Lists. Charts. Graphs. Sad.

I like making lists. A few years ago, I started making a list of every movie I watch each year. It's gotten a lot more detailed than when I started, becoming more of a chart than a list, and will perhaps continue to evolve. Here's what I currently put on the chart:

 1. The date I watched the movie. I started documenting this detail in 2016.

 2. The title of the movie and year it was released. I color code to signify
    whether or not I watched it for the first time. If so, the title is in
    black. If I've watched it before, I make it grey.

 3. Any comments I find to be relevant, such as who I watched it with, if I
    watched it with a commentary track, if I saw it in the theater, etc.

Then at the end of the year, because I find it interesting, I count up the feature length movies. For the total, I count repeat viewings too, including when I watched a movie, and then rewatched it with a commentary track. I also count how many I saw for the first time, and how many I saw in the theater.

In 2014, I saw 231 movies in total, 121 of which I was seeing for the first time, and 20 of which were in the theater.

In 2015, I saw 109 movies in total, 52 of which I was seeing for the first time, and only 3 of which were in the theater.

In 2016, I saw 88 movies in total, 38 of which I was seeing for the first time, and 4 of which were in the theater.

Just because I wanted to see what it would look like, I decided to put together a simple line graph.



To give some context, I was unemployed in 2014, and was living much closer to my best friend / cousin, who is my favorite person to watch movies with. We went to the movie theater together quite a bit. There have been a few times where I visited him over a weekend and we saw 6 movies in the theater. At the beginning of 2015, I moved to another state, got a job, and didn't have my movie watching friend around. Since my move, due to my work schedule, the absence of my friend, and various other factors, I haven't watched nearly as many movies as I would have liked. That explains the dramatic plunge in numbers between 2014 and 2015 (as well as my lack of posts here). I intend to do better this year, and I intend to keep up with the charts for the rest of my life, creating an updated graph each year. Right now the graph looks a little sad, but I'm sure it will get more interesting as the years go on.

Do you keep track of the movies you watch? Let me know if you have any ideas for my chart and graph.

Regarding all of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens spoilers.

It seems like every day I see more headlines promising newly leaked information about Star Wars: Episode VII. There's a book I have that came out in 1983 about the making of Return Of The Jedi, and during a recent reading, this one part of a quote by the producer of the film stuck out to me.

                    HOWARD KAZANJIAN
          We know from research that Star Wars fans don't want their enjoyment
          spoiled by the secrets of the plot being revealed prematurely.

It seems as though that has changed since 1983. I'm very curious though about what their research entailed, and what the same research techniques would find today. Have you been reading leaked information or have you been avoiding it?

About that Star Wars teaser trailer.

I thought a lot of it was great, but like many people, I'm really not fond of the lightsaber cross-guard design featured. Unlike most of those people though, the way I feel about it has nothing to do with whether or not it's practical, useful, or even possible within the scientific logic of Star Wars.

Have you ever had a friend who started trying too hard to be seen as cool, and even though their affectations may have impressed others, you actually thought they were a lot cooler when they were just being themselves and weren't trying to impress everyone?

The "what haven't we done with the lightsaber yet?" trend reminds me of that. Characters having multiple lightsabers, lightsabers having multiple blades, lightsaber staffs, lightsaber nunchakus, Wolverine-esque lightsaber claws, helicopters with lightsaber rotor blades, etc.

You know what's really cool? A regular lightsaber. And I think that scene would have been cooler if it just had one of those.

Maybe I'll change my mind after seeing it in the context of the movie.

Elizabeth Peña

September 23, 1959 - October 14, 2014

I was sad to hear about the passing of Elizabeth Peña, especially considering how young she still was.

In my adolescence, I became somewhat obsessed with an influential horror movie she was in called Jacob's Ladder. I've talked a little bit before about how as a teenager, I'd watch movies at night when I couldn't sleep. I would go through phases where I'd just watch one movie over and over every night, and then after a couple weeks or so, I'd switch to a different movie. Jacob's Ladder was one of the movies I did that with. In hindsight, that probably wasn't very good for my state of mind. I was so interested in the movie that it was also the first screenplay I ever read, and I used to be able to recite whole sections of dialogue just from seeing the movie so often.

