January 26, 2010

Film Lovers Are Sick People...

...or so said Francois Truffaut, who has five films on The Guardian's list of 1000 films to see before you die. He must be right, because only people ranging from mildly deranged to completely psychotic would attempt this experiment. As two self-described film lovers, we intend to watch every single film on that list (including rewatching any that one or both of us have seen) and write about each and every one. If we watched a film a day, this would take approximately two and a half years to accomplish. We're giving ourselves the wiggle room of watching one film every two days, and also acknowledging that this is not a hard and fast deadline. Because if we set a deadline we'll get stressed out and this will cease being fun.

To begin with, it should probably be clarified who "we" are. We are Jack and Caroline, abbreviated CarJack. We've been dating for just over two years at the time that this is being written, and find it to be an unusual point of pride that we met at a midnight Halloween screening of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (which is, sadly, not on the list). Though we tell everyone that we met on that night, we technically met as members of the Oregon Marching Band. However, if it weren't for RHPS we probably wouldn't have had much contact with each other and may never have begun dating, and if we weren't dating this project wouldn't exist. At the University of Oregon, Caroline is majoring in English and Jack in History, and both of us deeply enjoy movies and tend to have an interest in them beyond that of a casual viewer.

We know that this is a crazy endeavour that may end before we even get halfway through the list, or could eventually result in both of our descents into deep psychosis. That aside, we both want to watch all of the films on the list anyway, so we might as well make something out of it. And who knows, maybe it won't drive us mad and we actually will make it through all thousand films. That's the hope, anyway.

Now for the technical stuff:
There will be one post for every film. Each post will be divided into two parts, one written by Jack, one by Caroline. They will be distinguished by the fact that Caroline's parts will be in italics. All posts may contain spoilers, but we will try to make a point to acknowledge coming spoilers within each individual post.