One Thousand And One Nights
Life, every now and then, behaves as though it had seen too many bad movies, when everything fits too well - the beginning, the middle, the end - from fade-in to fade-out. In a quest to be able to hustle a game of Trivial Pursuit, Silver Screen Edition, I am trying to watch all of the movies in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Before I took stock of the number I had already seen on the list, I figured- hey I like movies, I've seen alot, so I've probably already seen a fair number of these. Not so. I'd seen just over a hundred. To be fair, I couldn't have seen most of these in the theater since 658 were released before I was born. But with the help of a DVR and cable television I've now seen 167. To some this may seem like an exercise in pro forma movie watching. So far though I've enjoyed watching these, including the excellent jazz soundtrack to Anatomy Of A Murder, the completely sung dialogue (in french) of The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, and the unexpected ending of Network. I created a spreadsheet to track my progress, it's posted here if you feel inclined to see how many you've seen:1001 Movies Spreadsheet.
4 comments:
Anne,
Thats so cool that you are doing this. I'm also a big movie fan as you know... I actually went through the entire list just now. The number that I have seen is 123. That is one hundred and twenty three.
I am proud to say the oldest, and one of the most interesting I've seen is "The Passion of Joan of Arc" It is a silent b&w film from 1928. The DVD is really good because it has a lof of information on the history of the film, and how it was long thought to be lost until someone found a copy a couple of decades ago and it has since been restored. Even though the women who plays Joan cannot be heard, the acting is so good that it is still very compelling.
I've seen the two oldest--both are available for free online (check their wiki pages to find the link). Also both are really short, so they were easy to check off of the list. I haven't see "The Passion of Joan of Arc" yet though. I've heard that The Wheel/La Roue is hard to get a hold of, and that only about two hours of the original 14 still exist. This may get difficult to finish toward the end because of availability. :)
I felt like I had seen a lot of movies, until I started filling this out. More than the number I hadn't seen, I was astounded by the number of times I thought, "gee, I'd always meant to see that." Of course, I was also surprised to learn that there are only 1000 films more important than Titanic.
I'm at 215; my earliest is Metropolis.
Ironically, Titanic is the one film I have vowed never to see because I think/thought Leonardo DiCaprio looked like a girl in it. Plus when it came out, all the other girls at school went nuts over how great it was (yeah I was in highschool). My thought-we know the boat sinks, what's the point? Anyhow, it will probably be number 1001...or maybe 1000-just so it isn't the last one.
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