Friday, October 23, 2009

The Coming of Movie-A-Day Month!

Don't read my blog if you hate movies.

I was really into music in high school and college. I have always been pretty happy with my diverse taste in music. But somewhere in my twenties I stopped buying a lot of music. Around that time I started getting more and more interested in movies. For the past few years I've been a bit upset with myself for getting away from music, but that's because I hadn't realized that movies had taken their place.

For me, my interest in movies really grew when I watched the AFI top 100 movies. the American Film Institute put our their list of the best 100 American movies. That seemed like a great starting point, as there were plenty of movies that I had heard about but never seen. As these were the days before Netflix, it took me several years to get though the list. i kept track of watching them on my website. I placed a copy HERE for your perusal. You'll even notice my Livejournal icon that I made from ten of my favorite movies.

As I mention at the top of that list, something clicked when I watched Citizen Kane for the third time. The third time was immediately after the second time. I watched it with the commentary from Roger Ebert. I saw the movie in a whole new light.

A few years back I started going to movies more often and keeping track. Then at the beginning of every year I try to post a top 10 list, which allows me to reflect back on the films I really enjoyed. In previous years I've tried to go to 20-25 movies a year. This year I've cranked it up a notch. I saw my 25th movie last weekend (which many critics loved, but will not make my top 10 list). I've gone out of my way to see a few smaller films that haven't shown in Concord, and tomorrow I'm planning to head into San Francisco just to spend a cool day in the city and watch a movie that isn't showing around here.

So that all brings me to my next -A-Day challenge. No it isn't in November. November is haiku-a-day month, as that's usually pretty easy. I'll give more details on that in a few days. But for December, I'm creating Movie-A-Day month. Each day, write about a movie. It doesn't need to be a full critique. Just pick a movie and write about it.

For me, I'm going to try to write about as many movies I can that I saw in the theaters that won't make my top 10 list for 2009. But I want to write about a few others that I really like. I'll probably put together some kind of list of rules so that we can all ignore those as well. But for now the only rule that I know I want to have is "You have to have seen the movie from beginning to end OR if you stopped early it has to be because it was that bad."

I've wanted to write about a couple movies already for Blog-A-Day month, but I've skipped them knowing that I was going to drop the gauntlet for December. for many of you who have avoided Blog-A-Day month because it's too hard, you were right. A new topic a day is tough. But have you seen at least 31 movies? Yes, you have. Can you write a few lines about it? Yes, you can. You're in.

3 comments:

Andrew Nolan said...

Three things:

1. I can probably handle blog-a-flick month, although the holidays in December may make it impossible.

2. I similarly embarked on a quest to watch all 100 AFI films and ran out of steam. You have inspired me to re-try.

3. I read every one of your reviews for those films. I can hardly believe you wrote them. Do you realize how many exclamation points you used? Sometimes you used three!!!. You also used the phrase "really neat" when writing about Goodfellas. Your writing has come a long way since the early 2000's, and I mean that in the least condescending way possible.

Kaboom32 said...

1. I'm with you on the holidays. I have a feeling that I'm going to have something about doubling up on days or something like that.

2. It was a fun four years.

3. Today was the first time I read it since then as well, and I noticed the exclamation points as well. i missed the Goodfellas comment. I credit better writing with nothing more than teaching writing for many years.

Lance Christian Johnson said...

I'm in. I've been wanting to write about a couple of movies too, but haven't gotten around to them. I'll save it for December.