As I was thinking about what to say in my 500th entry, it occurred to me that there are several topics I’ve long wanted to write about, and in some cases have even started writing about, but, for one reason or another, they’ve never seen the light of day. Take, for example, the subject of my All-Time Favorite Movies, a fairly obvious bit of small-talk that I promised to share way back in my third entry, just over two years ago. If you’ve been sitting around waiting for this one to appear, you’ve had a long wait.

What possibly could’ve happened, you’re may be asking yourself, to delay my blatheration about something so near and dear to my heart? It’s understandable how any other topic could fall into the void, but movies? And my favorite ones at that? How could I have neglected that subject?

Well, for one thing, I got distracted by other matters — the story of my life and of this blog, don’t you know? — and just never came back to it. But an even bigger problem is that I have quite the knack for making unnecessary work for myself. I originally thought this idea was something I could bang out in fifteen minutes and then move on, but I quickly found that I wasn’t satisfied to simply list the titles of my favorite films. I also wanted to say a little something about each of them, to explain my choices, defend my questionable tastes, etc.

In addition, I had a very hard time deciding just how long the list ought to be. A “Top Ten” is traditional, of course, but how could I narrow all my possible choices down to a mere ten? Think about it: you have a collection. Naturally, you collect only the things that you really like, so, in a sense, all the things in your collection are your “favorites.” Now imagine that you have hundreds of individual examples — hundreds of favorites — in your collection, and you begin to understand my dilemma.
As a result of thinking thoughts like this, the entry I started two years ago just kept growing larger and larger, like Grady Tripp’s never-ending book in the Michael Douglas movie (and fine novel by Michael Chabon) Wonder Boys. Finally, it became too unwieldy for me to deal with and I allowed myself to procrastinate it right out of my mind.

But no more! The time has finally come to reveal to the world just how low my tastes in cinema truly run!

First, however, if you’ll bear with me for just one moment longer, a couple of quick caveats: I do not claim that these are the best movies of all time, nor even the best I’ve ever seen, whatever “best” actually means. I enjoy serious, intellectual, and artistic films like Schindler’s List and Apocalypse Now just fine. However, they aren’t movies that I pull off the shelf when I want to kick back and relax. The titles on my All-Time Favorite Movies list are the cinematic equivalent of Hostess Ding-Dongs, comfort food that I can watch over and over again without getting tired of them, the movies that give me some sort of lift when I watch them. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these movies are garbage. Quite the contrary, in my opinion; I’ve often defended many of the these titles to people who think that no film is worth their time if it was shot in English or on a budget of more than one million dollars. I believe in and occasionally crave “quality” films, but I am no snob. I do not think that popularity and quality are mutually exclusive conditions, and I do not think that there’s anything inherently wrong with genre or escapism.

Also, as you will no doubt notice, many of the titles on my list were originally released in the 1970s and ’80s. That’s because my All-Time Favorites are, by and large, the ones I saw when I was a kid. They are the films that have had the biggest impact on my psyche; they are the films that made me fall in love with film. I suppose that going back to them now, as an adult, helps me recapture some vestige of childhood. Of course, not everything I saw and liked as a kid still appeals to me. (A little fantasy flick called Krull comes to mind. So cool then, so tedious and lame now…)

In any event, I’ve decided to do a Top Fifty list. I figured this was nice round number that would give me the space to make sure I didn’t leave out any of the titles that are really important to me, but still be somewhat manageable (and hopefully not too tedious for my loyal readers). For your reading convenience, I’m going to split the list into two parts. Come back a little later for the first one…