As many of you know, watching movies is probably my favorite hobby. At one point in my life, I thought I'd make this hobby a living (the whole going to film school thing), but that didn't happen (by choice), so now it's just a hobby I can appreciate even more. It wasn't a bad year for me for watching movies, but it wasn't great either. Either way, it's all summed up here after the cut. It should be noted that my year in review is for movies that I watched in 2008, rather than movies that were released in 2008.

( A Year In Movies )

This news that Netflix is partnering with Microsoft to make Watch Now available on the Xbox 360 for free couldn't make me happier. I'm so incredibly psyched for this to be released.

I've always thought that Netflix's Watch Now was a great feature, but I don't use it because I don't like watching movies and TV on my computer. Because of this, I've considered purchasing the Roku player to easily access Watch Now on my TV... but have been putting it off because of the Xbox 360 rumors. I'm SOOOOO HAPPY that the rumors are now confirmed. =)

So I was watching Atonement this evening and thinking to myself that James McAvoy can really be quite attractive.

Sure, part of it is the Scottish accent - that always seems to help quite a bit - but I was trying to pinpoint what it was, exactly, that was attractive about him, since it seemed to me to be more than just the way he looks. Don't get me wrong, he's good looking, but not crazy good looking.

Then I realized it was his ability to have the look in his eyes of being completely and passionately in love. It's one of my favorite skills when an actor can pull it off - the look is so real and incredibly believable, but it's entirely in the eyes and very subtle. It also happens to make the bearer of said expression much more attractive than they normally would be.

Once I had figured it out, I came to another stunning realization. That look, which made him so attractive in Atonement, is the very same look that made him creep me the hell out in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, in which he played Mr. Tumnus. It creeped me out because in that movie, he was playing opposite the character of Lucy, an 8 or 9 year old girl, for almost the entire film. And though the characters are supposed to become close friends, it always seemed to me like Mr. Tumnus was a little too enamored of the young Lucy. I guess that fabulous look can backfire on you sometimes. ;-)

Well, the year is over and the stats are in. In 2007...

... I watched 216 movies, from to start to finish. This figure does not include any Television series or short films made for TV (such as the multitude of hour-long Masters of Horrors episodes I watched).

... of the 216 movies I watched, only 6 were movies I had previously seen. I have therefore "broadened my filmic horizons" this year by 210 films.

... I went to the movie theatre 9 times.

... the first movie I saw was Lady In the Water (2006) and the last movie I saw was I Am Legend (2007).

... I rented 112 DVDs from Netflix.

... I watched the least movies in January -- only 3, due mostly to the big move from L.A. to Chicago.

... July, August, and September tied for the most movies watched, coming in at 33 each.

... the best movies I saw were Eastern Promises (2007) and The Dreamers (2003).

... the following movies were my 10 favorite films viewed this year (presented in the order in which I saw them):
The Illusionist (2006)
The Prestige (2006)
Stranger Than Fiction (2006)
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)
The Descent (2005)
The Princess and the Warrior (2000)
Eastern Promises (2007)
The Dreamers (2005)
The Lookout (2007)
Conversations with Other Women (2005)

Yeah, my moving watching really slowed down by the end of the year, so I'll wrap up November and December of '07 in one post.

The beginning of November marked my annual Horror Movie Marathon. The main thing of note for the evening is that I finally saw Suspiria (1977). I'd always heard that it was a "Horror classic" by Dario Argento. I had also been warned by my dear friend, Joanna, that it was awful... which is why I hadn't watched it years ago. Joanna was right. Oh my was it HORRIBLE. Don't waste your time.

I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the 60's horror flicks Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Damned (1963), which I expected to be cheesy and amusing, but which turned out to be campy, yes, but also quite enjoyable.

I saw two horror-comedy flicks:
One bad... Black Sheep (2006)
One good... Fido (2006)

The award for one of the most unusual movies I've ever seen:
Visitor Q (2001) by director Takashi Miike.

