100 Years Movie Challenge

With the James Bond project completed, it’s time to move on to a new endeavor. A colleague at Fandango is currently wrapping up a monumental project of watching 100 movies in 100 days and blogging every day. You can view the movies he’s watched here.

This gave me an idea. A crazy idea, but those are often the ones where we learn something about ourselves. I thought about a lot of old movies that I hadn’t seen since I’d left Fullerton and through that grew this somewhat masochistic and thoroughly challenging project; 100 years of movies in 100 days.
Here’s how it works. I’m going to start in 1910 and over the course of 100 days, move up one year each day until I’ve reached 2010 (which should be sometime in mid-November). Below is a tentative list of the movies I’ll be watching beginning August 8th.

The biggest challenge I see (besides trying to find movies from the 1910’s-30’s), is similar to my colleague’s of trying to fit in each review in before the stroke of midnight. I’ll be watching movies on DVD, at revival screenings and for the 1910-1930 range, on YouTube. I’ll post notices of any screenings that I go to if anybody would like to come along with me.

It should be a fun challenge and I look forward to watching a lot of movies that I’ve never seen and re-watching some that I’ve loved since the first time I’ve watched them. Now then, the list:

1910 – Frankenstein
1911 – L’inferno
1912 – The Girl and Her Trust
1913 – The Bangville Police
1914 – Tillie’s Punctured Romance
1915 – A Night in the Shows
1916 – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1917 – The Immigrant
1918 – Shoulder Arms
1919 – Broken Blossoms
1920 – The Mask of Zorro
1921 – The Kid
1922 – Robin Hood
1923 – Our Hospitality
1924 – Greed
1925 – Seven Chances
1926 – The General
1927 – Wings
1928 – The Passion of Joan of Arc
1929 – Pandora’s Box
1930 – Animal Crackers
1931 – M
1932 – The Most Dangerous Game
1933 – Sons of the Desert
1934 – The Thin Man
1935 – Mutiny on the Bounty
1936 – Desire
1937 – The Awful Truth
1938 – Bringing up Babay
1939 – The Wizard of Oz
1940 – Pinocchio
1941 – Citizen Kane
1942 – Casablanca
1943 – Batman
1944 – Arsenic and Old Lace
1945 – Brief Encounter
1946 – My Darling Clementine
1947 – Road to Rio
1948 – Bicycle Thieves
1949 – The Third Man
1950 – Sunset Boulevard
1951 – Strangers on a Train
1952 – Singin’ in the Rain
1953 – Roman Holiday
1954 – Seven Samurai
1955 – Kiss Me Deadly
1956 – Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1957 – Witness for the Prosecution
1958 – Touch of Evil
1959 – Anatomy of a Murder
1960 – The Bad Sleep Well
1961 – The Innocents
1962 – Lolita
1963 – Charade
1964 – Goldfinger
1965 – Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
1966 – Blow-up
1967 – The Dirty Dozen
1968 – Night of the Living Dead
1969 – True Grit
1970 – Patton
1971 – Straw Dogs
1972 – The Godfather
1973 – The Sting
1974 – Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
1975 – Jaws
1976 – Taxi Driver
1977 – Close Encounters of the Third Kind
1978 – The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
1979 – Alien
1980 – The Blues Brothers
1981 – Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982 – The Thing
1983 – Flashdance
1984 – Once Upon a Time in America
1985 – Back to the Future
1986 – Highlander
1987 – Raising Arizona
1988 – Grave of the Fireflies
1989 – Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
1990 – King of New York
1991 – JFK
1992 – Reservoir Dogs
1993 – Tombstone
1994 – Ed Wood
1995 – The Usual Suspects
1996 – Scream
1997 – Good Will Hunting
1998 – The Big Lebowski
1999 – The Matrix
2000 – Snatch
2001 – Moment in Time
2002 – The Bourne Identity
2003 – Finding Nemo
2004 – Anchorman
2005 – Batman Begins
2006 – The Prestige
2007 – Juno
2008, 2009 and 2010 TBD.

So there you have it. A tentative list of the next three months of my life. Should be an interesting ride!