A list of all the films to date

Pre-History!
1900: The Enchanted Drawing
1901: Stop Thief!
1902: La Voyage dans la Lune
1903: La Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ, The Great Train Robbery
1904: Welding the Big Ring
1905: Rescued by Rover 
1906: Humorous Phases of Funny Faces
1907: Ben Hur
1908: Japanese Butterflies

The Nineteen-Tens!
1913: Dr. Nicholson and the Blue Diamond
1914: Cabiria
1915: Birth of a Nation
1916: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1917: Seven Keys to Baldpate
1918: Tarzan of the Apes
1919: Broken Blossoms

The Nineteen-Twenties!
1920: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
1921: The Kid
1922: Häxan, Nosferatu, Dr Mabuse, der Spieler
1923: Cœur Fidèle
1924: Die Nibelungen
1925: Battleship Potemkin
1926: Faust
1927: Metropolis
1928: The Passion of Joan of Arc
1929: Man With a Movie Camera

The Nineteen-Thirties!
1930: All Quiet on the Western Front
1931: M
1932: The Island of Lost Souls
1933: Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse
1934: Lieutenant Kizhe
1935: Lives of a Bengal Lancer
1936: My Man Godfrey
1937: Laurel and Hardy Way Out West
1938: Alexander Nevsky
1939: Gone With the Wind

The Nineteen-Forties!
1940: Das Herz der Königin
1941: Peer Gynt
1942: Went the Day Well?
1943: Münchausen
1944: Double Indemnity
1945: Les Enfants du Paradis
1946: Great Expectations
1947: Miracle on 34th Street
1948: Rope
1949: The Third Man

The Nineteen-Fifties!
1950: Julius Caesar, Orphée
1951: The African Queen
1952: High Noon
1953: The Robe, The Titfield Thunderbolt
1954: Rear Window
1955: The Quatermass Xperiment
1956: High Society
1957: Bridge on the River Kwai
1958: The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
1959: Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ, Bucket of Blood

The Nineteen-Sixties!
1960: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
1961: Breakfast at Tiffany's
1962: The Longest Day
1963: Lilies of the Field
1964: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
1965: Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen, Doctor Zhivago
1966: Daisies
1967: Casino Royale, Herostratus
1968: Yellow Submarine
1969: The Bed Sitting Room, The Valley of Gwangi

The Nineteen-Seventies!
1970: Beneath the Planet of the Apes
1971: Shaft, Nicholas and Alexandra
1972: Shaft's Big Score!, The Godfather
1973: Shaft in Africa
1974: H is for House, Madhouse
1975: Winstanley, Lisztomania
1976: Taxi Driver
1977: Na Srebrnym Globie
1978: A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist
1979: Stalker

The Nineteen-Eighties!
1980: Miś, Xanadu
1981: Das Boot
1982: Blade Runner
1983: 2019, After the Fall of New York
1984: Heimat
1985: Ninja Terminator, A Zed and Two Noughts
1986: America 3000
1987: The Belly of an Architect, Dragnet
1988: The Last Temptation of Christ, Akira, A Short Film About Killing, Drowning by Numbers
1989: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town

The Nineteen-Nineties!
1990: GoodFellas
1991: King Ralph
1992: Glengarry Glen Ross, The Lawnmower Man
1993: Jurassic Park, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
1994: The Crow
1995: Empire Records, Kids
1996: Scream
1997: Starship Troopers
1998: Train to Hell, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Run Lola Run
1999: Dogma, But I'm a Cheerleader, Office Space, Glanni Glæpur í Latabæ

The Twenty Hundreds!
2000: Battlefield Earth
2001: Fellowship of the Ring
2002: The Two Towers
2003: Return of the King, Goodbye Lenin, Party Monster
2004: Finding Neverland
2005: Brick, Man Alone
2006: Das Security Bathroom, Southland Tales
2007: Persepolis, The BQE
2008: The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Slumdog Millionaire
2009: Up, Mary & Max

The Twenty Tens!
2010: Shutter Island
2011: Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!, Hobo With a Shotgun, Cabin in the Woods, Super 8
2012: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Life of Pi
2013: A Field in England, Die Andere Heimat, One Direction: This is Us
2014: The Grand Budapest Hotel
2015: Avengers: Age of Ultron
2016: Wizardhood
2017:
2018:
2019: Rocketman, Fisherman's Friends

...and a page of films that didn't get their own posts - because sometimes I watched films for myself, rather than for The Penciltonian.

