212 New Releases in 2012: A guided tour and strategy overview

by Don Handsome

One more year-end wrap-up on The Audient, but the difference is, I'm not writing this one. For more on Don Handsome's incredible feat, here's Don:

Am I right in assuming that all Film Nuts have their own Number? 

I posit that our Numbers equal the maximum amount of time we can physically sacrifice to the gods of the cinema as represented by the number of newly seen films (repeat viewings should not count toward Numbers, as these represent a very different style of viewing) divided by a relevant unit of time. A Film Nut’s Number is stated regularly in conversation about the movies, as in: "I try to see one-a-day," or "I’m doing three-per-week," or "I can't feel good about myself if I’m not seeing at least ten-each-month." We wear our Numbers on our sleeves, but they are not out in the open to be judged. In the unspoken code of the Film Nut, it is understood that none of us would ever short change the movies, and so our Numbers are just facts about us that break the ice and bridge conversations. But our Numbers DO mean a lot to each of us as they represent our time doing something we love to do.  

My Number is 250 Films Per Year.  I’m proud of this Number - it's all I can do for something I love. For me, 250 is comfortable: I’m seeing about 150 new releases and another 100 non-new releases for the first time each year and it just feels right. I’ve been with this Number for about six years now, and with it I never feel like I shortchange the medium or that I’m cheating my personal life.   

This is the story of how I threw my Number under the bus for no good reason.

Because readers of The Audient don’t know me, I feel as if I need to provide some context. While I’m not as rigorous a list-maker as our friend Vance, I do believe in tracking what I see and I certainly take some pride in having seen a ton of flicks in my time. I am not a professional but I am a film geek, a snob, and an obsessive. I pride myself on cultivating a deep film vocabulary. I am an honest fan and a reliable dabbler. In short: I am a Film Nut. And because I have been friends with Vance since we were three, we’ve developed much of our nutiness in tandem. We’ve been sharing our film lists on Oscar nomination day with each other for about 15 years now – since a time when both of our Numbers were probably about 100 per year. Nowadays, I think our Numbers are generally in the same ballpark and while I usually see more new releases each year, Vance edges me out in older films seen for the first time. But I think he was taken aback when I announced to him that I was going to try to set a personal record 200 new releases in 2012 – effectively increasing my number by 50.

SPOILER ALERT – I made it. I more than made it, actually. I SMASHED IT.

I saw 212 new releases in 2012, and since I saw 121 (love that symmetry) older movies for the first time, my Number for 2012 was at 333. It was a big step up. It’s the most films and the most new releases I’ve ever seen in one year. It's more moves than either Vance or I have ever seen in one year. So a few months ago Vance asked that I commit to documenting this run for The Audient and I happily obliged.

Before I continue, here’s the product - all 212 films I saw in 2012, from best to worst:

