not my all time best

I read through Time's list of the "100 All-Time Best Films" and was disappointed with myself because I only saw 32 of the listed films. That's 68 I never saw, but, even scarier, there are 58 titles that I have never even heard of. I always considered myself fairly sophisticated when it comes to movies, but after reading the list, I realized that I must broaden my horizons.

The films Time listed are great but where were my favorite movies? I didn't see a whole lot of Diego in Time (big shocker there, I'll have to wait for Newsweek's list), so I decided that I needed to make "Diego Trip's 100 All-Time Favorite Flicks." In my 40 years I must have seen well over 1,000 films, so picking 100 favorite films shouldn't be difficult.

The first step was to think of all my favorites. Off the top of my head, I came up with five titles pretty quickly. A few more came to mind and once I got wheels going a landslide of titles came my way. I started typing out a list as they came to mind and was impressed that I came up with a list of about 50 titles.

The next day I reviewed my list and started questioning whether these were truly favorite movies or were they movies I was supposed to like. I needed additional criteria to whittle away the fluff. I went through my DVD and video collection and compared it to my list. I own a lot of crappy movies, but 10 from the list were represented and I added a few more that I didn't think of to my list .

I still had 40 movies that I was iffy on. My next criteria was, if I was channel surfing and came across this "iffy" movie, would I stop and watch it regardless of how far along the movie was? I may have enjoyed them when I first watched them, but would I sit through them again and again and again. Many on the list fell off due to this criterion.

My list is down to 20 and I was stumped. I couldn't think of any more films because the brain has been full for some time now and any new memory knocks out an old one. I perused movie database lists and came up with another 10 titles.

Okay, so I figured out that it's not so easy to come up with 100 favorites. But they'll come eventually. Here are nine of my favorites in no particular order (I know most people do top tens but ten items wasn't a good number for the collage).

Cinema Paradiso ... wow a teenage Marco Leonardi
Snatch ... one of several Brad Pitt movies on my list
Minority Report ... my favorite Tom Cruise movie
Matrix Reloaded ... best chase and fight scenes
Fight Club ... a peek inside Chuck Palahniuk's brain
Godfather II ... my favorite DeNiro role
Gattaca ... such a sexy movie
Royal Tenenbaums ... hysterical dysfunctional family
Unbreakable ... major Night fan after seeing this