A note about our second year

This Sunday marks the beginning of the second year of Mt. Everest movie night. Of course if you've never heard of our little movie night you might be wondering why it's special enough to blog about, thus I present you with what makes us different, what I look for in movie selections, and why I spent all summer planning for a weekly movie night that has no application whatsoever to my future.

Mt. Everest movie night is unique because, among other things, it is held in a primarily freshman honors dorm. This means that although it is in its second year the audience for Mt. Everest is new and the reputation needs to be rebuilt. Needless to say the overarching plan for movie selection this year is to show films during first semester that build our reputation as a movie night you can trust to choose a variety of good movies to show. Second semester when we show movies that are lesser known, a regular crowd of viewers will have grown to trust our taste in movies enough to come even if they've never seen Finding forrester and they don't really know what it's about beyond Sean Connery's awesomeness.

On that note I have a vision for Mt. Everest Movie night beyond that of my co-host (in whose room we actually show said movies.) My vision is that this will not be just another movie night where the movies shown have been seen by most of the audience within the last few years, nor is it to introduce my friends to the "more artsy" independent and foreign films of the world. I hope to use Mt. Everest movie night to watch good films that may have been popular when we were younger and our favorite movies were Beauty and the Beast, Angels in the Outfield, and Toy Story and we could have cared less about all those boring "grown-up" movies like The Fugitive or Finding Forrester. We missed an entire generation of films as children that were rated, PG-13 and R, or that had storylines we weren't interested in. Perfectly good films that are worth seeing, but perhaps weren't loved enough to earn the cult status of Donnie Darko, the Monty Python Films, or Star Wars.

This doesn't mean that Mt. Everest movie night will never show Iron Man, Transformers, Blazing Saddles, or Back to the Future (all films that have been or will be shown.) It is the reason though that I spent my summer getting suggestions from parents, my older brothers friends, and reading Roger Ebert's 1996 Video Companion Guide trying to find films that although older, will be fresh when shown to a group of college kids this school year.

Finally a note about the format of this post. Each week I hope to have a post about the movie we are watching that Sunday and why it's been chosen as well as a post after the showing with a quick summary of the success (or failure) of the night. I am continually looking for feedback and suggestions so if you hate a movie and want to skip a week, tell me about it; if you have a movie to suggest, tell me about it; or if for some strange twisted reason you've decided to stalk me... well maybe I don't want you to tell me about that. Anyway I think that's enough about that.

Ta-ta,
Caitlin