What people know when they say they know movies.
Our friends at Time Out New York have whipped up a neat little alt-canon of 25 films most people wouldn't think of as essential to cinematic knowledge in the way of "Citizen Kane" or "Battleship Potemkin" but which, according to them, should be. Now, I applaud the TONY crew for digging deep into their personal loves and not pandering one bit: on their list, relatively well-known fare like "Barry Lyndon" rubs shoulders with rarities like Mikio Naruse's 1964 "Yearning." But mostly the alt-canon got me thinking about how dreary the idea of "canon" can be as a selection of the Movies That Changed Cinema Forever. When I was a freshman at NYU's film school, I took the mandatory "Language of Film" class, which is supposed to teach you how to watch and analyze films; in practice, it's more a crash course in film history tailored to the taste of whomever...
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