November is unthemed this year: one noir collection but otherwise not heavy on the femmes fatale and criminal sorts. It’s also nicely varied, with one blockbuster of a collection and a fair amount of other cool stuff. Actually two blockbuster collections now that I think about it.
Well holy crap, that’s a year’s worth of these. I’m certainly not blogging like I used to but the monthly commitment is working out! And what a good lineup for my 12th month. The top line collections rotate around two unquestionable masters, and the good programming doesn’t end there. We’ll eat well in September. Let’s get to it.
Hey, I’m using the year in the titles now! Shows I didn’t have much confidence that I’d keep this going a year ago. Well, a big raspberry to younger me. We’re getting spooky again, of course, with a lineup that is varied both in types of horror and in quality. I think we have another contender for worst movie to ever play on the Channel – read on to find out which one.
What a fun lineup. I think the Channel’s really nailing the summer feel this year. As always, there’s a palpable absence of Boston Crime collections, but I imagine they’re just waiting for the fall to get into that one.
Summertime! Pretty solid lineup coming in July; last month set a very high bar but we’re definitely continuing with those sun-drenched themes. Plus, uh, Haneke.
It’s clearly the beginning of summer because Criterion’s June lineup is even more summery than last month’s. And last month they did a whole collection of Coastal Thrillers.
The May Criterion lineup is, in my book, timely and exceptional. I am going to be excited for perhaps controversial reasons; let’s dig in! (Man, and I completely forgot to post this in a timely manner. Had it ready days ago.)
I’m going to start keeping track of how many New York themed collections Criterion runs before they get around to Boston. Which I suppose would need to be Boston Crime – it’s a low hanging fruit, y’all. Or Boston Journalism but that’s not quite as rich a topic. Anyhow I did wind up watching Carol from New York Love Stories so I can’t complain too hard. So, April’s lineup:
Aw, that’s cute, I thought I wasn’t going to watch as many movies as I did in 2022. Instead I went from 423 watched to 508 watched. Remember when I said “I want to spend more time following my whims”? That worked out really well. In 2022, I did a weekly challenge plus a weekly movie watching club plus another weekly movie watching club – it got to be a grind. In 2023 I was more varied about my tastes and I had more fun. ...
Something weird happened in 2022: I watched 423 movies. This is pretty atypical for me. It’s over 20% of the movies I’ve watched in my life. I’ve never watched as many as 100 movies in a year before. I’ve been trending up a bit recently, particularly during the pandemic, but 423? Sure, some of them are shorts, but that’s balanced by the 7 hours of Les Vampires and the 5 hours of Fanny and Alexander (TV version) and the 4 hours of Ludwig. At the end of the day – uh, of the year – we’re talking 730 hours of movies. WTF? Well, I quit playing World of Warcraft, and that’s a huge time sink right there. I also just got into a rhythm. On any given weekday night, it’s easy to catch a movie after dinner. If you’re not doing anything else during a weekend, what’s a movie after each meal? I joined a couple of subreddits that watch a movie a week collectively, I took on a challenge to watch 52 Criterion movies, and about halfway through the year I realized I was on pace for over 350 movies. All those neurons I’d been using on making WoW numbers go up got dedicated to making my movie count go up. Whoops. Fortunately S. is supportive of my whims and obsessions. An aside: Letterboxd, which I am linking to throughout this post, is amazing. Also a total enabler of my numbers go up obsessions. Worth every penny I pay them as a patron, which is not all that much. It’s been a great way to find movies I might want to see, it’s way more comfortable to use than IMDB, and I just love them to pieces. At times it was a grind. The trickiest month was October, because S. and I took on a horror movie challenge together. I didn’t love the way I was engaging with challenges in general; I love movies but I want to watch them because I love them, not because they’re leaving my favorite streaming service or because I need to finish a checklist. I am not taking on any challenges next year, although S. and I made a list of 50 date night movies. (Each one has a connection to the one before, and we swapped picks. It was really fun making the list.) But you know, it’s like anything. If you spend a lot of time on something you love, you’ll discover new depths and new joys and new preferences. Or I guess you’ll start hating it, but that wasn’t me and movies. I’m still not a guy who can breezily analyze Kurosawa in terms of his shot choices, but I know which directors and actors make me happy, which is good enough for me.