In April 1983, I was sitting in the kitchen of my townhouse in Gastonia, N.C., drinking vodka with legendary baseball writer Roger Kahn.
He was doing most of the drinking and I was interviewing him.
I remembering asking him about sports columnist Dick Young, the man who essentially drove Tom Seaver out of New York. I told him how annoyed Young made me in his Sporting News column when he loved to ridicule everyone under 40 by calling us the “gee whiz generation” who though greatness started when we came of age.
I was 33 then, but 41 years later, I certinly understand it.
I was sitting in the drugstore yesterday waiting to pick up a couple of prescriptions for my wife and reading a magazine called The 100 Best Movies of All Time, and boy did I feel like Dick Young.
Who would have believed that five of the 10 best movies ever were made after 1990? And that doesn’t even include “Titanic” or any of the Lord of the Rings movies. Don’t panic though, youngsters. All four of them were on the list in the top half.
Then there were the three movies absolutely adored in recent years — “The Dark Knight,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Pulp Fiction” — that all made the top 10. I’ll bet you didn’t know “Pulp Fiction” was the second-best movie ever made or that all three of them ranked higher than “Citizen Kane.”
I’ll bet you didn’t know that the best comedy — of the talkie era at least — was “Back to the Future” and that it only ranked 41st.
OK, enough for the visit to Geezeropolis. It’s actually understandable that people who aren’t film students would rate movies they saw and liked high on their lists. That’s the precise reason “best ever” lists are so ridiculous. Technical changes like sound, color, special effects and CGI made it unfair to compare eras.
Surprisingly, two movies from the 1940s were in the top six, but while one should come as no surprise, the other is actually sort of embarrassing. It’s no surprise to see “Casablanca” at No. 3, but “It’s a Wonderful Life” is probably 50 spots too high at No. 6.
I love Charlize Theron — hell, I even watched “Reindeer Games” — But seeing “Mad Max: Fury Road” at No. 52 is truly awful, especially when the next five on the list are “Blade Runner,” “Fargo,” “Rear Window,” “Some Like it Hot” and “The Apartment.”
Too many superhero movies, too much sci-fi, too little serious drama. I was sort of shocked to see “Life is Beautiful,” “Die Hard” and “The Green Mile” on the list, even though I enjoyed all three. But at least they were 98, 97 and 96.
Really the only fair way to come up with reasonable lists are to divide the films and rate them by the decades in which they were released. That way you won’t find “Fight Club” 46 spots ahead of “Raging Bull.”
I wasn’t surprised that there were films on the list, including two in the top 20, that I haven’t seen. But I was surprised there was a film I had never heard of.
Oh well.
I’ll count down the top 20 for you (without further comment on my part):
20. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” 19. “Moonlight,” 18. “Forrest Gump,” 17. “Parasite,” 16. “Saving Private Ryan,” 15. “The Empire Strikes Back,” 14. “Star Wars,” 13. “Citizen Kane,” 12. “Psycho,” 11. “Goodfellas.”
10. “The Dark Knight,” 9. “2001: A Space Odyssey,” 8. “The Shawshank Redemption,” 7. “Schindler’s List,” 6. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 5. “The Godfather Part II,” 4. The Silence of the Lambs,” 3. “Casablanca,” 2. “Pulp Fiction,” 1. “The Godfather.”