The Idea
- Watch and discuss movies together (kinda like a book club)
- “Crowd source” recommendations for not-entirely-new films (IE, older than a year or so, let’s say)
- Aim for generally bettering or curating our film “diet”
How it will work (at least at first)
- 1 film a month
- First, a post to take nominations/suggestions
- Post any film you want to watch, or have heard good things about, or recommend to everyone else
- Second, a post to take votes on the nominations
- And then we watch and discuss the winner
First round will start next month (July)
Please share any thoughts/feedback, though we’ll likely run this at least once first before making any changes, just to feel it out
This sounds cool, I love discussing films.
Yea, me too. IME, there’s always something that comes out of it. For me, it’s half of the reason for the idea.
Further Notes …
- This isn’t a live watch thing
- Watch the films in your own time and how you want, including a live watch thing of your own if you like of course
- This will be flexible
- There’s plenty of scope to adjust how this works along the way
- Happy to take suggestions here, as I said, but I think running it at least once before getting too much into the weeds is a good idea
- One of the biggest ways in which this could adapt, IMO, is being specific with the genre and/or era for any given month, and/or maybe even expanding it out to multiple movie clubs for different interests
- The first two aims listed above are the main thing IMO
- Which means the voting is just to lead to a suggestion for us to gather around one film at a time
- You can watch and post about any of the suggestions if you like (obviously, really) and that’d absolutely be a good thing … watching cool/good/interesting films is the whole point IMO
- This isn’t a live watch thing
Where do you intend on sourcing the films from? Netflix/YT/Prime/🏴☠️/DVD? Rotate through a set of sources?
Cool idea though, count me in if the films are accessible.
Yea, great question. I’d guess that this is likely to be the biggest issue with the whole thing.
I personally don’t think one person can source a particular film for everyone. I think crowd sourcing availability options is realistically the only way to go.
What we might find out though is that the current streaming system is actually a regression from the days of video rental shops. In the past, many of the films we’d want to watch would have been available at the local shop. Some might have required some hunting but nothing too serious. And esoteric ones would have been hard to find and required an academic library or something.
Now, if you have to sign up to a different streaming service and potentially VPN for every different film you want to watch, that may become prohibitive for many and would really be a step backward however convenient the internet is otherwise.
I’m hoping it’s fine, and I’m also rather curious to see how it goes TBH.
I personally have found decent success in renting films off of Apple ITunes/TV. And I’ve also found a nearby old-school video rental with quite a good collection of DVDs and BlueRays. So I’ll probably be leveraging those. But I don’t know how available or desirable that is for many here or exactly what other options there are.
It will certainly be a conversation for every film we want to watch, I think.
Thank you for the post and initiative!
This is cool! I actually tried attending one of the past live watch parties but was in the middle of doing something as well so couldn’t really actively participate. A scheduled discussion thread at a set time sounds great.
Yea a scheduled discussion thread could work well. Don’t know what times works for people … but if it’s pinned and always posted at the same time or the same date of the month, I’d imagine it would work well.
This sounds great!
How neat! Good idea, it sounds fun :)
Cheers!