Drafting a team of ten movies to watch forever

It's been a while since I've done a "project post" on this blog. Lo and behold, I thought of one right at the time that I'm preparing to move in just three weeks. Seems unlikely, or a bad use of my available time, but I need distractions right now I guess -- perhaps more than ever.

I'm not overly missing the end of my fantasy baseball season, which is now two months in the past, but I'm continuing to listen to baseball podcasts, so I guess the related issues are sticking in my head. On the most recent episode of Circling the Bases from NBC SportsEdge, they did a snake draft of Thanksgiving foods. 

For those of you not familiar with what this might mean, it means that the two podcasters selected available Thanksgiving foods in rounds to comprise a "team" of foods, similar to how you compile a team of fantasy baseball players each year in March. As in the first guy made his selection in the first round, then it was the other guy's turn, not only to make his selection in the first round, but to make his selection in the second round back to back. Then it was the other guy's turn for two selections, his second round pick and his third round pick. And so forth. 

A "snake draft" is a draft that snakes around, not returning to the first picker when the second round begins, but proceeding in reverse order. That means, theoretically, that no one picker gets a significant advantage over anyone else. Let's say there are ten teams, as that makes it more clear than just two. The tenth picker has only the 10th best choice of whatever is available -- usually, that would be major league baseball players, not food -- but then that person also gets the 11th best pick, so he/she has an advantage going into the second round. Then the ninth team gets the 12th pick. It's supposed to all even out over the course of the draft. 

And like in a draft with major league baseball players, their Thanksgiving draft required them to fill certain "positions" -- an entree, three side dishes and a dessert. Just how you can't pick all outfielders when you are drafting a fantasy baseball team, but rather, must draft someone at every position on the field, these Thanksgiving drafters had to not overload themselves on desserts, for example.

I don't know if I got the idea directly as a result of this podcast episode, but I decided to apply the draft logic to movies -- specifically, my favorite movies of all time.

Now, I would not be making any decisions in this draft. I would simply be assigning my movies to "teams" based on their position on my current Flickchart. The idea would not be to make selections among my favorite movies for a perfect team for myself, but rather, to draft up teams involving all my favorites and deciding which of these teams was my favorite.

The stakes would be high. I would draft up 16 teams of ten movies apiece, covering my top 160 movies on Flickchart. Then I would choose one team of ten movies that would be the only movies I could watch for the rest of time. It's kind of like the death match rules on the Filmspotting podcast, where they pit two movies against each other, and then the movie that loses is thrown into the incinerator, meaning no one can ever watch it again.

Why 16? Well, my real fantasy baseball league has 16 teams. And the more options, the harder to ultimately reach a conclusion, making it tougher on myself.

Just so I'm sure you understand how this works, I'll clarify the draft logic. Let's do the first two rounds so you understand which ranked movie on Flickchart gets assigned to which team. So in round one, here's what the teams get:

Team 1 - pick #1 and pick #32
Team 2 - pick #2 and pick #31
Team 3 - pick #3 and pick #30
Team 4 - pick #4 and pick #29

And so forth. And then when round 3 begins, Team 1 gets pick #33 and it goes snaking onward from there.

The following 16 teams were produced. I'm not going to go to the trouble of showing the ranking # next to each film, nor, for space reasons, a director and year for each film. If you really wanted to figure out how the films are ranked on my Flickchart, you could plug them into this snake draft formula. 

One other point of clarification: A person's Flickchart is never perfect. There are always movies that are ranked too high or ranked too low, depending on what duels they've had, how you were feeling on a particular day, etc. But these 160 movies are battle-tested, and if they deviate from my "real" feelings about the films, it's not by a huge amount. However, I would not be surprised if the end results of this little experiment included taking advantage of some movies I loved that were ranked too low on my chart -- in real fantasy baseball terms, those would be players I was able to draft later than expected, making them a "steal."

Also I have to pedantically note: Because I am writing these as a comma-separated list, I am excising commas from the titles. I know, the horror. 

