Story and You

( Source ) Last August, I was preparing to begin my first semester of my freshman year in university, and I went all out, watching as many movies as I could squeeze into my days. It was Summer Under the Stars on TCM, and I exclusively watched movies playing on the channel during that month, making a point to watch at least one film from each featured star. I considered trying that again this year, but I just wasn't as enthused by the selection of stars and films this year as I was in 2017--and more than that, I was feeling kind of burnt out this month and did not want to commit myself to any specific movie-watching challenges. The closest I came to that was getting a few 2017 releases out of the library and watching through them; this turned out to be a great decision, as most of my selections were excellent and I discovered some new favorites among those films I missed out on seeing last year. My classic film watching was less successful, and I watched a disproportionate nu...

(image via The New York Times) Despite my continued lack of posting, I've actually been doing more writing in the past few weeks than I have all summer; somehow, I just cannot bring myself to actually go back and edit everything I have been writing and post it. Instead, I write these massive essays in a creative furor, sometimes staying up half of the night getting them done, and then abandon them to move onto something else. Hopefully in the future I actually work up the motivation--and the nerve--to get these pieces out there, but in the meantime, I'm at least keeping up with these recaps. July saw a whole bunch of first time viewings, as usual, but also a number of re-watches. Often I feel so overwhelmed by the number of films out there that I've yet to see that I neglect returning to old favorites, but when I finally do I remember that it's in re-watching that you really learn about a film and come to appreciate it; a single viewing is never enough. In particul...

(image via Criterion) Midway through the summer, and my quest to purge my DVR of old recordings is still going strong. As always, I am impressed by the quality of the films that I have been allowing to sit un-watched for months on end; it makes for a potent reminder not to let them build up like that again. Over the course of the month I caught up on my Anthony Perkins films from when he was Star of the Month on TCM; I watched some really excellent films from 2017, including Game Night and Last Flag Flying , and the Pride Month triple feature of Thelma , Beach Rats , and God's Own Country ; I had a fantastic Noir double feature, Kiss of Death and Inferno , with Blu-rays that I blind-bought from Twilight Time; I saw Hereditary and Incredibles 2 in theaters, both great experiences in entirely different ways; and I discovered the films of Albert Brooks, a filmmaker who has immediately become one of my favorite directors. Read on to see the full list of films I watched, and a mor...

(image via The Playlist) May was the kind of month where I look back and think, hey, maybe I really do watch too many movies. I watched so much and to be honest, some of these films could have used more time for reflection than I gave them as I just kept moving on to the next thing. With that being said, this was also a month where I often went out of my comfort zone and really learned a lot a variety of filmmakers and styles of filmmaking that I was previously ignorant of. In particular, I watched a lot of documentaries this month, my supposed least favorite genre--and discovered that I just have not been watching the right documentaries, as is usually the case when I make broad statements about film genres or movements. I watched Monterey Pop, Gimme Shelter, and Dont Look Back , all incredible and engaging looks into the 60s rock scene; the adorable and informative Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story ; Icarus Film's 8-film DVD retrospective of Jean Rouch's work; ...

(image via Criterion) April has essentially followed the same pattern as December: I finish my courses, do my final exams, and prepare for a nice, relaxing break, only for a big movie to come out and suddenly I have 8-hour shifts every day and I can barely stay awake from sheer exhaustion when I finally do get some free time at home. While all of this business is excellent for my theater, I am looking forward to things quieting down so I can finally get that much-needed break. In the meantime, I have been watching a lot of movies; I mentioned, also back in December, that I was making my way through old recordings on my DVR, and that process is still ongoing. Much of the backlog was recordings from TCM Imports, so I have been watching a lot of subtitled, black-and-white films from the 1950s and 60s, which has been a lot more fun and enlightening than one might expect. Again, it was very difficult to narrow down my highlights list to five, and I had to skip some truly excellent film...

(image via the Nerdist) I am pretty sure that I have never been so busy in my life as I have been in the first three months of this year; certainly, the time has never seemed to pass by so quickly. Despite all of my schoolwork and work at the theater, my movie-watching actually went up this month, and I saw a lot of really fantastic films—so many that it was much more difficult than usual to narrow the list down to 5 favorites to talk about. I saw some really excellent films in my foreign film class, including the Canadian films Atanarjuat: The Long Runner and Water ; I saw the adorable  Love, Simon and the brutal Red Sparrow at the theater; I saw the great Vincent Price movies House of Wax and The Tingler, and re-watched my inexplicable new favorite film The Monster Club, which was just as good the second time; I watched some fantastic pre-Codes with the underrated The Maltese Falcon , Waterloo Bridge , and The Old Dark House ; and, most significantly, I finished the...

