A Movie Every Day?

Most people know him as Tom Servo, a sort of robotic gumball machine who lives aboard a spaceship in the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. In real life, however, he is Kevin Murphy, an extremely funny comedian who, as part of the MST3K cast, has provided me with enough grins and guffaws to last a lifetime.

Yet many fans of MST3K may be unaware that Murphy is the author of a book entitled A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey, in he chronicles 12 months living up to an extraordinary goal. "Beginning tomorrow, January 1, 2001, I, Kevin Murphy, promise to go to a theater and watch a movie every single day, for an entire year," he wrote. And he did it. The tome is less a book of movie reviews than a travelogue—Murphy traveled to all sorts of places, from local drive-ins to Cannes, France, to see movies.

As 2009 quickly approaches (it's in less than 2 hours, by my clock), Murphy has provided the inspiration for me to attempt something similar, albeit slightly less ambitious. I'm going to try to watch a movie a day for a year, but I'm going to drag my ass to the theater every day. I have, in my private collection, nearly 400 movies on DVD that I've never seen. The problem is, I never watch them. I've been squirreling them away, not for the winter but for my old age. Well, I guess that time has finally come. Time to bust open the floodgates and sample some of the films I've been collecting. It's a pretty interesting batch of movies...classics (Born Yesterday), musicals (Funny Girl), heavy dramas (The Pawnbroker), science fiction (I, Robot), light comedies (I'll Take Sweden), westerns (Joe Kidd), innumerable 1970s TV movies (Family Flight), and schlock (Schlock).

In fact, after careful perusal of my list of unseen DVDs, it occurs to me that to keep things interesting, I can schedule "theme weeks" for myself. I was able to organize most of the movies into categories such as:

BRITISH WEEK

Three Men in a Boat

The Railway Children

Skallagrigg

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer

The Witches

The Wrong Box

Accident

1970s WEEK

The Seven-Percent Solution

The Eiger Sanction

The Getaway

Pretty Baby

Hearts of the West

Play it as it Lays

The Last of Sheila

SUSPENSE FLICKS WITH ONE-WORD TITLES WEEK

Revenge

Payback

Breakdown

Impulse

Derailed

Shattered

Speed

ASIAN CHARACTERS WEEK

Snow Falling on Cedars

Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity

The Joy Luck Club

Double Happiness

Eat Drink Man Woman

The Last Emperor

Xiu Xiu

Other theme weeks I'm planning will include the following categories: science fiction, musicals, foreign language, remakes, cult/trash, historical dramas, movies based on plays, comedy, horror, thrillers, obscurities, westerns, and movies featuring some of my favorite performers: Woody Allen, Walter Matthau, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Eden, George Sanders, and the Marx Brothers. In addition, I'll do a week of the seven movies I most want to see in my vast collection, as well as one week each highlighting the selected favorites of my dear friends Merf and Connie.

Before I even embark on my own odyssey, I know in my heart it is doomed to failure. There's just no way I can watch a movie every single day, especially since I already watch a bunch of TV shows (including Desperate Housewives, Lost, Scrubs, The Office, Special Victims Unit, Without a Trace, 30 Rock and Monk). So I'm going to give myself a little slack—I'm going to try to see an average of one movie a day. If I skip a day, I've got to watch two the following day. Or, if I see two in one day, I get the following day off.

Oh. And if I see a movie in an actual theater, sorry, but that's going to have to count as my having seen a movie.

By the end of 2009, I will have made a huge dent in my collection. And although I am constantly adding more titles, the ones I already have represent most of the films I most want to see. I can't help but wonder how many I will actually enjoy. Each film will be graded on a 1-5 scale. At the end of the year, I'll tally the results and work out the average of all 365 movies; I'll predict the average will be 3.2.

The friends I've discussed my plan with agree that I lack the drive, the determination, the sheer time such an undertaking will require. I can't say I disagree with them, but I'm keen to see how long I can go. A week? A month? We shall see...

Beginning tomorrow, January 1, 2009, I, Brett Bayne, promise to sit at home on my lazy ass and watch a movie every single day, for an entire year.

90-Second Song

Getting ready for Mike Myers

English has many peculiarities, but one that has always fascinated me is how the phrase "get ready" has been rendered so meaningless.

Example: a TV commercial for the new Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru just implored me to "Get ready for the comedy event of the summer!" Basically, what the studio is saying is, "A new Mike Myers film opening soon." The rest is just a rather lame attempt to get me psyched. For it is as matter of principle that one of the ways I "get ready" for something like this is to glean the consensus of film critics, who have lambasted this alleged comedy as Myers' weakest effort so far, with a dismal Tomatometer rating of 16 percent. And yet, I feel certain that this was not the way Paramount Studios is expecting any filmgoer to "get ready" for this particular cinematic debut.

This begs the question: how should one get ready for something like this? Obviously we should get showered and dressed, make sure we have $25 to buy popcorn and soda, fill the car with gasoline and so on. But these things go without saying, no? Is there some other way I should be preparing myself for The Love Guru, other than finding a gas mask to wear during the screening?

Congratulations!

Their/There