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NOT QUITE A TOP TEN
There’s a fun piece in The Guardian today by John Patterson in which he lays out his ten films that made today’s cinema. It’s not a “ten best” list but instead a “ten most influential,” and not in a fussy, highbrow sort of way either.
For example, here’s Patterson on his numbers four and five:
“4. The Brady Bunch Movie (Betty Thomas, 1995) and 5. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). Released within six months of each other, these were the first smart-ass stepchildren of the self-referential post-Pulp Fiction effect. The only refreshing way to rehash the blandly inoffensive 70s Bradys was to subvert it utterly. Scream took the haggard teen-horror genre and gave it a sprightly makeover by consciously referencing every last cliche of the 70s hack-n-slash boom. All this self-referentiality finally became tiresome, though it remains with us and, like it or not, it’s the way we live now. Without them, we wouldn’t have: Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Shaun of the Dead, the Scary Movie trilogy, The Blair Witch Project.
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