(image via medium.com) Despite having a number of assignments and exams to do in February, and my spring break getting eaten up by too many shifts at work, I somehow managed to watch more movies this month than last without dropping the ball on anything else. Even better, the quality of the movies I saw increased greatly; while January seemed like a good month for movies looking back at it, February is definitely even better. I had a best picture double feature at my theater with The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (my first ever double feature at a movie theater, actually); I re-watched the incredible In the Mood for Love in my foreign film class and wrote my exam essay on it, two events that re-affirmed my love for this incredible film; I got my Vincent Price fix with While the City Sleeps and The Monster Club ; and I went to see Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which actually turned out to be a really fun time at the movies. Read on to see a breakdo...

(image via cinemaclock.com) I thought January was going to be a return to normal, or at least as normal as you could call the past few months, but yet again I was in for a surprise. I started taking my first university-level English classes this semester, one focused on literature and the other on academic writing, and they have proven to be much more work than any of the classes I took in the fall. I am definitely learning a lot, but the clear drawback is yet another reduction in my free time. I watched a lot less movies than is typical for me, less than 1 a day, and I often found myself missing my routine of winding down to a movie at the end of each day. Despite the reduction, I did still find the time to watch some great stuff: I continued to work my way through those DVR recordings from 2016, which resulted in watching 3 films each from two of my favorite classic actors, Norma Shearer and Charles Laughton; I watched the silent film Where Are My Children? from 1916, which now ...

(image via DoctorMacro) Yet another busy month has come and gone. Same old story for my lack of posting: lots of schoolwork and too many shifts at the theater. I've been busy enough that even my movie watching has suffered, with a number of days going by without watching any film at all--though my count still rounds out to slightly over 1 per day. This was my first Noirvember, and I was really excited to dig into a bunch of noir classics, but between time constraints and a lack of access to some of the films I would have liked to watch, a lot of my film choices fall under the neo-noir or more generic "crime" umbrella--still, among the handful of "real" noirs I got to, I did discover some new all-time favorites, so I would say my first foray into this event was a success. I also re-watched a number of films, most of them for my film class, but also Lover Come Back for the blogathon earlier this month and my annual viewing of V for Vendetta. I'm glad to s...

(image via Vice.com)  As I mentioned in my last post, October has been a busy month. Lots of shifts at work, lots of classes and schoolwork . . . It's all been pretty overwhelming, and I'm definitely looking ahead to December when I'll have a break. From the school part, at least--the number of shifts is definitely not going to improve in the wake of Star Wars: The Last Jedi coming out! Despite the busyness, I did watch a good number of films this month--38, the exact same number as in September, actually--and a lot of them were quite good. I didn't watch as much horror as I would have liked, but I did manage to finish off Val Lewton's horror filmography, and I watched two of the big horror releases of 2017, all of which I enjoyed and got me suitably in the mood for the holiday. I also re-watched some great movies in my film class, Pan's Labyrinth and Blue Velvet , both of which--while not exactly horror--felt appropriate to the season. All in all, a good mo...

(image via Flixster) I started my first semester of university this month, which brought me back to that all-too-familiar juggling of work, school, and free time (AKA watching movies). I did cut back on the movie watching quite a bit, especially compared to last month, but I still averaged about a movie a day in the end. I really should have watched less, honestly, but daily movie-watching is a hard habit to break! I began the month by finishing off my SUTS recordings--I still had movies from Leslie Caron, Slim Pickens, Marion Davies, George Sanders, and Elizabeth Taylor to see--and then transitioned into some very random viewing selections, and then finally got on track with my viewing theme for the whole latter half of the month, the lovely Jennifer Jones (interspersed with some viewings from my film class-- Rashomon is not one I would have otherwise chosen to re-watch in the middle of my Jones marathon!). Where before this month I had never seen her in a single film, I have now...

It was Summer Under the Stars month on TCM, and over the course of my self-imposed challenge to watch at least one film from every star being honored--and watching quite a few more than that for my favorites--I managed to watch more films than I've ever watched in a single month before. The grand total is pretty ridiculous, but then, I'm going to be very busy over the next few months between work and university, so I can't begrudge myself this epic movie binge during my last month of freedom. I'm also proud to say that this is the first month ever that I didn't watch a single film from the 2010s--in fact, I didn't watch a single film released past 1977! See details and a breakdown of my epic month of classic Hollywood below the cut.

