There's nothing special about that milestone. Nothing at all.
Except that this happened to be the milestone that prompted me to create a separate Excel spreadsheet to record all my previous hundred-movie milestones.
Ever since I started keeping track not just of the movies I saw, but the order I saw them, I have made note of the new passing of every 100th movie by bolding it on the running list I keep in a Microsoft Word document. This dates all the way back to when I started this document on the occasion of my 1500th movie of all time, which was watched on February 22, 2002, and was the documentary American Pimp, directed by Allen and Albert Hughes.
Why have I cared to mark these milestones? I don't know, exactly, except that a list-maker always thinks that more is more when it comes to the data you make note of.
But it's something more driving this impulse than just obsessive documentation. I like to think there's something, I don't know, distinctive -- meaningful -- about what movie happens to make up each hundredth I watch. I don't know what that could possibly be, but I think this nonetheless.
I should mention the implied given here: that each hundredth is random and unpremeditated. That's a key part of this whole process, that it has to occur organically.
That's not always possible. For starters, sometimes I intentionally choose what the milestone movie will be. But that only comes every ten hundreds, or put another way, every thousandth movie. Each new thousandth movie I see is worth marking in some specific way, and I'm comfortable with that.
The other nine milestones every one thousand? I want it to be whatever is randomly up next in a viewing order dictated by my week-to-week viewing priorities, determined by the new releases that are out, whatever I'm reviewing next, the movies I'm watching for various series on this blog or other movie challenges, and everything else that fights its way to the top of the queue to reach my eyeballs. (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a good example of this organic process, as I had determined to watch it during the week this week -- it not being a weekend night movie -- in order to listen to them discuss it on Filmspotting.)
For some reason, when I hit #6400, I decided to go back and record all 51 movies that have gotten bolded in my Word document since I started it with American Pimp. (Yes, it's been a busy 21+ years, watching 4900 movies in that time.) So I got together an Excel spreadsheet the other night.
And because any time I do a project like this, I also feel like I should tell you about it on my blog, this is me doing that.
I should say, though, that this is not merely a masturbatory impulse just to dump information on you. There's actually real insight to be gleaned from this. That's because one thing I decided also to do was determine the number of days that transpired between each installment of 100. I can see the times in my life -- in the last two decades of my life, anyway -- when I was most focused on watching movies, and the times when I was least focused. Like, in the year before my 2008 wedding I was not watching movies with the same sense of urgency, as well as in the year 2003, perhaps because I was more focused on my girlfriend at the time and watching movies together was something we did relatively infrequently. (Though I did spike after my first son was born. What does that say about me?) Then of course there were the years when I was watching features to include them in the human rights film festival, an activity that nearly doubled my usual movie viewing during the closing months of the years 2015 and 2016.
So I will include the list of each milestone movie below, as well as the amount of time that transpired since the previous one, followed by a few stray comments. I should mention that these are only first-time viewings I'm talking about here, so high periods of repeat viewings might have sometimes caused me to take longer to get to the next milestone.
#1500 (2/22/2002): American Pimp (1999, Allen & Albert Hughes)
#1600 (10/3/2002): One Hour Photo (2002, Mark Romanek) 223 days
#1700 (6/23/2003): The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984, W.D. Richter) 263 days
#1800 (6/14/2004): The Fog of War (2003, Errol Morris) 357 days
#1900 (4/12/2005): What the Bleep Do We Know?! (2004, William Arntz) 302 days
#2000 (9/16/2005): Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) 157 days
#2100 (2/3/2006): Monster-in-Law (2005, Robert Luketic) 143 days
#2200 (8/12/2006): Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006, Adam McKay) 187 days
#2300 (1/30/2007): The Power of One (1992, John G. Avildsen) 171 days
#2400 (8/18/2007): Superbad (2007, Greg Mottola) 200 days
#2500 (3/8/2008): Flightplan (2005, Robert Schwentke) 203 days
#2600 (10/17/2008): Sex Drive (2008, Sean Anders) 223 days
#2700 (3/13/2009): Role Models (2008, David Wain) 147 days
#2800 (8/27/2009): Freddy Got Fingered (2001, Tom Green) 167 days
#2900 (1/2/2010): Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009, Kenny Ortega) 128 days
#3000 (5/12/2010): Mr. 3000 (2004, Charles Stone III) 130 days
#3100 (10/1/2010): The Ghost Writer (2010, Roman Polanski) 142 days
#3200 (1/27/2011): Freedom Writers (2011, Richard LaGravenese) 118 days
#3300 (7/17/2011): Drive Angry (2011, Patrick Lussier) 171 days
#3400 (11/30/2011): A Better Life (2011, Chris Weitz) 136 days
#3500 (4/14/2012): The Big Year (2011, David Frankel) 136 days
#3600 (11/2/2012): God Bless America (2012, Bobcat Goldthwait) 202 days
#3700 (3/27/2013): The Descent (2005, Neil Marshall) 145 days
#3800 (9/22/2013): It's a Disaster (2012, Todd Berger) 179 days
#3900 (1/14/2014): Sightseers (2012, Ben Wheatley) 114 days
#4000 (8/17/2014): Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F.W. Murnau) 215 days
#4100 (12/28/2014): Willow Creek (2013, Bobcat Goldthwait) 133 days
#4200 (5/15/2015): Capricorn One (1978, Peter Hyams) 138 days
#4300 (9/15/2015): The Visit (2015, M. Night Shyamalan) 137 days
#4400 (12/21/2015): A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014, Roy Andersson) 83 days
#4500 (4/21/2016): The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci) 122 days
