Who is King of the Critics?

[paulofilmo]

too defensible.

[paulofilmo]

ugh i need to see L' Atalante

[Suture Self]

Pauline Kael. I frequently disagree with her, but she's a fantastic writer, she's fiercely independent, she always provides thoughtful defenses of her opinions, and she might be the best weirdo critic of all time. We could use more weirdos in criticism.

[djross]

Taking a look at all the top tens by all the critics and directors in that 2012 BFI poll mentioned by paulofilmo, I compared their results with my own top ten films, which are (and I believe this has remained unchanged since I joined Criticker in 2006) as follows:

2001: A Space Odyssey
Breaking the Waves
Contempt
Hitler: A Film from Germany
Murmur of the Heart
Scenes from a Marriage
Shoah
The Thin Red Line
Umberto D.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

All ten of these movies appear somewhere in at least one person's list, but, in the case of Murmur of the Heart, it is literally only one person out of hundreds, a woman named Ruth Harley, possibly Australian, but whose taste otherwise seems totally divergent from my own.

My systematic process of comparison consisted simply in counting how many of my top ten movies featured in the top tens of those on the list. Nobody had more than three of my top ten. The only two that had three were:

Saul Metzstein (director): http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/1163
Michael Wedel (professor): http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/301

There were quite a few whose lists included two from my own list. Of those, one also had two other films from my top twenty, making a total of four films from my own top ten. That was:

Arien Schweitzer (critic): http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/784

But Metzstein, in addition to 2001, Shoah and Umbrellas of Cherbourg, also had one other film from my top twenty on his list, Tarkovsky's Mirror. I therefore conclude that of the hundreds of writers and filmmakers surveyed by BFI, Metzstein's taste is closest to my own. Whether that is really true, who knows? Maybe I should see some of his movies. But in any case, there is another remarkable fact about this apparent connection between Metzstein and myself: he was born on December 30, 1970, precisely ten days after my own birth. Not bad taste for a kid.

But if this correlation between date of birth and top ten films is more than just coincidence, whether the causality is astrological or of some other kind, then it would seem to follow that my taste should coincide perfectly with that of Todd Phillips, time zone differences notwithstanding. Confirmation of this hypothesis may need to wait until the next BFI poll: seems like they forgot to ask him in 2012.