December 11, 2022meta

Why the Hell am I Watching 100 Movies in 2022?

I started chronicling my quest to watch 100 movies in 2022 over on Twitter and have picked it up on Mastodon recently, and one question no one asked, but I feel compelled to answer here near the end of the year is: why the hell am I trying to watch 100 movies???

It’s a good question, thanks for asking 😉

For basically my whole life I’ve been a movie fanatic, but as the new golden age of television presented so many great shows, I had really moved away from watching as many movies as I’d used to. But still, people saw me as the movie guy, and more importantly, I saw myself that way even though I wasn’t really watching that many movies anymore.

This isn’t to say that movies are fundamentally better then TV, but personally, I find movies to be something I can fall in love deeply with, while TV basically never achieves that for me. There's just something about telling a story that can fit in 2-3 hours that really clicks with me.

In 2019 I started logging movies I watched on Letterboxd, and I only watched 16 movies that year. In 2020 that went up to 61 (staying at home helped a ton) and then 64 in 2021. Those were much more in line with what I wanted, but I thought it would be fun to push myself to get to a clean 100 movies in a year.

I chose 100 mostly because it was a clean number, and us humans can’t help but do that, but also because I thought it was enough of an increase that it would make me watch more things a bit outside the norm. I love when a movie surprises me, and committing to watching a ton of movies helped increase the odds I watched things that I was mildly interested in and would then blow me away. Looking back on this year, I think about movies like RRR and Barbarian, both which blew me away and I may have skipped other years.

As of right now I'm at 87 films watched, which means I have 20 days to watch 13 more, which is very doable. If you want to keep up with the thread (which I will continue into 2023 as well), you can do it in 2 places: