The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made by David Hajdu

The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made Reviews

• 
  Bryce Wilson

  This is going to be one of those annoying autobiographical reviews so bear with:
  
  This is an odd book for me. On one hand it's something I'd probably turn my nose up at now. For one thing it's superficial barely devoting a paragraph to each movie. For another thing it's published by EW which now that it's slashed it's once proud DVD section, set visits, and retrospectives might as well be entitled "Owen "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?" Gleiberman, a bunch of studio fed blurbs, and stupid fucking lists: Weekly" it's dated as hell (Ooh a whole section on Laser Disc WOW too bad you didn't use that extra space to you know, WRITE ABOUT THE FUCKING MOVIES) and gives absurdly high spots to some serious early nineties dreck (Dances With Wolves is in the top five for westerns Wow. I didn't know that. City Slicker is one of the fifty funniest movies ever made? Well color me suprised. Not even Harry Met Sally or Mr. Goddamned Billy Crystal In Horrible Old Man Makeup Doing His Schtick? CITY FUCKING SLICKERS.
  
  But at the same time I can never forget what this book did for me. It was a constant companion in my childhood during the occasionally (read often) hellish occurrences known as "visiting my extended family". I spent literal hours reading and rereading it. And it was here that I first learned the names of Scorsese, Raimi, Truffaunt, Coppala, Depalma, Lynch, Herzog, Woo (Remember this is fifteen years ago, he still kicked ass), Jaramusch, Bergman, Fuller and countless others. And to give credit where it's due the book contained a fair amount of esoterica, leading me to films as diverse as The Honeymoon Killers, Maniac, and Liquid Sky.
  
  Yes this hyperbolic, poorly edited, occasionally idiotic little tome was my Rosetta Stone for the world of cinema. And what it unlocked was the vision of film as an infinite buffet, where most were happy to take whatever crap was shoveled at him. But the canny ones could create a fantastic meal for themselves by digging a bit deeper.
• 
  Ray

  What we've got here is a listing, by categories, of the greatest movies ever made. The top 100 dramas, comedies, musicals, kids movies (50 live-action, 50 animated), action, sci-fi, foreign, documentaries, sleepers, laserdiscs, and 50 movies of the '90's. The basic problem here is the book was published in 1996, so there's the rub. Hopefully, somewhere out there is a more recent listing. Some of the titles boggle my mind, such as the #1 comedy being "Airplane!" ahead of #2 "ASome Like It Hot"Anyway, I'll look out for a newer version of this book.