An Attempt at a Top 10 List, a.k.a. A Futile Exercise in Tokenism

Lists are all the rage in the entertainment evaluation community. At the end of each year, various entertainment publications will come out with their annual top tens: Top Ten Albums, Top Ten TV Shows, Top 10 Movies, Top 10 Celebrity Mishaps, etc. Every once in a while, a particularly ambitious publication might attempt to calculate a definitive list of the best works of a particular medium of all time. Of all time!

There’s nothing wrong with these lists, per se, but I do have a few problems with them, personally, which I feel are a part of a minor bothersome trend within the field of art criticism. However, I will go more in depth on these later. For now, I will start my demonstration by attempting to compile a list of my top ten favorite films of all time.

What should a proper top ten list entail? Quite simply, it should be a list of my favorite films of all time. The problem comes with the fact that I’ve seen many more than ten films. Many more than ten times ten films. Probably even more than ten times ten times ten films. Since there’s no way in hell I’ll ever remember every single film I’ve ever seen, I can safely assume that the ones I don’t remember probably wouldn’t make the cut, anyway.

But even when all those are eliminated, there’s still a few hundred films that I remember liking very much. Films that often times, I find comparisons between to be futile. Surely I can’t judge The Killer by the same canons I would judge Sansho the Bailiff, can I? The truth is, I like very much a wide variety of films that are often incomparable with one another. Perhaps the best way to start a top ten list would be to come up with ten wildly different films that I love which I feel best represent my taste in cinema. Now, to come up with ten different categories:

• Ozu and Mizoguchi should respectively be reserved a slot each for one of their films, simply because they are the masters and two of my favorite directors of all time. Choosing pretty much any Ozu would work fine, due to his stylistic consistency. The critical consensus seems to be that Tokyo Story is his best film, though I might have preferred Early Summer myself. Or did I? Or was my favorite Floating Weeds? I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward something from the “Noriko” trilogy. As far as Mizoguchi goes, he was a bit less consistent than Ozu, but the best of his works reach a level of artistic accomplishment that most filmmakers could only dream of. I think I’ve come to a consensus with myself that Ugetsu is my favorite, but how can I ignore Sansho the Bailiff, or The Life of Oharu, or Street of Shame? Women of the Night was absolutely gorgeous, too. Pretty much any of his films I’ve seen except Yang Kwei Fei could contend for this spot.
• A French New Wave Film. Quite simply, the French New Wave is not only one of the most important “movements” in film history, but one of my favorite. The free spirited nature of these directors changed forever the way that films are conceived and shot. This leads to a question of moral integrity: Godard or Truffaut? The answer was obviously Godard for a long time, but I’ve taken an extreme liking to Truffaut lately. On one hand, we have a wild experimenter, who challenged his viewers to think critically about the film they were watching. On the other hand, we have one of cinema’s greatest storytellers. One is completely in your face, reminding you that you are watching a film. The other is a master of narrative structure, subtly changing the ways a story is told. Perhaps the best answer to come to would be a happy medium. One of Godard’s more narrative-centered films, or one of Truffaut’s more experimental films. Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player serves as a great happy medium, don’t you think? Or what about Pierrot le Fou?
• A New Hollywood film. For the uninitiated, New Hollywood was the movement in the 1970’s that happened when a bunch of young, educated, bratty film buffs gave the middle finger to the Hollywood establishment and started incorporating influences from the French New Wave into their films, to reinvigorate the stale state of commercial cinema’s world headquarters. The consensus is The Godfather, which is a spectacular film and a sheer joy to watch, but at the same time just a tad bit overrated. I hate to use that word to describe a film as good as The Godfather but its greatness does get blown a bit out of proportion. I think I’ll go with Apocalypse Now, a film which unfortunately we will never see anything of its kind again. At least not in the current filmmaking climate.
• A Newfangled Chinese Art Film! Let’s expand this to Taiwan and Hong Kong, too. Wong Kar-Wai has always been one of my favorite filmmakers, but his films are much more expressionistic than most of this movement, which is marked by minimalism and subtlety. I probably should put at least one Wong Kar Wai film on this list based on that alone. I should also probably choose something from Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, or Jia Zhang-Ke. Maybe an early Zhang Yimou like Raise the Red Lantern would fit the bill. Of these filmmakers, Hou is the most experienced and respected, but unfortunately I’m mostly familiar with his more recent work thanks to the unavailability of acceptable versions of his earlier, and supposedly better, work. Jia is great, and I loved The Platform, but there are other films along the same time that I liked as much. Tsai is probably my favorite of these choices, but his films are so similar to Wong’s thematically that I’d feel redundant having both a Wong Kar Wai and a Tsai Ming-Liang film in my top ten. Perhaps if I chose Wong’s Days of Being Wild, his most subtle and rewarding film, that would solve this problem. It can also make up for my choosing a Truffaut over a Godard. It also unfortunately ignores the impact that Chungking Express had on me. What if I choose both Chungking Express and a minimalist film?
• An action film! Oh boy, what fun this will be. Action films are very intricate and difficult to pull off, yet don’t get the respect to deserve due to the fact that they have less “deep meaning” (arbitrarily) assigned to them. A Kurosawa film would sidestep that whole “deep meaning” (whatever the hell that phrase means) barrier. The thing is, while Kurosawa was an early pioneer of action, that would be doing a disservice to the complex and dynamic action sequences found at the height of Hong Kong action cinema. If I wanted to appeal to the bigwigs, A Touch of Zen would be a good choice. The problem is, the film is a bit on the bloated side and suffers in the dramatic sequences. There’s always good room for a John Woo shoot ‘em up. I think I’ll make my choice from madman Tsui Hark’s oeuvre. Tsui made three truly great action films in Peking Opera Blues and the first two Once Upon a Time in China movies. Any of the three will do.
• An American independent film, post-Stranger Than Paradise. If I include a Tarantino film, I’ll look like a complete noob, won’t I? However, I can’t deny how much I enjoy Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. Then there’s Richard Linklater, and his excellent films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which are two of the greatest romantic films ever made. Wes Anderson makes his nice little pageants. My favorite director of this movement is Paul Thomas Anderson, whose works are so consistently awe-inspiring that choosing a favorite is more difficult than fitting a camel being ridden by a fat rich man through the eye of a pin. Screw it, noobishness aside, I’m going to go with Pulp Fiction. Much like a lot of my generation, Tarantino was the first director whom I followed anyway.
• Two spots left, and I could use another national cinema. Something from Italy, perhaps? No, I’m hip and current, and to prove how hip and current I am, I should choose something from an exciting, emerging national cinema. Eastern Europe in general seems to be on the rise, but anyone who knows me knows how excited I get over Korean cinema. Look at the variety of voices, too: there’s Bong Joon-Ho the Satirical, Park Chan-Wook the Twisted, Hong Sangsoo the Guy with Women Problems, Kim Ji-Woon the Versatile, Lee Chang-Dong the Heavy-Handed, Kim Ki-Duk the Minimalist. I think I can safely narrow my choices down to Memories of Murder, Lady Vengeance, and Oh! Soo-Jung. Historically I’ve always liked Lady Vengeance but right now I like Memories of Murder a lot… Memories of Murder it is!
• One spot left. Should I choose a western? A silent film? A Hitchcock? A film noir? Citizen Kane? Something more typically mainstream? Classic Hollywood cinema? Soviet Montage? Italian Neo-realism? Erotica? I don’t have any comedies! Alright… think, Adam, think. Did Hitchcock ever direct any funny, silent westerns? God damnit. What if I expand the list to fifteen? No, then I’ll keep expanding it to include every film I’ve ever liked. Alright, let’s go with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Can’t go wrong with Leone, right? Not until someone mentions John Ford, but you all know how much I can’t stand that damn John Wayne. Yes, I know its heresy any I’m burning in hell. Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Okay, so let’s review what I’ve narrowed myself down to for a safe-ish top ten:

