How Many Licks Does It Take?

I hope none of my readers are too young to remember this iconic rhetorical question courtesy of Tootsie Pop. I use it to reference a key question in relation to film, which to put it simply what do you need to see to be an "expert". The analogy isn't hard, simply put the licks in this case are films you've seen. The center of a Tootsie Pop however can be any number of things. This can be one director's work, a film movement, all of film in general, or in this particular case the expertise necessary for a single year of cinema.

So if you recall the commercial it appeared that Mr. Owl's response was three. Let's not take my analogy too seriously no one will be considered an expert on say the films of 2009 if they've only seen three, regardless of which three films they might be. Critics certainly have an advantage on regular cinema fans because it is their job to see pretty much every film that comes out sometimes even if the film hasn't been distributed. So in a given year a critic may see somewhere around 300 films, which would make their top 10 fairly well informed then. The average person who has any sort of profession besides film critic will be lucky to see 300 films from any year let alone from the current one. So with the help of our critic friends we the people need some help filtering out the Hotel For Dogs and Did You Hear About the Morgans?

Now to make a top ten list what's the obvious bare minimum of films to see, well ten obviously. However even if you see 90 more films from the same year and none of them are as good as the first ten you saw, your list can't be taken too seriously. We do on occasion need points of reference otherwise how can we spot the truly exceptional films if we don't sit through a few duds along the way. The average Hollywood summer blockbuster offers enough mindless diversions to help you differentiate the substantial art. Not to say that films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine or Terminator Salvation are particularly awful films, in fact I enjoyed both. That said I don't see either one standing any chance of being amongst my list of best films of the year, or even in an extended also ran category. I haven't seen a great deal of stinkers from 2009, and to be honest I didn't see that many films period. In fact unless I miscalculated I've seen about 33 films from the past year. If you're reading this and thinking "Where is your top ten?" all I can say is that 33 is not my magic number.

Awhile back I set the arbitrary number to answer this rhetorical question I first posed at 50. Now 50 films isn't the answer to all the questions I asked, after all you can be an expert on the Coen Brothers films long before you see 50 of their films, simply because at last count they got awhile to go until they hit that number. You're hardly an expert on French cinema either with just 50 French films seen. However if you've seen 50 Romanian films you might very well be qualified to write a book on the subject, but that again is why this question never has one right answer.

Back to the yearly debate. I personally just feel that I can be comfortable with releasing a top ten list if I've seen 50 films from that year. Sure I might still see more films from that year, and in some cases ones that might very well crack the top ten, but if you chose your 50 films wisely their won't be too much room for late entries. Take this year for example and the 33 films to date that I've seen from it. I can make an easy list of films released theatrically this year in the US that I haven't yet watched and you would hopefully agree that a top ten of mine would be useless without at least checking these next films out: Where the Wild Things Are, Broken Embraces, The Last Station, A Single Man, In the Loop, The Messenger, Of Time and the City, 24 City, Police Adjective, 35 Shots of Rum, Capitalism: A Love Story, Lorna's Silence, The Limits of Control, or Two Lovers. If some of these films are making you scratch your head, then maybe you need to do some more research yourself. Now to say those are all the "worthwhile" films from 2009 that I missed would be foolish. I might not ever see all the "worthwhile" films from 2009 or any year for that matter. After all even such revered masterpieces of the past like The Searchers, Vertigo, and Touch of Evil were largely dismissed when they were originally released. Perhaps there is that next potential masterpiece that's going to take another decade or two to find. To give a recent example, how many top ten lists did Donnie Darko pop up on in 2001?

So I'd say in the future of this blog I can promise one thing, I'll never open my mouth about the ten best films of any given year unless I've seen 50 films. In fact the last year that I've met my own criteria for was 2006, where I've currently seen 71 films even though I'm still not sure I've seen all the good ones. I'm still yet to see Peter O'Toole's Oscar nominated turn in Venus. So you can see how this debate can be endless, when can you simply let go and say "this is the best I've seen"? I don't necessarily think that Venus even would make my top ten even if I haven't seen it yet. So since I know you're all dying to know this is how my top ten would stack up from 2006 (pardon the tardiness):

1. Children of Men
2. The Departed
3. The Curse of the Golden Flower
4. Bobby
5. Borat
6. Letters From Iwo Jima
7. A Scanner Darkly
8. Inland Empire
9. Pursuit of Happyness
10. United 93

Now as you can see this list has a few problems even now. For starters this isn't the exact ten that I originally posted for this year. I recently cut the South African Oscar winner Tsotsi, which although one of my favorites has since been eclipsed by the other films I've seen that year. Unfortunately that means the only "true" foreign language film on the list is Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower which quite a few people hated for it's bloated visuals and over indulgence. These people have typically resented Yimou's transformation to martial arts epic film maker from his once humble and rebellious 5th Generation roots. I personally love both films and would easily rank a film like To Live or Raise the Red Lantern alongside Hero or House of Flying Daggers. After all a good film is a good film, no matter the budget or who makes it. I mean who would have thought one of the best musicals of the last twenty years would come from Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark is a musical people)? However we haven't resolved the problem that my list is powerfully dominated by English language films. After all Pan's Labyrinth wasn't even on my list or the highly regarded German film The Lives of Others. Unfortunately you'll have to take my word for it that I did see more than a fair amount of foreign language films that year, but well the best films just happened to be in English. This says something about the state of foreign films that year and also the relatively sparse distribution for foreign films that year and virtually every year.

