So yeah, I watched 15 movies, read 3 books and did not finish a single TV show last year. How did that happen? Well, I spent most of that year watching operas, and boy that is time-consuming. Somehow it was the medium that was easiest for me to motivate myself for, and there were so many interesting titles for me to discover. But now I am stuck at opera no. 159 and that motivation is strangely gone, maybe because anything new I would be watching would precisely not meet the expectations of greatness I encountered with the first, say 50 titles. Of course every once in awhile something amazing pops up, but I don’t feel inclined to search for those anymore. But now that I have neglected everything else (movies, TV shows, anime, books and – especially! – manga) I feel like there is so much great material for me to catch up with, so perhaps I will get back into those.
I complained that I barely watched anything in 2015, but this year looks much worse. Without the Berlinale, I only watched occasionally films with Pip, saw a few films at the PIFF and another few on airplanes. (The lack of subtitles makes it impossible to watch any actually good movies, and that was pretty painful because they had “Love & Friendship”!) So this is the meager ranking for this year:
1. The Lobster
2. Hail, Caesar!
3. Zootopia
4. L’ombre des femmes
5. Paddington
6. Finding Dory
7. Carol
All the movies I saw were great (though I found “Carol” a little lackluster), and I have naturally high expectations for seeing more of them next year. There are so many films from last year I haven’t seen – aforementioned “Love & Friendship”, “Paterson”, “Toni Erdmann” (which everybody seems to have seen), “La La Land”, Hong Sang-soo’s “Right now, wrong then”, Makoto Shinkai’s “Your name” (though I am a little suspicious of that one), Almodovar’s “Julieta”, “Arrival”, “Elle” and Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden”. I also want to see Joachim Trier’s “Louder than Bombs” whose existence I only heard of literally right now. 2016 was a great for movies and I missed most of it despite having watched a few titles.
My New Year resolutions this year don’t only limit to films from 2016. While I drank some milk out of one of these plastic souvenir butterbeer cups from the Orlando Harry Potter World (I am obsessed with it, and I want one!), it reminded me of how I have only seen the first 3 films (before this blog was established even!) and am craving to re-read the books after I enjoyed those placement quizzes on the Pottermore website. I got Ravenclaw and a manx cat… rather fitting actually.
So let’s see what the new year will bring!