10 Years Later... 10 Times Worse

Tonight on CBS they aired AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).

The original list, AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies, which was released in 1998, was okay. It was an interesting project, but the order in which some great movies appeared on the list was pretty bad (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather Part II, and especially Fargo, were all way too low on the list), many great movies were excluded from the list (e.g., The Lost Weekend, The Night Of The Hunter, Being There, Hannah And Her Sisters, and The Usual Suspects) and some movies that are certainly not in the top 100 American movies nonetheless made the list (e.g., The Searchers, Easy Rider, and Dances With Wolves).

With the new list, AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition), few of the problems with the first list were corrected, and many new problems were introduced.

What didn't make the list, rightly so:

Dances With Wolves

What didn't make the list, but should have:

The Lost Weekend, The Night Of The Hunter, Being There, Hannah And Her Sisters, The Usual Suspects, were all still embarrassingly absent.

Some great movies that have been released since the first list, including The Big Lebowski, Being John Malkovich, Mulholland Dr., Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, as well as my current favorite movie, American Beauty, all failed to make the new list.

Some of the deserving movies that made the first list, including Giant, Rebel Without A Cause, and Fargo, which should have been much higher than #84, inexplicably fell off the list altogether.

What did make the list, but shouldn't have:

The Sixth Sense - This terribly overrated movie, which isn't in the top 1000 American movies, made the list at #89.

Titanic - This was seriously overrated when it was released, but I thought all that was long over. I was wrong. It made the list at #83.

The Searchers - One of the worst movies to make the initial list, barely, at #96. Instead of falling off the list like it should have, it shot all the way up to #12.

Raging Bull - While Scorsese has made many great movies, this is not one of them. It was too high on the first list at #24, and somehow this managed to make it all the way to #5 on the new list.

What did make the list, but should have been higher:

North By Northwest - One of Hitchcock's best movies, dropped from #40 on the first list, to #55 on the new one.

Dr. Strangelove - Easily a top 20, or maybe even top 10 movie. The first time around it made the list at #26. This time it dropped 13 spots to #39.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Dropped 13 places from #20 to #33.

The Godfather Part II - One of the most curious things about the first list was how this managed to only rank #32, considering how many top 10 lists it's made, and that it's currently #3 on the IMDb Top 250. Its rank was unchanged.

2001: A Space Odyssey - This managed to go up from #22 to #15, but it should have been in the top 10. Perhaps the reason this and Dr. Strangelove were so low was because while they're both great movies, they don't belong on a list of the best American movies, as they're British (along with a couple other movies on the list).