Jason updates his total minutes, again.

This is an update on the process I explained here.

You might have noticed in the last couple of posts, my total minutes number has gone up more than it should have. In particular, between my post on BATTLESHIP and THE BRIDGE BUILDERS, I saw 26 minutes worth of movies but added nearly 1,000 minutes to my total. Well, there's a simple explanation--I've finally gone through all my movies of 2006, looked up the running times for all, and entered them into my records (I had previously updated for 2007 and included that in my calculations without comment.) And it turns out 2006 is the current record holder for the highest average minutes per movie. My average time per movie in 2006 was 100.264 minutes. 2007 was actually pretty close with 99.666 minutes/movie. 2008-2012 (so far) is significantly lower, fluctuating between 96.25 and 97.63 minutes/movie. My gut feeling is I'm watching more film festival screenings instead of mainstream blockbusters, and they tend to be a bit shorter.

Anyway, updating my actual minutes and my estimate of the average running time for the movies I haven't updated yet explains that jump in total minutes. Also, 2005 is the first year I started keeping records of what movies I saw, so once I finish that I'll have a real* count of my total minutes. There is a bit of a problem with that, though.  Turns out my records from 2005 are pretty lousy. For the regularly theatrically released movies I saw, I recorded the titles. But for film festivals I only recorded the festival name. I.e., I have records that say I say N movies at Cinequest, or the SF International, of the SF Jewish Film Festival, etc. but no titles. So I'm going to do my best to reconstruct what I saw, but worst case I might just drop 2005 from the count. In which case, my total minutes would go way, way down.

[Update: I've gone through what was easy to reconstruct in 2005, and that actually gives me another few ~300 minutes. My estimated total is now 286,536. I still have 72 movies from 2005 left to reconstruct, 50 from Cinequest (man, I went all out that year, and that's not counting opening and closing night films, which of course I know,) 15 from the SF International (I took it kind of light that year) and 7 from the SF Jewish Film Festival (I saw more, but I couldn't quite figure out what I saw on a few of the days.) I'll do my best to figure it out soon.]

*Except that sometimes the running times are estimates, especially when I see silent films that can and often are projected at different speeds. Or when I'm not sure which version of a movie I saw (an edited theatrical cut, director's cut, etc.) For these I've tried to at best underestimate the running time so as not to give myself undeserved minutes.