Planes, Trains, and Running Shoes

#15 on my 25 Before 25 list is to watch all 100 movies on the IMDB Top 100 list. The list is actually the top 250 movies, but hey - I'm doing a lot in the next two years!  My plan is that if I've seen all 100 movies at my half-way point, I'll spring for the other 150, but we'll see.

One of the issues I have with this list is that I cannot watch scary movies. At all. It's not that I don't like them and it's not that I get too scared but they legitimately give me horrible nightmares that keep me up for weeks. The last scary movie I saw was Gothika my Junior year of high school and it took me about 3 weeks to recover from that film. Back in high school, I used to see a therapist and when I explained this to her, she asked me a lot of questions about the way I dream and her analysis was that I have much more vivid dreams than people normally do, so my nightmares seem much more real. That being said, some of the movies on The Movie List are horror films. These include Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, among others. I have yet to decide if I'm going to take these movies off of my list and just bump the numbers up a little bit and include movies in the 100-250 category. I probably will. Is that cheating? Kind of, but living by myself and watching these movies is only going to create a recipe for disaster. What would you guys do?

But enough about that! I've watched a few movies this month and it's time to let you all know what I though!

(#8) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) starring Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd - I watched this movie the night after I finished reading the book and was not at all disappointed. While the book is almost always better than the film, this film definitely did the book justice and was a very accurate portrayal of what the book was about. The film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest takes place in an insane asylum in the 1960s and the relationship that develops between a committed patient, Randall McMurphy (Nicholson) who was sent over from a prison work camp, and some of the other patients as they egg McMurphy on to torture the high strung head nurse on the ward. If you have a Netflix account, you can watch it instantly, so I definitely recommend checking it out!

(#46) Wall-E (2008) - I had no interest in seeing this movie when it came out. I had heard the acclaim and marked it as overrated and that's exactly how I felt about it. Wall-E is about a robot named Wall-E who is the only robot remaining on earth to clean all of the garbage that has taken over the earth while humans are living in space in giant space ships similar to cruise ships. Wall-E meets and falls in love with a robot named Eve who is on a mission to find signs of life on earth. When Wall-E follows Eve into space, they embark on a journey of assisting the human Captain of the ship take back control of the ship and bringing it back to earth to save the planet. I don't like movies that have an underlying message and this one was saying that computers and robots are going to take over the world and replace our human need for relationships and if we keep acting the way we do, the entire world is going to fill with garbage and we're all going to be extremely obese and have to go live in space. It's a kids movie, I just want to watch it and have fun watching it. I don't want to be forced to think about the implications of our actions now and how they will affect the future. So, in short, I didn't think I would like this film and I didn't.

(#50) The Departed (2006) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Matt Damon and Martin Sheen - First of all, this movie has my first-ever celebrity crush (Leo) in it, so it automatically gets 3 stars. This movie was incredible. Set in my home city of Boston in the early 90s, The Departed is a story of cop versus criminal and follows the Massachusetts State Police as they try to take down the Irish Mafia while both sides try to find out who among them is actually working for the other. This film is one of 4 directed by Martin Scorsese that have made the list and I can't wait to watch the others. It was so well done and was just an unbelievable film. I would definitely add this to my list of favorite movies!