Go to a Film Festival
Film Festivals are communities as well. If you love movies, treat yourself to a week of seeing as many movies as possible during a day, and meeting new friends standing in line who are also voracious movie watchers. The films that play Sundance, Cannes or Toronto each year tell their own narrative about that week, and can tell your own personal narrative too.
You’ll be choosing from the selection of new titles that made the cut according to festival programmers, but you’ll also be on the ground floor of movies that will emerge in the culture in the coming year. There are some festivals that specialize in retrospective showings, like the Turner Classic Movies festival, but many major festivals have a classics sidebar. Cannes, AFI Fest and Sundance certainly do, so that could fall under Timing, such as Cannes brought Cleopatra into my life last year.
When I’m there on the ground at Sundance or Fantastic Fest, even I can’t see everything that made it into competition in a single week. I may catch some of the Sundance films I missed later in the year, either playing other fests or getting distribution. I didn’t see The Spectacular Now at Sundance, but it became a priority when it played SXSW and that’s where it entered my narrative. My first Sundance, I missed Higher Ground, The Guard, Little Birds and Submarine but I sought them out when they were released, because their Sundance pedigree made them part of my narrative. I picked Hide Away because I missed it at SXSW 2011 under the title A Year in Mooring. See, it took me this long just to complete that story. I can continue and fill in my own story of the week I spent at Sundance, in Austin, etc. I remember what was in the buzz or just what was in the program. It’s nostalgic and I can place myself back in the theater at the premiere I missed. I still haven’t seen The Woman, but that’s also a film Vern reviewed so it should be on my list.
Even if you don’t have the chance to attend Sundance, Toronto or Cannes, you can learn what types of films each festival stands for. If there’s a festival you support, just knowing that a film was selected by that festival could earn it a spot in your queue. Now that I’m a fan of festivals, I can look at movies that premiered there in years before I attended too. I’m certainly a big enough fan of Sundance, SXSW and Fantastic Fest that if it has a wreath on the DVD cover, I’m interested in what that body of film programmers selected. Toronto is a good pedigree but maybe I’m not as passionate about those films, except maybe the Midnight Madness selections. Cannes is a prestigious selection, and an especially good way to sort through foreign films.
However, the festival movies that fall by the wayside have to be part of my narrative too. I would have thought that going to a festival would make every film I missed part of a homework assignment to catch up, but even that leaves more titles than I can watch in a year. The basic fests each have hundreds of movies a year, and Toronto has over 400. I may have a personal connection to some Sundance movies I missed, so that makes them worthwhile for me to catch up, like the above. Others, I’ve had to make the tough call to realize they didn’t cross my path at Sundance and they’re not going to cross my path now that I’m home. My first Sundance, the music documentaries Beats, Rhymes & Life and The Black Power Mixtape played. I missed them in Park City and years later I still have not seen them. Maybe in time they’ll come around again. Maybe if I missed a movie at Sundance, and it fell by the wayside afterwards, it wasn’t supposed to be part of my story.
So even if you follow Sundance every year, you’ll have to be selective within Sundance. Luckily there are different categories of programming. Maybe you’re into Sundance’s Next programming looking for new artists, or you’re a Midnight movie person. You could focus on documentary categories or the World Cinema entries. Same goes for any film festival, but man, what a story it tells when you were on the ground discovering these films first.
Something to Talk About
You can take the community approach on the individual level too. Again, this is less about the social groups you already have and more about forming new ones. I met a friend at South by Southwest and got to know her remotely, via texting in between Austin film festivals. She told me her two favorite movies were The Slipper and the Rose and Dream for an Insomniac, two movies that were not otherwise on my radar at all.
I watched these films so I could get to know my new friend and have something to talk to her about. Actually, I had to wait to watch Slipper with her because it was a rare, hard to find DVD, but that’s also a valuable experience, watching it together. It may seem like a no brainer that you watch things your friends like. I hope it’s a no brainer. I think everyone should be interested in what their loved ones enjoy, if for no other reason than to understand them better. Of course you don’t have to watch movies that make you uncomfortable if your friend is a horror fan or a devotee of Gaspar Noé, but people are diverse enough that you could find some favorite of theirs to explore.
This falls a little bit into the dating example, although it’s not about picking a movie for your upcoming date this weekend. This is about delving into the past to learn about the movies that made up your date’s story up to the point where you met. If my date mentions she loved Fellini’s Satyricon, you better know I’ll make damn sure to see Satyricon before our next date. That would be a nice overlap with my personal goals too. I personally cannot wait until I have kids and I can introduce them to my favorite movies, help create their personal narratives and see my favorite movies through their eyes.
This Goes For TV Too
Lastly, I want to extend this discussion into the television realm, though the factors are a tad different because on television, you are dealing with following series that could be 22 hours a year. There are also more television choices than ever, with every cable network creating original series and now Netflix, Amazon and Hulu getting in on it too.
Like the above, I will follow certain shows because my friends follow them, and I want to have something to talk about with them every week. I do have assignment viewing for work, and even those have to be prioritized because I can’t follow 22 episodes of every popular show. There are certainly online forums for individual shows or genres of shows that can be your community. Water coolers no longer exist so that’s not a factor, but with social media you now have to keep up with your shows before they’re spoiled.
You may pick a network and stick with them. If you like what AMC develops but are only so-so on TNT, why not make all things AMC a priority while you skip the lukewarm offerings on other networks. Become the AMC encyclopedia. Timing even rears its head in the TV discussion too, because if you’re binge watching, you might not have time for five seasons in the year 2005, but come 2015 you have a healthy hiatus on which to enjoy “The Wire” in its entirety.
Conclusion
It really is significant to me what movies you or I choose to watch, whether you’re hungry for art or just watching a badass indie because it’s awesome. Some viewers will only watch movies to pass time and may be satisfied with whatever is currently available. That makes them interesting to me too, but for those of us looking at this wealth of content options as somewhat daunting, I hope this is a helpful, productive way to think about how we relate to movies in the new media world.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
