Sunday, September 16, 2012

Some Thoughts About This Year's Top 100

Madman is my name.  Obsession my game.
Every year for the Filmspotting Forum, I make a top 100.  Last year's list was only half of a full effort.  I'm much more satisfied with this year's list.

I began to post the movies I watched on two different internet sites this year.  I have my most complete list on ICheckMovies.com .  That site is simple: you watch a movie and then you check off that you watched it.  They will automatically tell you which of their many official lists that movie is on, and keep you up to date on how well you are doing on those lists.  I have awards in 49 of the lists right now.  That's not a boast.  If anything, it shows how obsessed I am with movies, which may not be a good thing.  The other great thing about ICheckMovies.com is that you can "favorite" or "dislike" a movie, and you can have a list of each of those, if you like.

The second site I'm keeping my movies on is Criticker.com.  That site allows you to not only keep track of the movies you watch, but you can rate them on a scale from 1-100 (100 being best).  Also, you can keep a review on as many movies as you like.

This year, in preparation for my list, I took my list of 650 favorite movies on ICheckMovies.com and ranked and reviewed them on Criticker.com.  This allowed Criticker to rank these movies in a general order and gave me the opportunity to review all of these movies in my mind.  It was a lot of work, but I accomplished it in about a month.

Then I took the movies I rated from 100-90 and ranked the top 100 or so. This took a couple nights, but it was painful.

Nevertheless, my top 100 was revealed.

My bud, Richard.
THEN I took my top 100 and offered questions for each movie, that each movie compels me to ask.

If this isn't the work of an obsessed madman that deserves to be in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, then I don't know what is.

Why do I do this?  Because I want to be fair to the community I hang out with, the Filmspotting community.  I want to have a solid top 100, as solid as I could.  And this is my best top 100 yet, one perhaps I can build on.

I hope I won't ever have to do this much work on it again.  But we'll see about next year.

So on my blog here I will be posting answers to the movie questions I posed.  So if you see a question as a title, just remember, this is a film I consider to be one of the greatest ever made.  I'll tag it Top 100 Movies 2012.

Because nothing is real until it is blogged.

3 comments:

  1. "Because nothing is real until it is blogged."
    I love this quote!

    And I admire the serios attitude you have when you approach the daunting task of making a top 100 that feels solid. I'm not anwhere near your level of doing this. I don't use icheckmovies or cricketer and honestly I can't see myself changing that anytime soon.

    Suddenly it feels a bit unfair that my votes weigh as heavy as your do in this poll. *Hanging my head in shame*. But on the other hand I suppose noone would thank me from refraining from participating at all.

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  2. Please don't feel inadequate because I'm anal!

    I went through all that work and my top ten is still pretty much the same. I feel better about the rest of it, but it isn't radically different than my instinctive approach last year.

    In the end, no matter how much work we put into it, our opinion is our opinion, and our intuitive sense is worth just as much as our analysis of our personal opinion.

    Hey, I just realized that the four letter abbreviation of analyze is anal. Huh.

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  3. Your hard work shows, and is appreciated Steve! It's tough to rank our favorite films and narrow it down to a certain number. But I find the effort more rewarding than, say, using a random number generator.

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