• An Ozu. Something from the Noriko Trilogy.
• A Mizoguchi. Probably Ugetsu.
• A French New Wave Film. Probably Shoot the Piano Player or Pierrot le Fou.
• Apocalypse Now
• Chungking Express
• A Chinese art film. Let’s say Vive L’Amour until I’ve seen Hou’s early masterpieces.
• One of Tsui Hark’s three best films. I’m thinking Peking Opera Blues
• Pulp Fiction
• Memories of Murder
• The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

That four of these films are less than twenty years old is a bit alarming, no? I could go back and reevaluate to catch more of film history and make myself look better, but I have another point to make.

Here comes the second hurdle, the one that induces brain aneurysms: putting them in order.

This is the part I hate. This is the part where I have to compare films from disparate genres that I would prefer differently depending what mood I’m in. The part that I’ll redo every day for the next three years, not to mention that I’ll probably see more films that I’ll think deserve a slot in here.

Because these films are all so different, I can’t simply choose a set of general canons and evaluate them all based on such. The things that make an Ozu film great are nearly the opposite of what makes a Tsui film great, as are Vive L’Amour and Pulp Fiction.

Common criticism technique would tell me that I should forget form and stylistics in lieu of content and substance. What films enlighten me as a human?

But why is this so important? Looking at art objectively, is content not simply arbitrarily assigned by the artist? Why should I applaud the artist who makes something socially conscious and not the artist who makes the thriller? Does choosing a more “meaningful” subject matter really take that much more talent and inspiration?

No, it doesn’t, and until and unless I am convinced otherwise, I will continue to posit that form always takes precedence over content. Certain subject matters might have more personal appeal, but truly great art is able to transcend that.

To put it quite simply, ordering this list would be either an exercise in maintaining the status quo or a futile quest to upset it, or maybe a bit of both. The fact that certain genres of film will never produce a film that could ever be considered to be among “the greatest” simply because of their generic status as “low art” is a disgrace to all the hard work and creativity that went into them.

And that, my friends, is why I choose to no longer attempt to make definitive numbered lists.