With each new year comes a new list of resolutions, the majority of which fall by the wayside when you realise life is too short and busy to be ‘perfect’. However, it can’t hurt to try and I’ve enlisted the help of my online (and some offline) friends to form a challenge to help better my film-related habits.
Let’s start with a confession. I have a DVD, Blu-Ray, even HD-DVD and VHS buying habit that got out of control a long time ago, resulting in me having thousands of films to watch but never enough time to actually do so. Instead I watch screeners which I review here. So in an attempt to make a dent in my near 1000 unwatched films list, I’m setting myself a challenge of watching 3 films from the collection per month (an odd figure I know, but it’s the only amount I figured I could actually manage and it still feel like a challenge).
To make me more likely to tackle the challenge, I asked friends, family and fellow bloggers to help select the 36 titles so that I feel obliged to watch them and report back with my thoughts.
Below is the list of films I ended up with. I’m actually rather happy with it, as there’s a nice mix of films I’m very keen to watch and a few I feel like I should watch but have been putting off for a while due to length, subject matter or tone. Unfortunately I got sent 90 suggestions, so it took a lot of work to come up with the list of 36 here. Some rules I imposed when selecting were that if multiple people suggested a film, it had to be chosen and if someone only suggested one, it had to go on too.
Title – Nominated by
January
45 Years – Darren Bolton
8 Mile – Anthony O’Neil
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night – Daniel Lackey, Katy Vans, Mikaela Smith, Christopher Regan, Jason Hemming
February
A Scanner Darkly – Mikaela Smith, Jason Hemming
Animal Kingdom – Katy Vans, Mikaela Smith
Antichrist – Lloyd Burgess
March
Babel – Lewis Smith, Lorraine Chapman
Bugsy Malone – Katy Vans
Das Boot – Jason Cluitt
April
DIG! – Lloyd Burgess
Eastern Promises – Katy Vans, Rob Smith, Mikaela Smith
Empire Records – Laura Anstey
May
End of Watch – Rob Smith
Escape From New York – Jim Whalley, Jason Hemming, Jason Cluitt
Ex Machina – Mikaela Smith
June
Festen – Tom Whittaker
I Love Huckabees – Katy Vans, Lloyd Burgess
I Love You Phillip Morris – Michael Hankinson
July
Jarhead – Katy Vans, Michael Hankinson
Little Children – Mikaela Smith, Jason Cluitt
Locke – Mikaela Smith, Jason Cluitt
August
Midnight in Paris – Lorraine Chapman
Mud – Katy Vans, Mikaela Smith
Mustang – Katy Vans, Mikaela Smith
September
Mystic River – Kirsten Shorr
Of Time And The City – Tom Whittaker
Plan 9 From Outer Space – Katy Vans
October
Short Cuts – Jim Whalley
State Of Grace – Rob Smith
The Act Of Killing – Mikaela Smith
November
The Awful Truth – Andrew Goulding, Jim Whalley
The Great Escape – Jason Cluitt
The Ipcress File – Adam Goulding
December
The King and I – Lorraine Chapman
The Last Picture Show – Jim Whalley
Under the Skin – Mikaela Smith, Jim Whalley, Jason Hemming
And that’s what I’ve got to look forward to in 2017. I’ll do my best to stick to it although I might have to cut down on the screeners to do so. Keep an eye on the site to see my progress. I’m not going to post full reviews, but I’ll try and do monthly roundups of my brief thoughts on what I’ve seen.
Many thanks to all of those who submitted films for me to see. Hopefully I like them all as much as you do.
If anyone’s interested in seeing the full list of unwatched films in my collection (only never seen – I’ve also got a load more I bought that I’d seen previously at the cinema or on older formats), it can be found here.
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