Product review: 100 MOVIES BUCKET LIST POSTER

My love of films is one of the things which define me, so I was ecstatic when my colleagues got me this 100 Movies Bucket List poster, which now sits proudly on my door. At the start, all the 100 movies are covered with grey foil-type material, and you scratch off the foil using your fingernails or a coin, if you’ve seen the film, as I have duly done.

In assessing this poster, I looked at two main areas, design, and choice of film.

The design is absolutely incredible. The graphics used for each of the films are on point, and special commendation goes to the ones which really capture the essence of the films they’re depicting, such as Casablanca’s piano in Rick’s hat or the six different coloured ties of Reservoir Dogs.

Sometimes the beauty is in the simplicity, such as the lone pair of eyes in WALL-E, Darth Vader's helmet, or the operating system for Her. I really admire how the design people made use of the hammer picture twice, for Oldboy and Drive, but customised them to suit the films.

As for the choice of films, unfortunately, the list is a little too populist for me. So much so, that when I perused all the films listed, very few of the choices surprised me. I can only assume the poster went to print and edits weren’t allowed after Baby Driver came out, because, if the 100 films on the poster are anything to go by, they would have loved that!

Credit where credit is due for including Moonlight and not La La Land, but seriously, it’s like the producers of this poster interviewed 200 University students to list their favourite films, and this poster was the aggregated results.

Bless their hearts that they tried to include some classic films in a poster which is predominantly post-90s movies. You can never go wrong with Casablanca, which is in my personal top 20. But the two Alfred Hitchcock films that are on here, Psycho and Vertigo, aren’t the two that I would pick as my favourite from The Master of Suspense (that would be Rebecca and Rear Window), and once again shows that the poster’s makers just went for the lazy, populist route.

Here are some of the films on the poster which I fervently advise you not to waste your time with:

- Pulp Fiction 
- Fight Club 
- In Bruges 
- Drive 
- Shaun of the Dead
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Little Miss Sunshine

With Steven Spielberg having six films on the poster, Christopher Nolan with three, Stanley Kubrick with three and Ridley Scott with three, certain directors are also grossly over-represented on the poster. It’s unfortunate that some of the people who devour films from these auteurs tend for be misogynistic dudebros.

However, shout-out to the fact that the compilers of the films clearly love Disney (as do I), the fact that Shawshank, my personal favourite film is on (although it was never going to not make it, being a lot of people's favourite films!), and the Amadeus inclusion pleases me too. For those who like Hamilton, the dynamic between Salieri and Mozart in Amadeus strongly mirrors that of Burr and Hamilton!

Lastly, this isn’t so much a criticism, as head’s up in case you were thinking of buying the poster: if you’re going to scratch a cell off, make sure you scratch in the same direction throughout. As you can probably tell from the photo, I scratched a few titles both vertically and horizontally, and the end result is hella messy. It’s a shame, because such is the pig’s ear I’ve made for some of these films, that it detracts from the aesthetics of the image it displays!

In short, I’m far from in agreement with all of the films purveyed by the poster, but, then again, I don’t agree with the IMDb Top 250 either, and I certainly consult that often enough. Only this poster is much more pleasing on the eye, and, if you watch a film purely because it was on the list, you get rewarded with a pretty picture.

Grade: B+

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