Fortunately, I actually kept track of them all, and, thus, have documented proof of having accomplished this goal.
I started the year keeping short notes on each film, just as either a reminder of what it was about or my feelings on having seen it, but didn't maintain that throughout. I wish I had, because things like "Simon Killer" and "A Single Shot" could be about ANYTHING. Sadly, I didn't use the Haiku Review format, but I guess there's always next year. (Meaning this year. Ahh, calendarific semantics.)
Anyway, here is the list of movies seen by me in 2014:
2) Despicable Me 2 – eh. Had some cuteness, but not as good as the first.
3) Iron Man 3 – decent, better than 2
4) The Last Stand – pretty crappy action flick with Ahnuld
5) The Wolverine – entertaining
6) Pacific Rim – giant robots vs giant monsters. Got a little over the top near the end.
7) The Conversation – 70s thriller about eavesdropping. Kinda slow, would probably make a good remake.
8) The Wall – German/English film, started off very intriguing – woman is cut off from the world by an invisible wall out in the woods, but got very dull near the end.
9) Kick-Ass 2 – not nearly as fun as the first
10) Monsters University – since I don’t remember anything about Monsters, Inc, this was more-or-less a stand-alone film. It worked pretty well, I thought.
11) Dolan’s Cadillac – based on the short story by Stephen King, wasn’t a masterpiece, but was entertaining enough, I guess.
12) Ted – completely unfunny. Should’ve known, since it was Seth “Family Guy” McFarlane’s baby, but alas, I was hoping it would be at least a *little* bit amusing. It was not.
13) We’re The Millers – ridiculous (in a good way) comedy with Jason Sudekis and Jennifer Anniston. Not great, but had enough laughs to be worthwhile.
14) Carrie – 2013 remake. Just average, overall. Probably not necessary to have made this.
15) Prisoners – Drama about two families who have young daughters that are abducted. The main suspect is let go by the police, and one of the fathers decides to exact vigilante justice. I haven’t decided if I liked the movie completely or not, but it’s stuck with me.
16) Rise of the Guardians – Pretty. Imaginative.
17) Taken 2 – had low expectations going in to this. They were not met. Pretty pointless sequel.
18) Maniac – gory horror movie with Elijah Wood as a serial killer. The gimmick was that a lot of the movie was shot thru his POV, so the viewer partakes in the killings. Overall kinda icky.
19) Dark Skies – “horror” movie about a family being harassed by The Greys. Keri Russell was in it, and she was decent, but overall pretty lame movie.
20) The Brass Teapot – somewhat predictable, but still enjoyable, morality tale about a couple that finds a magic teapot that pays out whenever they hurt themselves.
21) Pandorum – I’d seen this before, but forgotten I had. Pretty good sci-fi/horror flick about an ark ship’s survivors waking up from deep sleep only to discover they aren’t alone onboard. Sets up a sequel, which I’d happily watch.
22) +1 – not particularly logical, or coherent, or worthwhile. The potential was there, but the execution fell thru. It was about a glitch in time (maybe?) at a college party that caused the last 15 minutes to repeat itself. Neat idea. Maybe with different writers it could’ve been awesome.
23) Escape Plan – action/thriller with Stallone & Schwarzenegger. Not bad.
24) Would You Rather – low-budget horror flick that was somewhat predictable and completely unrealistic, but still somehow compelling to watch. Rich psycho gets strangers together to have them play a “game” where they have to torture each other/themselves in order to get money.
25) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – a little long (could easily have been about 15-20 min shorter) but pretty decent adaptation of the novel, I’d say.
26) Thor: The Dark World – ehh. Wasn’t really feeling this Thor sequel. The first one was surprisingly enjoyable, but this one just didn’t work for me.
27) Elysium – sci-fi action thriller with Matt Damon in the future. All about class warfare. Decent.
28) Frozen – saw it (in the theater!!) in 2013, saw it again on DVD when Irina got it for Easter. Goosebumps and chuckles. Good flick.
29) The Perks of Being a Wallflower
30) A Single Shot
31) Haunter
32) Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues – some parts were pretty funny, but nothing out and out hilarious, and overall a LOT of unfunny bits, and also a tad too long. Oh well.
33) Simon Killer
34) Mary Poppins – Supercalifragilisticexpialidoc
35) The Heat – not bad! Funnier than expected.
36) Saving Mr. Banks – pretty good drama about Disney acquiring the rights to Mary Poppins from the author of the books.
37) Escape From Tomorrow – waste of time. The draw for this was that it was filmed in Disneyland/World without permission, but it was too “quirky” for quirky’s sake, and the “protagonist” was a complete jerk I didn’t care about. MEH.
38) The Internship
39) The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – a wee bit overlong. Smaug, the dragon, though, was pretty darn impressive.
40) Kit Kittredge – An American Girl – had seen this before. Liked it more the first time, but it was still decent.
41) Contracted – blegh.
42) Hotel Transylvania
43) A Perfect Getaway – went a little off the rails at the end, but a pretty enjoyable thriller.
44) Life of Pi – visually pretty amazing.
45) After the Dark –A “philosophy” class does several thought experiments about the end of the world and who gets to live on in the bunker after the bombs fall. They get an A for effort.
