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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.

#14: Psycho

Here's an odd fact: until I watched it for the purposes of this column, I had never been able to watch Psycho the whole way through without falling asleep before the final fade to black. It's not that I didn't like the movie. I always found it be a suspenseful tale, with a couple of bravura performances. The direction and cinematography are groundbreaking and cutting edge, and their impact and influence continue to be felt today - almost a half century after theatrical release.

And yet, I've always felt there was something vaguely dissatisfying about the film. It's nothing I'd ever been able to put my finger on. I'm a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock in general. Two or three of his films are among my very favorites, in fact. But obviously, there's a reason I've never been able to stay awake long enough to watch the entire movie in one sitting. With Internet word-of-mouth becoming a real phenomenon and factor in movie expectations, I think I've finally started to come around to realizing the reasons that Psycho, for me, is the least of Hitchcock's work, even if it is his most famous film.

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