But first let's look at movies in general.
By the end of the November, I had seen only two fewer new movies in 2024 than I watched in all of 2023.
That might seem a bit staggering, since December is always a busy viewing month, but there's a logical explanation -- outside of me just being a freak. In 2023, I rewatched 52 movies that I had already seen. In 2024, that number is only 33. Those extra viewing hours have to go somewhere.
And so they have gone into movies I haven't seen, and disproportionately into movies released in 2024. At this writing, I have seen 132 such movies -- or really, 132 movies that qualify by my rules. (There were three movies released in foreign countries in 2023 that only got released in the U.S. in 2024. And yes I go by U.S. release date even though I live in Australia.)
I didn't watch my 132nd film in 2023 until December 19th, so yes, I am nearly three weeks ahead of last year's pace.
This would be good if I were trying to set records each year. Really, I'm trying to avoid records, because watching too many movies sometimes makes me think my life doesn't have quite the dimension it should.
There is good reason for me to be ahead of last year's pace. Two, actually:
1) The Oscar nominations are revealed almost a full week earlier this year than last year. In a break from tradition, they are being revealed on a Friday, and that Friday is January 17th. Compare to last year's January 23rd, a traditional Tuesday, and you see I'll lose a week of viewing on the back end this year. That will actually be a relief for two reasons, but I can't number them because I'm already in a numbered set. One is that by early January, I start to crave an end to the madness. The other is that Friday morning will be a Friday evening for me, so I won't have to work the morning after I post my list, and can sleep in after staying up late to watch the nominations live and to post the list.
2) I am going to America for a little less than three weeks, in a little more than two weeks. And though I traditionally do view a fair number of movies on Christmas trips to America -- well, the single one we've done as a family, which was eight years ago -- I've vowed this year to not make myself absent to other activities that require my presence just because I want to watch some bad horror movie that happened to come out in the current year.
In light of this whole preamble, and despite the last two things I told you, I decided over the weekend that I needed a one-night break from 2024 movies, before I start to really sprint.
That turned into a two-night break when I fell asleep watching the movie I chose as that break on Saturday night, meaning I had to finish it on Sunday night. And it turned into a three-night break when I watched (only the first half of) The Dead Don't Hurt last night, as I mentioned I might do in yesterday's post, again falling asleep.
To give you some sense of how laser-focused I'd been, the only two movies I'd watched in all of November that were not 2024 movies were the movie I watched for my monthly Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta challenge (Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes), the movie for my own Blaxploitaudient series (Jack Hill's Coffy) and only a single rewatch, a post-election sort of comfort food (Anne Fletcher's The Proposal). All the rest were '24, 24-7.
I had intended to fit one more outlier into November, but since I ended up watching more than half of it on December 1st, that's the month it got credited to.
Sometimes, you just have to watch Red Sparrow.
Why Red Sparrow?
Well, I can do numbers again:
1) They've been promoting it on Netflix. Either it's a new arrival, or it just found its way to the front of their algorithm as requiring promotion.
2) I like Jennifer Lawrence and have seen (almost) all of her films.
3) I have to admit I was a little intrigued by the promise of some J-Law nudity, which was a piece of info that escaped about this movie at the time it was released, though that's not quite as much of a novelty after she shed it all again in No Hard Feelings. (In the end, I found whatever hoopla there had been over that a little overblown.)
4) There was a thematic link with the film I'd watched on Friday night, The Crow -- at least a flimsy one. Yes, if I hadn't had this post to write, I could have written a post called "Bird weekend on The Audient."
5) I like spy thrillers? No wait, I don't actually like spy thrillers very much. So we can stop at four.
Like it sometimes feels in late January, when you finally shed yourself of the burden of watching films released in the (now previous) year, it did feel like a bit of a relief -- a respite -- from the status quo. I did feel a little liberated as I watched it.
But I guess more than that I felt sleepy. I mean, it is 2 hours and 20 minutes long.
And I liked it okay, certainly more than its reputation. There are some things I really like about it. One of which is the effect they achieved of showing Lawrence's character's leg break during a ballet performance, in one uninterrupted shot, in as gruesome a bending as you can imagine. I went back and watched that about three different times to try to pinpoint how they created the illusion, but I could not.
And the cast is good, with lots of big names like Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, Mary-Louise Parker and Matthias Schoenaerts. It looks good -- Francis Lawrence is a good director -- and I was mostly interested from moment to moment.
In the end, though, spy thrillers are spy thrillers, and they tend to leave me a bit cold.
Okay, now it's Tuesday, and I last watched a 2024 movie on Friday night.
I can now quickly transition from a respite to a panic over all the things I haven't yet seen.
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