Two "critically acclaimed" films I saw that I didn't like:
Cache (2005)
After Hours (1985)

And one that I very much did like:
Ratatouille (2007)

December was a particularly sparse month for movies, but most of what I watched was enjoyable. Aside from seeing the very good No Country For Old Men (2007) in the theatres, I caught Conversations With Other Women (2005) on cable and really liked it. The split screen technique ran the risk of being gimmicky, but it turned out to be a very effective device for adding depth to a movie that consists only of two people talking. It was a surprisingly good film and I would definitely recommend it.

I suppose that's all for now. 2008 is a new year. Maybe I'll get the chance to watch a good chunk of movies in the first half of the year before I have the kid and inevitably have no more free time for such frivolous activities. :)

I failed in October to keep up the pace with my movie watching. There were many contributing factors -- my mother-in-law was in town for a week, the Horror Movie Marathon didn't actually happen until November, and I'm generally really freakin' tired all the time due to my current physical condition (see "Exciting News" post).

So my running tally is now 122 movies in 123 days... JUST short of averaging a movie a day. Not bad, I suppose, but I plan to turn the tides back in November. I had increased my Netflix subscription from 6-at-a-time up to 8-at-a-time to get all the movies for the marathon, and even though I've gone back down to 6, I still get 8 out until my next billing cycle, which isn't until November 19th.

As for the movies I saw in October. It wasn't the best movie watching month by a long shot. Actually, with a few exceptions, it was particularly impressive just how many BAD movies I saw. At the very bottom of the barrel, we have the following "films":

The Black Dahlia - When I first saw the trailers, I thought it could be really good. Then I heard from friends that it was awful... but I was still curious. So I went into this film expecting it to be bad and was still shocked by how awful it was. The strangest part is that it seemed that being a badly made film was a stylistic choice. Weird... and really really bad.
Ultraviolet - Yet another movie I expected to be bad but was shocked at how completely awful it was. It wasn't even good eye candy... just bad overly computerized graphics and not at all exciting fight scenes. Ug.

On the better side, there were two big winners this month:

The Lookout - A really smart film with nice layers, very well played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and with a nice style. Here's a film I expected to enjoy quite a bit, and yet it still surpassed my expectations. It was quite a treat.
Babel - Now here's a movie I've been avoiding seeing since it came out. It's one of those movies I had no real interest in seeing, but felt I had to see because of all the critical acclaim. On top of that, almost everyone I know either thought it was great or hated it with a passion. So I finally watched it and it turns out I liked it quite a bit. I'm not praising its utter brilliance or anything, but I do think it was very good.

Finally, on the stranger side, I watched this unusual piece:

Fantastic Planet - A bizarre animated French film from 1973 about a planet where humans are kept as pets by an alien race. It was interesting and quite unique. I'm glad I saw it.

33 really seems to be the magic number for me. Strange. So we're up to 99 movies in 92 days now! I've got to admit, I'm shocked I've been able to keep this up, but there you have it. I'm still loving it, and despite all the movies I've watched, my Netflix queue is still stuck at the 500 movie cap. Every time I remove a movie, I want to add 5 move. I'm guessing I'll be able to keep up the pace in October, due in large part to the fact that I'll be doing my Horror Movie Marathon again, which should account for at least a week's worth of films. Of course, I'm not sure anyone will come... since all my friends are still in L.A.

I saw two movies in the theatre this month:
Eastern Promises - What a fantastic new film by David Cronenberg. Really awesome, incredibly well directed, and Viggo is just great... and also HOT. I recommend that you all see it.
Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro - This was Hayao Miyazaki's feature film directing debut in 1979. It was being screened as part of some anime festival, which is kinda weird, since it really isn't anime at all. When will people learn that Asian Animation != Anime. It was silly, but enjoyable. Not nearly as good as his later work.

Other highlights of the month were...

Two great films from director Bernardo Bertolucci:
Last Tango in Paris - It's a classic that I just never got around to seeing until now. It is a very good film, but not for the reasons that the film is famous.
The Dreamers - I was surprised at how much I liked it. It was incredibly well directed. Also, the movie made me want to go and watch a bunch of old black & white films (since the characters in the movie were constantly talking about old movies).

