11 Things You Learn From Watching 336 Films In 2014

With New Year's Day gone and the fog of champagne and bad decisions washing away with the faint regret of something you can't quite remember doing, there's a good chance you will have come across a social media post by a boastful film blogger. "400 films watched this year. Can I beat it next year?" they smugly say, implying that they are somehow better and more learned than you because they don't have a good enough life to drag them away from the cinema or small screen. They're not better, they're tragic fools locked in the perpetual, grim cycle of hungrily filling every spare waking moment with films. Some of them get paid to watch that many, so they're at least getting something tangible back, but for the rest, the haul means watching films around jobs, kids, family and personal hygiene regimes. Sadly, some of those things have to be neglected in the interest of broadening filmic horizons. But that's not even the point: if there's one lesson more than any that you should broadly take from this experiment it's that it's remarkably easy to watch a lot of films that will in absolutely no way enrich your life. If anything, it's just a waste of time, and nothing to be crowed about on Twitter. And rather cruelly, it won't suddenly make you an awesome director either. This then is a morality tale of what you actually learn from watching 336 films in your spare time in a year. Not the top rated ones on IMDB, and not governed by anything as limiting as critical acclaim or success. It's just an everyman's tale of watching a lot, and learning as much from the hundreds of mediocre and terrible films as the great ones...

11. Nicholas Cage Cannot Act

A big statement, but hardly a surprising one. At one point it might have been the case that Cage genuinely could act: it definitely wasn't when he made The Cotton Club, and it's certain not now as he knocks out ten films a year with Steven Seagal-like titles like Stolen and Left Behind and Seeking Justice that you know will be terrible from their posters. And the fact that they've got Nicholas Cage in. Thanks to his prolific schedule, there's no way you can organically watch 300 plus films without seeing Cage's face a few times, unless you consciously turn some sort of filter on, and watching them in such close frequency will confirm concretely just how awful he truly is.