An Announcement: I'm Watching the AFI 100 Movies

There are currently two assignments and seven days between me and summer break, and what a feeling it is (and what a better feeling it will be once those assignments and days are behind me). The relevant takeaway from that fact is this: I'm about to have a whole lot of free time on my hands. The even more relevant takeaway: I plan on spending some of that free time watching and blogging through the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies list.

Ever since I started this blog, I've wanted to do a long series working through some major body of work, but I never thought of any work that I really wanted to work through. Until the other day, that is, when I decided to scan through AFI's ranking of what the institute considers the 100 greatest American films ever made. I've known about the existence of this ranking for about as long as I can remember, and I've read through it several times because I'm a pedantic slave to pop culture lists. From these read-throughs, I've always had the general sense that I've seen most of these movies at least once, but upon revisiting the list, I was struck by how many of these movies I haven't seen (roughly one third of them!). So this summer I'm going to remedy that.

Listen, you can say what you want about the biases, illogicalities, and predictability of the AFI ranking. These certainly wouldn't be my choices for the best American films either, although I do enjoy (and even love) quite a few of them. But whether or not you actually like the movies on the list, one thing you have to admit about is that AFI does about as good a job as any at identifying the canon of American film, or at least at ensuring that every one of its 100 movies is a bona fide classic. I don't mean "classic" in the "best movie evahhh!" sense but rather that each one of these movies has significant cultural prominence and/or importance to the medium of film. For someone looking to experience the major works of American cinema, you could do a lot worse than to start with the AFI 100 Years...100 Movies list. So, my not having seen about thirty of these suckers means that I have pretty significant gaps in my knowledge of American film, and it's my intention to fix that this summer.

A few ground rules:

1. AFI has made two ...100 Movies lists, one in 1998 and a 10th Anniversary list in 2007 (even though that's the 9th anniversary?). The two lists aren't hugely different, but for the sake of some of the more recent movies added, I'll be working through the '07 list.
2. I'm not rewatching movies I've already seen. I've got other things to do this summer, people! What that means is that I'll be working off my memory for my responses to a lot of these movies, and some of those memories might be a little hazy—to put it another way, it's been a long time since family movie night introduced me to Sullivan's Travels.
3. I'll put an asterisk next to the titles of the movies I'm seeing for the first time.
4. I'm not sure how many posts it's going to take me to finish this series, but it won't be one hundred. I'm planning on covering anywhere from two to five movies in each post. Maybe I'll say insightful things about those two-to-five movies, maybe I'll just be a rambling windbag. But each one will have at least a couple sentences written about it.
5. I'm going to stay away from list quibbling (e.g. "I can't believe they ranked Taxi Driver over Toy Story!"—which, by the way, is a real shame), since that can become tedious really quickly.

Other than those points, I'm leaving this project wide open for myself.

Honestly, I'm not sure how many people out there will really be that interested in this project. It's entirely possible that no one will end up reading these posts. And I'm cool with that. The real goal of this blog post series is that I want to deepen my understanding of film history and craft. I have this tendency to watch a lot of movies in such rapid succession that I don't take any time to reflect over what I've seen, and hopefully, making myself blog about these movies will help me to be more thoughtful in my viewing. Worst case scenario here: no one cares about these posts, and I've watched a ton of great movies. Best case scenario: my blog goes viral, I become king of the world, and I've still watched a ton of great movies. It's a win-win.

I should be posting the first entry in the series within the next week or so, depending on how long that schoolwork takes me, so if you're interested in this project, be one the lookout.

Until next time!

Update: You can read the first entry in the series here.

P.S. I linked to the AFI list a few paragraphs up, but in case you missed it, you can just follow this link.

I'm Not Worried About Mad Men

I should be working on one of several end-of-semester projects right now, but the new season of Mad Men starts tonight, so screw it. I'm writing a post!

Last August, I wrote that I wasn't worried about Breaking Bad's final spate of episodes because I was reasonably positive that the show would stick the landing. And now that we're in pretty much in the same position with Mad Men [1], I thought about writing the same sort of post about the impending finale of Don Draper and company's story. But as I started thinking more about the post, I realized that I had basically nothing to say about the likelihood of Mad Men's future artistic success.

This, I realized, is because I honestly do not care one bit whether Mad Men's ending is good or bad.

That doesn't mean I'm disinterested in Mad Men's final season. I'm actually super stoked to see it. I am practically on the edge of my seat waiting to see what Matthew Weiner and the rest of the Mad Men creative staff will deliver as their ultimate statement on Don, Peggy, Pete, Sally, Roger, Joan, advertizing, capitalism, family, gender, privilege, history, identity, race [2], love, art, death, and any number of the other fascinating thematic and character territories the show has covered up to this point. I'm just not really interested in where any of the remaining episodes will fall on an A+—F scale, whether or not the finale will be a four-star, two-thumbs-up triumph or an embarrassment that somehow retroactively makes the whole show awful [3]. I just want to experience the show, whatever ends up happening.

And you know what? That's a pretty enjoyable place to be. Sometimes it seems like I spend so much time evaluating the art I consume that I forget to do what that art was actually created to do, which is to give me an experience that conveys something meaningful and/or entertaining about the human experience. I'm so busy discussing whether or not a given movie, series, book, painting, etc. was good or bad that I forget to engage in the experience beyond that binary evaluative system.

A few weeks ago, Sam Adams at Criticwire wrote a great piece about watching movies in which he argues that "when you watch a movie...you agree to submit to its vision." You aren't passive, but by watching the movie, you enter a sort of contract with the film that should make you engage with the work's ideas. You as the viewer are subservient to the demands of the film in that your discussion of it happens on the terms supplied by the work's art.

Those assertions get into a whole lot of thorny theoretical issues about the relationship of author, art, and audience, but one thing about the argument I can definitely get behind is the idea that a given work of art brings to its audience certain premises, and if we audience members ignore those premises, we're doing at least a little disservice to that art's vision.

I can't help but feel that when I try to decide if a work is good or bad and leave it at that, I'm not submitting to that work's vision. That's not to say that evaluation is an inherently bad thing—if nothing else, the work of the late Roger Ebert, whose career's meat and potatoes were basically made of evaluations, is a great example of the vitality of a good review. But when the bulk of the discussion surrounding a movie or TV episode consists of people trying to figure out if that film or episode is good or bad to the abandon of everything else (as the Internet is so wont to do with its myriad of grades, scores, and upvotes), isn't that missing the point? At least a tiny bit?

I'm sure plenty of us will have feelings about the worth of Mad Men's final season in good time (and it's okay to have them!), but for now, I'm really enjoying the respite from evaluation.

Until next time.


1] Well, sort of. I guess to be in the exact same position, I'd have to have written that post back in 2012 when the first half of Breaking Bad's fifth season was about to air, given that Mad Men is pulling the same pointless, greedy, AMC-realizing-with-desperation-that-it-has-basically-only-The-Walking-Dead-and-nothing-else episodic scheme. But let's not get into that.

2] Here's hoping Mad Men's pulling a long-con on this one and will pull the rug out from under us sometime this season, given how underplayed any real insight into American racial politics has been on this show so far.

3] A response to finales I've never really understood. I didn't like True Detective's ending either, folks, but dang it all, how does an ill-fitted ending make the awesomeness of episodes four and five any less awesome?