Another year in movies

I saw less movies in 2024 than any other year since I started taking notes of what I was actually watching, but only just - this year the tally reached 245, just below the numbers recorded in 2021 and 2023, still well below the record 316 viewed in 2022. I have no excuse for this low number, I just got sucked into catching up on all the Star Wars TV shows I had fallen behind on. (I know they're not good for me, but I just ignore the big parts and dig the fighting.)

Still, if you count the 263 movies I had playing in the background while I worked this year, as part of my regular triple feature fun, I saw more films than ever before. But they were all things I had seen before, and I barely paid attention to most of them. They were just background noise. Even Die Hard.

The 245 movies I did officially watch this year did feature a lot of Netflix trash, because we only got free access to the streamer for the first time this year, but I also went to more movies at the actual cinema this year than any other year I've been doing this. I also loved walking out of theatres after things like The Zone of Interest, feeling like I'd got to see some proper fucking cinema.

This was my diet this year: 

• Even though I lived in a town with only one cinema, it was just a pleasant 20 minute walk away, so I ended up seeing 19 films in the theatre. That was 7.95 percent of all the films I watched this year, and I'm seeing more as God intended, each and every year I do this. 
• Less than a fifth - 17.99 percent - of the films I watched this year were ones I had seen before, after I made a conscious effort to get into new stuff. Comfort watches are all well and good, but they don't change the soul. (Neither do all the many, many direct-to-Netflix spy movies I keep watching, but you never know until you try.)
• The percentage of sequels, prequels and remakes was 16.31 percent, which was way worse than any other year. I also blame the streaming effect.
• The 6.69 percent of films that were made before I was born was the worst ratio since I started doing this thing. I am a bad cinema snob.
• It was the second highest percentage of films that were not in English, at 7.53 percent, which is still fairly dire.
• I still watch a lot of documentary feature films - 7.95 percent - because I like getting a whole non-fiction story in two hours or less, instead of an eight-part mini-series.
• And while one of the last films I saw this year was the excellent Sleeping Dogs, I am, once again, a bad kiwi. Just six films - 2.51 percent - were made in Aotearoa. I gotta get better at this. 

My favourite film of the year was probably The Substance, although I'm still thinking on that one. But any film that starts off feelings a little Kubrick, and ends up going a lot Troma, was always going to hit the fuckin' spot. 

I'm ending the year with that Guy Ritchie film where Henry Cavill kills a bunch of Nazi fucks, and I'm going to start the new year with some Nosferatu down the local cinema, and I'm looking forward to the walk home in the dark after that one. Same as it ever was.