How do you decide which DVD to watch from your collection? (1 Viewer)

[Joseph DeMartino]

I have two 400-disc Sony DVD changers, Typically I'll page through the alphabetical title list and settle on something to watch on a given night, and that will lead me on to the next title.

I'll go on genre jags, as mentioned above, watching one noir film or screwball comedy after another, or seeing an actor in movie "A" will cause me to watch movie "B", which co-stars a different actor, so now it's on to movie "C". Or I'll decide to watch an episode of a TV series and just have to go back to the first episode and watch it all over again, in order. (Although I do sometimes skip episodes I really dislike. More often I'll fast-forward through "B" stories, or sometimes even "A" stories, that I think are boring or unpleasant or that I'm just tired of.) At the moment I've just started season 5 of CSI for the umpteenth time. For some reason this seems to be the show that stands up the best to repeat viewings for me. Maybe because the episodic nature of the show makes it less intense than an arc-driven series like Babylon 5. The nice thing about the changer is that you can go from disc to disc and even season to seaon so easily that even long rainy Saturday marathons are effortless.

Regards,

Joe
Edited by Joseph DeMartino - 7/9/2009 at 01:11 am GMT
Edited by Joseph DeMartino - 7/9/2009 at 01:12 am GMT

 

[cineMANIAC]

Post deleted.
Edited by Luisito34 - 7/9/2009 at 12:06 pm GMT
Edited by Luisito34 - 7/10/2009 at 09:02 pm GMT

 

[Bob McLaughlin]

If you want a movie chosen randomly for you, and you have a list of all your movies in softcopy, use this site:

http://www.random.org/lists/

If you already have your movies listed on another site, it's usually pretty easy to either export them or cut/paste them onto a spreadsheet, that way you'll always have a softcopy to start from. Then just paste your list of movies into the field, click randomize, and it will arrange them completely randomly. You can either view the movies in this order, or just use the first one as your movie for the night. If you don't want to watch the first movie, you can always click "again", or just go to the second item on the random list!

On a related note, we had a discussion a few months back on arranging DVDs non alphabetically:
http://www.hometheaterforum.com/forum/thread/287321/arranging-dvds-non-alphabetically

 

[kenNew]

Thanks Bob. Both those links look very helpful.

 

[PaulDA]

I watch movies for two purposes--work and entertainment. With work, I select films that are pertinent to my classes (I incorporate film into most of my history courses as my graduate work was on film and history). Since March, this has meant Westerns, for the most part, along with a few films set in the mediaeval era (I'm teaching The Wild West and Western Civ. I this summer). When it comes to films for work, multiple viewings are a must. The main advantage is I get to watch some excellent films and (indirectly) be paid for doing so. The disadvantage is I must also watch some less than stellar films as well (not all films that were influential were good).

For entertainment, I go with what I feel like watching in a particular genre (I usually have my discs ordered by genre, but a bunch of them are scattered in various "piles" at the moment as I'm trying to reorder the shelving in my "man-cave" (as my wife calls it). I have a few films that are guaranteed at least an annual screening/viewing (I don't always watch films with my projector, but that's a separate topic). Casablanca, The Third Man, North by Northwest, It's a Wonderful Life, Withnail and I, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, at least 2 Trek movies (often all of them over a course of a year, but no less than two) and 3-5 Bond movies (they vary, but the odds of Goldfinger being among them every year are quite high). Not all "cinematic masterpieces" (though some of them are), but each has a particular reason for getting an annual viewing. As for the rest, I go with whatever strikes me (I have, at a guess, about 500 DVDs, 170 HD DVDs and 75 BDs--I've never catalogued all of them, though I've made several abortive attempts to do so). I also rent a fair number of films (both locally and via zip.ca--the Canadian equivalent to Netflix). I have a lot of unopened discs (in each format) but not that many are films I've never seen--I don't do blind buys unless they are really inexpensive or, on rare occasions, when I'm confident I'll like a film enough to buy it even at full price.

 

[cineMANIAC]

How many people here have piles of unwatched DVDs waiting their turn to be viewed? I make a lot of blind purchases (mostly Criterion) that I seemingly never have the time for but I have no intention of getting rid of any of them. Part of the fun of collecting movies is that you have stuff lying around that you'll get to watch eventually and hopefully discover a new gem or two, something which is a thrill I enjoy quite a bit. The longest I've had a movie sitting around unwatched was 18 months (The Gladiator extended cut). The thing is, I don't necessarily buy movies to watch them right away; when the time is right I'll check them out.

 

[Bob McLaughlin]

Classic movies tend to sit longer on my shelf before viewings than newer ones. Maybe it's because they're already old so I don't feel the pressure to have to view them while they're still timely. Mostly I keep up with my purchases, but I do have entire box sets I haven't gotten around to viewing, such as the 3rd volume of the Warner Gangster series, or the 4th volume of Warner Film Noir series. Other collection titles I tend to "graze" such as the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, and Kino's Avante Garde collection, or the Edison: Invention of the Movies collection. These aren't really meant to be viewed all in one setting, or even sequentially, so no guilt there!

Modern, non-collected, previously unviewed movies usually don't stay unviewed for too long.

 

[drrichardh]

I'm rather new to this forum and still reading my way through the various threads. Came across this one this afternoon and had to respond.

Like one of the earlier responders I have a collection of about 800 titles built up over a lot of years. Since I was the first in my extended family to get an HDTV and blu ray player I wanted to share these with my friends and family. After all with the upconverting feature even some quite old DVDs look a whole lot better and anything blu is eye popping.

So I catalogued everything. It took about a year to write the whole catalog which is now running to about 500 pages. I've made copies available to everyone who wants one and was pleased to find several who were interested.

The catalog is divided into sections by genre and each title gets a short review telling a bit about the content and why it was included in the library. Included in the back is a title index which allows folks to check to see if a title is in our collection then to find the review in the main text. The big item that has helped is an appendix I call Film Festival Suggestions. Listed there are groups of titles under these headings
Multiple Academy Award Winners
Individual Academy Award Winners - lists award and all films in the collection getting that award
Star Festivals - lists of stars and the film we own in which they appear
Film Series -
Director Festival
Film Score Festival - lists film composers and the films they scored
Commentary Festivals - all films with one or more commentary tracks
Cartoon Character Festivals
Theme Festivals - subdivided into these categories
The After Life
Biographies
Capers
Concerts
Disney Features
Famous Monsters
Fantasy and Myth
Film History and Studio Stories
Literature Adaptations
Traditional Musicals
Non Traditional Musicals
Nature
Religious
Science Fiction
Time Travel
Westerns

These have prove to be quite helpful as friends and family find all kinds of way to choose which films they like to see. Also it allows for groups of people to discover shared interests.

By the way the original catalog is designed in a modular style so as new titles are added to the collection it is only necessary to print a few pages to keep everyone up to date.

And did I mention I am retired so I have the time needed to keep this project going.

Hope this helps give someone one more idea as to how titles can be chosen for viewing.

 

[PODER]

My partner and I have an embarrassingly large DVD collection ... several thousand ... so we've come up with a What Do We Watch Tonight system that works very well for us. On one night, I'll pick three titles with a theme ... AA Nominees for Best Supporting Actress of 1952, say, or movies with the word SUNDAY in the title ..., and then Al will pick the one we'll watch. The next night we reverse the process. Part of the fun is coming up with a totally unexpected threesome.

 

[Mike Frezon]

My wife and I have always had problems deciding what to watch. But being recent empty-nesters, we have more time than usual to watch movies, TV shows etc.--compounding the problem!

I wrote this wiki recently to explain how we've had some recent success figuring things out:

Action Films Are from Mars, Chick Flicks are from Venus.

 

[Robert Crawford]

With my 5000+ collection, I usually go with a movie theme and choose from there. Last weekend, I watched six film noirs. This weekend, I'm doing the same, but with westerns.





Crawdaddy

 

[Holer]

I've recently lit upon a pretty good little system. I generally just watch or re-watch whatever I'm in the mood for. That's the great thing about having a DVD collection. I must confess though, for a few years, I was buying kind of heavy, especially during the heyday of catalog releases we experienced during the SDVD boom years.

The result was that I built up a pretty fair slush pile of movies that I just never seemed to get around to watching, and they run the gamut of all genres and styles. This year, since I'm participating in the 'Track the Films You Watch' forum, I decided to just alphabetize my slush pile and work through them systematically that way. I don't always stick to it - sometimes I just watch something I'm in the mood for or a new disk or whatever, but the key is I always, eventually return to the slush pile.

Admittedly, this is a lot easier now since my DVD buying has dropped off significantly, but the system really is working - I am moving through my slush pile at a very nice clip and am discovering some really wonderful movies in the process. Makes sense, since there was a reason I bought them all in the first place!

 

[Dick]

Watching films chronologically would be great at first (I prefer black and white to color, and the style of older films to new one, with some notable exceptions), but once I reached the 1980's, the diversity would narrow and by the late 90's it would consist mostly of heavy CGI'd action thrillers. Alphabetical viewing would solve that for me, except...

I have well over... oh, geese, you know, I'm not even gonna tell ya, 'cause it's almost embarrassing. Like many of you, I am a collector, and as we know, collecting can be for its own sake (simply to possess as much of something as possible) and/or for the sake of entertainment and pleasure. It is both for me. As a kid, I collected 8mm Castle (and other company) films, and just wanted every little 200' reel I could afford with my lawn-mowing money and whatnot. When I sold off this collection, which by 1980 included feature-length super 8mm sound films such as ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, I had about four hundred. I then amassed five hundred VHS tapes, and 300 laser discs. These gone, nearly all replaced with DVD, I now have half an entire room devoted to DVD and Blu-ray shelves. I love watching movies, of course... but I love collecting them -- possessing them. I am not a true completist (for example, I have 30 Hitchcock films but don't much care if I acquire his other 24), but I plan to own pretty much every movie I have really liked in my life, and I figure another 500 or so will probably do it for the rest of my life.

