2009 Movie Survey: Results!

At long last, the moment you've been waiting for: the results of this year's waste-of-time movie survey! *confetti*

This was by far the most successful of the half-dozen such polls I've run over the years: a total of 69 top-ten lists were turned in and tabulated, with 417 different movies nominated, ranging from Across the Universe to Zoolander. Thank you so, so much to everyone who took the time to respond! Thanks also to everyone who pimped this survey out in your own journals; better than half of the responses came from non-regular readers of this forum. (If you can, you might want to point to these results as well, in case they'd otherwise miss the fruits of their labors.)

The Movies: 417 different movies were nominated, from Across the Universe to Zoolander. The range of movies named is truly stunning—because the definition of "top ten" was left to the respondents, lists included everything from classics to "comfort movies" to critic's darlings to hip indie fare, often all within the same list. A few nominees did have to be disqualified according to the rules, either because they were made-for-TV titles that never made theatres, or because an entire series was named rather than an individual title. (This rule was added after the debacle of the 2007 poll, when several people insisted that The Lord of the Rings is a single film regardless of what the Oscars folks say, while others not only found it to be three separate films but named all three of them in separate slots, making scoring impossible. In the interest of fairness, if all of this year's nominations for any of the LotR films were combined with all votes for the trilogy as a whole, Lord of the Rings would be ranked at #11 on the final list.)

Scoring: This year, I used a scoring system based on the one used by Rolling Stone for their massive artist surveys. Movies were first ranked according to total number of votes; from there, ties were broken by assigning points according to how high their namers ranked them. A #1 vote would be worth 20 points; a #2 would be 10 (20/2); a #3 would be 6 2/3 (20/3), and so on down to 2 points for a #10 listing. Items that share a ranking number on the list below are tied at that number. (In all fairness, I perhaps should have cut the list off at 50, since everything from #54 on down received exactly two votes, making their inclusion more subject to voters' peculiar whims, but the full top 100 is included for interest's sake.)

The Winner: Drumroll, please...

*rumblerumble*

Thank you. This year's winner: The Princess Bride, for the second poll in a row. Unlike the last poll's three-way slugfest for first, however, The Princess Bride has won with a decisive blowout victory: 22 votes received, appearing on nearly a third of the counted ballots, with Casablanca in a distant second with 15.

here follows the top 100 list, as chosen by you, the readers. If you have any speific questions about the results, don't hesitate to ask. Thank you all again!


1) The Princess Bride [1987, dir: Rob Reiner]
2) Casablanca [1942, dir: Michael Curtiz]
3) Star Wars [1977, dir: George Lucas]
4) The Shawshank Redemption [1994, dir: Frank Darabont]
5) Citizen Kane [1941, dir: Orson Welles]
6) The Godfather [1972, dir: Francis Ford Coppola]
7) Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1975, dir: Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam]
8) Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981, dir: Steven Spielberg]
9) The Fifth Element [1997, dir: Luc Besson]
10) The Wizard of Oz [1939, dir: Victor Fleming]
11) Fight Club [1999, dir: David Fincher]
12) Pulp Fiction [1994, dir: Quentin Tarantino]
13) Blade Runner [1982, dir: Ridley Scott]
14) Wall-E [2008, dir: Andrew Stanton]
15) Boondock Saints [1999, dir: Troy Duffy]
16) The Matrix [1999, dir: Andy and Larry Wachowski]
17) Singin' in the Rain [, dir: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen]
18) 12 Angry Men [1957, dir: Sidney Lumet]
19) Lawrence of Arabia [1962, dir: David Lean]
20) Beauty and the Beast [1991, dir: Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise]
21) Clerks [1994, dir: Kevin Smith]
22) Amélie (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain) [2001, dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet]
23) To Kill a Mockingbird [1962, dir: Robert Mulligan]
24) Gone with the Wind [1939, dir: Victor Fleming]
25) When Harry Met Sally... [1989, dir: Rob Reiner]
26) Moulin Rouge! [2001, dir: Baz Luhrmann]
27) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade [, dir: Steven Spielberg]
28) V for Vendetta [2005, dir: James McTeigue]
29) Harold and Maude [1971, dir: Hal Ashby]
30) The Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) [1954, dir: Akira Kurosawa]
31) Brazil [1985, dir: Terry Gilliam]
32) Donnie Darko [2001, dir: Richard Kelly]
33) The Sound of Music [1965, dir: Robert Wise]
34) Goodfellas [1990, dir: Martin Scorsese]
35) Schindler's List [1993, dir: Steven Spieberg]
36) Return of the Jedi [1993, dir: Richard Marquand]
37) Kissed [1996, dir: Lynne Stopkewich]
38) Breakfast at Tiffany's [1961, dir: Blake Edwards]
39) O Brother Where Art Thou? [2000, dir: Joel Coen]
40) Start Trek II: The Wrath of Khan [1982, dir: Nicholas Meyer]
41) It's a Wonderful Life [1946, dir: Frank Capra]
42) Jaws [1975, dir: Steven Spielberg]
43) Iron Man [2008, dir: Jon Favreau]
44) Ghost Busters [1984, dir: Ivan Reitman]
45) Rear Window [1954, dir: Alfred Hitchcock]
46) Metropolis [1927, dir: Fritz Lang]
47) Vertigo [1958, dir: Alfred Hitchcock]
48) The African Queen [1951, dir: John Huston]
49) Alien [1979, dir: Ridley Scott]
50) Big Fish [2003, dir: Tim Burton]
( 51-100 )