Normally I’m not one to make New Years Resolutions. The idea of it seems silly to me nowadays- people make a long list of goals they hope to achieve, get to working on it for about a month, then grow tired and abandon the plans completely. Surely there are some people in the world who actually follow through on their own promises to themselves, but personally, I’d rather not force myself to make a change. The new year is just a new year to me.

But 2017 is a special year. In about four months, I’ll be graduating from college, thus taking my first real step into the adult world. It’s terrifying to think that the last few crumbs of my childhood will be washed away by summertime. I’ll officially have to be a grown up and do even more grown up things. [Shudders] For years my mother has been bugging me about moving out, getting a respectable job and building a stable career. For years I’ve kept her doubts in the back of my mind. It’s fine, I’d assure myself. No need to worry about it right now. You’ve got plenty of time to figure things out. Well plenty of time has passed, and the weight of my mother’s words is starting to sink in, a lot.

So to numb the stress of it all, I’ve come up with a goal. An enlightenment project, I should say. I like to think of myself as a movie buff, and yet I realize that I haven’t seen too many movies. Cinema has been around for over one hundred years, and thousands of films have been made. Think about that. A thousand glimpses into the past, a thousand fantasies, a thousand innovations, a thousand stories reflecting human experiences. Cinema teaches us so much about the world, and I intend to learn.

My goal is called the Schneider Cinema Project. Every  week I will be watching a film featured in Steven Jay Schneider’s “1001 Movies You Should See Before You Die” list. I’ll be tracking the evolution of film from the earliest shorts of the 1900s to the mainstream movies of the 21st Century. At the end of each week, I’ll write up reviews for a cluster of films. They will be short, very short, only a paragraph long. Since I have school, work, and other commitments besides this blog, jotting down a few sentences will save me a ton of time. (Creating a header for each post definitely won’t, but that’s a different story).

Anyway, the Schneider Cinema Project will be the primary focus of this blog for a while. I might sneak in a few book reviews or Random Ramblings here and there, but don’t expect much difference in content. This is a new passion project of mine, and I intend to see it to the end.

Cheers!