How to Make a Top Ten List?

Over the weekend I saw Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton and was quite impressed: soulful, troubling, gripping --even thrilling in a mature way. A film about adults for adults! (God, I love the Fall / God, I hate Hollywood release patterns that don't give that love any competition) It got me to thinking about the impending critical top ten lists. They start in late November/early December beginning with the long lead magazine journalists or junket blurb whores who want their list out there for quotation right away. Which movies will rise up as consensus favorites this year? Which, though greeted warmly on release, will be surprise no shows?

Of the movies I don't share consensus opinion on I've already prepared myself to witness a terrific showing from Knocked Up (zeitgeist movies always do well in year-end tallies) but I don't mind terribly much. It's not a bad movie. The bad movies I do fear in terms of year end hoopla are 300 and Waitress. The first will be boosted by its visual spectacle (no argument that it's eye-popping) and rationalized by crowd pleaser status and the second? I'll probably make too many enemies if I hammer away at that. I'll just say that I've never in my life seen such inept filmmaking rewarded with nearly unanimous thumbs up... and real love, too. Weird.

My screening of Michael Clayton on Saturday got me excited about whittling away at my own top ten list and my year end Film Bitch Awards. I've got 15 favorites at the moment... (shown in alpha order)

But it's only mid October there are plenty more contenders yet to see including (in rough order of release): 30 Days of Night, Gone Baby Gone, Things We Lost in the Fire, American Gangster, Southland Tales, Love in the Time of Cholera, Beowulf, Enchanted, The Savages, Atonement, The Golden Compass, Youth Without Youth, Cassandras Dream and There Will Be Blood

So I thought I'd address one readers very specific questions about the listing process, we're digging way into the dirt investigating the very soil of the list... so if you're at all list-phobic or navel-gazing averse, please run away to other places. Now

Q: There are so many performance driven films. For example, in terms of artistic merit, I would tend to think you'd agree The Departed is a superior achievement to The Devil Wears Prada. But it scored higher on your Top 10. Did the wicked combo of Streep/Blunt help place it there? In retrospect I've felt hesitant about ranking Unfaithful as high as I did in 2002- a choice based mostly on the work of a radiant Diane Lane. In other words, do your top ten lists represent the film's which, at the time, you believed to be the most superior quality film or merely a ranking of your love for each. I guess it's the old admire versus love argument. I got it; if it came down to The Departed and The Devil Wears Prada, and you could decide which film would be crowded the "Best" by AMPAS, which would you pick?

A: Admire vs. love is always the issue, yes. With the cream of the crop it's both and there's no conflict. Yet beyond the top few films each year, the loved and the admired have to fight it out --wrestle it out in the nude playfully: everyone wins! I've trained myself to honor the love or the "rewatchables" (for example: I really wish I’d place Mean Girls higher in its year) because so much of what passes for "best" in any awards situation is, one senses, the groups or the individual critics effort to label something as "important" I think this is detrimental to true movie loving because what it does is place genres in an unnatural hierarchy (a movie is not automatically better because it has a more serious or important subject) and it devalues the intangibles of a connection you can feel for a movie in favor of something more measureable like great technical skill.

I’m avoiding the Departed / Devil question. But I’m SO pleased that The Departed won the Oscar.

Q: If tomorrow you saw a film from, oh 2005, that you'd missed and now believe to be one of 05's top 5 films, would you change your list?

A: My current policy is to never change past "best of year" articles. They're time capsules. I do however change the top tens in terms of simple list format. I'm sometimes horrified when I go back and realize how whack my initial reaction was.

top ten lists: 2000 / 2001 / 2002 / 2003 / 2004 / 2005 / 2006

Q: In the past six years has there been a case were you viewed one film to be your favorite and another you felt was the actual "overall" best?

A: No. The #1 is always that happy wedding of both, or else it wouldn't be #1

Q: When the day finally arrives for your "Top 10 of the Decade", a day I look forward to with indescribable fervor, would you rank a film which placed lower than another of that respective year higher in the "Decade" top 10?

A: Your excitement for my list-making warms the cockles of my heart. I live to list and I'm happy that my obsessive compulsive disorder habit has quite improbably become something less than a sickness solitary activity. As to your question, I would, yes. Time brings distance and perspective. Some movies age better than others. There are a lot of minor tweaks I'd make if I could revamp my awards over the past seven years. That said, I am (mostly) happy with my #1 placements over the years. The further you descend through a top ten list the more I'd like to change. Lower altitudes bring more permeable feelings

Q: Do you have some personal, unique or semi-mathematical process of ranking your favorite films of the year?

A: I once enlisted my cat to help me predict Best Picture nominations. But beyond that aborted divining game (he seriously hates movies!) it’s all very mundane in movie-listing awards-giving land. The "grading" process tortures me but I do it partially so that I actually have a set of favorites to work from at the end of the year for awards and listing purposes. After I come up with a semifinalist list (usually all the B+ films and upwards) I start to make hard choices about rank. I generally put them in tiers so that I’m hammering out my feelings about them in relation to only one or two other movies instead of the whole thing. The tiered part isn't difficult but after that there's pain. The most difficult battles are of course the #5 vs #6 dilemma (because of the arbitrary five wide“Best Picture Nominee” thing) and the #10 vs #11 battle because of the Top Ten List bragging rights. I know that movies are inanimate objects but I feel like I’m hurting their feelings if they don’t place.

(I’m crazy)

The unfortunate side effect of all this reviewing and grading is that I find myself doing it during a movie. If a scene isn't working I'm suddenly deducting points or if it's really intense, beautiful and soaring I'm shouting inside my head"go for the A! go for the A!!!"

Maybe this is not an ideal way to watch a movie but it's how I do.

the 8th Annual FiLM BiTCH Awards
Start on January 2nd, 2008