Vlog: My Favorite Movies List (And New Reviewing Project)



So, this has been on my blogging to-do list ever since 2006 when Whisky Prajer did a blogging series about his favorite movies of all time, and I thought it was a really neat idea. 

I've kept putting it off, however, just because of what a major project it would be.  I knew myself well enough to know I would never be able to be succinct when talking about a movie I had a lot of history with.  Which meant I'd be writing for hours and hours about each movie.  And I waste too much of my time on this blog as it is.  (Whisky Prajer, who knows the value of succinct writing, was able to pull his own project off with a lot of short well-written essays.  But I doubt I'd be able to duplicate it.)

But then, the other day, the wife and I were watching The Godfather.  (She had never seen it before, but she had been curious to see it because she had been noticing a lot of references to it in pop culture.  I was eager to introduce her to the movie.  We had to stop it a few times because the baby was crying, but we did managed to get through the whole thing.)

"Are you going to do a video review of this one?" she asked me.
"No, I only do a review a when I see a movie for the first time," I explained.
"Why's that?" she asked.
"I don't know--it's just my system," I answered.  I started to explain how it took me much longer to review a movie I have a lot of history with...  and then it occurred to me that actually, these video reviews  I've been doing lately are much less painful than the written reviews.  I just turn on the video camera, ramble for 30 minutes, and then the review is done and ready to upload.  (This is, of course, the laziest way to do Youtube.  The top-tier Youtubers put a lot of time and effort into scripting and editing.  But I've been discovering more and more that there are a lot of other people like me on the bottom tier--people who just turn on the camera, say whatever comes into their heads, and then upload the video.  I've made my peace with being on the bottom-tier.)

So... I've decided I'm going to tackle this project as a video only review.

I'll be posting them on this blog as I do them, but just to be clear: no one is under any obligation to watch these.  I fully anticipate that these are going to get long-winded and rambling--in fact, that's why I'm doing them as video only reviews instead of attempting to write them.  I'm doing these more to get it off of my own chest than I am because I think other people need to watch it. So if you don't want to watch the video, we're still friends.

I'm taking the list that I posted in February 2017.  It was originally supposed to be a top 10 list, but then it got expanded into two top 10 lists when I didn't trust myself to differentiate between critically acclaimed movies and guilty pleasures. 
In the same post, I also posted my old list from 2002, which had some overlap, but also had 5 movies on it which weren't on either of my new lists.
So, what the heck, I'm just going to take all the movies from all 3 lists--all 25 movies total.

In no particular order:
The Star Wars Trilogy
Peter Pan (1953 Disney version)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
Platoon
The Planet of the Apes (The original 1968 version, of course)
Aliens
You Only Live Twice
Gremlins
Citizen Kane
The Godfather
Casablanca
The Great Dictator
Gandhi
Malcolm X
The Third Man
Psycho
The Big Sleep (This is the only movie on this whole list that I've also reviewed on this blog--see that review here).
Doctor Strangelove
Duck Soup
Easy Rider
Hard Day's Night
Help!
West Side Story

I'm planning on re-watching each of these before I record a review, so this could take some time.  I'm also not going to do this on any particular schedule.  It might take 10 years before I re-watch all of these movies and review them again.  But I will do it eventually.

The first one, obviously, will be The Godfather, because I just got done re-watch one.  I'll post that video tomorrow.  I'm not sure when the next video after that will be.

I'll be keeping the videos collected on this playlist HERE