The Cinephile Challenge

When I started this blog, I thought movie best-lists where a lame form of non-content.  I still largely do.  Over time, though, I find that I perhaps have less to say about the medium than when I started and I see more value than I once did in introducing people to content.  I have also been curious about the ways in which people can become more legitimate cinephiles and in ways that have some air of objectivity.  I came up with one approach to this in my old essay The Criterion Challenge.  I now have a new system that I think is better in nearly every way and much easier while also achieving the same goals.  I built it around one of my favorite essays I have written, Is There Such a Thing as a Must-See Movie?.

I have created a list of movies.  It contains a broad range of movies that are made up of my favorite movies to fill different categories.  I will not go into details on my formula here.  To get started, find the list below.

Go through the list alone or with your spouse.  Check off every movie you have already seen before.  Once you reach the end, if you still have more than fifty movies left over, start at the end and check off and remove more until either you desire to stop and keep the rest or you get down to fifty.  You may keep more than fifty or go all the way down to fifty.  Any amount that is at least fifty is okay, but once you decide to keep something, you must keep everything above it.

Once your keepers are chosen, go into the upper right corner where it says "order by."  Sort all the movies chronologically by release date with old movies first and new movies last.  Then click on "unchecked" and you have your list.

Two final things to note about the list: If you watch the movie Metropolis, watch the version with the original German intertitles.  Also, Prelude to War is a placeholder for the entire Why We Fight series.  If it is on your list, watch the whole series at that point.

Now it starts.  Do a zero to two-week media fast, meaning no recreational film, television, internet, or audiovisual media.  Once this is up, continue this fast, but with the exception of watching the movie list you created in the chronological.  The fast ends at whatever pace you finish the movies.