Last year I saw someone post something similar and it inspired me. I made it my New Year’s resolution to track everything I watch in a spreadsheet and keep up with it throughout the whole year. I’m happy to say that I was able to do it!
Disclaimer: My rating system (like every other) is 100% subjective and more of an indication of my enjoyment of a film rather than how I would rate the craft that went into making it. Just keep that in mind before you roast for liking The Last Jedi more than The Force Awakens or for liking Love Actually more than High Life.
Here is the list if that’s all you want to see. Stats are to the right at the top of the sheet: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14SQXDWDa3ibBKRE12gVuVOAK44QDEUfk/view?usp=sharing
Below are some random thoughts and takeaways that doing this brought to my mind.
TLDR, saw some good movies and learned some things along the way. I highly suggest tracking your movies for a year.
First here are some lists because... well... people like lists. See my list for a short thought on each one.
Favorite movies released in 2019 that I’ve seen so far (really great year so it was hard to decide)
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Parasite
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Knives Out
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The Lighthouse
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Marriage Story
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Uncut Gems
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Booksmart
Favorite movies from the past that I saw for the first time this year
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Blindspotting
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Mission Impossible: Fallout
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Nocturnal Animals
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MacGruber
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Snowpiercer
Movies I really liked that didn’t get enough attention
· Brittany Runs a Marathon
· Wild Rose
· Anna and the Apocalypse
· The Dirties
· Luce
Now onto some takeaways I had from tracking my movies…
Doing this taught me a lot about my viewing habits, which I found interesting. As you can see from the stats I included, I do the majority of my movie watching between the months of November-April. I believe this is a combination of winter weather here in New England making you want to stay inside as well as some of the best movies of the year being released in the lead up to awards season.
Another trend I noticed was that I didn’t rate anything lower than a 4. I’ve always been a huge fan of almost all movies and can find even some enjoyment in movies that some people otherwise can’t sit through. That being said, I also tend to have a pretty good radar for telling if I’ll like a movie or not and I can only watch a limited number of movies in my lifetime so I tend to be selective with what I watch at times and skip some movies I think I’ll hate.
The last and definitely most important thing I’ve learned by doing this was the power of expectations. If there’s a movie that I know I want to see, I’ll avoid any of the promotional material ahead of time to help keep my expectations in check. Even though I do that, I still found that expectations played a large role in my overall enjoyment of a movie.
To illustrate this I’ll take two movies that I watched recently and gave the same score of a 6/10, The Wolf of Wall Street and Noelle. I’ve had friends tell me for a while now how good TWOWS is and that I needed to watch it. I even remember when it first came out I never got around to seeing, but everyone I talked to that saw said they absolutely loved it. Once I finally saw it I just was left feeling a bit of “that’s it?”. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the movie and think that it’s very well made, but I had built up these mental expectations that ultimately took away from my viewing experience.
Conversely, with Noelle, I had seen some not so great reviews and thought it didn’t look all that great so when I put the movie on, it had no unnecessary personal pressure to meet some arbitrary standard. In the end, I was just able to just sit back and enjoy a light hearted and fun movie.
So my biggest takeaway is that moving forward I want to try and approach every film I watch with a blank slate and just let the movie make its impression on me. The more I’m able to rid myself of expectations and preconceived ideas of what a movie has to be, the more I can be emotionally impacted by what a movie actually is.
Thanks for anyone who took the time to read my thoughts. Let me know what your favorite movies were that you saw this year. I’m always looking to hear about new movies or discuss them with others.
Submitted January 01, 2020 at 04:20AM by Tgee913 https://ift.tt/2F6nv5s