Five years, or so ago, I decided that I needed to make a listing of my 100 favorite movies. I was working in an office at a time and even had 2 of my coworkers make their own lists. I worked on it painstakingly for several months and when I completed it, I promptly lost the list. #ADHDLIFE.
Sometime during Co-vid, my wife found a small notebook of mine that had 100 favorite movies scratched on it. It unfortunately did not have the completed list , but it did have the names of over 150 movies and some rankings and notations. I always intended to revisit the list every 5 years or so, but this feels more like starting over than revisiting.
For the past few weeks, I have been laying out a groundwork for determining my top 100. This process will include watching many of them again to see if they still resonate with me, sorting movies into different groups, and ranking them by group while continuing to develop a philosophy for establishing the final ranking.
An important decision I'll have to navigate is how exactly I'll be evaluating the movies. Am I basing their rank on their current importance, their historical importance, or simply the quality of the film, or some hybrid form? I know this isn't going to be a best film list, but I do tend to base a film's quality with how much I enjoy watching it.
Fortunately, I already have the top 15 worked out and can easily carve out the top 25 without much difficulty. The tricky part, I expect, will be ranking from 26 to100 and thus deciding what films don't make the cut.
I decided that it might help out thing considerably to pick what I think the 100th movie will be early in the process. This way I can have a yard stick of sorts as if to to say "okay, I like this film better than 100 so it must be in the top 100." or "This film is not as good as 100, so it must not be in the top 100." Of course this is just a starting point and the film I pick as the place holder, may end up being ranked significantly higher or lower.
I think at this time that the film I would rate as 100th would be the 1996 film, The Spitfire Grill. The Spitfire grill did not make my top 100 movie list, the last time around. The more I think about it, the more I think it should have.
Spitfire was release by Castle Rock and has a very Castle Rock feel to it. In some ways it is an odd film, and does not always go where I want it to. There are even certain parts of the movie, I don't like to watch on repeat viewing. These may be among the reasons why Spitfire did not make the cut on my original list.
Here are some reasons I have thought about revising my assessment.
The Cast: Marcia Gay Harden and Will Patton while secondary to the plot, anchor an excellent cast. Ellyn Burstyn does an excellent job as the irascible owner of the grill, and every time I watch this film, I am surprised that Allison Elliott did not become a Hollywood legend because she is a force to be reckoned with here.
The Cinematography: This like A River Runs Through It, Brave Heart, and Secret of Roan Inish, is a spectacle for the eyes. The Atlantic North East is majestically shown in this film.
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The Story: The plot in many ways is predictable but that does not diminish how rewarding it is to watch. Like I said earlier, the movie does not always do what I want it to do; but, what it does, it does skillfully and memorably. While the movie doesn't have the redemption arc I want for it, it portrays redemption in a broader more wholistic way.
In short, it is a flawed film with a high rewatchability level. It will be interesting to see where it lands on the eventual list.
I expect the process of making a new list to take me at least a year. I hope to use this blog as a way of talking about some of these films and then eventually presenting the list here in one way or another,
Love,
Dave