The Glang Show (live, Sheffield, and Edinburgh Fringe 2014)

This May, I went to a particularly unusual evening of comedy, The Glang Show, a sort of anti-gong-show staged by Sheffield comedy organisation AltComCab.  It was strikingly unlike any other entertainment I have witnessed, and since it is this week headed to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (every evening at Sportsters Bar), it seemed appropriate to write it up at last.

The Glang Show is an anti-competiton, in which stand-up comics take turns performing their usual sets, under the direction of a sort-of regimented heckling, an interactive element that constantly threatens to shipwreck the sets, but in actuality renders them wonderful.  At the start of the show, each member of the audience was given a Point of Information card (in actuality, pages torn out of David Hume’s 18th century tract ‘On Suicide’), and when we raised our POI cards we were empowered to interrupt the performing comic with questions, directions or comments to which they might respond.

Tom Little receives a typical Point of Information

‘Could you tell that joke again, but with a different punchline?’  We could ask the comedian to elaborate on their current theme, or request that they stop talking about topics that left us uncomfortable.  At one point I asked a performer to go for a minute without saying anything funny, which in retrospect may have encumbered their ability to do their job.

Fortunately we had a dextrous set of performers, who made good use of our disconcerting interruptions.  The duration of their time on stage was partly decided by a scene-stealing electronic Bingo Corner, and their sets were underscored, silent-movie style, by live keyboard music from the show’s producer Sean Morley — so the comedians’ wit, stamina and improvisational powers were really put to the test.

Host Dan Nicholas extols the virtue of the jam from the Glang Show's
'Jam Corner', where a local business provides jam-based prizes.

Somehow the format worked.  What should have been a mess turned out to be a disorientating, fantastically entertaining evening, which challenged the stand-ups to rely on their wits rather than their usual material.  The intimacy of the format made the performers seem more human and more charming than they might have been when delivering prepared sets, but allowed them to demonstrate a real flair of comic ability.  The run of the Glang show at Edinburgh promises a fresh array of stand-ups each night, making it an appealing way to savour new talent and find new favourites.

Since I was present in my capacity as a camcorder-for-hire, the whole show can be found here on Youtube (with a trailer embedded at the top of this page, to give you the general idea of the show), but you’d be better off heading up to see it live at the Fringe, 18.45-19.45 at Sportsters Bar on Market Street in Edinburgh.  If you do drop in, be sure to say hello to show-runner Sean Morley.  If you're a comedian, you may even find yourself on the bill.

P.S. There was a trophy, of sorts, for the greatest comedian in the world ever, but the rules governing its almost arbitrary allocation were arcane and terrible, in both meanings of the word.

P.P.S. ☆☆☆☆☆

The Fez of Etymology (and other stories)

Dear readers, my 2013 was not wholly devoted to the viewing of old films, nor was my writing restricted to the comments made on this blog.  With Tom Hagley, I worked on some fiction of my own - or perhaps that's poorly phrased.  Crucially, an assortment of short stories came together.  An anthology.  An E-BOOK!

What are its attributes?  It's short, it's exciting, and it's full of ghosts and talking animals and forgotten former prime-ministers.  International adventure, historical catastrophe, Old Testament fan-fiction, that sort of thing.  Most of all, it's dirt-cheap.  Much as I'd like to regurgitate the blurb, and sell the thing to you, this blog was never about adverts, it's about stories and history and where things come from.  Instead, let's ask: who were the Fez of Etymology?

