New York Times Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Best Movies of the Century (NYT)

Man of Constant Sorrow

Dan at Now I Know pointed to The Best Movies of the Century, According to the New York Times, and even provided a gift link.

“Between streaming services and superhero blockbusters, the way we watch and think about movies has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. But through that period of upheaval, which films have truly stood the test of time?

“To find out, we embarked on an ambitious new project, polling more than 500 filmmakers, stars, and influential film fans to vote for the 10 best movies (however they chose to define that) released since Jan. 1, 2000. In collaboration with The Upshot, we compiled their responses to create a list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century.”

First off, I did a list like this from a BBC list in 2016, and while there are some similarities, there were significant divergences as well.

Second, I’m not litigating the fact that 2000 is in the 20th century, not the 21st. The BBC used the same criterion.

If I saw it and wrote about it, I will link to that post.

I will note movies I have NOT seen this way:

DK—I don’t know this film and have never heard of it before, except if it was listed in previous lists.

WS- I’m familiar with the film and would have seen it, but it fell through the cracks, usually during the Oscar rush to see movies in December through February.

FF – There was a fear factor that it would be too violent or otherwise upsetting to watch.

We begin

100 Superbad, Greg Mottola, 2007. WS – maybe it was the marketing that made it feel too frivolous

99 Memories of Murder, Bong Joon Ho, 2005. DK

98 Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog, 2005. WS

97 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón, 2013. I liked it.

96 Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018. Not only did I love it when I saw it, but I adored it even more when I learned about Afrofuturism

95 The Worst Person In The World, Joachim Trier, 2021. I liked. And she isn’t.

94 Minority Report, Steven Spielberg, 2002. WS

93 Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, 2007. WS

92 Gladiator, Ridley Scott, 2000. I just wasn’t that interested.

91 Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold, 2010. DK

90 Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach, 2013. WS

89 Interstellar, Christopher Nolan, 2014. I wrote: ” I thought the third hour was better paced and more interesting than the second, which could have used a 10-minute edit. Bottom line: I’m glad I saw it, I wouldn’t watch it again, and I’m unsure whether to recommend it.”

88 The Gleaners & I, Agnès Varda, 2001. DK. BTW, #99 on the BBC list

Tolkien

87 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson, 2001. I wrote, “I’ve watched…only the first Lord of the Rings movie, and the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie; call me an incompletist.” They were fine, but not enough to see the sequels. At the time (2012), I had only seen one Harry Potter movie, but since then, I’d seen them all.

86 Past Lives, Celine Song, 2023. I liked it

85 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Adam McKay, 2004. WS. I think at the time, I wrote it off as silly, based on the trailers.

84 Melancholia, Lars von Trier, 2011. WS. I was disappointed to miss the story about a rogue planet about to collide with Earth, and how that affects people

83 Inside Llewyn Davis, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2013. I got the soundtrack before I saw the movie, which I liked in part.

82 The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2013. WS/FF. It is fascinating and scary to see the “incredible capacity of the human mind to compartmentalize and rationalize monstrous acts of cruelty toward other people.”

81 Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, 2010. WS – Given my wife’s interest in dance, I don’t know how we missed this.

80 Volver, Pedro Almodóvar, 2006. It was good; “Almodovar tends to luxuriate over certain parts of the female body on occasion…”

79 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick, 2011. WS, though I was grasping at what it was supposed to be: it “tries to wrap its arms around all of creation”?

78 Aftersun, Charlotte Wells, 2022. WS

Weird stuff

77 Everything Everywhere All At Once, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022. I’m convinced this is MUCH better in the cinema.

76 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2000. WS. I have, and LOVE the soundtrack. I did see a chunk of this movie on broadcast television, but not enough to say I WATCHED it. The scene with Man Of Constant Sorrow is a hoot.

75 Amour, Michael Haneke, 2012. Excellent, but somewhat depressing look at aging.

74 The Florida Project, Sean Baker, 2017. Excellent. NOT Disney World.

73 Ratatouille, Brad Bird, 2007. Rodent making food should not work, yet it does.

72 Carol, Todd Haynes, 2015. A good girl-meets-girl in 1950s NYC film.

71 Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh, 2001. It just didn’t catch my interest, although I eventually saw Ocean’s Eight and now want to know its origin.

