In less than a month, the world will be treated to movie-based hubris like it has rarely seen before – 400 posts detailing my 400 favorite films, one every work day for a solid year and a half. Which begs the question, seriously, what is the point of that? My 400 favorite movies? That’s something that will interest people? Who in the hell do I think I am? Well, I’ll tell you – it springs from two things:
1) Last year, there was a brief phenomenon on various internet locales where people would post a still from their favorite movies for like ten days, with no context, explanation, or the name of that movie. This, to me, felt insanely lazy, and sort of confusing, considering one of the first five questions I ask everyone is “What’s your favorite movie?” Or, if I’m at a movie theater and the employees are wearing this on their name tags, I’ll ask “Is Kung Fu Panda 2 really your favorite movie?”
Not buying it, Josh. No way.
And then, these folks would challenge their friends to post their ten favorite movies, so timelines got flooded with movie frames and no additional information. I did not care for this, and not just because no one asked me to participate.
2) But here is the key reason – besides the Death Pool, I haven’t been writing a ton lately, and as anyone will tell you, in order to write better you’ve gotta write more. So instead of mindless journaling or filling notebooks with lists of bullshit, I thought I should kick awake my decade old blog and hurl some content on it. Merging these ideas, I came up with this thing. So, while on the surface it will be me spewing hundred of thousands of words about a bunch of movies you’ve likely already seen, it is actually my very time-intensive plan to jump start some writing, and hopefully finish long-languishing half-formed projects. Fingers crossed it works, and I don’t need to move onto the, like, Set of 400 Songs of the Sixties, like some goddamn Time-Life operator.
Which is totally still available at timelife.com, by the way
They’ll be more details about the actual list making process before the posts start rolling out on February 25th, but I thought it best to preface all that with all this, because I’m not likely to mention again that this is all just a writing exercise. So, enjoy?
Now last year, going into the summer, I did say – to those who would listen, which weren’t many folks – that I thought you’d see seven movies gross over $200 million, and six of them actually did – TDK, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, and Hancock. The one that didn’t was the surprising disappointment Prince Caspian from the Narnia series. So, with this as rousing proof that for once I sort of knew what I was doing, I would like to impart that onto this summer’s crop of films as well. 
As some of you may know, I’m kind of into the Oscars. I like movies, and the other movie awards out there are kind of crap, let’s face it. The Golden Globes? Garbage! People’s Choice? Worthless! MTV Movie Awards? Horrible! So while the Academy Awards are largely self-congratulatory nonsense, they are the best thing going, that gets aired on television anyway. I like hearing what the critics choose in their various groups in December, but until they start airing them on TV with pointless dance routines accompanying, they will not get the same attention from this guy.
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is decidedly average. Yes, I’m talking about the Rankin/ Bass, claymation Rudolph, with Hermie the aspiring dentist elf and Yukon the man mountain prospector and the Abominable Snow Monster and all that jazz. It’s really average. Heck, I’d be tempted to go so far as to say it’s not terribly good at all, if it weren’t for Burl Ives as the snowman narrator and the fun songs. But the work as a whole? Not the best.
Knowingly Undersold 