Growing up, my family didn’t really watch a whole lot of movies. My dad would occasionally take us to the theater to see the new, big action flick and I distinctly remember him taking me to see Princess Diaries (what a good dad), but other than the Disney movies and the ones we begged him to take us to see, we didn’t go much.
This is for several reasons, really. My mom doesn’t like movies – she only enjoys seeing very clean, “family-friendly” movies, and even then she’s really just not interested. Another reason is that we didn’t have a whole lot of money, and with a family of six people, going to the movies was expensive even on an early Saturday morning. It just wasn’t in the budget.
Andrew on the other hand, watched movies all the time with his mom growing up. We were recently talking about all of the movies that were considered “classics” or the “best of all time” that we (and by we I mean mostly me) have never seen. We both enjoy watching movies, and there were so many movies we wanted to watch that we just never have. So we thought it would be a fun challenge to watch all of these culturally classic movies by consulted the IMDB Top 250 Movies list.
If you’re not familiar, IMDB (Internet Movie Database) is a website which does exactly what its name suggests. Users can also rate movies, and I’m not sure what their exact algorithm is but IMDB puts together a list of the top movies of all time. We picked the top 250 list.
We saved a copy of the list to Excel and dated it, that way if any movies were taken off the list or added to it, it wouldn’t set us back. Our goal is to watch all 250 movies. We haven’t given ourselves a time limit – that is a lot of movies and if we watched a movie a week, it would take at least four years (we’ve crossed off movies we both have already seen). Some weeks we may watch three or four movies, and then there may be two weeks where we don’t watch any. We want to have fun with it and not make it a chore, so by not setting ourselves a “to be done by” date, I think we will really enjoy it.
Before we started the challenge, we had both seen about 45 of the movies on the list. If one of us had seen it, but the other hadn’t, we didn’t count it. We both have to have seen the movie to cross it off.
We’re still establishing rules – and by that I mean arguing about the rules. I think that we should each be allowed at least two vetos. 250 movies is, again, a lot of movies, and I can think of several that I have no desire of watching. I don’t like a lot of vulgarity so I know that I will absolutely hate The Wolf of Wall Street, however much I do love Leonardo DiCaprio. I think I should be able to use a veto. Andrew believes that we have to watch every single movie, otherwise when we say “We watched all 250 IMDB top movies!” we also have to provide a disclaimer that we skipped a few. I know of a few that Andrew really doesn’t want to watch, so I’m hoping I can persuade him that we don’t have to watch them if he uses a veto.
What do you think? Should we be able to skip a few movies, or should we watch every single one so that we can truly say we watched the IMDB Top 250?
