Skip to main content

The Great Movie Conquest of 2022: A Year in Review


         I recently came across a clip from a lecture that filmmaker extraordinaire, Orson Welles, gave to a class of aspiring filmmakers. The relevant bit has Welles advising his students to not watch so many movies and to allow one's storytelling to be informed by one's own experiences.

    What a time for me to stumble across this bit of counsel ... 

    I wonder if this advice, should we choose to accept it at all, is applicable more to filmmakers than to film critics. My incentive for exposing myself to as many films as possible, even during times when I'm not literally watching a new film a day, is because I want to have a wide base of knowledge for the subject I claim to be an expert in. 

    That said, I have come to observe the limitations of inhaling too much media ... 

    If you haven't heard, I set a goal this year to accelerate my study of film by watching one film I hadn't seen for each day of 2022. What a way to familiarize myself with a range of movies while also forcing myself to try out new brands of film. 

    I tried something like this some years back. That challenge took place over a summer when I was also taking classes (Media Arts History I and II) for my film degree. That challenge took place over 100 days. I once thought this was a long duration of time, I now understand that it's child's play.

    Nothing's ever fun once it becomes a chore. Routine. I found out that much very early on this year. I became so concerned with getting my daily movie out of the way before I went in for work that I would just choose the shortest film on my watch list, or something light that wouldn't demand so much attention. 

    What's more, after committing to watch a new movie every day all year, eventually they all just start to blur together, which defeats the purpose of adding 365 new individual films to your repertoire. (Will someone please remind me what Hannah and Her Sisters was even about? I honestly can't remember.) True literacy is as much about depth of knowledge as it is about breadth, and that's not a process you can just rush. 

    This all to say ... I ended up calling the race with barely over a month to go.

        One might question the rationality of dropping out with only a single lap remaining, and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life, but I also understood that any films I would viewed during the remaining 30 days of the year wouldn't have received the full attention and consideration they deserve.

    While I ultimately dropped out of this game prematurely, some lessons were learned. One that is going to stick with me is that increasing the rate at which I consumed new films does not necessarly increase the rate at which I find good movies. I didn't add a greater sum of ten-star films to my list this year, and I've thought of a number of potential reasons why. 

    It's possible that there are simply fewer ten-star films remaining. This theory doesn't inspire much hope for me. I don't love the possibility that there is a cap to the number of films I can feel unfiltered adoration for, nor that I would encounter them in decreasing frequency as I venture further and further beyond the scope of mainstream film. It can't be that all the good films are all just the films that everyone already knows about.

    I also think back on many of the films currently on my ten-star list, and how many of them did not land on said list at the start. It's common for a film to strike me as "surprisingly good" on a first viewing and only be promoted to "excellent" after I was drawn back for a third or fourth viewing. Sometimes you have to dive into a film a few times before the depths of its genius reveals itself. I'm holding out hope that as I continue to reacquaint myself with many of the films I encountered this year, I'll discover that a few of them were even better than I remembered, and maybe a few of them I will find so prophetic and so finessed in their craft that I'll be baffled that I didn't appreciate them properly the first time around. And this is another reason why I eventually couldn't help but revert back to a schedule of mostly rewatching familiar films.

    The process itself was much more meaningful once I introduced monthly themes to my exploration. I devoted May to watching films with James Stewart and August to catching up on Netflix originals. Focusing my viewings like his helped keep my intellectual pursuits in mind and find patterns between films. That isn't to say that making time for new movies ever became less of a chore, but I had a lot more to say each for my monthly reports once I had an overriding motif to direct my viewing. Of course, identifying new themes became its own box to check off, which is partly why I wasn't able to sustain the trend during those last crucial months.

    The biggest takeaway is something I probably could have foreseen beforehand but needed firsthand experience to appreciate: no one will ever see enough films. The medium has been around for over a hundred years now and new films are being released every day all around the world. I could follow this challenge for several years and I would never get anywhere close to seeing all the films ever made. I might not even get close to seeing all the important films ever made.

Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories (1989)
    That honestly makes me a little sad. I know there are a lot of artists out there praying that someone will discover their film. Even after a filmmaker has gone through the arduous process of even making a film to begin with, studios and streaming services are constantly making decisions about what content they will support and what will be lost to the oblivion. The Youtube channel The Take recently did a piece on the crisis of vanishing content that highlights the urgency of the situation. There are a lot of meaningful films already out there that don't deserve to be lost to time. Part of my motivation behind this fool's errand was to scout out as many of these films as I could. I'm hoping that even as I return for a more manageable schedule, I will still be on the lookout for films that deserve some promotion, and I hope that likeminded film-lovers will take up the torch.