#4600 (9/3/2016): Jane Got a Gun (2015, Gavin O'Connor) 135 days
#4700 (12/3/2016): Living and Other Fictions (2016, Jo Sol) 91 days
#4800 (5/7/2017): Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele) 165 days
#4900 (9/24/2017): Patti Cake$ (2017, Geremy Jasper) 130 days
#5000 (2/8/2018): The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953, Roy Rowland) 137 days
#5100 (7/20/2018): Paddington 2 (2017, Paul King) 162 days
#5200 (12/2/2018): Outlaw King (2018, David Mackenzie) 135 days
#5300 (4/30/2019): School Daze (1988, Spike Lee) 149 days
#5400 (9/12/2019): Downton Abbey (2019, Michael Engler) 135 days
#5500 (1/16/2020): Vox Lux (2018, Brady Corbet) 126 days
#5600 (6/24/2020): Wasp Network (2019, Olivier Assayas) 160 days
#5700 (10/20/2020): Yes, God, Yes (2020, Karen Maine) 118 days
#5800 (2/14/2021): Synchronic (2020, Justin Benson & Aaron Morehead) 117 days
#5900 (7/12/2021): Black Widow (2021, Cate Shortland) 148 days
#6000 (11/18/2021): The Bible: In the Beginning ... (1966, John Huston) 129 days
#6100 (3/15/2022): The Tinder Swindler (2022, Felicity Morris) 117 days
#6200 (8/24/2022): She's Funny That Way (2014, Peter Bogdanovich) 162 days
#6300 (12/9/2022): The People We Hate at the Wedding (2022, Claire Scanlon) 107 days
#6400 (4/26/2023): Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 138 days
Now the promised random comments:
1) A disproportionate number of these seem to be gross-out comedies. In that category you have Superbad, Sex Drive, Role Models and Freddy Got Fingered -- and that's just from 2007 to 2009. Those types of movies definitely died out a bit after that ... or maybe I just watched less of them.
2) I thought it was funny that consecutive milestone movies had the word "writer" in the title, from #3100 The Ghost Writer to #3200 Freedom Writers.
3) Is it weird that the only director who has directed more than one milestone movie for me is Bobcat Goldthwait? He directed my #3600 God Bless America and my #4100 Willow Creek ... and only five other movies altogether, only three of which I've seen.
4) I was very consistent with my movie watching pace in 2011 and 2012, as it took me 136 days to get from #3300 to #3400 ... and then exactly 136 more days to get from #3400 to #3500.
5) For the most part I feel I've been fairly consistent with my pace during distinct eras of my life, but there are random exceptions that interest me. Considering that same period above, where I went exactly 136 days between milestones twice in a row, I then random jumped up to 202 days to get to #3600 in the middle months of 2012. Actually, when I started writing this little blurb, I thought it was random ... and then I realized that that was when I moved house. I'm sure a lot of movie watching was lost during that transition, and that period also featured the Boston Celtics making a memorable playoff run that the Miami Heat ultimately extinguished. Then there was also a trip to the east coast during that period. (We still lived in Los Angeles.) So I guess, not so mysterious after all, and when that period calmed down I went right back to 145 days between #3600 and #3700.
6) The 215-day gap from #3900 to #4000 was because of my vow to cut down on my movie viewing until I found a job after my move to Australia. Like clockwork, though, I went back up to a scant 133 days for my next milestone after I'd had luck in that endeavor.
7) The vast majority of these were movies I watched on video, in whatever definition that term held at the time. The only ones I watched in the theater were Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Superbad, Sex Drive, The Visit, Get Out, Patti Cake$, Downton Abbey and Black Widow.
8) I've seen exactly one milestone movie on my birthday, which I watched on October 20, 2020: Yes, God, Yes.
9) For the sake of posterity, I ought to make note of the thousand-movie milestones, the ones I chose intentionally: #2000 (first time I watched Casablanca), #3000 (Mr. 3000, an obvious tie-in), #4000 (I wanted a classic I had not seen, and Sunrise fit the bill), #5000 (The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, again an obvious tie-in and a rather disappointing movie) and #6000 (a movie about the Bible chosen because of the 6,000 years the world has supposedly existed).
10) The longest gap between hundred-movie milestones is easily the 357 days, nearly a whole year, it took me to get from #1700 to #1800. I can easily remember a lot of the movies I watched with my ex-girlfriend during that time ... which may just be an indication that it was a relatively uncommon experience. I suspect since I was relatively poor and there was no streaming, so you had to pay for every rental (unless you were using the library, which I wasn't then), I ended up just not watching as much. Streaming has really made a difference in my totals, obviously. Also, you can really tell that starting to date my wife in early 2005 re-stimulated a possibly temporarily dormant affair with movies, since it went from taking 302 days to go from #1800 to #1900 to a mere 157 for the next hundred, nearly half that. However, during that period I did also renew writing for AllMovie after they had needed to stop using freelancers for a while. That's probably a better explanation for the activity we're seeing during that time.
11) The shortest interval was a mere 83 days between #4300 and #4400, and indeed that was during the intense period of vetting movies for my first of two years with HRAFF (Human Rights & Arts Film Festival). A year later it took me 91 days to watch 100 movies during that same busy period. Weirdly, though, the third shortest was when it took me just 107 days to watch 100 movies last year, to get from #6200 to #6300. I don't have a specific explanation for why I was so ravenous for movies at the end of 2022.
12) The most common amount of days it took me to watch 100 movies was 135 days. That happened three times.
13) However, the average amount of time it took me to watch 100 movies over this period was 157.8 days.
And now I release you to go continue pursuing your own weird obsessions. I'm sure you have them.
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