When it’s so long that the comparative order of the list becomes utterly meaningless?
Empire film magazine have run a poll to find the 500 Greatest Movies of All Time – as voted for by its readership (and as they ran the poll online too, this has the potential to be a very broad readership). Now, I like Empire; it’s one of the two magazines I subscribe to, and I like that it likes and understands genre, unlike a large number of newspaper critics (at least the newspapers I read, by which I mean broadsheet). They’re very good at assessing films on their own terms as well as on critical terms, so they can tell you whether something is a very good schlocky actioneer if you’re in the mood for schlocky actioneers. Of course this means that both the likes of There Will Be Blood, and Pearl Harbour both got five star reviews. It’s a problem inherent in all reviewing – I like to know if a new Coen brothers film is less brilliant than some of their classic films, and I can figure out for myself that I’m going to like slightly sub-vintage Coen more than, say, Transformers.
Now, however, this problem has translated to an epic poll. 500 films is simply too many for a sensible list to be made. Pretty much anything any reader and viewer can remember can make it onto the list – there almost ceases to be any distinction of what ‘really good’ is. I may be a film snob, but I would like to maintain that there are good films and bad films (and really really bad films). This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the bad films – I own a copy of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead after all. But you can still know that you are enjoying them in their badness.
There’s an invisible standard which declares Mean Streets (#377) to be better than Four Weddings and A Funeral (#375) or 300 (#337) – even though you could have an interesting debate between Mean Streets and the Seventh Seal (#335) – where ‘better’ and ‘enjoyment’ mingle. Full Metal Jacket (#457) is better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (#453) and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (#449), and although you may want to toss a coin as to whether you prefer The Deer Hunter (#467) to Juno (#463), the former has stood the test of time and deserves to be ranked more highly than the latter.
So this is what I want, if publicly chosen film polls we are having. A list of no more than 100 films, none of which may have been released in the last 12-18 months. It’s called longevity, folks. It’s good.
And on a personal level, can I just say that Titanic is not and never will be better than Grosse Point Blank. The End.
