Summer Under the Stars

Every August, TCM does what they call Summer Under the Stars: each day is dedicated to one star, from 6am until 6am. They always play multiple films from The List.

This year, they are playing 37 films from The List.  I have seen 17 of these. I have not blogged about most of the ones I have seen. 

Every year, I have the intention of watching a bunch of the films, and every year, I some how manage to watch none of them or only a handful.  I'm hoping to watch a few this August, and hopefully I will then blog about them, for whatever readers I still have that haven't jumped ship a long time ago.

This mission to watch this list is one I will complete in my lifetime, I'm just not sure when......

Let's Go to the Movies

Way back in 1998 the American Film Institute (AFI) released a list of the 100 greatest movies of the last 100 years. I remember watching bits of the TV special, and I remember going through the whole list the next day. Eventually I printed out the list, and highlighted the films I had seen, which consisted of maybe a whopping 10 films. I hadn’t seen a lot, but I was only 13, so let’s blame it on that, shall we?

I remember saying to my older sister that we should try to watch all of them, but nothing much came out of it then. I would catch a film from The List on TCM now and then, but I didn’t really try to watch things from The List, mostly because I was dealing with school, work and internships. I actively started watching items from The List around Christmas time 2007, when my roommates gave me a gift certificate for Netflix.

Every year until 2008 AFI released at least one new list in the "100 Years..." series. This consisted of everything from comedies to romance, the greatest stars to the greatest film scores, making a total of 13 lists.

What I refer to as The List is eight of the AFI lists*, condensed down, so that films that are on multiple lists are only listed once, and it just makes for a much neater read overall. There are a total of 409 films on the list. I have currently seen 205 films, which is just over half of them.

I’m not quite sure what this blog is going to be. Maybe just me waxing poetic about how much I loved or hated a film or performance. I’ll randomly toss out some list statistics, and maybe blog about some of my favorite films that are not on the list every once and a while.


* The lists that make up The List are:
100 years…100 Movies (1998)
100 years…100 Laughs (2000)
100 years…100 Thrills (2001)
100 years…100 Passions (2002)
100 years…100 Cheers (2006)
100 years…Musicals (2006) (Note: There are only 25 films on this list, and as of right now it is the only list I’ve seen all of the films from.)
100 years…100 Movies (anniversary edition; 2007)
100 years… 10 Top 10 (2008)