Introduction

So what is "The Buttered Popcorn Project"?  It all begins with my love of Buttered Popcorn and Movies, which is my excuse to eat said kernels from heaven.  My Fiancée, Lisa, also shares my love of buttered popcorn, to a lesser extent and movies also to a lesser extent. She doesn't understand the draw to re-watching a movie even though I have watched it a couple dozen times (Shawshank Redemption, for example). I convinced her to try a fun experience with me, watch all the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies.


If your not familiar with the list, in 1998 The American Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 greatest American Movies.  To select the list the AFI took 400 American movies made between 1896 and 1996 and asked the opinions of 1,500 people in the film industry, and narrowed it down to the top 100. The list had "Citizen Kane", "Casablanca" and "The Godfather" as 1, 2, 3. It finished off with; "Unforgiven", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" as 98, 99, 100. 


In 2007 they revisited the list, adding 23 new movies and removing the same amount. (in a future post, I will try to wrap my mind around the logic of how a movie that was originally on the list can be removed and only 4 movies after 1996 were added).  They repeated the same criteria as before and included movies up to 2006.


So the first problem I come across is which list should I follow? If i go with either list then I am missing out on 23 movies, so I decided to combine the lists. Originally I was going to watch the movies starting at 100 and ending at 1. I was going to start with the original list and sub in the new movies at the number they were added. For example The first movie would be #100 on the old list "Yankee Doodle Dandy."  The second would be #99 on the old list; "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner", The third would be #99 on the new list; "Toy Story", a new movie added in 2008.  I decided that there might be a better way, so I came up with a formula. I assigned a number to each movie on both lists. The #1 on each list would get 100 points, the number Two movies would get 99 points, and so on down to the 100th movie which would get 1 point. If the movies appeared on both lists then they are added together. The top score would be 200 points (Spoiler Alert!! Citizen Kane got 200 points) the bottom 1 point.  This way all 123 movies are in some sort of order that I can defend. One more quick thing on the rankings, if there is a tie (which there is in second place) the movie from the older list got preference.


Now I'm not really sure what the point of this blog is.  What I plan to do, and keep in mind that I'm not a professional writer or movie critic, is blog about the overall experience and mine and Lisa's reactions to all the movies.  I also plan to eventually come up with my list of 100 greatest movies.  Every Sunday night and some Wednesday nights we will watch one of the movies. If all goes to plan I will write about it the next day. Periodically I also plan to start writing about movies that I feel might have been overlooked, and maybe start giving my opinions about new movies I happen to see.


The fist ten movies we are watching look like this:
(My Order - Movie (year) - 1997 rank - 2008 rank - My Point total)
123. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) - 99 - not ranked - 2 pts
122. Toy Story (1995) - not ranked - 99 - 2 pts
121. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) - 100 - 98 - 4 pts
120. Blade Runner (1982) - not ranked - 97 - 4 pts
119. Do The Right Thing (1989) - not ranked - 96 - 5 pts
118. The Last Picture Show (1971) - not ranked - 95 - 6 pts
117. A Place In The Sun (1951) - 92 - not ranked - 9 pts
116. My Fair Lady (1964) - 91 - not ranked - 10 pts
115. Sophie's Choice (1982) - not ranked - 91 - 10 pts
114. The Jazz Singer (1927) - 91 - not Ranked - 11 pts


I'll release the whole list with point totals if I can ever figure out if I can post a excel spread sheet.


Well thats about it, We already watched #123 this past Sunday and I will post a comment on it soon ( Kind of an interesting movie to start with). Enjoy and feel free to post any comments just try to stay away from insulting comments about my writing, I HATE WRITING!