My 2018 in Movies

Early in January last year, I started my account on Letterboxd.com tracking my movie viewing and keeping my to-watch list. This was one of several factors (also including the opportunity to share in a friend's Filmstruck account -- RIP -- and the replacement of my ailing Blu-Ray player) that led to what I'm quite certain was a personal record year for film.

Letterboxd compiles a year-end statistics page, and here's mine:
FRED'S 2018 YEAR IN REVIEW.

In addition to 6 short films, 9 stand-up specials, and 6 miscellaneous shows (making-of features or tv documentary miniseries) contained in the Letterboxd database, I watched 120 feature films last year. I'm pretty sure this blows away the only other possible contender: 1998, when I spent my summer watching much of the AFI Top 100 American films list and various other movies that viewing suggested.

I also tried to write a little something on everything I saw. This was almost entirely for my own benefit, to try to work out verbally what I do or don't like and why. So for all 120 of those, and a few others, I wrote between a sentence and several paragraphs on each. You can see that writing if you click on any of the poster images at the bottom of the stats page. I've enjoyed seeing what friends and other Letterboxd users have to say about a lot of these, and the social aspect of the site has suggested a lot of viewing as well.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 33 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 87 movies new to me
• 14 new Criterion Collection feature films (and 3 shorts)
• 13 features on Filmstruck (and 4 shorts)
• 13 theatrical viewings
• All 11 Star Wars theatrical feature films, all of them with Max, plus additional viewings of The Last Jedi and Solo, and two making-of-Star Wars features
• 5 Spielberg films (3 new). If you expand the year to include New Year's Day 2019, you get a 6th.
• 5 Scorsese films (4 new)
• 6 films written or directed by Lawrence Kasdan
• The list of performers is kind of overwhelmed by actors who were in those Star Wars movies, but there were also 4 Kevin Costner performances and 6 by Jeff Goldblum. Expand to 1/1/19, and you get 4 Richard E Grant performances.
• Two films featuring improv guru Del Close.
• A five-film cycle of Berlin-set films, spanning from the late Weimar Republic (Cabaret) to just post-war (Phoenix) to beginning of the Berlin Wall (Bridge of Spies) to late in the Cold War (Wings of Desire) to the fall of the Wall (Atomic Blonde).
• Several movies that had been on a little handwritten watch list I kept in my wallet for years starting in 1998
• One Polish mermaid horror sex musical.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite film I saw this year was Phoenix, a 2014 German thriller in a Hitchcockian mode about a death camp survivor who, following extensive facial reconstructive surgery, returns to the ruins of Berlin to find her husband. The twists and turns and the knowledge of which characters know what information at what times makes it very satisfying.
• I fell absolutely in love with both Wings of Desire and The Age of Innocence. The latter I tried to watch in college, and just couldn't get into it. The former I knew was supposed to be wonderful, but I worried would bore me. Both knocked me on my ass. Both are romantic, and subtle, and reward patience.
• Also in my top 4 this year was It Follows, one of the scariest movies I want to watch again in the future. Its premise is tailor made to frighten me, personally, as it taps into a recurrent childhood nightmare. Its production design seems intended to be as disorienting as possible. And its use of the film frame is brilliant.
• My favorite 2018 film was Isle of Dogs. Wes Anderson has his limitations, but he's also got my number.
• Other standouts that are still occupying space in my brain long after watching them, even if they weren't my highest rated: Locke, Chungking Express, Annihilation, War of the Worlds, Speed Racer, The Witch, and Blade Runner 2049.

I don't know that I'll get anywhere near 120 films again this year, but I hope to continue writing as I watch, and if you're interested, I hope you'll follow along, join Letterboxd, sign up for The Criterion Channel when they start it up again, and let me know what you're watching!