Recently, I watched All About Eve (1950) and loved it. Why didn’t I watch it sooner? Probably because there are so many movies to watch, many are just waiting to be selected. The thing is, how do I select the movies I watch?
I’m working on building for myself a solid film culture. I have been at it for a long time, but I never did it thoroughly. I’m always distracted. I want to watch a movie but it is just one more added to the pile. Recently, I destroyed the pile. I’m starting over in a way, and I finally choose how I’m going to go at it. The bonus point of this idea is that I finally know what to do with my blog, as all the great ideas I had never took form.
I’m launching a new series of articles titled “The Road to the Stars” (obviously, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour will be part of it at some point). Each article will focus on one movie star. The idea is to list their more famous movies, the ones you are supposed to watch as a curious movie buff searching to know his classics.
The goal is for me to do a little bit of research and find my blindspots to fill them. This will provide me with a roadmap in a way, and maybe others will find it useful. I’m going with movie stars, but I’ll probably also launch another series of articles soon to focus on directors. Naturally, there will be crossovers between the lists, but that’s part of the fun.
I intend to build the articles in a way that will allow me to go beyond the primary list because even if I want to watch those classics, I also like to look beyond. Anyway, I’ll make sure to update those articles if I find some less-known movies that I think deserve to be seen.
I could use Letterboxd to do that, you may argue, but I’m not always satisfied with the way they organize their data. Take Robert Redford. You click on his actor pages and the first movie listed is Avengers Endgame, then Captain America: The Winter Soldier. You decide to sort by “Average Rating” and they still are in the top 10, with a Jane Fonda doc and La Classe américaine. No disrespect to all these movies, but I’ll never watch them for Robert Redford. The system works better than IMDB though.
Anyway, we are starting with Cary Grant, and we will see how all of this takes form in the coming weeks and months (and years).