A CRITIC’S NOTES : AGITATING THE FICKLE GODS OF THE TOP-10 LISTS

You want free choice at its freest? I give you a random sampling of 1984 10-best lists and critics’ group awards. Browse among the lists from newspapers, big and small, East and West, and you can find “This Is Spinal Tap,” “The Ploughman’s Lunch,” “The Neverending Story,” “The Leopard,” “Mike’s Murder,” “Sugar Cane Alley” and “The Terminator,” and more than one appearance of “Repo Man.”

To the National Society of Film Critics, “Stranger Than Paradise” was the best film. (Psssst, wanna know the runners up? “A Sunday in the Country,” five votes below, and a three-way tie for third place among “L’Argent,” “Stop Making Sense” and “Entre Nous.” Taking a nicely broad overview, the society has no special “foreign” film category: “Day for Night” and “Night of the Shooting Stars” were two within memory that won best film.)

Farther west, “The Fourth Man” turned up as the Los Angeles Film Critics’ best foreign film, while the Golden Globes, God love them, nominated both “A Passage to India” and “Paris, Texas” in their foreign-film category. Gotta watch those movies with faraway places in the title.

The point isn’t that these choices are pretty peculiar; actually, with only a few exceptions, I don’t think they’re are. (The Village Voice’s singular eclectic J. Hoberman has that distinction when he adds Cyndi Lauper and Ed Griles’ 1983 video of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to his 10-best films list.) Wildly personal might be a better phrase. What this wide-ranging selection does illustrate is how reviewers feel about their year-end lists, and how completely different that is from the public’s view of the best pictures, if my own mail is any indicator.

Remember “Children of Paradise,” and the name for the general-audience seats in the middle 1800s--”the gods,” because they were so close to heaven? Well, if you go by the current batch of letters, the gods must be agitated. The biggest complaints:

Who’s heard of any of these movies, let alone seen them?

Admittedly, that’s one of the two great advantages of being a reviewer--you do see almost your fill of movies. (The very biggest plus is seeing them before every plot cat is out of the bag and well up the street.) Unless you have the two-or-three-movies-a-week habit, barely less expensive by now than a small, steady drug habit, or you make regular rounds of the Cineplex, the Nuart, the Laemmle theaters and the Fox International, some of these films may well have come and gone again. Some have just barely arrived: Bertrand Tavernier’s “A Sunday in the Country,” a staple on many national lists, opened here only last week. And feeling excluded does not a content reader make.

The only answer to this is eternal vigilance, building a cross section of critics you can trust, and haring off to their suggestions forthwith, before a little treasure gets yanked.

What is (fill in the blank: “Repo Man,” “This Is Spinal Tap,” “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Brother From Another Planet,” “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension”) doing on a list of best films?

(A tone of outrage that carries right through the envelope goes with this one.)

Who said best means dead earnest ? There seems to be a notion that a year-end list is marked by a certain stateliness, like the Queen’s honors list. If you can’t have fun in this life, or in these theater seats, what can you have? The idea of a year of “Masterpiece Theatre at the Movies” is withering, and any hint of it makes you cherish the beloved oddballs: They contain some of the freshest, most innovative moments around.

Unfortunately, in addition to the fact that, next to one’s fingerprints, humor may be the most personal thing on Earth, these are not the easiest of films to write about. That may account for a few genuinely frustrated exchanges over “Stranger Than Paradise,” which degenerated into “I know what’s funny and that’s not funny ,” answered, illuminatingly, by, “Well, it made me laugh.”

But it seems that, in addition to freshness, many of this little band of films gave back a reflection of the lives of many of us; those clutching, middle-of-the-night, “here are and where are we?” feelings. In both “This Is Spinal Tap” and “Stranger Than Paradise,” you could travel anywhere and all places looked the same. (In the great moment of the latter film, when that intrepid and decidedly unheroic trio finally got to their destination, Lake Erie in the dead of winter, they couldn’t even see it.) It may be the existential dilemma as a shaggy-dog movie, but it didn’t make it any less touching. In “Repo Man,” the film maker’s gaze at cartoon consumerism and its revenge, the repossession industry, was as caustic as it was comic.

Perhaps the point of critics’ films lists is a little like these quirky films. Just as the movies aren’t formulaic or predictable, neither are these lists. They’re not assembled simply to highlight films that everyone knows; they’re there to stir things up a little: memories; thinking; perhaps miraculously, even the return of an overlooked film. (I wouldn’t hold my breath about this last wild bit of optimism.) None of these “odd” films are trends, or even of mass appeal. What they convey is the sense of something new, successfully brought to the surface. Don’t audiences deserve to be challenged by intelligent and/or irreverent alternatives?