A Movie A Day… by Cami M. '23

One of the great things about MIT is PNR, a feature implemented that makes the difficult transition from high school to college easier, something especially appreciated at an institution notorious for being one of the most academically challenging places in the world.

Many frosh make use of PNR in various ways, where you’ll often hear phrases like “It’s okay, I’ll just NR it” or “Don’t worry, it’s PNR” or even “Do I even have to take this midterm? I pass with a 40% in this class.”

PNR simultaneously is a blessing and a curse — it takes the pressure off of work much more, but also, it takes the pressure off of work thus enabling us stupid, stupid frosh to make bad decisions.

I’ve been sticking to a relatively straightforward PNR lifestyle: I party about once every two weeks. I sleep early instead of giving up extra hours of sleep to finish up a pset. I go into Boston roughly once a month to go out and eat and explore the city.

But recently, my friend group⁠01 we call ourselves snoop snuddies (long story) and my friends r: aiden, aidan, caroline, melissa, mariia, raymond, and emma. i'd die for all of them. decided to start watching a movie every night for the rest of PNR.

This is a very new development. It really started back in October, when I attempted to do a weekly “Spooktober Movie Night”. We watched one scary movie and one funny movie afterwards to relieve tension. While we all had a lot of conflicting events and schedules, we managed to get some good movies in, including: The Cat in the Hat, The Shining, Whiplash, Fight Club, and Kung Fury.⁠02 Please watch all of these. They're some of my favorite videos/movies ever. I do not kid you when I say the Cat in the Hat is unironically one of my favorite movies in the entire world.

From here, we got a taste for wasting precious weeknight (see: pset) hours on movies. The movie streak, however, really was catalyzed by perhaps one of the most iconic Gen-Z movies of them all: High School Musical. Emma and I often quoted High School Musical around our friends, and it came as a true shock to us when Caroline and Aiden announced that they hadn’t ever watched High School Musical before. Immediately, we knew what we had to do.

This was also the moment I drastically fucked up my sleep schedule. Before, I slept at a nice and timely 11:30. Now, we start movies around 10pm, if not 11, meaning I go to bed around 1 in the morning. Shoutout to my 8.01L class, my only 9am. This is the reason why I skip it so much.

Currently, we’re planning to work our way through every Christopher Nolan movie ever, but knowing how volatile my friends are when it comes to decision making and movie tastes, I cannot guarantee that this will happen. Aiden and Caroline have curated their own list of movies they want to watch, while the rest of us chime in here and there with recommendations.

Some of these movies on the “To Watch” list include, but are not limited to: The Prestige, Dunkirk, The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, A Star is Born, La La Land, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Spirited Away.

As you can see, there’s a wide, wide variety here.

Honestly, watching a movie every night is not as detrimental to grades and academics as one might think. Aiden and Raymond actually view the movie night as a motivator to get their work done. By setting the movie at a specific time, they know to finish all their work before that time so they can watch the movie guilt free. Other times, it has an opposite effect where you just kinda go “Fuck it, I wanna watch a movie” and we all put down our work to start it.

Overall, it’s a very wholesome time. It’s especially fun to bring in one of your favorite movies and watch everyone’s reaction to it. (Imagine watching Fight Club in a room with your friends where only two out of the eight people there know what’s going to happen. It’s literally one of the best feelings in the world.)

I’ve been exposed to a lot of different movies, some I wouldn’t have ever watched or even considered in my own time. I had gone for 9 years without watching Inception, thinking really nothing of it, but last night, that changed. Inception. Fucked. Me. UP. To be fair, it messed up our whole friend group. We had a whole discussion about Inception even after the movie ended.

I’m personally very excited to start watching the Studio Ghibli suggestions, Dunkirk, and The Breakfast Club. We are making a promise to only watch Breakfast Club when all of us are there, since it’s very much a good movie to watch with your really close friend group.

We’ve actually technically broken the streak maybe three? times now, but we’re still not wasting our PNR. If we don’t watch a movie, we usually do some sort of party. So, not a waste.

If you’d like to keep updated on what movies we watch next, you can track it here.