My wife just finished reading Julie & Julia by Julie Powell. The book was inspired by her quest to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking. In turn, the book inspired an excellent movie by the same name, featuring the Oscar nominated performance of Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Oddly (for my wife at least), she liked the movie much more than the book which she struggled to even finished. But it has inspired her to think about cooking her way through a cookbook of her own (not Julia Child’s but Betty Crocker’s) and chronicling her quest in her blog http://mauldinfamily.wordpress.com.

What does this have to do with movies? Well, her idea (or borrowing of another’s idea) made me want to work my way through another list. But since I can’t cook very well, I’ll stick to movies. At first I thought about working my way through one of Leonard Maltin’s books out of the desire to inspire a novel called Logan & Leonard. But after that illusion faded I settled on another list.

At first, I thought about the AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies list. But that would limit me not only to 100 movies but to 100 American movies. Then it hit me. The IMDB Top 250 is probably the most well-known movie list in the world. It has been composed by compiling the votes of hundreds of thousands of normal moviegoers. In other words, this is a list for normal people and not some elitist movie-critics list.

I’ve already seen a good number of the movies, but I will blog my thoughts on all of them. I have not yet decided whether to do it as a countdown, alphabetically, or chronologically. The nature of the IMDB list makes it more complex, it constantly changes based upon user votes. Movies can drop off the list or get added at any time. I will decide in the next couple of days and begin my journey.

I’m sure that my ADD will get the best of me at times, so I’m not setting a hard and fast goal of a year or anything crazy like that. However, I will try to watch at least one movie a week and post a blog on it. It will not be a formal review, though I will post links to others reviews of it. At that pace, it will take me until sometime in 2015 to finish the list. So spread the word, and feel free to take the journey with me.