AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies

In our household, we’ve recently undertaken the charge of watching the complete list of the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest movies. As avid movie-watchers, we’ve naturally already seen a number of the films on the list – The Wizard of Oz, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Some Like it Hot, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings – but our experience has obviously been with the...“lighter” fare in this smorgasbord of influential, masterfully crafted movies. It has come as something of a shock to us, then, that the vast majority of the entries on AFI’s list are something of a slog to get through.
Ben-Hur, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Easy Rider...these are movies to make men sigh – with boredom. And it’s not just the films at the bottom of the list! (I’m about to commit sacrilege, so be sure you’re seated.) Citizen Kane is first on AFI’s list, naturally, and while its innovative use of cinematographic techniques and scandalous storyline are well-known, the modern viewer will be apt to find it all a bit boring (as Simon Cowell might say).
For students of film, each of these 100 movies is a landmark masterpiece that influenced the artists who followed, whatever flaws of story or pacing or casting the works might have. For more casual viewers, boring as some of these films might be, they are essential to understanding modern pop culture. How else could we laugh at an homage to The Godfather in a Super Bowl commercial?