July was another crazy month, but for the first time all year, it was a good kind of crazy! I got my new job at the movie theater, and so far it's going great; I think I've finally found a place that makes me happy, after a number of pretty disappointing positions. And with all of the free time I've had (this job has less hours than my old one), I've watched a lot of movies, most of them really good. I re-watched a number of films, got through half of my planned Audrey Hepburn marathon--part 2 coming soon--watched through a number of Powell and Pressburger movies--which were a real treat--and discovered a couple of completely unexpected new favorites, which is always exciting! See a breakdown of my viewing and my new favorites after the cut.

This month has truly been an emotional roller coaster. I had my high school graduation ceremony,; my apartment building had a fire, luckily with no damage to any suites but still a pretty harrowing experience; and, most importantly of all, I finally quit the truly terrible job I've been working since January. I was planning to stay until the end of the summer, but I finally had enough and I've now officially completed my final shift there. I'll be on the lookout for another job very soon, but in the meantime I'm taking a little vacation, which means lots of time to relax, and more importantly, watch and write about movies. I'm pretty exited! Despite all the busyness, I managed to see a lot of movies, including more catch-ups from 2016, a few Gable stragglers, and lots of TCM's Noir Alley series. It was a rough month in real life, but overall a pretty great one for movies--see a breakdown of what I watched and some highlights after the cut.

May is another month that's gone by in a flash. It helped that it was Clark Gable month on TCM, something I've been looking forward to for a few months now; with all of the films I watched, I've now nearly completed Clark's 1930s filmography! I've noticed lately that Clark Gable isn't talked about that much nowadays, and I'm not totally sure why--perhaps his ever-charming, suave screen presence doesn't resonate as much with contemporary classic movie fans, who prefer the more complex, tortured performers of classic Hollywood? Whatever the reasoning may be, this binge of his early films has cemented him as one of my favorite performers of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and I plan to watch as many films from him as I can in the future. Beyond Clark, I also managed to squeeze in viewings of some 70s horror films, more catch-ups from 2016, and a couple of re-watches, including You've Got Mail with my mom for Mother's Day. Overall, a really great m...

April has been a crazy month. On the one hand, it felt like it went by so quickly, but on the other, when I look at the films I watched at the beginning of the month, they seem like they're from a lifetime ago. I guess over-exhaustion does that to a person. On the plus side, it has been an amazing month for movies; I saw so many fantastic films and discovered so many new favorites. A particularly great discovery from April was not a specific film, but rather a newfound love for a whole decade: the 1950s has consistently been my least favorite among the decades of golden age Hollywood, but this month I delved into some of the best films it has to offer and now I'm hooked. After the cut is the list of films I watched, as well as a selection of my favorite viewings.

I watched 567 films in 2015. I still look at that number and feel surprised-it doesn't really seem possible, but, it seems it is. During the last few months of rocketing towards that number, I vowed that 2016 would be different. I would focus on other things, maybe catch up on all the TV shows I neglected all year. Well, in January 2015 I watched 58 films. This January I watched 53. Baby steps?

2015 has been a crazy year. 2013 was the first year in which I kept a log of all of the new-to-me films I watched, and that year I logged 50. In 2014, I logged 211. This year, my count was 519. I learned so much about film this year-I watched my first Tarantino, first Bergman, first Kubrick, first James Bond. Throughout 2014, as I started immersing myself in film forums and blogs and websites, I felt like I knew so little-I had an enormous mental list I "lovingly" referred to as "films everyone has seen except me". Now, as we head into 2016, that feeling is finally gone. I still haven't seen everything, of course, but I've reached a place where I feel like I fit into this crazy world of cinema enthusiasts, and maybe I even have my own things to contribute. So I would say it has been a pretty good year. Read on to see my year-long journey in more detail!

  Welcome to December (sort of)!   November was a crazy month for me, lots of schoolwork and exams (and December is following that trend, which is why this post is so late). My movie watching was considerably stilted for the first part of the month, but that was ok, because it gave me the break I needed and I returned really exited about films again. I didn't feel like this was an amazing month for movies, but as I look back I actually found a lot of new favorites, it was tough narrowing down my selections to highlight in this post. I hope November was great for you all, and that you had a good Thanksgiving!

Happy Halloween!! October didn't quite work out the way I expected. I wanted to work through my backlog of unseen horror films, but a lot of non-horror films were expiring off of Shomi this month so I had to get to those first, and combined with watching through American Horror Story, I only got in a couple of scary movies. And overall, I was once again disappointed with the films I saw this month. I was feeling pretty burned out on films and even the ones I knew were good on a technical level, well, I just couldn't get into them. But I couldn't really give myself a break because so many films I wanted to see were expiring. So, I hope you had a happy Halloween, and keep reading to see how my October went.