I've set out on a challenge for 2009: to watch 52 classic movies in 52 weeks and blog about it. Of course, just watching 52 random movies would be kind of lame. Instead, I want to use this challenge to get myself to see classic movies that I've always hears about and been told --sometimes sternly-- to see, but never got around to it because I was always grabbing something with lots and lots of explosions in it instead. My goal is NOT to become a student of cinematic history or the art of film making. Don't get too worked up if I don't appreciate a movie because it was the first to do this or a landmark on the trail to that. I'm just a guy here in 2009 watching these old movies and telling you what I thought about them from my perspective.

Now, any such list of "classic" movies would be arbitrary, so when building my checklist I took the easy way out and decided to just use the 2007 edition of the American Film Institute's "100 Years... 100 Movies," which you'll see reprinted below in chronological order. I'm sure there's some good/important stuff missing, but it seems like as good a list as any.

I've gone ahead and crossed out the movies that I've already seen, and as I go through this I'll link each movie title to my blog posts. At the end of the year, I'll take a step back and ponder what I got out of it all.

1916 - Intolerance
1925 - The Gold Rush
1927 - The General
1927 - Sunrise
1931 - City Lights
1933 - King Kong
1933 - Duck Soup
1934 - It Happened One Night
1935 - A Night at the Opera
1936 - Modern Times
1936 - Swing Time
1937 - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1938 - Bringing Up Baby
1939 - Gone with the Wind
1939 - The Wizard of Oz
1939 - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
1940 - The Grapes of Wrath
1940 - The Philadelphia Story
1941 - Citizen Kane
1941 - The Maltese Falcon
1941 - Sullivan's Travels
1942 - Casablanca
1942 - Yankee Doodle Dandy
1944 - Double Indemnity
1946 - It's a Wonderful Life
1946 - The Best Years of Our Lives
1948 - The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1950 - Sunset Boulevard
1950 - All About Eve
1951 - A Streetcar Named Desire
1951 - The African Queen
1952 - Singin' in the Rain
1952 - High Noon
1953 - Shane
1954 - On the Waterfront
1954 - Rear Window
1956 - The Searchers
1957 - The Bridge on the River Kwai
1957 - 12 Angry Men
1958 - Vertigo
1959 - Some Like It Hot
1959 - North by Northwest
1959 - Ben-Hur
1960 - Psycho
1960 - The Apartment
1960 - Spartacus
1961 - West Side Story
1962 - Lawrence of Arabia
1962 - To Kill a Mockingbird
1964 - Dr. Strangelove
1965 - The Sound of Music
1966 - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1967 - The Graduate
1967 - Bonnie and Clyde
1967 - In the Heat of the Night
1968 - 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969 - Midnight Cowboy
1969 - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969 - The Wild Bunch
1969 - Easy Rider
1970 - MASH
1971 - A Clockwork Orange
1971 - The French Connection
1971 - The Last Picture Show
1972 - The Godfather
1972 - Cabaret
1973 - American Graffiti
1974 - Chinatown
1974 - The Godfather Part II
1975 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
1975 - Jaws
1975 - Nashville
1976 - Taxi Driver
1976 - Rocky
1976 - Network
1976 - All the President's Men
1977 - Star Wars
1977 - Annie Hall
1978 - The Deer Hunter
1979 - Apocalypse Now
1980 - Raging Bull
1981 - Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982 - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1982 - Tootsie
1982 - Sophie's Choice
1982 - Blade Runner
1986 - Platoon
1989 - Do the Right Thing
1990 - Goodfellas
1991 - The Silence of the Lambs
1992 - Unforgiven
1993 - Schindler's List
1994 - The Shawshank Redemption
1994 - Forrest Gump
1994 - Pulp Fiction
1995 - Toy Story
1997 - Titanic
1998 - Saving Private Ryan
1999 - The Sixth Sense
2001 - LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring