30 June 2018

Mid-Season Personal Watching Review

Folks, we've reached the halfway point of 2018 and for many websites that means it's time to count up half the year and figure out what's good and what sucks so far. That's not why you came to Norwegian Morning Wood, though! Our halfway point is a little different - I like to check in in my personal viewing habits and see if I'm on track to beat my totals for last year. I am:

Movies watched in the Year 2018 so far: 127 (+13% over 2017)
Movies watched for the first time: 83 (65% of total, +41% over 2017)
Repeat viewings: 44 (35% of total)

For the record, here is last year's mid-year update and the final tally.

We can also get into the viewing methods, which we didn't calculate at the mid-point last year, so I don't really have a base for, but at any rate:
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Netflix Streaming5443%
Netflix DVD2620%
Hulu2016%
Theater97%
TV 65%
DVD54%
Kanopy32%
BluRay22%
Roku11%
YouTube11%

I've streamed movies pretty significantly. Netflix...I do a lot of Netflix. Including Hulu, Kanopy, Roku, and YouTube, that's 62% of the total. Total streaming last year counted for 38% of my total, so that's a huge jump.

This may not be that interesting to many people, but this is a useful stat if everyone counted their own habits. What is really the worth of putting movies anywhere else? It's a look at my own personal reality, which may or may correspond with other people's viewing habits, but I'm at least a guy pretty invested in movies.

Now let's look at release years:

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1930s11%
1960s22%
1970s76%
1980s119%
1990s1512%
2000s2822%
2010s6249%
20172318%
20181713%

As you can see, I've only seen seventeen films from 2018, so I don't totally feel qualified to judge what's best just yet. I also think that a list of the best 2018 films so far would be really obvious (Annihilation, Black Panther, Hereditary, A Quiet Place are all easy picks. There hasn't been that many great ones so far). What I do want to look at is how much 80s and 90s movies are almost the same and yeah, how dominant the last decade is.

Now, there are a bunch of reasons for that - the current decade is the only one that keeps growing so of course there will be more movies each year from that. Also when I'm continuously trying to search out films I have not yet seen, there's been a lot less time since a current film's release to go and see it at some point in my lifetime. Also, new movies are fun and exciting. Of course!

I also have the goal of watching at least one film from every year, 1970-2018. This is a bit harder than it seemed at first, but I should be able to do it. At the halfway point I am only missing 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1989, 1996, 1997, and 2001. The goal again is finding a film I haven't seen. What's remarkable is going through my 293 film-strong Netflix DVD queue and finding so little films that qualify.

This goes back again to putting some real numbers and reality on viewing habits. People often think that streaming services offer many older films, and that may be true with real old, 30s / 40s films, but 70s, 80s, and 90s prove to be a rarer bird. On that note, I went through all of 2017 without watching any movies from the 40s or 50s and am on pace to repeat that. I should probably add a goal of getting in at least one film from each decade.

I'm not sure this is a sustainable goal. I'll be watching only black and white films by the year 2021.

Finally, if I had to rank all the films I've seen for the first time so far this year, it'd be as follows:

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#10Get Out (2017) - Netflix DVD
#9Brazil (1985) - Netflix DVD
#8Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) - Hulu
#7Tragedy Girls (2017) - Netflix DVD
#6Thelma & Louise (1991) - Hulu
#5Annihilation (2018) - Netflix DVD
#4Boyz N the Hood (1991) - Netflix DVD
#3mother! (2017) - Netflix DVD
#2The Death of Stalin (2018) - Theater
#1City of God (2002) - Netflix Streaming

This list has been known to change wildly by year's end, so stay tuned in six months when we do this crap all over again.

And, as is tradition, let's talk about the worst film I've seen this year. Undoubtedly this is Lemon (2017), one of the most boring, pretentious pieces of garbage to ever exist. Although it did give us this:


And, for those of you keeping track at home, the on-going list of films and TV I've watched in the year 2018 can be found right here.

What have you watched so far this year?

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