6:56 pm re-phrasing: The American Film Institute brand has been sullied through over-marketing and a general watering-down. Call it the Christmas influence, but earlier this afternoon I chose to be compassionate by regarding their list of top ten 2007 films as non-alphabetical because it made them seem more decisive. The AFI, the word “integrity” and the phrase “semblance of original thinking”…whoda thunk it?

Plus it seemed agreeable at the moment that somebody, somewhere had put Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in the #1 position and that Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up would rank in the fifth-place slot.

It seemed like a nice thing, in other words, to bend over backwards and grant the AFI a toughness of mind and purpose that they probably never had to begin with. But since nobody got it, I had to rewrite and spell it out.