That would be 14 movies in 46 hours.
That's in fact two more than the most I'd managed before.
Factor in maybe 12 hours of fitful, heartburn-affected sleep -- remember that I bring a whole bag of junk food with me -- and those 14 movies were really occurring in something like 34 waking hours. If you give each movie a two-hour time block, which factors in 15 minutes of enforced downtime between movies (and sometimes to let the projector cool), that leaves only about six hours that I did anything other than watch movies.
Actually, I can't account for more than an hour or so outside the hotel, other than quick trips to the shops. That was my Saturday morning brunch, which was scrumptious. So maybe 2:15 would be a better block of time to allocate to each.
Now, 14 movies is a lot to write about in a recap post, if I'm intending to provide deep thoughts on what was my most recent (not my first) viewing of most of the films. Ten of the movies I watched were repeats, with only four new ones, and the last new one over by 11 a.m. on Saturday morning.
So instead of really writing about the movies individually, I thought I'd give you a flat list, with a line break in between the day changes, and then make some general observations about the experience. The movies in bold were the first-time viewings.
Rock Star
The Girl Next Door
Stop Making Sense
Loving Vincent
Frozen II
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Possession
My Octopus Teacher
Married to the Mob
Music and Lyrics
The Virgin Suicides
Labyrinth
Tangled
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The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Four Weddings and a Funeral
If I could I'd draw a line through both Possession and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because they both straddled midnight, though at least Rocky Horror was finished before I went to bed on Saturday night. I was really fighting the confounding first half of Possession on Friday night, and ended up being overwhelmed by a desire to sleep just before the first really icky supernatural element was introduced to the movie, at which point it really took off for me. Unfortunately, that last hour was watched between 7:45 and 8:45 Saturday morning, when the film's terrific horror elements were blunted by the morning sun trying to peek through the curtains. This movie deserves an entire post to itself ... let's see how the week goes whether I give it one.
Without really meaning to, I divided the movies pretty equally between time periods. Six total decades were represented among the 14 movies, including one from 1970s, four from the 1980s, two from the 1990s, three from the 2000s, three from the 2010s and one from the 2020s.
The distribution among streaming services also appeared premeditated, but I assure it was not. In fact, the six films I watched on the first day, if you count Possession as a Friday viewing, happened to be from six different individual sources: Rock Star (Netflix), The Girl Next Door (Amazon), Stop Making Sense (Kanopy), Loving Vincent (Stan), Frozen II (Disney+) and Possession (an mp4 given to me by a friend). Saturday's viewings proceeded along similar lines, though Kanopy sat this one out -- just as well as I'm down to my final two viewing credits this month. Those viewings went Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Stan, Netflix, Disney+ and a DVD from my own collection.
Oh, and funnily enough, only 11 of the movies I watched were from the 142 I told you in Thursday's post that I'd curated. As I mentioned yesterday, Tangled was not planned, and came up organically during the weekend. For some reason, Stop Making Sense didn't get added to the list when I was going through my Kanopy choices, but it was on my mind anyway because I'm watching it for Audient Authentic this month. And then I didn't list any of the DVDs I brought on that list, of which Rocky Horror was one.
Most of the films also had something in common with at least one other film. You notice these things when you watch 14 movies essentially back to back. Some of the common elements were intentional, inspirations from previous viewings, but most were not.
For example:
- Timothy Olyphant appeared in both of the first two movies, Rock Star and The Girl Next Door. I was so glad to see Olyphant's face in the first of those, having forgotten he was in it, that I specifically chose to follow up with The Girl Next Door to keep the Olyphant vibe going. (That also helps clarify which movie called The Girl Next Door this was. No, I wouldn't already be rewatching the violent 2007 version I only just watched for the first time a few weeks ago.)
- David Byrne appeared in three movies, in a manner of speaking. "Once in a Lifetime" gets played in Rock Star. Two movies later I followed up with Stop Making Sense, already sort of planned out as a Friday late afternoon movie, and as this is a Talking Heads concert movie, obviously Byrne is all over it. The real surprise was seeing that he did the music for Married to the Mob, which brought up the other surprise ...
- ... I ended up actually watching two Jonathan Demme movies. Demme directed Stop Making Sense, but I didn't remember he had also directed Married to the Mob until I actually started watching it.
