Monday, January 02, 2017

Movie-Watching in 2016



Every January for the last few years I've been counting down all the movies I watched from the previous year. I'm gonna do that again, but before then, I thought it would be fun to look briefly at all the movies I watched last year that weren't from 2016. About 88% of them, as it turns out.

I know that because it was the first complete year that I used Letterboxd from January to December and I was faithful about logging everything in. That means that by the end of the year, Letterboxd was able to put together a handy group of statistics about my overall viewing habits in 2016.

I watched a total of 415 films (or about 8 a week). That's a lot, but keep in mind that a) some of those are short films and b) I don't watch a bunch of TV series. Mostly, if the TV's on, there's a movie playing.



The first film I watched of the year was 2007's Alvin and the Chipmunks (on David's recommendation) and the last was When Harry Met Sally... because that's a New Year's Eve tradition.

For the first half of the year, I focused mostly on movies from the 1910s to the early '30s. So, far and away my most-viewed actor was Buster Keaton with 34 films (though most of those are shorts). Then there's a huge gap to the next group of actors I watched: John Wayne (12 films), Boris Karloff, Shirley Temple, and Bela Lugosi (8 films each), and Lionel Barrymore (7 films).

Keaton was also my most-watched director (32 films) followed by Alfred Hitchcock (9 films), Cecil B DeMille (5 films), Sergio Leone (4 films thanks to Hellbent for Letterbox), James Whale (4 films), and Josef von Sternberg (4 films, all starring Marlene Dietrich whom I finally got around to checking out this year).



The most critically acclaimed movie I watched last year was 12 Angry Men (1957) and the most critically panned was M Night Shymalan's The Last Airbender (thanks to Mystery Movie Night).

The most popular movie I saw was The Force Awakens. The most obscure was a 1931 B-movie called Sea Devils starring nobody we know.

52% of the movies I watched were brand new to me; 48% were ones that I'd seen before.

Since 88% of my movie-watching was of 2015 films and earlier, 12% were ones that came out last year. I'll have a lot more to say about those in the coming month, but before that - as usual - I'll run down a list of movies from last year that I wanted to see, but never got around to.

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