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Comment by RKoutnik | Hacker News Reader

Well done, in both data crunching and visualizing. I'd love to revisit this in 15 years and see what modern films held up. I doubt TDKR will last (even for being a decent movie). Avatar and TDK will probably continue to be notable films, as both were historic points in film.

The only one I was surprised to see on there was Juno. I've never seen it, is it really that notable?

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Avatar and TDK historic points in film. AKA Dancing with Smurfs, and The Movie With More Plot Holes Than The Titanic. Hum, I beg to disagree.

Overall, I got a good laugh from the list. Seriously, this list should be called "things white US kids (of my age, granted) like". Rather than a history of cinema, it belongs more in the "comedy generated by computer" genre. Exhibit one: City Lights isn't there. Exhibit two: Modern Times isn't there. No Le Voyage dans la Lune, no Man With Camera, no Great Train Robbery, Rashomon isn't cool enough to make the list, Vertigo is too weird, and Battleship Potemkin is, like, too commie, you know. The final straws would be Independence Day and It's a Wonderful Life making the list.

I mean, On the Waterfront looks like it's very good (I haven't seen it), but, but, it was released in the same year than motherfucking Seven Samurai!

Seven Samurai is not an unambiguously better movie than On the Waterfront. I hate Elia Kazan as much as the next guy for what he did, but he was a historic talent directing historic talent, making snitching on the working man to the bosses seem positively heroic. Foreign things aren't always better.

You can make a guess for how things held up in the past by looking at some of the Google Books datasets, though that does have some problems. One problem is that it's completely unnormalized (the proportion of the dataset that is made up of different kinds of books changes over time), and another is that you can't really search for movie titles that are also names of anything else, or common English words, without getting other stuff in the results.

But with those caveats it can be fun to play around with: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Birth+of+a+Nati...

> The only one I was surprised to see on there was Juno. I've never seen it, is it really that notable?

No. It was zeitgeisty in the way that some films are, and it got a lot of buzz among important demographics, but it's not "important".

I think that Juno is notable mostly as one of the most commercially successful "indie" films. It exposed a lot of mainstream audiences to films with a lower budget.

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