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Thursday, July 07, 2016

2058 Films

Ever since Bruce and Leslie asked me how many books I thought I read in a year, I've felt an increasingly overwhelming urge to catalogue not just what I'm reading now, but everything I've ever read. This mild obsession has extended to cataloguing every film I've seen and television series I've completed.

I've been using Letterboxd to log the films I've seen, and tonight I crossed the 2,000 film mark; indeed, I've catalogued 2,058 films, and I know that doesn't cover every film I've ever seen because I keep remembering more. Only tonight did I realize I'd forgotten to log Zero Effect, Xanadu, Vamp, Stripes, The Mummy, Red Dawn and many others. Remembering which films I've seen recently is relatively easy compared to digging out memories of movie nights from decades ago.

Letterboxd has a wide range of cool features, but I discovered one tonight that I really like a lot: it will sort your list of films by decade or even year. It's easy to see how many films you've watched from each of the dozen or so decades of the art.

So here's my list - at least as it stands today:

1900s: 4
1910s: 15
1920s: 22
1930s: 96
1940s: 109
1950s: 179
1960s: 207
1970s: 245
1980s: 335
1990s: 347
2000s: 300
2010s: 196

It's an almost disappointingly linear increase through the decades, with the exception of a small dropoff from the 1990s to the 2000s and a bigger drop from the 2000s to the 2010s (although to be fair, this decade is only a little half over).

As for individual years, the winner is 1998; I've seen 44 films released from that year. They are: The Thin Red Line, Shakespeare in Love, A Simple Plan, Star Trek: Insurrection, Babe: Pig in the City, Enemy of the State, American History X, Apt Pupil, Soldier, What Dreams May Come, Antz, Pleasantville, Rushmore, Elizabeth, Ronin, Run Lola Run, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, The Avengers, Ever After (which I reviewed in The Peak), Saving Private Ryan, The Mark of Zorro, Pi, Armageddon, The X Files, Free Enterprise, The Truman Show, Godzilla, Bulworth, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Deep Impact, Tarzan and the Lost City, The Big Hit, From the Earth to the Moon (HBO miniseries), Lost in Space, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Dark City, Burn Hollywood Burn, The Big Lebowski, The Replacement Killers, Zero Effect, Gods and Monsters, and Great Expectations. Of these, of course, I caught most on DVD or Blu-Ray or movie channels after their initial release; but I did catch a few of these films in theatres, including Shakespeare in Love (with Leslie, maybe, or do I just associate her with Shakespeare?), A Simple Plan (with Allan, I think), Star Trek: Insurrection, Soldier, What Dreams May Come, Antz, Pleasantville (with Kim, I think), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (with Parvesh in California), The Mark of Zorro, The X Files, The Truman Show (with Allan and Leslie, I think), Godzilla (with Sean?), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarzan and the Lost City (in St. Albert's theatre for some reason), Lost in Space (again with Allan, I think), Dark City, The Big Lebowski, and The Replacement Killers (maybe with Pete, Mike and Jeff Pitts?). Quite a year.

Several years are only represented by one film: 1900 (Cyrano de Bergerac), 1903 (The Great Train Robbery), 1917 (Bucking Broadway), 1918 (Take a Chance), 1921 (The Kid), 1922 (Nosferatu), and 1926 (The General). And of course, there are several years from the 1900s and 1910s from which I've seen zero films. But not for long - thanks, YouTube!

So there's my pitifully small sampling of the world of film as it stands today. As I continue to pore over my records and memories, I'll improve the list's fidelity. Let's see how many I've racked up by the end of the year...

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