re: Worst decade of movies?

quote:

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Basically there are good to great movies in every decade and you're really doing yourself a disservice to write of any one decade in favor of another.

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Well that's of course true and I think part of the reason for the disdain for the OP is - not just that he thinks the 70's is the worst decade (someone could have that opinion if they don't like gritty/realism cinema of which that decade has a high %) but that the OP sounded as if he hadn't investigated the decade..."overrated baby boomer" movies - the type of people who can't be bothered to watch the Godfather because it's too long.

While I previously mentiond AFI's Top 100 list to illustrate a consensus for the greatness of the 70's - I do agree with this blog post by Roger Ebert:

All lists of the "greatest" movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese's favorites, or Herzog's? The least interesting are those by large-scale voting, for example by IMDb or movie magazines.

To be useful to me, a list should contain titles I'm not familiar with, suggest directors I should be looking at, and inspire me to give some films another look. That's what I mean by its function as "propaganda." When any of us makes a list, aren't we really telling other people what they should like?

The quasi-official best movie of all time on many lists for many years has been Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941). It is named for many reasons, only one of them that it is a masterpiece. Cineastes embrace it because for once a director had the freedom to make a movie entirely on his own terms, and as his punishment was never treated decently by Hollywood again. "Citizen Kane" at the top of a list is a thumb in the eye to the kinds of people lathering to make "Transformers 3."

Any list of great films helps breaks the hammer-lock of box office performance that grips too many American moviegoers. I can't tell you how many people responded to my attack on "Transformers" by telling me how much money the movie was grossing, as if that had the slightest relevance. A great movie acts like a window in our box of space and time, opening us to other times and other lands. The more windows we open, the better.

And Ebert mentions Sight & Sound - director's poll conducted every 10 years since 1952.

So, here's more helpful propaganda by the World's director's:

# of movies on director's Top 10 lists

1920's - 6
1930's - 19
1940's - 16
1950's - 29
1960's - 19
1970's - 21
1980's - 13
1990's - 14

So the 70's comes in 2nd behind the 1950's - and you know what this tells me?

I need to check out more movies from the 50's.