Is there much question that the concepts of “best/greatest” and “favorite” are not precisely the same? There certainly isn’t for me. I can list what I think the best films of all time are with some confidence (some), but when I try to determine my favorites, beyond a few films which have long since secured their place in my heart, it becomes a lot more difficult. I cycle through favorites, through phases of taste, with this film or that one rising in my eyes as another…doesn’t fall, necessarily, so much as is obscured. The concept of “favorite” is simply too fluid to quantify in the way I quantify objective quality.
But of course, there’s absolutely a connection between what I consider a film’s objective quality and my personal taste. After all, looking at my #1 films of recent years, they’re pretty much all films I liked as much as I respected them—Melancholia, Spring Breakers, Dear White People, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (retroactively my #1 of 2017), The Favourite—all films I hold very dear, in addition to regarding them very highly as works of cinematic art.
And when you look at what I consider the greatest films ever made, all of those films are beloved to me as well; I just don’t hold a film so high in my eyes without holding it high in my heart as well. Sounds a bit mystical? Maybe it is. But that’s the kind of effect great art should have, and it’s the effect that the greatest films have: we can revel in their craft, meditate upon their themes, and analyze their structure, but also love or hate their characters, thrill at them, laugh at them, and weep at them.
Where it gets tricky is when you have films of undeniable skill that don’t move you on a deeper level, or films that you delight in but recognize as being faulty in one or more ways. Neither reaction delegitimizes the film’s virtues; what it does is affirm the humanity of the beholder. What could be more human than to embrace what we love, despite its faults, or to keep at a distance what we admire but do not love?
In the case of the former, I’ll cite Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It’s a film I enjoy greatly, even preferring it to the original, which I’m very fond of in its own right. Growing up in small-town Kansas, the idea of getting to run around a huge city on your own terms, to stay in a fancy hotel, ride in limos, eat all the pizza and ice cream you want…oh, did it ever appeal to me. And that’s without mentioning the joys of watching Kevin put Harry and Marc through hell, armed with a half-dismantled house and his considerable ingenuity. And it has a lovely original song, “Christmas Star,” which is just as good as “Somewhere in My Memory” but got none of the acclaim.
But I’ll readily admit it’s not at all great. It’s not especially well directed or crafted (adequately, but not notably). It’s a glorified remake of the first film in a lot of aspects, an improvement in some ways and a mere rehash in others. Even for a kids’ film, the logic is fearfully strained in order to make the plot work. When it tries to be serious, it doesn’t work very well; the whole subplot with Brenda Fricker’s “Pigeon Lady” is at best goopy and at worst a pretty naive treatment of the whole issue of homelessness. And for some, the cameo from a certain future Head of State might make it even less digestible. I’ve seen it many times and I’ll see it at least a few more, but I won’t try to make any kind of a case for it as an objectively great film.
On the other hand, you’ve got a film like The Battleship Potemkin. It’s a true classic, a fixture of greatest-film lists, and the Odessa Steps sequence is one of the most iconic in film history. Both for its editing and its propaganda, it’s one of the most widely studied and influential films ever made. How could you forget the ship’s doctor arrogantly declaring maggot-infested beef safe to eat? Or the sailor smashing a plate which seems to mock him with the inscription “Give us this day our daily bread”? Or the placard placed at Vakulinchuk’s feet as he lies in state on the pier: “For a spoonful of borscht”? Or the ending, where the sailors of the Potemkin prepare to battle the Black Sea fleet (almost certainly to the death), only to be given safe passage by their “Brothers!”?
But for all that greatness, is it beloved? Do those who rank it as one of the greatest films ever made also rank it among their personal favorites? Do many viewers watch it just to watch it? Maybe they do—but I find it hard to imagine. Maybe it’s the fact that it has practically nothing in the way of characters or performances, the way that even the characters who get names, like Vakulinchuk, are at best symbols, theoretically sympathetic but in practice little more than extras. This may be by design, since the film is more about revolutionary spirit and the Russian people as a whole than about any individual. But it doesn’t give the heart any more to latch onto, at least not mine. It left me cold in a way that makes it hard to make the leap from “very good” to “truly great” in my book.
