Most of the time when I watch a film, I have certain thoughts and impressions I'd like to express in some way; I think a blog is the perfect way to get those things down into concrete ideas rather than just letting them fly around in my head until the next sensory overload comes along.

To begin with, I tried to make a list of my 50 favorite films I've ever seen, which will be interesting to return to in a year after I've watched new films and re-watched these ones. Sometimes I feel like I need to make "favorites" lists to get things organized and try to determine the common threads between the movies, albums, books, etc. that mean the most to me. It's clear to me that with a few exceptions (The Thing, Open City, My Night at Maud's), I tend to like very expressionistic, stylish films; the ideal to me, as expressed in most of these films, is a perfect convergence of form and content, artist(s) and audience. That's all very abstract, and it's a difficult thing to express. It would be easier to take each film and give examples of individual scenes or moments, but who has that kind of time?
With this in mind, though, I realize that there are certain types of films I'm predisposed to like based on my approach/tastes, and certain films I can only appreciate without truly liking.
Enough is enough. Here's the list-

8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini)
Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski)
Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
Nashville (Robert Altman)
Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
Days of Being Wild (Wong Kar-Wai)
In the Mood For Love (Wong)
2046 (Wong)
City Lights (Charles Chaplin)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
Goodfellas (Scorsese)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
Chungking Express (Wong)
Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino)
Faces (John Cassavetes)
Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara)
The Thing (John Carpenter)
The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville)
Rocco and his Brothers (Luchino Visconti)
I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi)
Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi)
Archangel (Guy Maddin)
Night of the Living Dead (George Romero)
The Addiction (Ferrara)
Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara)
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Sergio Leone)
The Cranes are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov)
Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda)
Open City (Roberto Rossellini)
Boogie Nights (P.T. Anderson)
The Life and Death of Col. Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger)
My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer)
Alien (Scott)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick)
Manhattan (Woody Allen)
Audition (Takashi Miike)
Bottle Rocket (Wes Anderson)
Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard)
Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)
Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders)