Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Return of the Native

Back from the grave once again, I'm doing a bit of a face-lift on the blog, and also going to attempt to start getting back in the habit of keeping it up to date. I know, I've said that many times before, but this time between the posts of random nonsense, I may have some other options.

Last year, Chris Davis and I started a little side project where, using Lists of Bests, we would create lists of films for the other to watch. The other would have 1 week to watch the top film on the list, then 1 week from then to watch the next one. It went okay for a while before we seemed to abandon the project. Discussion has heated back up in rekindling the project, and my stumbling upon the ICheckMovies site will likely help to motivate us, especially when they add in the ability to make custom lists.

Regardless of that, ICheckMovies will be helping me get closer to complete of one of my ultimate (albeit lofty and at this point seemingly far-fetched) goals -- the goal of watching every film in the IMDB Top 250. Though considered by some sources to be a list made by elitist snobs, it's still a pretty impressive list. You can always see an up to date status report of how far along I am on this quest by looking at the little widget to the right. For the record, Davis has completed 52% of the list as of this posting, and I have completed 34%. I encourage any of my friends who enjoy movies to join ICheckMovies and add me as a friend on there (my username there is HillJackBob). If you rate movies on IMDB, it will easily import your IMDB vote history, which saved me lots of time. Of course, all good cinephiles should be on FlickChart as well (and my username there is the same).

In my quest to conquer this list, I have ventured back in the past to watch some films that in prior years I may have never gotten the motivation to view. Of course, after watching some of these films, I have been quite impressed with how well they have held up over the years. Examples of older films that made enough of an impression on me to make my Flickchart Top 100 include 1954's Hitchcock classic Rear Window (19), Billy Wilder's film noir 1944 classic Double Indemnity (24), and the amazing 1974 crime flick The Sting (39).

I may go back and review all three of those films in separate blog entries in order to possibly convince my readers to check them out, if they haven't to this point. Small movie reviews might become a staple of this blog over time, especially for older films that I think need to be seen.

No comments: