The List

A few words and a call for help about The List I am searching for. The List, of course, is the hypothetical, elusive Best Of film catalog, a sort of Platonic ideal of movie critics' picks. In reality, of course, there is no such thing. There are as many lists of films any self-titled movie know-it-all should see as there are movie know-it-alls. Perhaps what I'm interested in is where they tend to overlap?

Let's be practical. I've got a summer here, and actually I've only got evenings in the summer (during the day I'm mostly planning classes and learning Spanish), and then all hell breaks loose when I start teaching four courses in the fall. I won't be watching many movies then. So I'm not going to watch every great movie ever made in the next few months.

Nor do I just want to hit the cornerstones of each movement and genre, those films that are called most influential. I'd like a little more leeway than that, and I'd like to keep in my selections a bit of the spirit of how we choose movies: we look through titles and descriptions and posters and DVD covers and we land on ones that interest us. I'd like to balance my queue between these two things. How about some rules?

1. I will only choose movies that are generally agreed upon as "great" or "influential" in some way by smarty-pants critics.

2. I will hit each major film movement (aka French New Wave, New Hollywood, Dogme 95, German Expressionism, etc)

3. I'm not going to bother to do so chronologically or by any other logical arrangement (though I began this blog by saying otherwise), as I am bound by certain constraints: I have only the cheapest Netflix subscription, which means that I can only have 1 DVD out at a time. During DVD postal transits, I watch movies from my queue that are available to stream over the Internet, which dictates what I can watch when. Also, I prefer jumping around a bit so as not to get bogged down in any one style of filmmaking for too long. I mean, this isn't a fucking class, people. Cut me some slack.

4. I have trouble sleeping if I watch horror films, because I'm a generally unreasonable person, easily given to supernatural frights due in part to a strange religious upbringing. I may skip this genre altogether, satisfied that I've seen The Exorcist, which scared the living shit out of me and reinforced my old Protestant notion that Catholics are scary.

I guess that's enough for now. I'm off to search some lists and maybe find a history of film book at the library. Feel free to post list or book ideas for me in the comments.

For now, stay tuned for the following:

Bullit (1968)
Murmur of the Heart (1971)
The Rules of the Game (1939)