bleary

I think this is the right answer, that Stingo is necessary to the film as a POV character through which the story is told. But I still think the character falls into an unfortunate middle ground, where too much time is spent on him for how uninteresting he is. I'd be more okay with the character as a blank slate if he didn't demand so much time. As far as the trope-iness, I'm having trouble coming up with lots of examples of the things that I think are sort of tropes. As DannytheWall said, The Great Gatsby also features a young writer serving as the narrator/POV character who moves to New York and meets an interesting person whose past is slowly revealed over the course of the story. And although love triangles are aplenty in film history, there are even examples of this particular flavor of love triangle, in which the three parties are friends as the triangle forms. Certainly Jules and Jim falls into this category, but I'm at a loss for other such films that came out before Sophie's Choice. (Can anyone think of more?) The Big Chill is around the same time period, but it's sort of a more complicated shape than a triangle. One could argue that The Sun Also Rises works in this category, although Brett is certainly a proto-MPDG as well. More recent films in this trope include Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Dreamers. It also feels like an 80s movie trope to have the stories of interesting people told through a different POV character, like in Amadeus (as Amy and Paul mentioned), The Elephant Man, or even Dead Poets Society (which I haven't seen in a while but I recall it being predominantly from Ethan Hawke's point of view). There's probably more examples of this trope as well. There's enough that's unique in Sophie's Choice that makes it work for me, but it still feels like it's hitting familiar beats.

I have to say that I mostly agreed with Amy and Paul on this one. I think this is a really great movie, and I think it's my toughest call yet on whether or not I think it belongs on the list. As great as I think it is, I also can see Amy and Paul's argument that it somehow feels inessential. As far as whether Stingo is an "incel", in terms of the literal origin of the portmanteau, "involuntarily celibate", Stingo is that, undeniably. If it weren't for the kind of creepy and mostly useless scene with Leslie, the voluntariness might be more up for debate. As far as the current vitriolic connotation the term has, maybe I wouldn't go that far in applying it to Stingo. But that said, I still think Stingo is an uninteresting character. For me, the movie is interesting in studying Sophie's character, and, as Cameron H. put it, how can she move on after surviving what she did. The way that question is posed and answered in the film, mostly through Meryl's Hall of Fame performance, is why I ultimately come down on the side that this does belong on the list.

I'm glad we're doing this. Obviously, Star Wars on the week of May 4th. Saving Private Ryan on D-Day. Yankee Doodle Dandy on 4th of July. Chinatown for February 5 (Chinese New Year). Toy Story for the release of Toy Story 4. North By Northwest for Presidents' Day? Sunset Boulevard for the Oscars? Intolerance for MLK Day? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for April Fool's Day? Some Like It Hot or Tootsie for International Women's Day? Dr. Strangelove for the apocalypse?

I'll sign up for it, even though FilmStruck was better. Last I checked, the Criterion Channel had 5-10 of the AFI list, including, as you mentioned, all 3 Chaplins on the list.

By the way, anyone with a cable subscription who gets TCM can check this out until Thursday: http://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/titles/68769

Yeah, I was absolutely not buying the fiscal neutrality of his plan. Nor did I really understand why his camp couldn't be taken of through state legislature instead. But in terms of the story, his "bill" is a red herring anyway, in that it's just a means through which he finds out about the corrupt machinery.

It's like the border wall. Sure, Mexico will pay for it eventually, but Trump needs U.S. money for it now. (I hope the sarcasm was apparent.)

I was glad that Jon Lovett pointed out how silly it was for the Liberty Bell to be included in the DC montage. And I think he nailed why this film ultimately works so well: Jean Arthur's Saunders acting as an audience avatar, acknowledging the corniness of it all, but getting swept away by it anyway. She does similar heavy lifting in You Can't Take It With You and she's great in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, but this might be her best achievement, because she absolutely holds this together. At any rate, this is reasonably high on my list, but I look forward to hearing from detractors. Is this movie actually great, or are we all just won over by its charm?

I haven't listened yet, but I couldn't wait to see that Mel Gibson Simpsons clip.

