FINISHING SCHOOL: The Agenda

One of the perils of our age of DVD gluttony is putting the horse before the cart, and stockpiling far more of them than we can watch in the immediate future due to unmissable bargains or plain ol' Digital Versatile Lust courtesy of Amazon.com.

I have fallen prey to this on many an occasion, but rarely do I get home from JB HiFi and slam the disc straight into the player. My enthusiasm doesn't vanish upon purchase; rather I'm usually happy to let the movie sit, ready for when I get around to it. The problem is that unless someone else wants to watch one of these movies and blows the dust off, I usually get preoccupied with TV seasons and the latest episode of Lost and whatnot. Hell, I even have some seasons sitting on the shelf waiting for their turn (sorry, Brotherhood season one...).

So I decided to give myself some incentive to finally finish the bastards. I propose a recurring feature wherein I shoot off brief or not-so-brief reviews of the DVD that I've finally watched, with a view to how the films (and in some cases shows) hold up on rewatching. The vast majority of these discs are things I've seen before, either recently - in which case we'll see whether they earned being purchased - or long ago and I'm revisiting with a more mature eye (in theory). Earth 2: The Complete Series is an example of this, and hopefully not an embarrassing one - the point of this feature is that we'll find out together. [I rarely buy sight unseen unless I've heard amazing things and can't get it any other way, but there will be a couple.]

From a blogging standpoint though, this series will stretch my reviewing muscles, as I'll try to set myself new challenges each time, hence the title. They will all be as brief as possible while saying as much as possible, and I may shake things up with new formats (haiku may be pushing it though...).

This feature is likely to be two sides of a coin. Whereas this side is about reassessing old favourites, the other will be about completely new films. I'll save the details on that one until it begins, but it will share the trait of working through a collection, albeit a much larger one...

So let's begin. Hopefully this will be an interesting read in its randomness - we'll flit from The Godfather Trilogy to the Dilbert TV show - rather than self-indulgent. Let me know what you think