List-o-mania

Time for the 10 best of all time

Let the rest obsess about Happy New Year 2000. We of the film-critic trade are too preoccupied with making lists: the best of 1999, the best of the 1990s, the best of the century. Here at the Phoenix, Peter Keough and I have been asked, as a start, to offer our candidates to the American Film Institute for "America's funniest movies," the results of which poll are to be broadcast on CBS next June in a three-hour ha-ha salute, AFI's 100 Years . . . 100 Laughs.

Well, I laugh from start to finish of the painfully unknown It's a Gift, which stars W.C. Fields, and it's my favorite comedy in the world. So, AFI, here are my best-loved American comedies, in order of adoration:

1) It's a Gift (1934).
2) Adam's Rib (1949).
3) Duck Soup (1933).
4) Some Like It Hot (1959).
5) Bringing Up Baby (1938).
6) City Lights (1931).
7) Manhattan (1979).
8) Dr. Strangelove (1964).
9) The Freshman (1925).
10) Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).
11) Singin' in the Rain (1952).
12) His Girl Friday(1940).
13) The Gold Rush (1925).
14) A Night at the Opera (1935).
15) Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).
16) This Is Spinal Tap (1984).
17) Modern Romance (1981).
18) Hairspray (1988).
19) The Quiet Man (1952).
20) The Producers (1967).

And for the First Village Voice Movie Poll, a request from the Big Apple alternative paper for my Ten Films of the Decade, my Director of the Decade, and my Ten Favorite Films of the Century. Glad to comply:

Favorite Films of the 1990s: Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991); Gianni Amelio's Stolen Children (1992); Abbas Kiarostami's And Life Goes On (1992); James Ivory's Howards End (1992); Stephen Frears's The Snapper (1993); Terry Zwigoff's Crumb (1994); Steve James's Hoop Dreams (1994); Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1994); Todd Haynes's Safe (1995); Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi (1998).

Director of the Decade: Zhang Yimou. Runners-up: Abbas Kiarostami, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Atom Egoyan.

Ten Favorite Films of the Century: F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927); Norman C. McLeod's It's a Gift (1934); Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948); Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952); John Ford's The Searchers (1956); Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957); Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1957); John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963); Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966).

And a second 10: Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But . . . (1932); Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936); Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944); John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949); Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (1954); Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1959); Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960); Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972); Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989).

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"A refreshingly original comedy that riffs on celebrity . . . and the proverbial 15 minutes of fame" is the Boston Sunday Globe's encapsulation of Being John Malkovich, and it couldn't be farther from the truth. Spike Jonze's clever, original movie is about lots of things (too many?), but exploring celebrity isn't one of them. There's nothing special, or even slightly out of the ordinary, about being inside John Malkovich's head. That doesn't get us to Hollywood parties, to the Academy Awards, to movie sets, to rubbing against other stars, to fending off groupies, whatever. The only Malkovich celeb moment that occurs when we (and John Cusack) share his consciousness actually punctures celebrity status: that funny, Woody Allen-like occasion when the taxi driver mistakes Malkovich for some actor in a jewel-thief movie.

If their objective were to experience the celebrity life during their 15 minutes inside Malkovich, then the characters who inhabit him (and pay $200 for the chance) would complain afterward about being cheated. That never happens. All are satiated, lying by the Jersey Turnpike. I take it to mean that tripping inside another person is the pleasure, not who that person might be. Being John Malkovich could be being inside anybody, including you and me.

The November 28 Sunday Globe also stumbled by affording space to slumming non-arts staff writer Sam Allis to kick about American Beauty. This film, Allis claims, "implodes into a parody of itself and collapses under the weight of overwriting and overacting . . . " Despite American Beauty's rampant flaws, Allis notes sadly, "Critics are suckers for such stabs . . . "

He's right. I admire American Beauty. What would Allis have us like instead? Oddly, he reaches way back to 1966: "Witness the torque of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." What does that have to do with American Beauty? Also, he lets spill his boring middlebrow aesthetics: "Quick, what are the class acts of 1999? Where is the Saving Private Ryan or Shakespeare in Love?" Hey, Sam, you forgot to mention that you're still trembling over Life Is Beautiful.

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Dennis Lanson, a documentarian who teaches at Emerson and the Museum School, decided to write and direct a really low-budget "noir," Pitstop ("a fatal case of mistaken identity: two men with the same face, one a murderer"), but money ran out during shooting. A softcore producer stepped in, and certain dubious scenes were rammed into the movie. See Pitstop and hear Lanson's colorful production stories at the MFA this Friday, December 10, at 8 p.m.