"Let's Start at the Very Beginning (A Very Good Place to Start)"

I suppose that a confession is in order: I Love Movies. I love credits. I love knowing that Maria Falconetti, who has only two film credits to her name, both of which predate 1930, can be connected to Kevin Bacon in only three moves. I love the way rubber soul shoes stick to theatre floors that haven’t been mopped. I love the feel of freshly ripped movie tickets, and the way that they inevitably remind you to check the archives in your change pocket as you add them to the collection. There is a moment in every film when the lights go down and the logos of studios and ceremonious music simultaneously trumpet its beginning. In some movies this will be the best moment, but in many it serves only as an emotional primer for what is to come. This is perhaps my favorite moment, generally speaking, when going to the movies. It is the moment in which all things are possible. From there on in its flush or bust, and you’re in the hands of the filmmaker.

Movies have been special to me for as long as I can remember. As a child when I couldn’t sleep, my father would descend the stairs with me, and I would eventually drift off to the gravelly assertions of John Wayne or the melodious drawl of Jimmy Stewart. Dad was a movie guy. I guess I just got lucky. Still, I don’t think even my father suspected that as a teenager movies would become an obsession for me-- the next logical step after I foolishly assumed I knew all there was to know about rock music. There was about a three month period during my junior year of high school when I spent almost every Friday evening roaming the isles of Blockbuster with Jake Johnson trying to find anything that I’d heard was good, and wanting to see them all.      

            Then, in my freshman year of college I was lucky enough to take a three-week accelerated course in film. During the class I learned how much I didn’t know about the movies and was introduced to some of the finest films I’ve ever seen. Some were classics that I should have seen long before then, and some I saw in that basement lecture room for the first time with new eyes. I was hooked, and to my mother’s delight I got a library card the following summer. I think she was a bit disappointed when I starting bringing home armloads of DVDs as opposed to literary classics, but some of the them were Olivier adaptations of Shakespeare so she tried to understand.

            Though it was difficult to convince roommates when I returned to school to sit through some of the classics when I wanted the TV (and I must say I put them through quite a bit) by the end of my sophomore year I had pretty much exhausted the Greenville College VHS library.  Returning home that summer I decided to dedicate myself to a larger mission within the oeuvre of simply loving movies. Shortly after my 20^th birthday I purchased Steven Jay Schneider (ed.)’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and set myself to the task of doing just that. Upon purchase I had seen roughly 250 of the titles contained therein. Now, four and a half years later, I have seen over 800. The tome actually contains over 1001 films as it is a revised edition*.  As of today, my color coordinated check-off system indicates that I have exactly 200 left to see. And so it begins. This blog is a way for me to chart my progress and to undertake the challenge of doing what I should have been doing all along. I plan to write about each of these remaining titles as I attempt to complete the book by my 27^th birthday (June 16, 2013). I may finish long before then. I may not. I may, as the book somewhat ominously foretells, drop dead before I can complete the task. However, my resolve is strong and my thirst for films has yet to be quenched.

            I know already that some of my entries will be shorter than others, as the book has already taken me some places I didn’t want to go. I can’t see myself writing more than a paragraph about a film as utterly dull as Jackie Chan’s Project A, Part II (1987), a movie to which the text gives three.  Conversely, I find it hard to believe that Schneider’s contributors contained their summation of Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot (1989) to that same number of paragraphs. As with any journey, there will inevitably be some pit stops that are less rewarding, but ultimately necessary, to reach the final destination. And with that, I’m off.

*There has since been another edition printed which I can only assume will eventually lead me to lengthening my cinematic journey.