It’s the last year of the decade, so I figured, what better
time to do a little clean-up?
That, combined with the fact that I’ve got a really good
title for it, clinched my 2019 monthly viewing series.
It’s going to be called Audient Audit, and it will entail me
watching one movie per month that I’ve listed myself as seeing, but may not
have actually seen.
There are a surprising number of these. I’ve got 20
potential candidates and only 12 months to see them in.
How did I get so many? Well, it has something to do with the
formulation of my original movie viewing lists, and then the additions and
adjustments to those lists over the years to keep them accurate.
It’s going on 30 years since I originally compiled a list of
all the movies I’ve ever seen. I’m putting the creation of that list at 1991 or
1992, though I can’t say for certain. The list was the result of going through
a comprehensive catalogue of movies from my local video store, and even though
it was a really long list, of course there were going to be movies that I’d
seen that weren’t on there. I’ve added those movies as I’ve thought of them
over the years, and the list I currently have – which is 5,236 and counting –
is, I would venture, within a dozen titles of being the actual list of movies I’ve
seen.
That potential discrepancy of a dozen includes both films I’ve
forgotten about that aren’t on there, and movies I’ve included that I didn’t
actually see.
As I’ve been adding to the list and correcting it over the
years, there have been a number of times I’ve added a movie that I thought I
saw, but could not say for sure. Some of these even probably date back to the
time I originally created the list. Duelling movies on Flickchart, which I’ve
been doing for nearly a decade, was a big inciting incident for adding movies
to the list. A movie would come up in a duel and I’d rank it, feeling fairly
certain I’d seen it. Then I might notice it was not on my master list, so I
added it.
In 2019, I am going to audit that list.
Which has not traditionally been the spirit behind these
monthly viewing series. These series have been designed for me to see movies I
might not otherwise see, curated according to certain themes, parts of the
world, eras of filmmaking, or the filmographies of certain actors or directors.
In almost all instances they were movies that were actually new to me.
Not this year. Or, possibly not, anyway. Some of these
movies undoubtedly will be new to me, despite my previous statements to the
contrary.
Each month, when I write up the movie on here, I will then
make the determination of whether I’d really seen it previously or not.
I have mixed feelings about devoting a whole year to this,
but I also could not resist the title. Audient Audit? How could I not do this?
And it’s not the first time I’ve done a viewing series of
movies I’d already seen. In fact, I just did one in 2018. That was my
bi-monthly series, in which I revisited Coen brothers movies I hadn’t loved. In
2015 I also rewatched, on a bi-monthly basis, the existing six Star Wars movies
in the lead-up to The Force Awakens.
And the actual progenitor of these monthly viewing series was a couple of
weekly viewing series I did back in 2010, the first of which involved
rewatching movies others loved that I hadn’t, and the second of which involved
putting some of my guilty pleasures to the test with a second viewing. So,
there is historical precedent for this. (And even if there weren't, would it really matter? This is my blog and I do what I want.)
To balance things out, my 2019 bi-monthly viewing series
will be devoted to six new movies, though I will tell you about that in a
separate post.
So I won’t publish the list in advance, because as always,
my ability to watch these movies will depend first on me being able to get my
hands on them. As previously stated, I’ve got 20 options, so I hope I can
source at least 12 of them.
I’ll publish the first before the end of January, after I
close my year-end list next Tuesday.
Thanks for coming along.
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