I don't expect people to like the films I like. As a matter of fact, some interesting lists contain films I'm either indifferent to or downright dislike. But these lists come with an interesting edge to them. Admittedly, these are mostly lists curated by just one person, hence my point about how accumulated lists often come with their issues.
So there's that. Best lists are personal. They allow you to get into the head of their maker and get a better understanding of the maker as a cinephile. Of course, this can lead to misunderstandings, but that's one entertaining side to it! Clearly, if the maker is totally oblivious to film, his list will probably be riddled with uninteresting choices, just a cookie-cutter copy of the most popular films. Mercifully, it can still be saved by write-ups with details on why they find these films personal. (But there's also an issue of the person refusing to say why a work of art is personal, which is totally fine).
So what we're left with, most of the time is just the films. And way too many people only watch the absolute surface level cinema. This is boring. This leads to no new discoveries. This leads to no appealing, personal lists. Because to get below the surface, one needs to invest a lot of time into both finding and then watching films outside of the IMDb Top 250. Without this, we get another list with The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and The Lighthouse, if we're lucky. That's fine. These are good films. And it's fine to have them on the list if one really loves them, but had one delved deeper into the art form of cinema, one would have discovered there are better, and definitely potentially more personal, films out there begging to be discovered. But unanimously sticking to the 'canon' (whatever that is) won't lead anybody into discovering them. To make it clear, obscure films (however you define that) are not the aim of film-watching itself but rather the by-product of getting deeper into cinema, and it's only natural that some of them will turn out to be as good (if not better) than the ubiquitous canon (whatever that is).
And that's twice as true with accumulated lists. By the sheer law of statistics, the more lists you combine, the less interesting the final list will be. That's a ranking of popularity rather than quality. The most interesting choices are cut off during the process. That's why the list of one-pointers is more interesting than the final list. And that's, maybe, why I'm bound to be disappointed with a list of the best films of the 2000s. People probably haven't had enough time to discover great films from that era. Or haven't had enough other people to
tell them what films are worth discovering (incidentally, many film critics somehow get into the retard mode once we're talking about post-2000 cinema and often choose total garbage even if their older film choices were better, so it's a universal problem). Yes, lots of commercial cinema is garbage but not because it's commercial. And lots of obscure cinema is garbage, too. Trust me, I've seen enough fancy raters on Letterboxd that only watch obscure films and whose shtick is to watch and rate films nobody else has rated before (and unsurprisingly, these films are impossible to find, they're mostly not that good either, by the way).
A film is not better by the sheer virtue of being less known. But it's often much more interesting because of that. And a more interesting film is more interesting to check out. And by checking out more films, the possibility of discovering new favorites increases. But then you stumble upon a top of films that only contains the most tedious set of films you see everywhere. And what's there to get from it? Totally nothing.
I think most people watch films but they don't know
why they watch films. But that's fine.
It'd be very interesting to see what everyone liked--movies, music, books, whatever--in a world where nobody got to see what everyone else liked first
Sounds good on the surface, but comes with some issues. For one, if you never saw what anybody else liked, you'd be cut off from thousands of potentially wonderful works of art. That's how one discovers new favorites, by looking up other people's favorites. That's what searching on your own implies, too. Even many members of MoFo discovered great films thanks to looking up the "Rate the last film you saw" or personal list threads. If one was to be cut off from that, one would have to be forced to stay at the mercy of local theatres and unimaginative TV broadcasts. That, on the other hand, would contribute even more to cookie-cutter, boring, uninteresting lists of favorites.
So, unless, in the aforementioned world, we all had equal access to all works of art there are and unlimited time to experience literally all of them (or rather could experience them all just like that, in a second), then yes, it'd be cool. But since our time is limited, we must make choices as to what to watch, which inevitably implies some form of discrimination. I like the idea of tabula rasa you were probably suggesting here, but this is simply impossible to achieve. Even our previous watches inform future ones and form our taste.
lmao this dude sucks even when i agree with him.
Well, nobody's perfect!