Well, if everyone did it, I wouldn’t be much of a moviegique, would I? I’d just be some guy who goes to an average amount of movies.
I can’t even begin to total like Jake did. Actual features in the theater just in the past 20 years is over 2,000, so I’m sure I’m undercounting.
Holy cow, that’s a lot! Does that count watching things more than once? My lifetime total is probably somewhere around 800 - 1,000 movies (over 50+ years), although I’m a big fan of rewatching things that become favorites; probably seen Aliens 20-25 times at this point, for example.
MST3K has riffed over 200 features (and who knows how many shorts). So you might be lowballing yourself a bit.
I’m pretty confident that between MST3K, Rifftrax, Cinematic Titanic, Joe Bob and Elvira, I’ve seen more than 800 just there.
God lord I didn’t think of that, at least for the hours/years watched I’ve done a lot more than what’s recorded.
But no, for lifetime stats Letterboxd only records unique viewings, so that’s, 21,331 different films (5,901 of those are shorts), 28,010 hours spent on those films - 8,277 different directors and 168 countries.
Yearly stats do list them as diary entries. In 2016 only 19% were re-watches.
In 2017 I started naming best actors and actresses at the blog and did fewer rewatches (I had been collecting notes on this for years, and did some sampling, to refresh my memory on close races). But that year only 4.6% were rewatches as I was focusing on my acting watchlist.
I’ve watched more in the past 10 years since starting the blog - and more in the past 17 since the divorce and retiring from music making, gigs, etc (so I suddenly had a lot of free time - oh, and never had kids, so the things that would be gobbling up time for others, wasn’t a factor for me)
For a laugh, I like to tell people I once watched 75 movies in a day… before confessing that those were the early, early films, the Edisons, Lumière brothers, etc, where they only ran seconds long, 10, 20 seconds, maybe a few that hit the minute mark.
A much better version is the tv movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring, of all people, Jack Palance. Coppola’s version seems to draw a lot from it. My wife and I consider it the best “book version” of Dracula out there. It was on Amazon Prime, but I think it’s dropped off now.
Doh! I hadn’t thought of that, was only thinking about sitting down to watch movies “conventionally.” I’ve seen all MST3K (well, except K03), a large chunk of the Rifftrax library, and most of Cinematic Titanic, so that’s probably 400 - 450 right there!
And then there are the grey areas – hanging out with friends, maybe at someone else’s house, and unexpectedly catching the first/last 75% of a movie on TV. If I counted those I’m sure the total would be higher.
That was actually the second Dracula I ever saw. (Murnau’s Nosferatu was the first.) Not too long ago Shudder had a lot of Dan Curtis’ stuff, including this. (Curtis did “Dark Shadows”, Trilogy of Terror, “The Night Stalker”, etc.)
I like it but it also has the Mina-is-Dracula’s-Wife subplot which is most decidedly not in the book and probably would’ve been inconceivable to Stoker. (Although he did wrestle with a similar theme in Jewel of the Seven Stars so maybe I’m selling him short.)
Do you know why Dracula was after Mina Harker in the book? It’s his revenge. “I’m gonna turn her into a vampire, then we’re gonna hide for a century, and when you’re all dead, we’re gonna party!”
Movies never capture the fact that Stoker’s Dracula was a real jerk.
That one featured Star Force: Fugitive Alien II. So in a sense, you have seen it. If not quite the same cut.
I can’t recall ever walking out on a film, other than a film I’ve already seen or was never interested in. Like passing time in a Sci-Fi convention movie room waiting for someone to come get me. Or—others, not me of course—sneaking into another, possibly R-rated film one theater over.
And I’ve sat through some klunkers. Most recent was an amateur, low budget sci-fi-ish film at a film festival that supposedly already won a different film fest award. It was *** so *** bad, painful, yet I stayed. (But so many others didn’t, as testified to by the loud door latch mechanisms.)
. . .
What!? Oh, yeah, it’s been restored on video for decades now. I guess I was still in the mindset of expecting only to hear that claim from folks born prior to around 1900. LOL
There are a lot of well-known films people haven’t seen.
Blood and Chocolate, I couldn’t…just wasn’t enough to hold me in my seat.
No, you misunderstand, or perhaps I worded it poorly. My surprise was, out of the 80+ years of more popular Dracula films, that the 1920s Nosferatu would be a person’s first exposure to Dracula on film.
I don’t remember, but it may have been mine too. My father was a film historian with a special love for silent film.
My first exposure to Dracula was either the Count on Sesame Street, or some bad comedian going “I am DRAK-oola, blah blah…”
Leave during a move. Never. I mean I stuck it out through Origins: Wolverine, so fair to say once planted, the butt stays. But (heh) to be fair, I used to be a film critic so it was my job to stay put and see the whole movie. Guess that habit is ingrained now.
But (heh, heh) there are two incidents close to this.
Once was during The Piano. I remember somewhere during the film, can’t remember where but that’s kinda the point, I completely tuned out. Instead of watching the movie I was checking out the audience and looking at the faces. Just for something to do. I’ve never lost interest in a film that way before.
The other was during Bringing Out the Dead. Not because the film was bad, but right before watching I had some bad Mexican food. And for those who have seen the movie, there are scenes where, to show how exhausted Cage’s character was, they started to mess around with the focus. Needless to say, I had to leave the theatre for a bit to un-queese my stomach.
Hey! I’m only 112!
Also, it was not unusual in the pre-video era for people to have film projectors and film, it just wasn’t anywhere near as ubiquitous as the video player made it.
For whatever reason my grade school decided to have a night show of Nosferatu.
Oh! Also, we had a UHF channel that showed all the PD stuff which, at the time, was silent movies, old serials and the like. So Nosferatu played pretty regularly there.
The closest I’ve ever come to walking out of a movie was Hereditary—maybe I was just in the wrong headspace that day, but I have never been that aggressively bored by a movie. When an entire row of people in front of us got up and left about halfway through I had to convince myself not to follow them.
That’s what ya call a “slow burn” movie.
Has it ignited yet?
Lemme just say, if people say “'gique, can you recommend a recent horror movie for me to enjoy on a Saturday afternoon”, it’s not my go-to.
I don’t use Rotten Tomatoes any more because of all the nonsense they do with the scores, but back then I felt it deserved its 89/59 split. It’s not what you call a “people pleaser”.
My ticket cost $16.75 which I paid for with my MoviePass. Yes, I am the reason they went out of business.