I've been a movie fan for my entire life. I do reserve times for other sources of media like music, podcasts and TV, but my go to is to set aside a few hours and get lost in a story that I'm seeing for the first time or have seen a million times before. I have made an attempt to catalog and alphabetize how many movies that I "own", and between DVDs, Blu-rays and burned copies, my library easily exceeds 5,000 movies. With the emergence of streaming services in the past few years I've gotten some pushback from people for holding onto physical media, but my project for 2021 taught me that it was entirely necessary for what I was attempting to undertake - keep track of every single movie that I watched this year. This was a crazy idea but something that has been rumbling around in my skull for quite some time.
The idea stemmed from a throw-away thought about how often I watch a particular film (like Jurassic Park) instead of watching something new (at least to me) because it seems like I always watch the same handful of movies. People speak in hyperbole all of the time. How often have you said, "Oh, that movie? I've seen it a hundred times." But even though I promise you that I have not seen any one movie a hundred times this year, there are a few of them on this list that I can say without a doubt that I have seen a hundred times or more in my life. And since you can't depend on streaming services for availability or picture and sound quality, my collection comes in handy. Because when I'm in the mood for a certain movie, I want to watch it, not try and figure out where to find it online without paying for it or signing up for every single streaming service. I've got my own god damn video store. I am the Last Blockbuster.
While I did mention that this idea to track my movie watching has been around for a long time, it really didn't get serious until March of 2020 when the Covid-19 Pandemic pretty much just changed everything and shut down the World and our lives as we knew it. Because we were supposed to social distance and everything was canceled (like holiday gatherings, concert and music festivals, sporting events, bars, restaurants and movie theaters), I pretty much stayed home and watched movies by myself. While this was nothing new with my life, it just became more apparent how often it happened. And then in April 2020 I was furloughed from work for what turned out to be 6 months. To this day I still cannot tell you what I did with my time when I was off work and couldn't go anywhere or do anything. I should have done a better job of tracking my life back then. But it did give me the push I needed to finally catalog this ridiculous aspect of my life. And when I went back to work and then started working from home, it gave me the opportunity to put on movies in the background while I did my job, which really allowed the list to grow into the monstrosity that it has become.
By the time I decided to do this I settled on a start date of January 1, 2021 so that I would have an entire year's worth of data. In the end it doesn't really matter, but there's something about quantifying things in a time span that the majority of people recognize as significant just seemed like the right thing to do. So be on the lookout for a month by month breakdown of the movies that I watched this year and a little bit of commentary where I deem it appropriate. I'm curious to see the final results, especially the number of total movies I watched, how many new movies I watched and which movies I watched the most number of times. I'm planning on making this an annual thing, so check back often if you care to see how I wasted my precious life minutes in 2021 and beyond. 2022 is looking to be more of the same, so I do plan on keeping track of my movie watching again, but hopefully the conditions in the World won't suck as much and I'll be out living life instead of watching other people live fictional ones on the big and small screen.
- Scott Reck -
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