It's Showtime!

Before you even start watching a movie per day, you have to start wondering how the word "movie" even came to describe movies. First of all, it's not even spelled like it sounds. Shouldn't it be movey? Or moovie? It rhymes with "groovy", which is how your parents described cool things back in the '70s, and the concept of movies is very cool, but the word movie came well before and endures long after groovy's short lifespan.

I mean just look at it -- movie. Movie. Movie. Movie. Movie. Kind of like the word "drawer". Say that a few times. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer. No, not a guy who draws something! The place where you put your socks, in a drawer.

MOVIE.

It doesn't even look like a word that would describe moving pictures. The more you see it, the more you say, the more it sits there, the less it even looks like a word than a Roman numeral. Take out the "o" and "e" and it is a Roman numeral: 1,006. Which has nothing to do with movies.

What does have something to do with movies is trying to come up with a blog title, writing the word "movie" over and over while finding all the titles taken makes the word look even more weird. There's Movie A Day, A Movie A Day, One Movie A Day, and Movie Per Day. All defunct. You'd think they freaked out looking at the word "movie" over and over again, but then there's Film A Day and A Film A Day, both of which sound more pretentious but are as dead as all the rest of the movie-a-day blogs.

Turns out that the word "movie" is actually kinda cool. When they were all proper back in the day they called 'em "moving pictures." Which they were, since up to then all anyone had to look at was some big old painting and a few photographs. Then suddenly there was a picture that MOVED.

Can you imagine back in 1927 when some youngster wanted to impress a flapper by taking her to a moving picture (later a motion picture)? But you can't say, "Wanna go see a moving picture?" You give it a nickname, use some slang: "Hey, wanna go see a movie?" Movie, short for moving picture, now that sounds so much cooler.

Let's face it, AMovingPictureADay.blogspot.com just doesn't cut it. But A Movie Per Day does, and not just because it's the last name left.

Here's the concept. Over the next 365 days, I'm watching one movie each day. Give or take a few movies and a few days. Then I write about it. Not necessarily about the movie, but about watching the movie.

So in effect, this blog is going to be all about me watching movies, not necessarily the movies that me watches. If you want to read all about the movies, there's plenty of places for that -- the Internet Movie Database, Roger Ebert, Rotten Tomatoes, Ain't It Cool News, and so on. But there aren't very many places online to read about me. For that you have to keep coming back here.

As I'm sure you will.