RAISON D’ÊTRE

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU READ BLOGS


Can I blame my friends for this? The thing is, since last year some of them came up with those annoying blogs. Annoying because my humble self have already started in the dust and rust covered past three of those and abandoned them all fairly quickly. Now, that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do with a blog. After all, we all did it, did we not? You come all enthusiastic, bursting with ideas, full of optimism and good will and get fed up with it all sooner than you could say ‘oh-wow-I’ve-had-a-visitor-last-month-wait-no-it-was-me-from-a-computer-in-the-library’.

So, yes. I think I can blame my friends for this and so should you. In case I start this blog, carry on for three months and abandon it like every single one of them before, remember that you should blame my friend for this. For having better ideas than mine and for being consistent (unlike me). And for making me jealous and coming up with an idea that surely is silly, over the top and has a potential of mildly cool if I only managed to carry on for longer than, say, three entries. But then again, no one visits forgotten blogs so why should I worry?

To clear things out though – following my friend’s blog in which he committed himself to listening all the albums gathered in one of those 1001 [insert activity here] before you die, I thought I could go one further. So I got myself a book as well. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, the 2010 edition. Nice and round year to start a project like this. Quite a massive book, though. I mean, you know – one thousand and one films. Like those in the cinema, like. Them long ones. Bugger. That’ll take some time then. And some digging as well. Now, the book goes in a chronological order which poses some threats. First – that we’d be off to a very slow start. I expect some of the 1900 titles to be so obscure that even Hipster Cat hasn’t heard of them. It may start with Méliès’ A Trip To The Moon, which I should actually have somewhere already, but I shouldn’t promise myself equal measures of luck with all the classic titles. And second – if I follow that order, I have no chance of reaching the end of the World War 2. The sheer lack of diversity in styles, lack of colour, lack of anything more familiar would probably just kill me in a dark alleyway (in mostly black and just a little bit off-white). So I decided to follow the alphabetical index. That way we’ll have more varied journey, even if the idea of capturing the evolution of the cinematography will have to be butchered and sacrificed like a character from a Mel Gibson’s picture. But since I’m aiming at the entertaining end of the spectrum than the academic one, I do what I want. End of.

Rule two states that I must watch the film shortly before writing about it. It doesn’t matter how many times I have already seen it and how many lines I can quote from memory. Every film must be watched with the intention of observing it, analysing it, comparing, and all the other –ings which combined will end up on this very blog as an entry. No nostalgia has any right of interfering. Harsh judgement or nothing! (forget the entertaining end of the spectrum I’ve just mentioned...)

Last but not least, there is an issue of availability of some of the titles. Not checked that yet but I assume, there’s going to be trouble ahead. So it may happen that if hunting for a particularly rare type of red october lasts too long to bother I may simply skip one or two. Or postpone them until further notice. Still, I plan to mark an appropriate spot with some sort of acknowledgement. Or a Scene Missing frame. Or pretend that nothing happened and just carry on regardless. Who knows how it all is going to actually pan out?

And so, without further ado, let us start! The first film on the list is the magnificent 12 Angry Men. I have that one already, seen it before – easy peasy. Give me no more than two weeks.

Oh, and one more thing. I do apologise for mutilating English, but at the end of the day it’s only my second language. Which I started learning as a third. With the fourth one butting in and taking completely over for a number of years. You know what I mean. There will be bloo... mistakes. There will be mistakes.

Apart from that, enjoy!