We’re 50 movies in now, which is half the list. It took two years to get here, which is how long I initially expected the whole to take. I’m shooting for another two years for the rest. There are some movies that are more challenging to watch this time through – I’ll need to take a day off to watch Shoah and another day off to watch Satantango.

Some observations at the halfway point:

• The first 50 movies span 1924-1963: 39 years
  • The next 50 will span 1965-2019: 54 years
• The first 50 movies spans the major technological revolutions in film
  • Black and white to color
  • Silent to sound
  • Square to Wide
• You can also see the rough shape of the modern two-hour movie take shape, in terms of how many characters and what a plot feels like.
• I had seen 13 of these before
  • I’ve seen 20 of the next 50
• My average score for these 50 movies was 3.84 on LetterBoxd
  • I estimate my average score for the rest of movies I’ve rated on LetterBoxd is 2.74
  • Watching these movies led me to revise my LetterBoxd rating system. I kept thinking “this movie is on another level” and decided I wanted to create a way to acknowledge these kind of movies.
  • Now I think of my LetterBoxd scores as being out of 4 stars, where a 4-star movie is a perfect movie.
  • I set aside 5 stars for movies that transcend film, and belong to the top tier of all human culture
• I gave 5 stars to 9 Sight and Sound movies:
  • Rashomon
  • Bicycle Thieves
  • Tokyo Story
  • The Night of the Hunter
  • Late Spring
  • Sunrise
  • Pather Panchali
  • Sansho the Bailiff
  • Ordet
• Note two movies by Yasujiro Ozu on the above. I would like to watch more of his movies.
• The next movie is Pierrot Le Fou. Shockingly, to me, it’s not available anywhere to stream. I have rented it from the Des Moines Public Library.