Year-end list-making and me are just barely hanging on.
I didn’t put together a year-end music list for 2019. There was no Pazz & Jop last year, and that
was the sole incentive (and, before Pazz & Jop, the yearly Eye poll out of Toronto; for a few years
I submitted lists to both) that had me sit down every December, wade through all the other year-end
lists that had already been published, and compress a year’s worth of listening into a couple of
weeks...well, for at least the past decade--there was a time when I actually did keep up reasonably
well on my own. I wrote lots and lots of comments, three or four pages of them every year--cumula-
tively, probably more than anyone in the history of Pazz & Jop except Christgau himself; I really
do believe that--and waited to see if any of them were included in the published poll. In the
interim, I'd post all the lists and the comments here. I could still do that, of course, but absent
Pazz & Jop, the desire just isn’t there anymore. Scott Woods and I did draw up decade-end lists
a year ago, and compared notes in a 23-part Skype conversation, but opportunities for decade-end
lists only present themselves every 10 years by my calculation.
And that’s also what I did in place of a year-end film list for 2019, put together a list for the
2010s instead, but with the full intention of returning to a yearly Top 10 in 2020. I’d stopped
keeping up with new music, but new films were just part of living. Until March 11, 2020, anyway,
at which point they more or less stopped too.
I probably did end up seeing 10-15 new releases this year--a few before the pandemic, a few more
once theatres reopened (late summer? I can’t remember exactly--they’re closed again), and then
supplemented that with a handful of TV-streamed films, like the Charlie Kaufman labyrinth. A year-
end list would be meaningless, though: I liked the Michael Jordan extravaganza (which, if I’m hon-
est, is less of a film than ESPN’s O.J. extravaganza), but midway through the list I’d be falling
back on films I was basically indifferent to. So I’ll put that on hold for another year. Or two--
the virus and various drug companies will decide that.
As a placeholder, here’s the list I submitted to a greatest-ever poll the ILX message-board is run-
ning in advance of the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, the one where Vertigo supplanted Citizen Kane at the
top in 2012. You’re allowed to list up to 125 films. I’ve written before about my habit of watching
my favourite films over and over again until I numb them into oblivion; a list of 125 for me would
be at least half made up of such casualties. So I limited myself to 30--a Top 10, and another 20 I
didn’t rank.
This is the first time I’ve done this since I joined Steven Rubio and Jeff Pike for a shared Facebook
countdown in 2011 (literally the last time I said to myself, “Wow, isn’t Facebook great?”). I think
about two-thirds of my new list is drawn from the Top 50 I assembled for that. The new additions are
primarily guided by a) all the viewing I did in conjunction with writing You Should’ve Heard Just
What I Seen, and b) “prestige TV”--I hadn’t yet seen even one of these shows (the rollcall should be
familiar by now) in 2011, and I’ve been catching up ever since. Arguably the two most famous happen
to be my two favourite; whether or not I should have included them here, that’s another question.
Which brings me to something I realized while putting together the new list: I don’t care anymore.
I once thought of movie-going as a lifetime project, probably the most far-reaching and foundational
one of my life, and that, over time, I’d eventually get around to seeing all the important films I
needed to see. But it doesn’t, at the moment, feel like that project exists anymore. I want to say
that this is mostly fallout from 2020, a temporary pause, but that sense of largeness has in fact
been steadily eroding for years. I bought my first big-screen TV a decade ago, after which I was
less committed to seeing everything in a theatre. Then all those TV shows I caught up with--when
it became clear to me just how good some of them were, that scrambled everything up a little more.
I left Toronto, significantly reducing my movie-going universe (two pretty-good rep theatres within
an hour in either direction, about 20% of what was available to me in Toronto). And finally, COVID.
So I don’t really care that Mad Men and The Sopranos aren’t really films, or that Adventureland and
The Perks of Being a Wallflower won’t be getting a single vote in the Sight & Sound poll (they won’t
even get a second vote in the ILX poll). Writing in 2011, I issued an early warning that “Especially
in the lower reaches of my list, I’ll have a few picks that no one’s going to mistake for art.” Ten
years later, the lower reaches are moving up, the upper reaches are fading, and I’m including things
that no one’s even going to mistake for films. And I’m okay with that.
1. Zodiac (2007)
2. Mad Men (2007-2015)
3. All the President’s Men (1976)
4. No Country for Old Men (2007)
5. Lost in America (1986)
6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
7. Nixon (1995)
8. Welfare (1975)
9. 20th Century Women (2016)
10. Advise and Consent (1962)
Adventureland (2009)
American Honey (2016)
Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Boogie Nights (1997)
The Candidate (1972)
Casualties of War (1989)
Cold Water (1994)
Comfort and Joy (1984)
Double Indemnity (1944)
The 400 Blows (1959)
Goin’ Down the Road (1970)
Il Posto (1961)
Malcolm X (1992)
No Direction Home (2005)
Pather Panchali (1955)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
The Sopranos (1999-2007)
The Squid and the Whale (2005)
To Sir with Love (1967)