2014: Movies Year In Review

What, you think I stopped my most sacred and hallowed tradition?

For those of you who may have forgotten (by choice or otherwise), every year I keep track of the movies I watch, and general demographic statistics about them because it’s superfun (for a preemtive comparison on fun, check out 2013’s post here).

This year, however, was I believe the second least active since I started doing this in 2007. This is mostly because as I mentioned earlier, I watched the equivalent of 264 movies with my daughter, and I only count one viewing as a single entry. In addition to this, we had another baby, and that always puts a dent in personal hobbies. Wait did I say hobbies? I meant extremely important scientific studies.

Anyway, here’s the breakdown:

So in total, I only watched 72 unique titles in 2014. Yikes. Shameful. This includes a single watch of a full television series (not watched on live TV/DVR) as well, of which there were 10.

Almost literally half of everything I watched was a Kids/Family film, which doesn’t surprise me, but troubles me nonetheless.

Television breakdown (as is custom): 10 series, for 82.2 hours = equivalent of 55 hour-and-a-half films.

Now the fun part! Top 5 best first-watch movies:

5. Let the Fire Burn (2013, Jason Osder): B+
4. The World’s End (2013, Edgar Wright): B+
3. Blue Jasmine (2013, Woody Allen): B+
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson): A
1. Stagecoach (1939, John Ford): A

 

Top 5 worst first-watch movies:

5. Joseph King of Dreams (2000, Rob LaDuca): D+
4. Tarzan (1999, Chris Buck): D+
3. Pocahontas (1995, Mike Gabriel): D
2. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013, Cody Cameron): D
1. Paranormal Activity The Marked Ones (2014, Christopher Landon): D

 

So yeah. Pretty underwhelming year overall (in so, so many ways). Let’s hope 2015 turns the ship around. One snake eats the other, as they say.

Watching Movies with your Daughter: A Study

For exactly one year, I’ve decided to keep a record of every time I either chose to or was forced to sit down and watch a movie that my daughter insisted on watching. I felt that last year, the reason I wasn’t watching as many movies as I normally would, was because I had to watch the same movie with her dozens of times over, thus eating into my own movie-watching experience.

Here are the results:

In short, her old favorites Coraline and Paranorman (both Laika films) beat out the expected Frozen. Worth noting is that I didn’t include single-watch features (there were several).

Oh and the total? 264, and with there being 42 unique films on the list, 222 of those times were a time I’d already seen the movie at least once. If the average movie length is 1:30:00, that’s 396 hours of time spent watching movies with my daughter.

I think the data speaks for itself.