By now you've surely seen Time Out's "100 Best Movies" list. The hook and unusual angle is that the list is comprised solely from ballots of actors. Actors are famously impressionable of course so you get embarrassing things like the barely-out-of-the-oven Whiplash (2014) as one of the 100 best movies of all time but it's still an interesting list. #1 is not your usual Citizen Kane/Vertigo type deal (only one of those two makes the list) but is awarded to the classic comedy Tootsie (1982).
(And, no, we had no intention of posting two Tootsie related articles within the same 24 hours -- don't miss this piece on The Americans since we wanna know what you think of this new series idea -- but blogging can surprise you.)
The complete Time Out 100 list and 10 discoveries after the jump...
ACCORDING TO ACTORS POLLED IN 2015
You can always tell when a list was made by what's in the ether right then (notice the very high placement of To Kill a Mockingbird which is back in heavy rotation due to "Go Set a Watchman")
1. Tootsie
2. The Godfather
3. A Woman Under the Influence
4. Cinema Paradiso
5. To Kill a Mockingbird
6. The Godfather Part 2
7. Annie Hall
10. Taxi Driver
12. Goodfellas
13. Withnail and I
14. Kes
15. The Wizard of Oz
16. On the Waterfront
17. The Shining
18. Breaking the Waves
19. Pulp Fiction
20. Gladiator
21. La Haine
22. Jaws
23. Raging Bull
24. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
25. Some Like It Hot
26. Fargo
27. Rosemary's Baby
28. The Night of the Hunter
29. Chinatown
30. The Apartment
31. La Vie en Rose
32. There Will Be Blood
33. All About Eve
34. Life is Beautiful
35. Apocalypse Now
37. The Sting
38. Waiting for Guffman
39. Citizen Kane
41. Festen
42. The Lives of Others
43. American Beauty
44. Leon (The Professional)
45. A Star is Born
46. Casablanca
47. A Matter of Life and Death
49. Mean Streets
50. The Empire Strikes Back
51. The Turin Horse
52. The Princess Bride
53. This is England
56. Midnight Cowboy
57. Nil By Mouth
59. All That Jazz
60. Truly Madly Deeply
61. Harold and Maude
62. Notorious
63. Being There
64. A Clockwork Orange
65. It's a Wonderful Life
66. The Sacrifice
67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
68. Monster
70. Blade Runner
71. The Thin Red Line
72. The General
73. The Third Man
74. Amour
75. Tender Mercies
76. Tokyo Story
77. Star Wars
78. A Room for Romeo Brass
79. Scenes From a Marriage
80. Naked
81. The Goonies
82. Brazil
83. Caché (Hidden)
84. The Deer Hunter
85. The Piano
87. Carmen Jones
89. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
91. The Hustler
92. Sophie's Choice
93. Whiplash
94. Love Actually
95. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
96. Paris, Texas
97. Persona
98. Crimes and Misdemeanours
99. The Great Beauty
100. Schindler's List
Well Tootsie is superbly acted. And it's about acting. So why wouldn't actors love it? No matter how beloved that movie may be with actors and the public, it remains underregarded as a film. I think it's one of the best of its whole decade and should have won Best Picture in 1982 (give or take Blade Runner).
You can also look at individual ballots from the actors. Here are...
10 discoveries I made while perusing actor ballots
01 Juliette Binoche's list is exactly like what you'd expect with a series of prestige mostly foreign language films and a bit of iconoclastic protest ("all of Orson Welles movies" instead of listing a title). But she's also a HUGE fan of The War of the Roses (1989). Who knew?
02 Brie Larson has eclectic but young taste. Her movies are mostly recent American classics of disparate genres but then throw in a little Rashomon (1950) and Roy Andersson's You The Living (2007). Well, okay then!
03 We knew that Melanie Lynskey was a true movie-lover but somehow it had escaped us that she was a huge fan of the "dogme 95" movement with both Lars on Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) and Festen (1998) on her list. Those movies are so unmissable; if you've missed them, correct yourself!
04 Bill Hader (Trainwreck, SNL) who we have heard repeatedly is a cinephile, shows it with his list which even includes Todd Hayne's [SAFE]
05 Joanne Froggatt of Downton Abbey fame is maybe one of us (i.e. an actressexual) since all but one of her choices are huge actressy spectacles like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Monster and the like... with the lone non-weird exception of The Godfather
06 Andy Serkis of motion-capture fame actually has really well rounded taste and over a wide spread of years. He likes female-driven classics (Cabaret, The Piano), foreign language oddities (Let the Right One In, The Triplets of Belleville), auteur classics both epic and intimate (Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver) and so on
07 Anna Chlumsky is a classics-only kind of girl. Her only recent title is Munich (2005) but she mostly loves studio era pictures... especially Gene Kelly musicals. Amen.
08 Riz Ahmed has really high end taste (A Separation and Caché... nice) except he includes The Goonies (1985) which reminds you that childhood favorites transcend all ideas of "taste" because that movie is just crap (see also: people who love Hook).
09 I need to become familiar with the work of the actress Sophia Takal (V/H/S) whose name is new to me. Why? She's got three Judy Garland movies on her list. People who worship at the shrine of Judy G are keepers.
10 Final discovery. New life goal: become friends with Mary Elizabeth Winstead. We haven't really written about her at TFE but she's pretty great in the indie drama Smashed (2012) so hopefully she'll find a breakthrough signature part soon. Look at this terrific list! You really can't go wrong here...
1. Fargo (1996)
2. The Shining (1980)
3. Tootsie (1982)
4. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
5. Broadcast News (1987)
6. The Red Shoes (1948)
7. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
8. Punch Drunk Love (2002)
9. A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
10. All That Jazz (1979)
THOUGHTS ON THE LISTS? You know you have some.