But what makes true greatness, anyway? What makes, in my book, Birds of Prey a **** film (just barely) whilst The Martian is at the very top of ***½ but doesn’t jump that little bit higher? What makes Detroit 9000 **** and The Mirror ***½? What makes Videodrome **** and Moonlight ***½? What makes one film, in my book, truly great, but another, more acclaimed film merely (“merely”) very, very good? Maybe it’s taking a page from Ebert’s book and judging a film against its goals and how it achieves them—saying that one film might be a triumph of breezy entertainment but another film falls just short of the mark as a serious drama. Maybe it’s seeing a film on the right day, in the right mood. Maybe it’s getting that rush of excitement, that tingle in the gut, that ineffable sense of “this is a great film I’m seeing.”
But then, can a film be accurately judged from one viewing? I’ve often come to appreciate films considerably more when I return to them—do I owe it to some films that I might have undervalued to give them another chance? I certainly would, had I but world enough and time…but fuck it, I’m only human, and so are you. You’ve rewatched an old favorite in lieu of that film you really need to see. And you’ll do it again. I know I will. I may want to put together something like a definitive set of awards encompassing the whole span of film history, but life keeps getting in the way. And I’m only so inclined to fight it.
Let’s return to the question of how we determine greatness and add the question of how we determine our favorites. Years ago, after rewatching 2001 for the god-knows-what-teenth time, I was talking to my father and telling him how, despite the film’s reputation as being cold and distant, I was able to find new things to appreciate in it, especially regarding Keir Dullea’s performance as Dave Bowman (which I do think is better than generally considered). He suggested that ability to discover new virtues, even after multiple viewings, was one of the marks of a truly great film—and I’ve certainly taken that to heart. And for a time, I thought 2001 might just be the greatest film ever made. It’s certainly not far from the top, even if I currently go with a different film.
On another occasion, talking to my friend Spencer about our favorite films, he argued that one’s favorite film would be the one you could return to repeatedly without wearying of it, and at the time, that led me to settle on Snatch, a film I certainly love very dearly, a film which I haven’t gone back to in a while, but which fit comfortably in the role of my all-time personal #1 because it is so many of the things I look for in a film: inventive, hilarious, ambitious, accomplished, exciting, quotable, and engaging. Could another film unseat it? Perhaps—Who Framed Roger Rabbit is awfully close and has been one of my very favorites since I was very young—but not necessarily.
There’s a lot of overlap, then, between those ideas of “greatest” and “favorite” films. But that’s as it should be. There’s no need to over-promote the flawed films we love or half-heartedly embrace the brilliant films we don’t. But to put a film so very high, to put it above the other films of a given year or decade or genre or all films ever made, requires investment from the heart and mind alike. It’s hard for me to say a film is the best of the year unless I truly relished watching it, and it’s hard for me to enthusiastically or broadly recommend a film unless it’s superbly done, even making allowances for taste—because I know my own tolerance for the strange and violent and generally extreme is higher than average.
When I assembled my first set of All-Time Film Awards, I chose Lawrence of Arabia as the #1 film of all time, allowing that it was (narrowly) surpassed by other films in certain aspects—direction, writing, overall acting—but that no other film I could think of was so totally accomplished in every department, that no other film combined such a standard of acting, writing, and filmmaking. Moreover, those elements all go into telling a compelling story about a fascinating and sympathetic character, surrounded by comparably fascinating characters, all of which transcends the time and place of its setting to be a resonant story of ambition and identity, of the individual and the state (and vs. the state). It has excitement, suspense, humor, tragedy, beauty, and intelligence. I love it because it is so incredibly good, and it is so incredibly good because it was made by gifted artists at the peak of their respective games. It’s not my favorite film, but it’s definitely one of them.
Ultimately, to me, the difference between determining greatness and determining favorites lies in quantification. Greatness I can measure by some kind of concrete standard: by a numerical scale, by a star scale, or by a ranked list. Greatness is the price. But favorite-ness (there’s got to be an actual word for that) is the value. It’s what lies beyond numbers, beyond data, beyond ranked lists. Picking the very greatest film of all might take a lot of rating and weighing and hemming and hawing, but picking a favorite takes that innate sense, or nothing at all. And that’s why I prefer not to title my lists the “10 Best Films” or “My 10 Favorite Films” of a given year, but “My Top 10 Films” of that year, or decade, or all time. It’s the happy medium between two concepts which can’t exist without each other.
If You Want the Gravy... 