July 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 6. You can follow my regular movie diary on Letterboxd. Last month’s upkeep can be found here: January 2017, February 2017, March 2017, April 2017 , May 2017. June 2017.
It’s 10:17 PM on Monday July 31. It’s been a long month. I took a vacation to Hawaii for a week. I listened to a bunch of Chapo Trap House. I decided to put my film club on hiatus. And I got into Bit Bash with my button board. I actually built a website for that (buttonsare.cool) and made a video about the “button box” itself, which you can see on YouTube.
But let’s get into the movies.
Numbers
This month I saw 55 movies. coming to a grand total of 4814 minutes. That averages out to be about 87 minutes per film. The longest film was War for the Planet of the Apes at 140 minutes. The shortest film was a 2 minute Vogue short called Elle Fanning’s Fan Fantasy.
This thing most films were watched on Amazon Prime as I basically chewed through their entire award winning documentary section. The entire thing. Where are they hiding the rest of the documentaries, that’s what I want to know. I can’t have seen them all. In theaters I watched 4 movies, including War for the Planet of the Apes, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Dunkirk, and Spider-Man: Homecoming. 9 movies this month were rewatches.
In total this puts me at 392 movies, with 376 on Letterboxd. With the addition of this months minutes that puts me at 36,342 minutes total for the month and an average of 92.7 minutes per film.
Highlights
This month I continued out my subscription to HBO Now on Amazon Prime. I might have exhausted it though. Probably try a different documentary service or another film one. In addition I also watched a bunch of movies offered on the flight to Hawaii as well as the cruise ship in Hawaii. This was mostly large blockbusters I had either missed or just decided to rewatch because there was a small child screaming every 3 minutes on one of my five hour flights.
I don’t have a best movie this month. Even though some things I rated highly on Letterboxd (Captivated, a documentary about Pamela Smart or Dunkirk which is technically very competent) nothing actually stood out. I was thinking about this while tuning into Ed Smith’s stream of the game The Last of Us where he briefly talked about the quality of games coming out this year and seemed to reflect my feelings on the meh quality of those games. The same feeling is true for films. Even movies full of joy feel…complicated by their failings.
For bad films, there are a few contenders, mostly in the category of tawdry and disgusting documentaries. We’ll call it a tie between 77 Minutes and Bizarre Bazaar. Both are crime documentaries, the first about a shootout at a McDonald’s and the second about a Kansas City serial killer named Robert Berdella. They are fascinating in the way they both manage to be incredibly disgusting in their own unique way. Uniquely terrible, the lot of them.
Trends
This months trend was crime documentaries. Again. Big surprise. We’re drowning in a well of crime documentaries.
