I'm Natalie and I love films, but I am also notoriously indecisive.
As such, I struggle to decide what, out of the thousands upon thousands of films that are available at the click of a button, to watch.
Most of the time it means I watch nothing... well, I retreat back to the relative safety of YouTube and just rewatch videos I've already see dozens of times (shoutout to RT Game's Elden Ring playthrough).
But I want that to change!
My IMDb watchlist is, at this very moment, sitting at 1,576 titles, 1,374 of which are films.
I feel like I desperately need to address this problem and knock that down to a slightly more manageable number.
So we're gonna review some movies!
Last time I had a backlog that I wanted to make a dent in, I set a challenge for myself: I subscribed to a streaming service for one month with the goal of watching as many films that I wanted to see as possible (foolishly I did this in February so my subscription was a few days shorter than it would've been if I'd picked literally ANY other month)and I managed to watch 57 of the bastards.
So who's to say I can't watch even more than that if I set myself a- perhaps slightly unhinged- challenge?
The Rules:
I am going to watch 1 random feature length film for each year that there has been a feature length film released.
Yeah, you know we're going aaaaaall the way back to 1906, baybeeeee. ☆
where possible, I'll be picking films that already appear on my IMDb watchlist (because why set a challenge without tackling the root problem, the catalyst to the idea?)
I will primarily be watching films available on the streaming services I currently have access to- which is pretty much just the free ones, plus Amazon Prime Video (shoutout to my mum for continuing to pay that subscription so we can just osscilate back and forth through every season of Masterchef Australia until the end of time and never even try to watch anything else)
I'll probably have to use Internet Archive for some of the oldest films, though. Which is acceptable AND LEGAL because they're so old they're no longer copyrighted
If there's a year that doesn't have a film listed on my IMDb watchlist, I'm allowed to pick whatever I want from that year that I think sounds appealing- I'm not trying to make myself have a bad time here. I wanna watch good movies!
Having said that, if there are multiple films made in the same year on my watchlist, I will be obligated to go for the first one that appears when organised by release date. This is partially because, despite having an ecclectic watchlist, my tastes skew towards horror and I'm not aiming for this to become a horror blog so I want to remove my decision-making that would make that a possibility.
If I can't find access to any feature films for the first few years (1907-1915ish) then I may relax the idea of it needing to be a feature film and watch a couple of shorts instead- who knows how easy or difficult these things are gonna be to find until I start properly looking
And lastly: no documentaries! Just a personal rule- I have nothing against documentaries, but I find it harder to review when I'm talking about real life and not just characters- feels a bit icky to be critical of someone's actual lived experience. Though to be fair, it's not like I have a ton of documentaries on my IMDb watchlist anyway so I doubt it would be much of an issue.
And that's it! Have fun, watch movies, write about them, and try to kick my IMDb watchlist's ass! ☆