Almost three years ago, after Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened to big box office but largely negative reviews (A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in a collaborative effort, spearheaded by the folks at Cinema Fusion and Movie Patron, to produce a Top 100 films list on behalf of the online film community. I was sent a list of 500 nominees, and was asked to narrow it down to my personal Top 100, ranked in order.
I didn’t end up getting that far. Poring over the nominees list, I just became completely overwhelmed. It was easy enough to narrow the 500 down to 100 (frankly, there were quite a few films on the Top 500 that felt like placeholders–Pirates of the Caribbean? Grease? Seriously?), but I didn’t want to just submit a list of My Top 100 Most Favorite Bestests with Barry Lyndon at the top and the remaining 99 in random order. I decided I needed to come up with an organizing philosophy that would allow me to rank the films on a non-arbitrary scale, based on artistic, entertainment, and socio-historical value. But while I was agonizing over theoretical point values, everyone else was ranking their movies, and yesterday the final Top 100 list debuted on Cinema Fusion.
Considering that this venture was at least in part a reaction to AFI’s recently re-released Top 100 list, I think it’s useful to compare the two. Sean at Film Junk notes that he’s “a little disappointed that [the online] list wasn’t very radical or ‘progressive’.” This is a bit of an understatement; this new list is in fact so similar to the AFI list that if you compare just the two Top 20s side by side, seven films appear on both lists, with one film actually winning the same exact ranking from both groups. It begs the question: how did this self-styled “alternative list” come to so closely resemble the institutional verdict? Is this just an instance of consensus necessarily producing mediocrity, and if so, would there have been any way to get around that? Below the jump, you’ll find both Top 20s, and my analysis.
