An Offer They Couldn't Refuse

One of the by-products of the "100 Years" lists put out by the American Film Institute every year is the slew of rival lists that pop out of the www woodwork, claiming to "fix" what "they got wrong". Of course, one of the AFI's goals with these lists is to stir discussion about movies, but most of the naysayers are simultaneously nasty and insipid with their arguments. They wonder why such-and-such movie (usually one from within the past couple of years, natch) isn't on the list, while at the same time confessing that they haven't seen half the movies the AFI chose. Uh, don't you think you should actually see them all (or at least most of them) before you start casting stones?

One of the few levelheaded voices out there in cyber-spaceland at least set out to create a list with some degree of legitimacy. In response to AFI's 10th anniversary revisit earlier this year to their "100 Movies" list, the Daily Film Dose blog spent the summer tabulating over 500 votes from its readers, and the resulting "Fanboy 100" is actually a decent selection of movies, ranging from the early 1930's (King Kong, Duck Soup) to the early 2000's (all three chapters of the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

Granted, no silents were chosen (which is a shame), and the bulk of the titles hew closely to, well, fanboy favorites. Scorsese, Hitchcock, Kubrick and Spielberg are all featured several times, with Coppola placing twice in the top ten, with Apocalypse Now and their number one pick, The Godfather (AFI's #2). Naturally, science fiction and fantasy figure prominently (Blade Runner, The Matrix) if sometimes ludicrously (Jurassic Park? Ghostbusters?), with even a few sequels getting there due (The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2: Judgment Day). When all is said in done, 66 films appear on both lists (including the entire top 20), which just goes to show that there really isn't that much difference between an AFI "expert panel" and a bunch of film geeks on the internet.

Full disclosure: I am an AFI member and voted in this year's poll. I also submitted the exact same list of titles to the Daily Film Dose poll.

Links via AFI.com and DailyFilmDose.blogspot.com.