Must See? I Don’t Think So.
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Steven Jay Schneider, General Editor
I usually like reading books like this, books full of all sorts of cool, but rather useless (unless you’re planning on competing on Jeopardy!) information. Such books often send me searching for more information on certain subjects. I thought this book would be lots of fun to read. It wasn’t.
The first thing I want to know is, what planet do these movie critics hail from? They write these lavish articles, praising movies for things that most people go out of their way to avoid. It seems like half of these “must-see” films are either horror and/or horrifically violent, or else highly/purely sexual in theme. Some I had never heard of before, nor do I ever want to again: The 120 Days of Sodom (based on the writings of Marquis de Sade) and Videodrome are two of the worst. And if the films aren’t sickening in subject, then often they are about the despair and futility of life. Ok, so life is hard and meaningless sometimes. I don’t need a movie to tell me that.
Also, who chose the pictures to be included in here? There are pictures in here that are extremely disturbing, to put it mildly. I can’t imagine what some of them would do to a young child who happened to pick it up and flip through it. I know they would have given me nightmares when I was younger. Some still managed to give me the heebie-jeebies.
There are a lot of good movies listed too. But plowing through the trash to find them got real tiresome real quick. Towards the end I was only skimming the entries, trying to avoid the more gruesome pictures (I didn’t succeed) and only reading up on movies I had actually heard of.
If you are fanatical about cinema, and are more interested in nifty camera angles and lighting techniques than in being entertained, then 1001 Movies might have some interesting suggestions for you. For the everyday moviegoer, I would say that in the time it would take to read through this book, you could watch all three of the Lord of the Rings films end to end. And that would be time much better spent.