I didn’t start out to watch 366 movies in 2020. The pandemic kind of altered plans, and I ended up watching movies. Like, a lot. By early December I was talking with friends about how many movies I had watched so far, and realized that I was within distance of hitting 366 movies in one year. The idea that watching an average of one movie a day during the year intrigued me, so I set out to do that.
It took watching one hundred fifty three different movies in November and December, but I did it. The bulk of them were rewatching one hundred movies from 2014*. More were films directed by Robert Zemeckis, part of a run through I’ve been doing weekly with some very good friends. Others were Christmas staples like It’s a Wonderful Life and three versions of A Christmas Carol (two of which were actually worth watching, the other produced this). And some…some were just films I plugged in because they were on Netflix and I had other things to do (hi, Independence Day and Frost/Nixon!)
By December 30, I had one movie left to go, which was Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, part of my usual holiday rewatch of the trilogy. It was a fitting end of a year of watching films. It may have not been the year of film that I had hoped when I started last January, when I had hoped to see 100 new movies, but it was still a very interesting year. Without movies to distract me from and help me process the pandemic, it would have been a much more stressful year for me.
So what do I have planned for 2021? Well, the pandemic isn’t ending any time soon, and I do need to do something to top 366. How about 600 films?
No seriously, I’m going to watch 600 films.
Stuff That Might be Interesting, but I don’t Feel Like Putting In Paragraph Form
First Film of 2020: Her Smell
Last Film of 2020: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Favorite Film Watched (and Most Watched of the Year): Little Women (2019)
Least Favorite Film Watched: Cars 2 (not The Good Dinosaur)
2020 Top 5 Favorites
Honorable Mention: Birds of Prey, The Old Guard, Palm Springs, Tenet, Invisible Man
5. First Cow
4. The Assistant
3. I’m Thinking of Ending Things
2. Emma.
1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire**
My 2020 in film on Letterboxd
My 100 films of 2014, Revisited
* Some of these were double counts from other run-throughs earlier in the year, so I had to find other movies to hit the total
** Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a 2019 movie, but only if you lived in LA or NY. The rest of us had to wait until February to watch it in a theater. It was the last film I saw in a theater before the pandemic, and I’m counting it with 2020, because it deserves to be on a favorite list. My list, my rules.