Piousbox

The IMDB Top 250 Movie List
by Miles Mathis
First published August 29, 2022
No, last year's Lansky isn't on the top 250 list, but that picture stands as a teaser, since this paper spun
out in a direction I didn't see coming in. Isn't that so often the case?
With each passing year I realize more and more what an enormous waste Hollywood has been.
Hundreds of thousands of films produced in the past century, and only a handful of them worth
watching. I have been doing searches like “best films of 1980”, hoping to be reminded of some old
film I haven't seen in a while, but in each year I find only one or two worth watching, if I am lucky.
Sometimes entire years are a pass. This despite some 15,000 feature films being made every year
worldwide (before Covid). It is sort of like TV: thousands of channels and nothing is on worth
watching.
I just saw a preview of the best upcoming films of 2022 and 2023, and only one looked watchable.
That would be the last one, the Banshees of Inisherin, reuniting Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson
from In Bruges. The rest of the trailers were cringe.
So I finally went to IMDB to check out their list of the top 250 feature films of all time, based on
viewer ratings. There must be at least 25,000 votes for a film to be included, but the list still looks
padded, since Interstellar comes in at #27 with an 8.6 rating. How is that possible? It ranks just above
Star Wars at #28. Tell me bots aren't involved here. Interstellar is a total trainwreck in every way
from the first frame, and should be rated about 3. Others in that “voted up by CIA bots” include
Inception at #13, Coco at #76, Inglourious Basterds at #77, and Citizen Kane at #95.
I counted only about 30 films I would recommend or watch again, which isn't too good since these are
supposed to be the best of all time, all rated above 8. A huge number of them I immediately crossed
off as obvious war or history propaganda, selling us false narratives. Even some of those I would
recommend fall into that category, including The Sound of Music. But since the propaganda there is
incidental and fairly subtle, I let it pass. Even the number one film, The Shawshank Redemption, is
prison propaganda, meant to scare you straight. Or, to be more accurate, bluff you into absolute
compliance. The Godfather and all the other mob movies are history propaganda, since there never
was a mafia of that sort. That fiction was invented by J. Edgar Hoover to capture your tax dollars back
in the day, and it has only grown since then. See my recent papers on Dillinger and Capone for proof
of that. Also see below.
Since I am a Tolkien fan, you might think the LOTR films would be on my list, but they aren't. For me
they ruin the books, which are far superior, and I wish I hadn't seen them. I refused to watch the
Hobbit films.
Just for fun, I will show you my list of keepers:
12 Angry Men
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Fight Club
The Empire Strikes Back
The Matrix
It's a Wonderful Life
Star Wars
Back to the Future
Leon
Casablanca
Rear Window
Alien
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Aliens
Singin' in the Rain
Return of the Jedi
2001: A Space Odyssey
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
North by Northwest
The Sting
Die Hard
The Truman Show
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Jurassic Park
Dial M for Murder
Blade Runner
Ben-Hur
Barry Lyndon
Jaws
Network
The Wizard of OZ
Groundhog Day
The Grapes of Wrath
The Sound of Music
The Iron Giant
Now, admittedly, that list is not without big doses of propaganda, but my feeling is those films justify
their budgets despite that. The fun of watching them outweighs any other negative factor. Your
mileage may vary, and you may feel that way about some of those I nixed. This is my personal list and
I am not pretending it is anything else.
Nor are these the only 34 films I think worth watching. There are many on my list that didn't make the
top 250 at IMDB, including several Woody Allen films downlisted right now for reasons I don't have
to explain to you. I predict they will rise back up as many of these like Interstellar evaporate. Also
many others that we would no doubt find in the next 250, like Room with a View, Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid, Heaven Can Wait, Breaking Away, and Ghostbusters.
I beg you to notice that only one film on my list comes in after the year 2000. Is that really the only
film I have liked in the past 22 years? Well, no. We can go to my earlier paper on films, which I have
partially updated, where we are reminded that I also liked RED, Jane Eyre (2011), and The Hangover.
Still, it isn't much. Eclectic but very brief.
So let's return to the list at IMDB. At #17, we find Se7en, selling serial killers as real. Of course The
Silence of the Lambs at #22 is doing the same thing. The embarrassment of that almost sent our best
actor—Anthony Hopkins—into permanent retirement. Fortunately he came back for Howard's End
and Remains of the Day; though to be honest, he might as well have retired after that, staining his
legacy with crap like Nixon, Alexander, Noah, and Thor. He and Daniel Day Lewis would have been
best advised to have hung it up 20 years ago. Proof: Lincoln and Bobby. Like their American comrade
Hanks, Lewis and Hopkins have sunk to ever lower levels of propaganda, and they are still sinking.
Speaking of Hanks and fake murderers, we find The Green Mile at #26, also supporting The
Shawshank Redemption in prison propaganda. In a similar vein, we find American History X at #38,
selling fake neo-nazis, race wars, and prison propaganda. Notice that it was written by David
McKenna, supposedly from his own experience in San Diego. You have to laugh, since McKenna was
from a rich and connected family, think Terence McKenna*—probably a cousin. Both guys are
obvious spooks, with David McKenna ending up teaching film at Columbia and writing nothing but
propaganda, including the film Bully based on the 1993 murder of Bobby Kent—which of course never
happened. Compare it to the 1989 Glen Ridge “Our Guys” rapes of four years earlier, which has many
of the same points and was probably written by the same team at Langley.
At #54 we find Memento, in which we are supposed to believe two men attacked and killed a woman
while she was with her husband. The lesson, ladies? You are never safe, even when with your
husband in bed.
At #113, we find LA Confidential, which sells the Men-are-Pigs project in multiple stories. Russell
Crowe's character is obsessed with men who abuse women, since his mother was beaten to death by his
father. As is the experience of so many of us. But the main point of the movie is to sell the ridiculous
idea the LA precinct captain is corrupt and is on the verge of taking over the criminal organization of
Mickey Cohen. So this film is salting in that whole fake story from the 1940s one more time, which
was written by the same FBI fiction writers who wrote the Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel stories.
Johnny Stompanato also makes an appearance in LA Confidential, making you think he was real, when
he was nothing but another agent who did his acting job and then faked his death. Remember, he had a
famous scene with fellow actor Sean Connery, pulling a gun on him on set in England. Connery
allegedly grabbed it out of his hand. As you do. Stompanato was supposedly stabbed to death by Lana


