This week’s “Most Influential” poll closes up shop at 2:00pm PST, so get your votes in if you haven’t already. The film leading the pack should come as no surprise, but I’m surprised to see “Casablanca” so high. “The Matrix” is just barely ahead of “Taxi Driver” for the third and final slot, while truly influential staples like “It Happened One Night” and “The Great Train Robbery” are apparently down for the count.
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13 responses to “Get your votes in!”
…sigh
I don’t know how relevent the results of this series of polls are going to be. As much faith as I have in the readership of this site, it’s apparant that most people are simply voting for their favourite films. Sure, “Casablanca” and “The Matrix” are great, but in no way are they more INFLUENTIAL than “It Happened One Night” or “The Great Train Robbery”, or even “The Maltese Falcon”.
Within the digital world, few films have really breached the boarder of ‘brilliant’. The Matrix certainly was the first of it’s kind to bring special effects to the forefront since, oh, The Gate, or even Poltergeist. Then came LOTR and things were never the same. But The Matrix I would never EVER consider one of the most influencial films of all time. I was, though, extremely disappointed that such classics as The Rules Of The Game and Chinatown were left out of the top slot. Sure, it’s hard to say Chinatown is better than Taxi Driver and The Rules of te Game over The Maltese Falcon, but putting The Matrix over Taxi Driver, let alone such pitch-perfect pieces like It Happened One Night is a sin!
I ask you…what about Sunrise? North By Northwest? The Godfather? Agguire? Raging Bull? Acpocalypse Now, for Christ’s sake! And Pulp-fucking-Fiction!?!?! But, then again, it is hard to narrow down the ‘top’ or ‘most infleuncial’ films of all time without having 200 plus films on a list. If I was stressed to make a list, I think I’d fail at the attempt.
The poll you came up with is an admirable one. I certainly couldn’t do it. Needless to say, I am disappointed some films didn’t make it, and more so that people have put The Matrix over the REAL classics. Oh well. And so it goes. What’s your take on all this?
OKay…since I kinda came late into this one, I have checked all three polls and this is what I feel are worthy of the positions (in no particular order):
Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, Rashomon, Blue Velvet, Die Hard, Do the Right Thing, sex, lies and videotape, Blade Runner, Metropolis, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, The Rules of the Game, The Great Train Robbery, and Star Wars. My to 3 being: 1) Blade Runner, 2) The Rules of the Game, 3) Apocalypse Now.
I’m not sure how the categories were broken down, but I remember that there were about 5 0r 6 I wanted to vote for this week and maybe 1 I wanted to vote for last week.
Fun fact: The Great Train Robbery conceived the idea of “hands up.” Robbers never did that before the film, but the director wanted there to be more movement on the screen. Today, “hands up” is an essential part of any actual hold up. Life reflecting art. Sounds influential to me.
Matt, you forgot perhaps the two most influential films of all time: “Battleship Potemkin” and “Birth of a Nation.”
Bill: It’s all random. Way it crumbles.
Battleship Potemkin and Birth of a Nation are indeed extremely influencial. Where would we be without Griffith’s epic? As well as Eisenstein’s brilliant film, but, personally, I don’t agree. They are their best films to many, but Griffith’s also made The Musketeers of Pig Alley which, I feel, in regards to technical finess and brute talent, is better than Birth of a Nation, therefore more influencial. It’s just that ‘Nation’ had a wider release. And Sergi had many, many films that showed his genius and prowess more creatively and intensely than ‘Battleship’, namely Alexander Nevsky.
Matt: I haven’t seen Battleship Potemkin but I agree that Alexander Nevsky may be Sergei Eisenstein’s single most significant contribution to world cinema. Also, the fact that it was originally designed as a Soviet propaganda film proves that art can come from the unlikeliest places.
The Musketeers of Pig Alley is like 16 minutes long. It’s a short in Griffith’s collection of hundreds that has been arbitrarily singled out by film schools and DVD manufacturers to be seen over the others. Sure, he used those shorts to master the close up, medium shot coverage that defined visual language but to single out that one movie is absurd.
Aw Kris! I’d vote for almost all of the ones in this new poll.
Chad….Okay, maybe picking something like ‘Musketeers’ was a bit extreme…but for filmmaking influence, personally, I felt it deserves more credit than ‘Nation’.
Bill….seriously check out ‘Potemkin’, it’s fabulous. But I completely agree with you on ‘Nevsky’. It’s very true that art can come from the most unlikely places. Heck, the Coen Brothers wrote ‘The Big Lebowski’ because they had writer’s block (ironic, since they wrote it after ‘Barton Fink’).
Oh yes, the new list is perfect! I had a hard time picking three. Good choices! I’d’ve put too many Kubrick and Bergman films on there. But very good list.