May 05, 2005

The Academic Year in Movies

Well, we have hit the end of the spring semester, my junior year of college, and we're a week away from the end of one full year of my record-keeping on movies watched. You can see the count (not counting quite a number of movies re-watched in that period) on the right. Ahhh . . . movies are so great.

I realized about month ago that I should have done this around the beginning of the year, but I didn't so I decided to just do a double list at the end of the spring. Hence you will find below my "Top Ten" lists for Fall semester/Christmas break and Spring semester. In no particular order:

Fall/Christmas

-Rashomon

-12 Angry Men

-Garden State

-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

-Se7en

-Waking Ned Devine

-The Shawshank Redemption

-The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

-The Godfather

-Fiddler on the Roof

Four of these were movies I had never seen before last summer.

Spring

-Lolita

-Wonder Boys

-A Beautiful Mind

-The Joy Luck Club

-The Phantom of the Opera

-Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

-Babette's Feast

-Finding Neverland

-The Great Train Robbery

-Network

Eight of these were movies I had never seen before last summer.

The Spring list seems very odd in comparison to the fall and summer lists in that it seems to have a lot more movies on it that few people might have seen. I can't really account for this in any way that leaps immediately to mind . . . but they were all really good movies that I enjoyed a great deal. I recommend some of them to everyone, and a few of them to almost no one. Don't miss my "token" foreign language films (one in each list), but be sure to check the ratings before you go rent any of them (if you care about such things). Well over half are rated PG-13 or R for good reason.

Anyway, I look forward to a great summer of movie-watching and book-reading (but also plenty of coursework and cashflow). I have a rather interesting and eclectic mix of summer movies lined up on Netflix, and a whole crate of summer reading parked next to my desk. On with the summer!

Posted by Jared at May 5, 2005 01:21 AM | TrackBack