70 Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson, 2008. DK

69 Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer, 2014. DK and it’s a ScarJo film.

Why I go to the movies

68 The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow, 2009. I wrote here about how I had the Netflix DVD for four months and never watched it.

67 Tár, Todd Field, 2022. Good, but very internal.

66 Spotlight, Tom McCarthy, 2015. Journalism! Those were the days.

65 Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, 2023

64 Gone Girl, David Fincher, 2014. I DID see this on broadcast TV. It was pretty good.

63 Little Miss Sunshine, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006. I liked it a lot.

62 Memento, Christopher Nolan, 2001. WS

61 Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Quentin Tarantino, 2003. FF: ” Never before have shootings, stabbings, beatings, beheadings, disembowelings, amputations, mutilations, gougings, slicings, choppings, and bitings been so much campy fun.” Doesn’t sound like fun.

I’ve got blisters on my fingers!

60 Whiplash, Damien Chazelle, 2014. Good but exhausting.

59 Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade, 2016. DK

58 Uncut Gems, Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie, 2019. WS

57 Best in Show, Christopher Guest, 2000. I love the Christopher Guest films.

56 Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002. I recall liking it. It’s shocking since it stars Adam Sandler.

55 Inception, Christopher Nolan, 2010. WS

54 Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, 2006. WS/FF – I was on the fence.

53 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Larry Charles, 2006. I just wasn’t into it. Yet I saw the sequel.

52 The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018. “My wife mused that it was a movie for which we were somehow not privy to the code. “

51 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen, 2013. FF. Several people told me I should watch this movie. It was an important film, and Solomon Northup lived in my metro area. Nope.

Okay, this is long enough. I’ll finish it next week.

Stop Project 2025 comic!

It includes enabling the president to have much more power than the constitution allows.

Here’s your problem: trying to tell all your friends about Stop Project 2025 and why they should care. It’s difficult because the plan is dense, vaguely incomprehensible, and perhaps a little bit boring. I point to this great page, which is quite thorough.

It includes a 38-minute video, a quiz, and lots of words—important words, to be sure, but still. It does direct you to that four-and-a-half-minute song I’ve linked to before.

Several people created the Stop Project 2025 Comic, which you should share. Why did they make this?

“We’ve made comics to explain some of that agenda, and move you to vote against it.

“We did this because you shouldn’t have to read this monstrosity. After all, it’s more than fifty times as long as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution…combined.

“Our two founding documents are short because it doesn’t take a lot of words to say, ‘You matter, and you have a voice.’

“Project 2025 is longer because it’s a detailed plan to shut you up and shut you out.

“Don’t let it do either.

“Read on, then vote.”

Project 2025 is a detailed plan to shut you up and shut you out.

You matter, and you have a voice.

Related – Election Subversion 2024: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Is immigration something you do or something you are?

When Trump Rants, This Is What I Hear from Carlos Lozado, a NY Times writer who came to the United States at age three, is touching. The article is probably behind a firewall, but here are a few paragraphs.

djt’s “eating the dogs” rant prompted Lozado “to look back on his xenophobic cacophony, building so relentlessly over the past decade, in attacks that have narrowed the distance for me between immigration as a memory and being an immigrant as a present identity…

“When Trump told four Democratic women in Congress to ‘go back’ to their countries, he unknowingly trivialized how often I’ve gone back in my mind, wondering what that other life, that other person, might have been like.

“When he mocked immigrants for not speaking English, he ignored the interplay between native tongues and new ones and how demanding purity in language — and in people — is utterly self-defeating.

“How can immigrants ‘poison the blood’ of the nation when we have always been its lifeblood? With his accusations, Trump is administering his own brand of venom, one whose cumulative effect is to disfigure a nation, not exalt it.”

The 100 best books of the 21st century

The New Jim Crow

“These are the 100 best books of the 21st century, as voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, and critics.” So sayeth The New York Times. Alas, I’ve read but a few of them. Still, I will mention the ones for which I have… some relationship beyond seeing the author interviewed on CBS Saturday Morning, such as #76 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022).

