I always watched a lot of movies, in fact, 2014 has been the year I have been watching the least movies since 2005-2006 or something (when I was a videogame buff and I did not have time for film). In 2014 I watched only about 120 movies, 100 for the Asian film challenge and 20 normal movies.
I remember the period I became a film buff, it was a very stressful time in my life (2011), I was working after finishing college in a weird place full of math geniuses which were arrogant and with huge egos and I felt oppressed by this super-competitive research environment, was when I was working on my thesis and I got some free time in the weekend and I decided to kill some of the remaining films of the IMDB top 250 which I haven't watched (I know the IMDB top 250 since I was about 13-14). I noticed I never watched the anime films on that top 250 so I decided to watch Miyazaki's Spirited Away and a mediocre thriller film, Unstoppable because I read Roger Ebert's review of it on (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477080/). After I felt the timeless eternal sublime greatness of Spirited Away for the first time on that Saturday, I decided to watch Princess Mononoke on Sunday, I also watched that melodrama masterpiece Elephant Man by David Lynch on the same day, in fact I found Princess Mononoke a bit forced on a first watch and Elephant Man felt more natural and so I had a greater emotional response to it than PM on that fateful day. However, a couple of weeks later I watched PM again and I fully grasped it's eternal timeless greatness and couldn't sleep or work for 36 hours afterwards (which actually f*ed me up at work), becoming my most powerful cinematic experience in my life (in fact, surpassing my experience with 2001 which I had watched 4 years earlier when I was at college). After the life changing experience of entering in contact with the timeless eternal greatness of Princess Mononoke I became a hard core Miyazaki fanboy. I put myself a challenge of finding a movie that was as powerful as Princess Mononoke and I watched about 100 movies in the 50 days afterwards (which f*ed up my research at the time but that effect was only temporary anyway).
In fact, I still remember one of the finest movie watching days in my life at that great cinematic period on the months following my first watch of Spirited Away: I watched on the same day and by the first time: Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God, Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (was re-watch after about 8 years since I first watched it, nice to watch it from a mature perspective) and Malick's The Tree of Life (which I still regard as one of the worst movies I ever watched). I still remember that day as clearly as it was yesterday. Of course, I worked only 2 hours on my research that day but I watched 3 eternal masterpieces and 1 piece of turd. Still perhaps one of the most "productive" days of my life.
Interestingly, I never found a movie that could top Princess Mononoke's emotional power (animated or not) over a period of two years, when in 2013 (after a couple of months after I joined this forum), I watched a cartoon TV series from 2011, which surpassed every single work of cinema I ever watched and to a greater degree that Princess Mononoke did. That was the period when I decided: f*ck Bergman and Ozu, what I really like are cartoons! I never watched a Bergman or Ozu film since early 2013, (though to be fair I watched a couple of Kurosawa, Tarkovsky (re-watches) and others but with lower expectations). Still live action movies now don't affect me as strongly as they did in 2011 and 2012. I guess they are like a drug: if you use it too much it loses it's effect and anime is like a strong drug like cocaine while normal movies are a weaker drug that do less damage but that loses it's effect after one consumes too much of the stronger drug. Let's see how long my anime drug lasts. When it ceases to yield high levels of pleasure I will move to another hobby as I have always been doing. I was even into blacksmithing at a time. It was a very expensive hobby and I stopped "playing" with it because of risk of lung damage.