The Sunday Salon: This is not a post about plagiarism

No really it's not. But if that's what you want to be reading about, I recommend this post and this post for good words and updates.

Books
I'm currently reading The Selection which is a totally absurd book. The world makes no sense to me, but it's easy reading, I'll give it that. And from what I can tell so far, it's going to make a perfect CW show--love triangle, girl defined by her romantic prospects and interests, and also treated as property! I have some major issues with it, but even so there are some kind of interesting ideas in it that I'm curious to see if she fleshes out. Also, I know I said i wouldn't read this book because of how early it was optioned for television and yet here I am reading it anyway. I always change my mind, I am unreliable, etc.

List Making
I was reading this blog post by Roger Ebert about voting for the ten greatest films of all time and how he was adding The Tree of Life to his list for Sight & Sound magazine. The post is really interesting to me as he explains his thought process and discusses just how difficult it is to make such lists. Yes it is. It is always hard to make "best-of" lists but at the same time they are really useful. Also, I haven't seen many great films apparently. So it's also always frustrating for me to realize just how much my education is lacking. But besides that the comments are absolutely fascinating and reveal just why it's so hard to make lists. Everyone feels it's necessary to express how they disagree with the person and what their list is and why the list maker made the wrong choice. And they can also get pretty nasty. Everyone thinks their own opinion is the only right one of course. It was kind of interesting because someone pointed out that The Tree of Life wasn't even his top 2011 choice. And I thought about how that has kind of happened to me in the past, I give the books I read ratings and I've chosen at the end of the year to honor a lower rated book as a best of the year over a five star book. It's entirely possible for your feelings to change about something over time.

If you liked Tree of Life though the comments are a chore. It's amazing to me in a way that people call this film inaccessible to the general viewer, because I am an average viewer. I'm not a film student, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about great film, but I loved that movie. I do understand it's not for everyone, but I think this kind of talk is unnecessarily limiting. Having said that, I can see that it's probably never going to be the kind of film that has mass appeal. But I think there's a difference between saying something has mass appeal and it has no appeal for the general viewer.

How do you approach making best of lists? What would be your top ten films of all time?