#88 The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2010)

Around 2012, Lydia Davis spoke at the Albany Public Library, and I picked up this book. A few years later, the Friends and Foundation named her a Literary Legend, and I got to speak with her a half dozen times. “If her work has become a byword for short (nay, microdose) fiction, this collection proves why it is also hard to shake; a conflagration of odd little umami bombs — sometimes several pages, sometimes no more than a sentence — whose casual, almost careless wordsmithery defies their deadpan resonance.”

#69 The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2010)

Not only did I read it, I reviewed it. It’s an important book.

#48 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)

I took the graphic novel to a work conference but left it in my hotel room. They shipped it back to me, but it cost me more than buying the book again. It’s here waiting to be read. However, I did watch the movie on a flight from Paris to New York City in May 2023 and liked it.

#36 Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

In 2016, I wrote that I SHOULD read the book, and subsequently, I did but failed to review it. I found it moving.

A Family Tragicomic

#35 Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)

I did not read the graphic novel, even though ADD said I should, and he’s usually correct. And I probably will. However, I did a touring company production of the musical in 2017 at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, and I own the Original Cast Album. Here’s the performance from the Tony Awards in 2015

#26 Atonement by Ian McEwan (2002)

I saw the movie adaptation in 2008, which I did not love.

#20 Erasure by Percival Everett 2001

I saw the movie adaptation in January 2024, and I LOVED it! However, they changed the title to American Fiction.

#16 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)

Someone lent this to me years ago, and I got to about page 59 before stopping, and I no longer remember why. It’s still sitting on my shelf, next to Persepolis. Yes, 2000 is in the 20th century; I didn’t make the list.

#7 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016)

It’s been on my Amazon list since 2021.

#2 The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)

My wife has read and thoroughly enjoyed this 600-page book in the past few years. It’s about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North and West from 1915 to 1970.

What Causes Obesity

a complex, chronic condition

As someone who has struggled with my weight for a good chunk of my life, I was fascinated by this article in The New York Times in November 2022. Scientists Don’t Agree on What Causes Obesity, but They Know What Doesn’t. It should be sharable.

“That’s not to say the researchers disagreed on everything. The three-day meeting was infused with an implicit understanding of what obesity is not: a personal failing.” That messaging had been pervasive most of my life.

“No presenter argued that humans collectively lost willpower around the 1980s, when obesity rates took off, first in high-income countries‌, then in much of the rest of the world. Not a single scientist said our genes changed in that short time. Laziness, gluttony‌‌ , and sloth were not referred to as obesity’s helpers.”

The stereotypes have been… unhelpful in getting most people to shed pounds. Yet it seems as though “well-meaning” people would offer unsolicited “advice.”

Starving doesn’t work

This piece from Mount Sinai about diets for rapid weight loss is true in my experience: “People who lose weight very quickly are much more likely to regain the weight over time than people who lose weight slowly through less drastic diet changes and physical activity. The weight loss is a bigger stress for the body, and the hormonal response to the weight loss is much stronger.”

NYT: “In stark contrast to a prevailing societal view of obesity, which assumes people have full control over their body size, they didn’t blame individuals for their condition, the same way we don’t blame people suffering from the effects of undernutrition, like stunting and wasting.

“The researchers instead referred to obesity as a complex, chronic condition, and they were meeting to get to the bottom of why humans have, collectively, grown larger over the past half-century. To that end, they shared a range of mechanisms that might explain the global obesity surge.

“And their theories, however diverse, made one thing obvious: As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline.” In other words, fat shaming is counterproductive.

I’m happy that there has been a degree of acceptance in fashion, even in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue starting a few years back.

Newspaper endorsement

Media Literacy Week

When I read the Vanity Fair article, Is the Newspaper Endorsement Dying? and similar articles elsewhere, I was sad, but for a slightly different reason than one might think.

“Alden Global Capital—the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country—began adopting a new endorsement policy. ‘[The Boston] Herald stands for the people, not pols,’ read the headline of the Herald’s editorial, which went on to announce that the paper would stop endorsing candidates in presidential, gubernatorial, and Senate races…” Now, there may well be endorsements at the more local level.

