Unpausing the world's longest pause

For four of the past five years (I skipped 2016), my bi-monthly viewing series – not to be confused with my monthly viewing series – have been part of the lifeblood of this blog.

In 2015, I watched one of the six existing Star Wars movies every two months in anticipation of The Force Awakens. In 2017, it was anime films. In 2018, I revisited films by Joel & Ethan Coen that I hadn’t loved when I first saw them. In 2019, I filled in (most of) my blind spots in Spike Lee’s filmography.

In 2020, I am going to take a little pause from something quite that useful.

Starting in February and every two months thereafter, I will be finishing movies that I started, but was not able to finish at the time I started them for whatever reason. Think of it as kind of branching off of last year’s monthly series, Audient Audit. (In fact, I considered doing them both in the same year, but I decided I wanted to watch Lee’s films more.) Appropriately enough, the series will be entitled Finish What You Started.

So while this series has no grand thematic ambitions and it’s unlikely to be something you are going to “follow along with” – to the extent that you do that anyway – it’s a useful personal goal that helps tidy up my lists and scratch itches that were never fully scratched.

As I am working from a very specific list, I can already tell you the titles I plan to watch, assuming I can source them. Since I don’t know what order I’ll watch them, I’ll just list them alphabetically. They are:

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Nicolas Roeg)

Paddington (2014, Paul King)

Sisters (2015, Jason Moore)

That Sugar Film (2014, Damon Gameau)

Withnail & I (1987, Bruce Robinson)

Coincidentally enough, the reason I could not finish That Sugar Film relates to The Force Awakens, indirectly, but I’ll wait until we get to that film to expand on that further.

You’ll notice that’s only five films. That’s because when I first started gathering titles for this series, I had not finished Sophie’s Choice. As I watched the entirety of that film in 2019, it now quite obviously cannot be watched for this series. I already finished what I started. So that means that sometime before December, I will have to remember one other film I prematurely aborted, or else prematurely abort this series.

Just so it’s not a completely dry series, I will try to add some humorous comments about why I did not watch the entire movie at the time I started watching it.

In any case, this series may not be supremely interesting to you, but what can I say, it’s my blog and I decide how to use it.

Hopefully you will derive some enjoyment from it from time to time.