Liam Keane

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is a website run by Amazon.com that catalogs information about films. Users are allowed to register and rate movies, giving 1-5 stars. The 250 most popular movies are kept in a list. The Wikipedia article on the list goes into more detail:

Only theatrical releases running longer than 60 minutes with over 1250 votes are considered; short subjects, documentaries, miniseries, direct-to-video and made-for-TV movies are ineligible… Another common criticism has been that it is merely a popularity contest and does not therefore reflect any objective knowledge about the history or art of movies… In practice, however, many of the movies atop critical yearly and historical best picture lists appear high on the Top 250 as well

Although many great movies are not included, the list is a ranking of the most popular movies. Many people have set a goal of watching the top 250 movies and today I am joining them. I intend to watch all of the 250 movies.

To track my progress, I am going to use twofifty.org, a website created for this task by Tim Broddin, a 22 year old student from Belgium. At the time of registering, I’d seen 60 out of the 250. At the time of your reading this, I’ve seen:

You can track my progress by visiting http://twofifty.org/user/Liam/ where you will see my list:

Apparently, I need to see The Godfather. I know for Film 46 I need to watch Blade Runner which I plan to do tonight (so by tomorrow my count should be at least 61). If you end up registering let me know — maybe we can have a friendly race to 250.

Updated on December 14th, 2005…
I’m continuing to use twofifty.org but have also started looking at other social networking sites that focus on movies. Here are a few:

Social Networking - Movies
• MyFilmz — http://myfilmz.net/
  “find new movies to watch, put your watching list online”
• Ning powered Movie Reviews — http://movies.ning.com/
  Part of the Ning social application playground
• University of Minnesota’s MovieLens — http://movielens.umn.edu/
  Uses collaborative filtering to generate movie recommendations
• Listal — http://www.listal.com/
  A web based DVD, music, game and book collection manager
• liveplasma — http://www.liveplasma.com/
  Music and movies discovery engine (reminds me of They Rule)
• Flixster — http://flixster.com/
  Lists what you want to see (kinda like 43 Things)

I’ve heard of these by reading some comments on digg and if you know of any others feel free to enlighten me. Listal looks pretty cool but it seems to only be listing things you own or want to buy. At this time, I think I’m going to give Flixster a spin.