My son is at the age where the big questions have started to land. We've been talking about Siddhartha. A copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull is waiting on his shelf — my dad read it to me on a boat trip, and some gestures you repeat.
Movies were the harder problem. Not because he doesn't watch them — because he'll never run out. The algorithm has him covered. It knows what he likes and it will feed him more of it forever, and to be fair, a lot of what it feeds him is genuinely good. What the feed will never do is hand him Harold and Maude. Or Nine Queens. Or a single-room movie about a professor who claims to be 14,000 years old.
So I built a list. Film School 101: School of Dad — ninety-three films, kept on Letterboxd, mirrored here. One rule for admission: something he's not likely to find on his own, that teaches something worth knowing. Sharp dialogue. Precise direction. Subversive tone. Philosophical sci-fi. Offbeat emotional depth. Impact, not nostalgia.
The rule turned out to have teeth. Reservoir Dogs came off the list — not because it isn't great, but because the algorithm already has Tarantino covered; the door past Pulp Fiction opens itself. In its place went True Romance: same writer, and the Sicilian scene is the sharpest dialogue lesson I know, in a film nobody's feed will ever surface. Blade Runner 2049 came off for the same reason. The 1982 original stayed — he'll see the sequel with or without me, but the original needs a push.
It's not a list of my favorite movies. Most of my favorites — Star Wars, GoodFellas, The Princess Bride — he'll find without my help, and a favorites list wouldn't tell him anything about me that the whole world doesn't already share. A few favorites made the syllabus anyway, because a few favorites happen to also be school.
The last film on the list is the one I'm least sure he'll like. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy — one of my favorite comedies, not for everybody, and so uniquely mine that I almost left it off. I put it on anyway, because somewhere in building this I figured out what the list actually is. It isn't a prediction of his taste. It's an honest record of mine. A curriculum where the teacher only assigns what the student already wants isn't a curriculum — it's a feed, and he has one of those.
The list is public. Use it if it's useful. But it was built for an audience of one, and that's what makes it work.