   While I haven't seen every film worth viewing, I am ready to resume a less strenuous timetable for consuming new films. The Great Movie Conquest of 2022 has fulfilled its function, and I am ready to restrategize how I go about becoming a more literate film critic. I'll get to decide what that looks like in practice over the next few weeks, but for now I'm going to spend a lot of time rewatching 150-minute movies that I haven't had time for since last December.

            --The Professor


    

    Anyways, this ordeal wouldn't be complete without a few top ten lists, so we're going to do that now: 


10 Favorite Movies From This Challenge

Top Row: Sliding Doors (1998), Central Station (1998), Captains Courageous (1937), CODA (2021), Ordinary People (1980)

Bottom Row: The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), Ben is Back (2018), Belle (2021), Ikiru (1952), Prisoners (2013)


10 Movies I Would Never Have Seen Without This Challenge

Top Row: Hell's Kitchen (1939), Cadillac Man (1990), All or Nothing (2002), My Furher (2007), Sea Prince and the Fire Child (1981) 

Bottom Row: The Wild Swans (1977), Farewell My Lady (1956), Zebraman (2004), Monos (2019), They Don't Wear Black Tie (1981)


10 Movies You Can't Believe It Took Me this Long to See


Top Row: District 9 (2009), City of God (2002), American Psycho (2000), The Green Mile (1999), Unbreakable (2000)

Bottom Row: Seven Samurai (1954), Pulp Fiction (1994), Baby Driver (2017), Braveheart (1995), Shaun of the Dead (2004)


Every Film Watched This Year:

