Another day, another 100-best list

This one, from Total Film, ranks the 100 Greatest Directors of All Time. I'll save you a little work: Alfred Hitchcock at #1, fine, whatever. Scorsese at #2, Spielberg at #3... okay... Hawks at #4, Welles at #6, Ingmar Bergman at #7 (thanks for dying, Ingmar; it got you into Total Film's Top Ten).

Then we get squiggy. Peter Jackson (above left) at #9. David Fincher at #10.

Say what?

Those two above Kurosawa (#11), Michael Powell (#15), Jean Renoir (#23, above right), Jean-Pierre Melville (#29), Bunuel (#30), Ozu (#33, for pete's sakes), Leone, Truffaut, Herzog, Kieslowski, Lang, Fuller, Nick Ray, Satyajit Ray, Jean-luc Godard, Bresson, Eisenstein, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Buster Keaton, D.W. frickin' Griffith (#91, right below Curtis Hanson).

Really? "Lord of the Rings" and "Fight Club" over the combined filmographies of all those other directors? Dudes, I know their movies like totally blew you away, but are your baseball caps actually screwed on backwards that tight?

But the whole list is like that: modern entertainers and provocateurs mixed willy-nilly with classic greybeards and foreign visionaries. It's the ADHD approach to film history and consequently rates cultural sensation and commercial success as equal variables to insight, art, craft, and lasting impact in the Total Film algorithm. Yep, Ozu's "Ohayo" and Renoir's "The River" came out way, way back in the 1950s. They're still greater -- by which I mean better directed -- than anything Jackson and Fincher have done to date.

The irony is that Jackson and Fincher would be the first to agree.