Got any book / movie / TV show-related resolutions? Creative ones can go in here as well actually.
Every year I vow to watch more films from my Letterboxd watchlist and I always fail miserably. Will this be the year? If I get to the end of 2025 and there are still movies hanging around on there I added five years ago then maybe I should just nuke the watchlist. I also want to increase the number of non-English language films I watch.
I’d like to read more of the books I own, with special mention of chunksters Solenoid, The Vorrh and Always Coming Home.
This year I will have watched every Godzilla movie, need a similar challenge for 2025. Thinking about every Zatoichi movie, but unsure if they are actually any good (which tbf didn’t stop me watching a good half of those Godzilla films)
Also want to do more foreign language films, good at going to the cinema for them but totally sack them off at home
Keep going with digging into Spike Lee’s back catalogue. Especially want to try Malcolm X
Finally watch Red Rocket and The Wrestler and Beats
Maybe try to read The Power Broker. It’s huge so had an idea to do 100 pages a month over a year alongside my normal fiction. But even that sounds like a drag even in theory lol
Going to go for a rewatch of all the Universal Century timeline ‘Mobile Suit Gundam’ media I can get my hands on. Have plans to emulate the PS2 games based on that series too.
I’ll be reading the books I own… as part of that I’d like to try and read a couple of my German language books (Wolfgang Herrndorf’s language is pretty accessible for my rusty skills, but I also want to read my Christa Wolf) and I’ve got Generation P by Victor Pelevin in Russian which I still haven’t read. I think the idea of reading in German is usually more difficult than actually doing it but it does use additional brain power over English.
I’m woefully unversed in cinema in general and I’d like to keep exploring my tastes and discovering which types of films interest me the most next year. I especially want to keep watching more documentaries, as I’ve been enjoying those a lot this year. I also want to be more unapologetic about not being keen on certain tropes / genres / directors that people around me (many of whom are great cinephiles) hold in high regard. In the past I’ve tended to see it as a ‘me’ problem (same with music, honestly), but I want to give myself permission to give things I probably won’t enjoy a miss rather than seeing it as some kind of personal failing that I don’t ‘get’ it.
I don’t think I have any interest in watching The Godfather and I just have to accept that about myself. Probably seen bits of it on telly in the past.
One of my closest mates is a huge cinephile and I’ve disliked pretty much every film she’s recommended to me. I went through her liked films on Letterboxd and of those I had seen I hadn’t enjoyed a single one.
Maybe it’s fine to just watch the Mr Bean movie (1999) again…
In 2023, I did a thing where when I watched a film in English, I watched a film in another language. Ended up watching a lot of good stuff I might have missed otherwise.
Pre-millennium? Pre-whatever year you were born? Pre-New Hollywood? Read a book once that used the 1968 Oscars as a turning point for cinema so could use that as an arbitrary cut off? Depends on how old you wanna go I guess.
Think I’m going to try and play less video games this year. Not cut them out or anything, but I feel like I might get more writing done if I eased off it a bit. Speaking of which, going to aim to finish a first draft of the novel I’m working on by the end of June. Will probably get Switch 2 when it’s out though…
Not actively going to try and read less books, but I’m either not going to set a Goodreads goal or will put it really low. As much as I know there’s no set number of books I need to read in a year, having a goal of 50+ sits there like a reminder I’m behind or whatever, even if I do read that many. Been largely reading very recent stuff the past few years - going to add some older stuff into the mix.
Need to watch more English language films tbh - only did 30 out of 107 this year according to Letterboxd. Wouldn’t want any one to think this is some kind of chin stroking art house brag, that score is massively skewed by the Godzilla marathon, and most of the others were spooky Japanese ghosts with long hair in front of their faces or Chow Yun Fat shooting people.