Every once in a while Reddit conducts these movie polls that gather lots of votes from mainstream moviegoers, and most of the time, the end result is mixed at best, such as in last week's poll where Denis Villeneuve was voted as today's best working director.
This time around Redditor voters have compiled over 16,000 votes in a poll on the best directorial debut of all-time. I mean, most sane, well-informed, cinematically well-brushed film enthusiasts would say it's Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," no contest, with maybe "Night of the Hunter" at a close second. But not the folks over at Reddit. Welles' 1941 landmark finished second in favor of ... Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs." Yikes. This begs me to ask the question, how fucked is the future of cinema if millennials can't even vote for the most obvious choice in a poll? This poll should not have even existed. It's "Kane" by a landslide if you ask any well-seasoned cinephile. Even worse, the top 15 includes the likes of "John Wick," "Deadpool," "District 9," "Nightcrawler," "Get Out," and "Ex-Machina." All good to great movies, I won't argue with that, but clearly these voters have not been well-read with film history pre-1990s.
My own list would include:
(1) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), (2) Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton), (3) Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard) (4) The Maltese Falcon (John Huston), (5) 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet), (6) Badlands (Terrence Malick), (7) Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais), (8) Erasherhead (David Lynch), (9) Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino) (10) Night of the Living Dead (George Romero (10) The 400 Blows (Francois Truffault) (11) Son of Saul (Lazlo Nemes) (12) Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze) (13) Blood Simple (Joel Coen) (14) The Producers (Mel Brooks) (15) Blue Collar (Paul Schrader)