...by Ben Swithen and Tom Hagley

Let's flash back a moment.  Eleven years ago, Tom and I went to university in a tiny pocket called Bretton Hall, situated in the middle of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  Between our houses (Litherop and Swithen, two of the squalid blocks that clustered around the mansion) we constructed a tiny comedy troupe, named in a moment after my dictionary of etymology, and a novelty fez.  I'd had fun before university making audio-dramas, and with Tom, was keen to do so again.  We made seven-and-a-bit instalments of audio adventure, a story about a Victorian submarine going to Atlantis.  We made it up as we went along, and had rather unrealistic hopes for it.

Thankfully each episode was better than the one before it.  Livelier, more energetic, more inventive.  On reflection the opening pair had very little to recommend them, and it's unsurprising that our audience was few.  Nonetheless, when the series were played on Radio KoL, Jick, the creator of fledgeling RPG The Kingdom of Loathing, enjoyed it enough to name an in-game item after the eponymous Fez.

with Dan Bloor, the neglected third member of the early Fez

We, or at least I, had high hopes of prosperity and stardom.  Bretton Hall had incubated The League of Gentlemen, and their trajectory from students to radio comedians to TV comedians and (less successfully) movie stars was an alluring one.  Fame did not fall on the Fez of Etymology.  We eschewed the campus's regular open mic evenings, and never took our series to the big city (if one can so-describe Wakefield).  In our early years we performed live only three times.  Once in a bedroom, once in a wardrobe, and once on a sculpture (which was naughty of us).

We wrote a play, which was never staged, though it exceeded the merits of our audio adventure by dint of having a plan and a plot.  It was to have been called 'The Fez of Etymology presents Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, based on Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne', and rehearsals co-starred singer-songwriter Tom Hollingworth, adult actress Masie Dee, and a giant talking goose, named Goosey.

There followed a couple more seasons of audio-drama - 'The Mundane Egg', which was really quite good, but better in the memory; and 'Darius Cantor Must Die', a huge saga which no listener could bear, which saw us abandon silly comedy for silly drama and epic fantasy.  I'm inclined to think it had true greatness under its flabby folds, but my recent attempt to novelise it proved impossible.  Its merits are lost to time.

Tom's poster for Tamburlaine

At last, we did stage a play: 'Tamburlaine, the Lion of Persia' (Not a Real Lion)', a violent pantomime based entirely on the dramatis personae of Marlowe's Tamburlaine.  We'd never read nor seen his play, nor did we know its plot, but the list of character names fired our imagination.  Our play was either splendid or terrible, and nobody in the world could tell you which.  It was dense and fizzy and ran for two or three performances in Leeds.  I dearly hope some of the audience had come to see a sober classical tragedy; they didn't get one.

After that, Tom and I worked together on the start of many projects, but nothing held our attention.  We went our separate ways.  The best of our ideas had been an anthology of short stories, but who would publish such a thing: odd short stories by two unknowns?  This was before the world cared about ebooks.  When our tenth anniversary rolled around in 2013, I suggested we get together and make a short film.  Some lively ten-minute runaround on Youtube, possibly about Cromwell.  It became apparent that this could never happen.  We lived too far apart - or Tom did, at least.  But this was the age of the Kindle and the Kindle-analogue.  The stories could come alive again - indeed, in my mind the idea had never quite gone away.  We could self-publish - perhaps a vanity, perhaps a practical way to find one's own audience.

So here it is at last, the ultimate fruit of the Fez of Etymology.  'The Fez of Etymology and Other Stories'.  Our submarine tale is in there, or at least its skeleton, revivified and clad in curious meats.  Likewise Das Security Bathroom, which started life as a thirteen-minute Fez movie.  The other nine stories are new, for this is neither an exercise in recycling nor nostalgia.  Some of the characters hail from our audio and stage-work, most obviously Master Smith, a shard of Tom.  Characters we cared about, and ideas we didn't want to see trashed, can outlast those over-compressed mp3s.  Short stories are beautiful things: they're short, and they're stories.

Master Smith and Bandagongo, in 2008

Will the book prosper?  Not spectacularly, but small audiences are just as good as big audiences, and both are preferable to non-existent audiences, which is what the stories would have if the book had never been made available.  Hooray!

---

The book is now available from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.de, and all those regional amazons.  Readers, this ebook can be bought for yen!

