Oh, I'm not going to watch 142 movies this weekend. I mean that there are 142 different movies I might watch. Important difference.
If you haven't already guessed from this setup, I'm making a solo trip to the hotel again.
It's a thing I do about every year. My wife does it too -- a different weekend, obviously -- but her trips do not involve a movie marathon projected on the hotel wall like mine do.
We each used to go just one night, but lately we have expanded that to two. So much nicer on your first day knowing you don't have to pack up and leave tomorrow. And on the first morning you wake up, you still have more than 24 hours left of your visit.
Mine have involved movie marathons ever since I first envisioned this when we lived back in Los Angeles. It's a product of our years as parents, when it was really useful to get a night away rather than waking up at all hours of the night when your baby was crying. Now, we continue to do it for fun. And, I suppose in COVID times, to get the type of isolation from your family that you might need more than usual.
Most years I've done this, I've focused on DVDs, or occasionally iTunes rentals, as my primary source for getting my movies. I'd bring a dozen from my own collection and maybe another 20 gathered up from the library, knowing I'd get through half of them at most. It's nice having choice, and letting mood dictate what you watch next.
But COVID-19 has inevitably shifted how I think about such things. Not only are the libraries not yet open -- they are the last stragglers as we hit our 20th day without any new cases here in Victoria -- but my streaming subscriptions have exploded this year.
I might still bring some DVDs from my collection -- one of the two computers I'm bringing still has a DVD player -- but the vast majority of what I will watch will come from Netflix, Amazon, Stan, AppleTV+, Disney+ or Kanopy.
Hence, 142 movies.
That's right, I went through each of these services, as meticulously as I could handle before burning out, and dutifully recorded the names of all the movies I might consider watching this weekend. The majority of them are rewatches, as is consistent with how I've envisioned these hotel movie marathons in the past. In fact, 97 of them are movies I've already seen, though most of them not more than once or twice. I then whacked all the titles in a spreadsheet, including a second column that noted which streaming service on which to find them. I even printed it out for good measure.
The poster I've included here is one of the only ones I know I will definitely watch, and also one of the only ones that's not on a streaming service. Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film Possession is extremely hard to find, so a friend actually gave me a digital copy of it. And I know there's something fucked up about it, though I don't know (or remember) what. So isolating myself in a hotel to watch it, rather than at home on a weeknight as my wife is regularly walking through, is the way to go.
The rest ... well, I'll have my list to consult, won't I?
I do worry that my current plan entails an excessive reliance on the hotel's WiFi. I do not recall that its availability or its speed has ever been an issue in the past, but if it is, I could be out of luck. That said, I do have 40 GBs of data per month on my phone, 36.8 of which is still available between now and the 10th of December. I can probably lean on that if I need to.
I may have buried the lede in my eagerness to tell you about all the movies I've curated. And that is: I also have a new projector.
The one I'd been using in the past, whose possible lack of reliability I wrote about in this post, had cost only $80 to procure, slightly used. For $80 it was an amazing deal, and did the trick. But the image was not really good enough to watch foreign language films -- the subtitles were too difficult to read -- and it came with the additional headache of requiring an adapter to an American plug. Yes, I bought it in Australia from a guy on Gumtree (the local equivalent of Craigslist), but the guy had acquired it in America. The adapter did the trick, but it was always just one more thing to worry about.
My new projector cost ... more. I'll just leave it at that. And I tested it out for the first time last night. It's fabulous.
So this could well be my best movie marathon yet. One further exciting detail is that they said I could check in "around lunchtime." In the past it was always a strict 2 p.m. check-in, at least as I recall. I suppose industry-wide desperation could play a role in their increased flexibility. I'm off work at 11:30, and my wife is dropping me off soon after that.
In the meantime, I will not watch a movie tonight. My eyes need to rest up.
One hundred forty-two movies don't watch themselves you know.
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