Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

I keep hoping one of these days I just choose one random movie, that maybe I like, maybe I don't, and just spend the rest of my life watching it and nothing else.


See what happens when all other movies cease to exist and you have to contend with whatever one you are stuck with for the rest of your life.


Could be fun

Yeah, really loved it. The shot where he's on the rock and you can see through the water where his shadow falls is an incredible image.

Here's what I wrote about it.

That's the exact image I captured, as if I was still doing a name that movie game anymore

I've been stockpiling them for some kind of weird apocalypse

When I was like 10, I decided that for the whole rest of the summer I would only read the same Nancy Drew book over and over. I think I made it through the book 3 times before giving up. It was . . . something.

There was that guy who watched the same movie every day for a year, right?

I was literally going to say, have you seen Beau Travail, but then your last sentence answered that.


Splendid writeup

Every once in a while I come across an image that is from your movie game, and it makes my heart go pitter-patter. Was one of them from Jubilee? Maybe? It's the "man dressed vaguely like Jesus" picture. Anyway, I saw it semi-recently and it was thrilling.

I don't know if you listen to the band The Books, but they use a lot of pop culture samples in their songs, and the same thing happens sometimes where I come across a snippet that they used.

I know someone watched Groundhog Day every day for a year, which would not be a fun experience for me.


But this whole notion to me (which I will never do btw) is to just live with something for so long that you eventually see everything on screen. And then see everything that is insinuated outside of the frame. A place that, because you know it so fully, every viewing becomes a comment on your previous viewing. Or prepares you for your next.


But thats obviously just nonsense crazy people think about.


I think I just would like to disappear into one determined thing. Stop having to keep searching for other modes of expression, because maybe there is only one thing that has to be said. Maybe any one piece of art can suffice if you just keep looking and looking and looking....

I definitely used Jubilee for at least one image

My computer is buckling under the weight of so much pointless data storage

Oh, I don't think I know The Books. So, no I don't listen to them

I saw them perform live during a lightening storm while studying for a college exam about family structures in post-Medieval Europe. So I have no idea if they're good or not, my relationship to their music is purely emotional.

Part of me misses my pre-internet youth when I only owned 15 albums and therefore had the time to really live with each one and memorize every note. Hard to attain that sort of intimacy now that I've got hundreds, with thousands more available to stream.

Same with films.

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And I'm here for any future long-form, sporadically updated, haphazardly scored screenshot quizzes.

There was a Jesus figure from that shot-on-video thing who's title I've forgotten. I watched the film months after you posted the still, logged in to register my answer only to find that Tak had guessed it weeks earlier. Still feelin' salty about that one.

When I was young it seemed like I had time to watch films I liked over and over again. In my teens I became a little obsessed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show - it was like I'd ingested some kind of long-lasting psychedelic drug, and I kept on seeing a different kind of complex meaning in the film. Each viewing unearthed more treasures, and it was a kind of spiritually uplifting experience. I'd watch the film 3 or 4 times a day - sometimes I'd immediately start again after a viewing. I played the film on a loop as I studied for exams. I was in love with every aspect - but especially the interpretive one. This lasted maybe 4 or 5 weeks - until I'd absolutely exhausted this obsessive admiration. I think it had something to do with my age, as I was coming to that stage when the art and music you identify with becomes very important to a young teenager.

Today's world is so different to the one where I owned a few videos - my most favourite films - and watched them occasionally. Now I have literally 10s of thousands of DVDs and Blu-Rays, and multiple more film-watching avenues where promising new discoveries are just a click away. I so rarely rewatch films now - even ones that I'm particularly excited about. There's just too many new ones pushing those rewatches out of the way. I closed my eyes and picked a movie at random to be the only film I'd watch continually for the rest of my days. It was Donnie Darko.

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I rarely rewatch films nowadays. Since work is slowly consuming more and more of my life, I feel like it will be harder to watch as many movies per year that I used to watch, so the more first time watches I have under my belt, the better.

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I rewatch a handful of movies quite a bit, largely because I have a little group of films I default to if I'm having a bad day or if I'm trapped in indecision.

I've seen Hellraiser 2, Predators, The Hunted and a few others many, many times. I've probably watched Hellraiser 2 20 times, if not more. And Predators is quickly approaching the double digits if it hasn't surpassed that mark already.

And while it's not a movie, I've watched Folding Ideas "Comfortably Doug" video on YouTube probably at least 10 times. Watching Dan Olsen politely destroy the Nostalgia Critic with his measured tones and dry humor is calming to me in a way that seems like it should require a prescription.

Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is probably a bad movie. It's got all the superficial stylistic accoutrements that a phony baloney soulless junkheap like Babydriver has.

But it is also a movie that, even though it sucks, mostly just highlights how badly a charm vaccuum like Ansel Elgort harms an already problematically crap movie.

Don't hire Ansel!

Scott Pilgrim is, of course, still shit. But it is also anchored by a charmingly awkward performance by Michael Cera, that offsets pure hatred. And this is the difference.

So I don't hate it. I still would never want to invite it back into my house again though.

Suffer Little Children


Astonishing movie. I still lose my breath when I think of how much better a bunch of kids are at making a no budget horror movie....that is ****ing insane!

You will sometimes see me talk about movies in a musical sense. And it all has to do with my early years of watching certain films on perpetual loops. Sometimes multiple times a day, for months.



When you become completely acclimatized to the rhythm of a film, its edited beats, its noises, its images, something more about the projected image comes to life. Sometimes its intentional, sometimes definitely not. But if it's got that quality, I'm immediately onboard.



Pretty much everything I look for in films as I've gotten older, are those which seem to have that built in rhythm, that cascade of images and music and ideas that I remember starting to discover when I watched The Changeling for the 4000th time in a row.


How a film is cut is incredibly important. It's where images sing. The heart of a film is in this one particular element. Some times its discordant. Sometimes it's on point. But if a movie draws me into its beat, I'm usually hooked. And I don't care how bad everyone else thinks it is. Or how unintentional everyone else thinks its qualities are.

It will still be beautiful to me.

While on rewatches I've started noticing a few more things that I don't enjoy in this one, I do find it very rewatchable (in large part because of its episodic nature), and there are some moments that I never seem to stop enjoying. I also think that Kieran Culkin and Alison Pill are really good in it.

This is something I am currently struggling with.

I've rarely rewatched movies the last few years either....and I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. I think just constantly rushing forward, to watch as much as possible, in some ways leaves you seeing less.


But I really don't know. I'm trying to work out the most perfect calculus on this problem and I'm terrible at math.