What do I have to be embarrassed about now?

The biggest blind spot on my List of Shame had been Sunset Boulevard, as determined in this post.

It took me nearly two years since the date of that post, but this past Sunday, I finally watched it.

Loved it, but discussing Sunset Boulevard is not why I'm writing today.

The point of this post is to figure out what movie should now take over as The Film I Am Most Embarrassed I Haven't Seen.

I could just choose one of the remaining eight films on the list I gave you previously (I tackled Spartacus last year). To refresh your memory, they were Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, Platoon, Rocky, The Ten Commandments and West Side Story.

But I decided that since the year 2012 has seen a newly minted list of the best films of all time, I should draw from the Sight & Sound list for my new list of contenders for this (dis)honor. (And I promise I will stop talking about Sight & Sound after this.)

The problem with the Sight & Sound list is that many of the choices are very obscure, at least for your average film fan. I consider "your average film fan" to be a person who likes to see, in this order: a) most prominent new releases, b) the important older films that will deepen their perspective on the history of cinema, and then c) anything else they can get their hands on. As much as I might like to imagine myself having more pretentious ambitions than this, this is basically the type of film fan I am.

So you could say that I might be more "embarrassed" about not having seen a popular film like West Side Story or Rocky. After all, isn't this sense of embarrassment supposed to be derived from not having seen something you think you should have seen? I'm never going to be embarrassed that I haven't seen Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

So here is another one of those posts that I'm starting before knowing where it might go. What I'm going to do is go through the Sight & Sound top 250 and see which films I can legitimately describe as being embarrassed I haven't seen, then listing them below for your (and my) consideration, in the order that they appear on the list. If there's any overlap with the previous list, chosen from the more populist list of the films I haven't seen that are ranked highest by Flickchart's users, then that might really tell me something about what is "truly" my greatest blind spot.

1) Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau). The first best picture winner (sharing the award with Wings) is supposed to be an astonishing achievement. Its #5 ranking on Sight & Sound means that I should be embarrassed about not having seen it, if I'm not already.

2) Persona (1966, Ingmar Bergman). I haven't actually spent that much of my mature life as a film fan with Persona even on my radar. Maybe that's the most embarrassing part. In the past couple years, the film has come up continually. As a huge Bergman fan, I have to see it.

3) Rio Bravo (1958, Howard Hawks). This is another one that's been coming up a lot for me in the last couple years. As a man generally disinclined toward Westerns, I have not gravitated toward this film previously. I'd say it's definitely the Western I'm most embarrassed not to have seen, but there are actually others that I won't name here, in order to keep my shame at a minimum. 

4) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone). And speaking of Westerns I haven't seen ... this one is up there as well.

5) Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffth). Griffith was a racist m-er f-er, but I still feel like I should have seen this.

6) Once Upon a Time in America (1983, Sergio Leone). Wait, these are both by Sergio Leone? I didn't realize there was a connection between them, and in fact, I think I confuse the two of them. I'm sure they will cancel each other out, but I will list them both.

7) King Kong (1933, Merian Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack). This was actually one I thought of before I started going through the list. Probably one of the most iconic films I have never seen, if not the best. 

8) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964, Jacques Demy). Heard that this is wonderful. I guess it doesn't really scream out "embarrassing" if you haven't seen it. I guess I am still including it here.

9) The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks). This has come up a lot recently for me, especially since I just saw another incarnation of Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.

And Sight & Sound yielded exactly nine unseen choices I thought would qualify as embarrassing, falling short of the ten I wanted. Of course, none of those titles cross over with the titles I considered previously. Which I guess demonstrates either a) my previous success at watching the populist films on the Sight & Sound list, or b) the list's true divergence from what is really populist (as determined on such sites as Flickchart).

Which kind of brings me back to square one.

So, I really need your help. Not only do I want to find the one of these 17 choices that is my new Greatest Blind Spot, but I also want to develop a pecking order, so I don't need to keep pointlessly revisiting this topic time and again. In fact, one of the main reasons I revisited it this time was that it did take me nearly two years to watch Sunset Boulevard. Once we figure out which of these movies I need to see most, I might end up watching it two weeks from now, instead of two years.

What say you? The choices again are:

The Big Sleep
Gandhi
Intolerance
King Kong 
The Last Emperor
Mary Poppins
My Fair Lady
Once Upon a Time in America
Once Upon a Time in the West
Persona
Platoon
Rio Bravo
Rocky
Sunrise
The Ten Commandments
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
West Side Story

Of course, I've also made this as murky as possible by drawing a distinction between "the best movies I haven't seen" and "the movies it's most embarrassing I haven't seen."

Make of it what you will. That's the great thing about loving movies. Not only can we rarely agree on the best movies, we can rarely even agree on the best terms to discuss those movies ...

Sunset Boulevard is taunting me

Remember this post? When I was trying to figure out the movie I should be most ashamed of not having seen?

The results from the comments section told me unambiguously that Sunset Boulevard was at the top of my List of Shame.

And just lately, the universe has started to wave it in my face.

First it was when going through the archives of old Filmspotting podcasts. Having come in at episode #347, I decided to go back and dig through some of what I missed, and episode #300 seemed like a good place to start (if I wasn't going to start at episode #1, that is). Why episode #300? Well, they were listing their favorite movies of the decade encompassing 2000 to 2009, and since I engaged in an activity like that myself, I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast.

Episode #301? The beginning of their Billy Wilder marathon, with Sunset Boulevard as the first film up for discussion.

Knowing how much I want to cross this movie off my list of shame, I stopped listening to the podcast then and there, and haven't resumed. It's not that I expect to actually watch Sunset Boulevard before I resume the podcast, but I do expect to potentially fast forward through the discussion -- despite my statements to the contrary in this post.

Then just now I received my weekly email from Cinespia, which tells me which movie they're showing this Saturday night in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. That may sound morbid, but it's actually a very wholesome Saturday evening activity, often involving a picnic, bottles of wine, and even maybe the children, assuming that none of those elements contradict each other. In two previous visits, I've seen The Philadelphia Story and Lolita.

This Saturday? You guessed it: Sunset Boulevard.

And what a terrific location it would be to watch this consummately Hollywood movie.

I forwarded the email to my wife, intending to suggest that we go. Yes, we have a son who is not quite two, but we took him to an evening screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark last August, when he was not quite one. If it worked then, it could work now.

But before I even had the chance to type anything out, I remembered that she'd be exhausted from having to work all day Saturday. Not to mention that my son has been sick, so we probably shouldn't expose him to such things anyway. So instead my email was a "bad timing, eh?" type sentiment.

Sunset Boulevard, soon, you will be mine.