On topic, there are certainly times when it is hard to choose what movie to watch, even though I probably have 3-400 in my collection I've not seen completely through yet. I, too, return to favorites. I might well choose to watch a 50's sci-fi flick like CONQUEST OF SPACE for the sixth time rather than pull out FLOATING WEEDS for the first. It doesn't bother me to do this, and I do not feel remorseful for having built this collection. Movie fan friends of mine may be inheriting a helluva collection someday if they outlive me...

 

[Peter M Fitzgerald]

I'm mostly spontaneous in my disc-watching. Lately, though, I've scheduled my Saturdays (which are usually free) as nostalgic throwbacks to my childhood.

Mid-morning --I throw on the kid shows and cartoons:

* THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (just finished Season 5)
* BEANY & CECIL / TIME FOR BEANY (recently completed)
* SPACE GHOST & DINO BOY
* GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE
* MIGHTY MOUSE - THE NEW ADVENTURES (not quite from my childhood, but close enough)

Lunchtime:

* THE ABBOTT & COSTELLO SHOW
* THE THREE STOOGES (1 short, chronological, just began the Shemp era)

Afternoon:

* CREATURE TRIPLE FEATURE (3 horror and/or sci-fi flicks, nothing newer than the mid-1970s) --previously a Tarzan film, followed by a Creature Double Feature
* MUTUAL OF OMAHA'S WILD KINGDOM

--with a few exceptions, I've been focusing on unwatched discs of the above material so far; when I get caught up with that, I'll program killer mixes of genre films from my vast collection (though not quite as vast as Crawdaddy's). And, before long, the morning line-up will switch to WB cartoons, Fleischer POPEYE cartoons, JOHNNY QUEST, THE LITTLE RASCALS and Charley Chase shorts.

Sundays are somewhat similar, though a bit less structured--

Morning:

* ASTRO BOY (the 1963 original)
* SPEED RACER
* CAPTAIN SCARLET & THE MYSTERONS

Afternoon:

* ADVENTURE THEATER (loose two/three-film mix of fantastic and realistic, old and recent, foreign and domestic)
* ADAM ADAMANT LIVES! (via R2 disc, time permitting)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last Saturday's "Creature Triple Feature":

FLIGHT TO MARS (1951)
CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN (1962-Mexican, dubbed)
TROG (1970-British)

Last Sunday's "Adventure Theater":

THE MONKEY GOES WEST (1966-Hong Kong, subtitled R3 disc)
APOCALYPTO (2006, Blu-Ray)

 

[OfficialIron]

My DVD collection isn't that big, occasionally I'll dig up a movie to re-watch, but I usually just browse Netflix and look for something I can stream.

 

[Ruz-El]

I always go by "newest purchases/unwatched" first. As far as the 4000 of titles in different formats that are lying around... human sacrifice and reading the innards is the only method that works.

 

[battlebeast]

I have over 700 DVDs - most of which unwatched. I am collecting ALL 475 best Picture Winners and nominees. Also right now, I am watching all 475 films in 365 days.

 

So, to answer your question, I pick the film that fits my time table. Some days I have to watch two films, so I try to pick the films that are 2h's and leave the four hour epics (GWTW, Cleo, Lawrence, Giant, Ten Commandments) for my days off.

 

I ahve a great many TV DVDs, and when I get a new one, I will usually watch all the episodes in a marathon... as amny as I can in one day, and the next days and so on untill the set is done.

 

Also, if it is a series that I really like, sometimes I will get the urge to watch it... so I start with ep 1 and go untill the series is done.

 

M*A*S*H I will watch all the way through, same with The Simpsons, South Park, and Friends.

 

[MadMikeyD]

My collection is small, so deciding what to watch just depends on the audience. Is it just me (old b&w movies or classic characters like the Lone Ranger or Sherlock Holmes), my wife and I ('80s films, comedies, or 'chick flicks'), or the whole family (Pixar, Disney animation, "kiddie" movies). After weeding out the collection of stuff we never watched or stuff that only got watched once, never to be revisited, I only buy stuff that I know will be watched several times, unless I can get it for around the price of a rental. That way if I end up getting rid of it I don't feel as bad about spending the money.

 

[MadMikeyD]

My collection is small, so deciding what to watch just depends on the audience. Is it just me (old b&w movies or classic characters like the Lone Ranger or Sherlock Holmes), my wife and I ('80s films, comedies, or 'chick flicks'), or the whole family (Pixar, Disney animation, "kiddie" movies). After weeding out the collection of stuff we never watched or stuff that only got watched once, never to be revisited, I only buy stuff that I know will be watched several times, unless I can get it for around the price of a rental. That way if I end up getting rid of it I don't feel as bad about spending the money.