Formerly Relevant Listings Magazine Time Out Lists 100 Best British Films

and television shows if they feel like it...

http://www.timeout.com/london/bestbritishfilms/

not sure if you can easily define films as 'british'

Yeah, but if you limited it to "british films made in britain with british money and only with british people in it", would you get 100 films?

What makes a movie British is a long-standing row. Doesn't mean you should just shove any old shit with a British director or stars on the list. Dunno how it matters what British Cinema is in the post-Shooting Fish era. But iirc even the Quota Quickies were financed by American companies often?

Top 5 is a farce, will enjoy carping about this later.

No Hitch in the top 10 = go fuck yrself

exactly, it's an unwinnable war

think it's a great list, though an undeserving winner... 'red shoes' and 'third man' are legit top-five contenders shirley?

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yeah quota quickies were mostly US-financed

Third Man & Red Shoes are legit number 1 contenders. Placing the former behind Don't Look Now and the latter behind Kes is a head-scratcher.

http://www.timeout.com/london/feature/857/100-gbf-contributors-critics-r-page-2#stewartlee

glad someone else 'gets' 'where eagles dare' and also includes the tv play 'culloden'

but patrick keiller, shane meadows, steve mcqueen... i guess people vote for other people who are still alive and might be around for drinks?

think id have about seven powell and pressburgers

A Matter of Life and Death is rightly regarded with affection but rated too high here in terms of P&P's work, Trainspotting and Naked are good films but their placement here is a complete sop. Kind Hearts and Coronets isn't even the best Ealing, and Hitch under-rated badly here as I said.

I know it's the mechanics of a multi-voter list but I dunno boring.

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Yeah it's not even an exaggeration to say that most of P&P's shd be top 20.

Think Distant Voices is probably a fair bit over-rated here too.

I like the synchronous co-placings:

Trainspotting and If... and their nouvelle vagueisms at 9&10, Fires Were Started and Listen to Britain next to each other, Peeping Tom and Wicker Man together.

sometimes these things are interesting wrt fashion. i wouldn't include terence davies, but it's interesting he's so prominent whereas jarman and greenaway seem not to be.

sort of think the universal love for 'kes' is a bit of a dig at loach. it was forty years ago and sort of atypical, at least as i remember it. less overtly political? than 'my name is joe' or whatever.

Kes is head and shoulders Loach's best I think, and has some beautiful cinematography that reminds me of Witchfinder General and Wicker Man from that era - total British Rural Idyll which works best in Kes perhaps. The politics are there but not the polemic, maybe.

Only just noticed Greenaway's relative absence. I like him and Jarman much more than you do iirc but yeah they are obviously a long way out of fashion at the moment. Greenaway's fannying about with high-end digital shit for the second half of his career might have something to do with that? It's v. off-putting. Also this is a populist list and not heavily swung to the arthouse I don't think, tho the usual suspects are in there somewhere.

Didn't see Winstanley on there which feels like a significant omission if so?

Also Frears and Poliakoff seem to be right out of the loop now?

good point. the tv thing makes it all a bit difficult. without tv, the last four decades look pretty thin. but there aren't many tv plays that have the aesthetic heft of... an actual film. when all's said and done.

yeah 'winstanley' and 'it happened here'. plus brownlow not worth asking for a list? maybe he was, but couldn't be arsed.

Poliakoff's TV stuff feels filmic to me. Not the biggest Frears fan but he wd definitely have featured more in this list say 10 years ago.

London to Brighton the only obviously shit film listed as far as I can see. Is Sexy Beast not there?

No In the Loop either.

yeah quota quickies were mostly US-financed

William Everson interview:

http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/everson_interview.html

...has some interesting bumpf on this. The bit about Warners offering the BFI their entire set of QQs on an all or nothing basis, and them all getting junked when the BFI wanted to cherrypick them is pretty sad!

Pretty decent list of films in that article I thought.

Edgar Wright must have got up some peoples noses. I expected 'Shaun of the Dead' to figure pretty highly on this list. No Neil Jordan, Alan Parker or Ken Russell either, though I guess Russell's stock has fallen greatly since his late 60s heyday.

