On December 31st, 2018 I had a crazy idea.
I was thinking about my New Year’s resolutions for 2019 and the first thing that popped in my head was, “I wonder if I can watch a movie a day.” Now, that is not completely out of left field. I am a lifelong movie fan and I have been tracking all the movies that I watch since 2013.
I started tracking my movie watching after I heard a random comment on the /Filmcast. I could not tell you what episode it was on or who said it but it was a comment in relation to how many movies film critics watch in a given year. So that got me thinking and wondering how many I watch. That day I created a list on IMDB.com and started adding movies as I watched them. At some point I found Letterboxd and it was a match made in heaven. I even moved over my IMDB watch diary to Letterboxd.
So the fact that I track every movie I watch meant that I always checked in on my annual count on New Year’s Eve every year. So with that on top of mind, I set a resolution to watch a movie-day in 2019. The Movie-A-Day 365 Challenge was born.
Prior to January 1, 2019, the most movies I had watched in a given year was 127 in 2015, but I usually average around 100 movies. 365! That is more than three times my average. I am not a professional film critic. It’s not my job to watch movies so why would I do this? Am I that obsessed with movies? Maybe a little bit.
This website was built as an archive for my journey in 2019. When 2020 rolled around and the challenge was over it felt very anticlimactic. I needed a way to wrap this whole thing up. I wanted to make sure that this crazy thing I did did not just disappear into the ether. I wanted some record of what I did and how I did it.
Along with the website I am creating a video retrospective that will live here on this site. Of course, I am still watching movies so I will use this website to capture my film diary going forward as well and highlight film related videos I find online. This site is by no means a film news site even though I may get on my soap box and provide commentary and opinion from time to time.
Thanks for finding my small corner of the internet multi-verse. Welcome to the conversation.