The Best Movie Ever is…
(don’t scroll to the end for the answer)
Are you like me, and get extremely nervous when you have to play the icebreaker game where you, “Say Your Name and Your Favorite Movie” or are you normal?
Why do we ask that question? How do you feel when asked that question? Is it invasive or too personal? Do you feel pressure to say something interesting or smart and do you even know what a movie is???
This question, like all ice-breakering activities, is meant to let people know a little something about you — something inoffensive but hopefully insightful. Or, at the very least, it gets you to say words out loud in front of strangers.
NAME YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE
No, seriously. What is it?
(…that’s embarrassing)
What if, instead of the former question, I asked, “What is the best movie?”
Would you say the same thing?
I would guess NOT. But why is that?
Favorite is a personal characteristic that you assign to a thing that you love and you can love a thing even if you don’t believe it is particularly well made. Case in point:
But Best FEELS objective. It makes it sound like you are doing computations and assessing all cinema-variables (henceforth known as cinearials (a word I will never use again)) to state an empirical fact about art.
But no one really believes this in real life, right?
I don’t think, on a logical level, many people would say yes to this. BUT in a practical sense, there does seem to be an ingrained way of thinking which leads most of us to feel:
There ARE some movies that are Best, or at least Better, than others in an “objective-ish” sense.
Earlier when you named your “Best Movie,” did you select one that literally won a “Best Picture” type award or that possibly appears on one of those lists?
I’ve written elsewhere about how culturally we seem to have an obsession with identifying, awarding, and reinforcing the idea that there can be superlative art. (https://scottmakingcents.medium.com/the-grammys-and-comedy-music-dc1a8fbc9a96) Blah blah blah.
Lists, like those from Variety, AFI, and even Rolling Stone (stay in your lane RS), are only just the tip of the iceberg — Google searching “Best Movies List Lists” returns “About 6,170,000,000 results.” Sure some of these lists are more reputable than other; ie. Sight and Sounds’ List probably holds more weight than IMDB’s Top 250.
With any type of ‘best of’ list, you have to ask how do these films get picked and ranked? They are usually not democratically determined — at least not the lists that seem to matter. Even when there is a clear, democrat-ish/democratical* voting process it is highly swayed by who even gets the right to vote.
*One of the great advances of the internet age is that there has been more of an actual democratization of media criticism. I use the word “great” to mean significant and not super-cool-fun-time because once you’ve read some mass criticism you may come to regret it. IMDB’s list is probably the prime example of what is closest to democracy, but they put The Thing at #152 so like, what’s even the point?
Q: Does the fact that these lists have so many of the same titles on them make a more compelling case that those films deserve to be there?
A: Are you not paying attention?
Certainly, there are some technical grounds you could judge a movie on (that are effectively objective): Does it follow certain rules* of composition and editing OR is the camera in focus? But these qualities are rarely what anyone points to when asked to defend their preferences in a film. What do we point to then? Good acting, compelling stories, well-paced scenes, and sexiest dinosaurs (I mean visual effects?)— things that are all very subjective. 💋🦖💋
*Yes, I know that these rules don’t just exist in nature and therefore are just as subjective and flawed as everything else we’ve been talking about. GET OVER IT.
If we truly believe that art and appreciation is a subjective and personal experience why do we continue to delude ourselves with the concept of Best?
Especially when we already know that the Best Movie Ever is…
