July 2015 Recap

New viewings: 11 (plus 3 shorts)

1. The Search for General Tso
2. Antarctica
3. Daughter From Danang
4. A Long Goodbye
5. The Babadook
6. Bless Their Little Hearts
7. Plastic Galaxy: The Story of Star Wars Toys
8. Tig
9. Deep Valley
10. Trainwreck
11. Ant-Man

I also watched a few of the Carroll Ballard shorts included on the Blu-Ray for The Black Stallion, but none of them were worth writing about.

June 2015 Recap

3 new viewings
1 revisit

1. What We Do in the Shadows
2. Spy
3. The Future

The slowest month I’ve had since I started keeping track 12 years ago.  Hell, even when I was an ordinary, non-cinephile person I probably watched more than 4 movies a month on the average.  It’s just been a busy month for me and as I said before, we’ve been spending most of our free time (i.e., time not spent looking at and talking about houses) binging on television.  I expect July will be much the same.

May 2015 Recap

13 new viewings (plus 1 short)
5 revisits

1. Watership Down
2. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
3. Intimate Lighting
4. Nightcrawler
5. No No Sleep
6. Titli
7. Pitch Perfect
8. Boyhood
9. Never Cry Wolf
10. The Way We Are
11. St. Louis Blues
12. Casbah
13. Times Square
14. The Inner Scar

I’m gonna be pretty busy the next few days so I might as well do the monthly wrapup early.  I managed to squeeze in quite a few despite a long weekend away from home, and all the business of putting a wedding together.  And some really good movies too.  As far as consistency goes, I think it’s the best month I’ve had in over a year.  The only film I didn’t write about was my umpteenth viewing of GoodFellas.  Still one of my absolute favorites for all the reasons I’ve written about before… just an exhilarating experience.

Hey everyone, I’m getting MARRIED!  TOMORROW!  And then we’re off to Belize!  See ya next month!

April 2015 Recap

15 new viewings (plus 3 shorts)
3 rewatches (plus 4 shorts)

1. The Strange Little Cat
2. Dear White People
3. Time Stood Still
4. Imitation of Life (1934)
5. Going Clear
6. Stella Dallas
7. Su-ki-da
8. Sense and Sensibility
9. Tamako in Moratorium
10. Ghost
11. The Swell Season
12. Coherence
13. Avengers: Age of Ultron
14. Strange Triangle
15. Interstellar

I didn’t write about it, but I revisited Bottle Rocket just for the hell of it when I needed something to watch that I could interrupt frequently because I was cooking something.  I think it holds up really well.  Also I gave all the “Wallace & Gromit” shorts a fresh look.  I like them even more now.  Even “A Matter of Loaf and Death”.  I’m thinking “The Wrong Trousers” might deserve a place in my top 100, which would make it the first short.  Next month, some musicals and music-related films.  And oh yeah, I’m getting married!

March 2015 Recap

10 new viewings
9 revisits

1. The Jinx
2. Whiplash
3. Gone to Earth
4. When We Were Kings
5.The October Man
6. Quiet Wedding
7. The Staircase 2
8. Birdman
9. The Telephone Book
10. Star Trek: Insurrection

It’s amazing that I managed to watch this many movies.  Because, you see, my beloved Carrie got me hooked on this little show called “The Voice”.  And we got impatient waiting for new episodes, so we binged through the entirety of season 6.  That’s like 27 hours of TV.  On top of that, one of my rewatches was Satantango, which is 7+ hours.  So I got in some decent movie-watching time this month.  And I will most likely get some watching done while Carrie is away for a long weekend in April.

February 2015 Recap

11 new viewings (plus 17 shorts)
3 revisits
 
1. Kokoro
2. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
3. Be Sure to Share
4. The Lunchbox
5.Bird People
6. 10 Promises to My Dog
7. Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago
8. Chorus
9. High Tide
10. Enough Said
11. Jodorowsky’s Dune
 
One I didn’t write about this month was the documentary Walking the Camino, following several people taking the month-long “Camino de Santiago” journey in Spain, on foot.  It’s often interesting but unremarkable as a piece of filmmaking.  It doesn’t dig very deep.  I also watched 14 shorts by the provocative Richard Kern.  They ranged from adolescent bores (You Killed Me First, The Bitches) to gripping expressions of rage and dark desires (Woman at the Wheel, Right Side of My Brain).  Excellent music on most of them, often by one of my favorite musicians, Jim Thirwell (a.k.a. Clint Ruin, a.k.a. Foetus).  However, most of the month my lady and I have been revisiting “Twin Peaks”.  A remarkable show that turned into utter garbage after Lynch was forced to resolve the central mystery.  We’re slogging through the dreary doldrums of season 2, reaching for the light at the end of the tunnel when the series gets good again for the last couple of episodes.  And then a much-anticipated rewatch of Fire Walk With Me.

