Welcome to The Composite 251

Welcome to The Composite 251, a blog dedicated to my goal of watching the greatest movies of all time.

As long as I can remember I've been a fan of movies. Whether it be a drama from 1939 or a comedy from 2012, good acting, a strong story, and a beautiful soundtrack have the power to captivate me in a way that makes the problems of the world disappear for a short time.

Around 2007 I stumbled across a list from the American Film Institute (AFI) of their top 100 movies of all time. I'll admit I was embarrassed at how few of those movies I had seen. Most were old and, because of that, not something I had interest in watching and others were not what I would have considered to be "up my alley". After studying the list I decided I needed more culture in my life and that someday I would watch all the films I hadn't already seen.

Flash forward to December of 2012. While at a family gathering, I was having a conversation with my wife's cousin, Josh, and somehow the topic of movies was brought up. He began telling me about a goal he was starting: by the end of 2014 he would watch all of the top 250 movies on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) website. I in turn mentioned that I had a similar goal but had never gotten around to starting it.

As the days went by and the 2013 rolled in, I thought more and more about my long neglected goal. I looked up the AFI list and noticed that it had not been updated since 2007, which meant many of the great films from the past 5-6 years wouldn't be included. Not satisfied by using one slightly outdated list, I set out to make my own list of the top movies truly of all time.

Using the top 100 movies on AFI.com and IMDB.com as a starting point, I initially wanted to make a top 100 list that was a consensus of as many quality lists as I could find. My search lead me to top 100 lists on Ranker.com, Lifed.com, Empire.com, FilmCrave.com, and FlickChart.com. Using the top 100 lists from these 7 websites, I ended up with a list of 251 unique movies, all with at least one vote on any of the 7 lists. Then, using a formula I devised based on an individual movie's rank on each of the 7 lists, I built a composite list of the top 251 movies in order of average rank.

If that last part loses you a bit, I apologize. In short, I combined 7 smaller lists into 1 large list. Not an easy process to do, but it's fascinating when you see how one site ranks a movie very high in their top 100 and then another site doesn't even rank the movie.

Now, I'm not going to set a date of when I would like to be done with my goal. Obviously sooner is better than later but I understand that things come up and the goal is not exactly top priority. If I could do it before Josh accomplishes his goal, I think it will feel a bit sweeter, especially since I'm watching an additional movie and I took a large amount of time to build my list. Sadly, this may take a while because 184 of the 251 have to be rented using Netflix's DVD service.

Starting at #251 and working my way to #1, with each movie I will post the date I watched it, a comment about what I liked (if anything) and disliked (if anything), and my personal grade from 1-5; 1 being low and 5 being high.

I hope you enjoy my thoughts on the top 251 movies of all time.


-Greg