1              Silver Lining Playbook

2              Zero Dark Thirty

3              Looper

4              Moonrise Kingdom

5              Oslo, August 31st

6              Newlyweds

7              The Cabin In The Woods

8              Sleepless Night

9              Holy Motors

10           Bernie

11           Damsels in Distress

12           Rust and Bone

13           Killer Joe

14           Fat Kid Rules The World

15           Beasts of the Southern Wild

16           Waiting for Lightning

17           Sound of My Voice

18           Django Unchained

19           Girl Walk // All Day

20           The Imposter

21           Alps

22           Compliance

23           The Loved Ones

24           Killing Them Softly

25           The Deep Blue Sea

26           Prometheus

27           Wreck-It Ralph

28           The Bay

29           Jesus Henry Christ

30           V/H/S

31           Deadfall

32           The Dark Knight Rises

33           Fitzgerald Family Christmas

34           Shut Up and Play the Hits

35           Red Hook Summer

36           Klown

37           Your Sister's Sister

38           Lawless

39           Bones Brigade: An Autobiography

40           Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

41           Sinister

42           Ruby Sparks

43           Marley

44           Jeff, Who Lives At Home

45           Beyond the Black Rainbow

46           A Cat in Paris

47           The Amazing Spiderman

48           Turn Me On, Dammit!

49           Cure for Pain

50           The Queen of Versailles

51           Magic Mike

52           Coriolanus

53           Kill List

54           Tonight You're Mine

55           Knuckleball!

56           The Hunger Games

57           Friends With Kids

58           Celeste and Jesse Forever

59           The Perks of Being a Wallflower

60           The Kid With a Bike

61           The Five-Year Engagement

62           The Hole

63           Argo

64           The Loneliest Planet

65           The Perfect Family

66           Headhunters

67           Pitch Perfect

68           Goon

69           The Secret World of Arrietty

70           The Pact

71           Lola Versus

72           Take This Waltz

73           Chimpanzee

74           Extraterrestrial

75           The Master

76           Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

77           Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

78           Ted

79           Head Games

80           Footnote

81           Premium Rush

82           The Avengers

83           The Do-Deca-Pentathalon

84           Lay the Favorite

85           Liberal Arts

86           Paranorman

87           21 Jump Street

88           Get the Gringo

89           The Corridor

90           Safety Not Guaranteed

91           Hope Springs

92           Anna Karenina

93           This Is 40

94           Irving Welsh's Ecstasy

95           Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap

96           Dark Shadows

97           Gerhard Richter Painting

98           Bachelorette

99           The Vow

100         The Campaign

101         The Comedy

102         Take Me Home

103         Vamps

104         Lincoln

105         Contraband

106         Jack Reacher

107         One for the Money

108         Flight

109         2 Days in New York

110         From Rome With Love

111         Trouble With the Curve

112         Butter

113         The Grey

114         The Good Doctor

115         The Hobbit

116         The Words

117         Wanderlust

118         Dark Horse

119         Safe House

120         360

121         Norwegian Wood

122         Casa de Mi Padre

123         Men in Black 3

124         For a Good Time Call…

125         Arbitrage

126         Hitchcock

127         Skyfall

128         Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

129         Mirror Mirror

130         Total Recall

131         Jiro Dreams of Sushi

132         Cosmopolis

133         Life of Pi

134         Savages

135         Price Check

136         (Rec)3 Genesis

137         The Watch

138         Red Lights

139         God Bless America

140         Les Miserables

141         Sleepwalk With Me

142         Snow White and the Huntsman

143         Man on a Ledge

144         The Details

145         The Innkeepers

146         American Reunion

147         Cloud Atlas

148         The Snowtown Murders

149         Battleship

150         The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

151         Katy Perry: Part of Me

152         Chronicle

153         Hotel Transylvania

154         Good Deeds

155         Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie

156         Lockout

157         The Odd Life of Timothy Green

158         Detachment

159         The Raid: Redemption

160         This Means War

161         The Hunter

162         Giant Mechanical Man

163         The Bourne Legacy

164         The Impossible

165         Chasing Mavericks

166         The Color Wheel

167         Brave

168         Union Square

169         Apartment 143 [Emergo]

170         Safe

171         Silent House

172         Indie Game: The Movie

173         The Pirates! Band of Misfits

174         Ice Age: Continental Drift

175         L!fe Happens

176         The Letter

177         Beneath the Darkness

178         The Woman in Black

179         Haywire

180         The Man With the Iron Fists

181         The Raven

182         Hysteria

183         Snow on tha Bluff

184         The Devil Inside

185         Act of Valor

186         Fun Size

187         Stolen

188         Paranormal Activity 4

189         Sparkle

190         Rock of Ages

191         The Three Stooges

192         The Chernobyl Diaries

193         The Babymakers

194         Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

195         Step Up Revolution

196         Project X

197         The Dictator

198         John Carter

199         Red Tails

200         Piranha DD

201         Red Dawn

202         That's My Boy

203         Wrath of the Titans

204         The Lorax

205         Gone

206         Hit and Run

207         Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted

208         The Expendables 2

209         The Apparition

210         Rise of The Guardians

211         Branded

212         The Collection

I don’t know that I want to editorialize about these films beyond the editorializing that the order does for me. This post is not directly about what I liked and didn’t like (and I’m frankly still exhausted by this run) but I will say that even though I am ABSOLUTELY positive that my top films are the ones that I most treasure from 2012, I am disappointed that they aren’t unconventional choices. This is not how I identify as a film fan. Typically I like movies that non-Film Nuts have never heard of. But we can’t all pick the Ruby Sparkses each and every year.

