300 movies!!!

300 movie anniversary

As I already mentioned in my last post I have reached another milestone. I now have 300 movies under the belt.

Of course this is very much a matter of definition. In reality it is a bit more since I have also reviewed a number of Danish movies from the Danish version of the list plus a few movies ahead of the 300 mark plus a few additional movies, but that is all in the details. On the count that I keep I have done 300.

This places me solid in the mid-fifties, about nine years after the 200 movie mark. Yes, time-wise it is slow going now and the List fills up every year with a broad spectrum of movies from every genre and many nationalities. I think I counted twenty movies for 1955 alone.

It has taken me almost six years to get this far so with some quick extrapolation it will be… eighteen years until I am done assuming the List does not grow much above 1200 movies. I prefer not to think about that. So far I am still enjoying myself and every period seem to have something special to offer. The past hundred movie period was particularly strong on film noir, but that is almost over now. Instead the fifties seems to be the heyday of westerns, whether they be American or Japanese.

When I reached the 200 movie mark I introduced a special award with the intention of following up every time I reached another hundred movies, but today we have a major power loss and I am writing in darkness using the last battery juice left in the computer, so it is going to be a short one. The obvious category is:

Best film noir

Nominees are:

1.       Out of the Past

2.       The Killers

3.       The Big Heat

4.       Bad Day at Black Rock

5.       Mildred Pierce

6.       Double Indemnity

And the winner is:

Out of the Past.

This is a very strong field and I love all these movie. However at gunpoint I would pick Out of the Past as the movie that tells you exactly what a film noir is. Up to this points movies were trying to home in on the theme, afterwards they were trying to build onto or vary the themes, but in Out of the Past everything was exactly right.

Well, it is totally noir here with me in a town entirely blackened out with only candles and the light of the screen to keep the darkness at bay.  That must be enough for now.