Too comfortable.
Based only on movies I've seen since Christmas, I have already had to kick two movies out of my top ten that I had thought (and hoped) would be there at the end of the year. (I'm not going to tell you what they are, nor the movies that replaced them.) This is not a final placement, of course, as I am still likely to shuffle movies from where I initially placed them in my in-progress list.
But having this system of placing them as I go means that they are hardening -- ossifying, if you will -- into a certain place of elevated entitlement, before all is said and done.
And what does this mean for all the contenders I haven't yet watched?
It's a problem. And if I suggested from the title of this post that I knew the answer, well that's not correct.
I'm including the poster for Juror #2 with this post not because it necessarily makes for an example of the problem. It's mostly because I'm writing this post today and this is what I watched last night.
I'll divulge one spoiler by saying that Juror #2 is not going to make my top ten of 2024. However, I did have the conversation again with myself last night as I was watching it and really liking it. (Reminding myself, speaking of top tens, that the National Board of Review saw it fit to include Clint Eastwood's 117th film as one of their top ten.)
Especially during the first half, I asked myself "Okay, how can I possibly fit Juror #2 into my top ten?"
Cooler heads prevailed by the end of the movie, and though the movie will get a quite respectable ranking on my list, it won't be in the range of this most august partition of the rankings.
The trouble is, by already knowing quite clearly what it's up against, Juror #2 -- and the approximately ten more movies I will watch before next Friday -- doesn't necessarily get the fair shake it should if it were just being watched in a vacuum.
There is an obvious solution to this, which is not to make a draft of my list at all until a day or two before my ranking deadline. That's what my friend who does this with me does, though his task is herculean compared to what mine would be, as he will rank close to 500 movies this year. And I used to do it, too, though I think only that first or second year. I know for sure I did it in 1996, not having even gotten the idea to rank my movies until the end of the year, but by 1997 I may have already switched to my current system.
I am tempted to try that one year, but I just don't think I can do it. My brain is now too old in this respect to be rewired. If I were watching movies only with a star rating in mind -- which is another thing I can't help -- I might be so accustomed to, addicted to, my usual way of doing things that I would give up the experiment by February, March at the latest.
So the real only solution I can think of is to be honest with myself. To look at the movie currently at #10 and say "Is this movie I just watched better than this?" And if it is, well, I'll do the same thing with movie #9, and so on, until I find the right spot. It's a Flickchart-style dueling method that is informally how I handle this task.
The good news is, great movies make arguments for themselves quite easily. If I love a movie, it should mean I want to elevate it relative to another movie I might not like quite as much. If I can't imagine my top ten without Movie A, it should be even harder to imagine my top ten without Movie B, which I have determined I like better. And if I don't like Movie B better than Movie A, well there's the answer there too.
I guess the answer to this is really that the movie-ranking season is long. I mean, it is as long as it can possibly be, considering that I will start ranking 2025 movies before the end of January. But it's really the endgame I'm talking about here that's long. By the end of the calendar year, I am ready to be done with this and pack it away for the year. In fact, so is my friend I mentioned earlier, who is planning on closing his list a week earlier than I do this year -- and may still get his record of 500 movies.
In short, I guess the system works, or works as well as any system would work. But it doesn't mean it doesn't cause me these quandaries that eat away at me and prompt me to write blog posts about them.
In the end, my top ten list is what I want to present to the world about the movies I loved in the previous year. I can make it do whatever I want it to do, for whatever reason I want it to do it. If I want a movie no one liked to make my top five, because I loved it and I think they're crazy for not loving it, then that is an important part of it for me. If I want to squeeze in a beloved movie that I may not love as much as its most ardent supporters, that's what my #9 and #10 spots might be for -- depending on the year.
Because though the whole list matters -- a list that will be close to, if not more than, 175 movies this year -- we all know there's something special about that top ten. It's the standard all other critics use in sharing their own thoughts about the movie year. And in my own year-end post, each of the top ten titles gets a special write-up from me, just to honor the way it was able to bring movie magic into my heart.
In just eight days, I'll know for sure which movies I'll be writing about in that way for 2024.
And if movies I haven't yet seen, but expect to see -- like A Real Pain, Conclave and A Complete Unknown -- don't end up making my top ten, you'll know that the system doesn't work ... or maybe that I just didn't care for them all that much.
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