Another year has gone and come, another ball has dropped in Times Square (couldn't bear to watch Dick Clark attempt to count backwards from 10, so we opted for Carson Daly - not much of an improvement, I must say).
I'll need to double-check, but it looks like my favorite movie seen in 2010 is a toss-up, between "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and "The Time Traveler's Wife", both scoring a solid 9 out of 10. Runners-up with a score of 8 are "Slumdog Millionaire", "Up", "The Simpsons Movie", "The Prestige" and "The Hurt Locker". Yep, that seems about right.
Two years ago, I made a resolution to watch a movie a day in 2009, and 1 year ago, I made a resolution to continue the process. Today, I make a resolution to end the process this year. Oh, not right away - after watching 730 movies in a row, the big number 1,000 is looming in the distance, and it would be a shame to stop now. But I resolve to ONLY watch enough movies this year to get me to a nice round grand. 270 movies in 2011? No problem.
This means that I don't have to force myself to stick to an average of a movie a day - if I want to take a vacation, or not bring movies with me to Comic-Con, that's OK. And if I miss a day, I miss a day. So I finish in mid-October rather than early October, big whoop. I'd like to take some time this year to enjoy the holidays - I make a themed CD of Christmas music each year that goes out with my cards, and though this year the theme and the songs kind of just fell into place, I won't necessarily get that lucky again.
Watching movies is easy, but the toughest part is the organization of my list - I've now managed to compose TWO 365-movie strings, where each movie had something in common with the movie before it and after it, whether they were thematically linked, or just shared an actor. Now eventually I'll be left with a list of random leftovers, with nothing in common, and that makes it difficult to proceed. Sure, I could pick randomly, or decide what I'm in the mood for each day, but where's the fun in that?
So, after staring at a blank January calendar for a few days, I decided to look up some famous birthdays, some actors who I've highlighted already and some whose films I've been putting off - overlaying a few famous birthdays gave me a rough structure for January, and at least an idea of how I want to proceed. So look for some notable Birthday Shout-outs in 2011.
The numbers are encouraging - I started 2009 with a list of 435 movies, and since I was constantly adding to the list, the first year's viewing of 365 films only reduced the list to about 410 at the start of 2010. Today the list has been reduced to 338, so a lot of good progress was made this year. I still won't be able to polish off the list by watching 270 more movies, but maybe I can come close.
This year's dedication is a little tricky, since I figured by now I'd be dedicating this thing to my cat - but he's approaching 20 and hasn't packed it in yet, so I've got to go another direction. Maybe to Irvin Kershner, director of "The Empire Strikes Back", who passed away a month ago - George Lucas was an obvious source of inspiration for my movie-based career, but Kershner's like a (mostly) unsung hero. And I met him at Comic-Con way back, just when I was starting to learn digital cameras, and I flubbed a picture of Kersh posing with Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams - there's a photo opportunity that I knew would never come around again. I suppose my back-up choice would be puzzle expert Martin Gardner, who also died in 2010, but Kershner's got a better connection to the movie world.
Now, on with the countdown...
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