May 2017: I have seen 61 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, March 2017, April 2017.
It is 10:06 on a Wednesday night and while there’s a chance I may get around to watching more movies before the end of the day, that’s pretty unlikely. This month was mostly spent doing standard activities and continuing listening to my favorite podcast The Sample Study. I read some good articles about games. I played a game I did not like (Little Nightmares) and attended an adorable wedding. I started a film club, which you can join here or if that link is dead (it probably is) you can hit me up on Twitter and I’ll let you in.
I became a Letterboxd pro member, because as you’ve probably gathered from this list I’m a bit into stats when it comes to my media consumption and Letterboxd pro members get some pretty sweet stats. I would tell you what else they get, but that’s literally all I’m interested in. Seriously, here are my stats.
So now that’s out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. Like in upholstery but instead about movie numbers.
Numbers
This month I watched 61 movies, coming to a total of 5609 minutes. This averages out to about 91 minutes per film. The longest was the Netflix documentary series The Keepers about nun-murder, which clocked in at 432 minutes. The shortest was a 3 minute short film, an intramedia piece for Alien: Covenant called Prologue: The Crossing.
This month most things were viewed on Netflix and Hulu, where I was trying out the Showtime subscription. Short thoughts on that: it’s not great, and I’m turning it off. I saw 5 movies in theaters: Alien: Covenant, The Lost City of Z, Colossal, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and Five Films About Technology. Only 6 films this month were rewatches.
In total this puts me at 293, with 282 on Letterboxd. With the addition of this months minutes, that puts me at 27,348 minutes total, which comes out to an average of 93 minutes.
Highlights
This was an interesting month, mostly for movies in theaters. I saw 5 (if you count the short before Colossal) which varied from long movie about men in the Amazon jungle trying to find El Dorado to men smacking about great swords for England to giant monsters eating people. And only 2 of them starred Charlie Hunman.
The best movies this month were probably documentaries. This months best were both Burn Motherfucker, Burn! which was about the LA race riots and the situations that built up to them and Get Me Roger Stone which was about a man who very highly about how he’s a devil and master manipulator. Burn Motherfucker, Burn! was really really good at explaining a situation and the circumstances that contributed to it, especially since it was something I hadn’t heard about before.
Get Me Roger Stone was something almost cherry picked for raising up your hackles about the election process and the people who try and make things happen behind the scenes. I’m not sure if I believe in an omnipotent master manipulator who looks like he’s about to force Violet Beauregard into an arranged child marriage but the documentary was interesting nonetheless.
As for worst, that is actually more difficult this month. Part of me wants to say Chill: The Killing Game, a movie that looks like it was filmed by a college student with delusions of mastery and inexplicably shot on green screen. It’s poor sound quality, questionable graphics and sheer length make it difficult to stomach but it was also basically impossible to watch.
At the same time, there’s almost a subcategory of terrible movies that needs to be added. Documentaries with incredibly awful pacing and unnecessary voice over narration. A prime example of it was Bodyguards: Secret Lives from the Watchtower, a tedious and poorly performed and laid out documentary about a disparate group of people who are all body guards to some extent.
Trends
This month was another banner month for documentaries, in that I saw 26 of them. Still not as much as previous months, but a decent chunk of the total movies.
Due to a mix-up, I ended up seeing two different movies called “House” across a weekend. First was the 1977 Japanese film House, the latter a 1986 horror comedy House. Of the two, the first was preferable and the second was an interesting if slightly odd.
I’m not sure what the next month will bring. Maybe the Criterion collections streaming service or Shudder.
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.
