here we go. The bard.

The bard of AI. Right on the doorstep. Just keep going. It sounds strange, but keep going. The bard of AI. I don't know what pun I'm making. This is impossible. The bard of AI Vaughn.

Oh, my God. You're right on the doorstep. The bard of A. I just do the bar. Okay, well, that's great. The bard of AI Vaughan is fantastic. He is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica Servantes back next week with two new pods. The Year and Media on Monday. And one perfect story with Stephen Roderick about how he wrote a memorable piece about Lindsay Lohan and Paul Schrader on Wednesday. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.