Okay I suspect I have already lost most of you so let's just get into it:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 2 - Back to the Future, Ghost, Vanilla Sky, Like Father Like Son, Seven Samurai, A Separation, The Player, Misery, My Cousin Vinny, Happiness

Team 3 - Pulp Fiction, Time Bandits, Lost in Translation, Synecdoche New York, Election, Rear Window, Silence of the Lambs, Where the Wild Things Are, Memento, Toy Story 2

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 5 - Citizen Kane, A Fish Called Wanda, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Adaptation, My Neighbor Totoro, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Parasite, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

Team 8 - Toy Story, Defending Your Life, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spring Breakers, Jaws, Stand by Me, Finding Nemo, My Life as a Dog, A Ghost Story

Team 9 - This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally ..., The Empire Strikes Back, Parenthood, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Philadelphia, Superman II, Inside Llewyn Davis, Rabbit Hole, Mother

Team 10 - The Iron Giant, Unforgiven, Elf, There Will Be Blood, A Christmas Story, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Twelve Monkeys, Tanna, Rain Man, United 93

Team 11 - The Princess Bride, Donnie Darko, Almost Famous, Dangerous Liaisons, Once, Animal House, Miller's Crossing, Dances With Wolves, Coco, Trainspotting

Team 12 - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Run Lola Run, Die Hard, Titanic, The Social Network, Poltergeist, Step Brothers, The Last Temptation of Christ, Ordet, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

Team 13 - Goodfellas, Do the Right Thing, Glengarry Glen Ross, Ace in the Hole, The Bicycle Thief, Blade Runner, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Das Boot, The Untouchables, The Crow

Team 14 - Tangled, Bound, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Cell, Network, Dave, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Three Kings, Smoke Signals, Truly Madly Deeply

Team 15 - The Cable Guy, Say Anything, Flirting With Disaster, All About Eve, North by Northwest, Moon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sherlock Jr., Kicking and Screaming (1995), Night of the Hunter

Team 16 - Jesus Christ Superstar, Children of Men, Starship Troopers, Schindler's List, Malcolm X, Sunset Blvd., Let the Right One In, Cinema Paradiso, Hamlet (2000), The Wages of Fear

Before I go any further, now is the time to make any predictions you may have, as well as choose a team for yourself. (That's such a data dump that I don't know if either of these things is possible, but more power to you if you want to do it.)

Boy was this hard. These are all my babies.

I decided I would do rounds, eliminating half the teams in each round until I narrowed it down to just one. That made it much easier actually.

As with assembling a fantasy baseball team, the guiding principle is to have an even mix of talents and positions. An even mix of positions is a requirement in that format. There are no requirements here, but if I'm going to be watching only these ten films for eternity, I need a variety of genres, tones and time periods.

And I need COMEDY. I'm going to have to have regular occasions to laugh if I'm going to be watching only these ten films. That helped eliminate some teams right off the bat. For example, neither Team 13 nor Team 16 had a single comedy in them. Easy peasy. Gone, even if that meant killing films I dearly love. That's the nature of this business. Some other teams that had a decent comedy representation were also eliminated due to other deficiencies in their variety, or doubling up on other resources. For example, Team 8 had two Pixar films, which was too much for this format.

That got me down to the following eight teams:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 5 - Citizen Kane, A Fish Called Wanda, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Adaptation, My Neighbor Totoro, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Parasite, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

Team 9 - This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally ..., The Empire Strikes Back, Parenthood, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Philadelphia, Superman II, Inside Llewyn Davis, Rabbit Hole, Mother

Team 10 - The Iron Giant, Unforgiven, Elf, There Will Be Blood, A Christmas Story, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Twelve Monkeys, Tanna, Rain Man, United 93

Team 15 - The Cable Guy, Say Anything, Flirting With Disaster, All About Eve, North by Northwest, Moon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sherlock Jr., Kicking and Screaming (1995), Night of the Hunter

This was the time to start eliminating other teams where there were double ups. Team 5 had two films written by Charlie Kaufman, for example, and though he's one of my all-time favorite writing talents, that was too much using the current parameters. Then Team 10 had two Christmas movies -- the only two Christmas movies out of the whole 160, actually. By itself, one of those movies would have been a boon to the team it was on, but together they were overkill.

