That post, though, is not really subject to change. The names of the movies are the names of the movies, and it's not any more complicated than that.
The complication comes when I'm drafting posts that involve the quality of films I have yet to see.
Most problematic in this regard is the first post, the one where I reveal my complete rankings from #1 to #147 (or whatever the case may be in a particular year; I may actually exceed that this year). Part of that post is a dramatic countdown from #10 to #1, in which I write 200-300 words on each film, as well as include a small image from each.
Now, I have always written quickly. But I know I can't leave everything until the last minute, so I do tend to write up the blurbs on films I know are not going to exit my top ten, because they're currently nestled in my top five. As I creep closer to publication date and nothing has overtaken the films in the lower part of my top ten, I write those blurbs too.
This year, though, has been a weird year. I hardly need to tell you that. But I hadn't anticipated how this particular aspect of the weird year would be affecting me now.
Usually the last 15 or so movies I need to see, from Christmas onward, are a combination of prominent films, mixed equally between films that have gotten critical acclaim (making them "prominent" even if they would not otherwise be) and those that are popular.
This year, I have about as many films as usual to catch up with, but very few of those are "popular" films -- for example, the latest in some franchise that I just didn't catch in the theater because it didn't quite interest me enough, but which I wanted to watch before closing my rankings. Last year, for example, that included Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes & Shaw.
So without a lot of popular films to watch -- I have yet to decide on whether I'm going to bother with Bad Boys for Life -- those 15 films this year are pretty much all critically acclaimed films, films that have shown up on a lot of top ten lists. And though some years I may end up not caring for those films, this year, I've really been going for them.
I still don't know how this is all going to shake out, so don't read anything into me mentioning these titles, but recent viewings that have really impressed me have included Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Time, Soul, The Vast of Night, and this post's poster boy (or should I say poster girl), The Forty-Year-Old Version. That's five very strong top ten contenders -- just since Christmas.
Among the ten or so I'm still targeting, at least half have the potential for just this kind of prominence on my chart.
So it seems very premature indeed that I already wrote the blurb for what was then my #7 film of the year. As I said, I'm still moving things around, but that #7 may have already dropped out of my top ten, with another ten films still to go.
This wouldn't be such a problem if I'd seen some of these films when they first came out. Ma Rainey and Soul were not options until recently, but The Forty-Year-Old Version was one I had on my spreadsheet to review back in October when it debuted on Netflix. It lost out in a numbers crunch, I think in part because I was already feeling documentaried-out at the time. Lo and behold, I watch the film and it's not even a documentary. The director-star (Radha Blank) is playing herself, but it's like the Seinfeld-Louie-Master of None version of herself, fictionalized just a tad, but keeping a strong foot in her reality in order to be all the more provocative and thoughtful.
The Vast of Night I started back in early November, on one of the nights when the election had not yet been decided, and I was just too distractible to keep watching it, as the cleverness of its dialogue requires a keen ear if you want to stay oriented. I think I ended up with R.I.P.D. that night instead.
Whatever decisions I've made in the past, I'm here now. And the only decision that's really up to me now, if I want to stop throwing my top ten into chaos, is just to stop watching movies that I know are going to be good.
But that's really no choice at all, is it? At least not for a dedicated cinephile like me.
In reality, every film we watch is one we want to end up in our top ten for the year, if only because the act of pressing play on a movie (or purchasing a ticket in the "olden days," ha ha) is a supreme act of hope. Even if you don't think the movie is going to amount to much, you still want it to be great. That's your time you're spending on it, and you wouldn't waste that time unless you thought there was some chance you'd really dig it. (Either that or it's your job to review it.)
Still, I think I may have to consider a Bad Boys for Life or two (Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen also qualifies) down the stretch if I want a break from all this quality, and want my current #7 through #10 to have a fighting chance to stay blurb-worthy.
Needing a palette cleanser between 4+ star quality films is a good place to be, I suppose.
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