  1. His People
  2. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
  3. The Mortal Storm
  4. Begin Again
  5. Batman
  6. Alien Resurrection
  7. Grand Hotel
  8. Hans Christian Andersen
  9. Room for One More
  10. Promising Young Woman
  11. Braveheart
  12. Always Be My Maybe
  13. Delightfully Dangerous
  14. The Cider House Rules
  15. Belle
  16. Pressure Point
  17. Scream
  18. Armageddon
  19. The Wild Swans
  20. RoboCop
  21. I Am Sam
  22. Children of the Corn
  23. Tombstone
  24. The Secret Life of Pets
  25. The Fisher King
  26. Mr. Robinson Crusoe
  27. All the Right Moves
  28. Beyond the Moon
  29. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
  30. Salem's Lot
  31. The Tender Bar
  32. Australia
  33. Journey to Italy
  34. Shark Tale
  35. Irma la Douce
  36. I Shot Jesse James
  37. Abominable
  38. Prisoners
  39. The Exorcist
  40. The Social Dilemma
  41. Easy A
  42. An Officer and a Gentleman
  43. World War Z
  44. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  45. When Harry Met Sally...
  46. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
  47. Lake Placid
  48. Hollow Man
  49. The Power of the Dog
  50. The Bravados
  51. Designing Woman
  52. Rosemary's Baby
  53. The Coward
  54. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  55. tick, tick...BOOM!
  56. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
  57. Cyrano
  58. The King of Kings
  59. Ride Your Wave
  60. A Fish Called Wanda
  61. Guest in the House
  62. About Time
  63. Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
  64. Hell's Kitchen
  65. American Playhouse: Sunday in the Park with George
  66. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
  67. Diner
  68. Brute Force
  69. The Green Mile
  70. Turning Red
  71. Baby Driver
  72. Moby Dick
  73. Empire of the Sun
  74. Monos
  75. Vertical Limit
  76. The More the Merrier
  77. Mein Furher
  78. CODA
  79. Dangerous Crossing
  80. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
  81. Nightmare Alley
  82. Splendor in the Grass
  83. Grizzly Man
  84. Theodora Goes Wild
  85. The Lost City
  86. Man of La Mancha
  87. Peter Pan
  88. Free Guy
  89. Chronicle
  90. Shane
  91. Death on the Nile
  92. The Little Mermaid
  93. Take Me Out to the Ball Game
  94. Seven Samurai
  95. (500) Days of Summer
  96. Ingrid Goes West
  97. Sweet Charity
  98. Juno
  99. Ikiru
  100. Soylent Green
  101. Princess Mononoke
  102. Unbreakable
  103. Sea Prince and the Fire Child
  104. Criss Cross
  105. Pleasantville
  106. After the Storm
  107. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
  108. Father Stu
  109. Wanda
  110. My Dream Is Yours
  111. All or Nothing
  112. Nanook of the North
  113. Tenet
  114. The Hurricane
  115. Tokyo Story
  116. Single White Female
  117. Hannah and Her Sisters
  118. The Other Woman
  119. Zebraman
  120. Kill!
  121. Under the Tuscan Sun
  122. The Bad Guys
  123. Broken Arrow
  124. The Hollars
  125. Five Easy Pieces
  126. Love Affair
  127. St. Vincent
  128. The Flight of the Phoenix
  129. Blinded by the Light
  130. Ben-Hur
  131. Dazed and Confused
  132. Sliding Doors
  133. Take Her, She's Mine
  134. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
  135. No Highway in the Sky
  136. Clouds
  137. Captains Courageous
  138. How to Murder Your Wife
  139. Winchester '73
  140. Corpse Bride
  141. Breaking Away
  142. Frankenstein
  143. Without Love
  144. Girl, Interrupted
  145. The Glenn Miller Story
  146. Yojimbo
  147. Postcards from the Edge
  148. Bell Book and Candle
  149. Libeled Lady
  150. Monster's Ball
  151. Raging Bull
  152. Big Eyes
  153. The Omega Man
  154. The Lure
  155. Ordinary People
  156. The Letter
  157. Sunshine Cleaning
  158. Network
  159. Mission: Impossible
  160. Boys' Night Out
  161. Jurassic World: Dominion
  162. The Two Mrs. Carrolls
  163. High and Low
  164. The Fighter
  165. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
  166. Limitless
  167. The Scarlet Letter
  168. Office Space
  169. Marathon Man
  170. The Wings of Eagles
  171. Loving
  172. Black Gold
  173. Ghost World
  174. The Golem
  175. Elvis
  176. Too Late for Tears
  177. The River
  178. The Big Sick
  179. That Hamilton Woman
  180. Enemy of the State
  181. Blackboard Jungle
  182. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
  183. Krull
  184. Period of Adjustment
  185. Peninsula
  186. Tora! Tora! Tora!
  187. The Men Who Stare at Goats
  188. Red Sonja
  189. Defiance
  190. On Moonlight Bay
  191. Masters of the Universe
  192. At Eternity's Gate
  193. Imitation of Life
  194. Most Dangerous Game
  195. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
  196. Fences
  197. The Last Laugh
  198. The Dark Crystal
  199. Sing Street
  200. Viva Las Vegas
  201. Labor Day
  202. The Lord of the Rings
  203. Nope
  204. Wall Street
  205. Bright Eyes
  206. Antwone Fisher
  207. Witness for the Prosecution
  208. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
  209. Return to Oz
  210. Bohemian Rhapsody
  211. On the Beach
  212. A Letter to Three Wives
  213. Eternals
  214. The Humpbacked Horse
  215. The Adam Project
  216. Hooper
  217. Pulp Fiction
  218. Elmer Gantry
  219. Lonesome
  220. Passing
  221. The Wages of Fear
  222. Deadpool
  223. Blood on the Moon
  224. Extraction
  225. A Fistful of Dollars
  226. The Sea Beast
  227. Licorice Pizza
  228. Ivanhoe
  229. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
  230. Working Girl
  231. The Talented Mr. Ripley
  232. Lolita
  233. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
  234. Key Largo
  235. Beasts of No Nation
  236. Shaun of the Dead
  237. The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues
  238. Samaritan
  239. The Irishman
  240. The Big Sleep
  241. The Big Short
  242. The Postman Always Rings Twice
  243. City of God
  244. Lightyear
  245. Feet First
  246. Sidewalk Stories
  247. Mister Roberts
  248. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
  249. Central do Brasil
  250. Saboteur
  251. Pinocchio
  252. Salem's Lot
  253. Fantastic Voyage
  254. Damn Yankees
  255. Erin Brockovich
  256. The Thing
  257. Bye Bye Brasil
  258. Sorry to Bother You
  259. Now, Voyager
  260. 50/50
  261. Nausica of the Valley of the Wind
  262. Blood Diamond
  263. They Don't Wear Black-Tie
  264. Cadillac Man
  265. Paris Blues
  266. King Richard
  267. Deliverance
  268. Dick Johnson Is Dead
  269. The Bad and the Beautiful
  270. I.Q.
  271. Thor: Love and Thunder
  272. Jagga Jasoos
  273. The Perfect Storm
  274. San Francisco
  275. Rodan
  276. Big Fish & Begonia
  277. American Psycho
  278. It Happened on Fifth Avenue
  279. The Day the Earth Stood Still
  280. Amsterdam
  281. That's Entertainment!
  282. Original Cast Album: Company
  283. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
  284. Sleepy Hollow
  285. Misery
  286. The Idle Class
  287. The 40 Year Old Virgin
  288. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
  289. Hocus Pocus 2
  290. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  291. Uncharted
  292. Ben Is Back
  293. The Savages
  294. Harper
  295. Jackie Brown
  296. Cat's Eye
  297. Dracula Untold
  298. The American President
  299. The Darjeeling Limited
  300. Futureworld
  301. District 9
  302. Nothing to Lose
  303. Moonfall
  304. Fright Night
  305. DC League of Super-Pets
  306. The Little Mermaid
  307. Here Comes Mr. Jordan
  308. The Banshees of Inisherin
  309. The Adventurer
  310. The Pelican Brief
  311. Fatherhood
  312. Reflections in a Golden Eye
  313. Titan A.E.
  314. Till the End of Time
  315. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
  316. Swingers
  317. A Tale of Two Cities
  318. Up in the Air
  319. Training Day
  320. Good-bye, My Lady
  321. Missing Link
  322. Disenchanted
  323. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
  324. The Ladykillers
  325. Topper
  326. Rent
  327. Strange World
  328. My Father's Dragon
  329. The Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special
  330. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part of That World: Understanding Racebent Ariel

