The Top 250
There was a time right before I graduated high school that I just began to seriously become interested in movies. Looking back on the movies I was shown growing up, it was definitely an alternative film education. While some staples were there, like Hitchcock, anything with Jimmy Stewart, and anything with Tom Hanks, a lot of the “classics” were left out. (I saw Popeye and Joe versus the volcano multiple times before I had even heard of the significance of Citizen Kane) This may have been due to a lot of reasons but I think mainly my parents just didn’t really care about which movies were “important” or “influential”( I use the “” here because who is really to say how much more influential The Godfather is than say, Muppets in Space?), they just liked the movies that they liked and showed us the ones that they thought we should see.
But around this time I became obsessed with IMDb, particularly the IMDb trivia section. I remember I would look up a movie (regardless of if I’d seen it or not), read all the trivia for it, and if another movie was mentioned in the trivia as an influence or there was some type of homage given, I would look that movie up and the process would continue until to infinity.
In doing this I found the TOP 250 MOVIES OF ALL TIME list, and everything changed. I became fascinated by this list. When I first went through it and saw that I only had seen 45 out of the 250, it became clear to me exactly which movies I had to see. Completing the list wasn’t an option, it was my duty. So for the next 2 years, every movie I watched was written down on my Chick-fil-A calendar and if that movie was on the 250, I would write it’s ranking next to it. For some reason, top dogs like Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, and The Good The Bad and The Ugly have still escaped my viewing to this day.
Even though I was studying Communication in Film in college, I wasn’t really learning anything about actual films. We would talk about story and how to operate a DSLR but there was very little in the way of talk about anyone other than maybe Spielberg, who I was not remotely interested in at the time. So to me, this sacred list, this 250 films generated by majority average ratings, was my film education. I put so much value into these movies and would watch them even if I didn’t like them. I would suffer through them as though someone was going to check up on me and make sure I’m doing my homework. (That is not to say that none of these movies mean anything to me. Certainly ones like The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, The Shining, or Sunset Boulevard had a profound impact on the way I watch movies, just to name a few)
Things were going great and I was making my way through the neverending list of the Internet Movie Database, this was until I found the Criterion Collection, just sitting in the selection on Hulu at the time. My Theology professor recommend The Seventh Seal to the class and I had never heard of it. To my great surprise, it was on Hulu and I fell asleep during my first watch of it.
Through Criterion, I found Eraserhead. I had seen it’s entry on IMDb before, but due to its low audience star rating, I didn’t think it worth my time. On a whim I decided to watch it. (I think part of my interest in it lied in it’s beautiful poster, which I now have hanging on my wall)
Looking back, I would say that this movie changed everything for me. It’s meandering plot (or lack thereof), it’s strange writing, great practical effects and makeup and hilarious surrealism that I would later find out is a staple of Lynch’s work. This movie broke all the rules for me. I had never seen anything like it before. And the fact that it was made in the 70s! I couldn’t believe that there weren’t more movies like it. It was just so out of the ordinary and after watching it, an entire world of movies I have never heard of before opened up to me. Just like that, the floodgates opened. My new obsession became Criterion, IMDb was dead to me.
I went from trying to watch the movies that most people love, to watching movies that most critics love. The cycle continued, only there was just a new list for me to go through.
A similar thing happened with Criterion to where I would watch movies that I had no interest in, just because they were “important”. I watched Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (for those unfamiliar it’s essentially a near-four hour movie of a woman just doing household chores)
because I saw it on someones list somewhere, but had no context for it, so I hated it. I watched Tarkovsky’s Mirror and thought it was boring. I watched these movies as a means to check them off the list and make it seem like I had seen more movies than anyone else at my school. A journey to become the most pretentious person alive. All the joy of watching movies had gone and it became homework.
However, recently the pendulum has swung back to a much more moderate fervor. I have slowed down, stopped caring about which movies I haven’t seen and am watching movies that interest me. It was though this slowness that I developed an amazement at Spielberg’s spectacle, a love for the poetic quality of Tarkovsky’s Images, and an appreciation for movies that are beloved by many but just didn’t connect with me. To this day I’ve only seen 61% of IMDb’s 250 and haven’t even made a dent in the 1000+ titles that Criterion has to offer. And yet I’m am immensely satisfied with the state of the movies I’ve seen. Are there still hundreds of movies on my watchlist? Of course. But you can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll get to those when I get to them.
