First Film: Keeping up with the (Chuck) Jones

The first movie will be a series of three Warner Brothers Cartoons: Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, and What's Opera, Doc.  Here is a link to Roger's review on Great Movies.  Try to get the movie (you can find it  at Netflix DVD (if you only have the streaming option you may want to add the DVD option) - and watch it in the next week or so.  I would love for there to be an option to watch it in person and/or online together, I'm just not sure how to go about doing that.  If you have any ideas let me know.  There used to be a Netflix Party app on the Xbox and you could watch Netflix movies together - but they removed that program about a year ago.  Anyway, I'm anxious to get the journey started - watch the movie, we'll put up a post about it here and let the conversation begin from there.

The "A" List - Here are the movies

If you are interested in how the order for the movies was chosen - please take a look at the last posting.  I am going to try and post the entire list below (we'll see  how that goes), but here are some links to a 1) Word Version of the Movie List, and a 2) Plain Text Version of the Movie List.  I will keep links to these on the right in a download section of this Blog.

Here are the films in the order that we will watch them:


The Roger Ebert Great Movies – Watch Order


1. 3 Chuck Jones cartoons: Duck Amuck, One Froggy Evening, What's Opera, Doc?
2. Beat the Devil
3. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
4. Army Of Shadows
5. Days Of Heaven
6. The Terrorist
7. Juliet of the Spirits
8. Victim
9. Spirited Away
10. Diva
11. Playtime
12. L'Atalante
13. La Collectionneuse
14. Moolaade
15. An Autumn Afternoon
16. In a Lonely Place
17. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
18. Se7en
19. Floating Weeds
20. The Buster Keaton films

Order in the (Movie) House

Ok - we have a tentative order for watching the films on The Great Movie List.  How did I do it?  I put all of the movies into an Excel spreadsheet and gave them a number that more or less corresponded with the numbers found at RogerEbert.com.  Then I used a random number generator (an app I have on my Iphone)  to create a list of 362 numbers with no number repeating.  Then the hard part - putting those numbers into an another column in the spreadsheet.  Google is my friend.  I found help at this website, pasted the numbers into Word - then replaced the commas with line breaks - and then was finally able to paste the numbers into the Excel spread sheet.

The rest was easy.  I sorted the spreadsheet using the column with the random numbers and voila - there it is.  I call this a tentative list, because I'm not even sure how many of these films can be obtained fairly easily (Netflix, Amazon Instant, my local library, etc.)  I did want the films in a fairly random order (with the exception of the first and last films) - Roger Ebert put together the list over a number of years and he didn't make the list based on their chronological order - and neither, I think, should we.

Now to decide on how to watch the films - do we have watching parties (for those nearby - or any group of people can have viewing parties for that matter).  All thoughts and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

The Plan

So here is the plan - in short.  I have identified the 368 movies that Roger Ebert had in his list.  I have found a random number generator - and we will watch the films in a randomish fashion.  When I first ran the random number generator it created a list that put Looney Tunes cartoons first.  I'm going to rerun the program - but I believe fate has decided that cartoons must come first.  With that in mind, our first movies will be three classic Chuck Jones Looney Tune Cartoons: DuckAmuck, One Froggy Evening,What's Opera, Doc?  I want to give everyone time to get the movies (this is the time to get the Netflix DVD option - I know it was for me).   I'll put a watch time (still figuring out how big the window for watching should be - a day, a week?).  That's All Folks!

A Change in Name

The title of the Blog has changed - after going through Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, I noticed that some of the listings have more than one film.  I also found a great app for the Iphone that allowed me to generate a random number list (without recurring numbers) that will allow me to come up with an order to watch the movies in.  For listings that have multiple movies (ie The Godfather I & II, etc.), it will be important to keep those films together (viewed consecutively).  I have changed my Netflix account to include DVD's and will start seeing which of the movies on the list are available (which may also end up altering the order we watch them in).

If the number of movies change - we will stick with this number as our blog title.  Some things need to stay the same.

Roger and Me

After the death of Roger Ebert, I realized how much I truly valued his opinion, writings, and humanity.  Most of the movie questions that I have put together for my students include excerpts from a relevant review that he wrote, and when I read a review that he had written - I felt as though I knew both the movie and myself better than I had before I read his article.