Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark...

Sunday, March 9, 2008

100 Days, 100 Movies

Starting tomorrow, every day for the next 100 days I’ll be counting down my top 100 films. I’d like to state at the outset that this isn’t meant to be a “definitive” top 100 list – there are still too many movies I’ve yet to see for me to make anything even remotely resembling that kind of statement. Rather, this is simply meant to be a list of 100 great movies that, in one way or another, have helped to develop and shape my understanding of film as an art form.

Originally, I had intended to rank the films from 1 to 100, but found the process of trying to organize such a list inherently problematic. When attempting to revise the list I had created, I found that a film I ranked 90 could be removed with hardly a twinge, whereas I couldn’t bear to part with those I had ranked 91-100. The problem is, while it’s easy to distinguish a good movie from a bad movie, it’s more difficult to determine what makes one great movie “better” than another great movie. If Film A is better on a technical level than Film B, but Film B moves you more than Film A, how do you measure which one is the best? For this reason, the first 99 films will be revealed in random order and only the 100th selection will be “ranked” as being the film that I think is the absolute best, the one that I would choose if I could only watch one film for the rest of my life.

So, starting tomorrow and continuing for 99 days thereafter, please enjoy, please feel free to disagree, and if there’s a film on the list you haven’t seen, please go and seek it out because these are 100 movies that I couldn’t possibly recommend more.


1 comment:

Fletch said...

You're crazy, but I admire it. Trying to post every day is one thing, actually doing it is another (even if you write them in advance and just publish them each day).

Can't wait to see them all (though I'm obviously late to the party a bit).