On deciding what to watch

Discuss North American DVDs and Blu-rays or other DVD and Blu-ray-related topics.
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swo17
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#77 Post by swo17 » Wed May 25, 2011 5:55 pm

Not to mention that there will continue to be great films, novels, albums, etc. long after you die that you will never even know exist. Unless heaven turns out to be a Barnes & Noble.

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FerdinandGriffon
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#78 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Wed May 25, 2011 5:57 pm

swo17 wrote:Unless heaven turns out to be a Barnes & Noble.
Terrible selection.

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domino harvey
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#79 Post by domino harvey » Wed May 25, 2011 5:59 pm

Heaven probably is overpriced, kind of a hassle to navigate, and lit a bit too brightly

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Tommaso
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#80 Post by Tommaso » Wed May 25, 2011 6:07 pm

Oh dammit, I think I'm the surrender type, and I feel bad about necessarily having to miss so much ;) . Which is why this 30s listmaking could go on for the next two years if I had the choice. On the other hand, I'm currently 'negatively culling' everything made after 1960...Well', that's not entirely true, but you get the idea.

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colinr0380
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#81 Post by colinr0380 » Wed May 25, 2011 6:17 pm

So what they are saying is that Warners are actually doing everyone a favour by making huge swathes of their back catalogue unavailable so that we can enjoy repeated viewings of The Hangover II guilt-free?

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#82 Post by matrixschmatrix » Wed May 25, 2011 6:38 pm

That always seems like a great argument for why the "you call yourself a cineaste but you haven't seen [...]?!?" thing is so ludicrous- and as the article points out, it also means that there is always, always another rabbit hole to fall into. It's easy to make fun of people who never look back past the current foam of whatever's coming out at the moment, but whatever knowledge I have of movies is just as shallow relative to some on this board as such people would be to me. I find that really delightful, it means that I will always have a spot for myself on either side of the conversation, student or teacher.
Last edited by matrixschmatrix on Wed May 25, 2011 8:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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bunuelian
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#83 Post by bunuelian » Wed May 25, 2011 8:22 pm

A delightful thread. One of the many reasons to keep coming back to this forum. I'd missed this thread on one of my long hiatuses away from film watching.

My kevyip has been growing a lot lately as I've rediscovered my love of exploring new, unfamiliar cinematic ground, and the availability of discs covering areas of interest to me (1960's new wave movements, mostly) has greatly expanded. My film watching time is severely limited by the fact that my grilfriend isn't much into film, so I tend to watch them alone late at night. What constantly impresses me when I'm trying to decide what to watch is that I've managed to gather together an amazing library of films, thanks mostly to reading this forum, so I can usually pop in something from my kevyip and enjoy the hell out of it. When I don't know what to watch, I usually grab the first thing I run across that I've not seen.

Some things are harder to justify on a whim, and I'm wondering if I'll ever get to them. The Tarr films top that list, beacuse of their length and pacing. I also avoid the last few titles of directors I love that I've not watched, because the first time I watch Bresson's Joan will be the last time I see a Bresson film for the first time. The threat of my girlfriend interrupting that experience to talk about the dog's need to take a shit or a carpet she found on craigslist is too grave.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#84 Post by matrixschmatrix » Wed May 25, 2011 8:31 pm

That's funny, I never place a particular value on the first time I see anything. To some degree, I feel as guilty for all the movies I've only watched once as I do for those I own and haven't seen, since to me it's always the second viewing (or the third, or the fourth) that really brings out the subtleties of a movie- my favorite movie experiences are always coming back to something I love after letting it live in my head for years.

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bunuelian
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#85 Post by bunuelian » Wed May 25, 2011 8:39 pm

My group of unwatched films that I care that much about is quite small - two or three Bunuel films, a couple by Bresson, a couple Nykvist/Bergmans. I'm more concerned about the lack of interruption during the first viewing than I am about the fact of watching them "first for the last time." There's something terrible about having a first impression disrupted that can disrupt the gestation in the mind that follows. After having this happen to a few of my Czech New Wave first viewings, I've grown particularly defensive. It's especially problematic because I have at best three or four nights a month to watch films, so rewatching isn't common for me these days.

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MichaelB
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#86 Post by MichaelB » Thu May 26, 2011 3:24 am

Since turning freelance, I now have the luxury of being able to watch Blu-rays during the day - but my workload means that for the most part viewings have to be tied to current projects, so my plan to have a massive Ozu catch-up is still in abeyance.

