100 Films in a Year is dead.
Long live 100Films.co.uk

Welcome to my new-look blog!

Don’t worry, you’re going to find a lot of it familiar — I haven’t changed the underlying template, and all the old posts are still there, looking like they always did. Well, almost like they always did: I’ve chosen a new font for headings, so that’ll change. But, primarily, it’s a new name and a new logo, which is showcased on the front page in dozens of randomly-changing header images. (The old header and logo endured for seven years, and that was only a tweak & rearrange of the one I’d had for several years before that, so I think a redesign was about due anyway.) There are 20 new banners in total — can you catch ’em all?

More substantively, along with the revised aesthetics comes an adjusted focus.

As regular readers will know, I’ve been pondering “what to do about the blog” for a few years now, but the need for change was really brought to a head in 2021, when I spent most of the year only posting my monthly summaries. There were a couple of things going on that needed addressing. One: what to do about reviews? I wasn’t posting them regularly even before they ground to a total halt, and my ever-increasing backlog of unreviewed films — allowed to mount up over the past couple of years — numbers almost 500. Two: what to do about my eponymous challenge? Reaching 100 films every year has become a relative doddle: the last time I fell short was almost a decade ago, and in four of the last seven years I’ve reached 200 films in a year. Was that unchallenging challenge really still a fitting thing to base my blog around?

The easiest answer to the latter: move the goalposts. But to what? Another easy answer: stop doing it. But I didn’t want to give up blogging entirely. So, a new blog? Nah: a blog is a ‘brand’ (for want of a better word), and I wasn’t in the mood to start from scratch.

Ultimately, the inspiration for change came from the easiest of places. I’ve always referred to this place as 100 Films for short, including using that handle on Twitter and registering the domain 100films.co.uk — previously that just referred you on to my WordPress URL, but last week I moved the site over to it properly. (All the old WordPress URLs should still work, which is handy because otherwise I’d have a lot of link-fixing to do…) So, I could ditch “in a Year” and just go with the shorter title. But why that name? Oh, who needs a why? Though, to justify it at least somewhat, I intend to start a new occasional series about various 100-film lists — you know, like the Sight & Sound poll, or all those AFI ones. Plus, the “coming soon” page is going, to be replaced by an ever-changing list of the last 100 films I watched.

Which brings us back round to the other issue: reviews, and/or what other kinds of posts will appear. In short, my plan is to go back to the blog’s roots, with roundup posts every week or couple of weeks that review what I’ve watched in short capsule-like form. If I have more to say about a film, and the time to write it, I’ll still post separate full-length reviews. How often that will happen, only time will tell. (This “review as I go” approach is part of why the “coming soon” page is being retired.)

There are a few other ideas I have up my sleeve, but I don’t want to overwhelm with too much forward planning right now. Over the coming days, weeks, and months, the new and revised features of this fresh era will become apparent. Plus, some changes have had to wait until the ‘new’ site was live, so only now am I going to begin rethinking the menus, for example. And, to be honest, I’m still unsure of some of the details myself, so there may be aspects of the ‘old site’ that hang around for a bit before being discarded, or change and develop over time. We’ll just see how things go.

Also, there’s the small matter of wrapping up the last year of the ‘old’ blog, because I still have to post the statistics and my best (and worst) films of 2021. All that will be coming — complete with familiar graphics and imagery — over the next few days (as usual, a specific timeframe is hard to nail down. I haven’t even chosen a lot of it yet, never mind written it).

But first, later today I’ll explain how reports of 100 Films in a Year’s death may have been grossly exaggerated…