The BBC have published an article about a man who watched 1,000 movies in a year – including every James Bond, Star Trek, and Fast and Furious movie – and Film Twitter are predictably unimpressed, calling this tally “rookie numbers.”
To be fair, many people have responded to the headline, which is that Phil Watts watched “1,000 movies in coronavirus lockdown” – leading most posters to conclude that he watched them across two and a half years. However, if you (ahem) read the article, he actually watched them all in one year – 2021. This, of course, would not stop Film Twitter from proclaiming that this is “amateur hour, Phil.”
The most unbelievable part of the article is that Phil does not appear to have heard of Letterboxd – an app that makes easy work of logging the movies you’ve seen in a diary. It wasn’t until Spring 2021 that he even realised he’d watched “an awful lot” – how are we supposed to trust these numbers, Phil?! “I have to keep notes or I forget what I’ve watched.” In the almost-words of Don Draper; “That’s what Letterboxd is for!”
Phil Watts says that if he had to choose just one film, it would be 1988’s Cinema Paradiso; “by the end of it I was absolutely bawling my eyes out.” His father was a projectionist and he converted the garage of the family home into a cinema.
Some of us who are addicted to cinema, or are “super-geeks” as Phil calls himself, can see ourselves approaching these numbers even without the excuse of lockdowns. Filmgal on Twitter says; “he must be new here” and SteelyDante says; “this is literally just me.” You’re gonna have to pump up those numbers if you wanna impress Film Twitter, Phil!
If you want to set yourself a film challenge, why not try watching all of the Marvel movies in order?