March 2017: I have seen 46 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.
It is 11:46 on a Friday night as I’ve been writing this entry. I tried to tone it down this month, as people started giving me weird looks when they heard the number for the year and an old professor called me “hopelessly compulsive.” That kind of puts a damper on things.
So I read! I listened to podcasts! I still watched 46 movies this month, putting my total at 170 or so. Give or take the ones Letterboxd doesn’t count. For reading this month I got around to reading House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films by Kier-La Janisse, which is quite good if you’re interested in genre films. You can find it on Amazon. And I listened to a bunch of podcasts, like They Call Us Bruce & A Bad End.
But, as always, most of what I did was watch movies.
Numbers
Over the course of 48 movies I watched 4275 minutes of film. This averages out to about 98 minutes per movie. The longest movie this month was the SyFy channel original miniseries Tin Man which clocked in at about 270 minutes. The shortest was the short Kristen Lepore film Hi Stranger which was just 4 minutes long.
Most of the movies were viewed on Netflix, as it is a convenient medium and has a selection that I am quickly powering my way through. 4 movies were seen in theater, Kong: Skull Island, Logan, Power Rangers and Beauty and the Beast. This month, 19 films were rewatches.
In total I have seen 170 films, totaling out to 16,176 minutes of footage. This averages out to be 95 minutes per film.
Highlights
This month was a month of mediocrity, to be totally honest. I usually also do an average of my Letterboxd scores, but as this number is rarely very interesting I don’t talk about it. This month it was a 2.5.
The film I most enjoyed watching was probably the Australian magical realist story Girl Asleep. It’s relatively short, frequently compared stylistically to Wes Anderson and David Lynch, and I watched it twice because I found it so irrepressibly charming. It’s one of those movies that was just a joy to watch for me, though I doubt many others would share that impression. There were a couple of other good ones, namely the Polish horror (?) film Possession.
For bad movies, there’s really only one stand out worth mentioning, the Zen-film making travesty that is Guns of El Chupacabra. A direct to DVD bit of nonsense made by the director of Return to Frogtown, Guns is nonsensical to a point where it’s actually upsetting to watch. You get angrier the more the movie progresses until you’re an incandescent ball of rage and you’re not sure how you got there.
And then the movie keeps going.
It should be avoided at all cost. It made two other not great films, the over-stylized treatise on how not to film mental illness The Scribbler and the oppressively bland science fiction thriller Circle seem fantastic by comparison.
Trends
March, it would seem, was the least trendiest of months. There were 10 documentaries, like Iris and Jesus Camp, but that number is down from the substantial 34 documentaries I saw in February. I rewatched the entire Jurassic Park series (well I didn’t rewatch Jurassic World) and both the Peter Jackson King Kong and the new Tom Hiddleston starring CG monstrosity.
I also made a video of the Feburary viewing party, which is viewable on YouTube.
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.
