Intro To My Favorite 100 Movies Of All Time
Posted on March 11th, 2008 in Movies, top 100 movies | No Comments »
Before all of you fall off of the edge of your seats and hurt yourselves, I thought I should probably start the unveiling of my Favorite 100 Movies of All Time. Please note the word favorite. It’s very important to this system. Before getting to the list, I want to give you a run down of how this came about, the criteria and some of the movies that just missed the cut.
It started in college. I got a book for Christmas my junior year that had every movie ever released on VHS. At roughly the same time, the AFI came out with their 100 Years 100 Movies or in other words, their list of the best movies ever made. Me, being the movie geek that I am thought I should have a list of my favorite 100 movies. At first it sounded like a simple thing to do, just think of my favorite 100 movies and put them in some sort of order. I already had the top 10 worked out in my head. It was harder than I thought though. Then I remembered the book I got for Christmas. I went through it, wrote down every movie in there that I have seen in a spiral notebook, gave each one a grade and came up with a top 100. It took forever. There were a total of over 1300 movies that I pulled from the book initially. I brought the stupid book to class and went through it and skipped class to go through it. A lot of time was spent (or wasted, depending on your point of view) on it. Eventually I finished, my friends and I some fun with it and then sort of forgot about it. Some time passed. My old top 100 list sort of became irrelevant. I had seen a lot since it was first made and my taste had matured a bit. It needed to be updated. I had been out of college for 2 or 3 years and out of work for 2 or 3 months. Those 2 or 3 months slowly turned into 7 or 8, but that’s another story for another time. This wonderful time of unemployment checks and sleeping in until
There really isn’t a criteria to be on this list. You have to remember, I am not saying these are the greatest movies of all time. They are my favorite. In my view they are the greatest, but I can’t really make an official declaration of that. I do consider myself a pretty good judge of movies; so for the most part I think most people would be able to take movies from this list and would like more than they wouldn’t. Obviously taste is going to play a factor. While I understand the merit of a Die Hard or Jurassic Park, they don’t make my list. You aren’t going to find too many romantic comedies either. While I have a lot of the classics on this list; just because it is considered one of the all time greats, does not mean I am going to put it on my list. For example, you won’t find Citizen Kane on my list. If we’re talking Orson Wells I’ll take Touch of Evil or The Third Man over Kane any day. Neither of those made my list, but both were close. It’s a list mixed with old, new, big budget, low budget, comedies, dramas and even a few documentaries. At the very least it’s a good discussion starter and may get you out of the video store a little faster. One thing to keep in mind is it was really hard choosing the order. While I definitely would choose one movie over another you sort of have to lump every 5 to 10 movies together. As in – I like them pretty much the same. Another thing to keep in mind is my opinion varies. When going through this last week there were some movies like
In college basketball you always have a handful of bubble teams that just didn’t quite make it in to NCAA Tournament and end up having to play in the NIT. This section here is the NIT of my favorite movie list. It’s no insult. My entire database is up to about 1650 movies. I still consider these and many others to be great.
I am a huge Woody Allen fan and he has a fair share of movies in my top 100. He also has three movies that at one time or another were in my top 100 but have been squeezed out. Take the Money and Run was sort of the second movie that Woody directed. (It’s basically the first live action movie he directed. His directorial debut came with the very funny What’s Up, Tiger Lily? which was a voice over of a Japanese spy movie.). It’s the hilarious life story of an incompetent petty thief and one of the earliest movies I’ve seen that uses the fake documentary or mocumentary style. The other two are Play It Again Sam which is one of the few Woody movies to take place outside of
Two movies you commonly see on all of the best ever lists are Taxi Driver and Star Wars. Don’t get pissed at me. They were both bubble movies for me that I jut couldn’t include in my top 100. Taxi Driver is obviously an all time great; it’s just not one of my favorites by Scorsese. He and De Niro both get plenty of love from me on the list, just not with this movie. As for Star Wars, obviously legendary, I just like the next two better. Luke couldn’t have been more annoying. A couple other classics to just miss the top 100 are Bonnie and
Little Children is a disturbing story of what really goes on behind closed doors in those innocent looking suburban houses. Oscar nominated Kate Winslet is damn good in this and hot. Also nominated from this movie playing a creepy child molester is Jackie Earle Haley. You may remember him as the cigarette smoking and motorcycle riding Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears. He grew up to be really hard to look at. Spike Lee directed a great cast in 25th Hour. It’s the story of a man’s (Edward Norton) last day on the outside before serving a 7 year jail sentence for selling drugs. Quiz show, directed by Robert Redford is the true story of a network game show in the 1950’s being fixed. Bad Day at Black Rock starring Spencer Tracy is the story of a man stuck in a tiny
Ok, lastly I move on to the documentaries that I couldn’t fit in my top 100. Michael Moore’s first movie Roger & Me has him exploring the effect that the enormous downsizing of the General Motors plant in
Wow. Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I know that was starting to get a little long, but I feel so bad leaving these and so many other movies out of the list that I had to do it. Don’t worry it was almost as painful for me as it was for you. Anyway, those are all movies that I highly recommend, but the best of the best are coming. I will reveal movie 100 here in the next day or two. Yeah, that’s right. I am going to count them down like people really care. Come on. It’ll be fun. Until next time…
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