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.