Welcome to my new blog.
With the new year and new resolutions I thought it was time to try and start blogging again. I’ve been out of the game for a while so I thought it would be a good idea to just start over and start fresh. I’ve done film review blogs in the past but they never seemed focus, or rather lacked any real purpose to deem it worthy to read. This time I want to try something a bit different.
Last year I tried something on Facebook called the 100 Film Challenge. I stole the idea from a friend who’s been doing it for a few years now. The idea is simple: watch 100 films between January 1 and December 31 and keep a list. The goal is that they have to be films you’ve never seen before or remember very little of if you’ve seen them in the past. Watching Star Wars for the hundredth time doesn’t count. It has to be something you’re seeing or experiencing for the first time. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new film in the theater or something you’ve streamed from Netflix or a DVD you’re borrowing or a movie you watched on cable. Just as long as you haven’t seen it before.
Simple enough. I watch a lot of movies so I figured it would be easy to reach that goal. All you have to do is average two films a week. My friend that has been doing this the last couple years has usually reached the amount in the 200’s of films he’s watched. I didn’t think I would get anywhere near that, but 100 was totally feasible.
Boy was I mistaken.
Going into the start of the new year last year I was unemployed, living in a new city, a very small and secluded city at that, and staying home with our brand new baby so I figured I would have plenty of time to watch movies since I wasn’t going anywhere. The one thing I didn’t really factor is that raising a baby is HARD! It takes a LOT of work! And they have such odd schedules that finding time during the day to watch a two hour film wasn’t really possible. It would take me five hours, or sometimes two days to get through a film. I tried to watch late at night after everyone had gone to sleep but by then I was so tired I didn’t want to watch anything, I just wanted to sleep. And forget going to the theater to watch a movie. Arranging for babysitting and all that comes with that isn’t always convenient. And then there’s the factor of living in a small town. We have one theater with three screens that usually shows crap, or at least nothing I’m interested in seeing. I could drive over 50 miles to see something decent, but forget seeing any good Independent or Art film around here. I used to get to the theaters sometimes on a weekly basis, at the least. I believe I saw a movie in a theater around 15 times last year.
When all was said and done I ended up seeing 59 new films in 2012. Well short of my 100 film goal. So now I’m going to try again in 2013. This time I plan to blog about the movies I see. Sometimes they’ll be reviews, sometimes commentary, sometimes analysis, but mostly I just want to talk about the films I haven’t seen to motivate myself but also learn and discover something new about not only the films themselves but also the experience of watching them.
As a self described film lover there is plenty of classics I’ve never seen. I’ve never watched Gone With The Wind, or Casablanca, or Seven Samurai. There’s lots of great titles on the various AFI lists, or the Sight and Sound list that I haven’t seen. There’s plenty of good films scheduled to come out in theaters this year and hopefully as my daughter gets older it will be easier to get out to a theater to watch more. I also have several hundred DVDs I own that I’ve never seen that I need to start going through. I have lots of movies saved on my DVR that I need to start watching to free up space as well.
The point is I have lots of options for watching movies, and I have lots that I need to see. So as I go through this journey I plan to share my experiences with this blog and hopefully learn a thing or two, and perhaps maybe even teach a thing or two as well. I’m determined to reach my goal this year and I’m determined to finally make a dent in my large collection of movies that I keep putting off watching. No more excuses. Challenge accepted. It should be fun yet trying, and I hope you enjoy as well. I encourage you to participate and do your own challenge. I welcome your reviews, your suggestions, your comments, your criticism. Nothing makes the movie watching experience better than a good discussion following watching the movie. The debate and arguments is what made watching Siskel & Ebert so much fun and got me interested in movies in the first place. So please play along.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some movies to watch.
