Comments on: In 2024 I saw 1,289 movies...

In 2024 I saw 1,289 movies...

kristi — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:47:11 -0800

"And it seems that I'm just getting started." Hanan Levin (MeFite growabrain) has watched more than 4000 movies in the last four years and shares short reviews, favorites, and bits of film history on an extensive and engaging set of Tumblr posts (with a bonus spreadsheet of movies watched). [via mefi projects] (growabrain previously)

From this year's summary:

In January 2021, during the Covid lock-down, I began logging the many films that I watch every day, just to keep track. In the beginning I jotted a line or two about each, only to create a record. But then I started adding longer notes and more elaborate impressions, and before I knew it, I've got a 'Film Project' on my hands. The obsessive project mushroomed. In the course of these four years, I watched and reviewed a total of 4,126 movies; 885 in 2021, 954 in 2022, 998 in 2023, and a ridiculous number of 1,289 movies this last year. And it seems that I'm just getting started. As I wrote before, I owe an apology to nobody for my indulgence. I derive great pleasure from discovering daily the best movies ever made, and I enjoy even more the process of thinking about them and coming up with my own specific takes, if I can. ... The project, like the many others I created before it, is purely personal, and is a strict 'labor of love'.

By: Smedly, Butlerian jihadi

Smedly, Butlerian jihadi — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:50:38 -0800

That's 3.5 movies a day, and I am mildly concerned.

By: kristi

kristi — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:50:46 -0800

I saw this on Projects and started reading through the latest summaries and was just filled with a desire to track down these movies, watch some of the great things Levin has been watching. Levin's expansive interests and the wealth of observations relating movies to other movies are delightful to me.

By: kristi

kristi — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:52:37 -0800

(Ah, I kind of meant to put this in the main post: a number of these are shorts, so when I originally did some rough math imagining 2 hours a movie times 1300 movies, yeah, that seemed like a LOT, but if, say, half of them are less than half an hour, then it's a LITTLE less daunting. Alas, the spreadsheet doesn't list running time.)

By: kristi

kristi — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:58:34 -0800

Oh, and geez! I should also mention The Movie Crash Course, the fabulous film blog by EmpressCallipygos, and DirtyOldTown's wondrously prolific collection of movie posts on FanFare! MeFites! You're the best! (going away now to stop monopolizing the thread)

By: JHarris

JHarris — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:01:22 -0800

Wow! What an accomplishment! Good work growabrain, and thanks for telling us about it kristi!

By: JHarris

JHarris — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:02:33 -0800

This also causes me to wonder if we should be blogging the random movies we watch as pre- and post-show at MST Club.

By: Bryant

Bryant — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:45:39 -0800

Man, I peaked at 500 in 2023. But I did some math and when I retire, I'll probably have a 1000 movie year at some point -- once you get used to the idea that it's fun to watch three movies over the course of a weekend day, extending that to weekdays is plausible. (I look for themes a lot -- three Argentian noirs, or three Bond movies, or whatever.)

By: fleacircus

fleacircus — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:31:44 -0800

Fantastic. I keep falling short of my paltry one-a-day goal. People who ramp up their movie watching to levels like this: were there any surprises on how it changed your taste?

By: Czjewel

Czjewel — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:38:40 -0800

But so many are just rather forgettable IMHO. Quick, what movie won the Oscar for best movie in 2016?

By: DirtyOldTown

DirtyOldTown — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:05:06 -0800

#RoleModel Y'all think I'm over the top and I'm only at about 1.25 a day. Even my retirement watch-movies-all-day plan would only get me to maybe three a day.

By: Lemkin

Lemkin — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:06:12 -0800

My personal triumph of movie overindulgence was seeing 5 different movies in 5 different theaters in one day. This was accomplished in Manhattan, where screen densities are high. I think it would be a lot harder to pull off anywhere else. (Multiplexes are cheating.) I don't remember any of the 5 movies.

