2 Responses to “Mark Moring’s “Whither Jesus and Frodo?””

• Kathleen Lundquist June 24th, 2006 at 5:20 pm #

  I’ll add my “amen” to yours.

  Gary and I have found the AFI lists of “Top 100 this-or-that movies” to be a bit strange. In their Top 100 list of scary movies, there were very few that you could say took place in a Christian universe (i.e. that involved moral struggles, good vs. evil) - most were slasher-type stuff.

  And I agree - It’s A Wonderful Life is deserving of any accolades.

• Debra June 25th, 2006 at 8:05 am #

  Too true. I feel the same way about the various “lists” that magazines like Entertainment Weekly and Premiere put out from time to time. I usually agree with about half of their picks, and snort at the other half, marveling at the things or people they left out in order to include some choice I consider dubious at best. Which all gets down to “chacun a son gout“, I suppose.

  One of the recent ones that got my goat was Premiere’s 100 Greatest Performances of All Time. I was thrilled to see Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia in the #1 spot—that has been my #1 movie and performance of all time since I first saw it as a kid. But I was flabbergasted that they would include, for example, Tom Hank’s Castaway and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine and leave out Paul Scofield’s A Man for All Seasons; or include Brando’s Last Tango and not his Godfather—to me, that’s just weird.

  For one thing, I got the distinct feeling Premiere was pushing to include almost as many female roles as male. Very PC of them, I’m sure, but the sad fact is that there are far fewer good roles for women than for men, and they included a number of women’s performances that (however fine they might have been), don’t hold a candle to some male performances that were left out. And speaking of female performances, where the heck was Frances McDormand’s Margie Gunderson?

  I was glad they did include some comedy performances, however, like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow. And they had at least one Shakespeare, Olivier’s delicious Richard III, but what about Brando’s Mark Anthony, or Branagh’s Henry V?

  But besides the Scofield, what about Burt Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry, or Henry Fonda’s Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West? And not a single Monty Clift? Why, his five minutes in Judgment at Nuremberg beats out at least a third of the performances on the whole list! (I recall Burt Lancaster saying once that watching Clift do that scene was the only time in his life he’d felt truly intimidated by another actor.) Peter Sellars in Dr. Strangelove? Jeremy Irons’ Claus von Bulow? F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri?

  Shocking! Abominable! Give me five more minutes and I’ll be remembering more!