That One Time, At Christmas, When We Talked About The Best Movie Ever Made…

Monday is movies. Even when it’s Boxing Day! Should call it Un-Boxing Day, where you open up a brand new DVD…lol.

Good morning. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, or a good Christmas at least – or a nice day off bare minimum. We had a nice time. The most chilled Christmas I’ve ever had. Everyone doing their own thing for a lot of the day, but lots of nice chats and relaxation time. It couldn’t have been better.

Here is my Christmas swag.

A bunch of movie soundtracks.

I wonder if the, eh, ‘theme’ here is movies where the score is better than the actual picture? That seems a little unfair to The End of The Tour though, I genuinely loved that film!

Actually a fan of all of the films – hence wanting the scores – but the music in this pack-shot is arguably more memorable than any of the images.

Last night, around the Christmas dinner table, we somehow got onto the topic of The Best Movie Ever. It’s an absurd question. An impossible one. But we gave it a go. It came about in an offhand way, which is only right I guess. My brother joked that if Die Hard was a Christmas movie, maybe on Christmas Day we could just watch Jackie Brown, and call it a Christmas movie too. He then added that it was the best Tarantino film – and I said that I used to agree, until Once Upon A Time in Hollywood came along.

Cue someone suggesting that Pulp Fiction was one of the best movies ever, and me being a bore and saying that there’s a difference between best-ever and highly influential, and good as Pulp was, it was quickly surpassed by most of what QT went on to make after, and its nagging influence ended up informing a lot of substandard work from try hard chancers in its wake.

Somehow, we were able to move on and mum and dad got right into tossing out suggestions for best movie ever. My sister in law added a few too. We had Breakfast at Tiffany’s (declined by me for Mickey Rooney’s racist portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi, cue conversation about cancel culture and whether it was fair to rank a 1961 movie by today’s standards and so on). We had The Godfather and Shawshank Redemption and Kramer vs. Kramer and The Shining…

And a few others. I can’t remember them now. Most got a nod. No one really went in passionately to declare a winner, and I was the only one (of course) rejecting some of the entries. I also didn’t offer up anything. I couldn’t. I could never name just one.

Because some days the greatest movie I’ll ever see is The Toxic Avenger and other times it’s The Remains of The Day and I feel I could make a case for Planes, Trains and Automobiles and I probably have made a case for Stand by Me. And then there’s The Lost Boys and well, whatever else…hundreds…and most of my personal favourites that I consider the greatest are different from ones I would elevate if forced to think of The Best Movie Ever Made.

But I sometimes do think about this, and wonder if the greatest ever movies are the ones you watch only once. And they hang with you. Forever. I mean, I’ve never rewatched The Remains of The Day. And though I’m not making a case for it, I also really love A Perfect World – it’s probably the first (and only?) time I ever cared about Kevin Costner. And it’s not the sort of film that will ever get mentioned on any list at all by anyone ever, but I truly believe its magic to me is that I only saw it the one time. To be curious enough to rewatch it might be to ruin the magic.

There are people I know that will never rewatch any film. They cannot see the point. There are others that are stuck watching only the classics, on a near-maddening loop. And of course there’s no right answer.

Just as there could never be when it comes to picking the Greatest Film of All Time.

Unless of course you were to correctly say Rudy.

Happy Boxing Day!