Filmspotting recently (a couple months ago) tasked themselves with finding the answer to a specific question, the kind that my Flickchart puts me in a perfect position to answer:
"If you could take only five films with you to a desert island, and those five films had to come from the same five-year period, which five would they be?"
Now, my Flickchart would give me a very definitive answer to this question, if my ranking on Flickchart were an exact correlation to how much I want to rewatch a movie. If we assume that my #1 movie is the movie I want to rewatch the most, and each after that is a movie I want to watch progressively a little less each time, it's easy to come up with this answer. I just go down the list and cluster movies together until I get five from the same five-year period.
But we all know that this logic does not work perfectly. With this sort of thought experiment -- which the Filmspotting guys talk about in terms of an incinerator, as in, all films not chosen get sent to the incinerator -- it's never as simple as that.
For one thing, you have moods. You want to feed all your different moods with as much of a diversity of options as possible. I mean, let's face it -- you will get sick of all of these movies long before you die on this desert island, but the idea is to forestall that for as long as possible, and variety helps accomplish that.
And then there are some films that you might like "better" than other films, but those other films are "better quality" films, so you have them ranked higher. We could get off track on a "best vs. favorite" argument here if we wanted to, but it's clear that in this particular thought experiment, "favorite" should win out. But is that how I've been ranking my Flickchart, with any consistency?
So instead of just choosing the first clustering of five that came up, I decided to give myself ten different options of five-year spans.
Now, some of these clusterings actually cover multiple five-year spans. How is that possible? Well, I'll explain, and my first clustering is a perfect example of it. All five films in that first cluster come from three consecutive years, so that means they are the best five films of three different five-year spans: the one that ends with the last film, the one that starts with the first film, and then of course the one in the middle, where the first film is not the first year and the last film is not the last year.
And as I was going through, I also came across films that couldn't strengthen any group because all the eligible year bracketings were already filled up with earlier films.
So my top ten groups of films actually cover 15 different five-year spans, those that begin with 1981, and then begin with every year from 1983 to 1996. Sorry 1982 to 1986, your range got left out in the cold.
These were expected results. In 1981 I turned eight and in 1996 I turned 23, and that last range would have covered films until the year I turned 27. All parts of my formative years becoming a cinephile. There may be plenty of cinephiles who are in love with periods of cinema long before their birth, but my cinephilia has always had a healthy dose of nostalgia, and I don't apologize for that.
But how am I going to choose between these? I'll give you each of the options and then tell you what I settled on, with comments on each. I'll list them in order of how quickly they satisfied the five-film requirement on my chart, but I will list the films chronologically within each grouping.
1. 1992 to 1996 or 1993 to 1997 or 1994 to 1998 - Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3), Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19)
Comment: So I can get five movies from three different five-year spans, all within my top 19 films on Flickchart. Obviously I could be happy with this group, but it's a little light on comedy -- though I suppose both Pulp Fiction and Fargo have their lighter moments. Plus the fact that it takes care of three different time spans could potentially give this an edge as a tiebreaker.
1. 1995 to 1999 - Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)
Comment: You'll see I've listed this as #1 again because Bound at #19 also completes this five-year span, which is just shifted one up from the previous group. So we lose Pulp Fiction but we gain The Iron Giant. Not sure if I need two animated movies though.
3. 1985 to 1989 - Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20)
Comment: This group is hard to resist because it contains my top two movies of all time. We'll see how much a factor that ends up being in the final analysis.
3. 1986 to 1990 or 1987 to 1991 - Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18) , Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), Goodfellas (1990) (#13)
Comment: This is a similar thing as my first two, where we're shifting forward one year. In this case the movie we're losing is my #2, Back to the Future, which is not great. But gaining Goodfellas adds a dose of real cinephile credibility and otherwise gives additional variety to the portfolio.
5. 1996 to 2000 - Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), Run Lola Run (1998) (#21), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)
Comment: Same as 1995 to 1999 except we gain Run Lola Run in the middle of the range and lose Toy Story. I like the addition of the first foreign language film and don't mind losing one of the two animated movies from that group.
6. 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988 - WarGames (1983) (#22), This Is Spinal Tap (1984) (#9), Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11)
Comment: New additions are WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap, the latter being my #9 but not having fit into one of these ranges yet. Strong on comedy, and I think the addition of WarGames could quicken my pulse, but maybe I don't need to contemplate the end of the world too much when I'm already on a desert island and have lost 99.99999% of the films ever made.