          If I were to say that the discussion around the Disney live-action parade has been contentious, I would be roughly the 84,297th person to propose this. Historically, this sort of thing has just been the general opposition to Hollywood’s penchant for repackaged material, and how the Disney machine is specially equipped for this purpose. That's old hat. But something happens peculiar happens when the Disney machine shows a different face--when it looks like the parade might actually be leading the charge toward something like progress.               When Disney announced on July 3, 2019 that the highly coveted role of Ariel, The Little Mermaid, would go to African-American actress, Halle Bailey, you saw a lot of excitement from crowds championing fair representation. You also saw a lot of outrage, most clear in the trending hashtag #NotMyAriel, revealing a face of social fury that ca...
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding Nemo: The Thing About Film Criticism ...

       Film is a mysterious thing. It triggers emotional responses in the audience that are as surprising as they are all-encompassing. As a medium, film is capable of painting stunning vistas that feel like they could only come to life behind the silver screen, but many of the most arresting displays on film arise from scenes that are familiar, perhaps even mundanely so. It’s an artform built on rules and guidelines–young film students are probably familiar with principles like the rule of thirds or the Kuleshov effect–but someone tell me the rule that explains why a line like “We’ll always have Paris,” just levels you. There are parts of the film discussion that cannot be anticipated by a formula or a rulebook, and for that we should be grateful.         Arrival (2016)      But the thing about film–and especially film criticism–is that film critics are not soothsayers. Their means of divining the artistic merit of a movie are n...
2 comments
Read more

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Westerns Riding off into the Sunset

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era of film. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. I am referring of course to the western film. Musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life alert, and maybe one day we’ll get the  Wicked  movie Universal has been promising us for ten years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get a film like  No Country for Old Men  which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns  of old.  Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion.              Professors Susan Kord and Elizabeth K...
1 comment
Read more

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Do Clementine and Joel Stay Together or Not?

                    Maybe. The answer is maybe.             Not wanting to be that guy who teases a definitive answer to a difficult question and forces you to read a ten-page essay only to cop-out with a non-committal excuse of an answer, I’m telling you up and front the answer is maybe. Though nations have long warred over this matter of great importance, the film itself does not answer once and for all whether or not Joel Barrish and Clementine Krychinzki find lasting happiness together at conclusion of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Min d. I cannot give a definitive answer as to whether Joel and Clementine’s love will last until the stars turn cold or just through the weekend. This essay cannot do that.             What this essay can do is explore the in-text evidence the film gives for either side t...
1 comment
Read more

