ANNOUNCING THE 2022 MOUNT UNWATCHED® CHALLENGE!

For years, Greg Woods, JC Culp and some fellow cinemavens have used the catchphrase Mount Unwatched® to describe that daunting pile of untouched movies in our ever-growing collections. “Have you seen (insert title here)?” “No, but it’s on Mount Unwatched.”

Well, we are thrilled to announce  2022 as “the” year in which we take control of our collections (and lives) by scaling these towers of unwatched movies, videos and TV shows. Then we will post reviews of what we watch! Mused about for years, the Mount Unwatched® Challenge comes alive in 2022!

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Sound like fun? YOU can take part too! 

If you have stacks of movies waiting to be watched, by all means, start digging through them and post your thoughts on your blog or website, and send us the link!
We’ll gather links to all related reviews and send them out in a monthly Mount Unwatched Report! (Gee, we sound like Loblaws.) Welcome aboard! 

Here is what can be included in the Mount Unwatched® Challenge: any factory-pressed physical media that you own: feature films, shorts, even TV episodes, that you have on DVD, Blu-ray, VHS… even film prints, if you’re so inclined. 

NOT included are stuff on hard drives, USB thumb drives (you get the idea); AVIs, MP4s or any computer files; homemade VHS or DVD-Rs (ie- off-air recordings). (Sorry, but we had to draw the line somewhere. And obviously, theatrical and streaming are off the table, as we don’t “own” copies of them.)

Otherwise our only condition is, these must be FIRST TIME viewings. Everyone is taken at their word - including us! 

We also encourage people to include things like how and why they acquired these titles (if they remember), and how they feel about finally getting around to view them.

Send your links, or questions, to: mountunwatched at gmail dot com

Want to participate, but don’t have a blog or website? No problem- reach out to us at the address above, we’ll post it on our site for you, with accreditation to you.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned as JC, Greg, and the homebound masses recount their trek up Mount Unwatched®! 

(PS- that image is meant to be representative; it was NOT taken at any of our houses.) 

Introduction

     What a year. 2016 has been a real shit show for our generation, not least for the abundant deaths of celebrities who were part of our cultural upbringing, whose passings ensured little pieces of us perishing inside too. But this year has also been a travesty for local film fans. 

     As I write this, the fabled Honest Ed's is closing its doors forever. And with it goes most of the adjacent businesses on Markham Street. Favourite haunts such as Suspect Video, The Beguiling, and Butler's Pantry are also shuttering, or dispersing to other locations, all in the name of "progress". Just what we need: more overpriced condos, more frozen yogurt places. Yippee! 

     And yet, Markham Street already had a long and colourful history prior to my immersion. For instance, Captain George Henderson, whose Memory Lane nostalgia shop on Markham closed many years before my move to Toronto, continues to influence me, thanks to the numerous nostalgia-related publications released from his headquarters. Having all of these unique stores together within one city block, unified to preserve an endless reserve of pop culture history discarded by mainstream media for the next big thing. Alas, times have changed, and it gets increasingly harder to pay the rent with Casandra Stark videos and Flash Gordon comics. 

     With the changing landscape of overpriced Toronto real estate, it comes with no surprise that video rental stores are becoming an endangered species. This is due in part to the declining appeal of renting DVDs in favour of people's refusal to detach their asses from chairs and stay home to watch Netflix instead. But with skyrocketing property costs, who can blame the merchants for choosing to close up shop? 

     As a result, 2016 has also been a sucky year because we had also lost Queen Video's flagship store, and The Film Buff on Roncesvalles. Suspect Video's closure becomes the third of that triumvirate whose unique and rich catalogues have now been fragmented off into the hands of collectors. Try duplicating their stock through iTunes. I double dog dare you. Seeing the slow terminal decline of such culture this year has been overwhelming. 

Further, this blog was actually created 366 days ago. It was intended to be a journal of films viewed in the 2016 year. Life gets in the way of many things as we get older, and the desire to tickle the keyboards with ruminations of Lew Landers subsides when your overworked and tired. This year was also intended to be the resurrection of my film zine The Eclectic Screening Room (dormant since 2012), but due to ongoing circumstances is unlikely to happen till spring.
     However through all of this miasma finally came the realization that I could allow myself to further become a prisoner of this negativity surrounding changing times, or I could take all of this energy and shape into something beautiful that defines me as a human being.
     Mount Unwatched has been an oft-used phrase among my online friends at Lloyd's Cinema Club, alluding to the huge pile of films we all have yet to watch. This will serve as a scratch pad of observances made during my viewings in the upcoming year, pieces either full-length or bite-sized, and some in preparation for further extrapolation elsewhere. I would be remiss too, not to mention that this blog was inspired in part by my friend Jonathan Culp's annual Cinertia publications, which collected his film viewings of the previous twelve months. (Do more Cinertia, JC! We need you!) Between his lines, you also read about the context in which these films were viewed. In that sense, his words also became documents of various film scenes around town. That is what I also intend to capture in this blog.
     Thanks for taking the trip with us! Hope to see you soon!