2013 Dies!

Well, that was the year of The Penciltonian.  What an exciting time!  What a world of adventures!  What!  Why?

I had hoped never to watch another film again, but the bright lights and colours have drawn me back.  Since the official end of the project and the blog, I've found myself compelled to watch the following motion pictures, which I report here in order to wrap up the year:

Iron Sky (2012)

This is actually a far more appropriate end to The Penciltonian than whatever the actual end was: an exciting Finnish/German/Australian/kinda-American film, riffing on a lot of the German movies I've been watching (even 1943's 'Münchausen', which I'd thought pretty obscure) and slathered in modern-style Wagner.  An action comedy about space-Nazis, an enjoyable and necessarily broad satire, which didn't end as I expected.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

On St Christmas Eve's Day, I actually saw a movie on the BIG SCREEN, something I had failed to achieve through the body of the year.  It's an excellent telling of the story, and is pretty close to being a perfect film.  Attractive, exciting, amusing and moving, and the muppets work surprisingly well alongside human actors, without seeming unduly ridiculous.  I'm sure I had more to say about it, but Christmas.

Witchfinder General (1968)

What a jerk!  I've always liked the Puritan style, and have seen photos from the film and admired Matthew Hopkins' hat and fine array, but he was a horrid fellow.  This film sits neatly alongside 'Häxan' (1922) and 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928) as a tale of misidentified witches being beaten up by unchristian Christians - and it joins my beloved 'Winstanley' in being an inspiration for 2013's surprise hit 'A Field in England'.  This is a film of really horrible, hard-to-watch violence (which seems entirely appropriate, given the subject matter), and Pertwee-era-style crash zooms (which seem less appropriate).  Vincent Price IS the Witchfinder General.

War and Peace (1956)

I watched the first hour of this, but became immensely irritated.  It wasn't terrible, but it was slow and unexciting, and I'm no longer obliged to watch slow, unexciting films.  I have the liberty to escape such things.  I also grew aware that the film was not at all the best way to take this particular story.  As much as a massive, massive book is daunting, a film that boils a massive, massive story down to a few hours and makes it feel like any other romance, is a less appealing and less helpful prospect.

A borrowed and wearying cat on me, and upon you all.

So, what does 2014 bring?  I tried to make a list of my predictions, but the list started out frighteningly bleak and full of catastrophe (which celebrities will die, this year?), before becoming a sequence of portents of doom and stars of ill-omen, so I stopped making the list and wondered whatever was wrong with me.  2014 will be very lovely.  Amen.

The End of the Penciltonian

Well, that was The Penciltonian.  A hundred films from a hundred years, 1913-2013 - and a few besides.  There were a number of other criteria I ventured for those wishing to play along at home, and of these I believe I also managed a film from each letter of the alphabet.

The viewing and the blogging have encompassed:
130 films in total
25 British films
54 American films
16 German films
7 French films
19 silent films
28 crime films
28 comedy films
14 horror films
21 films about war
7 films about revolution, which I found to be the most interesting through-line

I failed in my attempt to watch a film from each continent - I only managed a couple from the whole of Asia, and neglected to watch any at all from Africa, South America, Antarctica or The Moon, so I certainly can't claim to have encompassed anything beyond Western, Minority-World cinema.  African cinema, in particular, sounds to be artistically and philosophically different from the sorts of things I ended up watching, and its absence is probably the single greatest deficiency in this Penciltonian project.  I also managed to find terribly few films by female directors, yet must have watched half a dozen with entirely male casts.

The 1920s and the 1940s seemed much the most enjoyable decades, with almost all their films garnering great praise, but I thought the 1910s were a bit rubbish, perhaps because of their lack of later cinematic techniques - I've ventured elsewhere that the decade's lack of close-ups left the performances feeling rather distant, meaning the actors were only able to convey rather crude emotions, lacking nuance.

I expect there will be a handful of additional updates to The Penciltonian, though on a less regular basis.  Wherever I see something startling, or unfairly neglected, I'll try to make mention of it.  But I won't renew a commitment to a century in a year, or two films a week - the costs in time and funds were too high.

