A streak that surely cannot continue

When it rains it pours, and when I write about a certain type of thing on this blog, it seems that’s all I can write about.

So yes, this is my third post this week about a streak, in a manner of speaking. This one is not a very long one, but I’m going to write about it now before it inevitably ends.

It’s not a very profound one, either, but my gut says to write about it, so why not?

And that is this:

I’ve seen five movies released in 2020, and each one I’ve liked more than the one before it.

So yeah, both not very profound and not very likely to continue very much longer.

You’d expect that kind of thing to happen early on in the year, as January is not the time of year you should expect really good movies to be released. But in each of the past few years, one of the earliest movies I saw was also one of my favorite. Fyre was the third movie I watched in 2019 and it ended up in my top 20 for the year.

This year, it’s going a bit more like you’d expect. I guess I thought five movies were statistically significant enough to write about.

I started out with a very low bar to clear, as Dolittle was the first movie I saw in 2020. I gave it one star on Letterboxd, but spared you a rant about it here. (Though if you’d like to check out my review, by all means.)

The current streak would have seemed unlikely when the second movie I watched, Tyler Perry’s A Fall From Grace, jumped all the way up to 3.5 stars. But I have an informal rule about those star ratings. If I think better of it, I can change the star rating, as long as I haven’t since logged another movie on Letterboxd. I thought better of it before the window elapsed, and downgraded it to only three stars. It probably really deserves 2.5, but what can I say, I have a soft spot for Perry movies.

The streak might’ve been dead right there because the next movie up was Birds of Prey (Long Title I Won’t Type Out Here). As a sequel/spinoff to the abysmal Suicide Squad, it stood a good chance of giving Dolittle company in the doldrums of my 2020 rankings. But I ended up liking Cathy Yan’s movie more than I expected to – the Cathy Yan part of it might have had something to do with that – and the movie nudged ahead of A Fall From Grace on my running list.

But the bar was not so high that my next movie, Color Out of Space, had a hard time clearing it. That’s a flawed movie too, but its three stars were slightly more favorable than the three stars of either Birds of Prey or Fall From Grace. I mean, it’s a new adaptation of a Lovecraft story I read only last year, so it had that going for it even if Crazy Nic Cage and some good body horror didn’t prop it up.

Now is a good time to write this post, though, because Emma has made things a lot trickier for its successor. At first I gave Emma only 3.5 stars, but upon further reflection – there’s that informal rule again – I decided that my enjoyment of this confection was a lot more appropriately described at the four-star level. I go on more about it in this review, just posted within the last couple hours.

Now, it’s possible that the next movie I see could surpass Emma without being a four-star movie. I have trouble explaining it, but my rankings are not simply a matter of mathematically ordering all the films I see in a given year according to their star rating. But it’s more likely to need to hit four stars than it would be later in the year, as enough time won’t likely have passed for me to realize I was too generous toward Emma.

I don’t actually know what that next movie will be at this moment, but there’s a pretty good chance it will either be The Call of the Wild or Sonic the Hedgehog, either of which could involve my kids.

And while there’s some chance one of those movies will be better than Emma, better write this now and just tick off another Thursday on this blog.