Putting the Top Ten Project on Hold

At the time of writing, I'm about ten films away from my goal of having watched fifty films from the year 1960, which means I've now watched at least fifty films from each of the last sixty years of cinema as part of my Top Ten project. And I feel that it's time I took a break.

I've been keeping up with this project for four years now, and devoting more and more of my time to watching older films for it. And the further back in time I go, the more films I'll need to watch in order to keep up. I'd need to watch roughly twenty-five films for each year of the '50s and thirty films for each year of the '40s. The accessibility of these titles isn't so much the problem. It's the time commitment. I've only got a limited amount of hours per day for media consumption, and I'm also trying to find room for current films, television series, and web content. There's also my ever-growing list of older films I want to watch, that don't happen to be from whatever year I'm working through for the project. There are a lot of '90s and early 2000s films that I've missed along the way somehow. And more '70s and '80s films that I only learned about in the process of working on this project.

Also, frankly, as I've been going farther and farther back, watching these films is becoming more of a chore. Occasionally I'll still turn up a great surprise, like the anti- "Pygmalion" culture clash comedy "Never on Sunday," but I've also found myself struggling through more and more lackluster films - usually the melodramas, war epics, and westerns. I knew that films from before 1965, when the Production Code still governed all the major studio output, meant certain restrictions on content. I knew cultural norms were also very different. However, I still find myself bristling at the increasingly limited depictions of women, and the aggressively patronizing portrayals of anyone not Caucasian. Asians and Native Americans, in particular, are treated appallingly in Hollywood films prior to the mid-70s. And while it's nice to finally be able to sort out William Holden from Glenn Ford, and see stars like Peter Falk in their early days, it feels like most of the films I'm watching have little relevance to the present, and are really only interesting for their historical value.

I've gotten a lot out of this project so far. I recently read Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution," about the history of the five Best Picture nominees of 1967, and it made such a difference that I'd waited until getting through the bulk of the mid-'60s films. Having seen roughly two-thirds of the titles mentioned in the book meant I had a lot more reference points and context for how events unfolded. Similarly, seeing "Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood" would have been a very different experience if I hadn't gotten myself familiar with the likes of Sergio Corbucci and Hal Needham. And I've become a fan of many more forgotten performers, including Sophie Loren, Alan Arkin, and Melina Mercouri.

However, when I weigh the value of spending so much time on these older films with catching up on the backlog of everything else on my watchlists, it's been getting harder and harder to justify. Currently, I'm averaging one season of current television per week (roughly 8-10 episodes, because it's 2020), and VOD and streaming options have steadily increased the amount of current films I have access to. I haven't been able to make time for older television and streaming series, though I've amassed a pretty long list of titles I want to take a look at. At the top of the list are "GLOW," "Infinity Train," and "Undone." I've also been meaning to give "Mr. Robot" another shot. I heard the finale was good.

Once I get through the last few films of 1960, I expect I'll be putting more viewing hours toward television series for a while. This is consistent with the decision I made last year, when I consciously started shifting the content of this blog to be more balanced between films and television, and thus more representative of my actual media interests. The pendulum will probably swing back toward films during blockbuster season and awards season, but for now I have some catching up to do with the small screen.

---