My Own Private Movie Heaven/Hell
So, as I am sure that most of you have been following along on my merry journey through celluloid land, this will come as knowledge that you already possess. But for those that have not (for shame!), here is the link to catch up on all the good stuff that you have been missing.
(The Excel Random Number Generator Gods Are Laughing Right Now.)
I honestly can’t remember how this whole thing stated. It probably came about as I was looking over my media collection while sipping on a Martini. “What am I going to do with all this content?”, I must have been asking myself. That is when the heavens opened and I saw the light. The almighty spirit had challenged me.
I have all of my media cataloged on a spreadsheet program, it was just a few simple steps to add some basic programming to manipulate the data. The end result is a spreadsheet that randomly spits out six films from my collection. So I never know what I am going to get when I ask it what to watch. The goal being, I am required to watch the films while riding a stationary recumbent cycle. It isn’t the movies that are important, it is the number of miles I rack up while watching them. I have set goals for specifics millage totals that I hit. I am about halfway to the first goal. I have been documenting all the films that I cycle through on my blog called Censored Mind, under the title Cinema Cycle.
(A grind-house T & A movie from the late 1980s, very collectible by some.)
So far, I have been at this for about a year and half. I have racked up just under 2,000 miles while watching the gamut of media from the 1900s to 2014. Heady stuff at times, terrible stuff at other times. Along the way I have experimented with tweaks to the format and tracking. Recently, I have added in a short video insert containing my commentary on the film to the Cinema Cycle blog.
(“Juno and the Paycock” out of the this collection, Hitchcock….Again?)
So the random function generator in the spreadsheet it designed to pick across the formats of my collection. LaserDisc / DVD / LaserDisc / VHS / LaserDisc / Streaming is the structure of the list that is generated when I request a new set of media to cycle through. This most recent list turned out to be a real winner.
(Shadowlands, the last of the Debra Winger films, she has done little since.)
Sometimes, the media that is selected are titles that I have already seen. Never the less, I watch them again, often times finding new details that I missed the first time through. Other times, I get handed titles that I have not seen that I am look forward to seeing. “Shadowlands” being one of those titles.
(Bondarchuk’s six hour epic.)
Then, I get titles such as this. The VHS title for this list is the original “War & Peace”. Most in the western world have not seen this film. It was released by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s during the height of the cold war. The film is six hour long and follows the book almost to the letter. To say it is a sweeping epic would be an understatement. I have seen it before and look forward to cycling through it one more time.
(No more silent film, movies to flex Hollywood’s audio abilities during the Great Depression.)
Finally we get the most recent addition to my LaserDisc library. Three films from the Dawn of Sound in Hollywood. These three films total almost 6 hours of viewing. So the end result is a list that is almost 16 hours of film that I am going to have to cycle through.
It is going to be a long June, 2015.
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