Overall it's a pretty decent list, though 'Don't Look Back' is way too high. I wonder what an ILM Britfilm poll would look like.

Things I learned today: Andrew Mollo, Brownlow's collaborator on It Happened Here and Winstanley, did the art direction on Xtro - a movie which I wd in all seriousness place above several of this list.

edgar wright's another one im surprised they didn't ask (or maybe they did). he'd surely come up with some random-ass horror film. i like the list but it needed more of would once have been called bad-taste movies. it was a ye olde time out critic dave pirie who wrote (i think) the first major book on british horror.

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lol like xtro maybe

Xtro is properly nuts, from memory. List cd do with more random genre flicks in general.

neil jordan is irish iirc

Well aware of that, but 'Mona Lisa' and 'The Crying Game' are British films, at least as much as 'A Clockwork Orange' or 'Barry Lyndon'.

Joseph Losey is American etc

It was mentioned in the Time Out article, people could've voted for Jordan if they'd chosen to.

Talking of Joseph Losey, I'd have had "The Criminal" in this list

re: david pirie - yeah his bk Heritage of Horror was really the first to take terence fisher etc seriously. there's a revised edition from a cpl of years ago, but it's been kinda overtaken by things like johnathan rigby's English Gothic now

haven't had a chance to look at the list yet, but agree w Noodle abt XTRO - pete walker's Frightmare shld be there too. Blood on Satan's Claw? Theatre of Blood?

I wonder what an ILM Britfilm poll would look like.

1. 'slade in wacka flocka flame'

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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/wasteland.jpg

I wonder what an ILM Britfilm poll would look like.

― I've been dancing since 9 and I'm tired and hungry (Dorianlynskey), Wednesday, February 9, 2011 2:35 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

I wonder what a thousand post clusterfuck on what exactly constitutes a Britfilm would look like.

I'm voting for whatever it is that acoleuthic just posted.

That was the band "wacka flocka flame" arriving for their gig...

OK list, I guess. Hunger might be a little too low at 48th.

I think Hitchcock's best British film might be Frenzy! There's fine early stuff, but maybe aside from Sabotage a warmup for what came later.

Sabotage is my favourite of his British films but I'd take the first Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps over Frenzy, maybe Blackmail and Rich and Strange too but it's been a while.

Formerly Relevant Listings Magazine Time Out Lists 100 Best British Films

someone didn't get a ballot eh ;)

i doubt i've seen more than about twenty british films

is get carter worth seeing

Only the Stallone version.

No I'm lying, it's good. Lot of pleasurable details, John Osborne is great.

yeah i remem seeing the first twenty mins or so as a kid and liking it

possibly unfairly associated with proto-ritchie blokefilm canon

Over-hyped by Loaded/Ritchie types but as I say lot of pleasure in the details.

'radio on' is v much not 'critical viewing' btw

Really, I've been wanting to see that for a while?

sort of rote exercise in national self deprecation, rolling cultural pessimism 1979 kinda thing

as with a lot of these films, it's pretty grim, i guess the parodic 'road movie' setting adds an extra bit of claustrophobia to the enduring problem of making films in a small country

i think my fav of those i've seen is 'nil by mouth', auteurism be damned....by being so relentlessly and hyperbolically grim, it somehow seems /less/ oppresive than so many 'affecting portraiits' of hopelessly limited lives and postwar auesterity

I didn't count up Peter Greenaways?

Don't think there are any? See discussion above.

snipy quotes from greenaway about being underappreciated in his flinty philistine homeland in 5 4 3

nil by mouth is great

are there any films that approach the level of depravity & grimness of niw by maaf

have just watched london to brighton and am mindful of watching 'the war zone'

I was gonna say the War Zone.

Paddy Considine's directorial debut Tyrannosaur sounds like it's following in the footsteps of Oldman and Roth in the grimness stakes. Not sure when it's getting a proper release though

niw by maaf

What is this?

Oh wait, I get it now I've just said it out loud.

Dead Mans Shoes is pretty grim.