We were in the living room and we
had just finished watching an episode of something on the DVR. As we switched
to live TV, the beginning of Close Encounters of the Third Kind came on.
Me: I haven't seen this movie in
years.
Mike: Me neither.
Me: It's really good. Who is that
guy?
Mike: I don't remember. (Pulls out
his phone to look him up on IMDB. Mike's phone exists solely to look people up
on IMDB. I'm pretty sure he looks something up on IMDB about fifty times a day)
Me: We should put this on our netflix queue.
At which point I got up to go mess
around with the netflix queue and we turned off the television. So, I'm looking
at Close Encounters, and I think, how many other old movies have we not seen in
a while that we really like. At the same time, the netflix queue is looking a
bit low, and we haven't come up with a new theme for movies to watch since we
finished all the James Bond, and then worked our way through a couple tv shows,
which we are now almost finished with. So I google Close Encounters, which just
so happens to be one the AFI's 100 Years, 100 Movies list of the greatest
American movies of all times. That's where the light bulb went off and I yelled
into the other room and said "we should do this!" and Mike agreed and
plans were made.
But then this happened. I am what is
known as an excel spreadsheet junkie. My life is ruled by a series of excel
spreadsheets. I use them for everything. Budget, book lists, logic puzzle
solutions, to-do lists, preparations for vacation, football stats. Anything
that can be done with an excel spreadsheet, I will do it that way. So, of
course, I needed one for the AFI movies. So,I pulled up the actual list of 100 movies on the AFI website, but that didn't want to copy/paste into an excel
spreadsheet. So I try wikipedia, because wikipedia always goes nicely into
excel. And what did I find, but two! different lists. Why? Well, the AFI first
released their list of 100 years, 100 movies in 1998. But then, in 2007, they
decided to do a 10th Anniversary Edition, with the order rearranged and some
new movies added. So I called Mike into the room and we looked at the lists.
And we had a problem. Because there were movies on each list that we wanted to
see, that weren't on the other list. So, what to do? Combine them, of course!
So I put both lists in excel, and then I combined them. We are going to watch
the movies based on their 2007 rank. But, if a movie was ranked in 1998, but
then left off the list in 2007, we are going to watch it with the similarly
ranked 2007 movie. I know, it's dorky. And then we decided to start at 100 and
move up to 1. We ended up with a list of 123 movies.
Now, I'm not going to get into the criticism of the list,
because I don't really care about that. We're not watching these movies as film
students. I don't care if they are in the correct order or if there are other
greater movies out there or if some of them are technically british movies
instead of american ones. I just want to watch the movies because a bunch of
people who know about movies agreed that they are all really good. I have seen
a number of them. Mike has seen a number of them. We have both not seen a
number of them. What makes it fun is watching them together and then talking about whether we liked them or if they should be ranked so high and all that blah-de-blah. I think it's going to be awesome.
It's also, probably, going to take over 2 years. Because we don't have time to
watch more than one a week. Will we finish
this project? I guess it will depend on whether we are enjoying the movies. I think we will enjoy the movies. Now, I'm not going to list them here... if you really want to know, you can go look at the wikipedia list above. And I'll keep a list as we go through of our ranking of the movies... I bet you can't wait! So, there it is. The AFI 100 (+23) starts now.
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