- I watched two Disney digitally animated films, though the watching of Frozen II sort of directly inspired the watching of Tangled, in that I told my friend I'd watched it and he asked if I'd seen the ten-year anniversary article on the AV Club, which I wrote about yesterday.
- Possession and My Octopus Teacher both have an octopus-like creature in them -- in Possession, a spawning human who has tentacle arms while he's still in his pupa stage, and in My Octopus Teacher, an actual octopus. (And yes, the first appearance of this creature in Possession was what I missed by falling asleep about three minutes too early.)
- Stop Making Sense and My Octopus Teacher are both documentaries. Interestingly, looking back across my Microsoft Word document that keeps track of my history of all these hotel marathons lo these past ten years, I had never watched a single other documentary.
- Married to the Mob and Music and Lyrics (watched consecutively) both feature a water bed. (Hey, I didn't say these connections were all amazing.)
- Possession and Rocky Horror both feature the use of an electric kitchen saw, the type used to carve meet, both of which are used to carve human flesh. (Now that's a bit more interesting.)
- Hugh Grant appeared in both Music and Lyrics and Four Weddings and a Funeral. The first one was the accident here, as I had already been strongly considering FWAAF for my traditional Sunday morning spot of "Movie You Know So Well, You Can Pack Up the Room While Watching It."
- Rock Star and Music and Lyrics are both about the inner workings of the music industry.
- Frozen II, Labyrinth and Tangled are all stories set in a fantasy world featuring a castle.
- The Girl Next Door and The Virgin Suicides are both coming-of-age stories told from the nostalgic perspective of an older version of the characters looking back.
I think there may have been some some others in there, but I wasn't taking notes.
The only movie that I didn't find to have some direct connection to another movie was Loving Vincent, but if you want you can say that it's an animated movie, like Tangled and Frozen II -- though the means of animation is infinitely harder and not very similar in appearance, so I didn't think it warranted its own bullet point. (Don't forget, this is the movie where every single frame of the film was hand-painted by one of a total of about 100 different artists.)
I haven't even mentioned that something threatened to derail my visit from the very start.
When I got the key from the woman at the desk and asked for the WiFi password, she told me the WiFi did not work very well in that room. No sooner had I started doing calculations in my head about how quickly I'd run through this month's allotment of data on my phone, than I discovered that the signal was nothing of the sort. It worked just fine, thank you, only once or twice buffering during the whole weekend. In fact, it seemed to be worse on my other devices, like the one laptop I was using to surf the web while the other was pretty much permanently attached to the projector. During The Virgin Suicides I did momentarily switch to my phone's data to work my way through some pixelated sections of the film, but by the next movie I watched I was back to the hotel WiFi, and never looked back after that.
As with any of these trips, you have your moments of crisis. The first few movies on Friday are always the best, because you still have the whole weekend ahead of you and -- if you've consistently followed my rule of thumb -- you have a couple good "afternoon movies" with a guilty pleasure vibe to welcome you into the experience. But over the course of the weekend, you do question your choices, and that happened to me on Saturday during the consecutive viewings of Music and Lyrics and The Virgin Suicides. I didn't like either movie as much as I remembered liking them, though to be honest, I've always been lukewarm on Sofia Coppola's first film. And there was a mild sense of panic about the time slipping away, and how I had essentially just wasted four hours on two movies that might have yielded their time to a handful of the 131 others that didn't get watched. At times like this you realize that even with watching 14 movies, you can't afford -- or, you don't feel like you can afford -- to make too many mistakes.
All told, though, it was as good an experience as it always is, one that fully cures me of that itch for at least another year, by the end of it. As much as the time starts "slipping away," I don't know that I could really watch another 14 movies in another 46 hours on top of those I'd already watched, so it's just as well when it all comes to an end. Ranking my three two-night trips to this hotel, dating back to 2017, I'd say this one wasn't as good as the first, but it was better than the second.
Oh, and my new projector? Just as much of a champion as I'd hoped it would be ... and as I paid for it to be.
Speaking of those other 131 movies, I'll end with a short list of the movies that didn't quite make the cut -- the ones I most seriously considered watching in one of my available time slots, before opting for something different and then moving on from there.
Beavis and Butt-head Do America
The Break-Up
Hot Rod
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Minority Report
Punch-Drunk Love
Road Trip
Rogue One
Sleepy Hollow
Speed Racer
A Time to Kill
Wayne's World
Which I guess just means I've got my starter list for next time.
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