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While we’re on the subject of Ingmar Bergman, let’s talk about Bergman parodies. To gauge the Swedish’s master’s impact on 20th century culture, one needs to look no further than YouTube, where you’ll find “Bergmanesque” clips from Mystery Science Theater 3000, French and Saunders and an Alamo Drafthouse video contest. Then there’s the above clip, which appears to be an NYU student short. Titled simply Thirst, its YouTube summary reads in part: “What if director Ingmar Bergman did a commercial for Coca Cola? Written and directed by Leslie Chase, the film is set in the late 50’s and follows the thirsty, lonely lives of two Swedish sisters.” It’s tribute, it’s dead-on parody, and it’s genius.

Under discussion:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest  (2006)

A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in a collaborative effort, spearheaded by the folks at Cinema Fusion and Movie Patron, to produce a Top 100 films list on behalf of the online film community. I was sent a list of 500 nominees, and was asked to narrow it down to my personal Top 100, ranked in order.

I didn’t end up getting that far. Poring over the nominees list, I just became completely overwhelmed. It was easy enough to narrow the 500 down to 100 (frankly, there were quite a few films on the Top 500 that felt like placeholders–Pirates of the Caribbean? Grease? Seriously?), but I didn’t want to just submit a list of My Top 100 Most Favorite Bestests with Barry Lyndon at the top and the remaining 99 in random order. I decided I needed to come up with an organizing philosophy that would allow me to rank the films on a non-arbitrary scale, based on artistic, entertainment, and socio-historical value. But while I was agonizing over theoretical point values, everyone else was ranking their movies, and yesterday the final Top 100 list debuted on Cinema Fusion.

Considering that this venture was at least in part a reaction to AFI’s recently re-released Top 100 list, I think it’s useful to compare the two. Sean at Film Junk notes that he’s “a little disappointed that [the online] list wasn’t very radical or ‘progressive’.” This is a bit of an understatement; this new list is in fact so similar to the AFI list that if you compare just the two Top 20s side by side, seven films appear on both lists, with one film actually winning the same exact ranking from both groups. It begs the question: how did this self-styled “alternative list” come to so closely resemble the institutional verdict? Is this just an instance of consensus necessarily producing mediocrity, and if so, would there have been any way to get around that? Below the jump, you’ll find both Top 20s, and my analysis.

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Under discussion:

Saw III  (2006)

• Sun Tzu-fan Paris Hilton will star (!) as Paul Sorvino’s daughter (!!) in Repo! The Genetic Opera, a “musical thriller” from Saw III director Darren Lynn Bousman (!!!). Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, and in this case, I can’t top Variety’s logline: “Hilton will sing in a futuristic thriller framed around musical numbers that range from opera to rock. The setting is 2056, when a plague nearly destroys the human race and survival is dependent upon being able to finance a pricey organ transplant.”
• Speaking of celebutantes that were thought to be unemployable, a Reuters story picked up by The Hollywood Reporter warns us not to write off Lindsay Lohan, because “no actor is uninsurable.” An expert quoted in the story says something along the lines of, “I got insurance for Robert Downey Jr. I could insure Lindsay Lohan barefoot with somebody else’s coke in my pants.”
• Johnny Depp is re-attached to The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, now to be directed by Bruce Robinson. But don’t put a lot of weight in this announcement: the project has fallen in and out of development since 2000, and at one point, Benicio Del Toro was on board to direct.