With my 2014 Film Noir Challenge completed, I can look ahead to what I’ll be watching next year. In the past, my challenges have always been bound to a specific genre, and for a time, I was considering sticking to this and making 2015 the Year of Musicals. But after drawing up a list, I found that I wasn’t particularly enthused by the idea. It’s not the singing and dancing itself that bothers me, actually — I quite like singing and dancing — but so many of the Important Musicals look like boring love stories, and I’m just not up for that at all. Also, I’ve been telling myself to watch more Academy movies for many, many years a while now, and while boring love stories do often succeed at the Oscars, so (thankfully) do other types of stories.
With that said, here are the twelve movies I am sworn to watch in 2015, lest I suffer a fate worse than death. (Okay. Not really worse than death. But I’d have to watch a spectacularly sucky movie, the kind even I don’t want to watch. And you guys know I’ll willingly watch a lot.)
The 2015 Challenge: Best Picture Winners
1. The Artist
2. The Hurt Locker
3. Schindler’s List
4. Platoon
5. The Deer Hunter
6. 12 Years a Slave
7. The Sting
8. The Godfather
9. The French Connection
10. In the Heat of the Night
11. Lawrence of Arabia
12. Gone With the Wind
I make no promises to watch this year’s Best Picture winner, though. If I’ve seen more than two nominees in any given year, I feel pretty proud of myself. And okay, fine, maybe I don’t feel proud of myself very often, but I’m relatively sure that a list like the one above means I’m growing as a person. Who knows, guys? Maybe by this time next year, I’ll have given up on all my superhero and horror flicks in favor of biopics and war movies. Maybe I’ll have even watched five of the potential ten Best Picture nominees.
Yeah, I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, either. For God’s sake, Age of Ultron is coming out next year. MUST SEE.
My Geek Blasphemy 
Boring love stories in important musicals? Which ones are you looking at? You might be doing it wrong.
Crap, I think I already deleted the list I had made. The only two I can remember is A Star is Born (which wouldn’t be a boring love story, but it does look decidedly depressing) and West Side Story (which looks to me like the epitome of a boring love story).
When you DO decide to go for it, make sure Cabaret, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and RENT are all included. Can Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog count? It DID change the populace’s view on web-released works. If I can think of any more, I’ll let you know.
I would, but usually the idea for these challenges is to watch movies I haven’t seen before. I could probably get away with Hedwig, since it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen it and my brain has apparently chosen to delete anything that happened from my memory, but Cabaret, Rent, and Dr. Horrible are all unfortunately out. (Mind you, I’d still consider doing reviews on any of these movies. Just not for one of the annual challenges. Still, fire away with the recommendations! I love recommendations, even if I take a while to actually get to watching them.)
You should watch the OSS 117 movies to get you in the mood for The Artist. They are goofy James Bondlike spoofs, and has the same lead actor as in The Artist. Fair warning, they are in French.
Huh, never heard of those. I’ll look into them, thanks. 🙂