The IMDb Top 250

IMDb Top 250 Movies
New Entries to the Top 250
My Watched List at twofifty.org

My Lists

How Far I've Come
Films That Should Be in the IMDb Top 250

Samples

I haven't got a clue whether this project, when finished, will ever get published or not. It would be great if it came to that, but it isn't the point of the project.

I certainly plan to upload everything here when it's finished, but until then here are a few samples.

Vertigo (1958)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Notorious (1946)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
King Kong (1933)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
M (1931)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
City Lights (1931)

The IMDb Project

So I decided to finally get on with something I've been talking about for quite a few years now: to watch and review all of the films listed in the Top 250 at the Internet Movie Database, from The Godfather at the top to Judgment at Nuremberg at the bottom.

After all, I've long thought of myself as a film fan. I've been watching films for as long as I can remember, I've seen a very wide range of them and I know a good deal about them and the people who make them. I don't see myself as the sort of Ultimate Film Fanatic who features on the show of that name on the Independent Film Channel, but I do see myself as a lot nearer to it than most. I spent much of my youth scouting for bargain videos in the 3 for £5 bins at flea markets and now I buy DVDs like some people buy food. I've also been following IMDb ever since I could download the entire thing onto fourteen floppy disks.

So I'm a film fan. Yet I haven't seen three out of every five of the movies on the IMDb Top 250 list, and these are supposedly the greatest films ever made. It's easy and probably very fair to argue that nobody should call themselves a film fan until they've seen at least most of these titles, if not all of them. So, for my part, it's time for me to fix that. I won't call myself a film fan again until I've worked through the lot.

And there's more. It would be highly dishonest of me to pretend that I don't have some pretty huge gaps in my cinematic knowledge. These gaps need rectifying and I'll highlight these as I work through this project. I'm sure that they will also flavour my writing as I discover names and faces that I had no excuse in not knowing all along. After all, as I start this project I haven't seen a single film by such directors of note as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, D W Griffith or Sidney Lumet. I've also never seen a film starring such major acting talents as Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Gene Kelly, James Dean or Joan Crawford. Many other important names I've seen only occasionally. I've seen Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Jack Lemmon, Bette Davis, Woody Allen and Grace Kelly precisely once each, and I've only ever watched four films by Alfred Hitchcock.

One reason for these gaps is my long avoidance of the mainstream. Rather than seeing the latest Oscar winner, I'm far more likely to be watching a cult movie, an obscure movie or a really bad movie. If life is good, I'd be watching one that satisfies all three of those descriptions at once.

For instance, I may not know the names above, but I do know directors like Wong Kar Wai, Pedro Almodovar, Roger Corman, Jean Pierre Jeunet, Alex Cox, John Waters, Ed Wood, Sergio Leone and John Woo. My favourite films include such obscure fare as The Bat Whispers, Bad Taste, Repo Man, Santa Sangre, Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, Manhunter and Days of Being Wild; and my favourite actors are people like Harry Dean Stanton, Brion James, Maggie Cheung, Sue Shiomi, Dick Miller and Rosanna Arquette.

So it's the classics I'm missing. I don't know three fifths of this Top 250 list, but I do know Japanese monster movies, Hammer horrors, spaghetti westerns, 50s sci-fi B-movies, exploitation flicks, black and white Mexican horror films dubbed into American, Hong Kong bullet ballets, giallo horror from Italy, Japanese anime, Shaw Brothers chop socky and all the odd stuff that Alex Cox chose to air on Moviedrome on BBC2.

You could say that I share a lot of my taste with industry luminaries like Jonathan Ross or Quentin Tarantino. The big difference is that they've seen the famous stuff too.

I haven't.

Yet.

This project is how I'll at least begin to catch up.