Reading The Movies

Every few years or so, my wife Maria gives me the gift that keeps on giving. No, not Pez, something even better. A movie guide. You know the ones, the thick books with the teeny words that have condensed as many millions of movie reviews as they can and shoved them between 2 covers. I love these books. Problem is, they go bad after a few years. As years pass, there are literally hundreds of new movies added to the "guide" and so it's time for a new one.

There were days, boys and girls, where you couldn't just go online and look up thousands of movie reviews. There was no Internet Movie Database. There were movie guides. Giving a succinct review, a number of stars depending on the quality of the movie, telling what the movie was rated, and who had directed and starred in the movie. I've been getting these things since the 90's, even keeping them under the counter at Campton Video Tyme for those occasions when a customer asked me "Do you know the person who was in that movie?" Sadly, or impressively, depending on the reader, I usually knew the answer.

These are also great books to keep in the bathroom, for when you want to just look up a review or 2.

However, last year, about this time, I made a random and spur-of-the-moment decision. Looking up a particular movie was boring! I was going to read that big boy cover to cover, every single movie review. There was no reason for this. I guess the hope was that I'd discover some little treasures, some hidden gems of movies that would make me smiley. It also felt like it would be an accomplishment, something other people don't do (and for a very good reason!). Finally, as I will say a hundred times in this blog, I love movies. Looooooove movies.

So I picked up the book, in this case, the book you see at the top of this post.

I've found that I enjoy reading Leonard Maltin. Our appreciation of movies is fairly similar, and he has a sense of humor. Not many movie reviews contain lines like "James Woods steals this movie, and he's welcome to it".

The trick to reading a movie guide is that it can't be all I read. I'm reading other books in the meantime, ranging from Roswell to Radical Forgiveness. It's been about a year now and I'm about 850 pages into this epic. Starting the M section. Halfway through. I have discovered some movies. I've discovered some wonderful names, like Googie Withers. I've noticed that many of the movies that I love are so bad that Mr. Maltin doesn't bother reviewing them. As they say in Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, there's only so much room in the book. Space can't always be spared for movies like Yor: The Hunter From The Future.

I expect I'll be done sometime in 2011. And you know, by then, it'll be time for a new movie guide. Question is, will I do this again?

By the way, to this day, the best review I've ever read, and this was several years ago, simply stated "Rated R for Refuse".