Two amusing 50's sci-fi horror flicks:
The Tingler - Not great, but amusing... especially when you knew this was the time in the movie where the theatre seats were supposed to start shocking the audience members.
The Blob - Highly amusing. One of the better 50's sci-fi horrors I've seen. I also watched the 80's remake this month, which was just awful.

Two surprisingly enjoyable period dramas:
Pride & Prejudice
Marie Antoinette - Great visual style!

Also...
Breach - Just good.
Cypher - From Vincenzo Natali, the guy who brought us Cube. Like most of his films it was pretty sophomoric, but surprisingly enjoyable and fun. Besides, I've always liked Jeremy Northam from when I first saw him in The Net.

... so I guess that makes 66 movies in 62 days. Sweet! The month of August was apparently exactly as productive for movie-watching as July was. Moreso, even, since every single one of the 33 movies watched in August was a movie I'd never seen before. I'm very happy that I've been able to keep up the pace.

Highlights from this month include three great movies from director Tom Twyker:
The Princess and the Warrior
Heaven
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

I was pleasantly surprised by these:
The Descent - Quite a good horror flick
The Last Mimzy - Not great, but a lot more interesting than I expected from what is clearly a children's film.

This was also really neat:
The Amazing Screw-On Head - cool visual style (see userpic) and very funny voice acting by Paul Giamatti and David Hyde Pierce.

I also finished watching all 3 seasons of Arrested Development in August. Season 3 was especially awesome. TV shows don't go into my movie count, so this was in addition to the 33 movies.

I have a feeling that I may not be able to keep up the pace this month, but who knows? I'll update at the end of September to let you know.

My movie-watching habits, starting about 4 months before moving to Chicago, haven't been what they used to be. I'd been averaging maybe a movie a week, including theatre outings, Netflix & owned DVDs, and movies caught on DirecTV. This may seem fine for most people, but it's really not for me. Also, considering that there are thousands of movies out there that I want to see (my Netflix queue is capped at 500)... and more movies coming out every month... I've been losing more ground than gaining, and that makes me sad.

So at the start of July, I realized a few things:
1) My DirecTV DVR had stopped recording new TV shows because everything I watch is currently off-season.
2) My freelance programming workload had pretty much disappeared.
3) I had a lot of movies that needed to be watched!

So I started watching movies again... a lot of movies. In the 31 days of the month of July I watched 33 movies from start to finish:
- Only one of them was a movie I had already seen: The Goonies - I love that movie
- Only one was seen in the theatre: The Simpsons Movie
- All the rest were recorded off DirecTV or rented from Netflix.

I gotta tell you, it feels GREAT. I love movies, and I love the fact that I've been watching them more. All it's really done, however, is made me more anxious to watch even MORE films. I'd love to say that I'm whittling down my Netflix queue, but I'm really not. Every time I watch a movie, there are 5 more I add to my queue. It's neverending, but that's part of what's so great -- there's so much great film out there to enjoy!

So far I'm off to good start in August. I saw 2 movies yesterday. How many will I watch today?

Jim Carrey as a psychotic, damaged, bad-ass is creepy. Even more creepy is the fact that he kinda pulls it off well.

Terry Gilliam = genius

Check out the story here.

I HATE statements like this. Hate, hate, hate them. Not only are the figures grossly inflated in this particular case, but there is one major fatal flaw associated with these types of "measurements"...

They work on the assumption that anything that was pirated would have been paid for in full, had pirating not been available.

This is just total BS, plain and simple. Everyone knows that as the price of a product goes up, fewer people will be willing to pay for it. I downloaded hundreds of songs for free when Napster first came out. I have downloaded ZERO songs from iTunes for $0.99, and it's not because I get the songs for free elsewhere, because I don't - I just don't download songs anymore.

