In our household we have a new goal in our lives! We have set ourselves the task of watching all 1001 movies in this book. It’s a film reference book presented chronologically with a brief synopsis and critique. It begins with Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon in (1902) and my edition ends with Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003).
I bought this book back in 2003 when I worked at Just Books and it lived on my bookshelf gathering dust. For the first 5 months after having Darwin I barely made it downstairs in the evening because of feeding and the trouble I had with getting him to sleep. So when I managed to get back downstairs in the evening for a few precious hours I wanted to do something with evening. Now I’m not about to go clubbing and it’s all too easy to spend hours mooching about on the internet. I wanted a goal I could complete and I wanted it tickable! I went through the book ticking (with a pencil phew) off the films I’ve already seen such as Rope (1948) and Seven (1995). What I really like about this book is that it’s expanding my horizons and making me watch films I probably never would have bothered with before. For example, Once Upon a Time in America (1983), depicting life in the Prohibition era is an epic of a film running for 3 hours 49 minutes. It took us two nights to watch that one. I don’t think I would have bothered with a film that long previously but now I’m compelled to watch it and tick it off. We also enjoy making our own popcorn with syrupy sauce to scoff as we view. So far we’ve recorded a lot of films from Film 4, indeed we have a hard disk rammed with movies!
We have the 2003 edition so when we’ve finished this lot we have to watch the new additions. Filmsquish has a complete list of all editions’ movies on the 1001 list past and present which means we have a total of 1078 films to watch.
