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In Reply to: Ridiculous list reflecting no knowledge of the genre (nt) posted by TG on June 28, 2000 at 17:41:23:
It's strange that negative reviews of various films are presented in a book that promulgates them as being the best. For example, "The Day The Earth Stood Still" -1951, was condescendingly reviewed by Bosley Crowther in September
1951, who said
the robot was so unmenacing that he'd seen better monsters in theaters
on 42nd St., and that the film makes for a tepid entertainment in
what is anomalously lableled the science-fiction field.
Obviously someone down the line at the NYTimes felt differently as
the film is listed in the book, which illustrates the idiosyncratic,biased
approach of a stuffed-shirt with no real objectivity or
knowledge of the genre.
This type of snobbery doesn't surprise me, considering that sci-fi
was struggling for recognition at the time and that NYTimes reviewers
probably considered the genre markedly inferior to the ones they were
used to evaluating.
... it really defies comprehension, doesn't it?To be fair, two entries (2001 & The Day the Earth Stood Still) are films I'd rate as amongst the best of the genre. Both have qualities which were ahead of the times when they were first released, and neither has dated badly, but as for the rest of the list - good heavens! What a sorry collection of B grade films, which seem to be linked only by the common thread of mediocrity.
I keep looking at them and trying to fathom what their criteria for selection could possibly be - box-office takings, perhaps? No, surely not. I can't even see how snobbery & pretense could come into it - you would have to work very hard indeed to churn out a believable thesis on the literary or cinematic merits of Star Trek II, The Fly or (yee gods!) Beetlejuice.
One possibility - maybe the editors unanimously loathe SF and decided to make a joke of the genre by compiling a list of what they considered the worst 10 examples of all time?
Are the other genre listings in the guide (say for horror, western and thriller/film noir) as risable as this one, or did they single science fiction out for special attention?
Cheers
TG
I think they are abysmally ignorant about sci-fi. Among those films listed in the
Action/Adventure category:
1- Close Encounters of the Third Kind
2- Star Wars
3- Back To The Future
4- Total Recall
They are somewhat better on horror and westerns; best on drama,comedy
and crime/mystery/suspense.
They simply hate science fiction.Consequently any SF film of any merit whatsoever which they can possibly wrestle into another category will go there instead of into science fiction. That means that all the leftovers which can't possibly go elsewhere will make up the SF category, instead it containing only good films.
Now, assuming that 80% of everything is c**p, that means that out of any list of 10 SF films formed this way, 2 will be good-uns and the rest will be rubbish.
Voila. The NY Times list.
B^)
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