Am I going to PAY to see a movie in the theatre I think will probably suck? No. Will I watch it on TV for FREE when I'm bored? Yes. This does not mean that TV is responsible for a $15 loss to the movie theatre. If the movie was never available to me for free, I just never would have seen it at all.

Terrence Malick, as a director, irritates the crap out of me. Now, I admit that I've now only seen two of his films - The Thin Red Line and The New World - and that I don't even really remember The Thin Red Line but both suffer from the same obnoxiously frustrating problems. They're tedious, drawn-out, and not at all held together by... well really anything!

The frustrating thing is that Malick is so skilled a director when it comes to visually stunning imagery as well as capturing a mood or a moment in such a refreshingly true and raw way. It's really quite beautiful. It's also something that most directors are unable to effectively accomplish, and whose films would be elevated to the level of greatness if they were only able to achieve it as Malick can. Malick's films are dotted with these moments, but they are only fleeting and lose their meaning because the film surrounding these moments doesn't ground them. There is no FOCUS on anything but the overall atmosphere - no real plot, no character development, nothing engaging to hold you from moment to moment... so you just drift off.

What a sad state of affairs.

So I saw MirrorMask this evening and while trying to distill my thoughts on the film into the limited space of the Netflix "two-cents mini review" I realized I just couldn't do it. So I figured I'd take care of expanding upon my thoughts here. First let's start by stating that as a traditional film in the sense of storytelling, screenplay, direction and acting, the movie is mediocre at best. Which is really kinda sad, because if all the craft of good filmmaking was combined with the visuals and imagination present here, we'd really have something phenomenal.

The film is in the grand tradition of the Henson/Froud collaborations of the 80's - The Dark Crystal and my all-time favorite, Labyrinth. And like The Dark Crystal, this film's greatest success is in literally making the artist's work come to life. For Dark Crystal, it was Brian Froud... one of my 2 favorite living artists, and whom I have had the great pleasure to meet and even work for for a short time. For MirrorMask, it's Dave McKean, who just so happens to be my OTHER favorite living artist. He is probably most well known for the cover artwork he did for Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic book series, but I think his best work is in his short story / graphic novel collaborations with Neil Gaiman. MirrorMask was actually co-written by McKean and Gaiman and the film was directed by McKean. It is a living, breathing work of art... and it is beautiful.

The funny sense that I felt while watching the movie, however, is that it's so stylistically self-aware that it comes across with the sensibilities of an artsy student film. A really freakin' awesome looking student film... but yeah. The story actually works - it's of a very typical childhood fantasy genre where child goes into fantasy world that is somehow tied to the real world and there are dark forces that need to be conquered to save both worlds along the way of also trying to get back home. Sure, it's formulaic, but it works. It speaks to children (those types of stories always spoke to me as a child) and with the fantasy genre it can be dressed up in so many different ways. But the screenplay was lacking and so was the direction. Gaiman is a better storyteller than script writer, and McKean is a better artist than director. He handled the direction of the visuals perfectly, but direction of actors and storytelling through filmmaking doesn't seem to be his forte.

All in all, I really enjoyed it and will certainly purchase it to add to my art collection. I can only hope that this movie does well enough that another movie of this type is made. It really starts to point at the largely untapped potential of the digital film medium as a means to create NON-photo realistic computer imagery - the stuff of dreams :)

... besides... how can I not like a movie that has monkeybirds in it?! (see 2nd picture) A bunch of monkeybirds named Bob... except for one.

... as an addendum to my previous post, my judgement of the movie is in no way being influenced by the subject matter or "message" of the film (whatever that may be). I could really care less about the political nature of the film, and might even argue that it isn't really "political" in a strict sense at all and it is just telling a story... but I'm getting off-track. My statements are purely based on its merits in the art and craft of filmmaking and storytelling.

As I so often quote from Roger Ebert, "It is not what the movie is about, it's how the movie is about it."

... I think this is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

I realize this is a lot to say, which is why I'm hesitant to say it at all... but I really think it is.

There are so many different things that can make a film "great." This movie has so many of them.

