봉준호 감독의 영화 ‘기생충’이 미국 매체 버라이어티가 뽑은 역대 가장 위대한 영화 100편에 선정됐다.
‘기생충’은 21일(현지시간) 미국 버라이어티가 발표한 ‘역사상 가장 위대한 영화 100편’(The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time)에 포함됐다.
82위를 차지한 이 영화에 대해 버라이어티 평론가들은 “이 영화는 의도성과 보편성을 동시에 보여주는 스릴러로, 상위 1%에 대한 화두와 아카데미 시상식에서 어떤 종류의 영화들이 큰상을 받을 수 있는지에 대한 티핑포인트(갑자기 뒤집히는 점)를 제공했다”고 평했다.
‘기생충’은 지난 2020년 제92회 아카데미 시상식에서 한국 영화 최초로 각본상, 국제장편영화상, 감독상, 그리고 최고상인 작품상까지 총 4개 상을 수상했다.
한편 이번 100편의 목록에서는 알프레드 히치콕 감독의 ‘싸이코’(1960)가 1위에 올랐다. 이어 ‘오즈의 마법사’(1939)가 2위, ‘대부’(1972)가 3위, ‘시민 케인’(1941)이 4위, ‘펄프 픽션’(1994)이 5위에 이름을 올렸다.
The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time
The movies are now more than 100 years old. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). But they’re just old enough to make compiling Variety’s first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been. Think about it: You get an average of one film per year. A great deal of ardent discussion and debate went into the creation of this list. Our choices were winnowed from hundreds of titles submitted by more than 30 Variety critics, writers and editors. As we learned, coming up with which movies to include was the easy part. The hard part was deciding which movies to leave out.
Variety, which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. (We invented box office reporting, in addition to the words “showbiz” and “horse opera.”) And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the beautiful, head-spinning variety of the moviegoing experience. We don’t just mean different genres; we don’t just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of spine-tingling eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that — to honor the movies we love most, whatever categories they happen to fall into.
Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That’s the nature of the beast — the nature of the kind of protective passion that people feel about their favorite movies. We invited prominent filmmakers and actors to contribute essays about the movies that are significant to them, and that passion comes across in all that they wrote. No doubt you’ll say: How could that movie have been left off the list? Or this one? Or that one? Trust us: We often asked that very same question ourselves. But our hope is that in looking at the films we did choose, you’ll see a roster that reflects the impossibly wide-ranging, ever-shifting glory of what movies are.
These film writers and critics contributed suggestions for movies: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge, Matt Donnelly, William Earl, Patrick Frater, Steven Gaydos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Laffly, Brent Lang, Joe Leydon, Guy Lodge, Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordine, Naman Ramachandran, Manori Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alissa Simon, Jazz Tangcay, Sylvia Tan, Zack Sharf, Adam B. Vary, Nick Vivarelli, Meredith Woerner.
5
Pulp Fiction (1994)
We all know what a fertile time the 1970s were for Hollywood, but it’s a truth less commonly acknowledged that the ’90s brought every bit as great a cinematic revolution — this one from the margins — with Quentin Tarantino as its motormouth mascot. Where fellow indie directors Soderbergh, Jarmusch, Haynes, et al. dug into the grittier corners of reality, Tarantino took his louche film-geek obsessions and remixed them into this monumental homage to the junk food that had nourished him as a video store clerk and B-movie addict. Unapologetically profane and infinitely quotable, “Pulp Fiction” transformed movies overnight. It inspired countless knockoffs, liberated movies to come from chronological storytelling and restarted the careers of Bruce Willis and John Travolta, while bringing a kind of hipster credibility to genre cinema that forever changed audience tastes.
4
Citizen Kane (1941)
For decades it was commonly thought of as the greatest movie ever made, and there are a lot of reasons why: the visionary excitement of it, the through-a-snow-globe-darkly Gothic majesty of it, the joyous acting, the hypnotic structure, the playfulness, the doomy haunting symbolism of Rosebud, and on and on. Then-25-year-old Orson Welles charged into Hollywood as if it were the world’s greatest toy store, directing his debut feature with such an ebullient, rule-breaking force of virtuosity that it’s as if he’d made the first American independent film. That Welles took on the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst (whom he plays a barely veiled version of), only to see his movie — and, in a way, his career — stomped by Hearst’s power, shows you that there were limits to what even a genius megalomaniac like Welles could bring off. But not many.
3
The Godfather (1972)
Riding the crest of the New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola made what is still the greatest film since the fadeout of the studio system: a classical epic of indelibly dark sweeping grandeur, and a movie that embedded itself so richly in the popular imagination that for 50 years it has spoken to audiences on every level of experience. Watching the saga of the Corleones, we’re plunged, vicariously, into a life of organized crime, in all its power and blood and influence and fear. At the same time, we’re immersed in the drama of an Italian American family who, in their dance of loyalty and rivalry and devotion, connect with us in a way that’s at once personal and primal. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and the rest of the singular cast embody their roles as if they’d been born to play them. The eternal shattering paradox of “The Godfather” is that the Corleones are at once a cozy clan of Old World romantic role models, ruthless paragons of the American dream and profoundly relatable monsters. Maybe that’s why their story became our story.
2
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Wholesome Hollywood entertainment at its most upbeat and pure, Victor Fleming’s joyous Technicolor classic has stood the test of time, gifting pleasure to multiple generations, while representing the gold standard against which all other cinematic enchantments are judged. That simple device of shifting from black and white to color when Judy Garland’s Dorothy enters the Land of Oz sets up audiences for the magical experience ahead, minting the template for the “Avatar,” “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” franchises. We marvel alongside our wide-eyed heroine as she sets off with her three new friends — and her little dog too — to prove their smarts, hearts and courage. At their most successful, movies feel like waking reveries, which is also how one might describe Dorothy’s fantastical quest. As it happens, this is how we as audiences engage with cinema, bringing every aspect of our life experience to the allegories presented on-screen, thereby making them our own. Meanwhile, in the character of the Wizard, young viewers get an essential warning about how the medium can be used to manipulate us into believing in an alternate reality.
1
Psycho (1960)
There’s hardly a frame of Alfred Hitchcock’s cataclysmic slasher masterpiece that isn’t iconic. If you don’t believe us, consider the following: Eyes. Holes. Birds. Drains. Windshield wipers. A shower. A torso. A knife. “Blood, blood!” A Victorian stairway. Mother in her rocking chair. For decades, “Psycho” enjoyed such a cosmic pop-cultural infamy that, in a funny way, its status as a work of art got overshadowed. Hailing it as Hitchcock’s greatest movie — let alone the greatest movie ever made — wouldn’t have seemed quite respectable. Yet there’s a reason that every moment in “Psycho” is iconic, and that Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, as Norman Bates and Marion Crane, became fixed in our imaginations like figures out of a dream. The entire movie, while shot on late-’50s TV sets and conceived by Hitchcock as a prank-the-audience Gothic trapdoor thriller, came to exist (and, really, it always had) on the level of riveting mythology. In 45 seconds, the shower scene rips the 20th century in half; what Hitchcock was expressing was profound — that in the modern world, the center would no longer hold. And once the movie kills off its heroine (killing off, in the process, the very idea that God will protect us), it turns into the cinema’s most hypnotic, seductive and prophetic meditation on fear, lust, innocence, violence and identity. More than perhaps any movie ever made, “Psycho” is a film you can watch again and again and again. It’s a movie that speaks to us now more than ever, because it shows us, in every teasingly sinister moment, how life itself came to feel like a fun house poised over an abyss.