That said, I've now watched five out of the fourteen titles that the BFI has released so far (all in 1080p), so I've made some progress.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#87 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu May 26, 2011 3:29 am

I'm always curious about this- does relating to the films professionally damage your ability to enjoy them personally at all? Do you find yourself having to force your mind into a dispassionate place lest your enjoyment of the movie distract you from whatever work related to it you're supposed to do?

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MichaelB
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#88 Post by MichaelB » Thu May 26, 2011 4:33 am

matrixschmatrix wrote:I'm always curious about this- does relating to the films professionally damage your ability to enjoy them personally at all? Do you find yourself having to force your mind into a dispassionate place lest your enjoyment of the movie distract you from whatever work related to it you're supposed to do?
If I stopped enjoying it, I'd give up my job tomorrow. Seriously.

I'm lucky in that I've never been one of those film critics who's had to review everything - I've usually had the luxury of being able to pick and choose what to focus on. This is even more true now that I'm a freelancer, as I can always turn a commission down.

Of course, in practice, I hardly ever do (for obvious reasons), but my various commissioning editors have mostly known me for years, and have a very good idea of my tastes and areas of expertise - so there's a strong probability that I'd respond well to most of the stuff that I'm given.

Probably the least enjoyable part of the job is having to write a lengthy Sight & Sound review off the back of a single unrepeatable screening. Actually, it's not so much the review that's the problem - it's the 250-word synopsis, which has to be as unimpeachably accurate as I can make it. It's fine if the distributor has supplied copious notes, but in practice most of their synopses tail off about a third of the way through. In fact I remember my delight when I saw the exhaustively detailed multi-page one for The Ghost in the press notes, as I knew I wouldn't have to waste time noting down plot points and could concentrate on more interesting details. My nightmare is getting a film like Shane Carruth's Primer (which has a fiendishly convoluted narrative structure that loops in on itself repeatedly) as a one-off screening with no pre-existing synopsis notes - fortunately, I covered that one off a DVD screener.

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knives
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#89 Post by knives » Thu May 26, 2011 4:41 am

You have had to cover the entire plot before? I've never seen that done for a review before where a general summary of the first act is usually what appears. Are you talking about more in depth stuff like your DVD booklet/ magazine write ups?

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MichaelB
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#90 Post by MichaelB » Thu May 26, 2011 4:50 am

knives wrote:You have had to cover the entire plot before? I've never seen that done for a review before where a general summary of the first act is usually what appears. Are you talking about more in depth stuff like your DVD booklet/ magazine write ups?
All Sight & Sound reviews of theatrical releases come with a full synopsis (spoilers, ending and all) in a separate box. This has been standard practice since the earliest days of the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1934 - when the MFB merged with S&S, the latter took over the policy. It's all to do with the magazines' semi-official status as the journal of record of what played in British cinemas, and what makes them so valuable as research tools - though they're often a lot harder to write than the main review because of the need to make them scrupulously accurate. If it's a narrative-driven thriller, this is fine - but if it's an elliptical arthouse movie, it's more of a challenge.

They're typically around 250 words, though they can be shorter (my one for The Queen was a fair bit shorter, and documentaries can be as short as 100 words), and I've occasionally had to make them longer if the plot was so complicated that I couldn't sum it up in 250 words without significant omissions. I remember the one for Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia (which I didn't write myself) was unusually long.

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knives
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#91 Post by knives » Thu May 26, 2011 4:56 am

That's fascinating and I can see how that would easily be a herculean task especially in the case of something like The Mirror or even Slacker.

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MichaelB
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#92 Post by MichaelB » Thu May 26, 2011 5:00 am

In fact, here are some examples. (Obviously riddled with spoilers, so approach with caution).

