The Manifesto Fiesta or, Why We're Here

The Basics:

We're both PhDs in American literature and love a movie. We also love a list. We make lots of lists. We read lots of lists. We e-mail each other and talk about lots of lists.

Yes, we can talk about ourselves as a "we." 

We bought copies of 1001 Movies You Must See before You Die in 2007 after buying and being severely depressed by 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die (we can't discuss it without our therapists present). The 1001 Movie book became a challenge. Because, more than we love a list, we love to mark things off lists.

Fast forward 3 years and we've decided to blog our list marking off adventures, hence Docs on Films.


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Rules & Methodology:

1. A movie is chosen from the list at random by that nifty random.org widget over there on the sidebar.

2. We go with that movie--no cheating *sigh*

3. We do, however, have the freedom to not watch that movie. But we do have to post something. That something could be a rant about why we're not watching said movie (pink vomit is a legitimate and oft-employed reason, believe it or not), a post about having already seen the movie and why a re-watch isn't happening, or a post about how infuriatingly hard it is to find said movie in any medium (think we've run into a few problems already?), for example. So, we each post for each movie.

4. We're primarily using the 2005 edition of the book 1001 Movies . . . BUT we have added in a caveat for the 2008 update (which is largely the same as the 2005 ed.). If we spin the widget and land on a movie that has been removed from the 2005 edition, we'll watch both the removed movie and a randomly chosen movie that was added in the 2008 edition. Meta-discussion about the merits of the list will ensue. [Yes, there is supposedly a 2009 edition but we can't get our hands on it. And there is supposedly a 2010 update of the book coming in October. If we can get it, we'll adjust the meta-list accordingly then.]

5. We encourage you to join along or just comment. We have a handy little "upcoming movie" schedule over there on the sidebar. Disagreements are ok--just wait until we hit a Woody Allen movie--oy vey ;) Snarkiness is highly encouraged. And tell us another movie to watch--we'll make a list.