How did I decide on the movies that made my cut? I’m so glad you asked…
Making the list wasn’t rocket science. It was worse. Can I get like a PhD or something for this?
“Babe, I’m embarking on a challenge”, I told my boyfriend as I proceeded to e-mail him an Excel file with enough KB usage to indicate mischief. Inside this Excel was a growing list of over 500 movies. (and, yes, my boyfriend and I do e-mail each other because what is text. What is google chat.)
Meg Ryan. Tom Hanks. Internet dating & a dialup internet connection. The essentials. Spoiler: this movie is NOT on my list
On a related note, this may or may not be the moment my boyfriend began to rethink his promise to be “supportive” of my hobbies.
If you’ve had the chance to read my previous blog post, Making Colour, you’re aware I’m preparing to climb the cinema Mount Everest. I’ve set my sights on watching the 100 Greatest Films of All time in under two years. If you haven’t read my introductory post, shameless plug here.
However, I have yet to hit play on any movies. In fact, I’m not even at base camp. I’m still in need in of my roadmap – my movie roster.
So what does a twentysomethingyearold do when she needs to find something? She Googles it. I quickly came to realize my top 100 list could not be retrieved via a single Google search. No. Oh no. But not for a lack of movie rankings/articles/online communities/prayer groups devoted to the subject matter. Everyone and their mother wants to chime in on the greatest films of all time. While there was the partial paralysis of choice overload, the unmistakable source biases and duplicate syndications – e.g. AFI’s website publishing IMDb’s lists - made the drafting inordinately difficult.
If I was going to do this right, I mean really right, I needed to be the woman my Research Methods professor molded me to be.
I compiled what I could only assume as credible sources:
Time Magazine: All-Time 100 Best Movies @AMC
With a heavy dose of lists curated in a crowd-sourced model:
Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 Movies of All Time
Ranker.com: The Best Movies of All Time
Filmsites.org Up Vote: The Greatest 100 Movies of All Time
I wanted to ensure the popular vote wouldn’t dominant the pool. If this was the campaign system, I had put an Electoral College safeguard in place
Timeout.com: Best Movies of All Time (Voted by Actors)
Lastly, I was ashamed with the lack of foreign films in my draft pool. I specifically sought out opinions on noteworthy foreign film options
Moveline Magazine: 100 Greatest Foreign Films
I still have high regards for Time Magazine’s list – for their abundance of foreign films and highlighting what they deemed to be the best movie of each decade – and Timeout’s list, being that it was like the superlatives of Hollywood. Curious about a source I didn’t use? I’m sure it was with good reason… Seriously though, who was the fool that thought it’d be a good idea to put a Top 100 online list in the form of a Powerpoint?
By now, I had an Excel file with 582 movie names. It was also around this time that I cashed in my phone-a-friend lifeline to get a refresher on some helpful Excel functions. What can I say - Life is too short to not to know how to pivot table, friends.
Oh, you left additional spaces in your movie titles? Jokes on you if you think I’m sorting anything for you – Pivot Tables
I made an executive decision that any movies that made 6 out of the 8 lists automatically made the cut. Subsequently, these movies are the heartbeat of my list:
- Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- It's a Wonderful Life
- Pulp Fiction
- Raging Bull
- Schindler’s List
- Some Like It Hot
- The Wizard of Oz
- Chinatown
- Citizen Kane
- On the Waterfront
- Singin' in the Rain
- Taxi Driver
- The Godfather
- Annie Hall
- Casablanca
After that, let it be known, I left my sanity somewhere between To Kill a Mockingbird and Pan’s Labyrinth. I handpicked the remaining 85 roster spots in a way that can only be described as overly structured and a little manic.
I had hesitations for this project at first thinking such a list would manifest as a love letter to the black & white, Humphrey Bogart-era. In other words, it’d be like AARP for my 22” Panasonic. But, much to my surprise, the first compilation was surprisingly diverse – spanning various decades, genres, actors and directors. There were only a handful of films I purposefully went out of my way to add in order to patch painfully absent categories:
+Rushmore - Wes Anderson directed flix
+City of God - Movies with Latino lead(s)
+Training Day - Movies with African American lead(s)
+Stand by Me - Child Cast
+The Revenant - Leo film (I had not seen already)
And lastly, my boyfriend, without signing up for it, has found himself in the passenger seat to my project. As retribution, in the only way I knew how, I allowed him to weigh in on some film-adds. Here’s what he came up with:
Gran Torino
How to Train Your Dragon
Stand by Me
Airplane!
Ocean's Eleven
The Magnificent Seven
Training Day
Gladiator
Inglorious Basterds
Memento
Scarface
The Revenant
The Untouchables
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid
Without further ado, Life in Colour’s 100 Greatest Films of all time: (Don’t like my list? To that I say, go make your own blog.)
If you’re actually reading this blog in-depth enough - #1, thank you. #2, the author acknowledges some film classics purposefully absent from her list: Forrest Gump, Gone with the Wind, American Beauty, The Princess Bride, The Usual Suspects. These specific films, among others, were removed from this project as I had already seen them enough time to warrant a creation of a new Netflix category: “Because you should stop Watching”. While I won’t be including them in my challenge over the next 2 years, I highly recommend my readers explore these films.