How do you pick your Top 100 movies?
I know a lot of you have your own Top 100 movie lists. How do you achieve a rank order for that many movies when you're comparing apples and filet mignon? I mean, I can easily decide whether I liked Fellowship of the Ring more than The Two Towers, or Independence Day more than Minority Report. But how do you decide the relative ranks of Who Framed Roger Rabbit vs. Fiddler on the Roof, or Spaceballs vs. A Beautiful Mind? The genres are so different that it's almost like trying to decide if I like a sci-fi movie more than a historical novel or a Beatles album.
Any insights into your thought processes in this matter will be appreciated.
4 comments:
I'll tell you this... it was NOT easy. And even now that I have a finished list, I've been meaning to go back to it to review it and see if I still feel the same about it a while after the fact.
Here was my plan of attack on the genre vs. genre issue. As you said, you can decide fairly easily within a single category whether Movie A or Movie B is your favorite. So I broke all my movies by categories, and ranked all the comedies, all the dramas, all the action/adventures, etc. I actually even had sub-categories a little narrower than that -- slapstick comedies separate from more intellectual comedies, for example.
Then I took each of those separate 6 or 7 lists or so, set them side by side, and looked at the top movie on each list. The types of questions I'd ask myself:
* Which of these movies would I like to see again most, right now, if I had to pop one in?
* Which of these movies made the biggest impression on me when I saw it? And does any of that carry on to today?
* If I could only own one of these movies on DVD, which one would I pick?
* Which of these movies would I most enthusiastically recommend to a friend?
And I found that through these lenses, in most cases, one of the movies on the top of those lists would jump right out at me. Sorry, Memento, much as I loved you, I loved The Sixth Sense better.
That was my approach.
Thanks, that should help! I'm going to give it a try. Though I might stop at a Top 50, because I just haven't seen the range of movies that you have.
Reynolds, the guy whose fault all of this is, told me to imagine a theater with 100 screens. Now, which one do you want to see first? Okay, pick another one, pick a third, just keep going. You have to ignore genre, and eventually it's okay that Shrek is next to Reservoir Dogs.
I have found out that the "impression it made on me when I saw it" thing doesn't hold water. Lots of movies that were "firsts" for Hollywood or me just aren't that good movies. Sometimes you're a real innovator when you do a "first," and sometimes you're just the guy that did it before everybody else.
But the most important thing is: It's your list! Even if Alf is on top! I wish we had a good way to post and maintain our movie lists on the web, because they make lousy blog posts. Ah well.
I didn't take it TOO seriously. Like Evan, a couple of questions helped whittle it down but any list like this is subjective to you and the mood you're in when you make it. I was happy have it it be snapshot of the day I made it.
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