It's Goodfellas, but not that good...

The contenders to the title of best ever film are a topic of endless debate. It is also a cheap way to get publicity for your magazine title when you publish your list.

Far from discouraging the cheap publicity Netcoms dot com is happy to add to the debate, with the news that Total Film had added its two admission tickets to the debate. While controversy over choices, helps the publicity, Total Film have made some particularly strange choices.

The top 25 is below:

1. Goodfellas
2. Vertigo
3. Jaws
4. Fight Club
5. The Godfather: Part II
6. Citizen Kane
7. Tokyo Story
8. The Empire Strikes Back
9. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
10. His Girl Friday
11. Persona
12. Chinatown
13. Manhattan
14. Taxi Driver
15. It's a Wonderful Life
16. The Apartment
17. Once Upon A Time In The West
18. All About Eve
19. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
20. Apocalypse Now
21. Crash
22. Sunrise
23. The Godfather
24. Rear Window
25. Sunset Boulevard

Among the more dubious elements to this list:

• How is filler The Empire Strikes Back the top Star Wars film rather than the ground-breaking original?
• And on that note, how can the me-too Goodfellas top its inspiration, The Godfather?
• Why is the Lord of the Rings in as a trilogy wheras The Godfather is not?
• And how did Crash and Fight Club even make the list?

I could understand it if it was compiled by the general public and subject to the inconsistencies of fashion and good taste, but apparently the list was compiled by the editorial staff.

In truth, if the top 5 contained all the usual suspects (in fact, where is The Usual Suspects in this list?), such as Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Casablanca, it would be less newsworthy and wouldn't be the subject of posts like this extending its reach online.

Ever feel like you've been had?

No more, no less, that's the Magic Numbers

Mercury Music prize nominees the Magic Numbers made history when they became the first band to walk out of Top of the Pops. The band is made up of two brothers and two sisters, two of whom are a little larger than your average pop star.

Presenter Richard Bacon introduced the band with the quip: “What do you get when you put two brothers and two sisters in a band? A big fat melting pot.”

Insulted, the band walked off at the gibe about their weight. Bacon has since said that he was 'mortified' and that 'big' referred to their status not their weight.

Who is he trying to kid? The joke is typical Bacon humour, the former Blue Peter presenter who went onto star on the firmly tongue-in-cheek big breakfast and the ever sincere art form that is commercial radio.

Ironically, the furore over the walk out has done the band no harm both in terms of publicity and credibility. It has become a major talking point over the web, showing once again the internet's ability to extend the shelf life of a story and provide those that missed it with the ability to search for all the juicy details.

Perhaps I could be a contender after all

After my not so recent post on helping this site to reach 'contender' status on Marketleap's link popularity checker, the site's number of incoming links has continued to grow unabated. Despite a shameful absence of recent posts, the site has now gone over the 'magic' 2,000 links mark.

This has resulted in a noticable increase in traffic and no doubt readers concluding that the blogger has gone AWOL (ahem). Of particular fascination to my recent visitors has been the traffic banker that is Janet Jackson's breasts, despite this being one of my oldest and silliest posts.

While concluding that writing less posts has resulted in more traffic is really not healthy to the continued existance of this blog, it has been interesting to see how existing links proliferate over time. Much of this is due to this blog appearing on the blogroll of several long suffering bloggers. As they continue to post at a comparatively prolific rate, so the number of links has increased. No doubt this post will return the favour somewhat to those regulars on my blogroll.