Ten Top Ten?

Last week, AFI broadcast what they called the 10 Top 10, the ten best films from ten different genres. I was really looking forward to seeing some movies get some recognition that usually get overlooked. I guess I should have known better. It was mostly the same list of the same movies as always, just reorganized, and they had to get pretty specific with their "genres" to do it.

Courtroom Drama is not a genre. Drama is a genre and Courtroom is a setting. And Gangster is just a sub-category of Drama ... unless the gangster movie happens to be funny or include a smattering of show tunes. Epic is not a genre. Epic is a scale. You can do Science Fiction on an Epic scale, you can do drama on an epic scale. You can even do romantic comedy on an epic scale, and frankly every list AFI puts out has those Epics anyway, so give some other movies a shot.

Sports? Sure, I'd like to give Chariots of Fire a genre ... which brings me to another part of the rant which I'll give you later ... but when you go into the video store and look under "sports", you're going to find Superbowl Highlight videos, wrestling videos, maybe some kind of golf instructional. You'll find Raging Bull and Rocky under Drama.

So, to help AFI out, here's a list of real genres for movies:

Drama, Comedy, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Thriller / Horror, Mystery, Action / Adventure, Musical, Animation, Holiday, and Western. Of course, that's 11 right there, which is a problem for AFI.

I was going to include definitions, but then I came to the definition of Action / Adventure and my brain cramped. (An action movie is a movie that has action?) Maybe somebody who's actually studied film will help me out on this?

I was then going to list some of my choices for the top movies in each category when I realized that i don't watch nearly enough movies. But maybe at some point I'll list my favorite movies in my profile by genre.

Now for my other rant: The ads for AFI's 10 Top 10 included scenes from The Incredibles, music from Chariots of Fire and I'd swear the space ship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. NONE of these films were on their lists anywhere.