POINTLESS

Back in 1995, I started a very stupid "tradition"... I guess I just wanted to see how many movies I could see/watch in a year... so I started a little Excel database where I detailed every movie name, the 3 main actors, the director, some financial info (budget & box office gross) and a star-based rating from yours truly.

***** = Masterpiece, **** = Better than average, *** = Average, ** = Below Average, * = Bad, 0 = Movie? What movie?

Why did I do that?... I really don't know... I guess at some point I believed that maybe someone would ask me how many movies I saw the previous year... and maybe that would have been cool... but the truth is nobody really cares... but anyway I carried on...

In 1996, I saw 287, 1997, 336, 1998, 258, 2000, 215, 2001, 219, 2002, 192, 2003, 184 and 2004, 180... my yearly average since 1996 is 217, which makes 2000 a *** (average) year, 1997 a ***** (Masterpiece) year and 2004 a * (Bad) year. Whatever!!!

I guess I am the only one who smiles when I browse through my database and see that in 1996, the best movie of the year was The Usual Suspects (followed by Fargo and 12 Monkeys)... in 1997, it was the English Patient (followed by Contact and The 5th Element)... in 1998, it was Private Ryan (followed by Shall We Dansu? and Good Will Hunting)... in 1999, it was La Vita E Bella (followed by Matrix and Abre Los Ojos)... in 2000, it was Cider House Rules (followed by Violon Rouge and The Fight Club).... in 2001, it was LOTR 1 (followed by Requiem for a Dream and Moulin Rouge)... in 2002, it was Amelie (followed by A Beautiful Mind and Harry Potter)... in 2003, it was LOTR 2 (followed by Chicago and Finding Nemo)... and... in 2004, it was LOTR 3 (followed by Kill Bill 1 and 2)...

The funny thing is that that is not my only database... I have a music database... I have about 700+ original CDs plus about 1500 songs in MP3s and a growing collection of video music of about 150 MPEGs. But, then again... nobody wants to hear about that!

And then... there are the projects which I start and never finish... I wanted to have the song lyrics to each and every CD I owned... status: abandoned.... I wanted to create a song database by topic... status: unfinished... I had some cool photographic projects such as a picture puzzle of a model (that is: taking pictures of a woman piece by piece, part by part) ... status: dead...

My point is that everything I do is basically pointless... why do I keep such databases?... why do I collect music?... why do I keep track of every single movie I see?... then again... why do I keep writing these stupid blogs?