As we welcome 2022 and say “goodbye and good riddance” to 2021 (which was even more of a suck-fest in many ways than 2020) I can at least say that for the first time ever, I actually made good on a New Year’s resolution. Well, technically I did achieve my resolution in 2009 when my resolution was to not make any resolutions, but I think that’s a bit of a cheat.
Two years ago, in January 2020, I had made what I thought was a great resolution—have lunch with an old friend once every month. I followed through with this in January and February of that year, but then in March the pandemic hit and you can figure out the rest. So in 2021 I decided to make a more home-bound resolution. I resolved to watch 100 movies that I had never seen before. That may seem like a pretty easy achievement to some, but with work and family commitments, not to mention a variety of episodic TV shows that my wife and I watch, finding time to slide in 100 new movies over the year ain’t as easy as making popcorn.
Another layer of complexity in achieving this particular resolution was factoring in our Friday Family Movie Nights. Every Friday a different family member picks a movie we all watch and more often than not, it’s a family favorite that we’ve seen before. I usually use my turn to expose the boys to older movies that they haven’t seen, with mixed results. (They loved Young Frankenstein, but hated The Out of Towners.) So watching movies I’ve never seen before on Friday nights is pretty rare. Indeed, this past year only 8 of the 52 movies (15%) we watched on movie night were ones I hadn’t seen before.
That’s right, I kept statistics, so get ready to be bored to death by data.
I started out 2021 at a torrid pace, watching 14 movies I hadn’t previously seen in the month of January. I did some math, though, and figured out that at that rate I’d reach the 100 movie mark by July, so I decided to slow myself down. (A more ambitious person probably would have just adjusted their goal to match that pace, but I thought seeing 168 movies I hadn’t seen before was setting myself up for failure.) Still, even with the adjusted pace, I found myself ahead of the curve and by the mid-year point I had seen 61 flicks.
Round about October I decided to make a sub-resolution of my main resolution and strived to watch a horror movie every day throughout Halloween month. The caveat here was that they didn’t need to be movies I hadn’t seen before, as long as they were horror movies. If you missed the blog about this startling turn of events, you can read all about it here.
By the end of October I had gotten to 98 movies, so I pumped the brakes hard in November and only watched two new movies. I had hit my goal of 100 and initially decided to stop watching movies I hadn’t seen for the rest of the year. For some OCD reason, I decided I would spoil my resolution if I watched more movies than I said I would. For a couple of weeks I stuck with this mindset and watched nothing new. Eventually, I realized I was being a putz, and if I surpassed my goal of watching 100 movies that I never saw before, I would not be tracked down and handcuffed by the resolution police. Besides, I like watching new movies, so I started back up again and by the end of this yearlong project I had seen 111 movies that I hadn’t previously seen.
Now if I was a complete loon, I would give a write up on every movie I saw in 2021, but luckily for you I’m only a partial loon, so I’m just going to make some interesting observations (interesting to me) before wrapping it up.
I focused a lot of my new movie viewing on horror movies and Best Picture Oscar nominees. Those two categories accounted for 74 of the films I saw, or 67%. In all, I watched 43 horror flicks and 31 Best Pic nominees (with 9 of those being Best Pic winners.)
The oldest movie I watched was Wings from 1927, which was the first ever Best Picture winner, and was a very enjoyable film. The special effects for a movie that is almost a century old were pretty amazing.
I saw ten movies that came out in 2021, five of them in an actual movie theater! That’s right, after 16 months of not going to a movie theater, I finally went back in July, while we were on a family vacation in Texas. I went with my brother-in-law and two sons to see Black Widow, and I don’t know if it was the thrill of finally going back to a movie theater after the longest hiatus in my life, or the fact that I have a schoolboy crush on Scarlett Johansson, but I had an incredible time watching that movie.
I’m sure the question that is on everyone’s mind at this point (or at least the three people who made it this far) is what movie did I like the most of the 111? That’s not an easy question to answer, because I watched a lot of really good flicks over the past year. But if you forced me to pick one (which would be weird, by the way, because why would anyone force me to do such a thing) I’d probably go with La La Land, which was one of the most charming movies that I’ve ever seen.
