Zach Sees Every Movie: On Seeing Every Movie

This is the first of threes posts meant to conclude the Zach Sees Every Movie project. This one will focus on assessing the entire project in retrospect. The one on Wednesday will collect a handful of reviews I never published. Finally, Friday’s post will be the Zach Sees Every Movie Awards, in which titles like “Best Bad Movie” and “Best Director Who Made Movies that I Liked that You Probably Assumed Were Terrible” will be given to the most deserving recipients. Stay tuned.

So…I saw every movie. 119 movies to be exact.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t actually see every movie that played from September 6, 2010, to April 30, 2011. It got to be too hard to keep up with towards the end, and in the last month or so I missed about twelve movies, in addition to the ten movies I had missed before that. (Though some were beyond my control, like Hatchet II, which was pulled from theaters after three days.) So the project kind of petered out near the end. Of course, for anyone reading these posts, the project petered out in the first month, which was about as long as I could sustain seeing every movie, writing about every movie, taking four college classes (three of which were difficult), and maintaining a functional social life. Something had to give.

Since I was no longer publishing my thoughts on every movie to this blog (which hasn’t seen an update since, oh…February. Great.), the purpose of this project was called into question, and this question was never answered. Because it really didn’t provide any external value once I started keeping my opinions strictly internal. (It also didn’t provide any external value the most recent time I did share my opinions, in that one dreadful podcast.) But despite the urging of many friends to give up the project, along with my mother, whose unenviable duty it was to refill my bank account after I blew my funds on another week of cinema, I pushed forward. My devotion to the project was too strong. If I ever missed a movie when it played at the AMC Loews Boston Common 19, I would venture out of Boston to whichever obscure theater was still showing it. (And as a result, I have some amusing stories.) Seeing every movie gave me a weird sense of focus, and I had plenty of energy that first semester. It wasn’t until the last two weeks of December when I had to focus on finals that I first let a few slip by.

When I returned to Boston after winter break, I got things off to strong start, seeing four movies in one night. But my plans to see even more films the following day evaporated when I was just too tired. That proved to be the last time I saw more than two movies in one day, a regular and, most importantly, necessary occurrence first semester. Somehow, even without ever really writing much, juggling the various aspects of my life with Zach Sees Every Movie was too difficult this spring. I still saw fifty movies, which I suppose is an impressive number, but it’s little compared to the sixty-nine I saw in the fall, especially considering the amount of movies I missed. My schedule was simply less accommodating. My only free weekday was Monday, and I usually slept into the afternoon and then had to focus on homework.

I didn’t even get to see a “last movie,” in that when I went into the last movie I wound up seeing, Fast Five, it was with the expectation that I would see at least a few more in the week before I went home. Again, finals interfered with that plan. But as I mull it over, I realize that not seeing a “last movie” was kind of the point of this project. I started it when I realized that in my freshman year of college, despite having a large movie theater with nineteen screens a mere two-minute walk from my dorm, I had only managed to see four movies (Inglourious Basterds, Paranormal Activity, The Invention of Lying, and Where the Wild Things Are) the entire year, and they had all been in the fall. This project was a response to that, a way to get myself to go to the movies on a more regular basis and see everything I wanted to see, rather than missing anticipated film after anticipated film for exactly no apparent reason.

So no, the project does not end. That is, I will hardly be seeing every movie going forward, but I will make much more of an effort to see the ones I want to see, or the ones I’m curious about, while allowing myself to miss Yogi Bear 2. And more importantly, I will motivate myself to go beyond the local mainstream movie theater. Already in the last two months I’ve seen Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a strong samurai film from a director I regard fondly; Meeks’ Cutoff, a slow, tense historical drama; Midnight in Paris, the latest trifle from my all-time favorite director; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a strangely beautiful movie that continued to dance around in my brain long after I left the theater; and The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s ambitious attempt to wrestle with man’s place in the universe, so magnificent that each time seeing it I left the theater awestruck, breathing in my surroundings as if I had stepped out into the world for the first time. I haven’t left the mainstream behind, of course; I’ve already seen X-Men: First Class, a strong superhero movie; Green Lantern, an awful superhero movie; Transformers: Dark of the Moon, an utter mess; The Hangover Part II, a mediocre sequel; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, a strong finish to the great story’s uneven film adaptation; and the upcoming Friends with Benefits, one of the must-avoid movies of the summer, and 30 Minutes or Less, a solid comedy with a really good performance from Aziz Ansari.

And that’s not to mention the various cult and classic offerings from the same venues I saw those, like Steven Spielberg’s masterpieces Close Encounters of the Third Kind (my first time seeing it) and Jaws (a film that looms large in my upbringing but that I hadn’t seen in full for a long time); the 1981 slasher flick The Burning, which has its pleasures despite a debilitating devotion to the genre’s histrionics (namely an unnecessary avoidance of showing the killer’s disfigured face until the end, which sends some potentially scary scenes into disorienting and clumsy abstraction in a movie otherwise stylistically straightforward); or Alice, Jan Svankmajer’s nightmarish, stop motion-heavy take on Alice in Wonderland.

The goal of the project was to get myself to go to the movies more often. And it’s difficult to say if I would have seen all of these if Zach Sees Every Movie hadn’t drilled in me the pleasures of seeing perhaps not every, but many movies. I doubt that I would have, although it’s impossible be completely certainty. In a simpler way though, Zach Sees Every Movie was undeniably successful: for all the stress, for all the time-consumption, for all the pieces of shit I allowed (or, rather, paid) Hollywood to thrust at me, I’m quite glad I did it. When this enormous undertaking of an idea popped into my mind at the tail end of last summer, I had no idea how far I would go, how dedicated I would be, or if I would have scrapped the whole thing before I even got to Boston (undoubtedly the sanest route). But I surprised even myself by continuing this project for the entire planned amount of time, even as my commitment slowly faded. And I can say with 20/20 hindsight that this project was misguided, irresponsible, demanding, unnecessary, and deeply rewarding.