How do I decide which movies to watch?

At first glance that’s an easy enough question to answer, I watch whatever the hell I want. If the premise of a film interests me, I'll watch it. If a trailer peeks my interest, I'll watch it. If the film is by a director that has delivered before or includes an actor or actress with a proven record (according to me), I'll watch it. Simple enough, no? Yes, but let’s dig in more formally at the process of selection for the movies that end up in my screen, since, believe it or not, I do not watch everything and time is a finite resource (allegedly).

2006 seems like a pretty important year in terms of my relationship with the world of cinema. I created my Internet Movie Database (IMDb) account in July 2006. This is crucial because IMDb is where I keep score of which movies I have seen, roughly when I saw it (for movies seen after March 2007), and how high or low I have rated them. This, in a manner of speaking, is the foundational structure in which everything else is set up.

The first movie I ever rated was The Godfather, rated on December 14 2006. But it wouldn’t be until March 2^nd 2007 that I would rate my second film: Con Air. It was on March 2^nd 2007 in which, like many others have done before and after, that I went on a frenzy rating movie after movie. You know how it is, you get in a groove and decide that you are going to rate every movie you have ever seen as a matter of bookkeeping. The rest is history, IMDb became ground central to rate all the films that I had seen and for future reference to score any new film I would see afterwards.

All of this was part of an important transformation that was years in the making. This transformation literally modified the manner in which I would interact with films.

1) I decided I would watch films in their original language. English in English (remember English isn’t my native language), Spanish in Spanish, Japanese in Japanese and so on and so forth. This meant no more dubbing and a lot of subtitles but I felt dubbing just couldn’t capture the affect the actors conferred in their original language.

2) I decided I would not watch movies with commercial interruptions. This development cannot be overstated, this marked a before and after. This meant that basic cable and local channels, the medium that almost exclusively had delivered me with movies during my entire lifetime, was out from there on till the end of time. Out was the Rocky marathon during summer on TNT and the James Bond marathon on Spike and in was HBO and HDNet Movies. Out was content edited for time constrains and dubbing for cursing and in was Tuner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscar.

3) Finally, and more abstractly, I decided I would watch movies at my own pace. I would not wait for movies to be released in DVD, I would go to the theater. Television would not dictate the terms of engagement, hence alternative sources of procurement. Television would not limit the library of movies available to me, I was finally free. I would watch any film I wanted, when I wanted (generally speaking, ha).

But which movies to watch? There are roughly 100 years (give or take) worth of movies out there and not any real authoritative source to guide me on which films I should see first, where to start? I lie, there were lists, and I was just put off by what they said. In AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list of the top 25 male greatest screen legends of American film history I barely recognized any of the actors on the list. Where was Al Pacino? Where was Jack Nicholson? Where was Robert De Niro? Ditto for the female list, I was as clueless as anyone can be. As for the lists of greatest films, I couldn’t shake the perception (my perception) that whoever compiled these lists seemed to have forgotten that they didn’t stopped making movies after the 1970’s. What is this Battleship Potemkin that everyone seems to talk about? Bicycle Thieves? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And who the hell names their film after a number (8½)?

For years I simply and happily just wandered around and saw whatever my hearts desired. And then around 2013 one of my dreams came thru and I acquired my 50 inch 1080p Panasonic Plasma TV and I knew it was go time.

Enter IMDb’s Top 250. This a list of the top 250 films as rated by IMDb users. As an exercise let’s look at Top 250 list for January 1st 2014:

The list always seemed to me like the good blend of new and old films. You got your Seven Samurai (1954) and 12 Angry Men (1957) with your Goodfellas (1990) and The Dark Knight (2008). Meaning: a great pop culture relevant list. I had it made, I knew I would eventually get to Battleship Potemkin and 8½, but this was a good introduction to an eclectic group of films.

Like many before and after me, I decided that I would watch all the films in the Top 250 list.

Of course, there were some films from the list that I had already seen but I decided that I needed TO SEE them again, meaning without TV editing or dubbing etc. and I wanted to see them with fresh eyes in High Definition. For all others, I started collecting and procuring from different sources if they were available plus some of them I could catch on HBO, TCM, HDNet or other premium channels. It became clear there were some films I wasn’t immediately interested on so they would be part of “a second phase”.

It also became clear to me that I would watch the films not in the order they appeared in the list (1 through 250 or vice versa) but in chronological order according to their date of release. I preferred it this way because I wanted to get a sense for each era in cinema (Classical era, New Hollywood etc.) and experience the progression in techniques and filmmaking as they developed through the years. Plus it is easier to “get in the mood” to watch a handful of movies from the 1930’s than to watch one from 2005, then one from 1939 and then jump back to 1976.

Just as a note, the Top 250 lists aren’t statics, movies “enter” and “leave” the list. Many times you may see a just released film shoot up through the list just to slowly fall away as the months/years go by. That means that, if we take them by year, all the Top 250 are different and the one that I ultimately used (which I’m not sure if it is the list from 2012, 2013 or 2014) is different from the current one in 2019. I eventually intend to watch all the films in all the Top 250 lists but that will take some time.

Now, the Top 250 is more of a Historical project for me which goes hand in hand with a Contemporary side. Of course, I’m not only sitting watching the films on the 250 list and nothing else. Like everyone else I like watching the latest films, so that’s where you would see a change in pace for me. Not in the mood for some 1940’s black & white films?, let’s see the most recent offering from David Fincher or Martin Scorsese. This combination are the two pillars of my movie watching experience.

So at the same time I’m on two tracks: the Historical Top 250 lane and the Contemporary lane. Looking back at my IMDb ratings it seems I finally started to go through the Historical component in the 8^th of October 2014 with It Happened One Night (1934), The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939). This also coincides with a limited revival of seeing movies at the theater in 2014 (as seen on an earlier graph).

That’s how you arrived, for example, at a 15 movie streak of: Avengers: Endgame (2019), Patton (1970), McQueen (2018), Andre the Giant (2018), Mid90s (2018), Eight Grade (2018), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), The Last Picture Show (1971), The Mercy (2018), Boxcart Bertha (1972), Badlands (1973), The Sting (1973), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Omen (1976).

As of this writing, my number of items rated in IMDb stands at 1,458. Out of the 2013 Top 250 list I have seen 168 titles for a 67% of completion so far. I would think, with 82 movies left, plus the never ending Contemporary component and the TV series component which has gathered steam in the last 15 years of so, that it will take me at least 10 more years to complete the Top 250. Thankfully, so far, finding good quality copies of the films hasn’t been an issue.

Looking into the future, right now I’m at 1988 on the Historical tract and of course in 2019 in the Contemporary tract. It will be fun to see once the Historical side ends (2013) and the Contemporary side (at large) takes over after 2013. There are plenty of movies from 2014 onward that got left behind (because of lack of interest or simply lack of time) and which I intend to see before going back to start Phase 2 of the Historical tract.

Chronologically, Phase 2 will start significantly earlier than Phase 1 with: The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The General (1926) and Metropolis (1927). Phase 2 has a much more European and international feel than Phase 1 with works from Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman prominently featured in the early part of the list.

I love movies, they can make you cry, laugh and dream. They let you escape from the monotony of everyday life. I hope to be able to continue to watch many films into the future and to finish the 2013 Top 250 IMDb list. After that, I look forward to completing all the Top 250 lists, seeing all the 4 star movies as rated by Roger Ebert, all the movies that have been nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and every movie that has been included in every Sight & Sound poll. So I guess what I’m saying is, let’s get on with it and lets watch some movies!