General Discussion

Since it looks like Screened is going to continue and I"m glad for that, I had an idea for a series of blog posts/discussion starters. I love movies and TV, but I'm not a true student of film by any means. IN order to better appreciate the medium, I'll watch all 100 of the AFI Top 100 Films, in reverse order, and post thoughts and questions. It's not groundbreaking, but watching all 100 is something I've wanted to do and thought this might be a fun community thing.

Is there any interest in something like this? Has it already been done? I'm probably going to watch and react, but I'll try to be a bit more structured and scheduled if there's legitimate interest.

I'm interested. I was working on doing something similar, actually, before I gave it up for my current director-specific focus. It was just a little too all over the place for me, but it's still going to introduce you to a whole ton of great movies. The only drawback is that since it's the AFI it's American-specific so you're going to have really major gaps in the eras where foreign cinema picked up a lot of the hollywood slack. I don't know how well New Hollywood of the 70s would play if you don't have some sort of grounding in what went on with French New Wave, for example. Buuuuut, you could fudge a lot of that, I suppose.

Cool, and that's the kind of thing I'm hoping I (and everyone who reads or follows) can get from this being a more public discussion than just one guy with a Netflix queue and a metric ton of popcorn. I'm still thinking through the approach, but I'd want to be up front about my previous exposure to the movie and biases (i.e. I'm already dreading watching Titanic, consider MASH one of my all-time favorite movies, etc) so that more knowledgeable members of the community can shed some light on why I didn't "get" why a movie was so great or things I may have missed, or other films to watch based on what I liked or didn't about the list entry.

I've been pick and choosing from that list for years. I think that this project is interesting, but realize that it would take you a very long time to do.

@Vichyssoise: Good question. I'm just scanning both, and my totally selfish answer/reason is the original so I don't have to watch Titanic. But that feels a little dishonest and ot in the spirit of being open to new experiences, so I'll take a look at the changes and see if one has fewer movies on it that I've seen. Raw numbers-wise, I've seen 23 of the films on the new list, but that's not a fair count. I've seen The Godfather and The Godfather II roughly 70 bajillion times because I'm a 30 year old American male. I've seen ET once when I was 3 or 4 and remember almost nothing. Same with To Kill a Mockingbird and Do the Right Thing, at different ages. I'm leaning towards the old list because it looks like a net gain of 6 movies I haven't seen, and a heavier emphasis on some of the "classics."

That's a lot of time though. You might be missing a lot of important films that weren't prestige or important enough in the eye of AFI. I watched the documentary and cherry-pick some of the films that seem to fit my test.

Not to mention...foreign films!