The movie I liked the least of the 111 was Space Jam: A New Legacy, which we also saw in Texas, although not in a movie theater. Listen, the original Space Jam, with Michael Jordan was only okay, but compared to the new version with LeBron James, it was like Casablanca.
I saw five British horror movies from the early 1970s and all five of them clearly used the exact same country road whenever there was a scene of someone riding on horseback. The movies weren’t all made by the same director or even the same production company, but it was obvious that it was the same road every time. The most common denominator amongst these films was that Peter Cushing was in four of them, so at first I thought maybe he had some sort of odd clause in his contract that required a scene on that particular road, but then what of the fifth film? Coincidence perhaps? Or maybe there is only one country road in all of England. What do I know?
I suppose I can keep going on making various observations about the films I watched last year, but I fear at this point I’m on the cusp of putting even the most diehard of my blog readers to sleep. So I will leave you with this final thought before sharing the full list of movies I saw last year: If you are ever given the choice of watching The Deer Hunter or Humanoids from the Deep, go with The Deer Hunter.
|
Date |
Movie |
Year |
My Rating |
|
1-Jan |
Dark Skies |
2013 |
8 |
|
2-Jan |
The Lighthouse |
2019 |
7 |
|
3-Jan |
The Impssible |
2012 |
8 |
|
9-Jan |
Peter Rabbit |
2018 |
6 |
|
9-Jan |
The Invisible Man |
2019 |
9 |
|
10-Jan |
Maniac |
1980 |
6 |
|
16-Jan |
The Insider |
1999 |
9 |
|
17-Jan |
Bohemian Rhapsody |
2018 |
7 |
|
18-Jan |
The Town That Dreaded Sundown |
1976 |
4 |
|
23-Jan |
The Hateful Eight |
2015 |
7 |
|
24-Jan |
Ju On: The Grudge |
2002 |
6 |
|
26-Jan |
Blood Bath |
1966 |
5 |
|
30-Jan |
Manchester by the Sea |
2016 |
7 |
|
31-Jan |
The House That Dripped Blood |
1971 |
7 |
|
2-Feb |
The Little Girl Who Liveds Down the Lane |
1976 |
6 |
|
4-Feb |
Frailty |
2001 |
8 |
|
6-Feb |
28 Weeks Later |
2007 |
6 |
|
8-Feb |
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World |
2003 |
8 |
|
14-Feb |
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs |
2018 |
8 |
|
15-Feb |
My Bloody Valentine |
1981 |
5 |
|
21-Feb |
Paths of Glory |
1957 |
8 |
|
27-Feb |
The Defiant Ones |
1958 |
9 |
|
28-Feb |
Crazy Rich Asians |
2018 |
6 |
|
28-Feb |
And Now the Screaming Starts |
1973 |
6 |
|
6-Mar |
Horns |
2013 |
8 |
|
7-Mar |
Sound of Metal |
2019 |
7 |
|
8-Mar |
The Vast of Night |
2019 |
8 |
|
9-Mar |
Aquaman |
2018 |
5 |
|
11-Mar |
Twins of Evil |
1971 |
7 |
|
13-Mar |
The Prestige |
2006 |
8 |
|
14-Mar |
Countess Dracula |
1971 |
6 |
|
16-Mar |
Dead of Night |
1977 |
5 |
|
20-Mar |
The Frighteners |
1996 |
7 |
|
21-Mar |
A Place in the Sun |
1951 |
8 |
|
27-Mar |
A Lego Brickumentary |
2014 |
8 |
|
27-Mar |
I Bury the Living |
1958 |
4 |
|
27-Mar |
