January 2017: I have seen 55 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.
It is 10PM on Tuesday, January 31st and I have seen 55 movies this month. It’s possible before the night is out I’ll attempt to squeeze in one more, maybe catch a documentary on Netflix. But in all likelihood I’ll cap out at 55.
It is unlikely that I’ll top this months amount. 55 is abnormally high, in part because I attended B-Fest, an event where I watched 15 movies in 24 hours. This might have skewed my numbers a little bit.
Numbers
Over the course of 55 movies, I watched 5773 minutes of footage. That comes out to about 105 minutes per film (give or take a few seconds).
The longest film on the list is OJ: Made in America, a 2016 documentary (originally cut into 3 rather long segments) at 463 minutes. The shortest was a short film called The Wizard of Space in Time, which was 3 minutes long and viewed as part of an annual tradition at B-Fest.
Most of these movies were seen on Netflix or Hulu with only 4 movies seen in theaters (Resident Evil: the Final Chapter, Underworld: Blood Wars, La La Land, and Moonlight). Additionally, I watched 15 movies at the B-Fest movie festival. The least used format for watching movies was YouTube, with only one film being watched on YouTube — Enemy of the State. 9 of these movies were rewatches.
Highlights
There are a few standouts from this month’s viewing of movies. From first run movies, the clear winner is Moonlight. Thoughtful, dreamlike in a way that so few movies every intentionally manage. My theater started showing this movie again after the Golden Globe win for Best Drama, and it was a joy to watch it in theaters.
This month I also managed to see quite a few movies from New Zealand and Australia, mostly horror. The best of that bunch was the heavy metal demon flick Deathgasm. Weeks later, I still think about how oddly sweet and thoughtful a movie with so much over the top gore can be.
By far the worst movies that I saw were either Maximum Ride, Spectral, or Suicide Squad. Of the three, Maximum Ride or Suicide Squad are perhaps the least competently made or edited. The first is a movie about kids with wings that somehow manages most of the movie without any of the children having wings. The second is a failure of editing that somehow made its way into theaters with the vaguest of interesting characters and neon colored glee. Spectral is maybe the most forgettable movie I’ve seen in years. I was forgetting the movie as I watched it.
Trends
This month had a few trends. First was mentioned earlier, in movies from New Zealand and Australia: Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, Deathgasm, and Bad Taste. Considering a general lack of movies that I’ve seen from that part of the world, three in one month is worth mentioning.
There was also three movies about financial crisis, from the fictional Big Short and Glengarry Glenn Ross to the documentary the Inside Job. There were 8 total documentaries this month. The first movie of February will actually be a documentary, so it seems likely that this will continue.
** I actually finished Sour Grapes before midnight, so that’s 56 movies this month.
