Sicko director Michael Moore submitted a question to the CNN/YouTube debate, but it didn’t make the final cut. (Hmmm….wonder why?) After the debates, he posted his question–along with a lengthy explication–at the Huffington Post.

I’m usually notoriously hard on spoiler Nazis. I know I’m in the minority on this–I recently found myself embroiled in a pseudo-hostile Twitter fight between John Brownlee and Joel Johnson because of it– but my theory is that if you care enough whatever is being spoiled, your investment should be able to withstand the revelation of a simple plot point.

Still, I think what Pete Vonder Haar is doing sounds intriguing. The FilmThreat writer has been intentionally avoiding reading set reports and watching trailers for new films, in order to preserve a sense of excitement for the film’s eventual release. Now, Vonder Haar is specifically attempting to avoid acquiring any pre-release information on the fourth Indiana Jones film, which is currently shooting in New Haven for a May 2008 release. “Call me a crazy insane crazy person,” Vonder Haar writes, “But I’d like to not know how the movie is going to end (or every major plot twist, or the big action sequences, or the climactic one-liner) before I actually go see it.”

In a great post at Movie Marketing Madness, Chris Thilk explains how Vonder Haar’s information abstinence stands in direct defiance of what the typical studio marketing campaign tries to achieve.

[S]ince ’surprise’ is in some people’s minds synonymous with ‘displeasure’ … the campaign creators, then, want the movie to feel familiar and safe so as not to scare anyone off. That’s why these casting announcements for the major flicks are broadcast far and wide, and it’s why studios on some level like Web sites that post spoilers. Those plot points reduce the odds of the movie being seen as an unknown quantity by the audience, upping the comfort factor as well as, hopefully, the subsequent desire to see the film.

So the studios are actually engineering a world in which the concept of spoilers–and the conflicting drives to either pursue or avoid them–becomes virtually meaningless. This makes Vonder Haar’s mission of interest on two levels: not only is it an effort on the part of a professional critic to recapture the enthusiasm of fandom, but it’s also a subtle form of protest.

This week, the American Film Institute announced a number of changes to their list of The 100 Greatest Films Ever Made Anywhere in the World (But Mostly In Hollywood) Of All Time (But Mostly Since The Dawn Of Sound). Of course, it’s a hot topic with us film bloggers. Here’s a tour through just a few of the many responses.

Ever the polemicist, The Reeler weighs in briefly just to make sure anyone who finds any kind fun (or even masochistic pleasure/frustration) in this sort of thing ends up feeling like a total moron:

I know this is supposed to be rooted in the spirit of discussion, so here we are. Let’s discuss how reading this list is like letting your grandpa yawn in your face — the grandpa on your stepmother’s side, the one you see once a year at some booze-fueled holiday and who pretends to “get it” while foisting his little arbitrary chestnuts of counsel and tradition on you. Except instead of an annual visit, you get one per decade, all joint aches, halitosis and constipation…

Although, in what would seem to be a break from tradition for our friend Mr. VanAirsdale, he eventually allows that a list of “the 100 best forgotten films” might be permissable.

Pretty much everyone else focuses on the actual movies Roger Ebert comes out of recovery to declare Fargo’s omission “unthinkable.” He continues, on a more wistful note: “New films become old films so fast. Raging Bull came out 27 years ago. It’s older than Casablanca (No. 3) was when I became a film critic.”

At NewCritics, M.A. Peel takes a close look at changes to the top ten. Raging Bull’s twenty slot jump to #4, Peel says, “makes sense.” Chuck Tyron laments that The Conversation, His Girl Friday, 25th Hour, Dark City, and Groundhog Day were snubbed, and he’d “substitute Robert Altman\’s Short Cuts for Nashville.”

Jeffrey Wells tries to have it both ways, first dismissing AFI for “whorishly shopping its once- distinguished brand on the tube for years with best-this and best-that presentations, and none of their efforts at self-promotion signifies a damn thing (except for their own diminishment)” … and then blurbing a few of “the 23 films that have vanished since the last time AFI published this list, in 1998. Example: of An American in Paris, which fell from #68 into oblivion, Wells says, “[W]ith each passing year, the obviously gifted Gene Kelly has seemed more and more un-genuine and absolutely desperate in his need to be loved.” Perhaps by way of compensation, AFI shuffled Singing in the Rain up from #10 to #5.

Ed Copeland qualifies the exercise as “silly” before admitting he finds the revised list to be “a vast improvement over the first version.” He’s got both lists on his site.

Most everyone notes a lack of diversity, although I don’t know how shocking it is that an industry run overwhelmingly by white men would declare that 99 of the 100 best films ever were directed by white men (Do the Right Thing came in at #96). In related news, the Aliance of Women Film Journalists has announced that they’ll produce their own list. I’m sure The Reeler will be pleased.

Above: Alonzo Mosley’s list-making spoof, 100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers

Hopwood DePree, screenwriter and co-founder for the Waterfront Film Festival, wraps up Sundance. Paul, Dave and Kevin debate questions like, who is The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? How do they pick a winner? Are losers chosen so they make better films? What is up with Dreamgirls among other bizarre anomalies of the 2007 Oscars?

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