Friday, April 3, 2015

30 Movies in 30ish Days before 30: Final Thoughts

So....I did it! I successfully watched 30 movies form the 30 years I've been alive before I turned 30...in 30ish days. I got a 2ish day head start since I knew it would be a busy month.  But I did it! What a crazy and interesting and satisfying project.

So setting off on the project I was always excited about. I thought it'd be fun to see how poorly some movies aged, how poorly I remembered some movies and if I still liked the ones I thought I did.  For the most part there weren't a lot of surprises there either.  But about 7 movies in...I started to realized what I'd committed myself to. 30 is a lot of movies. It's 30...movies...none of the movies were under 90 minutes and several were over 120...so it was a COMMITMENT. I wrote 11 blog posts in March which is about 11 more than I'd been writing over the last few years. So the watching was time consuming and then the writing was even more so.  Some of the movies I found entertaining to liveblog my thoughts to - OMG there were some bad movies.  Other movies I watched with friends and their commentary was awesome.  Then some movies I was just kinda meh about and just wrote some closing thoughts to. I also ranked all the movies...did I not give any Cs? That's hard to imagine, apparently I'm not a very tough movie grader. I gave a lot of B-s and a lot of A-s not a lot of A+s though.  Anyways here are the movies that were selected.


One thing I was asked over and over again throughout this challenge was, "Is {insert weird movie title here" really your favorite movie from {insert year here}?" And the answer was always no. I don't think any of the movies I watched were actually my Favorite Movie for that year, but movies I really liked, thought were interesting, movies I remember scaring the Jeebus out of me, or just movies I had a specific memory or emotional attachment to.  I watch a lot of movies apparently so I also tried to pick movies I hadn't seen in a few years. That got more difficult after I passed 2010 but it was still fine.

I also ended up renting a lot of movies online. I only ended up having 14 of the ones I watched. Friends had a couple of them, but I had a bunch of free Google $ from my Chromecast but I did probably spend about $20-30 renting movies for this project as well.  There were some that were originally on the list that I'm bummer I couldn't find to rent. Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead?!? Seriously how is that gem not available for rent! I also ended up buying a few movies during the project because I knew I wanted to own them anyway. Mitty and Big Hero 6 were on sale at Target so they entered my collection during the month.

I'm super thankful for my friends who put up with my movie project and constantly talking about movies and what it all meant to me because I'm sure it was a bit annoying.  But one of the things I've told everyone about after this was all said and done was how I didn't realize before this how much movies have been a part of my life. I always say I was really shaped by my books and music I listened to, but movies are there too.  I love movies like I love music and books, I really like the sad and depressing stuff.  I like the light bubblegum stuff here and there but when you ask me what my favorites are they're going to be a little darker and without a happy ending. Oh my gosh give me a movie without a happy ending and I am so excited.

Anyways it was a super fun project, no I will not be doing this in 10 years for 40. I have yet to watch another movie this week and it's felt kinda weird. I don't know if I'll watch one this weekend, I'm so movie'd out! But there were a bunch on my initial list that I didn't get to watch that I may sporadically watch but we'll see.  I did really enjoy blogging about movies, so I may try to blog more about some of the crap I watch we'll see.

Here's are the links to all the previous blogs!
Overview of the Project
My thoughts on Legend
1986-1989 Movies
1990-1993 Movies
2014

****** Special Note on Legend because there has been some controversy as to when it was actually released. It was limited released in 1985 but wide released in 1986- So I counted it for 1985. It's my project I can do what I want :) Thanks. ***********