June 2017: I have seen 44 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.
It is 1:09 AM on a Saturday morning/Friday night. It’s actually the 1st of July, but I was out til about Midnight watching the Edgar Wright flick Baby Driver, and earnestly didn’t remember that June had only 30 days. This month was mostly spent watching movies, but also building a 100 button arcade fight stick. I read some good articles about games, specifically a Jess Joho piece about What Remains of Edith Finch. Most of my month was spent on the arcade stick, so to be honest it’s best to just get down to the numbers.
Numbers
This month I watched 44 movies, coming to a total of 4180 minutes. This averages out to be about 95 minutes per film, which is a bit longer than average. The longest film was the documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills at 150 minutes . The shortest was a 6 minute art film called Junkopia.
This month, most things were viewed on Netflix and Amazon. I also tried out the service Filmstruck, which I turned off. Amazon has appeared more frequently because I am trying out the HBO add-on for Prime members. In theaters, I saw 4 films: Wonder Woman, the Mummy, the Book of Henry, and Baby Driver. Only 5 films this month were rewatches.
In total this puts me at 337, with 326 on Letterboxd. With the addition of this months minutes, that puts me at 31,528 minutes total, which comes out to an average of 93 minutes.
Highlights
This month I tried out two different streaming services — FilmStruck, best known for its access to the Criterion Collection, and Amazon plus HBO. FilmStruck has a lovely collection, for someone else. For the way I watch media, FilmStruck’s library of important works was kind of wasted. Their interface is also terrible. Amazon’s HBO add on is doing the trick for now, due to HBO’s long history of quality documentaries.
The best movie this month was Korean film The Handmaiden. An erotic crime film, it’s certainly one of the more interesting movies I’ve seen recently. It’s lushly shot, painfully erotic, and well paced. Despite the overall length of the film, I found myself watching closely for every interesting moment and careful touch.
For the worst film this month, I saw a few boring bad films (Predator Island, the Time Travelers) but the one I found the worst to actually watch was The Mummy. Boring, vaguely racist, and a poor set-up for a bad idea, I would rather sit through another 2 hours of time travelers from the 60’s than another 45 minutes of Tom Cruise and the worlds thirstiest mummy.
Trends
One of the perks of FilmStruck was being able to watch Grey Gardens as well as the Mayles’s follow-up documentary the Beales of Grey Gardens. The Beales are an interesting matched set, and the documentaries give a in depth look into their lives, where they live almost as ghosts in the ruins of their once grand lives.
I also watched 2.5 documentaries on the stories of West Memphis Three, including Paradise Lost: The Child Murders of Robin Hood Hills as well as Paradise Lost 2. The documentaries are interesting because they span 18 or so years, long enough to cover when the men were young boys on until you watch them with crows feet in their middle age.
This months theme for film club was Korean films, so I watched three: The Handmaiden, The Good the Bad the Weird and Train to Busan. Despite all being Korean, they actually didn’t have a lot in common. It was interesting to see these three movies that showcased the wide variety of talent and skill Korean cinema has to offer, and I came away from it having a longer watchlist of Korean films.
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.