Lifeforce |
1985 |
6 |
|
3-Apr |
Mank |
2020 |
8 |
|
10-Apr |
Frequency |
2000 |
8 |
|
11-Apr |
Julie & Julia |
2009 |
8 |
|
17-Apr |
Nosferatu the Vampyre |
1979 |
4 |
|
18-Apr |
The Man Who Skied Down Everest |
1975 |
7 |
|
24-Apr |
A Simple Plan |
1998 |
9 |
|
25-Apr |
Phenomena |
1985 |
4 |
|
1-May |
The Gift |
2000 |
8 |
|
2-May |
Witness for the Prosecution |
1957 |
9 |
|
8-May |
Humanoids from the Deep |
1980 |
5 |
|
8-May |
I Saw the Devil |
2010 |
7 |
|
15-May |
Shadow of a Doubt |
1943 |
8 |
|
16-May |
Milk |
2008 |
8 |
|
23-May |
The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo |
2011 |
8 |
|
23-May |
Bound |
1996 |
6 |
|
30-May |
Shane |
1953 |
6 |
|
30-May |
Nomadland |
2020 |
7 |
|
31-May |
How Green Was My Valley |
1941 |
8 |
|
5-Jun |
Wings |
1927 |
9 |
|
6-Jun |
Hollow Man |
2000 |
6 |
|
12-Jun |
Upside-Down Magic |
2020 |
3 |
|
12-Jun |
Minari |
2020 |
7 |
|
13-Jun |
Vice |
2018 |
8 |
|
19-Jun |
Philomena |
2013 |
9 |
|
20-Jun |
The Uninvited |
2009 |
5 |
|
26-Jun |
The Killing of a Sacred Deer |
2017 |
6 |
|
2-Jul |
Places in the Heart |
1984 |
9 |
|
3-Jul |
Downfall |
2004 |
8 |
|
10-Jul |
In Old Arizona |
1928 |
6 |
|
19-Jul |
Space Jam: A New Legacy |
2021 |
3 |
|
20-Jul |
Black Widow |
2021 |
8 |
|
24-Jul |
Secrets & Lies |
1996 |
7 |
|
25-Jul |
Splinter |
2008 |
7 |
|
1-Aug |
Mutiny on the Bounty |
1935 |
6 |
|
7-Aug |
My Spy |
2020 |
6 |
|
12-Aug |
Only Lovers Left Alive |
2013 |
8 |
|
14-Aug |
The Killing |
1956 |
8 |
|
19-Aug |
The Deer Hunter |
1978 |
9 |
|
21-Aug |
Yes Day |
2021 |
5 |
|
22-Aug |
The Queen |
2006 |
8 |
|
28-Aug |
Letters From Iwo Jima |
2006 |
9 |
|
29-Aug |
Pumpkinhead |
1988 |
6 |
|
4-Sep |
Wind River |
2017 |
8 |
|
6-Sep |
He Walked By Night |
1948 |
5 |
|
12-Sep |
Secret Window |
2004 |
7 |
|
16-Sep |
The Last Emperor |
1987 |
6 |
|
18-Sep |
La La Land |
2018 |
9 |
|
23-Sep |
Ghost World |
2001 |
6 |
|
25-Sep |
Summer School |
1987 |
5 |
|
26-Sep |
Tom Jones |
1963 |
7 |
|
2-Oct |
Halloween |
2018 |
8 |
|
3-Oct |
Wishmaster |
1997 |
6 |
|
7-Oct |
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings |
2021 |
7 |
|
9-Oct |
Suspiria |
2018 |
5 |
|
10-Oct |
The Creeping Flesh |
1973 |
5 |
|
16-Oct |
Venom |
2018 |
7 |
|
19-Oct |
Sinister |
2012 |
7 |
|
23-Oct |
I Was A Teenage Zombie |
1987 |
2 |
|
25-Oct |
Dead of Winter |
1987 |
6 |
|
30-Oct |
Halloween Kills |
2021 |
5 |
|
30-Oct |
Hush |
2016 |
7 |
|
6-Nov |
Hacksaw Ridge |
2016 |
9 |
|
27-Nov |
Free Guy |
2021 |
6 |
|
1-Dec |
Battle Creek Brawl |
1980 |
5 |
|
11-Dec |
The Life of Emile Zola |
1937 |
7 |
|
12-Dec |
The Power of the Dog |
2021 |
7 |
|
21-Dec |
Let Me In |
2010 |
8 |
|
21-Dec |
Ghostbusters: Afterlife |
2021 |
6 |
|
23-Dec |
The Best Years of Our Lives |
1946 |
8 |
|
25-Dec |
Darkest Hour |
2017 |
9 |
|
26-Dec |
I Wake Up Screaming |
1941 |
6 |
|
29-Dec |
Don't Bother to Knock |
1952 |
8 |
|
30-Dec |
Nightmare Alley |
2021 |
8 |
|
30-Dec |
Red Notice |
2021 |
7 |
