February 2017: I have seen 68 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 1. You can follow my regular movie diary on Letterboxd. Last month’s upkeep can be found here: January 2017.
It is 8:11 PM on a Tuesday night as I finish writing this entry. It’s been a short month, 28 days. It is the month of the Oscars. Valentines Day also popped up somewhere in the middle, to pass as it always does, unnoticed. It is unlikely I’ll add another movie to this list before midnight, but I did last month. So we’ll see.
Last month I was sure that 55 (ultimately 56) would be a difficult number to surmount. I am not actually attempting to top myself. This month I somehow found the time to add another 68 films to my yearly register, putting the total amount at 124. I have seen 124 movies in 59 days.
Fingers crossed, 68 seems to be a high water mark for a given month. It seems difficult to top.
Which is a really lovely segue into the first sub-section of this entry.
Numbers
Over the course of 68 movies, I have seen 6128 minutes of film. That comes out to be a little under 89 minutes per movie. The longest film this month was The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, an HBO documentary that was basically a mini-series but which Letterboxd counts as a movie. The Jinx came in at 240 minutes by itself. The shortest film was actually tied this month, between Pearl and Piper, which I saw as a part of a film series of Oscar nominated animated shorts for the year. They were both 6 minutes a piece.
This month I saw most of these movies on Netflix, but 11 of them I saw in theaters. This number is inflated slightly by the Oscar nominated shorts series, which included 8 films. I saw John Wick 2 in theaters twice. I saw movies the least on the streaming service Vudu, on which I saw the old exploitation movie Rolling Thunder. This month, 23 of the movies were rewatches.
In total, I have seen 124 movies, which comes out to 11901 minutes. This comes out to be about 95 minutes a movie.
Highlights
This being Oscar season I tried to go out and see some Oscar nominated films. I then proceeded to fail. I still have only seen three of the Best Picture contenders (La La Land, Moonlight, and Arrival) though I guess it counts for something that I saw the winner. What I did succeed in doing is watching the Best Animated Shorts.
My local theater puts on a slate of each of the short film categories the week prior to the Oscars. Due to a heavy work load, I was only able to go out to see the Animated shorts. While they were not all to my taste, I was particularly amazed by two in particular: Pearl and Pear Cider and Cigarettes. I know that Pear Cider has been getting a lot of flack for it’s unlikeable characters, but I’m still struck repeatedly by it even a week later. There’s something about its punchy direction, unique art style and mood that hasn’t quite left me. It is not for everyone, but for some part of me that will always be that 17 year old obsessed with Bret Easton Ellis? It hit the spot.
This is probably also the month that I give up on Nicolas Winding Refn. Last month I tried out Neon Demon, which I found to be a beautiful screensaver with a questionable view of feminine sexuality. This month I tried out his take on Vikings, Valhalla Rising. I don’t know how you make a movie featuring such extreme violence so deeply uninteresting, but it barely held my interest despite being incredibly lean. I wasn’t a huge fan of Drive when it came out, and I keep hoping I’ll love his movies in part due to their extremely well wrought aesthetic. But if Valhalla Rising is proof of anything, it’s that I can’t be swayed to his side even if he has a shirtless Mads Mikkelsen.
Trends
This month, the clear trend is documentaries. Of the 68 movies I saw, 34 (precisely half) were documentaries. They show a certain favoritism for true crime pictures, including some classics like Thin Blue Line and Into the Abyss. I saw two sets of follow up documentaries, one set being Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, the other Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and it’s 10 year epilogue The Monster Lives. The first set was an interesting and engaging look into the world and commodification of “America’s First Female Serial Killer” (a misnomer to be certain). The other is worth skipping.
Aside from that, there was an attempt to watch some of the staples of “bad movies.” In particular I watched R.O.T.O.R., Lady Terminator and Rolling Thunder. These frequently appear on “best of bad/schlock/cult movies” list, and they are deserving of such attention. Rolling Thunder eases its way into the violence that comes, like an oncoming storm, like it knows that you’re waiting for the break. And when it comes, it feels deserved in ways movies that attempt to ape the style (John Wick 2) can only dream of.
Clarification on What Makes a Movie in This Listing
I was unsure what to catalog as a movie in this counting. For my measure, counting short films feels a bit like counting YouTube videos. Counting mini-series also feels like it’s not accurate?
So what I’m doing is if Letterboxd counts it as a movie? Then it’s a movie. This seems an easy way of coming up with the rules. There are some movie length things that Letterboxd doesn’t count, as new movies are always being added to the service. I’ll try to avoid those. There was only one this month, a short documentary entitled Children of God.
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.
