My Top 25 Favorite Movies

My friends and I, primarily Steve Lewis and Jeff South, have been kicking around the idea of a "Blog Club" where we can encourage each other to keep active with the regular blog posts as well as comment on similar material, since we all share the same passion for the arts, including film, television, music, theater, and books.

Steve's taken the first crack at his Top 20 Favorite Movies, which he based purely on his subjective preference in terms of how much he enjoys the movie. What this means is that although quality was one of his criteria, it wasn't the determining factor (hence, "favorite" rather than "best").

I've decided to engage the "Blog Club" concept with my own take on my favorite movies but with my own personal twist. I'm sticking with my favorites, but I'm also letting quality drive the process a bit more heavily than Steve did, so you'll see a lot of award-winning, critically favored movies at the top of my list as opposed to the bottom half. This helped me determine the final order of all the movies.

My individual rankings were derived from an assignment I give each time I teach Advanced College Writing, in which I ask students in a group discussion to list their five favorite movies in six categories: a) All-Time; b) Comedy; c) Romance; d) Horror; e) Action-Adventure; f) Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I play along with my class, so I have my own films listed in all these categories.

I took my top three movies in every category (more or less), then threw out a few ("The Exorcist" is the scariest movie of all time but not one of my favorites), plus added in the extra categories of "Animated" and "Gangster." I then put all those movies out on the table and ranked them as a whole based on my personal affinity plus overall quality, critical reception, and awards.

So that's my system, and yes, it's just as subjective as Steve's was, as are all forms of qualitative evaluation (a term my ACW students know all too well). Debating the quality of artistic expression in terms of our emotional and intellectual reaction to those forms is what makes the performing arts such a rich and vital part of human life. It's what drew me to the humanities as a student and what continues to drive me as a college professor.

Here's what you'll see, starting tomorrow, and then hopefully each day as I count down from #25 to #1. If the list were one longer, this example would be #26, which ironically, I list as my #1 funniest movie because it makes me laugh more than any other, but it didn't make the cut because the other 25 are either better quality movies or more beloved favorites. In any case, here's the format you can expect to see:

#26—Liar, Liar (1997)

Genre: Comedy

Director: Tom Shadyac

Writers: Paul Guay, Stephen Mazur

Stars: Jim Carrey, Maura Tierney, Carey Elwes, Amanda Donohoe, Jennifer Tilly

Awards: 1 Golden Globe nomination—Comic Lead Actor (Carrey)

Metacritic Score: 70

IMDB Ranking: n/a