This Is Who I Am, and This Is What I'm Doing

I'm very torn, here: I'd like to push aside the long-term viewing and reviewing project I've undertaken, that gives this blog its title, and rush to treat this writerly real estate like a diary, to use this time and this space to tell you all about one or two of the more interesting movies I happen to have seen in the last few weeks, as of this writing, simply because, as you know, I can do that, if I want to; there are no editorial controls, here, to restrain me, to the task I supposedly have at hand, or anything else. For a writer used to constraining himself rigidly to assigned material, one way or another, the sense of freedom is breathtaking, vertiginous, even. However, I do, as I, and the title I've given my blog, have both already clearly intimated, have an intended goal in mind, and in hand, to which to constrain myself, and to do so is worth doing for its own sake, regardless of any and all writerly freedoms I may have to endure habitually, around these parts, to, you know, stick to it, at least intermittently.

About four years ago I moved to Miami to marry my amazing and wonderful wife, attorney Angie Wilt, and together we set about the grueling and expensive project of doing whatever it took to improve my health, and "put me back on my feet" as a writer, a filmmaker and a musician, if the thing is at all possible. We knew then that my health would demand of me several years yet of enforced convalesence, at best. But even during the worst parts of my now near decade of serious illness, I've been able to continue watching movies regularly; in fact, during the stretches when I was essentially bedridden, I've been able to see more movies than ever before, being unable to do anything else more active. So I began to consider the idea of using this excessive time I'd been forced to spend facing the TV screen, constructively; I began to think that my lengthy illness placed me in a unique position to undertake some vast structured movie watching project, to lay the groundwork for a blog, or a book, or maybe a blog, and then a book, to be written later, whenever I could do it.

I considered several long range long term movie viewing projects, before I thought of the Academy Awards. I could set out to watch every movie ever nominated for any Oscar. After a few months of trying to think of something that people might enjoy reading a blog about, more, and failing, I decided that Oscar was it, and so The Oscar Excavations is what this is (I couldn't resist the nod to the movie that remains my best known writerly work, even if that does happen to be misfortunate, insofar as THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS was work I was never paid for).

During the exhaustive and exhausting process of compiling a list of all the movies ever nominated for any Academy Award since the Oscars began in 1927 (thank you Wikipedia; thank you, Imdb), I worked out these ground rules and/or operating parameters: one final result, needs to be a list of definite masterpieces, organized by their original release dates, a chronological chronicle of the times the Academy "got it right," an ordered row of movies I confidently recommend as true, irreducibly timeless classics. It was important to me that in this context, I try not to make mistakes, as a critic; having been, for one hot year in Hattiesburg MS in the late nineties, a regularly publishing newspaper critic, one of the guys who covers and writes up everything the corporate cinema plays, I found out, some years later when I started seeing some of the movies I'd covered, again, that seeing a movie once, is no basis for judging how that movie will hold up over a period of years, over the course of multiple screenings. It is both maddening and humiliating, how often I found that I'd been wrong about which movies were good, and which movies weren't, when my opinions on the subject went into print.

So I decided that any movie I can personally sit through at least three times and still enjoy, including at least once since this project began, is a demonstrated masterpiece. If anyone here can come up with a better way to determine which movies really withstand the test of time, than to watch each movie three times over a period of several years and see if I still like it enough to sit through it again, at the end of that process, please let me know. (Seriously.)

Movies that clearly don't "work" anymore, as art or as entertainment, I don't feel obliged to sit through, in this pursuit, any more than I feel obliged to sit through them, as a private viewer seeking entertainment. The way things are currently, with streaming video backing up my home collection of DVDs, and Turner Classic Movies filling in the gaps, life is too short, and the possibilities for movie viewing too wildly various and enticing, for me to feel it's necessary that I require myself to sit through every last damned movie I start watching. Unless someone's paying me to sit through it, I give any unfamiliar movie a fourth of its running time, to hook me, or even to merely intrigue me; if it can't make me enjoy sitting there watching it by that far into a movie, I shut it off, and I think that's fair enough, given how experienced a viewer and critic I am, and, frankly, how much other cooler stuff I can and will watch, with those precious minutes of time I shave off the Oscar project. If you want to set out to look at every movie ever nominated for any Oscar, and you want to do better than sticking to only feature films (no short films), and you want to do better than giving each movie a fourth of its running time (about twenty-five or thirty minutes, usually) to demonstrate that it continues to be worth anyone spending the time to watch it all the way through, please, go right ahead and do better than me and supercede me. Let me know when you start, because my backup/fallback plan is "fantastic film and TV of the seventies and eighties," and that subject is looking like a lot more fun, by comparison, now that I've been keeping up with five Oscar titles a week, for more than three years.

Five Oscar titles a week: that's right. That's about half my total viewing, in any given week, give or take. I'm awfully ill; my medical condition, the pain, and the drugs I take for the condition and for the pain, all keep me from functioning very well, in most senses, during most hours of most days, but they rarely knock me down so hard I can't watch a movie. (No more often than twice a day, lately, and it passes within a few hours.) (Seriously.) (If it sounds like no small comfort to a man as ill as I am, to have a nice TV, and stuff to watch on it, you hear me accurately. Though believe me, there isn't a day on which I wouldn't trade the extra movie-watching time I get out of this chronic illness, for the promising career as musician and filmmaker I had going, ten years ago, when illness first knocked me down completely, and forced me to begin to set aside that life, for this one.)

I don't know how many movies I started with, though of course I could go figure it out, and so could you. (If you do, let me know.) (Seriously.) Because I counted them to prepare for this blog entry, I can tell you how many Oscar-nominated titles remain on my list, now:

As of this writing, I have 2901 movies left to watch (or try to watch). That includes:

21 I've seen three times, but not yet since this project began; these require one more viewing.

125 I've seen twice, and need to see again, to either confirm them as worthy of my final masterpieces list, or to find that they don't make the cut, as failing to solidly entertain me and sustain my interest, through and through, three times through the movie.

435 movies I've only seen once, and so need to see twice more, to complete this project to my own satisfaction. (Many of them I will only see once.)

The rest of the 2901 titles, belong to movies I haven't seen at all.

As of this writing, my final "masterpieces" list contains 88 movies. That's 88 movies I've seen at least three times in my life, and at least once in the last three-and-a-half years, that I still enjoy and like enough, to be looking forward to seeing them again. I guess I'll hold off on sharing that list, until I hit a hundred titles; it shouldn't take more than a few months, now.

At the moment, I'd rather write about the best things I've seen this week, than bother more with the Oscar list: I do intend to use this space to tell you about everything excellent and awesome I run across, and not just this Academy Award-nominated stuff.

What's that? This is already way long enough for one entry? I'll try to check in toward the end of every week, and next time, I'll be actually writing about movies, directly, rather than, you know, writing about writing about movies, which, frankly, gets to be a drag kind of quickly, whether or not you happen to be seriously ill, or editor-controlled, or anything else.