I guess I'd hoped I could sum up more victoriously, and tell tales of a project completed, which had led to some great, personal revelation, some spiritual refreshment, or revitalisation of character.  I have watched a hundred films - a goal any of you could achieve inside two months.  It's not especially impressive, only a tribute to obsessive list-making, and to materialism.  My main achievement here was to sit on my ass all year watching movies, which really oughtn't to be something to shout about.

The End.

The Alphabet (not a film)

If you find a satisfaction in the completion of arbitrary lists, please marvel at my ability to watch a film for each letter of the alphabet.  It's a far easier task than watching a film from each year of the century, and this is a venture you might enjoy trying for yourself (indeed, I once listed it as a way to play along at home)

America 3000 (1986)
The Belly of an Architect (1987)
Cabin in the Woods (2011)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Empire Records (1995)
Faust (1926)
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Häxan (1922)
The Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Julius Caesar (1950)
King Ralph (1991)
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
M (1931)
Ninja Terminator (1985)
Office Space (1999)
Persepolis (2007)
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
The Robe (1953)
Shaft (1971)
Train to Hell (1998)
Up (2009)
La Vie et La Passion de Jesus Christ (1903)
Winstanley (1975)
Xanadu (1980)
Yellow Submarine (1968)
A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)

One can have fun constructing one's own alphabet of movies.  I could just as easily have watched (off the top of my head) 'Animal Crackers' (1930), 'Beethoven's 2nd' (1993), 'Caravaggio' (1986), 'Dog Soldiers' (2002), 'East is East' (1999), 'Fantasia' (1940), 'Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns' (2003), 'Hot Shots! Part Deux' (1993), 'I, Robot' (2004), 'The Jungle Book' (1942), 'A King in New York' (1957), 'The Lion King' (1994), 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (1956), 'No Country for Old Men' (2007), 'The Omen' (1976), 'Il Postino' (1994), 'The Quiet American' (1958), 'Russian Ark' (2002), 'Step Up 2 The Streets' (2008), 'TMNT' (2007), 'U-571' (2000), 'V for Vendetta' (2006), 'Wall Street' (1929), 'X2' (2003), 'You Only Live Twice' (1967), and 'Zardoz' (1974).  But that would have been a different Penciltonian to the one you have been reading.

...and incidentally, a merry Easter Octave to all of you at home

I've been on holiday this week, or should I say holiday has been on me?  Either way, I've neglected to write up any Pencilton-shaped comments on films, or to watch any films, but I've notes and memories enough to resume this coming Wednesday with 'Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex' (2008), and carry on from there.

Just, y'know, reassuring y'all that the blog hasn't been abandoned.

P.S. I could absolutely write you a short set of notes on a film this evening, but I can't be bothered.

The films so far

People have occasionally asked me which years I've covered and which are blank.  Without giving you a massive list of titles, this post is a summation of what I have and haven't watched.  Squares are beautiful shapes, and square numbers are just great, so that's how we'll start.

Square of films so far

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

More useful list of all films

Not-films

Origins Achievements Pancakes Ballet

Years with multiple entries

1922: Criminal Vampire Witchcraft
1950: Shakespeare Mirrors
1959: Epic B-Movie
1965: Cohen Zhivago
1971: Shaft Rasputin
1972: Shaft Mafia
1974: Murder Windows
1976: Taxi Alphabet
1980: Poland Disco
1985: Ninja Zoo
1987: Architecture Cops
1988: Jesus Anime Killing
1989: Food Chicks
1992: Internet Salesmen
1993: Piano Dinosaurs
1998: Groove Running Nazis
1999: God Gayness Office
2003: Socialism Fantasy Party
2006: Bathroom America
2009: Beautiful CGI
2011: Pencilton Homicide Mystery Movies
2012: Tiger Gollum

Pancakes - a recipe (for three or so hungry people)

Pencilton snoozes under a warm pancake

Into a large mixing bowl pour a mole-hill of plain flour, about the volume of a small hat.  Sieve it, if you don't like lumps.  More flour here will mean more pancakes, and it's about the only part of the recipe you will need to scale up in order to feed more people, or the same number of hungrier people.

