HE LIKES TO WATCH: I think we have our first candidate for the ALOTT5MA Hall of Fame (which will be abbreviated to the ALOTT5MA HOF in future posts). Meet Colin Leach, a 30-year-old pharmacist from Kansas City who has been systematically viewing all the films picked in the AFI's 100 years...100 lists. As if that wasn't reason enough for this blog to embrace, Leach, the beautiful thing about his obsession is that Leach says "I'm not obsessed with movies. My obsession is with completion."
Some other highlights from the Leach profile...
Before he launched his film-watching effort, Leach was at best a casual moviegoer. Even today he knows almost nothing about film history or film theory. He rarely turns on the TV except to watch a film. He and his housemates don't subscribe to cable.
So, he's watched some 500 movies and still doesn't know anything about the history of film? Umm, I'm not sure if I really want leach filling my next prescription.
After graduating from the University of Missouri-Columbia almost a decade ago, Leach realized that as a math-and-science type he knew virtually nothing about literature. So he found a list of essential novels and started reading.
He put that project on hold when he discovered the first AFI list issued in 1998.
Think he's read a book since?
"I realized I'd seen maybe 25 of these great movies," Leach recalled. "I didn't know who Grace Kelly or Humphrey Bogart were. I'd never seen a silent movie."
He was presumably born in 1974 or 1975 and didn't know Kelly or Bogart? I weep for the youth. The 25-year-old receptionist at my last job had never heard the song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." Shouldn't there be some kind of pop culture studies requirement in our high schools?
Now as soon as the latest AFI list is issued, Leach scans it for titles he hasn't seen and devotes the next few weeks to filling the gaps.
And when he's done, he sets new goals. He has worked his way through Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. He has created his own must-see lists: the films of Paul Newman or Walt Disney's animated features. And he only recently discovered Westerns.
Among the films on the original AFI list are: Treasure of the Sierra Madre, High Noon, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Stagecoach, Dances With Wolves, Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, and The Searchers. A better student of film history may have been able to find a common link between those movies...hmmm, horses, guns, cowboys hats, good guys and bad guys, Indians, the West, you know they really should group these movies in some kind of genre.
There are other lists in Leach's life. For several weeks he got up each morning and cooked a different type of omelet from a list of recipes he compiled. Another time he decided to buy and sample every type of fruit juice available in Kansas City groceries.
OK, the fruit juice thing is a little strange.
Asked where this behavior comes from, Leach said he traced it back to his last year at MU and the deaths of two close friends in separate auto accidents.
"At first I was drinking a lot, staying out all night. Then I got sort of philosophical. I decided that life's short. If you like something, drown yourself in it."
Ummm, wasn't he already doing that? Still that's an interesting leap of logic. You hate to think that among his dying friends final thoughts were, "Damn, I wish I had seen Amadeus."
"The more movies I watch, the less critical I become. Now I just sit back and soak it up. I always find something that validates the time spent...How do you compare 'Braveheart' to 'Forrest Gump'? It's like looking at two supermodels. They're both great in their own way."
Wow, it's hard to get much more uncritical than that. Based on that, I'm guessing if this article were written in five years, Leach might be saying, How do you compare Weekend at Bernies 2 and Mannequin 2?"
Leach said he was especially blown away by "Casablanca," the Judy Garland version of "A Star Is Born" and anything with Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn, "these fantastic women I'd never seen before."
I was willing to give him a pass on Kelly, but he'd never seen Hepburn before his movie-watching binge?
Still, he says, he enjoys the feeling of accomplishment more than the actual act of watching the movie..."And watching old movies is a nice way of figuring out how the world came to be the way it is. If you watch an old movie, you can see what the people who made it and watched it were thinking."
What can I really say at this point?
Congrats to Colin, moviewatcher, list-completist, and a hero to all of us here at ALOTT5MA.
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