You know about the AFI Bestest Hollywood Movie Times of All Time (Redux). You may have also heard that the Alliance of Women FIlm Journalists has announced plans to release their own counter-list; a few individual, unaffiliated bloggers, have already beaten them to the punch. Meanwhile, film blog bigwigs such as David Poland, Anne Thompson and Jeffrey Wells are furiously compiling lists of possible Oscar contenders, even though Poland admits that they're way ahead of the studios -- maybe the gameplan is to get buzz circulating on personal favorites before the studios lay PR money on what *they* think are their best bets?
I certainly don't begrudge the AFI a chance to promote themselves (and as Self-Styled Siren puts it, "if even a few people put Sunrise on the Netflix queue then the AFI exercise was not in vain.") I also admire the passion and dedication it takes for anyone to sit down and rank a list of 100 anything.
But grand-scale list-making is so inherently subjective, it more often than not ends up being uselessly narcissistic. A supposed catalyst for discussion ends up spawning a flurry of responses, each one playing as though the respondent barely registered the original entry before the launching their self-serving counterattack.
It's just all so ... macro. So, in an effort to bestow on movie list-making something resembling a practical function, I'm launching a new SpoutBlog feature: The Micro 5. The idea will be to create a lot of five-item lists, on film-related topics that go beyond blanket declarations of "good" or "bad", in order to spawn a real dialogue -- kind of like what goes on at the Spout group Top 5, with lists like the Top 5 Overhead Shots, or The House Next Door's occasional 5 For the Day feature -- but potentially even more hyper-specific. For each list, in the interest of welcoming actual debate/discussion, I'll tag five film bloggers who I'm directly inviting to produce lists of their own--but feel free to make your own list, even if you're not tagged, and leave the link in the comments.
Check back tomorrow morning for the first installment: Five Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes.
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