2019 is in the books. I hope it was a good year and a good decade for you. I assume that if you’re a regular reader of this website, you’re a big fan of movies. If that’s the case, I highly recommend signing up for Letterboxd if you haven’t already. This isn’t a paid plug. I like promoting sites that I use frequently, and as someone who kept a movie journal before Letterboxd even existed, I adore having a place to keep my film viewing habits.
The value of a movie journal is that it can push you to expand your horizons. Yes, it’s a good place to keep your notes and thoughts on movies you’ve seen, but the more you use it, the more you want to start keeping track of all the films you haven’t seen. The site also has fun metrics to help you out with how many of your films were rewatches, which director you viewed the most, which actor you viewed the most (it will almost always be Samuel L. Jackson because let’s face it, he’s in everything), and more.
Something I’ve been doing since about 2011 is making a little collage of my movie journal. It’s one thing to go through diary pages, but it’s another to view it all in a single image, so at the end of the year, I go through my Letterboxd diary and put together an image from every entry, and by the end I’ve got a pretty neat way of seeing what I did and didn’t see. For example, I can see I certainly fell short on seeing black and white films. I didn’t make good use of my Criterion Channel subscription, so that’s something I’m going to resolve to improve on in 2020. But overall, I’m pretty happy with how my year of movies turned out.
Click here to follow me on Letterboxd, and click here to follow our deputy editor Adam Chitwood. Thanks for reading all my ramblings this past year and this past decade. I wish you the happiest of new years, and look forward to watching plenty of movies in 2020.
Image via Matt Goldberg
