List Loving Film Goodness

The first Friday of each year marks freeing time for me, because it's the time when I start to make new archive lists. Although it may looks like link bombardment, for me it's exciting to see the lists build of 2011 release by title and by date, and also new box office lists of #1's by week and by weekend gross. And I'll have a new list up soon for 2011 release, after I've reviewed films that are from this year, Country Strong and Season of the Witch are likely candidates for first entries to that list. These are lists I update every week diligently and often peruse over the year.

I've always been a list maker, but usually for my own to do's, goals, etc, but several years back when I started getting back into film I was all about the lists. How many titles have I seen from this list or that list? Often I looked at what I loved and hated, but more often I was just obsessed with how much I had seen - was it all of the titles? Could I see all the films? Could I even *find* them all?

This was heightened during any awards season. I was (and still do) craft this in multiple formats: by category, by film (detailed) and by film (simple number of nominations), the world work to see all the films before the awards show. I've never done that, never saw them all. But, I got interested in number of titles, and then looked even further and wondered what films even qualified for this list? That was harder to find, and usually I could only find the parameters of the list but not the list itself. And those parameters were pretty wide, and usually were something like 'all releases in specific location for at least 7 days consecutively'. But I could never find anyone who was tracking that. The IMDb list by year is enormous and doesn't filter out DVD from Theatrical, plus you can pin point it to US release date - but I don't live there! I live in Toronto, Canada. It's a whole different country!

Then I had a total Mike moment from A Chorus Line where I said "I can do that!" We get lots of releases here in Toronto, and I can track what comes out every week! I can ever share it with others so that they know what's been out this week, month, year. I can look back on that list, a list of films that I actually had access to see and that people around me might have seen to and would be talking about. It also shows the film tempo of the city each year. I keep the standard up of a one-week consecutive day release as a guideline and presto! Now I have are archive including titles from 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and this week the cycle starts again the first six films released in 2011.

I love being able to look back at this list throughout the year, to print it off and have a highlighter handy and mark of the ones I've seen, or the ones I want to see. Or to look back at the list after the years have gone by and go "Wow, that was a good year" or "That was the year that westerns came back" or "That was the year that superhero movies exploded". I love looking at information from different angles, and having an archive is a like diving into puzzle where you don't know what the end picture looks like but you have all the piece. As we put together each piece of this years puzzle, I wonder what 2011 will bring, and what it's picture will say. What do you think 2011 will bring?