Ah, I get what you're saying, instead of viewing an incomplete ranking in the 25-dimensional space, just take the projections of everyone else's rankings down to the lower dimensional space. Yeah, that would work well to give comparisons to other lists for that incomplete list. However, the scores between two 25-dimensional vectors aren't well-comparable to the scores between lower dimensional vectors, since eliminating films from consideration will decrease the squared-distance. More importantly to me, the spreadsheet I whipped up in 5 minutes doesn't easily give me the capability to consider those projections.

Sure, and this is what I swept under the rug when I used the word "essentially," since I didn't feel the need to mention that the monotonicity of the square root function ensures that order will be preserved between the quantity calculated and the actual Euclidean distance, and that the only downside of not taking the square root is that the triangle inequality is not necessarily satisfied, so that we don't have a proper metric space under the quantity calculated, but that's not a big deal for the purpose it was used for. The way I did it, the dimensions are the 25 films themselves, and a person's ranking is the component in that direction. (So there doesn't need to be a 1st dimension, 2nd dimension, etc., but rather the Titanic dimension, the Sixth Sense dimension, etc.) I alphabetized just to standardize, but one could easily just take the films in the order the episodes were released, in which case the vector <1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 25> would be a list in which Citizen Kane is ranked #1, Ben-Hur is ranked #2, and every subsequent episode's film took the next place on the list. Under this system, there's nothing good to put in for an unranked film that would give a consistent result. If I put in 0 for all unranked films, that would score them as being high on the list rather than not on the list at all. Putting in a high number for unranked films is fairer, but still won't be comparable to other scores. Granted, my background is in analysis rather than statistics, which is why I took an analytical approach rather than perhaps a statistical approach. Someone more skilled in statistics than me could probably tell me a better way for computing similarity scores on lists. Anyway, I didn't think anyone would care about the details, so I didn't get into it before. But I'm glad to talk about it since you seem interested!

The intros, where they talk about feedback on the previous episode, and where they play call-ins, are taped weekly. The rest of the episode, where they talk about a movie, do an interview, and choose the next movie, can be taped as far in advance as they need. At any rate, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington still does not seem to be available on any subscription service, so I recommend checking your local library (mine had two copies!) or you'll have to use money to watch it. As for the rest: Sophie's Choice is available to stream through Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075DQBMN9/ A Clockwork Orange is also available to stream through Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K6VF6TK/ Rocky can be streamed for free with ads through Crackle at https://www.sonycrackle.com/rocky or through YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etojf-AFVXI

Definitely agree. I think there's a happy medium though, because some items on the list do feel unnecessary. As you mentioned, I don't think Godfather 2 needs to be there. As I mentioned earlier, it seems like a waste of a spot or two to have City Lights and The Gold Rush and Modern Times all representing Chaplin. Similarly, do we really need both of Duck Soup and A Night At the Opera? Do we need both The African Queen and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for that matter? But none of Spielberg's films on the list feel superfluous. Some of them might not belong on the list for quality reasons, but I certainly wouldn't say he's retreading the same ground, at least in these five films.

You've got 7 more films to rank! The method I used requires a value for each of the 25 films (since it's essentially just computing the Euclidean distance in a 25-dimensional vector space), but I could get numbers by plugging in 19 for each of the missing films. But that wouldn't be very consistent with the rest of the scores.

A full list means I can compute more similarity scores! Your list's similarity to, from more similar to least similar: Cam Bert - 836 Amy - 870 sycasey - 958 Paul - 990 Cameron H. - 1300 me - 1672 AlmostAGhost - 1964 I think you're the first list I've seen that's closer to Amy's than to Paul's!

Okay, because I'm a math nerd, I rigged up some similarity scores between the full lists posted in this thread, as well as Paul's and Amy's. The score is equal to the sum of the squares of the differences in rankings, so the lower the number, the more similar the list. (This is a somewhat arbitrary metric that punishes huge differences more than a simple sum of absolute value of differences would, but Google Docs' spreadsheet had this function built in, so I just used it.) From most similar to least similar: Cam Bert and Cameron H: 412 Cam Bert and sycasey: 530 sycasey and Paul: 532 Paul and Amy: 650 sycasey and Cameron H: 882 Cam Bert and Paul: 974 sycasey and Amy: 1150 me and Paul: 1170 Cam Bert and Amy: 1274 Cameron H and Paul: 1312 sycasey and me: 1342 me and Amy: 1402 Cam Bert and AlmostAGhost: 1452 sycasey and AlmostAGhost: 1588 AlmostAGhost and Paul: 1600 Cameron H and Amy: 1612 Cameron H and AlmostAGhost: 1646 Cam Bert and me: 1812 AlmostAGhost and Amy: 1928 AlmostAGhost and me: 2370 Cameron H and me: 2438 I think I just mathematically proved that my opinion is wrong.