Of course one of the problems for this is that often the best foreign films of a given year don't come to US shores in that same year. Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Hana and Alain Resnais' Private Fears in Public Places would have easily made my list if they were released here in 2006. I can't retroactively update all my top tens based on when the film was geographically released however. I do employ this tactic for films released last century, considering for most of those years I'm catching films retroactively. In plain English I don't care if Jean Luc Godard's Weekend was released in the US in 1968, it was produced in 1967 and premiered sometime in December 1967 internationally so I'm counting it as one of the best films from that year. I have in fact seen more than 50 films from 1967 and let's say foreign films do a little better than in 2006. I'll save that top ten for another blog entry, perhaps on the 60's in general once I get every other year that decade above 50, but I digress.

Now nearly every year I make a vow to keep up on the new releases. I did this in 2005 and that remains to this day the only year I was able to post a top ten by December 31st. Sure I had to wait until January for a few of the Oscar contenders that year to come out (Munich for instance) but I made a point of going to the show practically every week. I happened to be lucky because 2005 was one of the strongest years in recent memory. Which begins another question, what if there aren't ten great films from a year?

Who's to say that just because you've seen 50 films from a year that there are ten masterpieces worthy of a top ten placing. Hell you can see 200 films from some years and never find 10 worthy. Maybe a given year only has 6 or 7 great films. 2003 is such a year for me. Sure I really enjoyed films like Elf, Bad Santa, and Thirteen but in any other year these wouldn't have placed on my top ten. Not to say there weren't some excellent films made that year, for starters City of God was released as was Kill Bill Vol. 1, Elephant, and the final installment of Lord of the Rings. Just to say there were ten films of that caliber would be a mistake. In fact 2006 is another example, I'm not sure United 93 or Pursuit of Happyness would make my top ten in a stronger year, like 2005 for example. Now this is where you have to make that distinction and list the "pretty good" films that might ordinarily pop up on a runner's-up list rather than your best of.

The Seventh Seal dir. Ingmar Bergman one of the many great films of 1957

However the opposite can certainly happen. 2005 I'd rather list a top 15 than merely ten. In fact you can easily find more than 10 masterpieces without even having seen 50 films from a year. I can easily make a case that 1957 was the greatest year for cinema. I've only seen 47 films from the year (which would put it under my magic number) but there are no less than 14 films that I would not hesitate to call a "masterpiece", and plenty of other also-ran's that could place on any number of lists. From Russia (The Cranes are Flying) to Poland (Kanal) to Sweden (Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries) to Japan (Tokyo Twilight and Throne of Blood), to India (Aparajito) there are no shortage of masterpieces from this seemingly charmed year. Even the American's offered a few gems with Bridge on the River Kwai, Paths of Glory, Witness for the Prosecution, Sweet Smell of Success, and 12 Angry Men to name a few. I would have a hard time chopping four films off this list to accommodate a top ten, but I guess when you're a critic whose seen 300 films from a year you have to make similar sacrifices every year, much to public outcry. Roger Ebert mentioned taking a lot of flack for posting a top 20 for 2008, and even while apologizing to some extent offered a list of ten "mainstream" films and ten "independent" for 2009.

So why do we need ten? It is easily digestible but depending on the subject ten can seem an insult. Before too long Sight and Sound will be updating it's every decade list of the best films of all time and this list has always been a top ten. If you ask over 100 movie critics and professionals their ten favorite films it seems almost like an insult. How many surprises can you find in a list of ten films for the growing cinephile? You'd be lucky if there is a film or two you haven't seen. However if Sight and Sound upped this to 100 there's a good chance that most fans of cinema would at least have a few films to check out, even possibly a list whore like myself. Back to the year end list though, ten just seems to be about as much as we can digest. After all even a seemingly well balanced list like Film Comment's top 20 this year seems to bog down towards the bottom. If you are basing what films to see on it, you'll certainly make a point of seeing the higher ranked films but might be distracted by warm weather and baseball by the time you work your way down to the 16-20 realm. Sure that list is gospel to the creator, but to the reader its something to be taken into consideration arguably for nothing else but to put together their own well informed list.

I apologize if I've been far too long winded with this blog, didn't know I had so much to say.