April 2017: I have seen 62 movies this month.
In a sort of half-hearted New Years resolution, I thought it might be a good idea to watch more movies. This is month 3. You can follow my regular movie diary on Letterboxd. Last month’s upkeep can be found here: January 2017, February 2017, March 2017.
It is 9:13 PM on a Sunday night. I have just returned from a camping trip, a weekend spent in Red River Gorge that I kept track of here. I have started listening to a friends podcast, the Sample Study podcast, which is great. I started to read another book on genre fiction, but it ended up being a textbook and I wasn’t really in the head space for that.
But this month, as all months, what I really did was watch movies.
Numbers
Over the course of 62 movies I watched 5563 minutes of film. This averages out to be about 89 minutes per movie. The longest movie was the Netflix documentary series (split into 3 parts) called Five Came Back, which came out to be 187 minutes. The shortest was the Kirsten Lepore short Hi Stranger, which was 2 minutes.
This month most movies were either viewed on Hulu (where I’m trying out a Showtime subscription) or Netflix, as they are both convenient methods for watching movies and also still have movies I have not seen. I’m interested in maybe looking at a Shudder subscription, but that will depend on whether people watch movies with me since I don’t really watch horror alone. I saw three movies in theater this month, the Fate of the Furious, Free Fire, and an advanced screening of the film The Lost Arcade. 14 of the films watched were rewatches.
In total, that puts me at 232 total movies total (227 on Letterboxd), with a total of 21739 minutes. This averages out to about 94 minutes per film.
Highlights
This was an interesting month for movies. As mentioned previously, I attempted the Showtime extension for Hulu, mostly so I could watch some documentaries that looked interesting.
The films I most enjoyed watching were probably some really fantastic documentaries, namely Tower — a documentary about the school shooting at a Texas university. It had an incredibly distinctive visual style and managed to capture the story of the shooting without glorifying the shooter, instead focusing on the people there the day of.
In a non-documentary sense, rewatching Furious 7 with a group of people was basically just as entertaining as watching it the first time. It’s a deeply silly movie full of deeply silly things, that really needs to be appreciated. Over the course of a few nights, I managed to rewatch all of that series and the real stand out for me was watching Furious 7.
The worst movie I watched this month was Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe, a brutally awful action film starring Jesse Ventura. I either actually fell asleep near the end of this movie, or it was just so boring my brain could not latch onto it. The only part of this film that actually stuck out was the oddly sexy sax music that was playing all the time.
Trends
There were a few trends for the month of April.
To start with, as previously mentioned, I watched most of the Fast and Furious franchise this month. The end of last month was 2 Fast 2 Furious, and I proceeded to watch the rest of the franchise including the newest installment Fate of the Furious. As a part of this viewing, we actually hooked up to the speed of the movie to the speed of a bike so that the faster you pedaled the faster it went.
This month I watched 27 documentaries, down from 34 in February but still a quite substantial number. Most of these were watched on Netflix and Hulu.
An unintentional trend was watching movies related in some way to professional wrestling. At the far end of this is the documentary about the UFC (which is more professional wrestling adjacent), but there was also a documentary about GLOW, No Holds Barred, Abraxas, Reunion, or Card Subject to Change. Just a whole lot of wrestling.
This month I’m looking at getting Shudder and probably trying to watch a few more horror films, but realistically my content will probably not change a whole lot.
If you’re interested in following day to day, for some reason, here’s a link to my Letterboxd profile. I post reviews of every movie I watch. They’re usually about a line long, but I do post them.
