An Introduction

I always hate it when someone asks me, "If you could take five things with you to a deserted island, what would they be?" Usually, the person expects me to give sentimental answers; instead, they get an answer including a communication device, a reflective object, GPS, etc. Now I get the evolved question: "If you could take five movies with you to a deserted island, what would they be?" I never have been able to answer that question. I wouldn't take five movies because if I had the opportunity to take movies to a deserted island, I'm quite confident I could carry more than 5 of them. I would take as many as I could...screw the limitations!

Well, since then the question has evolved some more. Now I'm asked, "What are your favorite movies?" Now there's a question I can answer -- in maybe ten or so years.

To counteract this question, to submit to some of your requests, and to reflect on the movies that make me want to watch every film I can, I introduce this website: The Great Movies. So I've followed down the paths of most film critics actually getting paid for this. But, I have fun doing it, several of you like reading about it (strangely), and even more of you like what I have to say regarding certain movies (and hate what I have to say about others).

A couple of things about this website: There will be no lists. There is no possible way I can arrange movies from least favorite to most favorite. I may have a rating scale, but there are more movies than there are intervals of my scale. In fact, there will be no rating scales on this website. It can be assumed I think of all of these movies as four-star material...why bother rating them after that?

The second thing is that the reviews on this website will never match the ones on my original site. I will talk about things with these reviews that I will not on the main movie site. Several of my reviews here will be longer and more in-depth.

Finally, this website will be updated very infrequently, so I will mention an update to this website on the Movie Archives webpage.

I will start this weekend with Once Upon a Time in America. Enjoy!