Duck Soup (1933)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Casablanca (1942)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Adam's Rib (1949)
Stalag 17 (1953)
12 Angry Men (1957)
Inherit the Wind (1960)
Psycho (1960)
Goldfinger (1964)
The Godfather (1972) / The Godfather, Part II (1974)
Annie Hall (1977)
Star Wars (1977)
Superman (1978) / Superman II (1980)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Batman (1989)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
The Rocketeer (1991)
Batman: Mask of the
Phantasm (1993)
Groundhog Day (1993)
The Nightmare
Before Christmas (1993)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Toy Story Trilogy (1995-2010)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Hamlet (1996)
Air Force One
(1997)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Mummy (1999)
American Psycho (2000)
Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy (2003-2008)
The Incredibles (2004)
The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012)
The Departed (2006)
Stranger than Fiction (2006)
Charlie Bartlett (2007)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Ratatouille
(2007)
There Will Be Blood
(2007)
Burn After Reading
(2008)
Iron Man (2008)
Taken (2009)
Black Swan (2010)
Easy A (2010)
Inception (2012)
The Avengers
(2010)
Skyfall (2012)
Man of Steel (2013)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
Batman v Superman:
Dawn of Justice (2016)
Captain America:
Civil War (2016)
Not too many updates to explain - just the addition of Burn After Reading, which had been excised during the old "limit 50" days, and the other two films in Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, which were on cable the other day and likewise were considered "encompassed" by the 2003 film. With that out of the way, let's get on to crunching the numbers.
By The Numbers
This is going to be an interesting experiment. I honestly don't know what we'll find, or if it's going to reveal anything meaningful.
Not surprisingly, The Personal Canon leans pretty heavily to the present, peaking in the 2000s - right about when I really started taking my moviegoing identity seriously. Nearly three-quarters of the list - 44 of 65, just about 68% - were released in my lifetime. But remember that not all Personal Canon films are created equal; I'd put 12 Angry Men over Pulp Fiction any day of the week, but at the end of the day I love them both equally.
Again, little surprise here. Films in color outnumber black-and-white films more than four to one. What is slightly surprising is that the division happens cleanly at 1960 - no color films before then, and no black-and-white films after. Can you think of films that ought to break this bizarre line in the sand? (Answer: The Wizard of Oz and Schindler's List are strong contenders.)
On a related note, my proclivities bend toward live action films, with animation only landing seven entries on the list.
The Personal Canon includes 48 distinct directors, 36 of whom only appear once. The other 13 comprise 29 films on the list, and perhaps not surprisingly it's Christopher Nolan who leads them all with four, more than anyone else on the list. Does that automatically make him my favorite director? If nothing else, he's my most trusted. The real surprise to me is that only one of those 48 directors is a woman - Mary Harron, who directed American Psycho. My immediate next choices to rectify that disparity are both Kathryn Bigelow films, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, and I think very fondly of Frozen. I also remember being very moved by City of God, but the fact that none of these films made the cut says something about just how deeply I felt about them.
Genre/Subgenre
Here's where it gets even more subjective, as I assigned these genre designations myself. I found an immediate problem with this endeavor - five of my seven animated films defied genre conventions (Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and The Incredibles were pretty easy to categorize). Where would you put Toy Story? What kind of a movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas? Is Ratatouille a comedy, a romance, an adventure? In the end, I lumped them all into the category of "Animated," in part because I love these film precisely because of their unwillingness to fit into neat little boxes.We can see a decent balance between Action (19) and Drama (14), with Comedy (10) coming in third. What might come as no surprise to anyone is that, of the Subgenres I identified, 15 of my 65 Personal Canon films are superhero films. (Honestly, though, didn't we expect that number to be a little higher?)
So there you have it, folks - a more statistical analysis of the Personal Canon and how some of my cinematic proclivities shake out. Any surprises? Any contenders that might upset some of these numbers? Next time: we'll look at some of the famous faces who appear more than once on the list, and I have a feeling there are going to be a few surprises there.
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