Lesson #1 from 2012 is the more new releases one sees, the more the element of surprise is eliminated from the ranking equation. I have a firm scoring system (to be discussed) that is designed to remove all the mystery from why one movie ranked higher than the other. The problem with seeing so much is that you begin to lose definition on the fringe, and though you still appreciate small innovative films, they tend to lose out to all the noise.  Thus I found that I’ve been gravitating towards films that leave a lasting impression on the whole instead of movies that may have made a significant stride towards advancing the medium, and I’m not sure this is a good thing.

Why Would I Want to Mess with My Number?

The short answer is that I did it because I could. Or maybe I did it because I’ve always wanted to just let it rip and see how many films I could see in a year. But there was no real driving reason behind it. While I argue that 2012 was a fine year for film, I wouldn’t say that it was an exceptional year. But nonetheless at some point in the year I made a choice that 2012 was the year I was going to really push myself. It was one of those organic-but-arbitrary decisions that is probably a result of deep psychosis, but because I believe that there has to be a tangible explanation for everything, I’ve come up with the following excuses:

·         The Slow Start – I saw my first film (Norwegian Wood) right about when I normally start seeing new releases – in late January. But then the next movie I saw was Chronicle nearly a month later in mid-February. And then I wasn’t on the board again until I saw Goon on March 6th. By the end of March I was at only five movies for the year and that made me freak out. I remember giving myself a pep talk around tax day, in which I vowed to turn this around before it got out of control. I guess I listened to myself, because by the beginning of July I had seen 50 films;

·         Chasing The Cabin In The Woods - On April 20th I saw and adored The Cabin in the Woods. It was so clearly the best movie I had seen at that point in the year, that I wondered if it would actually top my year-end list. There is something so intoxicating about seeing a film that captures your imagination that you can’t help but chase more of the same; and

·         The Holy Ranking System - Prior to 2011, I ranked the films I saw in the year by piecing together a list.  I would find relative positions by deciding that one film was better than one but worse than another and with enough tweaking throughout the year, I would eventually end up with an order. It was never perfect and I never liked this method because it always insulted my empirical sensibilities. I would actively target movies that I felt were too high or too low, but would ignore others that didn’t jump out at me and I was always nagged by the possibility that I could be inflating the actual quality of films that I wanted to like above films that might be superior achievements. 

Surely top ten lists and year-end rankings are understood to be models of personal finesse and taste, but I was bothered enough by this that in 2011 I developed a scoring system to do away with much of the guessing. My system is based on a ten-point score with movies gaining points based on categories such as "gut reaction," "style," "look," "editing," "story," "performance," "sound" and "wow factor." I won't go into much detail, but please understand that I have clear parameters set for each category (except wow factor, where I allow up to one point for just being sucked into a movie's aura) and I believe that they work really well at approximating the very things I watch films for and the very qualities I want to be scoring. I ran a test of the system in 2011, and I really liked the results I got – they both felt true to my impulses AND were defensible. I liked the results so much, that I grew a little infatuated with my system and I couldn’t wait to see how well it would work for me in 2012 – the more films the merrier. Of the three excuses I’ve provided, I think this had the most influence on my record-setting run in 2012.

How Exactly Does One Raise Their Number?

