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Piecing It Together (The Watch List redux)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

For serious, it’s Sunday evening already? Man, time flies when you are having fun cleaning up the administrative mess left over from the previous year.

I’ve spent the better part of the weekend filing away emails, pictures, receipts and all manner of boring stuff that I only need occasionally, but regret it when it isn’t handy.

But that’s not what we’re here for today. Nope!

On the previous Timely Thursday entry I wrote about one of my major goals for 2016 – tackling The Watch List with more veracity. The reason for this venture is so that I can begin to share some thoughts and research on human behaviour and how we can learn a lot about what motivates us. My theory is that this is perfectly possible to do by participating in pop culture and it’s often more formal sister, the arts. And if we marry the sciences and arts together, we are better for it.

When I last left off, I had just outlined the guts of my movie diet for the year. But now I need to spell out my regimen for you. How I plan on doing this is threefold.

  1. Watch new movies as they come out in the theatre or are given a home release.
  2. Watch movies I have added to my collection during my bulk shopping routines (black friday, boxing day, store closeouts, discount bins, flea markets, etc.)
  3. Watch movies that are on the top rated lists of IMDB, ensuring I hit at least the top 10% or 25 movies of each genre

Point number one is pretty straight forward – I buy 1 new movie each week on a Monday, and review it before posting about it the following week. I also give you guys a heads up on my instagram if you want to know what’s coming. (@timotheories)

Point number two is also fairly straightforward. I currently have 88 movies to watch. Most of them were from Black Friday and Boxing Day of 2015, but roughly 10 of the movies were runoff from the previous shopping efforts of 2014. That means if I want to stay ahead of myself, I need to get those movies opened and enjoyed before November 25th 2016. Or to put it another way, in 44 weeks.

Point number three is where it gets interesting. I currenty have 951 movies on my list which I have not watched. It used to be at 1109, but my efforts between 2014 (142 watched movies) and 2014 (15 watched movies, sadly) bridged the gap somewhat.

This is why I said The Watch List would take a few years to complete – I knew when I first shared this project with you at the end of 2014 that I had been powering through movies, without any real schedule or rhythm. It would be impossible to keep up that rate without discipline, because while most of these movies are critically acclaimed, some of them are boring as shit, and even I get bored watching movies over and over without anything else going on.

Without going into too much detail, my 2014 was pretty subdued and movie watching was the highlight of that year.

So let’s talk numbers now!

If I keep up with my expectations of watching one movie a week for a review, and want to get through all of my bulk purchases before 2015 Black Friday, I need to watch two of those a week as well at the minimum.

If I am being completely unrealistic, I would need to tackle 18 Watch List movies a week to get through them all this year. I know that is unrealistic because if each movie is roughly 2 hours that 18 movie watch time is equivalent to a 40 hour work week. And let’s be honest, I have to work my day job, sleep, write blog posts, watch 3 other movies, and do other things like video editing, game night, reading, and attend local events to stay on top of my other timotheories goals.

So I’ve decided that I am going to commit to watching at least 1 movie from The Watch List a week, and I’ll try to squeeze in extra movies when I can. The challenge of course is whether Netflix and the public library have the catalogue I need, so I may be buying some of these films in my bulk purchases later in the year, which will allow for some cross-functional categories.

You see, dear readers, I have this theory, that if I stick to this schedule, I can get through this list and provide you with the content you need, curating it as I go, of course.

What do you think, is my list too crazy? If I only cross off 52 movies this year, I still have 900 to go. At this rate, I’ll complete it in 18 years. Welll, my hope is that I will start binge watching them on the weekends, and that I will bulk buy new movies less often as time goes on.

Please leave me some comments, encouragement, criticism, whatever! See you tomorrow for a music review!

Tim!

 

Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé… Olé… Olé (Goal Setting)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

In December of 2014, I wrote about a longstanding goal of mine and efforts I had made to set it up so I could eventually achieve it!

That goal was The Watch List.

I’ve referenced this goal a few times on this blog, because it’s a fun topic and seems a little silly, but mostly because it directly ties in with my bigger and longstanding goals of writing about the connections between pop culture, human behaviour, and living a successful life (which I’ve slowly been sharing with you, but will continue to build on as we go), I decided it was crucial to become a proper cinephile in order to contribute to the conversation.

Hence I went through the effort of visiting lists of the most popular as well as the most critically acclaimed movies ever made and committed to watch the best of the best.

The conditions I set up for myself were to sample from every film genre known to man, and use IMDB as a reference point for genres – 22 of them to be precise.

I removed movies that I had already seen from the lists, and created my own list to avoid duplicates. How I accomplished building this master list was by identifying all categories for each movie as I added it, that way when I would move on to another genre and look at the top 10% or top 25 movies if the genre was smaller, I didn’t add a movie twice or three times by accident.

Now The Watch List makes just a little bit more sense, right?

Today I want to share with you some developments in this project and a particular component of timotheories – Theatrical Tuesdays. Theatrical Tuesdays is my opportunity to either review a play or piece of theatre I’ve recently watched, a film which is currently in movie theatres or a movie that has been released on Digital HD, DVD and/or blu-ray.

I am choosing to do this for a few reasons.

  1. I want to stay on top of culture as it happens,
  2. It’s important to provide you with my perspective on it
  3. This forces me commit to the practice of viewing new content as it comes out, rather than just watching or purchasing what I am comfortable with when I feel like it

Some of you dear readers might think that this is an easy process and does not take any effort on my part – trust me when I tell you that it does. I have to commit to being available once a week within a certain window of time so that I buy the film (and often the album for Melodic Mondays), and then committing to a window of time to watch the film, and finally setting aside the time to write about the film.

This means I need to maintain discipline and say “no” to certain activities OR prepare posts well ahead of posting time so that I am consistently releasing these posts on schedule. As a consequence, my personal film collection grows by at least 1 film a week. Which is cool, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee I am watching a film that fits into those top rated lists, especially because the content on webistes like IMDB are curated over weeks of time and the top movies aren’t necessarily in said list exactly when they are released.

And this process also fights with my progress on The Watch List. Which is why I only watched a handful of movies from the list in 2015.

Another challenge I face with completing The Watch List is that I purchase blu-rays en masse during Boxing Day, Black Friday and during closeout sales or special events where movies are on sale. At those times I am buying releases I missed over the course of the year and movies I want to add to my collection.

With those types of purchases (bulk buys, not weekly review buys) I have decided to file the movies away once I’ve opened them and watched them. That way I’m not only collecting, I am also making use of my purchases. Because of this method of collecting, my collection is currently sitting at about 650 movies, and approximately 350 of those are blu-rays.

Now you are probably wondering how many movies I own but have yet to watch correct? 89 of them.

One week has already passed in 2016, which leaves me with another 51 weeks left to watch those 89 movies – if I want to stay ahead of my bulk purchasing habits and have fresh inventory for 2017. So that means I need to up my game.

But that’s not what today was about, today was about sharing with you what is going on. You’ll have to wait until Sunday to see how I’m going to address this issue.

What a tease, am I right? It is Timely Thursday after all! So leave some comments, tell me what your goals are for 2016, and how you are personally impacting the arts. I wanna hear what you have to say!

Until next time, I’m out of theories for now!

Tim!

Encoding Culture (The Watch List)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Last week on timotheories (I’ve always wanted to do that), I wrote about archetypes, common sense, motivation, and how watching films can help in learning about human behaviour (see my post, Motivation and Movies). This week I am going to get a little more personal and write about one of my longstanding goals that has become both a great effort and a great help in staying motivated to glean more from the world around me.

Before I fill you in on my goal, I am going to speak to the activity known as list making. List making is an ancient practice that I would argue goes as far back as the beginnings of the written word, and I may be generalizing, but I think we would be hard pressed to find proof to dispute that matter… And if someone does, then I have no problem withdrawing this statement, but I hope its worth the time, effort, and energy to said person to prove me wrong!

Moving right along.

There are lots of uses for lists – examples can include breaking up projects into tasks, prioritizing chores, planning out our days, keeping an inventory, arranging items in a particular order (ex. Top 10), putting together playlists, bookmarking information or for sharing with others, among other uses. In brief, lists are an awesome method to organize information in such a way that we can digest life more easily.

So what is my goal you ask, dear readers? Well my goal is to watch approximately 1100 movies within a 2-3 year period. I’ve decided to affectionately call this project The Watch List, because I think that this title succinctly wraps up the purpose of the list.

Now you are probably wondering, “well how did you come up with this list Tim?” And that is a very good question as there are thousands of movies out there and I don’t necessarily want to watch them all, but I do want to view those movies that have cultural significance, cult status, or a combination of both.

I decided to start my list by visiting the most straightforward of places, by looking at IMDB’s Top 250 list. For those of you who are unfamiliar with IMDB, it is also known as the Internet Movie Database, one of, if not the most, popular movie websites on the Internet. And according to ebizmba.com, it receives approximately 115 million unique monthly visitors each month.

I’m not going to delve into detail about what movies are on the Top 250 list, otherwise I wouldn’t have given you a reference link above. I highly recommend you check it out if you are interested in an amazing cross-section of film, but some of the highlights include The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather: Part II, Pulp Fiction, Schindlers List, Inception, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Going through that list initially, I determined that I had already seen more than half of these movies, but what I didn’t immediately recognize upon first glance is that IMDB also indexes films based on a group of 22 sub genres. Examples of these genres include, action, comedy, drama, film-noir, musical, sci-fi, and western.

The more I started to dig the more excited I got though. And so the idea finally hit me in a way I could articulate, why not look into every single sub genre and start writing down all of movies I hadn’t seen? That way I would expose myself to genres I was less comfortable with like war, film-noir, and biography. But that would also mean I was sure to run into some movies more than once, and so I set myself up to the task of creating a Google docs spreadsheet that could house all of the movies, and I could then search by title, decade, year, genre or a combination thereof by taking advantage of the filter command available in Google spreadsheet. Below is a screen cap of what my list looks like. I might get around to sharing it at some point, but this should do the trick for now.

Screen Shot 2014-12-09 at 10.20.51 PM

I have colour coded the list for myself so that I can remember what movies I’ve watched over a certain period of time, as well as identifying which movies are available at the Edmonton Public Library or on Netflix. Lets face it, it would insane for me to buy such a great volume of movies right out the gate, but that is something that I may get around to, once I start rating the films myself, but lets stick with baby steps for now.

And that’s all the theories I’ve got this week – until next time. But please let me know what you think of my list, and if you have any ideas of how to improve upon it or if you want to know what the list is made up of, leave a comment or send me an email!

Tim!

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