The Movie List

So, after much deliberation, I have finally narrowed the list of movies for this summer from seemingly millions down to just 65. I feel like I can watch 5 movies a week (one each "work" day) for the majority of the weeks of the summer. It's much more doable than my original plan of 100 movies, that's for sure. Perhaps 5 movies a week is still asking a lot, but it's the summer. What else am I going to be doing?

Most of the list is mostly based on Yahoo Movie's 100 Movies To See Before You Die: All Time Greats. I chose this list because not only did it include a lot of prestigious award winning films, but it also had a lot of foreign films (an entire pool of films I have barely stuck a toe in), and films like Animal House which didn't appear on more respected film lists such as AFI's Top 100, but I still think is culturally important. I, of course, had to narrow it down from those 100 films listed on Yahoo Movie's website (it did help that I had seen a considerable few already, like Animal House), and I threw in some of my own that I have repeatedly run into in conversation in film school and various other places. I could keep editing this list forever, but it's time to stop making lists and start watching movies!

So, here is the finalized list, organized in groups of five (for each week). Each group is generally from the same time period and usually has mostly movies of the same genre or topic. However, sometimes it was difficult to achieve this for all of the groups of five, so some of them are a little funky (as you can see from the first grouping).

#1. 1927: The General (Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton)
#2. 1927: Metropolis (Fritz Lang)
#3. 1922: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau)
#4. 1931: Dracula (Tod Browning)
#5. 1931: Frankenstein (James Whale)

#6. 1939: Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming)
#7. 1939: Ninotchka (Ernst Lubitsch)
#8. 1939: The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica)
#9. 1939: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra)
#10. 1949: The Third Man (Carol Reed)

#11. 1933: She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman)
#12. 1940: His Girl Friday (George Cukor)
#13. 1949: Adam's Rib (George Cukor)
#14. 1950: All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
#15. 1952: The African Queen (John Huston)

#16. 1954: Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock)
#17. 1954: Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
#18. 1958: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
#19. 1959: North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)
#20. 1960: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)

#21. 1955: Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray)
#22. 1956: Baby Doll (Elia Kazan)
#23. 1966: Blow Up (Michelangelo Antononi)
#24. 1967: Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn)
#25. 1969: Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)

#26. 1952: High Noon (Fred Zinnemann)
#27. 1956: The Searchers (John Ford)
#28. 1969: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill)
#29. 1962: Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean)
#30. 1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean)

#31. 1959: The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
#32. 1964: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)
#33. 1972: A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick)
#34. 1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)
#35. 1973: Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse)

#36. 1972, 1974: The Godfather-- Part I and Part II (Francis Ford Coppola)
#37. 1974: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola)
#38. 1979: Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
#39. 1979: Alien (Ridley Scott)
#40. 1982: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)

#41. 1983: Zelig (Woody Allen)
#42. 1979: The Jerk (Carl Reiner)
#43. 1986: Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes)
#44. 1987: The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner)
#45. 1999: Office Space (Mike Judge)

#46. 1986: The Fly (David Cronenberg)
#47. 1986: Labyrinth (Jim Henson)
#48. 1987: Little Shop of Horrors (Frank Oz)
#49. 1988: Beetlejuice (Tim Burton)
#50. 1990: Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton)

#51. 1980: Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
#52. 1990: Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese)
#53. 1989: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
#54. 1989: Sex, Lies, and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh)
#55. 1991: The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme)

#56. 1994: The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont)
#57. 1999: The Green Mile (Frank Darabont)
#58. 1993: Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg)
#59. 1998: Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg)
#60. 1997: Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni)

#61. 2000:Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee)
#62. 2001: Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)
#63. 1994: Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
#64. 2003, 2004: Kill Bill-- Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino)
#65. 2006: The Departed (Martin Scorsese)

Well, that's the list. I'm certainly excited to finally get around to seeing these films and writing about them. Hopefully I'll actually follow through!

COMING SOON: Week #1-- Silent Films and Scary Movies. First up: Buster Keaton's The General.