Following up on last night’s post about Bob Rehak’s movie-a-day project, one of my longstanding goals has been to watch the entirety of the AFI’s Top 100 Movies list. Putting two and two together, it only makes sense that this would be a great place to start my own movie-a-day project (right after I finish Lost, I think).
This is complicated by the publication in 2007 of a “10th Anniversary 100 Greatest List”, which is, of course, different from the one I’d been using. I’ve only seen an embarrassing 39% of the original list, and an even more embarrassing 33% of the new list. How many have you seen? The list is up on Wikipedia; check it out for yourself.
What surprises me, though, is how few of these classics are currently available in HD. Of the 100+ titles (of both lists combined), I think the only ones available on HD-DVD are as follows:

• The Deer Hunter
• Unforgiven
• Spartacus
• 2001
• A Clockwork Orange
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• Goodfellas
• Casablanca
• Blade Runner

I just picked up the majority of these due to two whopping after-Christmas sales currently running at Amazon and Best Buy, and I’ll even stake the following claim: when studios release these films in a high-definition format that I have access to (which is HD-DVD, until I invest in a PS3 sometime this summer), I’ll plunk down the cash. I want to up those percentages I listed above, and I want to build up the ‘classics’ section of my film library – but I want to do it in a way that I won’t wind up replacing the discs again in another two years. (Yeah, yeah, I know – if HD-DVD loses the HD war, yadda yadda yadda, but it’s the hardware I already have, so I’m not too worried about it.)
Hopefully these discs will show up by the weekend, along with the speakers I ordered. Since Laura’s working on Saturday (the drawbacks of working retail), I may have to take some time off my Lost-watching schedule to gorge myself on some classics.