7,714 Movies, and Counting

Congratulations on being able to keep your list in one collection. I started a similar list at 17 when I started film school at the U. of Iowa in 1970. I've recorded 19,700+ titles since. I do co-reviews on a local radio station (KCCK-FM) and am continually amazed at the growing number of titles available, in theaters, on cable and through Netflix. We are lucky to have so many obscure, old and foreign titles to see.

Like the poster above, I'm part of a younger generation that reveres older films (while largely spurning the contemporary output). One correction, though, for gaia227, if they're actually 25 (I'm 23, 24 in a week)...we're not Generation X! That would apply to people at least in their thirties, some even 40. They had their day in the sun, and though we share some qualities with them for better or worse - a bit of both, actually - I'd say we're a different breed, to the extent that one can parse these generational groups at all. And I do see some silver linings in the storm clouds on the horzion. One is an issue of quality: the abundance of carefully and lovingly transferred and celebrated older films emerging on DVD lines like Criterion, making decades of great cinema available to everyone (at least if you rent them online, circumventing the hefty purchasing price tag). And there are a few younger directors emerging whose work is having a strong impact on the pop culture (I'm thinking particularly of Wes Anderson) whose work is much sharper and more cinematic than the slacker-aesthetic indie films of the 90's. The other silver lining is quantity, or what's known as the long-tail phenomenon; this is especially great news for those of us who are (at least aspiring) filmmakers as well as filmgoers. Sure, there's a load of crap on You Tube and other viral video nexi (is that a word - plural of nexus?). But I'd rather spend nothing to watch some kids goof on camera for a couple minutes, amateurish but at least sincere in their desire to entertain and have fun, than drop $12 to be force-fed some Hollywood garbage enmeshed in a cynical system. Besides, amongst all the dross there are enough gems to make the whole effort worth it: voices that wouldn't be heard otherwise, surging up through the new mainstream rather than being forced to the margins, if anywhere at all. Who knows -- perhaps in forty/fifty years some now 10-year-old can write nostalgically of discovering a new world of film (be it literally film or not) in the decades to come. One can hope.

Great article! Movies are America muttering (and shouting) to itself, and Ansen (as always) gets it. I always read him first, though I don't always agree. We all swung out on the same hinges (Bonnie and Clyde) and then back in(Star Wars/ Jaws).
There's a slot for fine films today (Lovely and Amazing, Old Joy) but it's just a slot; the money is too big to risk on maybes.
Ansen's piece is an outline for a real "art History" of postwar America, so lets see the book, David. --an old Red Rocker

It's almost as though in Star Wars, you saw film's past...and it's future all at the same time. It sounds like you had lost your faith in the movies and Star Wars helped bring it back. It sounds a lot like Landau's review of Springsteen's concert, from the Real Paper. Ripoff.

I am so envious of your list - what a great idea. I am a sucker for melancholic nostalgia and I can think of nothing better to feed such an impulse.
To the baby-boomers out there who have lost hope in us Gen X kids and believe all we enjoy are mindless Adam Sandler comedies and silly action movies. My life has been enhanced and colored by the movies of the 30's on up. At the ripe old age of 25 I can't help but be pleased with myself when in the company of my older co-workers or my parents friends I can spout out my knowledge of Taylor and Burton, list my favorite Cary Grant movies, become excited by my love for both Hepburn's but Hepburn and Tracy really were something special, go on and on about why Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors and with loving tears in my eyes explain why Gone with the Wind is my all-time favorite movie and how my love affair with this film since I was ten years old has changed my life. I could write pages about GWTW I have it memorized from beginning to end and after 50some viewings I still grasp my pillow in anticipation and hoping against hope that this time Rhett will decide not to leave Scarlett but of course he always does and I keep coming back again and again waiting for the moment he doesn't.
There are of course good movies that come out of Hollywood these days but it is not the same. It has been a long, long time since I walked out of a theater in awe, sure I have been utterly dazzled by the special effects and I did love the Lord of the Rings but it isn't the same feeling. There is a theater here in NYC I go to that shows the old classic's and I love walking out of there with the words of Bogart and Bergman, Hepburn and Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly ringing in my ears pretending it is fifty years prior and I am one of the first americans stepping out into the bright sunlight, squinting involuntarily and smiling after a viewing of what would become an american classic.

Bang ! Pow ! Boom ! Swish, splash, crash, kaboom !

That is most likely what young people today will remember about movies, a few years from now, were they to write an article like yours.


I was brought in Brazil and as a pre-teen, teenager and adolescent, my friends and I "only" (ah! ah!) had the beach or the movies as distractions. School ended at noon and, after lunch at home, practically every day of the week we would go to a movie. On Saturdays and Sundays, after leaving the beach in mid-afternoon, we 000usually managed two movies - interrupted by a quick dinner and, for the second feature, followed by the normal party.

There alone, over 7 or 8 years, I must have seen close to 3000 movies, prior to going to the U.S. at the ripe moviegoing age of 20 - to Cambridge and MIT. But the main point is not to enter into a contest with you about numbers but to comment on the two major aspects of this "growing up" environment :

(1) Brazil had no quality film industry (at the time, of course) so 99% of movies were imported. As a result, much before Americans, we were used, day-in and day-out, to see foreign movies (they all were, obviously) from France, Italy, England as well as the more numerous US movies.
(2) Because it was the sole entertainment possibility (we didn't have cars, we didn't have summer jobs so we could afford great treks away from home- and it wasn't the culture), like movie critics we basically saw pretty bad movies together with the best. So, our "sensitivity" or critical judgement were honed quite fully.

Once in the U.S., at the end of the 50s, I was privileged to witness the surge of Ingmar Bergman, Indian directors (not Bollywood, yet !) and a few others, thanks not only to the proximity to New York - I spent a lot of weekends there - but to that great institution, the Brattle Theatre (which you must know).

There are a lot of "misses" in your article, which is perfectly understandable, lest you took up the whole issue . Among some, Chaplin, Ford, Hitchcock, the Ealing Studios comedies, Kurosawa and on and on. Not, obviously, because you ignored them, but surely because there just wasn't room - and you were not writiong a book.

At any rate, it brought back great memories. And it is significant that you stopped at Star Wars. After that, although there were many good movies and directors, the great bulk of productions today are either gore, boo-I-scared-you, or Bang ! Pow ! Boom ! Swish, splash, crash, kaboom !

thank-you David Ansen.

thank-you for keeping score because for the majority of us we simply walk through the history of our lives and it is only when people like yourself write histories of your lives do you allow us to remember our own.

As I was reading your oral history of your life at the Movies I remebered my own life at the movies.

I grew up in Las Vegas NV during the fifties and sixtiesand I can recall being a child wating in line for hours to see Mary Poppins at the Huntridge Theatre (Now a discount Mattress Warehouse) being 13 and sneaking into the R-rated Bob and Carol Ted and Alice at the El Portal Theatre on Fremont St (eliminated to make room for the Fremont Street Experience) being 17 and awestruck every time I saw Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Oddessy at the Fox Theatre (Now a Home Depot Center)

They have been replaced by the multi-plex theatre that sell bottom,less buckets of pop-corn with half gallon containers of pop. if you arrive early (I do) you get to watch endless loops of commercials followed by fifteen minutes of previews that assault the senses with over-ampified surround sound crashes and screams. By the time the movie starts you hope that somehow the movie will be good enough to make all of this worthwhile. More often than not it doesn't. Not horrible is now considered good. A weak plot if disguised with expensive F/X. Good acting is often overshadowed by the cult of personalities that the make movie stars of the my childhood seem "quaint".

We seem to have so much more now...but for those of us who can still remember...so much less.