2020 is featuring some strange Top 10 lists

Above : Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg star in “Palm Springs.” (Photo: Amazon Prime)

When I was a lot younger, and far more intractable in my opinions, I subscribed to the line-in-the-sand school of movie reviewing.

My critical world tended to be binary, as in black-white, up-down, in-out. When applying that process to film, I considered a movie to be either art – or garbage. Entertaining, maybe, but still garbage.

My favorite – or not-so-favorite – memory is when I wrote of the Coen brothers’ film “Raising Arizona” that you’d have to be brain dead not to find it funny. Or words to that effect.

No surprise, it didn’t go over well with some Spokesman-Review readers, a number of whom wrote letters telling me where I could shove my review. It took years for me to admit that reactions to art function on individual bases.

Yes, consensus does happen. The 2020 Spike Lee documentary “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” for example, has a 98 percent positive rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. That’s a pretty good score.

But, then, that also means that 2 percent didn’t like it for some reason.

Divergence of opinion seems to be the case more than ever in this year of 2020. And it’s not likely to improve anytime soon – though that, too, is merely an opinion.

As I’ve written previously, this is the time of year where critics – and to be specific here, movie critics – are printing their Top 10 lists. And none of them are likely to please everyone.

First, there’s the factor of accessibility. It’s long been the problem of those of us living in this part of the Inland Northwest that we’ve been unable to see everything, especially the more obscure independent and foreign-language productions.

Of course, one good aspect – maybe the only good aspect – of the COVID-caused pandemic is that many more screening options are available through streaming. Even so, it’s just not possible to see everything.

Only then do we encounter the problem of differing tastes, etc. Just going through some of the Top 10 lists makes it abundantly clear that 2020 is even more lopsided in terms of critical opinions than your average year.

Take this list published by the staff at Ars Technica. Yes, the site describes itself as a “publication devoted to technology that would cater to what (might be) called ‘alpha geeks’: technologists and IT professionals.”

Still, even “geeks” have to question whether a film such as “Bill & Ted: Face the Music” deserves to be on anyone’s Top 10 list. But even more so, whether “Palm Springs” – a moderately entertaining time-loop romantic comedy – should reign as No. 1.

Not that I’m drawing any lines in the sand, but it’s clear that 2020 is blurring any and all critical lines that ever existed.