Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”—Roger Ebert
At the beginning of my YouTube review of the 4K version of Highlander, I featured a clip from the movie Talladega Nights in which Rickie Bobbie says that Highlander won the Oscar for “the best movie ever made.” This prompted a comment from one of my viewers saying, “Best movie ever made? Nobody can answer that question!” My response to that viewer was “I think many people would answer the question. It’s just that they would all have different answers…” And then I got to thinking, maybe I’ll try to answer that question, so here goes…
It seems that the answer to the question “What is The Best Movie Ever Made?” depends on when you ask it. In 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) topped the first poll. So I asked Google what was the the best movie ever made and got 3,790,000,000 hits.
There’s a book called Greatest Movies Ever: The Ultimate Ranked List of the 101 Best Films of All Time so if you want an answer, you can let its author do some of the thinking for you. I don’t know what they picked as “the best” because the book’s price ($58.95) is outside my budget and the local library only has the eBook version and I prefer reading analog books.
In poking around some of Google’s suggestions, I found one website that claims 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was the best movie and it’s certainly an impressive piece of filmmaking. As an aside, back in the day I got to see 2001 in Cinerama! This was the version that used the less wide but still spectacular Super Panavision 70 format. The American Film Institute insists that the best movie is Citizen Kane (1941,) which was the go-to “best film” for many such lists over the years. I’ve had the Criterion Collection’s 4K version of the film since it was released on November 23, 2021 and haven’t watched it yet. I’m not sure what that says about my feelings for this film. By comparison, the British Film Institute says it’s Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film I’ve never even heard about, so go figure. Are you sensing a pattern here?
The Greek Reporter say the best movie is Pulp Fiction (1994.) IMDB says it’s The Shawshank Redemption (1994.) Wikipedia says that its Leave No Trace (2018,) which I think reflects a preference of many movie goers/viewers who doesn’t appear to have a common demographic but reflects the fact that some people don’t like old movies. They don’t like black and white films and they don’t like movies where most of the stars have passed away. I think this is sad because it deprives of them of seeing such incredible films as Casablanca that I just reviewed for my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos.
If you look at this subject from a different perspective, Avatar holds the top spot as the worldwide highest-grossing movie of all time. Is it the best movie? I found the film interesting, especially in a 3D theater experience, but I don’t think so. If gross receipts were a measure of quality, McDonald’s would be known as the best restaurant in America. For Joe’s Movie Club, I produced an unranked a list of my 100 Favorite Movies. It’s not a “best of” list just my favorites and you can read that here. Although there may be a hint as to my true feeling in the first few movies listed. I also wrote a post about the worst movies I saw in 2022; you can read that here.
OK, so what do I think is the best movie ever made? Easy, it’s The Third Man (1949.)
You can send me movies to review —DVD, Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray— that can be used in my videos on my YouTube channel, Joe Farace’s Videos, and this blog by using the email link in the Contact section. Just ask where to send the discs.