Going Ape

Here's a nice change: a greatest-movies list that's full of...shots. The online media and culture magazine Feed recently announced results of its Jump Cuts poll of the greatest individual shots in the history of the movies. Readers watched short QuickTime clips of 20 classic movie moments ranging from 1922's Nosferatu to 1997's The Sweet Hereafter, nominated mainly by a panel of judges that included filmmakers (Grace of My Heart'sAllison Anders) and critics (Roger Ebert). And the winner is: the sequence from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in which a bone tossed in the air by an apeman gracefully changes to an orbiting space station. The clip was nominated by Ebert, who says the shot ''just struck me as a great visionary leap of the imagination — the most unexpected possible outcome of the film's opening sequence.'' Feed's editors promise that the winning clip will remain online forever ''or until we run out of space on the servers.'' Let's hope they're not using a HAL 9000.