Archive for February, 2011
My Year in Film: 14 Favorites
I tried a little experiment this year. I wrote down (okay, typed out) every film I watched this year, the date I watched it, and assigned it a letter grade. Grading films like that is sadly reductive, but it was a first step toward externalizing and therefore crystallizing my reactions. (I filled in some of 2009 from memory and from my Netflix history.) I had hoped to write brief two- or three-sentences responses for each film, but I didn’t succeed there. Perhaps in 2011.
I’ve found the practice to be instructive in many ways, but most of all it has been fun. Now as we leave a movie theater, my wife wants to know what my grade is going to be, and I ask her grade. How dare I give True Grit a B, she tells me, since it was easily an A- at least. (Much like what happened to Kelli Marshall, I was talked into a B+.) One of the joys of watching film is the company of the people we watch it with, and most of my cinema experiences this year have been with my wife, whose taste fortunately overlaps a great deal with mine.
I watched 170 films in 2010, roughly one every two days. And if I counted correctly, I watched over 50 films with a 2010 release date. That means there are still a lot of films, including many critical favorites I didn’t see. No Dogtooth. No I Am Love. No Certified Copy. No Sweetgrass. But you can see grades for all the films I did watch here (sortable by release date).