Using an unbroken egg, make an indentation in the top of the mole-hill of flour.  Break two medium-to-large eggs into this hole, giving the appearance of a volcano.  Add a pinch of salt, which will bring out flavours later on.  Using a wooden spoon (or a whisk if you have one), stir the eggs into the flour, and start to add the milk.

The milk should be poured in little-by-little, each time the mixture seems to be too dry.  In the end, after a good amount of stirring, whisking or beating, the mix of flour, egg and milk (and that pinch of salt) ought to be somewhere on the fine line between gloopy and soggy.  To see whether it's there yet, lift a spoonful of the mixture and pour it from your spoon.  Does it creep like treacle?  If so, it's too floury, and needs more milk.  Does it flow like water (or milk, indeed)?  If so, it's too milky - add some flour.  It should be somewhere between the two.  The more viscous, the more filling the pancakes will be, the wetter, the less likely to become a pancake.

Now, using your pancake pan (or regular frying pan, if you will), fry a large lump of butter, about the size of a big toe.  Let it coat the pan's interior, and drip the remainder of the melted butter (which should still be a sizeable amount) into the mixture you have prepared, and stir it up.  A good amount of melted butter in the mix will mean the pancakes are self-lubricating, and you won't need to pour any oil into the pan between each one.

Leave the mix to settle for an hour, or less, or not at all if you're very hungry.

Heat your pan until it is very hot.  Pancakes cannot be achieved over a low heat, and some camping stoves are incapable of reaching pancake temperature at all.  Pour (from a cup or ladle) a measure of pancake mix into the middle of the pan, and move the pan about until your batter spreads out to cover its bottom (or whatever size you wish your pancakes to be).  Heat for a short while - until the surface of the pancake looks dry but clammy, or until smoke emerges.

Now, the time is come to flip your pancake.  You should shake the pan vigorously (but carefully) to unstick the underside from the pan - or carefully slip a spatula beneath the pancake, to make sure it isn't cleaving to the pan.  Once you're sure that the half-cooked pancake is moving freely, give your pan a confident, but not excessive, jerk, forwards and upwards, tilting the far end of the pan up higher than the handle end.  Your pancake ought now to rise, rotate, and land upside-down ready to cook to readiness.  Do not be afraid - the pancake is very unlikely to travel far in any unexpected directions, so, with practice, you should be able to turn the pancake over with very little panic or use of energy.  Cook this side of the pancake for a slightly shorter time than the first, then slide the finished item out of the pan onto a plate.

Since the pancake mix does not itself contain sugar, the resultant pancake will be suitable for sweet or savoury fillings.  On the savoury front I'd recommend salami and grated cheese, with black pepper - or courgette and mushrooms if you're vegetarian, again garnished with black pepper.  Pepper is the savoury sugar, when it comes to pancakes, and will make any savoury filling seem deliberate.

I've no doubt you have your own preferences when it comes to sweet fillings, so I shan't presume to recommend any.

P.S. I'm well aware that this is not a set of comments on a film, but pancakes are important too.  Pancake Day is almost upon us (and as I often note, it's always Pancake Day in your heart, except on Tisha B'Av, the Jewish day of mourning)

Join in at home: ways to play along

Now, I don't expect y'all to watch a hundred films ancient and modern, but I can't help feeling this blog should be a slightly more interactive affair - that there should be ways for you to join in at home, do some film-watching-shaped activities and claim some victories.

The best games have multiple victory conditions, and I believe there are ways to prosper in this film-watching project other than consuming as many films as I'm currently attempting (1,100,100 films, if you count in binary).  Therefore, I've prepared the following *achievements*.  See how many you can unlock (by which I mean achieve).  If you get them all, you can perm some skills, whatever that means.  Oh, give it a go, senors and senoritas.

Beginner

1. Watch ten films from different decades.
This one is actually way easy, and anyone can do it if they have access to a library or BBC iPlayer.  One film per decade from the 1920s to the 2010s.  'The Wizard of Oz' was out in 1939, so if you're averse to monochrome you only have the 20s to worry about on that count - and if you despise silent films, you could avoid them entirely by keeping to the back end of that fine decade.

