If you're one of the visitors who has been here since the beginning, you can remember that this site started out as a place for me to blog my reviews of the latest movies I have seen. If you have been following this blog, you will have seen it go all over the place, turning into a webcomic, a weblog about numerous different subjects, a weblog with 150 subblogs and a weblog where nothing really much was posted at all. I'd still like to think of myself as a movie buff, and when I sit in the living room of my new home, facing the couch is a nice collection of movies old and new, winking at me and going: "We're pretty cool, aren't we?" Lately though, I have noticed that there are more and more movies still wrapped in plastic lying in that cupboard, waiting to be unwrapped and watched. Because even though I have been very busy with all sorts of things lately, one of those things has not been watching movies. In fact, I think that in my new home I have so far only seen a single movie (Corina Corina with Whoopie Goldberg, which was actually quite good), and I cannot even remember what was the last movie I saw before that.
I can remember the times when I used to watch a dozen movies a week, times which are not even that far away, but lately the celluloid imaginings of the world's finest moviemakers have been shown everywhere except on my television. It's not like I don't have any good movies waiting to be seen. Pan's Labyrinth dropped into my mailbox at work yesterday, and I still have a few American football movies yearning to be unwrapped (We Are Marshall and Invincible), as well as the new Platinum Edition of the Jungle Book and actually about two or three dozen movies more.
This is a serious situation. With every movie added to the pile, I feel a little bit more guilty. I can remember that one of my resolutions for 2007 was to not have movies 'breed' like that anymore, and to watch anything that came in within two or three weeks, so that I could store them away and not have those guilty feelings. It's not like I don't have time anymore to watch all those flicks. The moving house is done, so my wife and I have plenty of time to clear away a movie or two from the pile every night. Then again, moving house brings with it all sorts of little tasks that have to be done weeks after you think you are ready, the house is flooded with people who want to see the place, and what little time is left is wasted on videogames and bad games of football on the television.
And then there is a small bookcase next to my bed, with about thirty books that are also still waiting to be read. You see, my wife and I love reading books, but we also love buying them, meaning the pile of books to be read grows quicker than any sane human being can read.
Alas, a new challenge then. I wasn't too satisfied with challenge 10, to be honest, which I only wrote down because I couldn't come up with a real challenge 10. This changes now. The new and improved challenge 10:
10. When the year of the challenge is over, I don't want to have a single movie or book in my collection that I haven't watched/read and consequently blogged about.
There, that'll show me!
I like your new challenge #10 a lot; might even adopt it for myself! Although that *would* mean having to read "For the Independent, Peaceful Reunification of the Country" by former North Korean prime minister/president Kim Il Sung... Why oh why did I ever buy that one?
Posted by: jpk | October 20, 2007 at 10:34 AM