The year in movies

 For the first time ever, I actually made a list of every single film I saw this year - it's a lot easier when you can just make notes on your phone - and it turned out I watched exactly 254 movies in 2021. I know I would have watched way more during the period in my life when I was all about the movies and nothing else, but that's a reasonable number, I think.

A lot of those 254 films were trash - cheap and nasty action films are often all I wanna watch at four in the morning when I'm trying to get our new arrival to sleep. But if I had to pick a favourite film I saw this year, it was Lover's Rock by Steve McQueen, which said so much with so little actual words. Although I also had weirdly huge emotional reactions to Adopt A Highway, a little film about Ethan Hawke dealing with society after decades in prison; and to The Matrix Resurrections, a little film about how kung fu is cool and love conquers all.

But by taking note of every single film I saw this year, I did find that out of the 254 films I saw -

* 26 percent were movies I had seen before 

* 9 percent were prequels, sequels or remakes

* 13 percent were made before I was born in 1975

* a paltry 4 percent were films that were not in English

* 6 percent were full length feature documentaries

* 3 percent were New Zealand films

* 1 percent were Shakespeare adaptions

* 2 percent were movies actually seen in the cinema. (Even without a pandemic, getting to the movies is fucking hard right now, man.)

While I don't have many regrets over watching all these films, I do wish I had seen more movies of quality, and that's got to be a goal for the next 12 months. Unless the kid starts sleeping better, in which case, movie time turns into sleeping time, and I'll probably end up watching 12 films all year. I can live with that trade-off.