For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of entertainment projects. First, I'm trying to watch every Best Picture winner that I haven't seen already. For some people, that might take a weekend, but for me, I started out with over 50 movies on that list, and I'm down to 47 as I start this year. I have a long way to go.
Added to that, I'm also watching some classics that didn't make the Oscar Best Picture, so this is going to take me a while. It doesn't help that my wife is only interested in about 4 of the Oscar films (she's much more caught up on the recent ones, and has no interest in the old ones), so I'm working on the other classics with her. Of course, she often tells me that the book was better.
This weekend, we watched Bullitt, with Steve McQueen. This comes after we recently watched the French Connection and Six Days of the Condor, which helped us appreciate the films that were made when we were very young - all of them have held up, although Bullitt seemed a bit dated, and it was easy to tell that it was a prototype for many movies yet to come.
Why am I doing this? I don't know - it seemed like something to do when the pandemic started, and I just didn't spend a lot of time on it in 2020 (or the first half of 2021, for that matter). But I am highly confident that I would not have watched movies like Marty, The Apartment, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre without deliberately doing so. I think my challenge will be to find some of the very old Oscar winners, but I'm hopeful that Netflix and Amazon will come in handy.
The other project I'm on is to read all of the novels of Philip K Dick, a prolific author who wrote the stories behind many, many popular science fiction movies. These include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, and others. I'm intrigued by his writing, and his imagination, and I want to explore the other worlds he's created.
I started with a non-science-fiction novel called Voices from the Street, about a young man in 1950's San Francisco seeking his place in the world, disappointed with what his life has become (at 25!) and a descent into a form of madness that followed. Long and drawn out, it probably could have been 100 pages shorter, but it had a good sense of foreboding throughout the novel, and was an interesting exploration into the psyche of someone who feels like there should be more in his life, but not sure why he feels that way.
I moved from there to a few of his early sci-fi stories, including Solar Lottery, which has a number of elements that fed into his "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the source for Blade Runner), and Vulcan's Hammer, which was an early take on despotism. Even in the short years between these novels, I can see the evolution of his writing and his storytelling. I'm looking forward to this journey, assuming it doesn't fall into the story told multiple times.
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