Cinema Paradiso

For at least the past eight years, I've tried my best to keep track of the films I've seen thus far in my life with a spreadsheet ranking them according to various rationales, litmuses, etc. Over time the list has been revised, amended and edited hundreds of times.

Earlier this week I realized I had not touched the list in almost a year, mostly due to the fact I had not seen more than six new films in theater in the same period of time. Now that I've seen the list fall into such antiquity, I have no choice but to try and update it.

Therein lies my problem. I don't know where to start, and I'm rediscovering the problems I had with it the last time my thoughts dwelled on it. For example:

• Can I really decide whether "Dr. Strangelove" is better than "Lawrence of Arabia"?
• Does a Wes Anderson film truly belong in my top five?
• Am I comfortable enough to admit that "The Godfather" is much better than "The Godfather Part II" despite popular wisdom suggesting otherwise?
• Is it wrong to have "Schindler's List" and "The Producers" next to each other?
• How do I decide between half a dozen great Coen Brothers film, and how does one reconcile that their only Best Picture winner ("No Country For Old Men") may not even rank among my top five Coen flicks?

It's gotten so bad that I've listed the director of each film next to the title so I can go through the rankings and create a new list: My Favorite Films, by director. What have I learned from this exercise?

• Steven Spielberg has made A LOT of movies better than "The Lost World."
• "Blues Brothers 2000" shouldn't have been made.
• Stanley Kubrick could have died before making "Eyes Wide Shut" and seem a helluva lot cooler.
• Quentin Tarantino isn't nearly as prolific as most college-age males are led to believe.
• Frank Darabont and M. Night Shyamalan are in career free-fall, having peaked in the 1990s and stooping as low as being most notable these days for cameos on "Entourage."

This is my hell. For the next few weeks (or months, who knows?), I'll be pondering in my free time whether "Silent Hill" is truly one of the worst films I've ever seen, or if I'm just quietly lamenting the reality that I haven't seen a film by a French director that I truly liked since "Delicatessen" (and even that one loses points over time because it was directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who was responsible for another of my least-liked films, "Amelie").

So say a short prayer for all the titles muddling through the middle of my list, left to chance whether they meteorically rise or fall: "Labyrinth," "Scarface," "Gross Pointe Blank" and "Million Dollar Baby." They can use all the help they can get.