Sam's Top 5 Comedies

Ah, top 5 lists. What a fine way to think about favorites of any kind. I used to make top 10 movie lists with my dad in the car on road trips. It was and remains a fun way to reminisce about all the movies I've seen in the past, and sometimes through doing so you come across pieces you'd really like to go see again. My problem was that they always seemed a little too long. As a kid I hadn't quite seen enough movies to flesh out my list, but even at 19 it's hard to pick 10 that feel deserving of the "favorite" title.

Enter High Fidelity, a movie where the central characters make top 5 lists of everything. Music is their medium of choice, although Rob Gordon (played by John Cusack) also uses them to reflect on his past relationships. Lists are so neat and orderly; it was fun to watch other people think in the same way I do. The movie left me with a few thoughts. Most of them were something like "I loved this movie, holy shit!", but one was that lists of 5 are very nice. 5 is such a smaller number than 10. Each item on the list feels like it fought hard to get there; each item deserves its place. Plus 5 is easier to keep track of than 10. It's short, it's compact, and you can remember it. For whatever reason, 5s don't have to be ordered, whereas I feel like 10s need to be ranked. It's hard enough to choose just 5 or 10 of something that ranking them is torture. High Fidelity convinced me to both start making top 5s and to move to a free-form, unranked style of list.

In at least one scene in the film, Rob talks about how it would be impossible to make a list of his all-time top 5 songs. It depends on the situation - are we talking top 5 songs alone? With friends? From college or now? Is he depressed or happy, single or in a relationship? Many factors play into his favorite songs just as many things play into what movies I'm in the mood to see. You may see an all-time top 5 favorite movies list from me at some point, but it's always changing. That said, more specific lists are more static...

Top 5 comedies (in no particular order):
Zoolander
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

...

I'm forced to pause at this point since I'm sort of at a loss as to what I can include. It's hard to define a comedy. Do we include anything that's labeled a comedy on the back of its box, or do we include any movie that's made us laugh? Harold and Maude is one of my favorite movies. It's probably on my Top 5 comedies list if that's what you can call it, but it's so much more a story about life and death than it is about making the audience smile. I suppose I could divide the list into movies that are just there to get as many laughs out of me as possible and anything that's sitting in the comedy section, but that still leaves the list full of Judd Apatow films where I'm both laughing the whole time and walking out of the theater thinking about the message.

Let's try this again.

Top 5 movies found in the comedy section of the video store (in no particular order):
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
High Fidelity
Juno
In Bruges

Even that list makes me sad, though. Harold and Maude didn't even make the list. Where's Zoolander? Where's the Coen Brothers love? Does In Bruges even count as a comedy? It's so black. It's blacker than a black bear at midnight on a cloudy night with no moon a thousand miles from any city lights. Only two of these movies have me laughing a lot (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and High Fidelity), and the reason I like all of them is not because they're comedies but because I like what they're trying to say. It seems stupid to make a top 5 comedies list and only have two films on it that I laugh at.

Maybe that last list should be revised to "top 5 romantic comedies", and I could swap out In Bruges for Harold and Maude.

Top 5 movies I laugh at:
Zoolander
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
High Fidelity
Tropic Thunder

I like that list a lot. Lots of variety. A couple movies I've only seen once or twice, a few I've seen over and over, and a decent spread of sub-genres ranging from romance to action to just being stupid. I suppose this would be my actual "top 5 comedies" list. Watching these five in a row would have me laughing the whole time (assuming I didn't have to watch Tropic Thunder with people who aren't into that sort of thing) while providing some serious romantic relief at the same time. Nice.