To celebrate our seventh anniversary, the ScreenAge Wasteland team is sharing individual lists of our 100 favorite films of all time. Explore the full collection here.
Making a list of films I love is easy. RANKING them, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass. Any system I choose – how many times have I seen it, how likely am I to watch it again, how important is it to my film watching experience – seems arbitrary and likely to change from day to day. So the only way I could actually do the ranking part – as opposed to the joyous fun of simply saying “I LOVE THAT MOVIE!” and adding it to the list – was to embrace the fact that this is a temporary list. An artifact of this moment in time and my state of mind during it. Honestly, it’s good that Kane decided to make these lists into graphics, because I would be tweaking the damn thing for weeks after it was published otherwise.
I really enjoyed the “piling sand in the sandbox” part of this project. (If you don’t care about process, you can skip this paragraph.) I told a friend what we were doing and they said something like “I’m not sure I could think of 100 films I liked.” And I was immediately like “I’m not even getting out of the 1980s without a couple of hundred films on the list.” (The total for the 1980s ended up being just shy of 400.) I did a speed run at first, just adding films I could immediately think of, then went through decade by decade, adding anything I had forgotten. I actually need to go back to the early decades and add more, because my criteria when I started included “could be in the top 100,” but by the 1970s, I was more just adding anything I enjoyed. That seems like a good project to me, to have a list of movies I liked, so thanks to Kane for suggesting this, because I’ll end up with a living list I never really took the time to make before.
The list itself is just weird. It’s horror-heavy, which is probably not a surprise, but it includes a lot more comedies than I expected. I feel like I probably gave dramas short shrift here because I enjoy them, but I rarely re-watch them. Newer films also suffered for a similar reason – I expect things like Sinners or Dune will make their way into the list at some point, but for now, they just don’t have the road miles most of the other films do. When I’m watching The Substance for the 8th time because it just happened to show up as I was flipping through services? That’s when it’ll creep onto the list and kick something else off. There are also a lot of “bad” films on here just because I love them. Shock Waves was in the top 10 at one point, before I came to my senses.
This is more rambling than you probably want or need for a top 100 list thing.
The thing I’m most looking forward to with this project? Reading everyone else’s list and cursing myself for not including something they’ve added. We’re all a work in progress, and this list is as well.
Let us know some of your favorites from Bob’s list! And complete the ListChallenges to tell us in the comments how many of his 100 you’ve seen!
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