http://www.listchallenges.com/afi-400-greatest-films
There’s a list going around on Facebook at the moment. It is a list of all the nominees for the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Movies. A list of of 400 movies in total.
The question asked on Facebook is: “How many of these have you seen?”
I love movies. I studied film in University. But when I took this test my score was an appalling 237 out of 400. I thought I was a bit of an expert on movies, but this list made me feel like a big old poser.
And there’s films on this list that I should have seen. They’re not all that hard to track down and many of them were released in theaters in the years that I was regularly attending movies. I just didn’t bother.
Some of them are obscure and would have been very hard to track down in the pre-internet era, but with the resources available online a lot of these films should not be difficult at all to track down. Yet, still I have not bothered.
Is it the time commitment? Is sitting down for two hours to watch a film going to give me less time for more important things? Like… I don’t know… writing blog posts or perusing lists of things on Facebook?
Anyway, I feel like a bit of a lazy know-nothing now with a result like this. There’s 163 movies that I should watch now. How hard would that be? How difficult would it be to find a spare 326 hours to complete the list?
I can do that! Sure I can! As long as I stay focused and don’t get distracted…
Oh, but look… there’s another list on Facebook! Let me just check that out first!
Jack Mackenzie: Writer 