The last movie I saw in a theater was 1917 in January 2020, and I don’t expect that to change soon. We are perfectly content to enjoy new movies as they become available on streaming platforms. I know a lot of people are missing out on the experience of seeing things on the big screen, but we aren’t prepared to take that risk yet. More than anything else, we’re missing out on movie popcorn!
We averaged about a movie a week throughout the year. This doesn’t include the seventeen times I watched Yellow Submarine with my granddaughter, who grew briefly obsessed with it. I’d never seen it before, but now I know it inside and out.
Ironically, the first film we watched was called Death to 2020, and if we’d known what 2021 had in store for us we might have given it a pass. A few of the films we watched were second viewings inspired by fondness for a particular movie experience. We really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou when it first came out, so we enjoyed it again. We took a trip down memory lane with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I re-watched The Dead Zone to get ready to contribute a 5-minute segment to the DVD commentary of a new edition. We’d never seen The Whales of August, but have since rectified that situation.
Do we consider Get Back a movie? Or three?
Some of the movies were documentaries or comedy specials. One was a filmed production of Come from Away, which I’ve always wanted to see. I introduced my wife to Attack the Block, which I’d seen for the first time in 2020 and to The Maltese Falcon, which one of my all-time favorite films. We got a kick of out The Hitman’s Bodyguard and Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, especially the way Sslma Hayek went thirteen-letter-curse-word to thirteen-letter-curse-word with Samuel L. Jackson.
If I had to narrow the list down to a top 10, it would look something like this, in chronological order:
- Promising Young Woman
- The Dig
- Nomadland
- Minari
- The Father
- Ammonite
- Nobody
- CODA
- Pig
- Belfast
but I’m really bad at making this sort of list, so I’m not sure I believe it myself! Here is the full list.