46) The Shining – I kinda don’t get why this is so highly praised/analyzed. IT was a mediocre adaptation which left me thinking that the book was better.
47) Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs 2
48) Robocop (2014) – remake that wasn’t bad as its own, but came nowhere near the awesomeness of the original.
49) Dredd
50) The LEGO movie
51) Zoolander
52) Oldboy
53) 13 Sins
54) How I Live Now
55) Tucker & Dale vs Evil
56) Blindness
57) Dark Touch – even at 91 minutes, and even watched at double speed, this felt incredibly long. It was just so …boring. (Was about a trio of young children who are abused and have telekinesis. I think.)
58) Oldboy – 2014 remake of the Korean film. I might be the only person on earth who enjoyed them both equally.
59) Non-Stop
60) Enemy
61) Paranormal Activity
62) Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
63) Gravity
64) Muppets Most Wanted
65) The Amazing Spider-Man 2
66) The Never Ending Story
67) Big Bad Wolves
68) The Purge – ridiculous, but marginally entertaining
69) The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
70) The Last Days on Mars
71) Transcendence – bleh, coulda been much better.
72) Her
73) Curse of Chucky – pretty much as dumb as expected.
74) Under the Skin – what.
75) Find Me Guilty
76) Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox
77) Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
78) Justice League: War
79) Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons
80) X-Men: Days of Future Past
81) Alan Partridge
82) Captain America: The Winter Soldier
83) Identity Thief
84) Godzilla – the 2014 version. Parts of it looked pretty cool, but overall…meh.
85) Neighbors – extreme and crass, but with moments that were pretty funny. Watching the gag reel, I discovered that Seth Rogen has one of the most annoying real life laughs ever.
86) Snowpiercer
87) Locke – sigh. 85 minutes of Tom Hardy just driving and talking on his phone to various people. Kept waiting for a twist or a payoff, but …nope.
88) Maleficent – it was cheesy-ish, but I liked it.
89) Europa Report
90) Joe
91) Carrie – rewatched the 2013 remake. I liked it better this time around, actually. (I have also just recently reread the book, which may have helped.) There were still flaws with this, but it wasn’t a bad movie by any means.
92) Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones – I liked it better than the first (not that this was a good movie, just that it was slightly more enjoyable)
93) Olympus Has Fallen - White House Down was better
94) White Dog
95) The Machine
96) The Signal – the trailer promised weirdness and mystery. The trailer lied.
97) Son of Batman – the first DC Animated movie that didn’t really work for me. Part of it was the voice actor they got for Batman – he felt off. Part of it was the story – just sort of meh.
98) Captain Phillips
99) The Purge: Anarchy – ridiculous, but marginally entertaining.
100) The Wave – German movie about the dangers of fascism – even in supposedly “enlightened” high schoolers.
101) Batman: Assault on Arkham – this one was FUN!
102) The One I Love – a couple in therapy goes on a weekend getaway in order to get to know themselves…in the Twilight Zone.
103) Doc of the Dead – didn’t really inform me of anything I didn’t already know, but it’s always nice to see Bruce Campbell in stuff.
104) Edge of Tomorrow – AKA All You Need is Kill, AKA Tom Cruise Dies a Lot. Solid, fun sci-fi flick.
105) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - I would not be opposed to this series continuing. (Although I don't know where else they can go.) Also, more women characters (human and ape) would be extremely welcome.
So, that's that. The worst movie seen was easily, hands down "Under the Skin".(oh, looking over the list, I forgot I also wasted my time on "Escape From Tomorrow". That was also REALLY bad.)
Best movie? Hmm. I'm not sure I could narrow that down.
Moving on, this year I do have some goals (or gimmicks or whatever you want to call them), and since I'm at the keyboard, I might as well share them.
For 2015 I plan to:
Blog more. (Accomplished already!)
Write at least 2015 words every month on a fictional story. I don't need to finish the story, I don't need to start it - it could just be outlining or working on a particular scene, and it doesn't have to be the same story each month. Just need to write something fiction, and have put in at least two thousand and fifteen words into it. (I realize this seems like setting the bar pretty low, since the total word count for the year would only be 24,180 - which is not even half of what the Nanowrimo goal is, but considering my writing output lately, I think it is a rather achievable target.)
Watch as many movies as possible. (I was going to again set the mark at 100, but I'm feeling like that might not be able to happen this year.) I might do an A-Z thing on Netflix later, too. I've been wanting to do that for a while - start with the "Recently added" section, and find the first movie that begins with A, and then watch that. Then, move from there on to the B title, and so on. (If there is no movie with the correct letter in the section I'm in, I would move down to the next section, until I found one.) Anyway, that's a possibility for later in the year, especially if I'm lacking in interesting titles of things to watch.
Work on the Project (yes, the very same project I was mentioning on this blog back in [sigh] 2007.)
Ex...er....cise?
Read at least half the amount of books that Stephanie reads this year. I'm pretty sure that she is shooting for a goal of 60. I think I can manage to read 30 books in 365 days. I always give my star-rating on Goodreads.com, but I might start jotting down quick notes/thoughts about the books too. As I get older, I find that having things documented is a much better way to remember them. Heh.
That's more or less it. Or at least, all that I can think of right now. Bring on 2015!
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