El baño del papa:
SpoilerShow
Melo, Uruguay, 1988. Beto and his friends scrape a living by smuggling goods across the Brazilian border to and from nearby Aceguá, risking confrontation with either customs men Alvarez and Luna, or mobile patrolman Meleyo. There is much excitement in Melo when it is announced that Pope John Paul II will visit the town as part of a tour of Latin America. The local media predicts a crowd of between 30,000 and 200,000 wealthy Brazilians. Beto’s friends and neighbours plan to set up catering stalls and cash in on the expected bonanza. Beto wants to earn enough to buy a motorbike, and decides to open a public toilet and charge visitors for its use. He begins building it in his front yard, and trains his wife Carmen and daughter Silvia in its operation. He has to take on more smuggling runs to pay for materials, eventually agreeing to do a series of jobs for the hated Meleyo. Silvia finds out about this and confronts him in front of Carmen. Crushed, Beto refuses to collect his fee from Meleyo, and although a guilt-ridden Carmen makes it up from her savings, valuable time has been lost. Beto has to do a final run on 8 May, the morning of the Pope’s visit, and the toilet bowl itself is installed only at the last minute, after a roadside confrontation with Meleyo. It is all in vain: the sparse crowds number 8,000 at best, most of them from Melo. But Beto claims to have another idea...
Battle for Haditha:
SpoilerShow
Haditha, Iraq, 18 November 2005: Captain Sampson’s US marine 1 platoon - which includes Sergeant Ross, corporals Marcus, Matthews and Ramirez, and Private Cuthbert - is informed that insurgents are active in the city. Former soldier Ahmad and his friend Jafar collect a bomb from Al-Qaeda activists. In a tranquil suburb, betrothed couple Hiba and Rashied make love, while a circumcision party for young Abdul is prepared. Ahmad and Jafar bury the bomb by the roadside, and retreat to the top of a nearby building. Various people observe them and inform the Sheik, the local Islamic authority. He tells them to pray to God. Ramirez’s platoon finds a bomb factory in a suburban house. A man plants an olive tree to mark Abdul’s circumcision. Mistaking his motives, the marines shoot him dead.
19 November: as the marines drive past, Ahmad triggers the bomb, killing Cuthbert and wounding others. Sampson orders Ramirez to find the perpetrators. The marines kill numerous people, including children, Rashied’s elderly parents and Rashied himself. Ahmad and Jafar, who have been filming the events, escape and return home.
20 November: after a mass funeral, the Sheik films a video testimony by Safa, a wounded 12-year-old who has lost her entire family. An official US statement claims that eight insurgents were killed. Ramirez is awarded a Bronze Star.
8 March 2006: following the emergence of video evidence, Ramirez, Marcus, Matthews and Ross are informed that they will be investigated for murder.
The Boss Of It All:
SpoilerShow
Denmark, the present. Ravn plans to sell his IT company to Icelandic businessman Finnur Sigurdsson, but Finnur insists on dealing directly with `the boss of it all’. However, the boss is in fact a nonexistent scapegoat for the tough decisions that might make Ravn unpopular. Ravn hires actor Kristoffer to impersonate this mythical figure, insisting that he stick to his script instead of applying the performance theories of Kristoffer’s favourite playwright Gambini. Finnur refuses to let Kristoffer grant power of attorney to Ravn and insists on his presence at all negotiations. After Kristoffer inadvertently introduces himself to Ravn’s colleagues as the company president, Ravn reluctantly includes him in staff meetings. In his office, Kristoffer tries to divine what he’s said to staff over the past decade (in Ravn-penned emails) and ends up being seduced by Lise and inadvertently proposing to Heidi. Kristoffer discovers that his ex-wife Kisser is Finnur’s Danish lawyer. She tells him that Ravn will fire his colleagues after the sale. At the next meeting with Finnur, Kristoffer refuses to sign. He later tells Ravn that he will only sign once Ravn confesses his duplicity to his staff. Ravn does so, but blames Kristoffer. Kristoffer in turn blames his own (equally nonexistent) boss, and suggests they go on a staff outing at the company’s expense. At the final meeting with Finnur, Ravn’s colleagues expect Kristoffer to refuse to sell, but he discovers that Finnur is also a Gambini devotee, and signs. The Danes leave in disgust. Kristoffer starts to perform Gambini’s most famous monologue.
The Saddest Music in the World:
SpoilerShow
Failed Broadway producer Chester Kent returns to his home town of Winnipeg with his Serbian girlfriend Narcissa. Lady Port-Huntley the local beer baroness, announces a $25,000 contest to find the saddest music in the world. Although Canadian-born, Chester tells the Lady, a former lover who lost both legs in an accident involving Chester and his father Fyodor, that he will represent the United States. In exchange for sexual favours, she agrees to finance Chester’s musical plans. Musicians arrive in Winnipeg, including Serbian cellist Gavrillo the Great, who is actually Chester’s estranged brother Roderick. Roderick and Chester have an uneasy reunion at their father’s house; Fyodor then shows Roderick his collection of prosthetic legs, including a glass pair made for Lady Port-Huntley. The contest begins, with Fyodor’s Canadian entry defeated at the first stage. Chester and Roderick are more successful, though tensions arise when Roderick recognises Narcissa as his ex-wife and the mother of their late son. Narcissa denies this, and enrages Roderick by turning his grief-stricken lament into a lively dance number. Lady Port-Huntley is delighted with her new legs, but refuses to forgive Fyodor. Fyodor drinks copiously, smashes up his workshop and drowns. His funeral degenerates into a fight between his sons. At the finale, Lady Port-Huntley appears on stage, but her legs shatter at the sound of Roderick’s cello. Distraught, she stabs Chester with a glass shard. Lighting a victory cigar, he sets fire to the building. Narcissa finally recognises the tune that Roderick is playing, her memory returns and the two are reconciled. While the others flee, a mortally wounded Chester plays the piano; he finally sheds a tear before perishing in the flames.
...and the shorter-than-average The Queen (I didn't really have anything to add to this one!):
SpoilerShow
London, May 1997. Queen Elizabeth II wakes up to hear that the Labour Party has won the general election, and receives Tony Blair at Buckingham Palace. On 31 August, her former daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, is killed in a Paris car crash. The Queen, backed by the other senior royals, believes that the appropriate response is a quiet funeral accompanied by dignified silence, but the overwhelming public grief makes that impossible. Ensconced in Balmoral Castle in Scotland, the Queen makes numerous small concessions over the next few days, but Blair correctly senses that the popular mood is turning rapidly against the monarchy and tries to persuade her to make a high-profile televised speech. After much debate and soul-searching she returns to Buckingham Palace to address the nation. A few weeks after the funeral, the Queen and Blair meet again, and try to make sense of what happened.
...and the one for Primer, possibly the hardest I've had to write:
SpoilerShow
Dallas, the present. While privately trying to solve a problem faced by his garage-based technology consortium, Abe makes a new discovery which he shows to his closest colleague, Aaron. Inside Abe’s machine, a children’s toy Weeble develops a coating of mould that normally would take years to accumulate. Concluding that the Weeble must have shuttled backwards and forwards in an infinite time loop, Abe builds a larger machine capable of housing a human being. After testing it himself, he shows Aaron how to travel back six hours in order to manipulate the stock market to his advantage. Although the invention is initially successful, problems arise: Aaron starts bleeding inexplicably, and his mobile phone rings when two Aarons are in simultaneous circulation. It also seems that would-be backer Thomas Granger has been using the machine, but he collapses into a vegetative state when confronted. Distrust grows between Abe and Aaron, who start making independent journeys back in time to manipulate the situation to their advantage. Aaron is drugged and locked in his attic by another future self. Abe seeks to affect the outcome of a violent altercation at a party involving Granger’s daughter, Rachel, with whom Aaron has been having an extra-marital affair. Realising the implications of what he has done, and desperate to evade his doubles, Aaron leaves the country. Abroad, he supervises the construction of a much larger machine.
With that one, I added in the main body of the review that "Although the attached synopsis covers key plot points, it unavoidably simplifies the recursive multiple-Moebius-strip structure, and the voiceover from one of the Aarons adds a further level of complexity (or confusion, according to taste)."

