My Top 10 Films...Plus 10 More! Oh, And More Gushing About Playtime

NEW YORK—So, the pool of voters constituting two of the most prominent end-of-year online-only movie surveys—the Skander Halim Memorial Movie Survey, or "Skandies;" and the Muriel Awards, or "Muriels"—recently decided to team up and co-host their own Sight & Sound-inspired poll asking participating voters to contribute their own individual lists of 20 greatest films of all time, from which a larger list of 20 top vote-getters would be culled and presented at this site as part of "The Skuriels." As someone who has been a Muriels voter in the past, I was naturally asked to participate...and so I did.

Thus, remember that list of 10 I came up with for The House Next Door recently? I came up with 10 more to add to that! Check out my ballot four lists in from the top here.

And no, I am absolutely not kidding about my No. 20. I mean—I know it's become a cliché when picking out memorable moments from ZAZ's underappreciated follow-up to Airplane!, but if nothing else, this particular scene really is all sorts of comically inspired:



In addition, I was asked to write a little bit about my favorite film ever, Jacques Tati's Playtime, which ended up placing fourth in the Skuriels master poll. Little did I know that I would be sharing the same space with the one and only Jim Emerson, the esteemed film critic behind the consistently scintillating Scanners blog. That was cool. You can read both our tributes here.