Thoughts about keeping a watched-movies list
I've been keeping a list of all the movies I've watched on Letterboxd since August 2018 - so that's eight years now, and as of today 1005 total movies.
That makes 125 movies a year. I think the number is pretty inflated by 2020 and 2021, when I spent a lot of time indoors. Strangely, 2023 was also an outlier year - but in 2023 I actually tried, very hard, to watch a fuck ton of movies for some reason. I had no good reason. I hit 179.
I do remember thinking frequently during that year, "I wonder if I can watch more movies this year than I've ever watched before?!" It was definitely a kind of make-number-go-up thing. But it wasn't bad! Watching movies is, actually not a waste of time. I also read a lot of produced and unproduced film scripts that year. I think it was good for me!
One of the biggest things I've noticed about keeping this list is that my sense of time's passing does not match reality at all. If a movie was good, and made a big impact on me, I tend to perceive it as a more recent watch. If it was bad, I either forgot about it completely or perceive it, somehow, as something I watched a longer time ago. That's pretty weird!
By the time I get to August or September, I have no ability to remember the order in which I watched movies in January or February. I'll look at my list and think, "Wait, I thought I watched that one only a couple months ago! And I thought I watched that other one two years ago!" Reviewing a list like this to root your perception of time is pretty strange!
I've noticed that I'm better able to reflect on movies if I review them immediately after I watch them - just write down some thoughts about them completely off the dome. I have friends who prefer to think about a movie for a bit before writing about them, but if I do that, I tend to forget quite a lot, and the stuff I write tends to be less interesting. Very few movies impact me strongly enough for my opinion about them to develop over the course of several days. It's best if I strike while the iron is hot and write about how I felt immediately.
This means that reading these reviews from my "film diary" list is pretty good at transporting me back to how I felt immediately after watching the film. I find that I actually recall these movies more sharply if I have those fresh thoughts to return to.
Keeping a list of movies is actually more of a diaristic thing for me than writing this blog is. I don't often write details here about my actual life - when you see me posting about a thing I read online, or a game I played, or a fun website I found, re-reading that post doesn't transport me back to what I was doing at the time, or what was going on in my personal life.
The movie reviews on my Letterboxd don't contain that diaristic information, either... but for some reason, re-reading them does a better job of reminding me what was going on in my life at the time. It's probably because re-reading a review of a movie reminds me of when and how and where I watched it, and who with. So they actually do a better job of prompting those kinds of memories for me.
Anyway, I do recommend doing this. Keeping lists of things can be fairly meditative... blogging is also a kind of list-keeping, in a way. It's definitely fairly odd that I've managed to keep up both these things at once for nearly two years.
In two weeks, actually, I will hit the two-year streak of daily blogging on this site. Pretty nuts!! I still don't really understand why I am doing it!!!