Uh: I obsessively catalog every book I read and every movie I watch. (I have a separate list of movies that I see in theaters, which is mostly a really depressing list, and which I will probably never look at again because I don’t want to relive the shame this spiritually-bankrupt century has poisoned me with. Hah!!!!)
Anyway I divide my lists into years. It’s just a text file on my computer with “BOOKS” and “MOVIES” written in bold and I make a bulleted list beneath them. It’s real cool to look at sometimes. I like looking at it. Yeah!
Here is my movie list for 2015, which is not complete. I watched probably two or three times as many movies as this, but I’m not including things I’ve seen a billion times (‘Blade Runner,’ ‘The Master,’ ‘Akira,’ ‘The Prestige,’ and so on), because I watched all of them four or five times each over the course of the year, usually at 4 a.m., usually they were on in the background, usually I was drunk and miserable and alone and so on—and thus the movie was essentially the audio / visual equivalent of wrapping yourself in a warm blanket.
I also did not include dumb stuff I watched. I watched a lot of dumb stuff. It was interesting dumb stuff but I omitted it anyway. Most of the things on this list, I would say 80–85% of it, I had already seen. But I was watching them again because they are, uh, considered “classics” and I was in some ways studying them I guess. I was pretty loose about what I watched . . . I would start off with a director (Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson), and then if an actor kept popping up, like Gene “Jacket” Hackman or Jack Nicholson, I would just watch movies with them in it, most of which were filmed in the ’70s.
Gonna go ahead and say it right now: I don’t like ‘Giant,’ I don’t like ‘Magnolia,’ I don’t like ‘Full Metal Jacket.’
Most of these are real good. Sometimes they were so good I watched them multiple times, first by myself and then again with real cool people. I have noted this below!
HERE IT IS:
- Apocalypse Now Dedux (x2)
- The Conversation
- The Godfather
- American Graffiti
- Funeral in Berlin
- The Billion Dollar Brain
- Midnight Cowboy
- The Graduate
- The French Connection (x2)
- The Shining
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Full Metal Jacket
- Rebel Without a Cause
- Giant
- Boogie Nights
- Magnolia
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Goodfellas
- The Aviator
- Heist
- The Spanish Prisoner
- Spartan
- Five Easy Pieces (x2)
- Chinatown (x2)
- Bronson
- Valhalla Rising
- Lawless (x2)
- True Grit
- Citizen Kane
- Touch of Evil
- Road House (x4)
- Blue Velvet
- Wild at Heart (x2)
- The Day the Earth Stood Still
- They Live
- Escape From New York
- Escape From LA
- Big Trouble in Little China
- The Thing
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (x2)
- Kagemusha (x2)
I am doing it differently for 2016. I am sticking with directors and for the most part going in chronological order. So instead of just blindly adding movies to a list, I already have all the movies listed and I’ll strikethrough them after I’ve watched them. I am going to rewatch things I’ve already seen, even if I’ve seen them a lot, and even if I watched them in 2015 (like ‘The Shining,’ which I have seen probably eleven or twelve times). I reckon I want to see how these things fit into The Bigger Picture.
(Akira Kurosawa, for instance, has like literally 30 movies. I don’t think I’ve seen even half of them but I will watch them all. I can’t wait!!!!!)
Listen: I plan to go it alone, because I always go it alone. But if you are in my city, and if you want to participate in this holy ritual, then by all means, come and get some. I will feed you and give you whatever hot and cold beverages you desire. You can sleep on my bed and I will sleep on the floor. Unless you want to share my bed, which I have no problem with. I have shared my bed with many people. It’s a nice thing. I have a super thick queen-size mattress and I’m not a blanket hog. Anyway I’m serious, so keep that in mind. We will watch real cool stuff and have us a real good time.
Yeah baby. Yeah. ☆ミ