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manicsounds
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#93 Post by manicsounds » Thu May 26, 2011 11:05 am

Nice one for Primer. I don't think the director could have even put it in words as coherently.
"Slipstream" by Anthony Hopkins is a difficult one to do. When a friend saw I had the DVD and asked to borrow it, I just told him, "When you watch it, just don't think about what's going on. You'll either love it or hate it." Easy enough...

I let my girlfriend decide what to watch. She usually picks a number for me, and watch the coresponding alphabetically ordered title. Either that, or she'd pick a year and start from there. But I know I take up a lot of time if I tried to pick something out on my own.

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Re: On deciding what to watch

#94 Post by PillowRock » Thu May 26, 2011 1:24 pm

bunuelian wrote:When I don't know what to watch, I usually grab the first thing I run across that I've not seen.
That "first thing I run across that I've not seen" concept just doesn't fit into how I have things set up at all.

I keep my kevyip shelved in my living room (where it's as convenient as possible to my main viewing location). I have my (already watched at least once) library of movies on bookshelves in a spare bedroom upstairs. If I'm in the living room, all I have to do is look in the right direction and there are more movies I've never seen than I can shake a stick at, and *very* few that I have watched before (many, many more blind buys than disks of movies I've seen in there).

The thing is, I've gotten very little movie watching in lately. I started in on Rosetta Stone Spanish (Latin American) a month or so ago, and the nightly time spent with that pretty well gets rid of the concept of having a big enough block of time on a weeknight to watch an entire feature straight through.

There have been times when my decision technique was to scan my kevyip looking for the shortest feature that I can find so that I can watch something and still get something approaching enough sleep to work the next morning. (Recently got around to watching Lupino's The Hitch-hiker that way.)

