My Year Of Movies

I am a movie fan. Or better yet a fan of all forms of movies, tv, music, books - a big chunk of what's out there in popular culture. I've got movie lines and references, song lyrics that get triggered in my thoughts in sometimes the strangest of ways, book characters I love and wish existed outside the pages of their stories, all floating around up there in my brain. A lot of it isn't necessarily going to ever get me a job or help me save the world, but it's what makes me, well, me. I come from someone who is also a fan of pop culture, though he leans more toward the old silent films and TV westerns that he grew up on. It is most definitely from him that I get my love of film. The love of reading comes from the other side - a mom and grandmother who read to me and gave me books at an early age and never limited me in what I wanted to explore, even if it was done so cautiously. 

This idea was born somewhere around the end of 2011 - a few friends and I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting and fun to watch movies long distance?" Thanks to the magic of the internet and texting, we would all choose movies and then they'd be put into a planned list of dates to watch - we chose Fridays and Sundays as days we all (usually) had free and chose a time that would suit everyone as we are spread across the country. 

(Now I have to stop here and mention that if it weren't for a certain former band of Monkeys (and heck even the certain movies one of those Monkeys starred in) and the great friend they'd lost and his amazing family, we all might never have known each other. How else would people from across the country, who have not much else in common, ever have met? www.spencerbelllegacy.com Go. Now. I'll wait.)

(Did you go? Ok. Now I'll continue...)

And somewhere once this all got started, I thought it would be a good idea to try and keep track of all the movies I watched throughout the year, even setting the goal of one movie a day - 366 (it was a leap year) and seeing if I could even achieve that - or break it. 

Now I'm not usually good at keeping up with that sort of thing. Or at least I used to be. I even decided along the way to track the books I'd read through the year as well. Incentive to keep both lists going. This is where it was handy to have access to Facebook and programs like Evernote and my phone's own document writing software. I'm not sure this would have been possible for me to accomplish if it weren't for such great mobile technology. 

And sure enough, to my surprise, I kept the lists up, even tracking my progress to that 366/one-a-day goal. Needless to say that was a rather lofty goal - and I didn't even come close to making it, though I don't think I did too badly. My final total for 2012 - 210 movies in 366 days, about 0.57 movies per day, so about half a movie per day. (My book goal - 52 in 52 weeks. My final - 37 books in 52 weeks. Something like 0.716 per week - so a little more than one book every 2 weeks. Also not bad, though not as good as I'd have liked it to be.) I tried my best to not watch things more than once, though there were apparently 7 movies that I just couldn't stop myself from watching - or didn't realize I'd seen them already that year. 

Along the way there were all time favorites, introducing the others to some of those classics that everyone should see at least once in their lives, plenty of movies I'd never seen - some to the complete shock of my friends, some I'll watch any time I find them on TV, movies I wonder why I even bothered to watch, and some moments in my life I will never forget, times spent with people that will forever mean a great deal to me, whether the years eventually part us or not. 

Given the success of the first list, I've decided to keep it again this year. For one, to see if I can manage to actually keep it up again, and for another because it's an interesting way to look back on my year that was. (I'm keeping the book list too.)

This blog - I've started watching a certain list of movies - more on that in another post - feels like the natural continuation and extension of the movie list. Here I can try to review what I watch, though I don't write the best reviews, and just in general get the thoughts I have about what I've seen out of my head. 

It will leave more room for those quotes and song lyrics.