A Paid Subscriber Project: Movies From A Mug

On a silly idea I came up with when I wasn't feeling well.

My brand new mug full of movies.

The other day, when I wasn’t feeling well, I decided to make something worth looking forward to in the future. I pored over my various niche and not-so-niche watchlists and chose 107 movie titles from 5 different lists. I wrote the titles out on slips of paper in different colored pens, then I got tired and slept. I’m still recovering from COVID (I caught it for the first time at an airport just over two weeks ago), and while I finally started new medications yesterday that helped ease the lingering symptoms, I’ve been pretty low energy for way longer than is comfortable for me.

At any rate, over the course of a few days, I eventually finished my project: I now have a big Golden Girls mug full of 107 slips of folded paper. Among them are dozens of movies I’ve meant to watch for ages, several DVD blind buys gathering dust on my shelf, movies recommended by 12 different friends, Vietnamese films championed by my colleague Nguyên Lê, and, of course, a handful of titles starring my favorite old man, Alan Alda. This is the second or third time in my life that I’ve attempted to make my watchlists literal and randomized, a sort of draw-from-a-hat method that cuts down on the time I spend overwhelmed with the possibilities of what to watch next. Every time I do it, the act of picking my next watch brings me an inordinate amount of joy.

It’s a silly little project that I made as something to look forward to, but since this bout of COVID put me behind on work in a way that’s maddening and feels impossible to overcome, it’ll still be at least a few more days until I have time to watch a movie from the mug. In the meantime, though, I figured you, dear dedicated readers, might want in on this. So I have a little homework for you — if you’re up for it: