Movie Challenges

In my quest to watch every movie worth watching, there are a couple of lists I'm trying to completed. The 1001 movies you must see before you die and the ImDB top 250 being the most important at the moment.

The editor of the 1001 movies ... book released 4 slightly smaller books last year, 101 n Movies you must see before you die for values of n in {Gangster, Horror, Sci-Fi and War}. I've just bought the War and Gangster books to get my hands on the full lists so can now track my progress on these as well. The 101 subsets include films not on the larger 1001 list, so there are far more films I have to watch now than previously.

As it stands at the moment, I've seen 29 from the Gangster list, 28 from the Horror list, 38 from the Sci-Fi list and 21 from the War list. Neil and Gwen are hoping to complete the Sci-Fi list by the end of 2010, so I think I'm going to go for a similar challenge and try for the Gangster or War lists (Probably the Gangster list as there are less left to see on it)

Max von Sydow

Strangest thing ever, I'd never heard of the actor Max von Sydow before about 3 weeks ago when I watched the pretty shonky Stephen King adaptation Needful Things.

I've just written a review of the latest film I've watched, 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama Wild Strawberries and had noticed that it had a cameo from the main character in the last film I reviewed, 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama The Seventh Seal (There's been a lot of Ingmar Bergman in the past couple of weeks). I went to check it was the same actor, and find out that not only was he in Needful Things as well, but he was also in The Exorcist which I watched on Friday.

So in the past 3 weeks I've seen 4 movies which he has starred in and didn't even know who he was or that it was the same actor (the movies were from 1957, 1973 and 1993 so his appearance changed quite a bit between each film).

Anyway, he's a pretty good actor and I must congratulate him on a career in cinema which has spanned such a massive time period and led him to be a part of so many great movies (and Needful Things).

Bizarre!

1001 Movies you must see before you die

Just got the 2009 edition of the 1001 Movies you must see before you die. As usual, a bit more adding and removing this year, with notable inclusions of The Dark Knight, Wall-E, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and rather randomly, Korean Action adventure The Good, the Bad and the Weird.

Luckily, the changing about means I'm now 4 movies up with a total of 223 viewed in the new book.