I always thought Peña's performance as Jezzie in the film was quite striking. She had a way of jumping naturally back and forth from caring and beautiful, to frightening and rather ugly, sometimes even blurring the lines between the two. She also made me fall in love with the name Jezebel.

#‎ExplainAFilmPlotBadly‬

I saw people playing a fun game on twitter today, so I joined in for a couple.

A drunk author with a receding hairline stays at a hotel with his family. His son rides a tricycle.

A police chief goes to the beach, then goes on a fishing trip with two other guys, but their boat's not big enough!

Shirley Bennett joined in as well. #ShirleyExplainsAFilmPlotBadly

Robin Williams

July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014

The death of actor Robin Williams was of course quite a shock.

Like pretty much everyone around my age, I grew up with Williams due to his roles in movies like Hook, Aladdin, and Mrs. Doubtfire. But my two favorite performances of his are in movies I didn't see until I was much older.

I had trouble sleeping (insert Insomnia joke here) when I was a teenager. I would just lie in bed, watching the same movie over and over again every night. I'd go through different phases where I'd watch a certain movie every night for around two weeks and then I'd pick a different movie from our very limited collection of DVD's or cassette tapes. For some reason we had a copy of Good Will Hunting on VHS, so that was one I regularly watched on school nights when I couldn't sleep.

I hated English class all throughout high school. I could go on and on about why, but this isn't the place for that. Once in a while though we'd read a good book or watch a good movie. One teacher who I didn't even particularly like showed us a few things I still love to this day, including a movie that affected me profoundly: Dead Poets Society. It always amused me that rather than attempting to inspire his own students, my teacher showed us a movie about another teacher inspiring his.

Summer Classic Film Series 2014

A local theater (or 'theatre' as they spell it... for some reason I can't see it spelled that way without hearing Tobias Funke say it in my head.) has been playing several classic films this summer. My friend and I decided to go see a few. Rear Window, King Kong, and Creature From The Black Lagoon. I had already seen them before, but never on the big screen.

The picture quality of all three films was gorgeous, but the sound could have been better. I think the acoustics in the theater were to blame. There was this reverb with a long decay, like in a cathedral, and it made the whole soundtrack muddy, especially the dialogue and sound effects. And that's a shame, because I love the attention to detail in the sound design of Rear Window. The sounds of all the little things happening at the apartments. By the way, how wonderful is it that the score's mostly made up of the beautiful piano piece L.B. Jefferies' songwriting neighbor is composing throughout the film? I love all of the quirky neighbors too, and the voyeuristic little glimpses we get into their lives.



King Kong and Creature From The Black Lagoon was actually a double feature, and I thought that was a really cool pairing. Both are influential black and white monster movies. Each monster infatuated with a beautiful woman.




Creature From The Black Lagoon is of course a Universal Monster movie, and it's easily one of my favorites of those that I've seen. Its influence on Jaws, one of my favorite movies period, is undeniable. I'm really amazed by how well the gill-man still holds up. Something about the material of the suit, and the way various parts of the head move makes it just seem like a real creature to me instead of an actor in a costume.



I have of course mentioned in a post before that the stop-motion animation by Willis O'Brien in King Kong inspired a young Ray Harryhausen. So I was thinking about how, in that way, it was kind of linked to the triple feature I saw at another local theater last year. The only thing that doesn't really hold up in King Kong is the close ups of Kong's face, which were done using a large bust of the ape's head. The stop-motion is still beautiful to me though, and I'm an absolute sucker for stop-motion dinosaurs.



My friend and I gave spare tickets to a woman and her two children. She thanked us multiple times, but if I understood, I guess the kids weren't particularly thrilled to be seeing a black and white movie. They had said they were probably only staying for one movie, which is understandable because they were playing pretty late. About a minute after King Kong ended, and I was back to reality, I remembered them and wondered what they thought of the movie. I turned around to ask, and they were already gone. And so I was left wondering...

Wondering out into the wasteland...

Oh, I'm sorry. I got distracted by how great the Mad Max: Fury Road trailer is.