Marathon Movie Watching

Posted by Leslie C. Halpern Jun 26, 2008

Striving to earn his place in the Guinness Book of World Records by beating the previous record of 117 hours of non-stop movie watching, Ashish Sharma of Mathura, India, recently spent 120 hours watching 48 Bollywood films. Rules stipulate that each movie must be at least 90 minutes long and that participants can rest only 10 minutes between movies.

That’s five days of non-stop Hindi cinema, and although Sharma claims to love the movies, any genre would get tiresome after awhile.

So what kind of movies would you watch during a marathon, assuming you were limited to just one genre?

As much as I love romantic dramas, the last thing I want to do is get burned out on love. What about five straight days of suspense, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action/adventure, or animation? Although Guinness requires that a doctor be present the entire time, I’m not sure my heart could take all that excitement. Maybe try 120 hours of foreign films with subtitles, eye-opening documentaries, or highbrow art films? I’m not sure my mind could take it.

So whether old silent black-and-white comedies or silly spoofs from the 1960s through the 1980s or gross-out comedies from the 1990s and today, my marathon movie genre pick would be comedies. Mixing in a little romance, action, or mystery is fine, as long as the overall effect is comedic.

Although other genres rely on formulas that become predictable after you’ve seen a few, comedies have no such restrictions. Running gags, jokes, physical humor, irony, puns, hyperbole, satire, sarcasm – the list of ways to bring on laughs is nearly endless. Even though many comedic ploys fall short of belly laughs, 120 hours of a few intermittent chuckles sounds like a good deal to me.