While I believe in the purity of the theater experience, and prefer the theater in all circumstances, I don’t hold myself to seeing everything in the theaters. Like all of us Film Nuts, I feed my Number by going to the theater, renting movies from the store (and sadly, my beloved neighborhood video store closed this past fall, becoming another Dunkin Donuts that I won’t patronize), utilizing Netflix, visiting a Redbox or two, and watching through iTunes, OnDemand or Amazon.  But Lesson #2 of 2012 is that you just have to embrace the many different watching options that are out there, and appropriately I embraced some new-to-me "delivery mechanisms" that are primarily responsible for getting me up and over my goal:

·         I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas in 2011 – I’m not too much of tech guy, and I never thought that I’d venture into the tablet world. But the Fire really works for me. It's not overly complicated, but I can read books on it and I can rent new movies cheaply from Amazon, download them onto my device and watch half while sitting on the bus on the way to work and half while sitting on the bus on the way back from work. I did this approximately 18 times in 2012;

·         Mastery of the Business Trip Cram Session - I have a job that takes me out of town every month or so. I travel for meetings and workshops that take place all over the southern part of my state during the daylight hours, but since I generally travel on my own, my nights on the road are generally mine. Years ago I embraced seeing one movie while travelling, either in the theater or via hotel pay-per-view rentals, but in 2012 I truly familiarized myself with the theaters of downstate Illinois. With no obligation to be home with my kids for dinner, I found I could start watching films at around 5PM and not stop until I’d seen three, sometimes four, movies;

·         I discovered Drive-In theaters.  I’ve long been obsessed with the Drive-In. This is an offshoot of an obsession I have with California, which is not where I live. I associate Drive-Ins with quintessential Route 66-style Americana that is so evident in southern California. As I discovered this year, drive-in movie theaters are actually part of the lore of Route 66 all along that old road -  which just so happens to have historically begun in Chicago, where I live. So this year I really pushed the Drive-Ins, seeing as many movies as I possibly could there. Around here, the Drive-Ins are only open from Memorial Day to Labor Day and none of them are less than an hour away from where I live, but I still managed to see eight movies at the Drive-In:

§                   The Amazing Spiderman (End of the year ranking: 47/212);

§                   The Avengers (82/212);

§                   The Bourne Legacy (163/212);

§                   Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (202 / 212);

§                  Prometheus (26/212)

§                Snow White and The Huntsman (142/212);

§                   Ted (78/212)

§                   21 Jump Street (87/212)

On the whole, it doesn’t appear that the Drive-In yielded too many gems – most of the above films are middling at best, but only three of the above were films I planned on seeing anyway (The Avengers, The Bourne Legacy and Prometheus), so it could be argued that the Drive-In helped give me an edge this year. Incidentally, it could also be argued that there is a profound “Drive-In Effect” on these films. Nearly all of them are actually higher than maybe they need to be (Prometheus especially) - maybe that ranking system of mine needs some tweaking.    

·         We Dumped Cable - Last December, my wife and I decided that we would like to save over $100 per month by swapping cable for a Roku Box and a Hulu subscription. This has its drawbacks (I felt incredibly disconnected from a healthy baseball obsession that I have) but it had a measurable effect on my film totals in 2012. With this life change we never ended up adding new television shows to our repertoire in 2012, and in fact we jettisoned two sitcoms and one procedural from our watching rotation. This action saved us roughly two-hours a week for 22 weeks throughout year – that’s time for about 22 movies, if you’re counting at home.  

·         Let Time Be the Decider - In April I decided that I wouldn’t let desirability drive my film choices.  Instead, in some cases, I would adopt the philosophy that a movie starting NOW is as good as any and whenever I had the chance, I simply would walk into a theater and get a ticket to see the next unseen film starting at that theater regardless if I wanted to see it or not. Utilizing this methodology, I saw the following films:

§                       
      Branded (211/212);

§                     The Collection (212/212);

§                     Fun Size (186/212);

§                    Hit and Run (206/212);

§                    Red Dawn (201/212); and

§                    The Watch (137/212)

Lesson #3 of 2012 is that this methodology is junk. I may have added several films to my Number using it, but nearly all of them are bottom feeders.  Clearly, this is not a worthwhile strategy and I will never engage it again.  

