You don't watch movies you haven't seen.

I know it's a strange sentence, and you're already punching plot holes into it, but let me explain:

Outside of new releases in a rather short time frame, say a year or two, if you haven't seen it, you probably wont.

It's a strange thing that occurred to me as I was browsing my "to watch" list, and realized I had managed to nearly recreate my parent's VHS collection, cherry picking movies I remember watching while growing up. Nearly everything I'd bookmarked or saved turned out to be something that I'd already seen, likely dozens of times. I was a couch potato at every opportunity as a child.

Okay, so things haven't changed much.

But even with a voracious appetite for movies, I don't really go after films that aren't a part of the here and now unless they are already favorites, or a particular line of dialog is stuck in my head and I have to witness it again to dislodge it.

This is why my wife runs screaming from the room whenever I say I'm going to watch Groundhog's Day again. Sorry... I love youuu..

When I do get around to watching something new-to-me but from a few years back, It's usually because I've fallen down a wormhole. I'll be chasing a performance from an actor I've become fascinated by, or searching out other films in a narrow genre.

How many films about summer camp are there anyway?

And when I do, I feel wonderful about it, seeing old actors young again and in surprise roles. Sometimes getting to finally see a scene in it's entirety instead on the coming attractions before an old tape I wore out forever ago as a ten year old boy. My favorite part is being able to enjoy a "Period Piece" without being a recreation; the ACTUAL 90's playing out as a pastiche in front of me. Wonderful.

I guess what I'm trying to say is go watch a movie you haven't seen tonight. The video rental stores full of 80s and 90s treasures are gone, but the streaming services are picking up new-old and wonderfully dated films all the time. Check the used rack at your local dollar store, or the cheap bin at your big department store.

Give a little love to the older movies, watch them with popcorn and your tongue firmly planted in your cheek. I just watched Trapped in Paradise, for the rediculous reason that it's a christmas movie starring Nicolas Cage, Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz as bank robbing brothers. It was delightfully bad, and there are a multitude of reasons why it wouldn't, and shouldn't, be on anyone's list of christmas movies to watch every year; Dana Carvey maintains one of his over the top voices throughout the entire film, apparently inspiring Nic Cage into using an accent that sounds like a space alien's approximation of a Jersey dialect. It makes the already zany Jon Lovitz come off like the straight man. I'll let that sentence sink in.

I'm not saying you watch it, I'm just saying: go watch something.

But if you haven't already seen groundhog day, tread carefully, cause it'll take over your life.