We’re only midway through the third month of the year,but my resolution to watch the 2007 AFI list of 400 movies nominated for the 100 Years…100 Movies honors is already perilously close to my goal.  Thanks to a productive couple of weeks and a slew of movies I needed to see airing as part of TCM’s 31 Days of Oscar, I now only have 69 unseen movies left from my original list of 117.  Considering my goal is to get this list down to 50, I am practically at my goal.

Here is the problem though: I am running out of stuff I have easy access to watch.  TCM will continue to air some of the missing pieces and there are a few left on Amazon’s online store that I can watch, but the pace I’ve established is starting to slow. I’ve taken to watching movies not on the list again, not because I am avoiding my project, but because it is hard to justify spending all that money hunting some of these more obscure titles down.

So, I decided to call an audible and widen my reach for this project.  There is another AFI-produced list of 400 movies.  This is from the original list, issued in 1998.  You’d be surprised how much a decade can change people’s tastes.  Several movies did not make the cut the second time around.  In fact, of the 96 movies on the 1998 list I haven’t seen, 38 of them are not on the 2007 list.

You could argue that because they didn’t make the cut both times AFI undertook this project, but considering I want to keep watching worthwhile movies, it seems sensible enough to add those 38 to my list.  That brings the number of unseen movies to 107.  Let’s see if I can get that down to 50, as opposed to seeing all but 50  out of my previous list.  Here they are:

1. The Americanization of Emily

2. Around the World in 80 Days

3. Bataan

4.The Broadway Melody of 1929

5. Bullitt

6. The Caine Mutiny

7. Cavalcade

8. El Cid

9. Cimarron

10. David Copperfied (1935)

11. Fantastic Voyage

12. From Russia With Love

13. The Great Ziegfeld

14. The Greatest SHow on Earth

15. The Gunfighter

16. Hail the Conquering Hero

17. Hud

18. Intruder in the Dust

19. The Last Temptation of Christ

20. A Letter to Three Wives

21. Little Big Man

22. The Little Colonel

23. The Mark of Zorro

24. Medium Cool

25. Melvin and Howard

26. El Norte

27. On the Beach

28. Only Angels Have Wings

29. Pillow Talk

30. Rambling Rose

31. Run Silent, Run Deep

32. Sands of Iwo Jima

33. Shadows

34. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

35. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

36. The War of the Worlds (1953)

37. Within Our Gates

38. The Yearling

And here are the 69 movies I still need to see from my original list:

1. Ace in the Hole

2. All Quiet on the Western Front*

3. All That Jazz*

4. Badlands*

5. The Band Dick*

6. Beau Geste*

7. Ben-Hur (1926)*

8. The Big Parade*

9. Blue Velvet*

10. Brazil*

11. Bull Durham

12. Cabin in the Sky*

13. Camille*

15. The Cheat*

16. City Lights

17. Coming Home

18. The Defiant Ones

19. Dirty Harry

20. Do the Right Thing

21. Five Easy Pieces

22. Force of Evil

23. The Four Horsement of the Apocalypse

24. Frankenstein

25. The Freshman (1925)

26. Fury

27. Glory

28. Goldfinger

29. Gun Crazy

30. Halloween

31. The Hustler

32. The King of Comedy

33. Last Tango in Paris

34. The Little Foxes

35. The Man Who Would Be King

36. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

37. Modern Times

38. My Darling Clementine

39. Nashville

40. The Night of the Living Dead (1968)

41. Out of the Past

42. The Outlaw Josey Wales

43. The Ox-Bow Incident

44. The Poor Little Rich Girl

45. Porgy and Bess

46. The Pride of the Yankees

47. Queen Christina

48. The Quiet Man

49. Requiem for a Dream

50. Return of the Seacaucus 7

51. Road to Morocco

52. Safety Last

53. Saturday Night Fever

54. The Scarlet Empress

55. Sex, Lies, and Videotape

56. Sleeper

57. Sons of the Desert

58. Sophie’s Choice

59. Sounder

60. Stranger Than Paradise

61. The Sweet Smell of Success

62. The Thin Man

63. The Thing from Another World

64. Trouble in Paradise

65. 2001: A Space Odyssey

66. The Wild Bunch

67. The Wind

68. A Woman Under the Influence

69. Young Mr. Lincoln

As for updates, I have given up blogging about the movies I’ve seen here, because I have discovered a new, nifty social site for movie lovers, Letterboxd.  I’ve developed a profile over there and started reviewing everything on my profile on the site.  You can check it out if you’re curious how things are going.