In Don McKellar's apocalyptic comedy "Last Night", a radio DJ, knowing the world will end at midnight, counts down the minutes and hours by playing the greatest songs of all time. He plays them in order, so that the last song, the best one ever, will go out on the air at exactly 12 o'clock. It's only as he's cuing up the final song that he admits to his listeners that he's simply playing the songs he wants to hear.
Compiling a year-end 10 best list is a little like that. Whatever contortions you go through to appear even-handed and objective, your choices are idiosyncratic. You're picking your personal favorites. At the same time, drawing up a list can provide some perspective on what kind of year you had going to the movies. Some years are better than others.
For the record, my approach to creating a top 10 list works something like this:
Sometime around the middle of January, when all my reviews for the year are in the can, I go back and sort the titles, using my notoriously fallible zero-to-¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ rating system. Any new release rated ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ or higher automatically makes the year-end list. If there are more than 10 ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ movies (the sign of a good year), I add five more titles to accommodate them all. If there are fewer than 10, I go to the movies rated ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2. The ratings are subjective to begin with, so the notion that I'm doing anything the least bit scientific would probably not hold up in court. Or anywhere else.
On my list for 2010, there's one ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2 movie, six rated ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢, and three at ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2. (Technically, there are five at ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2. I cheated.) Which might suggest that 2010 wasn't a real good movie year, but I'm not sure that's the case. It's more that there were a lot of movies I admired last year that didn't quite blow me away. Movies like "Please Give" and "The Social Network" and "The King's Speech" and "Black Swan". All good movies, maybe even real good ones, but not films that made me want to run right out and buy the DVD. It comes back to that personal element. Everybody's different.
Factor in all the movies I didn't get to last year, pictures like "The Kids Are All Right" and "127 Hours" and "Winter's Bone" and "Shutter Island", and you can see what an inexact enterprise this is.
Despite all that, and maybe partly because of it, making a 10 best list is one of the most fun things I get to do on the blog. It might not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but I'm pretty sure another list in all its whimsical imperfection will turn up here next January.
Meanwhile, if you want to know what song the world ends on, the one the DJ in the movie spins at the stroke of midnight, you'll just have to watch "Last Night".
