Let's end the summer with an at-home film festival

Here's the full line-up if you guys want to play along

First, I’d like to thank Josh Winstead for some great last-minute work to add graphics and badges to this week’s festivities. It was insanely kind of him to do this for us.

But, wait, you ask. What festivities?

Well, summer’s over. I think that’s particularly hard to wrap my head around this year because nothing happened this summer. The end of last year’s school year was profoundly strange and truncated and barely felt like it ended.

Both of my kids are headed back to school, sort of. They’re not going to physically be going, but they’re gearing up for digital classes starting a week from Tuesday. I want to do one last thing with them for fun this summer and they’ve been brainstorming ideas and we ended up landing on a Film Nerd 2.0 version of a film festival here at the house.

There are a ton of movies that they both saw when they were young that they don’t remember. There are also movies that Toshi’s seen because he’s older, and it’s time for Allen to catch up with them. The biggest of those is Pulp Fiction, something Allen’s been rabid to see for over a year now.

With those two themes in mind, we’re throwing the First Annual Ketchup Film Festival. We’re starting tonight and we’ve got programming running all the way through Friday night. There are a lot of blockbusters here, some of the biggest films of all time, and I’m amazed how little Allen in particular remembers about them.

It makes sense. I worried about doing this with Star Wars, but I think we managed to do that one right. My conversations with the boys are interesting because of what they do or don’t remember. We’ve been playing a lot of the card game Cinephile, and while I regularly annihilate them, unsurprisingly, the things they connect or remember are so fascinating. Sometimes it’s just an image. Sometimes they’ll remember a film in detail that’s startling. Sometimes they remember one particular thing, something I never even noticed. They both love connections between things, and they love starting to be able to make those connections themselves. I think that’s why Cinephile is such fun for them. It’s teaching them those things and making the entire process playful.

I thought I’d include the schedule here so if any of you want to play along at home, you can. We’re going to make badges and we’re going to make everyone line up between films and we’re going to be ridiculous about it. Because… why not? What else do we have going on right now? It’s not like we can go out.

So… I’ll be updating during the week and posting other things here but that entire time, we’re going to be watching a whole lotta movies. Here we go:

And while we’re sharing some of the things we’re going to use this week, I thought you guys might like to see our badges as well:

That’s mine. Here’s my girlfriend’s:

Toshi’s looking particularly good on his badge this year:

And of course, there’s Allen, who is mainly curious about we’ll be eating this week while we watch:

If nothing else, we should have a good time with the ephemera around the festival this week. Anything to break up all this endless sameness before the boys head in for a truly weird year at school, right?

Let me know how you guys are wrapping up your summers, and let me know if any of you decide to play along. Talk to you tomorrow!

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Image courtesy of Miramax
Image courtesy of Warner Bros
All original art by Josh Winstead