100 Movie Project

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Max recently told me about someone she read about doing a 100 movie project. I’m not sure if that was the actual name or who it was so I can’t credit them, but the idea is to watch 100 movies. There was probably more to it. But she mentioned it in passing and without hunting them down online I can’t be sure exactly what they were doing. But I liked the idea so I decided to do something similar.

Like I mentioned in a previous post I’ve recently started to become more interested in directing and cinematography, expanding from generally just being interested in acting. This is largely because I don’t have enough friends to be able to focus on just one thing. So I decided to try to be better at more things. This has got me reading books about things like filmmaking and scriptwriting. And when I heard about the 100 movie project I realized I could incorporate that.

Normally when I watch movies I just watch them for the story. They’re escapism and I watch them for enjoyment. I don’t usually dissect much about the movie’s directing or how it cuts between scenes. Unless something is really jarring or obvious I tend to focus on the entertainment value the movie provides. So I decided to try watching movies with more of an eye towards what goes on behind the scenes. The acting, the directing, the camera angles, use of light, story beats, and things like that.

This coincided with trying to watch more kinds of movies than I usually do as well. I tend to watch dumb comedies and mindless action movies. They’re what I enjoy most and I usually stick to them. But I decided to try watching more genres in case my friends and I decide to make a short film that doesn’t involve fighting.

The third piece was anthology series. Things like Black Mirror and Love, Death & Robots to see how all of the aforementioned things were done when time was more of a constraint. I figured anything my friends and I did would be much shorter than the movies I was watching, so TV episode length and shorter pieces would be important to watch.

So off I went. I started with some older movies that are considered classics. I watched Taxi Driver, Léon: The Professional, did a third viewing of Blade Runner, and was planning to watch Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. Then I ran into all the movies that would leave Netflix at the end of the month. This was April so I pivoted into all the movies that left Netflix at the end of the month and watched things like The Florida Project and The Artist. Now I’m doing sort of a mix between what leaves Netflix in the current month and the things I want to watch.

So far it’s going pretty well. I was managing to watch quite a few movies while I was between jobs and now I’m managing one or two a week. I feel like I’m learning a lot and I'll talk about the stuff I’m watching in future posts. I also probably won’t actually watch 100 movies. Maybe more, probably less. It's just sort of the idea that I liked you know?

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all my pictures and videos.