Saturday, April 27, 2013

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.

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