My 500th film on IMDB

As a result of boredom, too much time on my hands and the bad influence of a particular person, I have created and been updating a list of all the films I’ve ever seen on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB). Naturally of course, there are plenty of films I don’t remember for various reasons. These reasons of course range from ‘I was too young’ to ‘they weren’t memorable films’ to various other things not worth mentioning. Anyway, as it turns out, my 500th film added is ‘The Italian Job’ (2003) (i.e., the remake)*.

The original ‘Italian Job’ entertained me to some extent. The extent of that entertainment of course should be understood as ‘it sent me to sleep before then end more than once.’ But you know – it could have been worse right? And at least I’ve seen that clichéd entirely grating line ‘you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’ (I wonder if slipping that in will improve my google rank?). As I remember that was pretty much the only memorable thing (tautology/truism). This poses a question – is it better to watch a film which is ‘good’ but not memorable (original), or one so bad that you’re frustrated, arguing solipsistically against the [alleged] ‘plot’ (remake)?

Personally, I think I’d probably go for the latter in its Ocean’s 11 like format, over the original somewhat slapstick heist film. I can certainly see why people said they were nothing alike, to the extent that to call it a 'remake' is really quite misleading - a 'title thief' might be more appropriate a label to apply...

* And as an indicator of how arbitrary the ‘film number added’ is – I just added ‘The Italian Job’ (original) as my 501st film…seems I’d forgotten I’d seen it. What film would I have been blogging on otherwise…?

The list can be found here: http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=40423196