Bright Young Women: The Legacy of Ariel and The Little Mermaid

  I had an experience one summer at a church youth camp that I reflect on quite a bit. We were participating in a “Family Feud” style game between companies, and the question was on favorite Disney movies as voted on by participants in our camp. (No one asked for my input on this question. Yes, this still burns me.) I think the top spot was either for Tangled or The Lion King , but what struck me was that when someone proposed the answer of “The Little Mermaid,” the score revealed that not a single participant had listed it as their favorite Disney film.               On the one hand, this doesn’t really surprise me. In all my years of Disney fandom, I’ve observed that The Little Mermaid occupies this this very particular space in pop culture: The Little Mermaid is in a lot of people’s top 5s, but very few people identify it as their absolute favorite Disney film. This film’s immediate successors in the Disne...
1 comment
Read more

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 25 Most Essential Movies of the Century

       "Best." "Favorite." "Awesomest." I spent a while trying to land on which adjective best suited the purposes of this list. After all, the methods and criteria with which we measure goodness in film vary wildly. "Favorite" is different than "Best," but I would never put a movie under "Best" that I don't at least like. And any film critic will tell you that their favorite films are inevitably also the best films anyways ...      But here at the quarter-century mark, I wanted to give  some  kind of space to reflect on which films are really deserving of celebration. Which films ought to be discussed as classics in the years ahead. So ... let's just say these are the films of the 21st century that I want future champions of the film world--critics and craftsmen--to be familiar with.  Sian Hader directing the cast of  CODA (2021)     There are a billion or so ways to measure a film's merit--its technical perfectio...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

     Some die-hard fans of the franchise may have to correct me, but I don't remember Mario having a solid backstory. Or any backstory. I'm pretty sure he just emerged fully grown from a sewer pipe one day and started chucking turtle shells at mushrooms for fun.       I remember, for example, that Mario and Luigi are canonically brothers, yet there's little opportunity in the video games to explore anything like a relationship between them. That's domain better trod by film.       And this weekend's feature film adaptation from Illumination does succeed in carving out character, personality, and history for all the players on the board. The fact that Mario and Luigi are brothers isn't just a way to excuse their nearly identical apparel. Their relationship is the foundation for Mario's quest. Even more impressive is that the film reaches its degree of texture with its characters without cramming in exposition overload. This is one ar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Investigating Nostalgia - Featuring "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "Pokemon: Detective Pikachu"

The 1700’s and the age of exploration saw a massive swell of people leaving their homelands for an extended period or even for life. From this explosion of displacement emerged a new medical phenomenon. Travelers were diagnosed with excessive irritability, loss of productivity, and even hallucinations. The common denominator among those afflicted was an overwhelming homesickness. Swiss physician Johannes Hofer gave a name to this condition. The name combines the Latin words algos , meaning “pain” or “distress,” and nostos , meaning “homecoming,” to create the word nostalgia .  Appleton's Journal, 23 May 1874, describes the affliction: Sunset Boulevard (1950) “The nostalgic loses his gayety, his energy, and seeks isolation in order to give himself up to the one idea that pursues him, that of his country. He embellishes the memories attached to places where he was brought up, and creates an ideal world where his imagination revels with an obstinate persistence.” Contempora...
Post a Comment
Read more

REVIEW: Turning Red

     It's really easy to overlook a film like Turning Red , a non-franchise entry from Pixar that reads like a cross between Teen Wolf and The Edge of Seventeen . Perhaps that's why Disney chose to ship this film directly to streaming while (as of now) the Buzz Lightyear origin story is still primed for theaters. But I'll save that conversation for another time.      It's really easy to overlook a film like Turning Red , but I really hope we don't. The film follows a thirteen year old girl who experiences the onset of an ancient family curse that transforms them into giant red pandas when they experience any high-volume emotion. This can turn studying for an algebra test or seeing her favorite boy band perform live into a very awkward experience. Thank goodness there's a family ritual that can lock away the beast for good.      But as Meilin learns to live with this quirk, it starts to feel less like a curse and more like a superpower. Is sh...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Night of the Hunter: Redefining "Childlike Innocence"

The veneration of children as a reservoir of evergreen purity is a thread that informs much of modern storytelling, both in the entertainment arena as well as the political one. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)      The media likes to cast children as vessels of uncompromised goodness that adults could only ever hope to emulate. This is interesting since most theories on children’s moral development actually posit that humans don’t internalize principles until they are in adulthood, if ever. Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development traced out childhood as a time where individuals judge morality largely on reward vs punishment. Still, their purity forms the bedrock of the conversation. Because the future hinges upon their innocence, efforts to preserve their unblemished state can go to any length. You can justify any number of actions as long as you are doing it “for the children.” The incentive to ban the teaching of critical race theory and the histor...
Post a Comment
Read more