Missing milestones

Earlier this week I watched my 5,900th movie ever -- and completely blew past it without even noticing.

This is very unlike me.

Every hundredth movie watched is not a milestone worth recognizing in a venue like this, unless you want your readers to start slapping you for your self-indulgence. But I certainly recognize it privately. In fact, I feel a little excitement as that benchmark approaches, wondering what title it will be. Once I hit the benchmark, I bold the text when I record that title in my Word document where I keep track of my viewings in chronological order. 

So it's very unlike me to get so far behind in my documentation that I don't even notice which movie is the landmark movie.

I don't think I'm particularly busy right now -- in fact, we've just entered into another "snap" five-day lockdown -- but for some reason I have gotten behind on recording my new viewings. I left off after my viewing from last Thursday (ten days ago), when, I now see, I had watched my 5,897th film (The Tomorrow War). I'd already watched five more movies by the time I got back to this Word document to record any of them.

So it was with a different kind of excitement that I discovered, in retrospect, that my 5,900th viewing was the long-delayed Black Widow.

I'm not saying it wouldn't have been Black Widow if I'd known that I'd seen 5,899 movies when I sat down to watch it. It was a planned second movie of the night after I went to an earlier critics screening of Gunpowder Milkshake on Monday night. 

But I usually prefer a movie like Gunpowder Milkshake to be a milestone movie; it's just more memorable. (For the great title, not for the quality of the movie.) At the same time, I am quite determined not to specifically steer my viewings toward a milestone viewing. That's not to say you can't make subconscious decisions that affect this outcome.

And the two movies I watched before Gunpowder Milkshake were both rewatches on Sunday, as you will remember I wrote about here. Would I have made one of those a new viewing if it might have lined up Gunpowder to be #5,900?

I like that it worked out that I didn't know, as it made the whole thing more organic. But this is the first time I can remember missing the milestone in, I don't know, thousands of viewings? I've been marking these milestones for close to 20 years now. So I don't expect this organic experience to happen again anytime soon.

And definitely not for my next milestone, which is a milestone worth writing about here: 6,000 movies. And a big milestone like this is also the only time I do steer myself toward a particular viewing, to celebrate the milestone, and just hope I'm in a convenient position in my life to work it out -- not on vacation or something, for example.

Having watched a few more movies since Black Widow, I now have 97 more movies to figure out what landmark #6,000 might be. At my current pace I estimate that might arrive in late November.