Giving Cinephilia a Bad Name

Warning: bad-tempered fit of spleen ahead.

A dimwit named Allan Fish at the occasionally useful filmblog Wonders in the Dark has decided to grace humanity with an un-annotated list of his top 3,000 films, just the titles, countries, release years, and directors, in order, counting backward from 3,000 to 1. I could not resist taking a potshot at this, in the form of a comment which may or may not get published at the blog. If it doesn't, I get that; I'm not fond of insults, either, and I've moderated some comments of that type out of existence here. However, I will archive my reaction at my own blog, because I truly want to record my objections to such an exercise:

Well, since you said you need to have your head examined…you do understand that this is exceedingly childish, right? That this is the sort of thing that gives cinephilia a bad name? That the dedicated study of movies needs fewer people such as yourself, who would undertake such a cockamamie project, and more who are past the adolescent, High Fidelity-esque “art-house fanboy” stage? You do know all this, right?

Am I being as childish as Mr. Fish? Quite possibly, and without a doubt I am also being unkind. But this sort of intensive, labor-heavy trivialization of something that matters a great deal, the history of film, will never sit well with me, at least not coming from someone over the age of 20. And a top 3,000...yikes. Come back, all my prior betes noires; none of you can begin to compete with this. Fish has out-fished you.

POSTSCRIPT: In the interest of cultural sanitation, I'm not linking to the list; it's easily found. But here is a representative sample of ten films:

2965 Michael Clayton (US 2007…Tony Gilroy)
2964 Ormen (Sweden 1966…Hans Abramson)
2963 The Assassin (Italy 1961…Elio Petri)
2962 Cutting it Short (Czechoslovakia 1980…Jiri Menzel)
2961 An American Werewolf in London (US/UK 1981…John Landis)
2960 Troy: director’s cut (US 2004/2007…Wolfgang Petersen)
2959 Hamlet (UK-TV 2009…Gregory Doran)
2958 My Sister, My Love (Sweden 1966…Vilgot Sjöman)
2957 Let George Do It (UK 1940…Marcel Varnel)
2956 Never Let Me Go (UK 2010…Mark Romanek)

What could this possibly mean? That Mr. Fish has diverse tastes, that he has seen a lot of obscurities, that he neither privileges nor dismisses Hollywood movies? Welcome to the club(s). That Troy is ever so slightly better than An American Werewolf in London in the cosmic scheme of things? If the order of these ten films were scrambled, or they were placed elsewhere in Mr. Fish's 3,000, or he removed them all and replaced them with roughly equivalent titles not currently in the list, would that add to the sum of the world's knowledge? It wouldn't even add to our knowledge of Mr. Fish.

UPDATE: Did I not understand, Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark huffed, that Allan Fish was one of the most acclaimed film bloggers and that he has seen "over 8,000 films in his life"? I'll assume that Mr. Fish is not an old man, so if he has seen 8,000 films in his life, he has done very little else; he has not actually lived a life, and what he has to say about the films in question is highly unlikely to be of much interest. Of course, in the case of this list, he isn't saying anything.

Mr. Fish himself picked up the volume theme. "How many of this 3,000 have you seen? Once you have seen them all, and the several thousand that missed out, then you can come back here and start insulting me...Now go get an education!" You know, Mr. Fish, it is quite possible to get a more balanced education than watching 8,000 movies. That you and Mr. Juliano are all worked up over the numbers merely underlines my point about the fanboy mentality. Someone could have seen no prior films and still have more pertinent to say about Citizen Kane than a cinemaniac.

I suffer from OCD myself, I recognize the symptoms, but with assistance I have learned when OCD is simply not relevant. The assessment of art is one of those occasions. Mr. Fish, psychological help is available!