I watched 107 movies in 2022, including three (3) rewatches. 104 new movies is more than I've watched in any other year of my life. Movies!!!
Five of them were 2022 releases, all of which I enjoyed somewhere between "infinitely" and "enough". A ranked-ish list:
Everything Everywhere All At Once
I watched this in June and was immediately certain it would be my favourite movie I watched all year. It's so full of everything - laughs, heartbreak, action, warmth, truth, stupid sight gags, parallel universes - that summarising it seems impossible. A maximalist fever dream? I really felt different, having watched it.
Glass Onion
This would probably have been my number one movie of the year if it came out in a different year, but, you know. Still an absolute delight, intricately constructed and crammed with beautifully over-the-top performances that would have been scene-stealing if not for the fact that pretty much everyone else in every scene was doing it too. Sometimes I don't like it when Cleverness is a movie's main thing, but Rian Johnson really nailed it for me here.
Seeing Red
I think I skipped a few Pixar movies before this one, and dragged my heels a bit when it came to actually watching, but I really liked it. Resonant echoes of things that friends have shared about their lives (like family dynamics! yikes!), and really stylish animation. And the weird awkwardness of teenagers was captured perfectly.
Prey
Prey marked the completion (for now?) of my household's ongoing project: watching all of the Alien and Predator movies (...including the Alien vs Predator movies). This was the best one since Alien. Prey is a genuinely good movie, proving that the franchise can actually still contain those. (It's been a long journey, okay?) I'm glad that people from the Comanche Nation and other First Nations were involved in making the movie, and I'd like to rewatch it sometime with the full Comanche language dub. I don't think it's a coincidence that an action movie made with respect and representation in mind turned out better than a lot of other action movies do. (Also, I can't believe I used to watch the director on The Totally Rad show, years ago. Hahahaha.)
Fresh
This wasn't a great movie, but the way it careered wildly yet deliberately from one tonal extreme to another - even one genre to another - was quite amazing. Much more horrifying than its more lighthearted early scenes would lead you to expect, but also quite silly most of the time.
Probably about half the older movies I watched (as well as Fresh) were because I was following along as much as I could with Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9. I'm no horror movie expert, and wouldn't even have said I was all that into them, but after watching 50+ horror and horror-adjacent movies this year I might have to reconsider that. At the very least I can enjoy horror movies that aren't very good, and feel like I got something out of the time I spent watching them, which is not true of a lot of other genres. (Musicals and movies about musicians is another category that usually works out regardless of quality, although there were a couple of notable exceptions this year.)
I don't really pay any attention to awards nights, but I thought a fun way of sharing some of the older movies I've watched this year would be to give out some awards of my own.
Most Disgusting: Braindead (a.k.a Dead Alive).
I've seen some disgusting movies in my life, and even just this year, but this is streets ahead of all of them. It's really, really, really disgusting. Trust me.
Also nominated (but a long, long, long way from winning): Ticks (one of two movies on this year's list to feature a very young Seth Green); Dagon (mostly just for one scene, but it was grotesque); Society (ditto). RNGHPNo.9 was responsible for my watching everything in this category!
Most Reminiscent Of A Video Game I've Played: the first four Paranormal Activity movies
I get the impression that if I'd seen more found-footage horror I might have found this series less intriguing, but I haven't, so I didn't. Although by the fourth instalment things had gone a long way off the rails, it featured the most exciting appearance of Phasmophobia-like gadgetry yet: green Kinect sensor dots in a dark room, through which something can be seen moving, just for a moment .... Video cameras (with night vision), smudge sticks, motion and sound detectors, and even a baby monitor that looked like an EMF reader from the game showed up. Looking out for Phasmophobia parallels helped smooth out some of the rougher edges of these movies and keep the ride feeling fun, although I don't think I'll be venturing any deeper.
Most Useful When Watching Television Quizzes: To Catch a Thief.
Question setters love to test contestants' knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's cameos.
Most Unsettling: Hereditary.
I didn't realise until afterwards that this was made by the same director as Midsommar. If I had realised earlier, I might have been a bit more prepared for how emotionally brutal it was. Really good, but not something I could in good conscience recommend to anyone, ever.
Also nominated: Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, ich seh). Not rough going for most of the running time, but towards the end there was a scene that I found physically impossible not to look away from.
Best Use Of Non-Supernatural Scary Things: Jaws
Okay, I hadn't seen Jaws before and was mostly watching it to have watched it. Cultural capital and all that. But I was really impressed! This is one of an unfortunately large number of movies that are hard to watch in 2022. The baffling selfishness and terrible decisions of people in power wrt things like catastrophic public health risks no longer seem implausible to the point of threatening to break immersion; instead, they make it all the more frightening because we know it's exactly what would happen. Anyway. Really enjoyed the visuals and Richard Dreyfuss, who according to my preliminary research was never as appealing before or since.
Also nominated: Green Room. Neo-nazis are terrifying even when none of them are played by Patrick Stewart, and when things start going wrong in this movie they go so wrong.
Best Use Of Lily Tomlin: 9 to 5
Admittedly, this also stars Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, but Tomlin was the main draw for me and did not disappoint. The others were also absolute powerhouses. The concerns and demands of the female office workers in this movie still feel depressingly contemporary. Some of the jokes would not have made it into a version of the movie filmed today, though.
Also nominated: Big Business (also the second movie I watched this year with a tiny Seth Green), which has Tomlin playing two characters and Bette Midler playing another two characters, and at least as many ensuing highjinks as that might suggest.
Most Overdue Campy Nineties Classic: Strictly Ballroom
After seeing Muriel's Wedding last year I felt well equipped to venture back into the Nineties Australiana vault. I don't know if I could really have enjoyed either movie when they came out - some kind of cultural cringe effect? - but seen from a respectful distance of a decade or two this is endearing rather than embarrassing. I felt quite a fondness for all the cartoonish scene-chewers, and although ballroom is not my style at all I'm pro-dance enough to enjoy this movie's spectacle anyway.
Also nominated: Romy & Michelle's High School Reunion, which is a touch less camp and induced a few more cringes from a 2022 viewpoint, but reinforced my belief that Lisa Kudrow is a comic genius and featured an unexpectedly perfect resolution-through-dance.
Most Astonishingly Un-Dated-Feeling: M
This movie was made in 1931! What? Restoration is magic, but it can't change the filmmaking, and M holds up really well with very little "for the time" disclaiming required.
I've run out of steam thinking up awards categories, but a few really good older movies I saw this year were, in no particular order:
- Samson and Delilah
- West Side Story (the new one)
- Sound of Metal
- Suspiria
- Rabbit-Proof Fence
- Parasite
- The Personal History of David Copperfield
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
It's been a good year for watching movies. I might not watch quite as many next year.