"Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define."
-Ani DiFranco

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Finished!

I finally finished my list of the 250 best movies of all time. The last one I watched was Gone with the Wind which seemed suitably epic to wrap everything up with. And now I know the source of yet another famous line that always gets quoted: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

What an education this little project has been. Not just in film but in our whole culture. What an influence movies have had on our lives.
I am ready to return to modern movies now. In fact, I have found a bunch of lists of the best movies of the past decade. I don't intend to commit myself to watching all of them but it is a good source for new titles.
Well, fair well James Stewart, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Humphrey Bogart, Kathrine Hepburn, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, and Paul Newman to name a few. And those I am not so sorry to be through with, Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino. These are undeniably great directors but I find many of their films a task to watch and if there is one thing that I think movies should not be, it is that.
I don't care to tally up the hours I have spent watching all of these. Many, many, many.
Modern movies are so completely different from the old classics that I find it almost impossible to compare them. It is almost like a completely new medium. Because of this I wonder if a modern film could ever push Citizen Kane out of it's throne. I suppose The Godfather has according to some(not in my books). It will be interesting to see how well our recent successes age.

2 comments:

TedinZim said... [Reply to comment]

whoa! epic.
and quite an achievement!
equivalent to 3 months of 40 hour weeks - that makes you certifiably hardcore:)

Alejandra Ramos said... [Reply to comment]

@TedAgree!

Post a Comment