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01 July 2020

Sweet Crap, It's Only Halfway

We're at the moment, folks. Day 183. The half-way point of the year. How is 2020 halfway over? It feels like we've lived a thousand lifetimes. One weird and inconvenient thing we do around here is keep track of each and every movie we watch. That's right. We have pushed this pretty far over the last few years. Now is the time to examine where we are at the halfway mark, talk about the best and worst that we've seen and dive into some superlatives. Let's get to it!

Total Movies Watched: 89
New Movies Watched: 50 (56%)

By Platform:

Streaming Total: 63 (71%)
DVD Total: 21 (24%)
TV Total: 3 (3.3%)
Theater Total: 2 (2.2%)

I have only watched TWO movies in theaters? Well, we are in a global pandemic. What's more depressing is that those two movies were Rise of Skywalker (2019) and a drive-in viewing of Bloodshot (2020).

I'm always eager to breakdown my streamed movies and see how my tastes in services are changing. I caught 22 on Hulu, although half of those come from splurging on the HBO add-on (does that count as HBO Max now? No one seems to know.). 27 are Netflix, so that's still a good lead, especially if I didn't have the HBO supplement. That leaves quite a few left, the biggest chunk of which is eight from Disney+. The rest are digital downloads and random YouTube and Amazon Prime one-offs.

Of the DVDs I of course have the Netflix Mail model, which supplied 15 out of the 21 movies I watched with the good ol' DVD player. That means Netflix, either streaming or DVD accounts for just under half of the flicks I checked out so far, or 47%.

By Year:

I've only seen six films that came out in 2020. Oof, but c'mon, 2020. Let's go by decade:

2020s: 6 (6.7%)
2010s: 49 (55%)
2000s: 16 (18%)
1990s: 11 (12.3%)
1980s: 4 (4.5%)
1970s: 2 (2.2%)
1960s: 1 (1.1%)

So, that's rough, obviously. My old movies have sincerely fallen by the wayside. I usually get one great '30s or '40s film in there. It's good to see the disaster where I'm at and know to buckle down in the second half. The 2010s are dominating more than I thought they might with the biggest single year understandably being 2019 at 21 films. Notable years I'm missing right now are '98, '02, '08, and '13. We're beyond complaining about the 90s at this point.

Prior Years:

I knew this was going to be a down year, but here's where we are when comparing to other midpoints. Note that in 2015 I did not keep track of first-time viewings.

2019: 112 total / 72 new (65%)
2018: 127 total / 83 new (65%)
2017: 112 total / 58 new (52%)
2016: 114 total / 62 new (54%)
2015: 92 total

We are below 2015 levels, which is certainly rough, but this has also admittedly not been a priority this year. We'll see if we can reach that fabled 200 mark, but I may be hesitant to set sights that high at this point. Our percentage of new films seen is also down, although marginally higher than 2017 and 2016.

Best Films Seen So Far:

This includes all first-time viewings, regardless of which year they came out. I actually struggled with this list. I had eight no-brainers and then had to pull to get to ten. It's rough. I've seen...I've seen an inordinate amount of bad movies this year. Anyway,

#1: The Lighthouse (2019)
#2: Da 5 Bloods (2020)
#3: Portait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
#4: Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)
#5: Mandy (2018)
#6: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)
#7: Ford v Ferrari (2019)
#8: The Platform (2020)
#9: The Howling (1981)
#10: The Frighteners (1996)

The Top Seven or so I think will be very strong contenders on our end-of-year list, as I really loved all those movies. We'll see what, if any, 2020 film can come out to challenge, but otherwise Da 5 Bloods is far and away the best film of 2020 so far. Godzilla vs. Kong (2020) coming out hopefully though.

Worst Films Seen So Far

I feel like there's so many. Again, first time viewings:

#5: Frozen II (2019)
#4: Undercover Brother 2 (2019)
#3: Killing Gunther (2017)
#2: Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
#1: American Ultra (2015)

I'd love to get into this more. Bottom Three were very hard to pick. Killing Gunther was saved by Schwarzenegger, though. IX is mostly trolling here, but I'm pretty serious about how much of a colossal letdown that was. But really, American Ultra was the most boring movie ever made with no idea what kind of tone it was going for. I couldn't maintain interest at all.

That's the halfway point, people! How many more movies will we get up to! Stay tuned here to keep tracking: http://www.norwegianmorningwood.com/p/movies-and-tv-in-2020.html

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