Down the homestretch

A little more than nine years ago, I enrolled in a course called American Cinema at the college I was attending at the time. The course covered a broad range of American films -- spanning from the silent era all the way into the present. 

One of the topics that I became infatuated during my college years was the American Film Institute's 100 films ... 100 years list which had the AFI rating what it thought were the 100 best films in the last 100 years (with 1997 being the cut-off date) in the then 100-year history of American Cinema.

This list is also one of the biggest reason why I wanted to start blogging about movies again.

I immediately immersed myself in several of the films on the list and made it my goal to watch all 100 movies. Unfortunately, I never set a time limit and the goal was just kind of there -- something I would cross a movie off here or there from time to time.

Life took over. I finished college. Got a job. Got married. Moved to Wyoming. Had a kid. But the last two really didn't hinder the list (they actually helped). When my wife and I moved to Wyoming, we got ourselves a Netflix account, which made it a lot easier to see these films than going to a video store or a library that only had a select number.

Now that I am blogging again, in addition to providing my musings about film -- which no one probably gives a shit about anyway -- I also want to catalog my progress in completing the AFI list, completing the AFI's 10th Anniversary list, the IMDB Top 250 and other lofty goals I can complete in my campaign to champion for my well-deserved title of "Super Nerd." (It's no wonder I never get laid. I'm like a 16-year-old "Star Trek" fan with acne constantly debating about how winnable the Kobayashi Maroon is... or assembling models of AT-ATs, Star Destroyers, Tie Fighters and the Millennium Falcon that will destroy the U.S.S. Enterprise and help the Star Wars franchise reign supreme over the Star Trek franchise once and for all. Well, uhhhhh...)

Anyways... 

As of last night, I did another count of what I have to see ... and here is what I have left:

• 19 films on the AFI 100 years ... 100 movies
• 21 films on the AFI 100 10th anniversary list (with a little overlap from the list above)
• 68 films on the IMDB Top 250 (although I refuse to watch the anime)

So, needless to say, I'm a little excited and giddy of the light at the end of the tunnel.