Monday, April 16, 2007

Un Voyage Dans le Sofa

So a while back, I was introduced to the list of 1001 Movies to See Before You Die. My first run through the list put me at 215, and it's slowly becoming an obsession. As in, when I'm flipping through channels, I check AMC and Turner Classic Movies to see if they're playing something on the list (and they frequently are); if we're renting a movie, I try to ignore things not on the list (which, of course, includes anything made later than 2004, so I'm not usually listened to). I'm not watching a movie a day, but they're slowly getting checked off. Slowly.
That is, until yesterday, when I added seven (7) - that's right, seven (7)! - films to my checklist. In the morning, TCM was showing His Girl Friday; I particularly enjoyed the line, "He looks like that guy from the movies... Ralph Bellamy." They followed that up with The Nutty Professor. Yes, the Jerry Lewis version. While I was waiting for that to start, I skipped over to the Library of Congress site to watch A Trip to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery, thus finishing off the entire "1900s" decade of the list. After the adventures of Julius Kelp came Hannah And Her Sisters, one of far too many Michael Caine movies I've seen in the last week (insomnia + television = sitting through Blame It On Rio). After that was Saturday Night Fever, which I'd actually seen before, so it wasn't an addition to my checklist, but I hadn't seen it in a while. Finally, I watched Trois Couleurs: Rouge, the last of Kielkowski's "Three Colors" trilogy. And, like most French films I've seen, I didn't get it. I probably will if I watch it three more times, but how likely am I to do that? Darned art films.
"But wait," I hear you cry, "if you'd already seen Saturday Night Fever, how did you add seven (7) films to your list?" Well, as I was perusing the list to find my new entries, I came across Frenzy, and suddenly recognized it as a Hitchcock film I had seen many years ago ("Mr. Rusk! You seem to have forgotten your tie!"). This has happened several times; you just can't read through 1001 film titles and recall immediately if you've seen each one. So there's my seventh, which puts me up to 227. Summer break is coming; I'll bet I can hit 250 by June.

1 comment:

anne57 said...

I like His Girl Friday too, actually anything with Carey Grant is ok with me. I liked Hannah And Her Sisters the best of the Woody Allen films I've seen since I started this...project..cough..obsession.