The problem with most film sites, this one included, is that everything is about the new. It’s all about what movie is in the cinema this weekend, or what’s due out in a few months time. However there’s over a century of cinema that largely gets ignored, so to redress the balance a little, I’ve come up with a new plan, that if it all works out will take two-and-half years to complete and take in everything from Chaplin’s shorts and golden age greats like Gone With The Wind, to world cinema classics and arthouse oddities. If that sounds rather dull, don’t worry because most of the time I’ll be waffling on about much more popular movies, from Fight Club to Hellboy.
The idea is to go A-Z through my DVD/Blu-ray collection, watching and writing something about a different disc each day, but being tied to whatever film comes next in the list. If you’re wondering why you should care about my DVD collection, you shouldn’t, but it’s the only one I’ve got easy access to and it’s slightly unusual in that because I’ve been reviewing films for the past decade, it’s very eclectic and covers a massive array of different kinds of film. This should allow me to riff about anything and everything cinema. These won’t be reviews, they’ll be, as the title of this website suggests, muses, where I’ll look at whatever ideas and themes each film throws up, whether that’s personal anecdotes, looks at the way movies work or anything else I can think of.
Now for a few stats. The collection consists of 909 TV and DVD releases (if I’ve got multiple box sets for a TV show, they’ve all been gathered together to count as a single entry) ranged across more than 40-feet of shelving, and by my reckoning it should take almost exactly 2.5 years to go from A to Z at a rate of writing about one a day. I’ve also worked out that if all you did was sleep and watch DVDs, it would take more than six solid months to watch everything I own.
With that last thought in mind, I have to admit I haven’t watched every disc in my collection. There are numerous things that have come into my possession, which have simply sat on the shelf, kept but never opened, so goodness know what I’m going to discover as I go on. Even with a lot of the things I have watched, I have no idea what I’m going to write, but hopefully something will come to mind!
So make sure you come back every day, because you never know what film I’ll be covering (unless you look at the index below, of course), or what I might think up to say about it. For example, in almost exactly a year’s time, we’ll have a week where we’ll be covering Laurence Olivier’s 1945 Shakespeare adaptation Henry V, followed by directly by the sci-fi TV hit Heroes – Seasons 1 & 2, before moving onto the three High School Musical movies and the 70s horror classic, The Hills Have Eyes. And you can’t get much more eclectic that that.
Now that you know the general idea behind the project, here are the rules:
1: To qualify, a film has to have been in my DVD/Blu-ray collection on September 10th, 2009.
2: All discs I own will be included, whether I want to watch and write and about them or not
3: While film sequels, remakes and spin-off are counted as separate entries, multiple season box sets from the same TV series have been gathered together as a single entry (basically so we don’t have, for example, two weeks just talking about 12 different seasons of ER).
4: Films have to be watched and written about in A-Z order, with a new post about a different film every day, starting on September 11th, 2009 (except for the first day, when there’ll be two).
5: When alphabetising, the words, ‘The’ ‘A’ and ‘An’ have been ignored, so, for example, The Silence Of The Lambs is categorised under S instead of T.
And that’s basically it – quite simple, but who knows what the results will be or if I’ll run out of things to say halfway through. I’m hoping that the seemingly random groupings of films might throw up some interesting parallels and that both I and anyone reading might find a few interesting things along the way. But who knows where this journey might take me over the next two and a half years, or even whether anyone will care!
So CLICK HERE to see the 909 films and TV releases I’ll be talking about, from A to Z, starting on September 11th, 2009 with the poker flick 21 and the documentary 9/11 (it seemed silly to wait until September 13th to post an entry about the Trade Center attack) and ending sometime in March 2012 with Zodiac – Director’s Cut, taking in everything from silent Russian films to modern blockbusters in-between!
Tim Isaac
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
CLICK HERE to read the first Movie-A-Day article, on the poker movie, 21