2. Watch a film beginning with each letter of the alphabet
I suspect I'll end up achieving this one myself without meaning to.  There are only a small number of tricky letters, and I'll see if I can make them less daunting.  Z, as in 'A Zed and Two Noughts' (1985), 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1992) or 'Zoolander' (2001).  X, as in 'Xanadu' (1980 - but it's on Wikipedia's list of 'films considered the worst ever), 'X2' (2003), or more tenuously any film starting with 'cross' or 'trans'.  Y, as in 'You Only Live Twice' (1967), 'Yellow Submarine' (1968) or 'The Young Victoria' (2009).  I'll also venture 'K', as it's my least favourite letter in the Western alphabet - but any film starting with 'King' or 'Kangaroo' will suit you here.

3. Watch ten per cent of the films I watch for this blog
Currently that only requires you to watch two films, and it isn't a number that will suddenly escalate.  Bonus points if you watch ones you hadn't heard of prior to 2003.  And make that twenty per cent, not ten per cent, if you work part-time or not at all.

Intermediate

4. Watch ten foreign-language films from different decades.
The whole Penciltonian thing, watching a hundred films from a hundred years, etcetera is, as well as an excuse to watch more films, a chance to look at a hundred years of human culture.  Foreign-language films are very important to this.  I used to find them daunting, but I was shown 'Amélie' (2001), and discovered they were very easy to watch - the same as English-language films, but fascinatingly different.

5. Watch a film from each continent
And that includes Antarctica.  And the Indian subcontinent.  And if you can see your way to include The Moon, so much the better.  And it doesn't count if it's just about English folks going out and being merry in such-and-such a country - these should be films conceived and made within the continent concerned.

6. Pick a genre, watch eight films from it, from different decades
This one's pretty easy, and potentially interesting.  See how the musical, or the Western, or the swashbuckle, or the horror developed.  I'm inclined to disallow sci-fi here as it's so excessively broad and ubiquitous.  I've limited this to eight films, as you might otherwise find yourself forced to watch a terrible film because it's a decade's sole example of whatever genre you've happened to pick.  It's a vague one, so feel free to write in with a better idea for achievement six.

Advanced

7. Watch 10 different films in the same language, other than your own.
I suspect I'll find little difficulty fitting ten German films into my hundred-or-so.  If I can get one per decade, so much the better.

8. Watch 'Die Zweite Heimat' (1992)
This is the film I love the best, but it's also the length of any 13 other films, so it's an investment of time.  Very well worth it.  I like to think its duration isn't the sole reason I rate it so highly, but you won't be sure until you've seen some or all of it.  Truly, I think this is one of the best bits of art to come from the 20th Century.

9. Make your own film
Any quality or duration, collating and synthesising some of the things you've learnt from film-watching.  I intend to do this, and I fully expect it to be embarrassingly identical to films I made before this whole hundred-film adventure, proving I haven't really learnt anything.

Bonus easy and difficult achievement to unlock:

10a. Make and eat some pancakes.
My pancake recipe will appear on this blog shortly before Pancake Day.  This may not seem relevant to films, but pancakes are, in fact, very important, and they're in season.

10b. Eat a live porcupine.
Because it's good to have something to strive for, and nobody should be able to unlock every achievement or achieve every lock.

Sleeping Beauty (live belly-dance)

I've always thought of belly-dancing as a mildly saucy novelty - a sorbet between more substantial acts, or a bit of background colour in films.  When I was invited along to see the first ever belly-dance production of 'Sleeping Beauty', I was somewhat wary, but intrigued.  There was a thrill to sitting in the theatre, knowing I was wholly ignorant of what would ensue, of what manner of story-telling lay beyond the red-orange curtains.

I found myself at the theatre, having been invited by friends who were, unfortunately, encumbered by illness and unable to attend.  I wasn't alone, as three other friends had likewise had the idea suggested to them, but none of us knew quite what to expect.  Crucially, where this would fall on the line between ballet, kabuki theatre and pantomime?  Would this be two solid hours of dancing?  Would it be exciting?  Amusing?  Terrifying?

