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100 Greatest Movies.

#1 - Citizen Kane (1941)

I thought it was boring really. Shouldn’t be #1 considering some of the other movies on the list are more entertaining and tell a better story. It could be that it is just an older movie and my tastes are more…new school. But it lacked excitement. But IDK, I guess back in 1941 there wasn’t much excitement they could put in movies and get away with it.

A little background. Born in the 50's and growing up in the 70's. Movies would come to the theater and then, poof, whey were gone forever. You might see a few turn up on one of the three networks here or there but that's it.

I was a movie buff in my younger days. I would hear about so many classic movies, like Casablanca but could never see it.

VHS tapes came into being during the 80's. Blockbuster hit their stride in the 90's. They used to rotate movies through selling used movies for around $10 as PVT'S (Previously Viewed Tapes).

[As a note, video stores used to buy tapes for about $80 each and rent them out.]

Studios began to lower the price on new tapes. Video stores would acquire more copies. Space became an issue.

Blockbuster would conduct major "pulls" a couple of times each year and pull hundreds of tapes from the rental shelves of each store. They would mark them down to a few dollars, about the price of a rental.

I would go from store to store, collecting these used movies on VHS tapes. When I started selling off the collection in 2000, I had 3,800 different pre-recorded movies on VHS tape. I kept track of them in a database. I sorted them into different groups.

My "classical" group went from 1915 through 1960, it had 600-movies.

I had a lot of movies. I watched a lot of movies. I had about every Best Picture and the other top Academy Award movies in the collection.

I thought that Citizen Kane, was not only, not a top award winning movie but I thought it was one of the most boring movies I have ever watched. That is coming from someone who likes classic movies!
 
As a kid I really wanted to see The General with Buster Keaton. The only place I could track it down was an 8mm copy from the library, 4 or 5 reels if I remember right. I thought it was pretty dull. I watched it again a dozen years later with other people and thought it was one of the funniest things I"ve ever seen.
 
As a kid I really wanted to see The General with Buster Keaton. The only place I could track it down was an 8mm copy from the library, 4 or 5 reels if I remember right. I thought it was pretty dull.

Years ago, those 8mm movies were your only option to watch a commercially produced silent movie. I used to buy movies like that on 400' reels back in the 60's.

They used to show in-flight movies in 16mm. There were a lot of these movies floating around on the secondary markets.

In the 70's, we had 16mm sound projectors like they used in the schools. We would show regular Hollywood movies in our living rooms.
 

Doc4

Stumpy in cold weather
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