More Lessons Learned 

I have always maintained a working list of the films that I want to see in a given year. Typically, I only add films to this list about which I hear or see something that peaks my interest. My theory is that I am my own best resource and that films I recommend to myself are generally the films that hit best with me. Admittedly, I do a lot of talking about movies that I want to see at home, at bars, with Vance, and around the office, so I am aware that discussing my watch-list may bias me towards them and incite a self-fulfilling prophecy. But with the establishment of a working scoring system, I thought that I might be finally able to see if  "The List" really works.

Lesson #4 from 2012 is that The List really works. As 2012 started I had four films on my anticipated film list to start the year (The Cabin in the Woods, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper and Django Unchained).  Throughout the year I added 12 more. With the exception of Gangster Squad, which didn’t open in 2012, I saw all of them. Here is how they performed:

§           Bernie (10/212);

§          Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (39/212);

§          The Cabin in the Woods (7/212);

§          Cloud Atlas (147/212);

§           The Dark Knight Rises (32/212);

§           Django Unchained (18/212);

§           Killing Them Softly (24/212);

§           Lincoln (104/212);

§           Looper (3/212);

§          The Master (75/212);

§          Prometheus (26/212);

§          Rust and Bone (12/212);

§          Silver Linings Playbook (1/212);

§         The Sound of My Voice (17/212); and

§          Zero Dark Thirty (2/212)

There is a pretty excellent track record here. Five of The List movies were in my Top Ten for the Year (in fact, my entire top three comes from the list), an additional other four of them are in my top 25. The List isn’t perfect -- I didn’t really see the charm of the intentionally vague The Master, and I didn’t like the minutia of Lincoln set against Speilbergian pomposity -- but even those two are in my top half for the year. The lowest ranked of all of these is Cloud Atlas which I almost missed seeing because, even though it was on The List, it kept feeling like a chore (it was). Still I think that the success rate here speaks for itself. 

Lesson #5 for 2012 is that regrets are OK. I did, at some point, come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t see every film in 2012. There are regrets here. I clearly wish I had never seen The Collection, and I have a hard time justifying that I saw that vile film, but didn’t see Seven Psychopaths, Amour (I actually couldn’t see this without traveling to New York or LA), Promised Land (apparently my Gus Van Sant obsession no longer applies to films he’s directing for other people), Not Fade Away (I’ll make it up to you, David Chase), Room 237, How To Survive a Plague, The Paperboy and Samsara. These are my biggest regrets for the year, but I’ve come to realize that we need to save things for later. New Releases are only part of my Number and I look forward to the above list filling in some of my 2013 Number and beyond.

Lesson #6 for 2012 is that you should always stay true to your Number. So my new Number is 333 per year, right? Absolutely not. I’ve alluded to this in the above, but let me come right out and say it – pushing myself in this way was not fun. I’m tired. I spent more money on movies than I have in any other year, and I stressed myself out numerous times throughout the year. I shirked some friendship responsibilities and in the end, I found that I didn’t even enjoy watching the movies anymore. It was an awful experience. So my Number stays at 250. As I said, 250 is comfortable and I owe it to the movies to enjoy seeing them.

What’s 2013 Look Like?

In order to keep my number at 250, I’m obviously never walking in to a theater to see the next available movie again. This was a fruitless exercise. And I think I’m going to eliminate the Kindle Fire from the methods that I use to watch films – there are plenty of books to read on the bus. But I do vow to expand The List in an effort to get back to what’s most important about being a Film Nut: Loving The Movies.  

So what’s going to be first in 2013?  Like Vance, I think I’ll see Gangster Squad first -- it’s the only movie currently on The List.  But I won't see it for a couple weeks -- not until I spend some time at home researching what is on tap for 2013 and not until I recharge my battery by indulging in some rewatches of tried and true classics (Blue Velvet, I’m looking at you).  Oh yeah, I’m also going to finish the complete series rewatch of The Sopranos that I started last night (David Chase, I told you that I’d make amends). 
 

What can I say?  I come heavy or not at all.