Turner's 14-year-old daughter with a kitchen knife, which also makes no sense. I can't believe anyone
ever bought that groaner. And I remind you who Stompanato was with before he bearded Turner:
actress Helene Stanley. So we have a Stanley and a Cohen in the same paragraph here, and we only
need a Komnene for the trifecta. I will be told Stanley was only her stage name, and that she was a
Freymouth and a Seigert. But as is so often the case, she probably took her stage name from her
extended family, since she was a Stanley as well. I looked up her other two grandparents to prove that,
but she is completely scrubbed. She has a Findagrave page, but it omits her mother and all other
relatives but Stompanato.
If you aren't following me, here is the mugshot of Mickey Cohen from Wikipedia:
See any problems? Where is the side view? Why are his eyes shut? In real life, they would slap him
and retake it, telling him to keep his stinking eyes open. And why doesn't his shirt fit? The collar is
too tight, isn't it? But I guess that was the only plain, prison-looking shirt they had on set and they
were too lazy to find one that fit him. All the other ones were silk. Also, he is prisoner #1518, aces
and eights of course. I guess #1188 was considered too obvious. But since Alcatraz only had room for
336 prisoners, why would they have a prisoner number 1518? I guess they retired all previous
numbers, like football jerseys, as a nod to good sportsmanship. It would be bad for your self-esteem to
share your number with a previous murderer or rapist! And check out his signature:

Another curly girly signature, like we found with Al Capone and Eliot Ness. I joked there that if
Capone's name had had an “i” in it, he would have dotted it with a heart, and Cohen almost does that
here, as you see. It's pathetic, since Lana Turner's 14-year-old daughter had a manlier signature than
that. Do you really think the head of a crime syndicate is going to sign his name like that!
And how about this photo from 1949:
That's from a LIFE magazine photoshoot. Why shouldn't LIFE be photographing this mobster in his
closet?


Is he just coming off the golf course there? No, he is coming out of his 1958 murder trial, where I
guess he was showing the jury how he could blast out of a sandtrap with his jigger.
Here he is being visited by his wife in prison in 1951. Sure looks like 50's prison clothes to me, boss!
No plexiglas partitions or tables needed back then, just expensive wooden director's chairs. And what
prison wife doesn't bring along her camera crew from LIFE wherever she goes?


There's a funny one. How tall is that guy with him? Seven feet tall? No, he is about my size, since
Cohen was about 5'3”. Meyer Lansky was even shorter, being under 5 feet. Don't believe me about
Cohen? Well, let's try again:
That's Tony Fauci territory. So that was fun.
Also remember that Meyer Lansky was never convicted of anything. Fifty years as the mob's
accountant, and never convicted of a crime. We are supposed to believe this was because Lansky had


sexually embarrassing photos of J. Edgar Hoover. Yeah, and Hoover didn't have the reach to suppress
those in the press? C'mon! Lansky supposedly died broke in Miami in 1983. Lansky's grandson is a
Rapoport: just one more reason I distrust anyone with that name.
That's Meyer's requisite fake mugshot, shot with raking light—which they don't use—in a hat—which
isn't allowed—and seated for the side shot—also not allowed.
There are six of the seven dwarves in a “mafia line-up in 1932” with Lansky in the middle (4th). The
tallest one is about 5'4”. Lucky Luciano is the third guy.

That's Lansky with a normal sized Jew, his lawyer Moses Polakoff.
And did you know that Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano were awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom by Harry Truman in a secret ceremony 1945? They were, and the Times of Israel is proud of
it. We are told Lansky and Luciano copped the award for their work in Operation Husky, in which
they funneled information through the Sicilian mafia to Allied troops in Italy during the war. Do you
believe that? I don't. It is obvious these guys were given these awards for their work here, faking the
mafia for the benefit of the FBI, which manufactured huge budgets to fight them. It was like an Oscar
for best actor in a “real-life” drama. The Lansky fiction is still being heavily promoted, see last year's
movie Lansky, with Harvey Keitel. It bombed, but making money wasn't the point of it. The point was
to continue to sell this fake history. That is job number one of Hollywood.
Also see the 2019 graphic novel Meyer, by a Jewish author selling Lansky as a Jewish hero or mensch.
The author Jonathan Lang forgets to tell you Lansky was just another Hollywood actor, in the easiest of
roles since it required no speaking parts. All he had to do is show up and have his picture taken.
*See my comments on McKenna here.