Saturday, January 1, 2022

Cinematic Resolution Resolved


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


 
Note: The ones highlighted in yellow are the ones I saw in the theater.

No comments:

Post a Comment