I did it.

Two-hundred movies across the year 2021. Individually, 215 movies and about 220 total viewings when you factor in the flicks I saw twice, one of which was Jason X because EVERYONE should watch Jason X twice a year. He just wanted his machete back.

I should have a better goal for 2022, but…I really like movies, man. Like I should… write 12,000 words for fiction properties. Get an episode of the podcast to break 300 listens. Or just… quit fucking playing Fallout 4 for, like, two god damn minutes.

I started… I started another playthrough, guys. To see how tedious the game would be without using any mods.

Turns out, not as tedious as I’d though! And it gives me TROPHIES for dumb bullshit! Wow!

I seriously have owned this game for 3-4 years and never touched it, but now I can’t… stop… playing it. I will BRIEFLY stop actually, but then I’ll watch a video about something in it on YouTube, and it makes me miss it. That can’t be healthy.

ANYWAY!

I’m open to 2022 resolutions. Historically, it turns out I can only keep resolutions that have to do with movie-watching. That’s strange.

I should embrace that!

Let’s see…

I saw 36 new releases in 2021 (hint hint for another article soon). I could shoot for 50 in 2022. That’s a… that’s a thing.

I have a few days left to figure this out. Throw some ideas at me!

Until then, let’s see how 2021 rounded out on my journey to 200.

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MOVIES

What did December 2021 give me? It gave me both the BEST and WORST new release of 2021 that I saw (again: spoilers for that other article)! Starting off with the worst new release of 2021: V/H/S 94. This was heavily disappointing in that it started strong and then just got weaker with each new story. The first short tale had a terrific ending. The second was actually creepy and well made. Everything after that was the absolute pits. And the through-story was abominable. I feel like one star may be a bit low for the flick that gave me “Hail Raatma”, which I will quote until I die, but boy… it’s been a while since I so just wanted a movie to end with 30 minutes left.

The 2006 remake of Black Christmas, man. Who needed that? I know that the mid-to-late 2000’s were Remake City for classic horror movies and franchises (Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, The Crazies, Nightmare on Elm Street… among SO MANY OTHERS), but Black Christmas has to be one of the very worst. It has convoluted plot points that go nowhere, introduces characters that don’t need to be there, and makes teasing promises that it immediately bails on. It’s ROUGH. Even for a murderer’s row of gorgeous actresses (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert), there is no joy in this Mudville.

For SOME REASON, after being broken by VHS 94, I went back to the well and saw the original V/H/S. I had it on my movie playlist and just wanted to get rid of it at that point. It is… better than the newest entry, but it faced the same issues of knocking the good stories out of the way first and getting progressively worse. I may have even just turned this one off with fifteen minutes or so left. Not even a Raatma in sight.

I had never seen Road House before, and it seems I was missing frighteningly little. That flick is a MESS for the first 90 minutes–the story is nonsense and it just kind of jumps from scene to scene with little care for developing anything–but the last half hour of abject lunacy raises the rating a great deal. The cartoonish (even by 80’s standards!) villain throws a spear at Patrick Swayze! I should not have loved that as much as I did.

Question, though: how did a movie that stars Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott get a mass release and leave ANY purely heterosexual men left on the planet?

RED I watched for a future episode of the Stew World Order podcast (more on that in a bit), and it is forgettably adequate. Considering I have a whole thirty-plus minute show coming out on it in a few months, I won’t go too far into depth (though a solid ten minutes of that was my guest Kalvin and I talking about the drive-thru at Chik-Fil-A), but I will say this: Watching Mary Louise Parker and Bruce Willis act in the same scenes is a master class of seeing someone trying her damnedest to get literally anything out of a costar who couldn’t care less.

I don’t know how much I’m supposed to hold the fact that My Neighbor Totoro is a pure kid’s movie against it. There’s no depth to it, and even less plot, but it IS kind of adorable. And it made me chuckle a few times at the cutesiness of it all. I need to go on a Studio Ghibli tear, but so far I’ve only seen this and Spirited Away. And this was no Spirited Away. But for what it tries to be, it succeeds. I just wish it had, you know, A STORY.

I had never seen Face/Off before! I know, right? Here is a movie that has aged just… perfectly. It now feels like an incredibly well-made parody of itself. I’m not sure this movie ever meant to take itself seriously–I’m pretty sure it didn’t–but nowadays in the post-meta era of filmmaking we live in, it feels like an almost Hot Fuzz level send-up of, you know, ITSELF. I’m not… I feel like I’m presenting that I liked this movie ironically. I didn’t. I genuinely enjoyed it. I just wonder if the movie is smarter and more ahead of its time than I think it is, or if it is just SO WELL MADE that it holds up even in an era where you can’t take it seriously.

I shouldn’t be thinking this hard about Face/Off.

Or maybe I AM supposed to!

Whatever, I dug the heck out of it.

And that leaves us with Spider-Man: No Way Home, which I obviously saw twice in less than a week. You could say I liked it. I even recorded a short (twenty minutes) special edition review of it for the show, and you can check that out here. Or you could download it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Goodpods, etc etc etc and help boost those numbers!

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Whelp, I did not come up with a pop culture related new year’s resolutions in the last However Long it took me to write that article. So I’m still open to suggestions!

Until next time… which will be 2022!… take care!