TOP TEN

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Adam and Asher and I were in the car headed to Fort Worth. We knew there would be traffic - there is always traffic in Austin, then you add a holiday and things get out of control - however, we had no idea it would take SEVEN (yes, SEVEN) hours to get to Fort Worth. Unbelievable! It wasn't very fun, but there was nothing we could do about it (except complain occasionally and brainstorm ways to avoid it in the future!). In an effort to make the monotony more enjoyable, Adam came up with a "list" for us. We often do things like this on long drives, and it's always great - you just think of a topic and take turns adding to the list. Examples: bands with women in them, movies about aliens, cereals, etc. This time, Adam switched it up; instead of doing a back-and-forth list like we usually do, he broke out the big guns and suggested that we both compile a list of our top ten favorite movies. *GASP*

Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal, but we are serious about our movies. I knew right away this task would be daunting, if not downright impossible. There were so many questions - do the movies on the list have to be ones I would want to watch over and over? I mean, just because I would want to watch a movie several times doesn't mean it's a great movie. So does a "favorite" have to be "great"? I also had to be careful about including more recent films, in terms of not letting the "newness" color my decision. I'm telling you, this was serious, complicated business.

I decided to start with a sort of free-form list of movies I love and/or like - I think I had about 30 on there - then I began narrowing it down. Soooooo, the following is what I came up with - a list of my top ten favorite movies as of November 25, 2009 (in no particular order):

Almost Famous
The Money Pit
High Fidelity
The Royal Tenenbaums
Amelie
Ghostbusters
Lost in Translation
When Harry Met Sally
Shaun of the Dead
Jurassic Park

Geez, even reading this now I am second-guessing my choices, but after 7+ hours of thinking about it, I guess this is as close as I can get at this point. Would a list like this be super-hard for anyone else to compile or am I just weird?