So everyone and their mother is proclaiming film culture dead. The conversation is happening in all the little corners of the Internet. It seems to happen once a year and with the summer movie season recently coming to a close and the doldrums of September seeming as if they would never end, what better time than now to get all, “Movies are dead! Wah!”
Well, as Oliver Lyttelton at The Playlist points out, this isn’t the first time movies have been declared dead and it certainly won’t be the last. That doesn’t mean, however, we should simply expect the conversation to continue without doing our part…
Enter the RopeofSilicon Movie Club.
For years I’ve wondered how I could get readers to not only talk about new movies, but also older movies. I wondered this as I myself began to discover great movies from the past that I had not seen and wanted to share that discovery with others. It proved difficult.
This past weekend I posted my 161st installment in my “What I Watched, What You Watched” column, a column I recently considered shuttering as it wasn’t inspiring the amount of conversation I wanted it to since starting it back in September 2008. Things quickly changed.
This last Sunday’s “What I Watched” column has, so far, generated 99 comments and while I hope that kind of interaction continues amongst the readers of this site I hope the same will take place in these Movie Club installments.
I started this site in 2003 and was far from a seasoned movie watcher. Since then I have made every attempt to broaden my cinematic horizons, and with this Movie Club I hope to continue that effort as a community. I want everyone that takes part to have an equal share of influence on the conversation. I will certainly take the lead in the conversation once films are decided and the first article is posted, but from that point on my hope is that in the comment section of each Movie Club post, the conversation will take on a life of its own.
All of this leads me to the reason for this post. I announced the coming of the RopeofSilicon Movie Club on September 17 and to my welcome surprise the idea was embraced to the tune of 87 comments.
Today, I open the doors to the homepage for the Movie Club, which will hold an up-to-date calendar of events and all the discussions we share.
Each movie listing on the Movie Club homepage will include the date it will be discussed, a link to the page here on RopeofSilicon and links to the film on NetFlix, Amazon, IMDb and Hulu Plus. This will hopefully provide easy access to a multitude of ways to see each film and make sure you’re a part of the discussion. Titles will be announced approximately a month in advance as a poll will be added to the bottom of each movie discussion, voting on what the next title to be added to the schedule will be.
You’ll also notice the RopeofSilicon homepage now has a schedule of upcoming films to be discussed (see image above to the right) and the date they’ll be discussed. The title of each is clickable and will lead you to the film’s individual page on RopeofSilicon or you can always click to visit the Movie Club homepage for additional links for each title.
Then, after a movie is discussed, a ribbon such as the one seen to the right here will show up on the individual movie pages here on RopeofSilicon. Clicking it will lead you directly to the discussion, hopefully making sure the discussion never ends.
For registered and logged in users of the site, you can easily bookmark films in the RopeofSilicon database, linking them to your profile for easier reference in the future.
So, with that we are on our way, and less than two weeks away from our first gathering, scheduled for October 15 when we will discuss Peter Weir‘s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
For the rest of the upcoming schedule click here and I truly hope you will all be able to take part in an effort to make sure films from the past are not forgotten on this site and that RopeofSilicon will never be a place where we declare film culture is dying.
