The Autodidact (Self-taught man), a character in the book of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, has a system. He arrives at the library, takes a book and reads it. And the system is that he chooses his books in alphabetical order.
I study him with a sort of admiration. What will-power he must have to carry through, slowly, obstinately, a plan on such a vast scale. One day, seven years ago (he told me he had been a student for seven years) he came pompously into this reading-room. He scanned the innumerable books which lined the walls and he must have said, something like Rastignac, “Science! It is up to us.” Then he went and took the first book from the first shelf on the far right; he opened to the first page, with a feeling of respect and fear mixed with an unshakable decision. […] He has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from a work on Tamerlaine to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism, he has never been disconcerted for an instant. […] And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left: he will say to himself, “Now what?”.
This system has an advantage and an issue. Advantage is randomness of choice which can bring the joy of adventure, which can redirect our thoughts and hence our lives to a completely unexpected path. Disadvantage is the unpredictability of quality of reading, as stupidity is often hidden behind wise-sounding words (cough-cough).
In a similar way, but in a lighter fashion, one may approach watching movies in an organized order as well. What is great about this approach is that you don’t have to spend seven years to reach the letter ‘L’ just like the Autodidact. It takes about five times less time to educate oneself in cinema than in literature.
There is a fine resource of Great Movies by Roger Ebert. All a person needs to do, is start watching movies in an orderly fashion, the way it is published in Ebert’s website. First he will watch The Ballad of Narayama, then Monsieur Hire, then Veronika Voss, then Spirit of the Beehive, then Mulholland Dr., and then The Life of Oharu. As a consequence, he will reduce the time spent making a choice to zero, will retain a sense of adventure and unpredictability, will train his willpower, and educate himself in a good cinema; he will watch movies that he wouldn’t watch in any other case because of the running time, year of production, genre, etc.
The only disadvantage of this approach is that Roger Ebert’s list breaks in the year of 2013, upon the critic’s demise. The other issue could be with boredom, but one must promise himself beforehand that he is going to watch the movies till the end, preferably in one attempt, without skimming, and without distractions. This is system. And one day, after watching the last of the total of 383 movies in Ebert’s list, he will say to himself, “Now what?”.