The IMDB Top 250

One project I've been working on for a while is to watch every film on the IMBD top 250. One of the consequences of growing up on a boat and travelling a lot is that you end up with big gaps in your general knowledge - especially when it comes to popular culture.

I have always felt that I didn't know much about cinema or cinema history. A lot of conversations take place around movies and I often had to shrug and say: "I don't know, I've never seen Braveheart" at which point my friends would gasp, the room would go silent and passersby would frown and shake their heads at me disapprovingly.

I wanted to be able to stay in the conversation and know what people were talking about.

I also just love watching a great film. When you walk around the DVD store trying to pick a movie to watch it's a very hard thing to do. Too often you blindly choose one based on the DVD cover, the actors, the director only to be disappointed.

Friend recommendations are well-meaning but most people usually recommend a film they liked without taking into account what they know about your tastes. When I recommend a film I usually ask a lot of questions about films they really liked and, based on their answers, I suggest a film that I think is similar to those regardless of whether I personally liked that film.

This means I often recommend films to people that I thought were awful films solely because I think it will match the person's taste. Because you know what, it's not about me and what I like or trying to convince other people that they should like the same films as me, it's about recommending a film they'll enjoy.

So what if there was a way to take a poll of all of your friends and see what films they liked best, as a group? Well, that's what the IMDB list is. IMDB is the biggest movie information website in the world.

It's been around forever and when you register with their site you can vote on films by giving them a score from 1 to 10. The films with the highest average (and a minimum of 1,000 votes) form the top 250. It used to be that you had to be a regular user of the site for your vote to count.

That way you could just register an account to only vote up a film you liked. But it seems they have changed (or have a better algorithm for filtering that behavior).

In my mind there is simply no better way to choose a great film than to work your way down the list. It would also round out my general knowledge and allow me to discover movies, directors and genres that I didn't know I liked so much.

I started this mission in 2007 while I was living in Korea and it was a lot of fun. From memory I had only seen 62 of the films on the list. I hadn't seen the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Godfather films.

I had, however, seen the number one film on the list: The Shawshank Redemption. I'm still going all these years later and, to be honest, I haven't watched a film off the list for the past nine months or so. I only have about 18 left (you can see my remaining films here).

I've watched most of the Usual Suspects (including the bombshell ending) but I haven't had the patience to sit down and watch it from start to finish. It's because I've had the ending spoiled.

Often I find myself watching films off the list in fits and starts. I'll go out of my way to watch a lot of films off the list in quick succession one after the other and then I won't watch any off the list for about 6 months.

I should also note that I watch movies that are not on the list including low-brow comedies so this isn't about being a movie snob. The other thing to remember is that the IMDB list isn't about quality it's about popularity alone.

When I found a movie I thought was a 10/10 film then I would look it up and see who the director was and what other films they'd made. Then I'd forget about the list and take a massive detour to discover a bunch of films I would never otherwise have seen.

This is how I ended up getting into Hayao Miyazaki, Akira Kurosawa and Paul Newman. I still have a lot of Kurosawa's films to watch and I'm glad because they're an absolute joy every time. I think High and Low is one of the best films ever made. It used to be on the list but isn't any longer.

Since I first started on the list several years ago I've noticed an obvious change that was always going to happen. Older films are getting pushed off of the list by newer films.

Simply put, most people don't have the patience or imagination to sit through an old film anymore so those films don't get any votes.

New comic book movies get a lot of high votes from young audiences that are perhaps a bit more free and easy with giving a "10" to a film whereas people who watch older films tend to be more deliberate and critical and much less likely to rate any film a "10".

Fair enough, although had I started on the list this year then I might never have seen a lot of amazing films that have slid off the bottom of the list.

I'll do a list of films I love another time but other films I discovered are: Dances with Wolves (the director's cut which is around 4.5 hours long took me forever to sit down to watch but by the end I wish it could just keep going), Hud, Festen, Paper Moon, A Man For All Seasons, The Battle of Algiers, The Wages of Fear and much, much more.

Possibly more interesting are the films I found extremely hard to sit through and watch to the end - but watch them I did damn it!

These include the Lord of the Rings films (I can't stand the fantasy genre), a lot of silent movies (with the exception of The Gold Rush all the Chaplin and Keaton silent films drove me up the wall), a lot of the musicals (Gigi has to be one of the best modern arguments for allowing the death penalty for director's - what's that?

You want to change your accent three times during the film? Sure, why not?

It's not like anyway is still awake at this point anyway, Oliver (Victorian England drives me insane, since when was such a grubby lack of hygiene a charming world that anyone would want
to visit?).

An American In Paris (this one made me want to throw up on a regular basis as does most of Gene Kelly's work including Singing in the Rain), Ingmar Bergman and his weird, symbolic and indecipherable films like Persona, many of the Westerners, Humphrey Bogart and perhaps most of all The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The website also used to have lists by decade but that has since been removed - although you can used advanced search parameters to find them. Those lists were top 50 and I'd succeeded in seeing all the ones for the 2000s and most for other decades.

They still have lists by genre but those have been changed now so they only list recent and popular films as clearly IMDB is moving away from their users ever having the trauma of encountering a film made before 2008.

I also used to try and watch every film nominated for in a major category at the OSCARs but that's fallen by the way side. Still I think I can claim it for 2001-2007. Beyond those years I'm not too sure.

I do know I've watched the best actor winning performance for every film back to the 1950s. I'm trying to do it for Best Picture and Best Director as well. The hardest nut to crack would be for best supporting actress as those films can sometimes be really obscure and hard to get a hold of.

Perhaps I'll finish the list this year, that would be really cool. But, ultimately, it's a glorified hobby and will take a backseat to other priorities.