The first 2022 movie I'm not reviewing

You get a sense of how much my reviewing at ReelGood has become a one-man operation by the fact that I'd seen 11 2022 movies and reviewed all of them, most recently The Batman nine days ago. That's also the last thing that has been posted to ReelGood, which makes for an unusually long drought, a drought I'm usually hustling to prevent. That's why I'm sure to watch the new streamer releases when I can't get out to the theater, and why so few slip through that I didn't review.

In fact, to crush this particular drought I'm planning to watch Netflix's The Adam Project tonight with the hope of getting up a review by Friday morning, so I don't go the whole work week without posting something. It should have been Turning Red, which my son wanted to watch while we were in Sydney last weekend, but we didn't bring an HDMI cable with us, and surprisingly, the TV in the hotel room didn't use one. I made the call that we couldn't just watch a new Pixar movie on my laptop screen. 

There has been one other review of a 2022 movie on the site, Moonfall, but it was reviewed by a pair of my reviewers doing a bit of a Siskel & Ebert routine, and I haven't yet watched it myself. Sadly, these are busy guys (one of them is in France the last I checked) so they haven't been able to contribute any solo reviews so far this year.  

Well, that streak of 11 straight 2022 movies that I both watched and reviewed is finally over. 

Even though it was the topic of a little zeitgeist buzz earlier this year, I wasn't really anticipating the documentary The Tindler Swindler -- in fact, when I saw it advertised on Netflix, I thought it was yet another TV series. 

Watching it Tuesday night, six weeks after it debuted, for another documentary alternate Tuesday, I am obviously not going to review it. I say "obviously" though I should probably explain that I have a guiding philosophy that a review must post on my site within two weeks of the film's release, preferably one week, preferably only a couple days -- though the Thursday (theatrical) and Friday (streaming) release dates make that tricky, given that I don't post on ReelGood on the weekends. 

That's all I really wanted to say today -- not much, but after writing so much on this blog during the first 75 days of the year, the current three-day drought seemed epic. 

Though I should give you a word or two of my thoughts on The Tinder Swindler, and why I'm glad I didn't review it.

I gave the movie 3.5 stars, or 7/10 according to the ReelGood rating scale, but it's just the kind of movie I've given a 3.5-star rating by default in the past, which really might deserve more of a three. (And I said I was not going to do that anymore, for the umpteenth time, earlier this year.) It's well made and the subject matter was interesting, but I guess I didn't end up feeling particularly surprised by what I saw. I mean, one of the great truisms of the world is that scammers know how to scam. This one might have had a slightly higher degree of difficulty, but it didn't represent an unusually high level of commitment before the scamming proper began.

I'm also glad I didn't review it because I don't really want there to be a 1:1 relationship between movies I've seen and movies I've reviewed in a given year. It never ends up that way by the end, of course, because you miss movies in the theater or streaming and catch up with them later (The Tinder Swindler being the first example of that in 2022). But this particular streak of 11 straight was reminding me that I need to do a better job finding other people, reliable people, who can write for ReelGood, so the whole site doesn't rest precariously on my ability to watch this week's handful of new streamers.