Get Obsessive
Credit where credit is due, I got this idea from Martin Scorsese. I once had a chance to ask him, on a Hugo red carpet at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, how modern movie fans can deal with trying to absorb the last century of cinema. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of early cinema, because he got a good head start on a lot of us. It was a red carpet so he was brief, but he said, “Well, I think it’s a matter of choosing the style or the period. Let’s say German Expressionism in the ‘20s. Russian Cinema in the ‘20s, study that. Really, you have to find a topic in a way and follow it.”
He knows it would be impossible to start with Man with a Movie Camera and work your way up to The Wolf of Wall Street. If you focus on specific movements, you’d have a manageable amount and you can exhaust a complete knowledge of one facet of cinema history. If you take his example of German expressionism, or Russian Cinema or maybe throw in French New Wave, you’d still have a long queue of titles on which to focus. For me, I started exploring Hong Kong Cinema when I discovered Jackie Chan and John Woo in the ‘90s. I will still catch up on the latest Donnie Yen or Tsui Hark though and continue the Hong Kong journey.
This is good advice for any such tastes. It doesn’t have to be highbrow academic movements. You could follow any genre into specific factions and choose those factions to make your personal mission. If you like comedy, think about subgenres of comedy that could narrow down your taste. Specificity is always more interesting, and will give your personal tastes a stronger perspective. Say you like screwball comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Watch every screwball comedy you can find. If a new screwball comedy pops up on Netflix, that’s your mission. Even if it’s as broad as buddy comedies, and there sure are a lot of them in the last century, make it your mission to see every buddy comedy there is, even Collision Course with Pat Morita and Jay Leno.
One of my personal quirks is I love post-apocalyptic movies where the characters have to find supplies. This may seem a very obscure niche, but I still haven’t seen them all. Sure, I started with the mainstream ones like The Road Warrior, I Am Legend, Book of Eli and even Waterworld. I went back to the previous Legend remakes Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man, zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead, and even the obscure Robert Altman film Quintet starring Paul Newman. There weren’t many supplies in Quintet and if you’re not a post-apocalypse, Newman or Altman completist, I would still recommend it in the “weirdest damn movies you’ve never heard of,” which is a category everyone should have. Anyway, I still haven’t seen all the movies dealing with supply-gathering after the apocalypse. It’s such an easy genre to do on a low-budget, there are plenty of grindhouse examples I haven’t gotten to yet.
I’m also Franchise Fred, as you know. If there’s a sequel to anything, you know I’m going to watch it. Maybe I’ve never seen Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, but I want to see Hellraiser: Deader just to see how many different ways Pinhead can rip someone’s head open. Hence, Breakin’ 2, which is also just legendary in the dance genre and for its oft-referenced subtitle. If you are a biblical epic fan, Ten Commandments would be better part of your narrative.
Hopefully, if you’ve lived a little bit of life, by now you know what you like. You don’t need me to tell you to watch movies that are about things that interest you. Just get as specific as possible, then make it your mission to complete that list. If you like superheroes, you’re in luck. There are a lot of superhero movies, but be sure to explore the obscure ones too. I chose Intolerance to fill in some of my early film history, and to complement a long ago viewing of Birth of a Nation. While Intolerance was impressive, I do not think I will be making epic silent films one of my obsessions.
A word of warning, don’t use the Netflix recommendations to follow this path. I’m saying we can do the work of researching our specific obsessive tastes and queuing up all the movies that fit personally. It is going to fall to us individually, because no online algorithm is going to be able to find your favorite movies, and you could go down a rabbit hole of bad recommendations that way. We’re trying to optimize our time here so we can’t take that risk.
Give Yourself Homework
I am lucky that I can make it my job to watch movies. I can do research on actors or directors I’m interviewing, I can research a topic about which I’m planning to write, or maybe I just need to review the latest Blu-ray that came out this week. I watched Foxy Brown and Coffy because Pam Grier will be promoting a new TV show in January, “Unsung Hollywood,” so it’s as good a time as any to catch up on her classics. However, just because you may not have a job that depends on seeing all the movies starring Nicolas Cage, doesn’t mean you can’t go on a Nicolas Cage marathon all by yourself.
A fun way to deal with the exponential number of titles available is to give yourself homework. Pretend you are doing a case study on all the films of Billy Wilder. Or maybe pick someone less universally praised and see if you can find the good that everyone is overlooking. I guarantee you if you binge watch Rob Cohen movies, you’ll have a unique perspective that few others will share. Be completely obsessive though and see even the most obscure thing that the actor or filmmaker produced. Leave no stone unturned. I saw Nicolas Cage’s Canadian rowing movie The Boy in Blue.
Once you have your homework, you’ll have to complete your assignment before you get distracted by other movies available. When you do, you will have an interesting conversation piece. Imagine if you were at the office Christmas party and if someone made small talk, you could say, “I just finished watching all the films of Billy Wilder.” You could either be the one educating your colleagues about Billy Wilder, or perhaps by chance connect with another Billy Wilder expert. That is ultimately the goal of any hobby. We will go out into the world with an individual perspective on this subject that will give us a way to connect with both other aficionados, and with people who may just be interested in what you do with your life.
When I discover a new movie that I like, I like to then give myself the homework of seeing that filmmaker’s previous films. Often that’s only a handful of films, as by the time they’ve made four or five films, they’re somewhat established names. But I discovered Drake Doremus from Like Crazy and then was determined to see Spooner and Douchebag. I always lament that there are so many Fellini and Godard movies I have never seen. I should probably get on that and take my own advice.
