Thou shalt watch movies

I'm not sure if The Ten Commandments will actually be one of the movies I watch in the upcoming personal "film festival" I'm about to tell you about. It would suck up two nights all by itself, which is problematic. And though it was one of the original films up for contention, I now have 25 other films on my custom list on Letterboxd, and only ten nights of available viewing time. (Plus one long stretch on a Saturday afternoon, which may really be the time to do it.)

What is this I'm talking about? Why, I'll tell you.

A delegation from my family will be making a trip to the United States this week, but that delegation will not include me. In fact, it will be composed entirely of my wife. She's coming to a conference in Orlando for her work, and will be out of the country for a total of ten days.

While she's gone, I will watch movies.

Oh, I'll also go to work, do all the shopping, do all the cleaning, be a single dad to my two boys and all that that entails, and sleep.

But when I'm not doing those things, I will watch movies.

I pretty much do that anyway, of course, which is the only way to keep a pace of five to six viewings a week. The difference about the upcoming period is that I can start these movies just after my kids go to bed, not an hour later after my wife and I have watched some appointment TV together. (We're just wrapping up The Handmaid's Tale.) And that means I can tackle longer movies when I'm still fresh enough to watch the whole thing without falling asleep. Maybe not as long as The Ten Commandments -- not in one sitting, anyway -- but a 150-minute movie should be no problem on a given weeknight.

What makes it a "film festival," as such, is that I have been curating the films over recent weeks, in terms of library rentals, iTunes rentals and titles available on our streaming services. I'm not going to program which movie plays on which night in advance -- I'd like to leave it a bit more subject to my own whims and moods -- but I will indeed draw from this available list of titles on Letterboxd. (It's a private list, so don't bother trying to check it out -- as if you would do that.)

And as in a real film festival, there will be no nights off. Each night between this Tuesday night and the following Thursday night will feature at least one movie, with themed double features hoped for on other nights. (Just a taste of that: The Shining paired with Room 237 and Trainspotting paired with T2: Trainspotting, the latter of which I have not seen in both cases.)

The Saturday viewing slot comes courtesy of my sister-in-law. She has agreed to take both my kids on a sleepover at her house the Saturday night my wife is gone, allowing me to remain home and lie around in my own filth for a day. (Not that kind of filth -- just the general mess that I like to leave when I'm home alone, for no other reason than that I can.) As I do when I have mini film festivals on an overnight hotel stay, I will try to fit four movies into Saturday (depending on when she picks them up) and one more Sunday morning before they return.

And yeah, I could use that afternoon slot to swallow The Ten Commandments whole, but who knows if that mood will strike me when I'm actually in that position. I've already got a perfect four other titles lined up for that day -- again, mood pending.

Of course, now I've gotten carried away and short-listed entirely too many movies, leading to inevitable disappointment. But, we shouldn't spend too much time worrying about things that are inevitable.

I will do my best to document all this viewing -- much of which will be revisiting -- on my blog. And because I like catchy titles, I will label these blog posts "Cat's Away," and then whatever title I consider appropriate following the colon. (Either the movie title or a little pithy comment about the viewing experience.)

It's not that I really am a mouse playing while my cat's away, since my cat basically lets me watch whatever I want, as long as I'm infringing on nothing other than my own sleep. But there is indeed a "mouse playing" mentality when you suddenly gain complete dominion over the television for a period of time, and I will undoubtedly watch some things that would require explanation to my wife -- not even necessarily because they involve sordid subject matter (though there will be some of those), but just because any time you watch something, another person in your house might ask "Why are you watching this?" And you feel like you have to give some answer that makes sense.

I also like this festival as a symbolic baton passing between the two distinct halves of my viewing year. As I have said elsewhere on this blog, I like to break my viewing patterns down into six-month chunks. From February to July, I focus on old releases and rewatches, with new releases sprinkled in. From August to January, I focus on films from the current release year, with old releases and rewatches sprinkled in. It's about to become August, so this festival will operate as a last binge of old releases and rewatches, probably with an emphasis on the latter.

Then the baton gets passed to a real film festival, which symbolizes my shift to focusing on new releases. The very day my wife returns, the Melbourne International Film Festival begins, kicking off another viewing orgy devoted to new releases. I'll be going to about nine films during those 17 days, though for the first time this year, that also includes one old release (but more on that when the time rolls around).

Will this intense viewing period over the next month exhaust me? Well, have you met me?

Here's to the start of a bunch of exciting film watching ... whether it involves Charlton Heston and stone tablets or not.