By: Bryant

Bryant — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:27:38 -0800

People who ramp up their movie watching to levels like this: were there any surprises on how it changed your taste? My taste got more diverse. I think having a sense of context made a difference there -- in a real sense, every movie is in conversation with its influences. I'm not much of a horror guy really, but when I saw Texas Chainsaw Massacre the other year I spent some time thinking about American New Wave road trip movies and how in part Tobe Hooper was reacting to those -- it works great even if you're not thinking about that, but it's fascinating to compare it to the road trip movies of the era like Bonnie & Clyde or Five Easy Pieces. I also started really loving deep dives into specific times and places. Watching a lot of 60s and 70s Italian crime movies was enjoyable because they were decent enough movies, but honestly the real pleasure in most cases was watching the edge get harder and harder as a reaction to societal changes in Italy. (The exception being Damiano Damiani, who is the best unknown political filmmaker of all time, his movies are flat out awesome. As well as being Italian crime flicks.) I'm more willing to just try something random. It doesn't represent a huge percentage of my movie time for the month, so why not go deep and see if a gem pops up?

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:53:21 -0800

My peak was 243 in 2020, when I was at home almost all of the time. I hit 150 in 2024, but I don't watch a lot of TV shows.

By: DirtyOldTown

DirtyOldTown — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 16:57:45 -0800

People who ramp up their movie watching to levels like this: were there any surprises on how it changed your taste? Probably the biggest difference is that in addition to the "how good is this movie?" scale and the "how well does this match my interests/tastes?" scale, I have developed a third scale for "how interesting is this movie as an artefact of its time/place/era?"

By: DirtyOldTown

DirtyOldTown — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 17:05:11 -0800

Letterboxd says I saw 452 movies last year.

By: growabrain

growabrain — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 17:17:33 -0800

Thank you, @kristi. What a surprise to find this FPP! I really appreciate it. I spend a lot of time writing my reviews as if they matter, but I doubt that anybody ever read them. However, by now, this journey is indeed my destination, and I'm excited to discover exceptional movies every single day. And if anyone will find them useful, that will be even better. I want to point out that I did "cut the cord" many years ago, and I rely exclusively on "free" streamers. So if anybody ever reads a review and gets curious, they can simply click on the highlighted name, and watch the full movie right then and there. There are many websites like cataz.to and m4uhd.tv where you can watch anything you want without passwords, torrenting, viruses, subscriptions, Etc. I think that today the crime is not watching 'pirated' content, but supporting the multi-national MSM conglomerates. Netflix and Disney are not my friends, and I say, fuck them. If anybody has any questions, I can do an informal AMA.

By: axiom

axiom — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 21:13:56 -0800

Quick, what movie won the Oscar for best movie in 2016? That depends on whether you're asking Faye Dunaway or not.

By: Atreides

Atreides — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 07:18:49 -0800

But what is the context for watching the films, growabrain? Is it just how you end the day after work? Are you retired? Do you have them playing in the background as you multi-task? I just have so many questions about the process. Are there any days where you just nope out for an alternative form of recreation or pastime?

By: growabrain

growabrain — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:24:57 -0800

@Atreides, not to get too personal, but I kind of use this as a slow-moving, deliberate suicide process; I've stripped my life of everything that was important to me before, and that's the only activity that remained. It's rich, free and unattached. I retired and resigned over a decade ago, I gave away (or lost) everything that I ever had, I'm completely alone (but not lonely) without any connections or illusions, and I don't want to 'do' anything else any more. So I live like a monk with an iPad in a literal tiny cave, and I do nothing else, except of dreaming about the end of the world. Sometimes I take walks around, but mostly I just find all my emotional and spiritual needs in this. I know it's a bit weird, but it works.

By: Atreides

Atreides — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:29:40 -0800

Not weird at all. You found the thing you need in the place in life where you are. If this is where you find your happiness or contentment, then all the more power to it.