Project Summer: An Introduction

Well, that worked out pretty well.

If you scroll down this page (past the Wolverine review), you’ll find that my previous blog post is dated 1/3/2009. I’m glad to see that I can’t make good on my promises worth a squat. (Of course, I’m relatively certain that nobody read that post to begin with, so we’re still good.) Looking at my Blue Cherry-centric Word document, I found an unfinished “Best of 2008” list that is a bit useless these days (although I could find a way to repurpose some of the content). All in all, the reboot was a spectacular failure.

Now, I can certainly assure you that I wasn’t taking a break from popular culture, by any means. So far in 2009, I’ve taken in 17 movies at the local theaters. They cover the entire range of the filmic spectrum, from The Wrestler to Twilight. (For those of you who’ve friended me on Facebook, you’re no doubt aware of this.) Plus, there’s the workload of television I’ve valiantly kept up with this year – which has made me hope and wish for the first time that networks would cancel as many of the shows that I watch as possible. (Looking at what’s already been picked up so far for next fall, it looks like I’m not going to win.) Fortunately, my network television viewing schedule shuts down on May 18th (or May 19th, if I go ahead and watch the pilot for Ryan Murphy’s Glee). The $64,000 question is: What will I do then?

Well, obviously, I have plans to take in as many big summer movies as possible. My calendar so far includes: Wolverine (which I’ve already seen), Star Trek, Angels & Demons, Terminator: Salvation, Up, Drag Me to Hell, The Hangover, Transformers 2, Public Enemies, Bruno, Funny People, Inglourious Basterds, Final Destination 4, H2, and probably a couple more that I’m forgetting. But obviously, that will only take up a few hours each week, on average. I’ve also got at least one vacation planned, and a potential move. But, I’m hoping to find a decent way to occupy my time.

So, over the past few weeks, I’ve come up with a relatively cool solution. My goal this summer is to watch as much of my growing Blu-ray collection as I can. I’ve been accumulating discs for low, low prices over the past several months, but I haven’t found the time to watch much of them. So, I shall watch them, and I will write about them here. Thus, I’ll accomplish two goals: I’ll work through my backlog of movies, and I’ll actually have a steady stream of content to publish to my blog.

I hope to intersperse other content with my Project Summer writings, such as my hastily written movie reviews. For those who aren’t aware, I’m a big fan of midnight and advanced screenings of movies, which is why you’ll usually find me at the Century 14 on late Thursday nights. Since I prefer to write my movie reviews immediately following these screenings, this usually means that I’m up until 3:00-3:30 in the morning to plop down my initial reactions. Plus, that will hopefully encourage me in my quest to continue producing blog content.

Here are some of the specifics of my so-called-plan:

• In the interest of keeping things as unpredictable as possible, much of what I’ll be watching will be picked at random, using a rudimentary program for cataloging my collection that I wrote in 2003 during my college time. I could pull up anything from Children of Men to Failure to Launch, so this could be a summer of excellence or a summer of masochistic torture. We’ll just have to wait and see.
  
• Brand-new movies that I haven’t seen yet will be given the standard review treatment. Recent movies from the past couple of years, which I have formally reviewed already, will contain my initial reviews from when I first saw the movie, followed by updated comments and re-evaluations. (I know there are several movies that I’ve become less impressed with over time, so hopefully that should make for some interesting reading.)
  
• It’s very possible that some of the movies picked at random will be well-known older movies, or personal favorites. For me, the trick with these flicks will be to find some unique angle or angles from which I can write about these movies. I don’t know exactly how this will work, but we’ll find a way.
  
• With regards to TV series over the summer, I have some very specific plans. Namely, I am hoping to burn through my Blu-ray season sets of Dexter and Mad Men. For Mad Men, my goal is simple: watch both seasons in time to tune into the third-season premiere sometime in July or August. (I was hoping to do this last summer in time for Season Two, but I kept pushing it off. The fact that we didn’t have AMC in HD also influenced matters. But, we finally got AMC HD in December 2008, so now I have a much greater incentive to pull this off.) Likewise, I hope to make it through all three seasons of Dexter; I already have Season One on my shelf, and I will be picking up Season Two this Tuesday. My hope would be to time my viewings of the first two seasons around the time that Season Three will be released (hopefully August). However, I have no immediate plans to tune into Showtime for Season Four. (Let’s face it: for all their awesome original series, their movie selections are crap. That’s why I’m an HBO man.) When writing up on TV shows like these, my approach will be to evaluate them as entire seasons, not episode-by-episode. This will allow me to elaborate more easily on the broad canvas that television series have, namely their narrative goals.

So there you have it. My goal is to kick this shindig off on May 19th or 20th, with perhaps some preview posts to whet your appetites. Let’s hope this goes somewhat better than my January plans.