Preview - December Film Festival

I’ve always been a fan of lists.  I could write a full post about that alone, but I think I’ll mostly save it for another day.  Suffice it to say, though, that when I was little, I was the kid with the most complete, hierarchically ranked and frequently updated Christmas list.  I never outgrew this love of lists, and once I got a computer with Excel, things really blew up.  Making lists in Excel is so much fun; if someone would pay me to do that, it would probably be the perfect job for me.

Naturally I have lists pertaining to most of my pastimes, including watching old movies (And cooking, and restaurants, and books…).  At some point, I decided I wanted to watch all the classics, and happened upon the American Film Institute’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” countdown special.  I decided I’d try to watch all of the movies on that list, just by recording them whenever they happened to be on Turner Classics.  Well, then AFI decided to follow that one special up with 10 others: 100 Stars, Laughs, Thrills, Passions, Heroes/Villains, Songs, Quotes, Scores, Musicals, Cheers, 10^th Anniversary Edition of 100 Movies, and a Top 10 in 10 different categories.  Before I knew it I had a list of 479 movies to watch!

It became pretty apparent that my random recording method wouldn’t make very quick progress of the list, or ensure that I saw the best movies out there.  Sometimes I’d find myself recognizing a film name in the guide, and recording/watching it, only to find that its only claim to fame was having the 98^th best film score, or something.  While I might want to see that movie sometime, it shouldn’t take precedence over the ones that are best overall.  So I drafted a new list and started a new plan.

To begin with, I will only work on the movies from the “100 Years, 100 Movies” and “100 Years, 100 Movies, 10^th Anniversary Ed.” lists, which contain a lot of overlap, leading to a total of 123 films.  Since I am very much a save-the-best-for-last kind of guy, I plan to start at the bottom of each list and go back-and-forth, working my way up to number 1.  Obviously they won’t necessarily be on TCM when I want, so I’ll make use of the metro libraries as well.  I’m starting fresh now, so even if I’ve seen something before, I get to (or have to) watch it again.  And I’m shooting for 5 movies per month.

With all that said, here is the lineup for the December Film Festival:

100 (1) – Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

100 (2) – Ben-Hur (1959)

99 (1) – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

99 (2) – Toy Story (1995)

98 (1) – Unforgiven (1992)

98 (2) – Yankee Doodle Dandy (Already listed as 100 on list 1)

Assuming I make it through all these movies by the end of the month, I’ll post one wrap-up for the whole “Film Fest,” rather than writing a summary/review for each movie I’ve seen.  I like to write a little about what I’ve seen, but it’s fairly challenging to say too much without giving away any spoilers.  That seems more conducive to one combo post than 5 individual ones.

So, we’ll see how this goes.  Last time I started writing about movies, I got one film in before I decided to give up.  I think I like this plan better, since it has some structure to it, so it might go a little better.  However, 123 movies at a rate of 5 per month will take something like 2 years to get through entirely, so it will be a bit of a challenge.  Regardless of how it goes, I will end up getting to see some good old movies, and I got to make a new list, so I can be happy about that.