That's 3.5 movies a day, and I am mildly concerned.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 12:50 PM on January 22 [8 favorites]

I saw this on Projects and started reading through the latest summaries and was just filled with a desire to track down these movies, watch some of the great things Levin has been watching.

Levin's expansive interests and the wealth of observations relating movies to other movies are delightful to me.
posted by kristi at 12:50 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]

(Ah, I kind of meant to put this in the main post: a number of these are shorts, so when I originally did some rough math imagining 2 hours a movie times 1300 movies, yeah, that seemed like a LOT, but if, say, half of them are less than half an hour, then it's a LITTLE less daunting. Alas, the spreadsheet doesn't list running time.)
posted by kristi at 12:52 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]

Oh, and geez! I should also mention The Movie Crash Course, the fabulous film blog by EmpressCallipygos, and DirtyOldTown's wondrously prolific collection of movie posts on FanFare!

MeFites! You're the best!

(going away now to stop monopolizing the thread)
posted by kristi at 12:58 PM on January 22 [7 favorites]

Wow! What an accomplishment! Good work growabrain, and thanks for telling us about it kristi!
posted by JHarris at 1:01 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

This also causes me to wonder if we should be blogging the random movies we watch as pre- and post-show at MST Club.
posted by JHarris at 1:02 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

Man, I peaked at 500 in 2023. But I did some math and when I retire, I'll probably have a 1000 movie year at some point -- once you get used to the idea that it's fun to watch three movies over the course of a weekend day, extending that to weekdays is plausible. (I look for themes a lot -- three Argentian noirs, or three Bond movies, or whatever.)
posted by Bryant at 1:45 PM on January 22 [5 favorites]

Fantastic. I keep falling short of my paltry one-a-day goal.

People who ramp up their movie watching to levels like this: were there any surprises on how it changed your taste?
posted by fleacircus at 3:31 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]

But so many are just rather forgettable IMHO. Quick, what movie won the Oscar for best movie in 2016?
posted by Czjewel at 3:38 PM on January 22

#RoleModel

Y'all think I'm over the top and I'm only at about 1.25 a day.

Even my retirement watch-movies-all-day plan would only get me to maybe three a day.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:05 PM on January 22 [6 favorites]

My personal triumph of movie overindulgence was seeing 5 different movies in 5 different theaters in one day.

This was accomplished in Manhattan, where screen densities are high. I think it would be a lot harder to pull off anywhere else. (Multiplexes are cheating.)

I don¡¯t remember any of the 5 movies.
posted by Lemkin at 4:06 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]

People who ramp up their movie watching to levels like this: were there any surprises on how it changed your taste?

My taste got more diverse. I think having a sense of context made a difference there -- in a real sense, every movie is in conversation with its influences. I'm not much of a horror guy really, but when I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre the other year I spent some time thinking about American New Wave road trip movies and how in part Tobe Hooper was reacting to those -- it works great even if you're not thinking about that, but it's fascinating to compare it to the road trip movies of the era like Bonnie & Clyde or Five Easy Pieces.

I also started really loving deep dives into specific times and places. Watching a lot of 60s and 70s Italian crime movies was enjoyable because they were decent enough movies, but honestly the real pleasure in most cases was watching the edge get harder and harder as a reaction to societal changes in Italy. (The exception being Damiano Damiani, who is the best unknown political filmmaker of all time, his movies are flat out awesome. As well as being Italian crime flicks.)

I'm more willing to just try something random. It doesn't represent a huge percentage of my movie time for the month, so why not go deep and see if a gem pops up?
posted by Bryant at 4:27 PM on January 22 [9 favorites]

My peak was 243 in 2020, when I was at home almost all of the time. I hit 150 in 2024, but I don't watch a lot of TV shows.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:53 PM on January 22

People who ramp up their movie watching to levels like this: were there any surprises on how it changed your taste?

Probably the biggest difference is that in addition to the "how good is this movie?" scale and the "how well does this match my interests/tastes?" scale, I have developed a third scale for "how interesting is this movie as an artefact of its time/place/era?"
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:57 PM on January 22 [7 favorites]

Letterboxd says I saw 452 movies last year.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:05 PM on January 22 [8 favorites]

Thank you, @kristi. What a surprise to find this FPP! I really appreciate it.

I spend a lot of time writing my reviews as if they matter, but I doubt that anybody ever read them. However, by now, this journey is indeed my destination, and I'm excited to discover exceptional movies every single day. And if anyone will find them useful, that will be even better.

I want to point out that I did "cut the cord" many years ago, and I rely exclusively on "free" streamers. So if anybody ever reads a review and gets curious, they can simply click on the highlighted name, and watch the full movie right then and there. There are many websites like cataz.to and m4uhd.tv where you can watch anything you want without passwords, torrenting, viruses, subscriptions, Etc. I think that today the crime is not watching 'pirated' content, but supporting the multi-national MSM conglomerates. Netflix and Disney are not my friends, and I say, fuck them.

If anybody has any questions, I can do an informal AMA.
posted by growabrain at 5:17 PM on January 22 [20 favorites]

Quick, what movie won the Oscar for best movie in 2016?

That depends on whether you're asking Faye Dunaway or not.
posted by axiom at 9:13 PM on January 22

But what is the context for watching the films, growabrain? Is it just how you end the day after work? Are you retired? Do you have them playing in the background as you multi-task?

I just have so many questions about the process. Are there any days where you just nope out for an alternative form of recreation or pastime?
posted by Atreides at 7:18 AM on January 23

@Atreides, not to get too personal, but I kind of use this as a slow-moving, deliberate suicide process; I've stripped my life of everything that was important to me before, and that's the only activity that remained. It's rich, free and unattached. I retired and resigned over a decade ago, I gave away (or lost) everything that I ever had, I'm completely alone (but not lonely) without any connections or illusions, and I don't want to 'do' anything else any more. So I live like a monk with an iPad in a literal tiny cave, and I do nothing else, except of dreaming about the end of the world. Sometimes I take walks around, but mostly I just find all my emotional and spiritual needs in this. I know it's a bit weird, but it works.
posted by growabrain at 10:24 AM on January 23 [5 favorites]

Not weird at all. You found the thing you need in the place in life where you are. If this is where you find your happiness or contentment, then all the more power to it.
posted by Atreides at 10:29 AM on January 23