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Gregory
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#95 Post by Gregory » Thu May 26, 2011 2:28 pm

First, I decide based on whether I'm watching with other people or alone. Quite a bit of what I have wouldn't be a crowd-pleaser for one reason or another. I still get semi-teasing flak from a certain party for having "made" her watch Aguirre the Wrath of God about 9 years ago. She agreed to watch it with me and then loathed it for reason I still don't get. Anyway, secondly, I narrow choices down based on length. For one thing, I'm renting and don't have light-blocking curtains for the room where the projector is, so I try to get really long films out of the way in the winter, and I'll also often do double features on longer nights. I'm generally unable to sleep in anymore, so I try to be in bed by about 12-12:30. A month from now, where I live, sunset will be at 9 p.m. I'm still happy with this setup and enjoy viewing everything at night (it surely makes my days more productive). On the very rare evenings when I'm alone in the house for the whole night, I usually try to pick out an extremely long film to tackle. About a month ago, I did Bernard's Les Miserables all in one sitting, which was lovely.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#96 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu May 26, 2011 2:40 pm

Gregory wrote:First, I decide based on whether I'm watching with other people or alone. Quite a bit of what I have wouldn't be a crowd-pleaser for one reason or another. I still get semi-teasing flak from a certain party for having "made" her watch Aguirre the Wrath of God about 9 years ago. She agreed to watch it with me and then loathed it for reason I still don't get.
I love Herzog, but outside of something like Grizzly Man, I would never hold someone not liking one of his movies against them. Herzog's world is a difficult place to live in.

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Gregory
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#97 Post by Gregory » Thu May 26, 2011 3:23 pm

(reasons, I meant to say)
I don't hold it against her in the least. It was just a surprising reaction for reasons I can't explain without going too far off-topic.

Back to taming the kevyip-- I was making real progress last year and the year before, but it's looking hopeless again. Too many unmissable bargains, too many box sets, too many Blu upgrades... I still haven't even watched the first Eclipse set from four years ago. Somehow it just never feels like the right time for 1940s Bergman.

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Re: On deciding what to watch

#98 Post by Archers of Loaf » Thu May 26, 2011 7:01 pm

I rarely give myself the opportunity to reduce my kevyip. The combination of a DVR and TCM is a dangerous, dangerous thing - often when I have down time and i'm close to the TV, i'll go through the guide and set dozens of films to record. I get myself to the point where I feel guilty for watching a DVD because I know that I have an unreasonable amount of films taking up space on the DVR. For instance, this week i'm pretty locked in to watching a handful of Esther Williams films, and yet my newly received Tracy/Hepburn collection will find its place on my shelf and collect dust.

On several occasions, i've tried to enforce upon myself a calendar to dictate what films I will watch on what days. I would plan the next six weeks of movie watching - the idea being that I would find the most sensible rationing between theater-going, NetFlix releases, films on the DVR, and my kevyip. Naturally, the plan always falls apart within days.

I suppose I have grown to accept the shame of a growing kevyip... besides, who wants to keep a library full of books they've already read?

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#99 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu May 26, 2011 7:17 pm

Haha, this feels like Alcoholics Anonymous. My name is Tom, and I'm addicted to buying movies.

I have 444 movies I own and haven't watched yet right now (I know this, because I keep a database. I have time for that, evidently, but not actually to watch the things.) A lot of it is giant box sets- I buy something like the Harold Lloyd set and don't get a chance to watch more than one or two things from it for months- and also because I buy things in huge quantities from friends or people on the forums here, on the grounds that I'd rather have it cheap than timely. But nonetheless, the only metric I seem to be able to maintain is a minimum 50/50 ratio of watched to unwatched. I feel guilty for all kinds of stupid things, for rewatching something I've seen, watching TV shows instead of movies, watching movies that don't fit one or another of projects I'm working on, etc.

On the other hand, it's not like DVDs an blus go bad if you don't watch them, and given the way I purchase them, I generally don't even have to worry much that their value will fall. And hell, I have an enormous selection of things I've never seen available to me every time I set down to watch something. It's daunting, but it's also nice.

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bunuelian
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Re: On deciding what to watch

#100 Post by bunuelian » Thu May 26, 2011 9:03 pm

Last night I took some flak for the size of my kevyip, after I added the Oshima Eclipse set to it. "Do you really need more DVDs?" she asked me. "You hardly ever watch them." *sigh*

My other money sink is modular synthesizers. At least with that, she's got no clue what she's looking at. I need to get more sophisticated in how I structure my kevyip...

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