Team 15 was an interesting case of a really good mix of movies that didn't represent me as a cinephile in all the ways that it should. Nearly half the movies are comedies while nearly the other half are from before 1960. There were some great repeat viewing candidates in there but the team ultimately was not diverse enough.

I also noticed at this stage that I was going to be eliminating any team that had an animated film in it. Tragic.

That left the following four teams standing:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

At this point I think I can start talking about their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Team 1 has my favorite movie of all time, plus a number of other sentimental favorites from my childhood (Big, WarGames, Return of the Jedi, Goonies). Extra points for having a Star Wars movie. But is that loading up too much on nostalgia? Although I respect the hell out of The Passion of Joan of Arc, I'm not sure if that's a movie I want to be watching all the time (I've still only seen it once). Harakiri is a new favorite that I've also seen only once, but is it too slow to watch repeatedly? Boogie Nights gives me what I called an "auteur epic" as I was making notes on these films. Apollo 13 is a strong selling point to this group.

Team 4 has a number of teams doing double duty, which is really useful in this type scenario. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home fell earlier on in the process, but Galaxy Quest has the same flexibility by serving as both comedy and sci-fi. Raiders and Shawshank are a very strong 1-2 punch, and this group has a lot of something lacking in the other lists: horror. Between The Exorcist, Jacob's Ladder and Under the Skin, I'll be plenty creeped out, and Ghostbusters (another double duty) even has the "There is no Dana only Zool" scene. Quest, Ghostbusters and Dr. Strangelove also provided different intellectual levels of comedy. Bonus points for having a musical (Chicago). However, Strangelove is the only film from before 1973. 

Team 6 also has four different distinct sorts of comedy from different eras, those being The Great Dictator, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Airplane! and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Star Wars, T2 and Strange Days fill out sci-fi admirably. Wizard of Oz joins The Great Dictator in giving us some bonafide classics, plus Oz is also a musical. I'll be light on horror with only The Sixth Sense, but The Sixth Sense also has a scene that makes me cry, so it can join with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly whenever I need sentiment. Butterfly also allows me to get on a foreign language film. 

Team 7 contains a Coen movie in Fargo, which is a big bonus as the Coens made two of my top ten films of all time (along with #1 Raising Arizona). Dumb and Dumber and Major League both give me comedy, and Major League is my only chance on the whole list to ever watch a sports movie again. Greed gives me a classic silent film, and having one film that runs four hours could be useful in this scenario. The Matrix and Star Trek II give me sci-fi, and Jessica Stein and Ruby Sparks give me romantic comedies, the latter with a built-in head trip element. Bonnie & Clyde provides a taste of classic New Hollywood.

After a struggle, Team 1 and Team 7 were eliminated. Bye bye Coen brothers.

Leaving only these two finalists:

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

And since I've already outlined the selling points for these teams above, I'll just give you the winner:

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

The variety of types of comedy present here was a big deciding factor here. Four Weddings will remind me of my formative Monty Python period after I had to eliminate Holy Grail in an earlier round, and it's charming as hell. Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz are all-time classic family films, making up somewhat for not getting any animation on my final team. I may not have quite as much head trip content on this list as some other lists, but Strange Days and The Sixth Sense both qualify. And Airplane! is there when I just want to be goofy.

Overall it's just a very solid list with a lot of versatility. Which is what you want when you will be watching these movies for the rest of time.

I realized after the fact that I doubled up on James Cameron, as Cameron also had a hand in Strange Days as writer and producer. Oh well, no list is perfect. 

And for the 150 movies I will never see again ... you will carry on in my heart. 

Okay, thanks for sticking this out, assuming you did.