Sunday, June 30, 2013
The List
Subject to change if and when new suggestions come in. I've marked the ones I've already seen with a ✓. Eventually, I'll get this thing set up so that each movie title links to my post about it or to its Wiki page or maybe both. We'll see how it goes.
Just Watch It Already
If you ask me to go see a movie, I'll say yes 100% of the time. It doesn't really matter what movie we're seeing. I don't care if I've never seen it, if I've never heard of it, if I've already seen it, if I've seen it a thousand times. I don't care if the last time I watched it, something traumatic happened that scarred me for life, forever associating the memory of that movie with blinding stomach pains and vomiting popcorn and plain M&Ms all over tacky theater carpet. It doesn't matter because I love the movies, and I'll happily sit through the 2011 remake of Footloose if it means I get to pack my fat ass into a poorly-padded chair and sit in a dark room with a hundred strangers for two hours.
It helps that I don't actually have good taste. I've been trying and I can't think of a movie I actively hate, just movies that bore me in parts or inspire feminist rants on Facebook. In high school French, Mademoiselle Lee took an extra few minutes to explain to the class the difference between gourmet and gourmand. A gourmet loves food, but only accepts the very best -- think the angry British food critic from Ratatouille. A gourmand mostly loves eating. In just about everything to do with pop culture, I'm the latter. This is why, at age 24, certain songs from High School Musical still appear on my Top 25 iTunes playlist, and why I'll just as soon eat an entire Domino's pepperoni pizza as my mother's hand-tossed margherita with homemade sauce. I like everything. The problem with that situation is that I'm very easily satisfied, and I stick with the things I know. I order spaghetti and meatballs at every Italian restaurant I go to and my mother can recount with horror the number of times I watched Thumbelina after school, every day, absolutely without fail from the fourth grade to the ninth. I like what I like.
Somewhere around the end of high school, I discovered that I had gigantic holes in my movie knowledge, despite the fact that the movies has been my favorite place to go since I was six months old and slept through Batman and Robin on my father's shoulder. I had watched mostly brand-new movies because it meant I got to go to the theater, but I'd never seen such classics as, say, Jurassic Park or Terminator or Groundhog Day or whatever. Say what you will about the lack of cultural memory in American teenagers, but at age 16, I was the only kid at the Halloween party who'd never seen Psycho and was genuinely shocked when Vera Miles ate it in the shower. By the time I left for college, I was hilariously undereducated, and majoring in the humanities means you're expected to have a pretty thorough knowledge of pop culture -- considering that most of my professors were at least forty, that meant that Disney VHS and Top 40 radio were no longer going to cut it.
I reached a moment of crisis in my one and only film studies class, Cult Movies and Gender Issues, which had been cross-listed in gender studies, my second major. I'd never seen a single movie on the list, except for Rocky Horror, which for some reason my parents had felt was required viewing before entering the world of adults. I'd never seen Dirty Dancing, or The Godfather, or even Alien. I'd never seen anything.
So I did what I've always done: I made a list, and I started from the beginning.
In the next post you'll see the list of 1,277 movies I made in my junior year of college, pulling from Roger Ebert's most historically significant, IMDB's most popular, The New York Times' 1000 Best Ever Made, and every other list I could find sometime back in 2010, when I had a lot of time on my hands. Because I spent three years as a librarian but mostly because that's just how I roll, it's alphabetized, starting with numerals and ending with Z, and I'm going to get through the whole thing if it takes me the next ten years -- by which point it'll probably be time to start a new list.
I've already seen some 200 of them, but if you'd like to join me in my self-imposed homework assignment of the remaining thousand, I'd love to hear about it. The list has been steadily swelling since junior year, and if you have any suggestions for me, I'll stick them on.
Wish me luck!
It helps that I don't actually have good taste. I've been trying and I can't think of a movie I actively hate, just movies that bore me in parts or inspire feminist rants on Facebook. In high school French, Mademoiselle Lee took an extra few minutes to explain to the class the difference between gourmet and gourmand. A gourmet loves food, but only accepts the very best -- think the angry British food critic from Ratatouille. A gourmand mostly loves eating. In just about everything to do with pop culture, I'm the latter. This is why, at age 24, certain songs from High School Musical still appear on my Top 25 iTunes playlist, and why I'll just as soon eat an entire Domino's pepperoni pizza as my mother's hand-tossed margherita with homemade sauce. I like everything. The problem with that situation is that I'm very easily satisfied, and I stick with the things I know. I order spaghetti and meatballs at every Italian restaurant I go to and my mother can recount with horror the number of times I watched Thumbelina after school, every day, absolutely without fail from the fourth grade to the ninth. I like what I like.
Somewhere around the end of high school, I discovered that I had gigantic holes in my movie knowledge, despite the fact that the movies has been my favorite place to go since I was six months old and slept through Batman and Robin on my father's shoulder. I had watched mostly brand-new movies because it meant I got to go to the theater, but I'd never seen such classics as, say, Jurassic Park or Terminator or Groundhog Day or whatever. Say what you will about the lack of cultural memory in American teenagers, but at age 16, I was the only kid at the Halloween party who'd never seen Psycho and was genuinely shocked when Vera Miles ate it in the shower. By the time I left for college, I was hilariously undereducated, and majoring in the humanities means you're expected to have a pretty thorough knowledge of pop culture -- considering that most of my professors were at least forty, that meant that Disney VHS and Top 40 radio were no longer going to cut it.
I reached a moment of crisis in my one and only film studies class, Cult Movies and Gender Issues, which had been cross-listed in gender studies, my second major. I'd never seen a single movie on the list, except for Rocky Horror, which for some reason my parents had felt was required viewing before entering the world of adults. I'd never seen Dirty Dancing, or The Godfather, or even Alien. I'd never seen anything.
So I did what I've always done: I made a list, and I started from the beginning.
In the next post you'll see the list of 1,277 movies I made in my junior year of college, pulling from Roger Ebert's most historically significant, IMDB's most popular, The New York Times' 1000 Best Ever Made, and every other list I could find sometime back in 2010, when I had a lot of time on my hands. Because I spent three years as a librarian but mostly because that's just how I roll, it's alphabetized, starting with numerals and ending with Z, and I'm going to get through the whole thing if it takes me the next ten years -- by which point it'll probably be time to start a new list.
I've already seen some 200 of them, but if you'd like to join me in my self-imposed homework assignment of the remaining thousand, I'd love to hear about it. The list has been steadily swelling since junior year, and if you have any suggestions for me, I'll stick them on.
Wish me luck!
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