Today, I watched the last of the movies on the Facebook list of my 50 favorite movies, part of a group that started the project a few months ago. Tomorrow I will post #5 … we still have a couple of weeks to go, each of us posting twice a week … but I’m a bit ahead, and now I’ve seen and written about them all.
It has been a very interesting project, and my own participation has not been the most interesting part, at least for me. I haven’t had many oddball choices. There were some at the beginning of the list, when I felt a certain freedom to be goofy (#46: Evil Dead II). But my four most recent picks (#6-9) have been A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild Bunch, Citizen Kane, and The Rules of the Game, not exactly risky choices. The best part of my own list has been reading the comments from the folks in our group. It’s safe to say that not everyone has liked all of my picks, but their comments were always enjoyable, and often showed me an angle I hadn’t considered.
The most interesting part has been seeing what turned up on the lists of Jeff Pike and Phil Dellio, the others who have made lists for this thing. Sometimes, they’ll choose a movie I don’t much care for (Elephant), while other times they’ll choose a movie that just missed making my own list (Chinatown). It’s been a learning experience seeing what they had to say about such movies, but even better has been the list of films I’ve never seen. I’ve been watching them, one by one, and it is a lot of fun seeing these movies for the first time, in the context of lists of someone’s favorite movies.
I’m thinking of running my own list on this blog, once we’re done on Facebook, maybe put up my pieces a couple of times a week. At this point, there are close to 50 people in the group, but most of them don’t comment, and I know there are people who read this blog but haven’t joined the FB group, and thus will have missed out on 150 fine short essays about some great movies. So I may cannibalize my own essays, starting sometime next month.
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