I think that's all I can say about the movie right now. I need it to settle in a bit more and perhaps to see it again.

So, there have been a lot of e-mails and posts going around from Netflix customers who are all up in arms about this article "exposing" a Netflix policy dubbed by many as "throttling." In short, the article states that if you are marked as a "heavy renter" by Netflix, two things will happen:

1) You will be given a lower priority to recieve movies that are in high-demand (most frequently new releases and out-of-print titles).
2) You will experience deliberate shipping delays from Netflix, making it so that you cannot rent as many movies per month.

I have been a Netflix member since November of 2000. I started out on the 3 DVD plan, upgraded to 5 DVD's a couple years ago, and just recently upgraded to 7 DVD's this past October. I have gone through periods of renting A LOT OF DVD'S in a month, as well as periods of renting HARDLY ANY DVD'S in a month... so I think I'm a good judge of the impact the "throttling" technique may have on its members. In my time with Netflix, I have directly noticed the impact of #1 above. However, I have never ever had any experience with delayed shipping from Netflix, regardless of how frequently or infrequently I return my movies. They always ship me a new movie the day they recieve one from me, with very rare instances where they didn't ship until the next day. But we're talking once in a blue moon, and it was not linked to times when I was renting heavily. Perhaps other people have had different experiences, but I'm honestly not convinced that Netflix had ever intentionally delayed shipping for any members.

But let's get back to the part that is most certainly true -- Lower Priority to recieve high-demand movies. This is when you see "short wait" to "very long wait" next to a movie in your queue. Let me start out by explaining how this works...

Your personal spot on the priority list is determined by your rental activity during the previous billing period. So if you rent a ton of movies in January, you're marked as a "high-volume renter" in February. But if you hardly rent any movies in February, you'll be back on the "low-volume renter" list for March. So you aren't marked for life or anything. For example, last month, Jim and I hardly watched anything, so I've been getting whatever movie I want this mont. Next month, however, will be a different story ;-)

I actually think it's an incredibly fair system, especially because the tendancy is that people who watch a LOT of movies probably have a LOT of movies they want to watch and can keep busy with until the demand dies down, whereas lesser movie-fiends just have a few they're interested in, and they're mostly the big blockbusters that everyone wants to see. And it makes sense, really. High-volume renters are effectively paying less on a per-rental basis while Low-volume renters are paying more on a per-rental basis. So I personally have no problem with them having a higher priority for high-demand movies... mainly because the wait is never all THAT long (the most I've waited is a couple weeks, I think) and even when I'm at the bottom of the priority list, it's only new releases and other REALLY popular movies that are affected. Not to mention, if you time your returns right, you can almost guarantee you'll get a new release on the day it comes out, regardless of your priority.

Granted, it kinda sucks if there is some new release that you DESPERATELY want to see RIGHT AWAY... but you'll see it eventually. I kinda view it as purchasing a bunch of movie "tokens." If I want to... I can exchange those tokens for tons and tons of movies that have been out for a few months or more... or I can save those tokens up to guarantee that I get every new release I want -- You do whatever works best to meet your needs.

The bottom line is that there will always be some movies for which the supply will not meet the demand from renters. Someone has to get priority to receive those movies, how would you decide that priority?

Also, let me be clear... I don't think "throttling" is a good thing, I just think it's a necessity to make a service like Netflix feasible... and a wonderful service it is!! It's still a fantastic deal, and though they clearly should have been far more up-front about their policies, and though their method of determining priority may not have been the best way to go about it, I personally think it's a pretty reasonable and fair way to conduct their business given that they can't always give everyone what they want right away.

And on one final note and to be completely clear... I think deliberately delaying shipping is completely unacceptible. But as I mentioned above I'm not convinced this is actually practiced, as I have never experienced it first-hand (and have clearly experienced the other symptom of "throttling.")

P.S. If any of you Netflix folks out there aren't on my Netflix friends list yet, send me an invite! I thrive on knowing what everyone I know is watching at all times. Kinda creepy, huh?