2014 in Movies

I didn’t start off the year wanting to watch more movies than any other year since I started keeping track of my movie watching in 2001, but apparently there isn’t a whole lot of anything good on television, so it just sort of happened.

Since I had gotten a box set of all the Bond films for xmas, I did start the year with a plan to watch them, which is 23 right there. I also wound up watching all of the Alien movies which merged into the Predator franchise and, after threatening for years, I finally watched all of the Fast and the Furious films, and the man with no name trilogy. I also enjoyed the Dark Knight trilogy, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and Memento had to be watched twice…once in the original format and a second time in chronological order.

So, which was the best new movie seen in 2014? Well, I don’t believe in such things because, unless they are very similar subject matters, they shouldn’t be compared. Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down are basically the same so they could be compared to each other fairly, but you can’t really compare The Maltese Falcon to Casablanca. And in no circumstance should either of the former be compared to either of the latter.

However, I will say that of the new movies I saw in 2014, the two where the expectation going in was completely blown away by the actual movie were Snowpiercer and Coherence.

Final Tallies

I watched 204 movies totaling 22,807 minutes, which is about 380.12 hours, about 15.8 days, or about 4.34% of the year. The average length of a movie was 111.8 minutes.

72 of the movies were rated R and another 72 were rated PG-13, followed by 33 with a PG rating, and the rest were either not rated or some older “general” type rating from the early days of movie ratings.

The months with the highest totals were December (30), November (23), February (22), and August (22). I assume that’s because three out of the four were colder months and any new TV shows that might have been of interest for me were either canceled or I had lost interest in them. August was right before the new TV season started, so there wasn’t much on TV anyway.

The months with the lowest totals were May (8), October (9), and September (11). Not really sure why May was so low, but September and October had a slew of new or returning TV shows, and I opted to check them out instead of a movie on some week nights.

I doubt I will come close to 204 movies in 2015, but if the current trend of awful TV shows continues, I might just challenge that number after all.

Jan 7, 2015