sovay: (Claude Rains)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-04-09 07:52 pm

DVDs weren't out yet, so please ignore my box set

The hundred movies meme was even harder to assemble because I spent far more of my childhood and adolescence immersed in books than in movies and therefore many of the films on this list were not so much formative as illuminating once I finally started paying attention to cinema as an art form, and/or they wired themselves instantly into my brain and are quoted regularly to this day. A list of favorites might overlap significantly but not identically, I imagine tilting more heavily toward sff and noir. I feel it may be a much more mainstream list than my formative books, although still full of meaningful absences. (I sacrificed a number of classics as well as movies whose circumstances were potentially more important than their content, but just glitched on The Medium (1951) and Katerina Izmailova (1966), both of which I even own.) I find it very difficult to try to winnow accurately. I may just not be designed for this format of meme.
genarti: Knees-down view of woman on tiptoe next to bookshelves (Default)

[personal profile] genarti 2025-04-10 05:04 am (UTC)(link)
13, which is more than I thought it might be given how rarely i watch movies (it's always a social activity for me) and thus pleasing; also, significantly less than the number of books I got, more mainstream or no. The list reminded me of how much in all directions Johnny Eager is, of the fact that I should really rewatch Pimpernel Smith sometime soon, and of how many of these movies I haven't seen I ought to put on the list to... maybe get around to or maybe not, let's be honest, but at least earnestly intend to.
genarti: Knees-down view of woman on tiptoe next to bookshelves (Default)

[personal profile] genarti 2025-04-11 03:18 am (UTC)(link)
Are television shows the same way?

They are! The exception is documentaries and other nonfiction, which I can and do watch solo, and occasionally the right kind of animated show. But for whatever reason, watching live-action stuff is pretty much always a social activity to me.

If I lived alone, I'd probably learn how to watch things solo more, admittedly. When I was living in Montreal, there was a movie theater right around the corner from me, and I'd go see blockbusters in the French dub sometimes as practice. That's how I saw the 2018 A Wrinkle in Time movie, and Thor: Ragnarok the second time, and I think one or two others I'm forgetting. As you can tell from this list, though, it still was a relatively infrequent endeavor.

(These days, bulk of the nonfiction I watch is youtube, which I have playing on my phone on the windowsill while I do the dishes. It's a tightly curated list that includes PBS, though -- I love Eons, which is 10-20 minute videos about paleontology and deep time -- so I sort of count it as tv-adjacent.)