I’m not quite sure why I decided to watch Sex and the City in its entirety. It could have been my curiosity about the show, or my desire to put Sex and the City 2 in some fair context in an Internet blogging landscape overwhelmingly composed of male writers and male readers, or maybe I was seeking out some sort of endurance test…or maybe all these are lame excuses to shamelessly justify watching a show that one would so easily encounter ridicule for watching.

It takes a big man to admit the fact that he hasn’t seen one single movie from a director as famous as Akira Kurosawa. It’s especially embarrassing if you’re a mildly successful movie blogger such as myself. But it was true. Was being the operative word, as I’ve chosen to dedicate this week’s For Science to the start of my Kurosawa journey. It begins with four films, from a range of time periods, all of which center on one particular historical period: feudal Japan.

With the Academy Awards right around the corner, I’ve had history on the brain. Ever since I bought my mom The History of Oscar in the 11th grade (she’s a lover of Hollywood’s big night), I’ve been curious about Best Picture winners. What made something the Best Picture of its particular year, and how has the criteria for such an award evolved over the years? In an effort to start this journey, I sat down this weekend with four best pics from an era long before my time…

Because I hate myself, I’ve taken on the task of watching Z-grade crap for an entire day. This is supposed to prove something, I think, but at this point I don’t have the mental capacity to figure it out.

In the year of our lord, 1996, pop culture commentator and writer extraordinaire Chuck Klosterman ate nothing but McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets for a week. He would later go on to chronicle this feat in an Esquire article about a man who made a name for himself eating McDonald’s for an entire month for the purposes of making a film. That film was Super Size Me, and that man was Morgan Spurlock. In 2010, two idiots from Film School Rejects would prove that history does repeat itself, despite itself.

This week, I take a trip back to the French New Wave. And I do it For Science, discovering the Six Moral Tales of director Eric Rohmer.

Sometimes, there is work to be done. And sometimes, the world needs a hero. That work is science, and I am the world’s hero. This week I watch the first season of Glee in one sitting, and live to tell the tale.