All right! Now I’m done with the AFI Top 100 list, whoo. (Although there are a few that Jess hasn’t seen, and that I’ll probably watch with her at some point.) And it only took, uh, six years (we started in June 2018, which seems like genuinely forever ago).

That’s incredibly slow compared to when I went through the S&S list (which took a mere two years). Partly that’s just because I was watching this list with Jess, and it’s harder to coordinate two people’s schedules. But mostly it’s because… well, this list just isn’t as enjoyable as the S&S list.

As I wrote at the end of it, watching through that S&S list just reprogrammed my brain, and completely rewrote my relationship with cinema as an artform. Obviously watching through the AFI list afterward couldn’t have that same kind of impact — it was never going to re-rewrite my relationship to movies — but I’m fairly confident that even if I had watched these movies first, they wouldn’t have had that impact.

Because the thing is, the S&S list was full of surprises, of things that I didn’t know existed, and hadn’t imagined could exist. But the AFI list mostly wasn’t. I mean, okay, there were some surprises and happy discoveries, but like… a handful of movies, maybe? Most of what’s on the list is just very conventional Hollywood film-making.

And that’s not a knock against the AFI, it’s just… what they’re doing. Their goal here is to highlight American movies that were important — that made a ton of money, that won a lot of Oscars, that had famous directors and famous movie stars, that inspired a lot of imitators. And the movies that hit big like that aren’t generally going to be the really weird arthouse movies, they’re going to be the big-budget, big-studio movies.

And so if it’s a worse list than the S&S list, considered as a source of good movies (and it is), it’s a great list considered as a walk through American cinematic pop culture of the twentieth century. All the big moments are here, all the big stars, all the big directors. From the silent era through “classic Hollywood” into the gritty ’70s and the blockbuster era of the ‘80s and beyond, all the greatest hits are here.

(Maybe a good analogy is that the S&S list is the mixtape your older sibling, who’s off at college and by far the coolest person you know, put together; whereas the AFI list is “Now That’s What I Call Music!: 20th Century.”)

I don’t regret watching these movies; I’m glad I now have all this cultural context, and only a small minority (10-15%?) of these movies were actively terrible. But this did feel like a bit of a homework assignment at times.

So whereas my answer to “should I watch through the S&S list?” is very simple (yes! if it sounds interesting to you, you should absolutely do it!), my answer to the same question about the AFI list is more conditional. If what you want is to watch a bunch of great movies, no; go back to that S&S list, you’re going to get way better movies off of that. But if what you want is to build that pop-culture understanding of the American cinematic landscape, then yeah, go for it.

And for my part, I’m just glad to have finished it. Whew.