January 2015 Recap

12 new viewings (plus 4 shorts)
4 rewatches

1. Deep Water
2. The Ape Woman
3, The Missing Picture
4. Guardians of the Galaxy
5. The Wind Rises
6. Anna and the Wolves
7. The Blessed Ones
8. The First Echelon
9. Oxen
10. The Naked Street
11. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
12. The Mighty Ducks

A light month, but that’s probably how it’s gonna be from now on.  Some really good stuff, though.  The year is off to a decent start.

December 2014 Recap

11 new viewings (plus 6 shorts)
12 revisits (plus 3 shorts)

1. The Inheritance
2. Tommy Boy
3. Little Man, What Now?
4. The Thick-Walled Room
5. All My Sons
6. Snowpiercer
7. I Will Buy You
8. Begin Again
9. Under the Skin
10. To the Ends of the Earth
11. Madagascar

Another slow month for me, finishing off a year where I slowed down my movie consumption considerably.  40-50 films a month used to be my average, now it’s 15-30 (and more heavily skewed towards rewatches rather than new discoveries).  But the month finished off exceptionally strong, with two of the best movies I’ve seen all year.  Really quite a good month all around, and I’ve got a lot lined up that I’ll hopefully get into in January.

November 2014 Recap

13 new viewings
2 rewatches

1. Split Second
2. Crashout
3. The Glass Web
4. The Good Die Young
5. The Unfaithful
6. Ivy
7. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
8. Cry Terror!
9. Strange Bargain
10. The Sleeping Tiger
11. Murder on the Home Front
12. Three Fugitives
13. Dumb and Dumber

Back from Hawaii and finally catching up.  First off, I have one last quickie review for the month.  On the day after Thanksgiving we went to see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1.  I enjoyed about as much as the first two, which is to say not a ton, but enough to be sufficiently entertained for a couple hours.  The series benefits from getting out of the structure of the games themselves, but the tradeoff is that it definitely feels like a “Part 1”.  It’s getting everything lined up and so there’s not a lot of forward momentum.  Way too many scenes of Katniss being horrified by ruins (they even do it TWICE with her home district).  I really like Lawrence as an actress, but this material kind of forces her into a one-note performance.  Also, I still don’t give a shit about Peeta which makes it rather hard to share Katniss’s single-minded obsession with protecting him.  Still, there’s something about this universe I like, and I can’t say I didn’t want to see what would happen next.  Rating: Good (71)

As for the month as a whole, it was pretty light.  Of course I had a whole week where I just watched the one movie, but also my lady and I have been somewhat bedeviled by the “Property Brothers” and their many TV series about real estate and renovation.  Don’t know what it is about those Canadian twins and their formulaic shows, but we got hooked.  So it wasn’t much of a Noir-vember, I didn’t even get to all of the meager dozen I had picked out.  But there were a few surprisingly good flicks in that bunch, and I may even have to make some minor adjustments to my top 100 noirs list.  In December, I’ll be watching the remaining few.  I also still have a whole lot of Tati to revisit, among other things.  And I picked up the entire Harry Potter series on Blu-Ray, but I probably won’t write much about those since I’ve covered them pretty thoroughly before.

October 2014 Recap

17 new viewings
11 rewatches

1. Death by Hanging
2. Ballad of Orin
3. Black River
4. Ballad of Narayama
5. A Touch of Sin
6. Deprisa, deprisa
7. Places in the Heart
8. One True Thing
9. Odd Obsession
10. Gone Girl
11. The Contender
12. Here’s to the Young Lady
13. Bitter Rice
14. Yearning
15. Always
16. The Hitcher
17. Freaky Friday

Quality over quantity this month.  The big thing was tackling my watchlist movies that are in Criterion’s selection on Hulu Plus.  This paid off quite nicely, especially with regard to Japanese cinema.  The other big thing was revisiting Cassavetes through the Blu-Ray box set and finding new affection for the ones I previously wasn’t that keen on.  And I have one more quickie review from yesterday: Jia Zhang-Ke’s A Touch of Sin.  Jia’s in a very cynical more here, presenting four stories (loosely connected) that explore violence.  The second tale offers little to chew on, but the other three are somber reflections on life in contemporary China and how it drives people to the brink.  Beautifully photographed as well, gorgeous use of light and color.  Fine performances all around, especially Wu Jiang (a dead ringer for older brother Wen).  Rating: Very Good (86)

November is of course Noir-vember, and I’ve got a dozen titles lined up so far… none of them especially promising, but we shall see.  It will also be a short month for me, as I’m spending Thanksgiving week in Hawaii with my fiancée and her family.