The misanthrope's corner.

I WAS planning to write about the Y2K crisis this time, but then I stopped by my new post-office box and found a batch of letters wanting to know my opinion of the American Film Institute's ''100 Best Movies.'' Ask and ye shall receive. I'll start with the ones I hate.

Citizen Kane: Too long, too dark, too talky, too arty. Orson Welles was a ponderous overrated bore, the cinematic equivalent of William Faulkner.

The Maltese Falcon: Does anybody really know what was going on? I don't. It's so overplotted that following it is like following Ariadne through the labyrinth after she runs out of string.

The Grapes of Wrath: Wherever there's a democrat singin' the praises of the People, I'll be there. It's not Ma Joad we revere, but the actress who portrayed her, Jane Darwell, Hollywood's premier commanding dowager. In the book, Ma was as primitive as the rest of the family, barring only Grandpa, who masturbated at the table.

The movie is a love letter to the New Deal. When the mistreated Joads arrive at the migrant labor camp run by the Department of Agriculture, the administrator is so kind and polite that they can only stare at him in poleaxed disbelief. As they stand there with their jaws sagging, he explains how self-government in the camp works. To me his speech is worse than any abuse the Joads have endured. The smiley officiousness that comes over him as he rattles off a list of mandatory committees recalls that classic moment in mimicry when the parodied bureaucrat says, ''I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.''

Forrest Gump: It came out after I had stopped going to the movies because of the cretins in the audience, but by the time it ran on television Pat Buchanan had ruined it for me with his columns linking truth, honor, patriotism, pure love, home, and mother to room-temperature IQs.

This is a conservative movie, my friend. The smart people do stupid things and the stupid people do smart things, proving that the elitists don't know half as much as the working-class guys named McGowan, Schultz, Hernandez, Lucetti, and Leroy Johnson in that foxhole out in Nam who don't think it's funny that Forrest got confused and mooned the President at the Medal of Honor ceremony because it's love of God and country that counts, not making Phi Beta Kappa at Berkeley with a bunch of peacenik intellectuals.

Buchanan followed his Gump either - or with another in praise of Sgt. Alvin York, who ''never got out of the third grade'' and was not a member of the ''cognitive elite.'' Alger Hiss was, therefore he committed treason. It stands to reason, folks, because ''In America, character, not IQ, is destiny.''

Wherever there's a populist beatin' up on brains, I'll be there. Both of these columns came out in 1994, giving me two years to resolve never to vote for Buchanan, whom I once adored, and a full three years to nurse my loathing of a movie I finally got to see.

Identifying conservative movies is a tricky business. They are loosely defined as those in which John Wayne says ''We're goin' in'' and ''We're movin' out'' at least once each, but these scripts usually center around a spoiled rich boy who is forced to shape up. He always does, and even becomes a hero, but he's invariably rich.

Another misleading genre is the traditional-values extravaganza featuring the banker with a heart of gold who approves loans with no collateral so that the little people can own their own homes. Two such films made the 100 Best list.

It's a Wonderful Life: As you no doubt guessed, this is a movie I love to hate, but not for the reasons you thought. I can take the unceasing self-sacrifice, I can take the shambling good cheer, I can even take the angel, but that raffish Building & Loan reminds me of the Women's Bank of early feminism.

The Best Years of Our Lives: Democratized by the army, banker Frederic March abandons the Hooverish fiscal prudence of his pre-war career and makes an unsecured loan to a penniless fellow veteran who wants to buy a farm. Defending his new practices in a speech at a financial banquet, he delivers a drunken harangue on the heartlessness of ''stuffed shirts'' who don't believe in humanitarian lending.

Ayn Rand wanted to cite this as anti-capitalist propaganda when she was called as a friendly witness by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Richard Nixon supported her, but Parnell Thomas, afraid to criticize such a popular movie, limited her testimony to Song of Russia, a heavy-handed and comically obvious piece of Communist propaganda that flopped at the box office.

YOU already have a pretty good idea of the kind of movies I like, but two of my more obscure favorites did not make the 100 Best.

Sylvia: A 1965 black-and-white starring Carroll Baker as an intellectual prostitute with a character of gold. A daughter of the slums, she pulls herself up by her library card, doing whatever she has to do but reading the whole while -- even in the brothel parlor as she waits for her next john. When her friend is run over and needs a lifesaving operation, Sylvia risks the ultimate degradation to pay the medical bills. Emerging triumphant and as self-contained as ever, she and the friend escape the life and Sylvia becomes a respected poet. This movie is unsurpassed as a statement of female autonomy and sisterhood but there's not a word in feminist film critiques about it.

Theater of Blood: A 1973 British black comedy starring Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor who murders, one by one, the critics who panned him, copying the murders from the plays. One is beheaded in his sleep, one is drowned in a barrel at a wine-tasting, and the frustrated spinster who flirts with gay men is electrocuted under the dryer as Price, disguised as a hairdresser, recites Joan of Arc's death sentence from Henry VI, Part I: ''Because she is a maid, spare for no fagots, let there be enow.''

Miss King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, Va. 22404.