Watching Movies

Posted by Richard on Saturday, 9 March 2019

Joseph Planta, a podcaster who interviews notable people in public life, once posted the list of films he had watched over the course of the year.

Recalling this at the end of 2017, I had made added to my yearly list of New Year's Intentions the idea to carve out time to watch more movies. I decided that Friday would be movie night, and that as part of my Sunday routine, I would pick a film to watch the following week. As 2018 progressed, it was obvious that I couldn't rely on Friday night to be the specific night for watching a movie, but my conscious effort paid off in making good on a promise to watch a movie almost every week.

It certainly helps that I live two blocks from a commercial cinema and the TIFF Bell Lightbox, not to mention subscribing to Netflix and Amazon Prime. I'm a Bronze member of The Revue Cinema in Roncesvalles, and have had a fun time at their Drunken Cinema series, where hooting and hollering is encouraged. It is not often that I rent a DVD, the closest store being an hour round trip, but the Toronto Public Library has a good selection, so I include them on my list. Only as a very last resort do I secretly and illegally download a film. I tend to turn on captions for movies, especially if people with British accents are speaking, but also because almost always captions capture what is said at low volume in the background, adding colour to the scenes. I'm not sure I'm willing to use the captioning display unit that Cineplex theatres offer, but that's without having tried it.

I'm particularly interested in movies in which a character’s understanding and effective internalization of the content of a systematic moral theory is a major driver of the story, films that showcase Los Angeles, and movies directed by women.

I post my movie-watching activity to my profile on Letterboxd, and have even been known to add a movie or two to the database it pulls from. For 2019, I switched from Friday being movie night to having at least one movie night sometime during the week. My watchlist on Letterboxd is plenty long, so I shouldn't lack for films to watch over the coming months.

One thing that has been lacking has been my ability to talk about film. It is common across all media, that is, my inability to tell people why I think something is good. When I come across the course for film appreciation that I lost track of, I'll sign up for it.