S. T. VanAirsdale disses "best of the year" listmakers by coming up with his own list of "top 10 of top 10" (worst) listmakers in The Reeler.
Among the ridiculed listers are Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Ben Lyons of E!, and Transformers fan Sean Elliott of iF Magazine.
Here's VanAirsdale's intro:
"As you might expect in a year credited with one of the best cinematic vintages in a decade, 2007 was also a time of unparalleled hype, complacency and obsequiousness among scores of list-making film critics. But it was also a time of reinvention, with many critics adapting their rituals to evolving pressures and preconceptions. In a media era when seemingly everyone has a voice, it's not how one contributes to the discussion but rather how one permutes one's rave for No Country for Old Men that really sets him or her apart.
"As such, The Reeler's third annual Top 10 of Top 10s was a grueling undertaking, responsible for parsing more than 150 lists that ranged from your basic 10-best to 10-best-plus-15 to 40- or 50-best with four-way ties for 22nd place to… you get the picture."
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I couldn't quite follow — or, at other times, agree with — some of VanAirsdale's reasoning. ("I like Blood a lot more than No Country, but is it really better? And are both really better than 50 dozen other films that shared their year of release by little more than coincidence? Is this the best we can do: the same old physics exam, 100 lists at a time, decade after decade? When do we get better?").
And I couldn't quite follow — or, at other times, agree with — many of his jokes and/or analogies, either. ("In a year when navel contemplation was all the rage among top 10ers, [Aaron] Mesh [of the Willamette Week] embarked on a full-scale camping expedition. But not just with an Aristotle quote, the 83rd assessment of the year's moral quandaries and the shopworn Apatow Double-Dip…")
Even so, I'd recommend VanAirsdale's article because some of the issues he raises are unquestionably valid, while some of the questions he asks will likely make you stop and think. And that's considerably more than what most critics out there accomplish, whether through their top-ten lists or through their reviews.
By the way, VanAirsdale's "Time Magazine's big Dick and little Dick" remark aroused my curiosity, though I was too spooked out to even attempt to figure out which was which.