The programme (I was stingy here, so looked over my neighbour's shoulder to read his copy) filled in a few details.  Jenny Muhlwa had a dream, a compulsion to bring belly-dancing to the masses, to show it to be be a legitimate way to tell stories.  Belrobics had been formed, a circle of linked belly-dancing groups, of all ages, around Sheffield.  They came together to show their work, their moves, and their bellies.

The curtains opened and the bellies began.  The stage was dominated by a rather magnificent backdrop painting of the Taj Mahal.  Bar a couple of chairs and a crib-full-of-baby, this was the full extent of the set.  This production was all about the dancing.

Here ensued dance after dance, belly after belly, the jangle of coin-belts, a pageant of rich saturated colours, and the pallid Winter flesh of Britain.  This whole production, cast mainly with keen amateurs, seemed a commendably un-self-conscious show.  Now, I would be daunted to show my battenberg-filled belly in public, knowing myself not to be honed and toned to society's impossible standards, but the dancers here were bolder than I, and not bound by such miserable restrictions.

I feel ill-qualified to comment on either quality or style of dance, as I've pretty much ignored it as a medium, and my own engagement with it has hitherto been restricted to the odd ceilidh and a few seconds of alarming movement half-way through the music video to 'The Princess I Never Knew'.  What I can say is this, that the dancing was enthusiastic, energetic, joyful and hypnotic, with each of the groups coming forward with scenes and set-pieces.  I hadn't expected so much variety within belly-dancing - or rather, I hadn't realised it could hold my attention for two full acts without growing repetitive.

There were many memorable images within the extravaganza of undulation and shimmying.  The good fairies with their huge wings moved with a grace and fluidity, and impressed more than I might have expected from such elegantly simple props.  The dancers playing thorns deported themselves very well, and were the best costumed, by merit both of looking much like thorns, and looking not very much like belly-dancers; thorns aside, this did seem to take place in a kingdom made up entirely of belly-dancers (as opposed to, say, a kingdom made up of people who happen, in this telling, to be belly-dancing).  One particular highlight was a dance near the first act's end, in which the evil fairy works the eponymous Aurora like a puppet - showing off the dynamism of the two dancers' movements and the precision of their timing.  This was a too-rare moment of interaction between characters, not that the others didn't dance together - just that they didn't dance together.  Here was a piece of good drama within the dance.

Act two gave us a male character, and thus a male dancer in a cast of sixty or so females.  I was a little daunted by the prospect, through concern that finding a male willing to belly-dance might have resulted in resorting to somebody very terrible indeed.  But no, the man danced with all due passion, virility and grace - though I found his character, as in many tellings of this story, unpalatably arrogant, a man driven by his lusts rather than inherent heroism.  Thankfully, in what was either slight mistake on the part of the dancers or a brilliant faux-ad-lib, the prince and the awoken beauty bumped rather suddenly into one another, and shared a laugh more human and less calculated than much of the production.  Perhaps they were merely enjoying themselves.  I hope so.

So, do I foresee a time when going to the belly-dance will be a Christmas tradition for many?  I certainly like the idea, and there's a joy to any new tradition.  It's as good a way as any to tell a story, and for now the novelty of it makes it intriguing, so I'll be very glad to return to next year's productions.  There's a lot to be said for all forms of physical theatre, and I'm keen to see how this company will develop.  I particularly liked the mix of dancers at different levels of ability and complexity, the production bringing learners and professionals together under the same discipline and with the same gusto.  I've sometimes found dancers who dance so extraordinarily that I can hardly believe I belong to the same species, but watching 'Sleeping Beauty' I felt anybody open to the experience could learn to belly-dance.  Do excuse me if I don't, however.

P. S. You can see Belrobics in action on their Youtube channel 

P. P. S. I hope you'll excuse me sullying the purity of this blog's focus on film, but it is nearly Christmas.

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Belrobics staged the first ever belly-dance production of 'Sleeping Beauty' at the Montgomery Theatre, Sheffield, 20th-22nd December 2012.  I've no doubt they will return in a matter of months.