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We're a list society. From Casey Kasem and the American Top 40 to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die to BOP's very own Best Horror Films (one of our most popular features ever), people love to talk about lists. They love to debate the merits of the "winners" and bemoan the exclusions, and start the whole process again when a new list captures pop culture fancy.

Perhaps one of the best-known, most widely discussed lists is the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies. A non-profit organization known for its efforts at film restoration and screen education, the AFI list of the 100 best American movies was chosen by 1,500 leaders in the movie industry and announced in its first version in 1998. Since then, the 100 Years... 100 Movies list has proven to be so popular that the AFI came forth with a 10th anniversary edition in 2007, along with other series such as 100 Heroes and Villains, 100 Musicals, 100 Laughs and 100 Thrills.

In addition to talking about which films are deserving of being on the list and bitterly shaking our fists because a beloved film was left out, we also love to brag about the number of movies we've seen. As I was looking over the 100 Years... 100 Movies list recently, I realized that I've seen 47 - less than half. As a lover of film and writer/editor for a movie site, this seemed like a wrong that needed to remedied. And so an idea was born. I would watch all 100 movies on the 2007 10th Anniversary list - some of them for the first time in as much as 20 or more years - and ponder their relevance, worthiness and influence on today's film industry. With luck, I'll even discover a few new favorites along the way.

#83: Titanic

With the release of Avatar just around the corner, the past several weeks have been marked by a variety of people crawling out of the woodwork to bash James Cameron, a director who hasn't had a non-documentary movie in theaters in 12 years. The majority of this backlash seems to come from people critical of Titanic, the biggest money making film of all-time as well as the one that still holds the record for most Academy Awards received (yes, The Return of the King has the record, too. I know). Since Titanic does appear on the 2007 edition of the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, I thought this would be a fine time to examine the film with new eyes, and as objective a point of view as possible.

When Titanic was initially released in December of 1997, I resisted the hype. I had no desire whatsoever to sit through a butt-numbing three-hour film with an obvious ending that could be nothing but a downer. I had nothing against Cameron himself (in fact, Terminator is still one of my favorite films to this day). I just wasn't interested.

My feelings changed a bit during the summer of 1998. While staying at a Jamaica resort, I ran out of beach reading material, and one of the only books in the gift shop that looked interesting was A Night to Remember, a true history of the events surrounding the sinking of the Titanic. I powered through the book and found it tragic but fascinating, and my interest in Cameron's depiction of the sad tale was piqued.

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