The traditional mid-point of my movie year

July 31st does not mean a lot on most people's calendars. For major league baseball, it's the deadline for completing trades -- in a usual season, anyway. This year, it's only a week into the season, and could be one of the last days of the season if COVID-19 has anything to say about it.

For me, July 31st usually represents a turning point in the focus of my viewing year.

A couple years ago I informally realized that I have two halves of my movie year, though the movie year doesn't follow the traditional calendar. Because I finalize my year-end rankings in mid to late January, that represents the end of the second half of the year, if we want to reverse engineer it. So the first half of the year begins in February, and includes the months March, April, May, June and July. That's six if you're counting. During this half of the year, I focus more on older movies and not as much on new releases, though for sure I keep pace on new releases as well.

The start of August marks a shift in those priorities, and it is ushered in by the Melbourne International Film Festival, which starts the last few days of July or the first few days of August. It's doing that this year as well, in online form, starting on Thursday. They're calling it "MIFF 68 1/2," because it's not the full 69th year of the festival. Fair enough. Anyway, this shift means that in August, September, October, November, December and January -- that is also six months -- I make new movies much more my focus as I try to see most of the titles people will be talking about at year end. I still see older movies, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between.

As we hit this pivot date in the weird movie year of 2020, I thought it would be interesting to see how I have thus far conformed to my usual rhythms.

For starters I can tell you that there has been a big change to my ordinary viewing habits this year, and it has only tangentinally to do with not being able to see movies in the theater. The change does, though, almost perfectly coincide with the pandemic.

You may remember that back in early March, my former editor at ReelGood basically retired, leaving me the reins to the site. (Not for age reasons -- he's like 14 years younger than I am -- but for reasons of shifting priorities.) I say "basically" because he does intend to continue reviewing, but the shutdown of movie theaters and new releases coming out of Hollywood has left him disinclined to write anything yet.

For a while, that left me as the only critic writing for the site. Eager to keep up appearances as much as I could, a proposition complicated by COVID-19, I started reviewing more than half of the new movies released to Netflix. Before this year, I had only ever reviewed one Netflix release, that I recall. This year alone, I've reviewed ... 22.

Add to that the 11 movies I've reviewed during this period that were available from other sources, either in the theater (during the brief time they were open) or on VOD, and I've reviewed 33 new movies since the pandemic began. During a similar period in previous years, I might have reviewed 20 to 25, since my editor also would have been reviewing about that many.

In the past two months, at least, I've had a little help. I've brought a former ReelGood critic back into the fold, and thus far he has reviewed four movies for me. That has theoretically freed up some time on my viewing schedule for other viewings, but the net effect has still been that my first half of the year has felt unbalanced toward new releases.

Interestingly, though, this is more a perception in my mind than a reality. Because I keep track of such things, I can tell you that The Hater, which I watched on Thursday night as the last movie in the first half of my year, was the 56th movie from 2020 I had seen. A pretty impressive total, I guess, given the dearth of new releases in the theater.

I'm a little ahead of my 2019 pace, but not significantly. My 56th 2019 release was a film I saw at MIFF, Baby. I saw that one on August 10th of last year. So I guess my increased viewing pace of streaming releases has been balanced out by the fewer movies I've seen in the cinema (only three since I watched Downhill on March 10th).

But another thing has cut into viewings of older movies -- older movies that were new to me, that is. This year I've been on an increased pace of watching movies I've already seen, part a comfort food response to the pandemic, and part a nostalgic response to the passing of my mother. So far in 2020 I have seen exactly 50 movies I had seen previously, which seems like it could be a record to this point for any year. (That includes January, a lot of which fell into the first half of the viewing year because my 2019 list was finalized on January 13th.)

Well, I picked the wrong year to compare that with, because by this time in 2019, the total number of movies I had already seen was ... 63. But that's because I was working on the project of rewatching movies from the 2010s for my best of the decade list, at least one per week, in addition to other movies I was rewatching for other reasons. So 2019 was, in that sense, as unusual a viewing year for me as 2020.

But if you compare it to 2018, which was more of a typical year, I had rewatched only ... 42. Okay, eight more than that is not significant.

So why does 2020 feel so light on older movies I'm seeing for the first time?

I guess one reason for that is that while I'm in this comfort movie mindset, it feels easier to watch unseen movies from the last few years, rather than digging back into cinema history. This year I've seen only 24 new-to-me movies whose release year starts with a 1, and a full seven of those are a result of my monthly classic documentary viewing series, Audient Authentic. That's compared to 52 non-2020 movies whose release year begins with 2.

Anyway. This analysis probably is useful to nobody but me. It is useful to me, though, because it helps me re-set my priorities.

Given the small number of times I've dipped into cinema history with my choices in the first half of my movie year, I think I will be slower this year to shift my focus to the current year's releases. The start of MIFF later this week complicates that somewhat, though I'm certain to watch fewer films overall when I'm doing it from my own living room, when there are fewer choices overall, and when many of the films playing the festival are not from the same caliber of director as in the past.

I'll start tonight, watching something with a 1 beginning its release year, though as of right now I don't know what.