Who doesn’t love a movie list? Whether it’s super specific sub-genre, like I don’t know – time travel films, or a fun list like “Top 10 Weepy Breakup Films to Eat a Pint of Ice Cream During”, there’s enough of them out there.
So it was interesting when this one came across my Twitter feed in the fall of 2021- “100 Movies – Bucket List”. With absolutely zero context.
Most people retweeting and quote tweeting it were commenting on how many they’ve seen out of the 100 . And There was also some general commentary highlighting either their own viewing habits or taking to task the list on why movie X and not movie Y.
I took a look at the list and have seen 77* of the films. What intrigued me by the list is the utter randomness to it.
Well not necessarily random maybe just a bit unfocused. Kinda like me when I go to the grocery store on an empty stomach and without a shopping list.
Now before I go any further let me start by saying I not about to film-shame anyone for liking or disliking a movie. A completely popular film can leave you cold, and a film that you absolutely love might be one that I have no interest in seeing. Life’s too short to get hung up on trying to be a completest and watching all the “classics” whether they be Spielberg movies from the 1980s or Bogart films from the 1940s. And I think that’s what struck me as odd about this list – the fact that someone titled it BUCKET LIST. The implication being, for me at least ,was these were “must-see” films before you die. [Also kinda hard to watch movies AFTER you die – but I digress] And I get no one has the time to explain why EACH and EVERY film on this list might be worthy of seeing, but with the lack of context it left me a little confused and searching for answers.
I’m wondering if the person who compiled the list was like Steve Rogers and frozen in time for the past 80 years and needed to catch up on the cultural touchstones.
I may seem invested in this, but my hyper-focus only lasts for so long and a 5 minute google image reverse search didn’t really help turn up the origin of the list. What I did stumble upon though was a Bucket List that matched this list in order film for film from 2019 on IMDB by User emmalap https://www.imdb.com/list/ls022614703/ which presumably Emma or someone else converted to the image above at some point.
So that lead me to try to look at the list analytically if not objectively. Remember that hyper-focus I mentioned? yeah well let me just say it’s a curse and a blessing.
Not-to-nitpick, but lets get the first thing out of the way. This list is NOT 100 films. Sure Emmalap’s list is a 100 films, but who ever generated the GIF made two subtle revisions to the list. Emma’s list included The Fellowship of the Rings (#22) and the original Star Wars – Episode IV A New Hope (#40) whereas the GIF includes both trilogies (But ignores the Matrix trilogy!). So taking the list at face value, its actually 104 films.
Second tiny nitpick. However many films you think you’ve seen from this list I think 99% of us (me included) need to subtract 1 from our total. Go back and take a close look at #68. I’ll wait.
Yup that’s not a typo – it says The Intouchables not the The Untouchables.
If you were thinking Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness and Robert DeNiro as Al Capone, and NOT the French drama about a paraplegic white rich dude hiring an impoverished black guy to be his care giver then subtract 1 from your total.
That’s also the lock on why the GIF list and Emmalap’s IMDB list are the same. There’s no way that inclusion of The Intouchables is a random coincidence.
Okay on with my unscientific analysis of the list.
Of the 104 films there are a total of 113 directors involved. Of those 113 directors there are 88 unique directors involved, and that includes the films where there multiple people listed as directors. In other words there were several directors over-represented with multiple films listed – Steven Spielberg (6), Stanley Kubrick (4), Peter Jackson (3), Christopher Nolan (3), and a number of directors like Hitchcock and Scorcese with 2 films each. Of those 113 directors, less than 5% were women. Now I know men are over-represented in the movie making business in general, but there are still a lot of women directors out there. Here’s just ONE list curated over on Letterboxd.com with women directors – https://letterboxd.com/po/list/women-directors/ which includes Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Gurinder Chadha, and Amy Heckerling none of which are on the bucket list.
Let’s not even get started on how American this list of films is. I get most English language films come out of Hollywood, but a quick eye-ball of the list I would say on about 16 or about 15% were truly “foreign” films made either outside the Hollywood system, or with no USA co-production.
Interestingly enough while pulling up some of the data of IMDB.com I took a look at the number of films listed here that were “Oscar Nominated” as a measure of their “popularity/familiarity”. Meaning they had either been nominated for an Oscar (anything from costume design, or editing, right up to Best Picture) or won multiple Oscars. Of the 104 films listed I wasn’t surprised that nearly 65% had at least one Oscar nomination.
Also a feature of IMDB.com was whether the movie was ranked in their top 250 based on popularity and score. I think its determined by number of votes and average scores. The ranking might have differed slightly in 2019 when the original list was assembled, with some movies having since been displaced by more recent fare – e.g. Dune 2021 which is ranked #156, but of the 104 movies listed – a total of X films were in the top 250 on IMDB. Surprising the list of films that weren’t (currently) included in the Top 250 were films like E.T. (1982), Dirty Dancing (1987), The Goonies (1985) to name a few. I would have assumed would have easily ranked in the top 250.
The list also skews heavily to films made in the 1990s and 2000s. Crunching the numbers 75% of the films were made after 1980 and nearly 59% were made after 1990.
So yeah, that’s my break down of a Bucket List (that was making the rounds 2 years ago) that I started to write about in the heat of the moment, but lost steam when it came to crunching the numbers until now and that’s how I know I have undiagnosed ADHD.
Regardless of the biases of this particular list, I do love a good movie list.
