2020 hasn’t been the best year for anyone, and Bobcat Territory was no exception. For the first time since we started the site we went through a multiple month streak of not posting a blogcat. This will be the first one since July. There are a whole bunch of reasons why it became difficult in the latter half of the year to summon the energy to write anything. All of us here have had different major changes in our lives this year that we have been dealing with.
2020 hasn’t been the best year for anyone. One of the ways I personally have coped with the year was to throw myself into watching movies. While movies have always been a passion of mine, this year has seen a marked change in the way I relate to movies and the diligence with which I have consumed them. I also decided to start tracking the movies I watch and the movies I want to watch on a spreadsheet so I can look back and assess my viewing habits (and remind myself what I have actually seen … for example, just in the past week I have watched 13 movies, and it’s easy for some to slip through the cracks without a written list).
Later in the year, I transferred my spreadsheets to the Letterboxd app to streamline my tracking. Over the next couple of months, I plan on doing some deeper dives into some of the movies I’ve watched and why I find them so interesting. For now, though, just to round out the year, I’m going to give an overview of what I’ve watched with some quick numbers and a top 10 / bottom 10 list.
In total, I’ve watched 239 different movies in 2020, or about 0.65 per day. The aggregate runtime of these 239 movies was 416.5 hours, a little over 17 days. Note that I’m not counting the various TV shows I have binged this year into these counts; that’s probably the only reason my movie average isn’t >1 per day.
If we break it down by day, my busiest movie day was Saturday with 54 movies watched on that day this year. The runner-up, surprisingly, was Wednesday with 47 movies, followed by Friday with 44. Thursday fell in last place with only 14 movies (so I only watched a movie on ~27% of the total number of Thursdays this year). The most I ever watched in a single week was 16, more than 2 per day.
Only 7 of the movies I watched this year were new releases for 2020. The earliest movie I watched was released in 1932. I watched 11 movies released in 1989 and 11 in 2005, more than any other release year. My most prolific decade was the 1980s, from which I watched 69 (nice).
In terms of genre, I have to rely on Letterboxd’s classifications since I don’t want to have to go through all 239 to classify them. Genre divisions are pretty fungible, and Letterboxd uses very broad genres (for example, they don’t count “Western” as a genre, and I’ve watched a number of Westerns this year, which will mostly be split among the “Drama” or “Action” categories). In any case, the top 3 genres were Drama (103 movies), Horror (79), and Comedy (63).
It should be no surprise that there is an English-language and American-produced bias in the movies I watched; I watched 198 English-language movies of which 159 were from the USA. The top 3 non-English countries of origin were France (21 movies), Russia (12 movies), and Germany (11 movies). Note that trying to identify the country of origin for a movie can be a bit imprecise. For example, I watched 18 movies by the Australian director Peter Weir, but only 11 are considered Australian productions since the other 7 were primarily produced in the US (e.g. The Truman Show). The Letterboxd app also creates this nice handy map so you can see the full spread of my movies around the globe:
Unfortunately I don’t have an easy way of sorting the movies to see how many were by non-white or female directors. Certainly white males make up a large proportion of the filmmakers I followed, but as I hope you can see from the map I made a conscious effort to expand to seeing things from different perspectives. The 3 directors I watched the most were Peter Weir (18), Andrei Tarkovsky (11), and Peter Jackson (5).
I think a pretty funny demonstration of my tastes in movies is by which actors I have seen the most often across my movies. Tied for number 1 are the entire cast of the original Star Trek series (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, et al) and Nikolay Grinko (a Russian actor who appears in an number of Andrei Tarkovsky movies). Tied for number 2 are Ed Harris and Max von Sydow.
So what were my favorite and least favorite movies that I’ve seen? To be honest, it’s tough to compare some of these, and I would likely come up with a slightly different list every time you asked. But right now, here are my top 10 and bottom 10 from this year (ordered arbitrarily by release date … these movies I all either love or hate to the point that it’s tough to distinguish between them, it’s like arguing being Michael Jordan and Lebron James for best basketball player of all time, at a certain point they are all just equally great … or awful).
Top 10:
- Tokyo Story (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
- Andrei Rublev (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
- Hour of the Wolf (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1968)
- The Ninth Configuration (dir. William Peter Blatty, 1980)
- Eating Raoul (dir. Paul Bartel, 1982)
- Come and See (dir. Elem Klimov, 1985)
- Happy Together (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 1997)
- Werckmeister Harmonies (dir. Bela Tarr, 2000)
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
- First Cow (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2019)
I will break down some of these top 10 movies in future blogcats.
Bottom 10:
- Exorcist II: The Heretic (dir. John Boorman, 1977)
- Deathstalker (dir. James Sbaddellati, 1983)
- Blood Diner (dir. Jackie Kong, 1987)
- Vampire’s Kiss (dir. Robert Bierman, 1988)
- Hudson Hawk (dir. Michael Lehmann, 1991)
- Tank Girl (dir. Rachel Talalay, 1995)
- Pandorum (dir. Christian Alvart, 2009)
- 24 Frames (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)
- High Life (dir. Claire Denis, 2018)
- Wonder Woman 1984 (dir. Patty Jenkins, 2020)
To be fair, a couple of the movies on the bottom 10 I did kind of enjoy watching, but still, these movies were all tough to get through.
More to come in 2021, but to close out I’ll give a clip from a movie that just barely missed the cut-off into my top 10: