On Movies & Movie-Watching: My TBW List for the Weekend of April 8-10, 2022

Ah, TGIF! And with the weekend looming ahead of us – sort of like the iceberg that sank the Titanic – my thoughts are with my To Be Watched (TBW) list of movies from my collection of movies and TV shows on home media.

As of today, that collection consists of:

• 4K UHD Blu-ray: 84 feature films, 0 TV Shows or TV Series Seasons
• HD Blu-ray: 409 feature films, 60 TV Shows or TV Series Seasons
• DVD: 161 feature films, 79 TV Shows or TV Series Seasons

Of course, since I tend to get upgrades to most of my favorite movies whenever a new home media format emerges, there are a lot of “repeats” in my collection. For instance, the six Star Wars films that were released by 20^th Century Fox, the four Indiana Jones movies released by Paramount, and the first 11 Star Trek theatrical films from 1979 to 2009 were part of my mostly-DVD collection until I began to focuson Blu-ray titles; until recently, Blu-ray releases also included a DVD disc and a digital copy code slip, so I have stopped buying single-format DVDs unless there’s a title out there that I want that’s not available on either 4K UHD or HD Blu-ray.

Still, even ignoring “dupes” in my collection, I have a cinephile’s smorgasbord to choose from. This can be either a curse or blessing; sometimes its easy for me to choose something to watch, especially if I have just acquired a new title, such as West Side Story (2021) or Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019.

Other times? Not so much. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to my various “media storage towers” from IKEA to pick a movie for the night, stood there with a dazed look on my face, and ended up watching something on Amazon Prime Video instead because I couldn’t decide.

Sometimes, Dear Reader, there is such a thing as an “embarrassment of riches.”  

So, just like I do with books, I create TBW lists – in my mind, mostly, since I have bad handwriting and hate scribbling things on paper – to at least have an inkling as to what I might watch over the weekend.

For the weekend that starts tonight, this is my list of possible movie choices:

1. Chernobyl (2019)
2. A Walk in the Sun (1945)
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
4. Casablanca (1942)
5. The African Queen (1951)
6. Catch Me If You Can (2002)

Whether or not I stick to my TBW list, only time will tell. My leisure time choices depend greatly on how I am feeling at the time, so we’ll just have to see how this TBW list fares.