I can't wait to find out. Of the ones left on the list that I've seen, there's nothing that I absolutely hate, but plenty that I think is overrated. And there's stuff like The Gold Rush that is certainly good, but really shouldn't be on the list being that City Lights and Modern Times are there as well.

Since others are doing it: 1. 2001: A Space Odyssey ★★★★★ 2. Raiders of the Lost Ark ★★★★★ 3. Citizen Kane ★★★★½ 4. Duck Soup ★★★★½ 5. Apocalypse Now ★★★★½ 6. All About Eve ★★★★½ 7. Singin’ in the Rain ★★★★ 8. High Noon ★★★★ 9. Titanic ★★★★ 10 .The French Connection ★★★★ 11. The Sixth Sense ★★★★ 12. The General ★★★★ 13. The Wizard of Oz ★★★★ 14. King Kong ★★★½ 15. Taxi Driver ★★★½ 16. Psycho ★★★½ 17. Bonnie and Clyde ★★★½ 18. Double Indemnity ★★★½ 19. Platoon ★★★½ 20. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ★★★ 21. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ★★★ 22. The Shawshank Redemption ★★★ 23. The African Queen ★★★ 24. Ben-Hur ★★★ 25. Swing Time ★★½

Great point, I think I've gotten 9 of the 25 films so far from my local library. (Still haven't had to pay to rent a single film on the list.)

Fantastic call on Top Secret!, I haven't seen that in way too long, I need to queue it up again. Also, There's Something About Mary was actually on the AFI ballot! And the AFI's list of comedies has it at #27, so it's lauded beyond just a guilty-pleasure: https://www.afi.com/100Years/laughs.aspx

So I've enjoyed seeing people post both (a) the comedies that they think should have made the list (or in some cases, should have at least made the ballot), and (b) quasi-guilty pleasure comedies that make us laugh like crazy while still probably being undeserving of AFI laud. In the first category, I've already mentioned What's Up, Doc?, and I think it's absurd that it wasn't even on the ballot. Ditto for The Jerk, Trading Places, and Coming to America. (Seriously, how did Austin Powers make the ballot and not a single live-action Eddie Murphy film did?) People have mentioned Airplane! and the Mel Brooks comedies as a few top notch comedies that made the ballot but not the list. Spinal Tap hasn't been mentioned here, but it's another one that made the ballot and not the list. In the second category, I laugh a lot at second-wave Shane Black, particularly Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys. And I'll tune in to a good chunk of Major League 2 whenever I see it on cable. Who has some more like this?

This is a good point. The longer that a piece of comedy remains fresh, the more it's seen as something singular, or elemental. I also think there's probably a bit of bias against parodies and spoofs for this reason. Someone might justifiably ask whether a film that derives humor from defying the expectations formed from previous work will hold up as well over time. Of course, I think it's safe to say that the best parody films, like Airplane! or Blazing Saddles absolutely transcend any reliance on audience knowledge of the previous work. Whereas something like Austin Powers (also on the AFI ballot!) probably does not.

You might be right! It might just be on the list because it made more of the voters laugh than Airplane! did.

But at the same time, boiling this down to just the wordplay really diminishes the gifts of Harpo.

I'm just built differently, because I laugh at the same jokes over and over, and I love all kinds of wordplay, good and bad puns alike. I currently watch Duck Soup about once every year or so, and it cracks me up every time. And you list the "eliminate" gag as an example of a flat joke, but there's a very simple exchange in that scene that is one of my all-time favorite dumb puns: I'm giggling now just copying and pasting it, and I think about this and laugh to myself every couple months. So I guess what I'm saying is that Duck Soup feels like it was made specifically for me, because it's just wall-to-wall with stuff that makes me laugh.