7. 1988 to 1992 or 1989 to 1993 - Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), When Harry Met Sally (1989) (#26), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Goodfellas (1990) (#11), Unforgiven (1992) (#25)
Comment: Welcome to the show, When Harry Met Sally and Unforgiven. A much-needed influx of comedy for this range, offset by Unforgiven being particularly humorless. I might need more comfort and smiles than this group can give me.
8. 1981 to 1985 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (#4), Time Bandits (1981) (#27), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) (#23), This is Spinal Tap (1984) (#10), Back to the Future (1985) (#2)
Comment: Our earliest range of five years gets in a whole host of new titles, plus This Is Spinal Tap and Back to the Future. I love the diversity some of the new titles bring, but this group may be a little laugh deficient as well.
9. 1990 to 1994 - Goodfellas (1990) (#13), Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3)
Comment: A few new titles here doing good work, but again this group won't be getting a lot of guffaws from me, and I'm going to need them. (I think we have to assume a neutral emotional state, even though I mentioned earlier the idea of despairing about the end of the world.)
9. 1991 to 1995 - Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3) Toy Story (1995) (#7)
Comment: And here's the same as the previous group, only it gains Toy Story and loses Goodfellas.
I might be able to keep going down and eventually come across a perfectly diverse group of five. And I'd be interested to see what my first date range from the 21st century would look like. But I can't sit here and do this all day.
So ... what to choose here? And how to choose it?
I'm tempted to tell you why I'm ruling each one out, but instead I'll just tell you what I decided to rule in and why:
If I had been a guest host on this episode of Filmspotting, I would have chosen 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988.
Although I've said throughout this exercise that humor would be important to me, I've decided that lightness of tone might be even more important, and this span has five movies with light tones: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona, This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. (Yep, I am down with the comedic sensibilities of 1980s Rob Reiner.) All of those movies will make me laugh, but more importantly, they'll also make me feel good. And then WarGames can jangle my nerves a bit whenever I need a little bit of that.
Plus the fact that this time bracket also includes my #1 and my #2, which is hard to compete with.
The cherry on top was when I added up their Flickchart rankings -- remember we're going golf scores here, where the lower the score, the better -- and you get a 45 for these two year ranges. The next closest is 52, which is the next group up, 1985 to 1989.
These two groups have three movies in common: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona and The Princess Bride. The group I've gone with gives me WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap on one side, while the group I didn't choose gives me Say Anything and Do the Right Thing on the other. I'm essentially choosing the first two over the second two.
When Adam on Filmspotting was talking about how he chose his date range -- a much harder task when you don't have a Flickchart -- he started out by reviewing their previous episode in which they presented their ten choices for the Sight and Sound list, to see if there was chronological consolidation among his choices. A good way to start the process, and it ended up being the way his co-host, Josh, settled on a range.
Adam said he ruled out one particular range because the movie he loved so much that might have helped anchor him to that range -- Grave of the Fireflies -- is not a movie he wants to watch over and over on repeat. It's too glum. If you've seen it, you know what he's talking about.
And that's my problem with Do the Right Thing, I guess. Even though the range I've chosen gives me no real credibility with cinephiles as they are classically defined -- where the selection of Lee's movie would have -- I have to be honest with myself that I don't want to watch on repeat a movie where people spew hatred for an entire movie until it boils over into chaos and death. This probably explains why I've only seen Do the Right Thing once in the past 25 years, whereas all the movies in the group I've chosen have gotten multiple viewings during that period, some as many as four or five.
Arbitrary? Perhaps. Defensible? Absolutely.
For the record, Adam chose 1979 to 1983, and he selected one film from each year: All That Jazz (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The World According to Garp (1982) and The Right Stuff (1983). I can get behind this list because three of these films are also in my top 150 and I really like the other two. When I get around to ranking The Right Stuff, which I only just watched in August, it'll do very well on my chart. Adam clearly went for the comfort of nostalgia picks, though he won't be laughing a lot. (The most humor might be in The Right Stuff, actually, which I characterized as a comedy when I wrote about it on The Audient.)
Josh? He went arthouse, or rather, cinephile, as the period he chose reached its completion two decades before he was born. His range of 1951 to 1955 allowed him Ikiru (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Rear Window (1954), Ordet (1954) and Pather Panchali (1955). Rear Window and Ordet are both top 150 movies for me, but I found Gentlemen significantly inferior to the similar Some Like It Hot and I couldn't crack Pather Pachali. I haven't even seen Ikiru, but I've seen its remake, Living. I think he will be starved for films with more entertainment value after a couple watch throughs of these films.
Anyway, this was a fun exercise, and I hope it was at least sort of fun for you to read.
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