One of the 50 best movies of all time? Really??

Rating: 5/10 (31 December 2009)

"The Departed" isn't a bad movie, but it's certainly not one of the best movies ever made, yet as of this writing it is #49 on IMDb's Top 250-- a list which reveals far more about the reviewers than the films.
One look at the Top 250 is enough to make any cineaste curse transient gods like Michael Bay and the Wachowskis. The list is so slanted toward movies that are both American and recent that a serious list of excluded movies-- from 1919's "Broken Blossoms" to 1939's "Rules of the Game" to 1959's "400 Blows" -- makes the Top 250 look downright silly. How silly? It includes the following, all of which have good qualities but nothing approaching best-ever levels: Inglourious Basterds, The Prestige, District 9, Kill Bill I, V for Vendetta, In Bruges, Benjamin Button, Big Fish, Crash, and an Eastwood quadruple-threat, Gran Torino, Changeling, Million Dollar Baby, and Mystic River. (News flash: Eastwood is as talented a director as he was an actor.)
Ranking "The Departed" at #49 is particularly strange because it isn't even as good as the Hong Kong original, "Infernal Affairs" (2002), which lands at No. 249. (Foreign films take a real beating on this list, which is why I cite many non-American filmmakers here. The USA is, after all, only one of more than 150 countries producing movies.) "The Departed" at #49 is also odd because it's far from the best work of any of the actors-- Damon, DiCaprio, Nicholson, Winstone, Farmiga. (As for Oscar-nominee Marky Wahlberg, all I can ask is WTF. His apparent facial paralysis wasn't a particular handicap in his role as Sgt. Dignam, maybe that's why he was lauded. All he had to do was deliver profanities, but even at that Wahlberg is to R. Lee Ermey as Bud Lite is to Guinness Stout.)
It's probably also true (for obvious reasons) that a lot of IMDb-ers have mainly seen movies made after they were born, and mainly American movies besides. No wonder they produce a list as lame as the Top 250. A lot of young people I know categorically dismiss black-and-white movies, which is probably a fair reflection of the number of idiotic fusspots in the world. But if you've never seen Gregg Toland's cinematography, how can you evaluate Wally Pfister's? One 20ish couple I know-- movie buffs who are well-read and savvy-- haven't even seen The Third Man or Grand Illusion or Rashomon, so I find it really impossible to take their uneducated opinions about film seriously. I also wonder if they really are fans. I don't see how they can be if they're not searching out Ozu and Leone and Lubitsch.
Ultimately, IMDb's Top 250 is a good list if your teeth need grinding. As for the actual written reviews-- some of which are very very good-- the only profitable way I've found to read them is to customize them by eliminating all ratings of 1 and 10. Try it. It's an astonishingly effective filter because about half the reviewers don't seem to know that numbers 2 through 9 even exist. I just checked an unquestionably average-to-above-average film, "Rushmore": it had 592 comments-- and 452 (76%!) rated it 1 or 10.