I’m an easy going guy. Rarely enraged, scarcely seething and never particularly frustrated by life’s little grievances (I call these life’s ‘surprises’). I’d go as far as saying that I’ve never had a bad day in my life and there’s a reason for this: I don’t make lists.
To make a list is to set boundaries and limitations. Nothing that’s on a list is ever definitive. For example, notice that when you go shopping you either miss something or spend a small fortune on something a television advertisement told you to. It’s for these reasons that lists can only leave you disappointed.
People who write lists probably think they’re orderly and, like Brick Tamland from Anchorman, “rarely late”. But I believe these ‘listophiles’ are backward thinking. These are the people that if they had it their way cider wouldn’t be served with ice. Hotdogs would never have made it to the half-foot milestone they deserve and baseball caps wouldn’t have developed a cool neck-shield.
We don’t need to-do lists, shopping lists and, most of all, the hyperbolic ‘Greatest Film’ list.
Never has there been such a pretentious, overarching arrangement than film lists. Firstly, they are boring. If “The Godfather” tops another film list I will eat a trilby hat. This is not to say that The Godfather doesn’t deserve the accolade of top spot. Far from it. It represents the zenith of Hollywood moviemaking, featuring a once-in-lifetime ensemble cast and perfectly marries Italian-American values with the mafia underworld.
It may be hard to dispute the validity of a list that carries a film of The Godfather’s stature as its flagship, but a greatest film list should inspire, not merely confirm a consensus: we already know The Godfather is a great film. What a list of this nature should do is bring other (possibly lesser known) pictures to the forefront. Film lists should act as a guide and not a manual.
Film lists are also wrong. This is especially true of one’s conducted by movie magazines or ones where people can vote for a film. Just a quick scroll through the imdb.com top 250 poll and I made a few startling finds. Look at the top ten and you’ll see that “The Dark Knight”, a film that’s hardly stood the test of time, sits at number 7. To put that into perspective, that’s sixty five places above the incredible “Raging Bull” – another film that features a main character struggling to confront his inner-self.
One of the reasons why the imdb poll, and any film list, is flawed is because of something I call ‘fanboy-voting’. This is when fans of a particular film will pump thousands of votes into a film regardless of whether it’s any good or not. This was apparent in 2007 when The Simpsons movie skyrocketed into the top 100 but with one small problem – it hadn’t even been released!
One thing we have to remember when we look at film guides, or indeed film reviews, is that people are 1) different and 2) quite often stupid. Everyone has a right to their opinion (unless you’re reading this in Iran) and films, above all other art forms, provoke the most debate amongst their viewers. Because of this for every person who pines for “The Shawshank Redemption” there’ll be another who craves for “The Love Guru” – and there’s a whole list of reasons why that’s a bad film.
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