Sunday, June 10, 2012

AFI 100 Years, 100 Movies Project

As mentioned in my last post, Mike and I are going to embark on the AFI's Top 100 Greatest Movies of all time, and I imagine I will talk about many of those movies on this blog. But, first I thought I would give some background. In case anyone is interested. So, here's what happened...

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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