“Earlier in the piece, the editorial staff offered some context for the decision. ‘As America’s political divide continues to deepen, the role of traditional news media as impartial providers of a common set of facts is more vital than ever,’ the editorial began, citing the ‘increasingly acrimonious’ nature of public discourse ‘with misinformation and disinformation on the rise.’

“At this particular moment, the [Hartford] Courant added in their editorial, the ‘partisan selection” inherent to endorsing political candidates “is counterproductive to achieving the essential goal of facilitating healthy public debate and building trust in our journalistic enterprise.'”

Other newspapers are cutting back as well. It may be “prudent” not to offend their shrinking customer base. Indeed, “a committee of editors from Gannett newsrooms nationwide [recently]… recommended the company’s papers avoid making endorsements in [statewide] races… ‘Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think’ and ‘perceive us as having a biased agenda,’ the committee said… citing editorials and opinion columns as not only ‘among our least read content,’ but a ‘frequently cited reason for canceled subscriptions.'”

The Wire

A friend of mine pointed out that writer David Simon, way back in 2009, “expresses fears for newspapers’ future and accuses media owners of contempt,” some of them rightly so. Ultimately, he was making a case for online paid subscriptions, which has had mixed success.

More pervasive in the years since is the cult of personality that has become more important than real news. In The Hollywood Reporter, psychotherapist and media theorist MJ Corey views the cultural sway of the Kardashians. ‘There is a sadomasochistic element to the way they put themselves out there.’ The sociologists and philosophers who have foundationally influenced your thinking on media — Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, and Daniel Boorstin — spoke a lot about the acceleration of media, spectacle, and the creation of the self.”

Another Hollywood Reporter story, this by Keli Goff, suggests Trevor Noah’s “decision to leave his Comedy Central show — and the continued decline of late night it signals — back to the politician who first eschewed legacy media,” Sarah Palin.

“Palin’s [Katie] Couric interview became fodder for memorable sketches on Saturday Night Live, but the fallout also led to the political divide that defines media consumption today. Palin wrote off the press as condescending, mean-spirited, untrustworthy, and out to get people like her (non-elites who would rather hunt than read.) People who saw themselves in her began to write the press off, and the rise of social media finally made it easier for them to do so.”

Pushing back

Some papers, including the Albany Times Union, want to push back. Editor Casey Seiler noted, “To be clear: The editorial page doesn’t direct news coverage, and it isn’t beholden to opine only on topics the Times Union’s reporters have covered.” Knowing Seiler somewhat, I’m willing to take him at his word.

But many folks do not. They perceive the mainstream media – or “lamestream media,” as Palin called them, as intrinsically unfair. There was a recent poll that was conducted by the New York Times indicating that the Republican generic House candidate had a 4-point edge over the Democrat. This was a straightforward story unless you read right-wing media, which I do. Newsmax indicates that EVEN The New York Times had to ADMIT that Democrats were losing. A very different spin.

Even a decade ago, people would share with me some info nuggets. I’d ask the source; they’d say Facebook or Twitter. “But what SOURCE, not the platform?” Even then, it was a struggle to get my point across. Now, what Kim Kardashian tweets about is treated the same as, and indeed is followed far more closely than, actual news on the legacy media. And THAT makes me sad.

Hope?

Still, I always try to find hopeful signs. The New York Times notes that this week, October 24 to 28, is Media Literacy Week. The article Teenagers and Misinformation: Some Starting Points for Teaching Media Literacy – the link SHOULD be available to you – has lots of useful information. “Five ideas to help students understand the problem, learn basic skills, share their experiences and have a say in how media literacy is taught.”

Number 3 is Learn from teen fact-checkers, specifically “the MediaWise Teen Fact-Checking Network, which publishes fact-checks for teenagers, by teenagers. According to the site, the network’s ‘fact-checks are unique in that they debunk misinformation and teach the audience media literacy skills so they can fact-check on their own.'”

Some of this, I would think, is common sense. Mike Caulfield, “a digital literacy expert… has refined the process fact-checkers use into four simple principles:

1. Stop.

2. Investigate the source.

3. Find better coverage.

4. Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.

Otherwise known as SIFT.”

Even adults could make of the methodologies described in the article.