Time flies when you’re distracting yourself from life’s constant struggles! Here I am again, staring at the calendar and realizing that yet another year has passed and I’m still writing reviews. I started way back on April 12, 2010! Hard to believe.

April 2013–April 2014 brought many great movies, but I’m too lazy to look through the reviews and see exactly what they were. 🙂 I did run through all the Superman movies, as well as Peter Jackson’s filmography. There were a couple of cool milestones the site hit during this year also, most notably breaking the 1000 post barrier and Stephen reaching 100 reviews (with this week’s look at Birth)! So let’s dream big! 2000 posts total and 200 reviews from Stephen next year!

It’s my anniversary tradition to write about what I hope to do in the coming year, as well as check in on last year’s predictions and see just how far out in left field I was. I remember thinking I would be done with the Full Moon series two years ago, and yet still in 2014 there’s quite a bit more to go. Hahahaha. Woody Allen once said, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,” but at this stage of the game my plans don’t get that far. I plan and I laugh, because I almost instantly see through my own bullshit. In any case, here’s another load of false promises and ideas of what Year 4 at Silver Emulsion might be like!

Going down the list from last year’s anniversary post, I was a lot more realistic with my goals than I had remembered. Hmm… where’s the fun in that? Anyway, here’s the current state of everything at the blog:

• I am still “fairly close to finishing” the Empire International/Full Moon series. I probably have 50 or 60 left, along with any new releases. The debut of Full Moon Streaming a few months ago has made the series’ completion more easily attainable, as many of the Moonbeam films available there had previously only been available on VHS. I’d love to say I’ll be done with the series by next April, but I’m guessing I’ll still have 20–30 left at that point. We’ll see. The movies are still a lot of fun, in any case.
• Last year I had hoped to be “at least to 1973 or so” in my Shaw Brothers series, but alas I am still in 1972. At least I’m at the end of 1972! But regardless of that, it’ll probably be a little while till I get to 1973, because a few films that were previously unattainable have become attainable. It seems like the end of one year is the best time to do these stragglers, so look out for those reviews of super obscure Shaw Brothers movies to update into your RSS readers for you to ignore and scroll past! After that I’ll be plowing head first into the awesome movies of 1973, and hopefully by next April I’ll be either just finishing 1974 or a few films into 1975. These are total guesses, because… it’s more fun that way.
• The Sam Fuller series is ostensibly complete. The main portion has been done for a few months and I hope to finish the “Written By” section within the next couple of months (maybe by the end of summer?). Then I just have his TV work to look at before I can close the book on Fuller. He’s one of my favorites so I’ll be sad to finish, but finishing will allow for more exploration of other directors and that’s always interesting and exciting for me.
• The Jackie Chan series began in January 2013 and surprisingly I’m only just now cracking into his ’80s films. By next year I would hope to be done with the ’80s, but there’s a bunch of those so I might only be close to finishing them. Who knows? I do know that these damn series take too long when you do too many of them.
• The Arnold Schwarzenegger series is going well (but slowly). I’m almost done with the ’80s, and after the ’90s there aren’t too many more thanks to his political run. Last year I was hoping to “blast through his filmography” but that clearly didn’t happen. I can see myself being close to done (or done!) with this series by next year. Fingers crossed!
• The Blind Spot series continues to be a joy, and while I screwed up and missed March’s post (it’ll be up next week), I don’t see anything coming in the way of finishing this one. Of all the series, this is easily the most manageable as there are deadlines and it’s only one movie a month.
• The little unplanned hiatus that hit the site a couple of weeks back is likely to return throughout the year. It might not, but there is a high probability that it might become yet another ongoing series. 😛

This is the time where I generally ponder on other series that I want to start, but I’m going to resist the urge… even with this wonderful Criterion Zatoichi box staring me in the face. 🙂 Last year I mentioned potentially starting a Godzilla series — something I’ve wanted to do for about 3 1/2 years now — but that clearly isn’t in the cards right now. I don’t care about the US remake (yes, I saw the trailer… didn’t do anything for me), so why should I tie my series to it? Take that inferior, CG Godzilla!

I also welcome your suggestions, words of wisdom, encouragement, thanks, negative comments, spoiled food hurled towards my general direction… anything really. If you’ve read some of my stuff and you enjoyed it (or hated it) enough to come back a few times, I humbly thank you and hope you’ll continue to make Silver Emulsion a stop on your movie blog train. Choo choo!