Friday, April 25, 2008

IMDb 250, my new quest

What do the following have in common Casablanca, Pulp Fiction, Cidade de Deus, Shichinin no samurai, Alien, Blade Runner, Star Wars, 2001:A space odyssey, Ying xiong, The Shawshank Redemption ...

These with 250 others make the current IMDb Top 250 and are heralded as the best in cinematic experience.

Most of these ushered in a new era of technical innovations with visionary narratives, futuristic concepts and above all redefined the art of story telling as never seen or done before. So great was their influence, now deemed cult classics, they spawned a whole new breed of literature, video games, merchandise, television series and sequels.

So what elevates these movies into a league of their own, IMHO, is predominately the concept/script. No wonder most of these are adaptations of literature - be fiction, non-fiction or comic books. Having visionaries like Spielberg, Kubrick, Wachowski bros, Tarantino, Hitchcock, Lucas, Pixar studios spearheading these doesn't hurt either.

I appreciate good cinema. It fuels your imagination and serves as an escape to a virtual world. And while you are there, you can make your own rules, live your dreams, experience a gamut of emotions and do whatever your free will desires. The story lines will truly astound and amaze you, rattle your notions of what, why and how of life, form and matter, question your beliefs and understanding of things and lead you into the unknown abyss. ...And it's this expanding of mind's horizons that is the most gratifying aspect of this whole experience.

Now...take an educated guess as to how many you would have already watched...70%? 60%?. I, for one, consider myself a movie buff, and my viewership is at 80 movies, a dismal 30%. Surprised? ..Well, I was.

Some of those on the list are at least a couple of decades old. So unless you go out of your way to watch them..you never will. And when you watch them, you have to be cognizant of the era they were made in and what it would have meant...undoubtedly true pioneers of the art form.

So, if you have a taste for good cinema, watch these and be in awe of the vastness & boundlessness of human creativity and potential.

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