My son's birthdays with Paul Rudd

Whenever we can, we go to a movie on my son's birthday, which is also New Year's Day. He's 12 now.

More often than not, Paul Rudd is also there. 

We couldn't go last year, because -- pity us -- we spent the day at Universal Studios Hollywood instead. But this is now three out of the last five years (I don't know why we missed 2023), and in two of those, it's been a Paul Rudd movie.

The most successful was 2024, when we saw Next Goal Wins, making my son the noted soccer fan very happy -- and the rest of us very happy as well. Paul Rudd is not in that. Paul Rudd is, however, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2022) and Anaconda (2026). We enjoyed Ghostbusters quite a bit too, at least that first reboot. 

Four years ago when he was only eight, my son didn't know Paul Rudd from a hole in the ground. Now, however, he recognizes all of his Avengers. We saw a trailer before Anaconda for Crime 101, which stars two of the original six: Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo. He identified Hemsworth straight off, but I had to point out Ruffalo. I didn't bother to tell him that Halle Berry had been in the original X-Men movie, because I don't think that's a reference for him.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure he knows Paul Rudd is Ant-Man and he definitely knows Jack Black, who has been in a disproportionate number of movies he's seen, most recently A Minecraft Movie.

I was hoping Anaconda would be as fun as that, even if it weren't going to be as R-rated as the original. 

Unfortunately, Anaconda was not fun. It was not funny, and it was not fun. In fact I found it quite painful. In fact I couldn't believe, after it ended, that it was only 99 minutes long.

I don't really plan to give you a full Anaconda takedown in this post -- I'll probably have a review up on Monday if you want to read it -- but I did want to express my disappointment with not keeping the birthday win streak alive for my son. 

Oh, I think it stayed alive for him -- he said that he really liked it, though I think he ventured this a little reluctantly, while the credits were still rolling. I said "Yeah!" in an encouraging tone, which walked the line between enthusiastically endorsing his perspective while also not saying it was actually my own. In fact, I did not speak another word about the movie, positively or otherwise, which seemed to work without being awkward. We just talked about other things on the ride home.

I couldn't tell if my wife shared my perspective, though she certainly laughed a couple of times -- which I think was partly out of a desperate desire to laugh. It's been a rough year concluded by an especially rough past few weeks. 

The 15-year-old? I couldn't tell what he thought. He didn't offer up a perspective either way, he just kept his mouth shut, which maybe shows wisdom beyond his years. 

I'll still go back to the Paul Rudd well if he has a new, age-appropriate movie coming out for my son's 13th birthday, but this does feel like another reminder that we can't have nice things. It's just a bit of a rotten time right now, and maybe proof of that is a disjointed, intermittenly diverting but ultimately soulless Anaconda meta reboot with weakly drawn characters and tangential bits that should have been left on the cutting room floor. (The whole part where Steve Zahn has to pee on Black's leg after Black gets bitten by a spider? CUT IT.)

I guess 2026 can only get better from here? 

The year overstuffed with last year's leftovers

I had envisioned an entirely different approach to my traditional year-end post -- not to be confused with the several posts related to my best and worst of 2021, which will come along in a few weeks.

Titles under consideration were "The year movies felt perfunctory" and "The year I stopped updating." The first is self-explanatory, indicating a going-through-the-motions quality to my watching of movies in 2021, and the second refers to a habit I have previously had of updating my records as soon as I'd finished a viewing. My wife used to make fun of me because the credits wouldn't even have stopped rolling, and I'd already be at my computer adding the movie to my various lists. She even came up with a little sing-songy joke at my expense, with the lyrics "Update, update" and an exaggerated pantomime of me typing. Unlike some jokes that hit too close to home, I thought this one was sweet and hilarious.

She couldn't make the "Update, update" joke in 2021 because I would go three or four days, sometimes even a week, between updating my records, at which point I had to add like five movies. That certainly seemed indicative of a decrease in my normal enthusiasm.

But as the date to write this post grew closer, I realized that any end-of-year ruminations focusing on a decrease in my movie appetite would directly contradict the facts in front of me. I'll outline those here.

For starters there is the number of new-to-me movies I've watched this year. My total of 275, with two days left to watch, is trailing last year's total of 276 by the smallest of margins. That was my highest total since 2016 -- and my highest total ever if you remove the years 2015 and 2016, when I blew past 300 while vetting films for that human rights film festival. Depending on how I structure my time between now and New Year's Eve, I could surpass the non-festival record. 

Then there's the number of 2021 movies I will be ranking when my list closes in a couple weeks. That's definitely going to be a record, no two ways about it.

I don't know how this happened because I didn't specifically set out to consume as much new content as possible. There were a couple periods -- such as the month of October, when I watched a lot of 70s horror, and my DVD film festival back in June -- when I neglected new releases for a couple weeks at a time. Plus I had no international flights, which is where I usually collect four or five new movies at once -- on both legs of the trip.

The reality remains, though, that my personal high of 151 movies in 2016 is going to get left in the dust by my 2021 total. I'm at 147 movies as of this writing, and I'm not even closing off the list until January 17th.

I do know how it happened, actually: All the 2020 movies that couldn't come out in 2020 finally came out in 2021.

It explains not only why I'll shatter my previous record, but why I still feel like I'm scrambling to see several dozen significant films before my list closes.

It's one of the reasons this holiday season in particular feels so overstuffed. When can you remember at Christmastime getting the latest movie in three major franchises, those being The Matrix, Spider-Man and Ghostbusters? Only the third of those was supposed to come out in 2020, but earlier delayed releases -- from Fast 9 to Black Widow to Dune to No Time to Die -- have cumulatively placed strain on the release schedule and created a logjam at the end of the year. 

Perhaps the reason this has felt so perfunctory to me, though, is that I've found the overall quality of these films to be down significantly, an idea I will probably dig into further in a couple weeks. 

I'm wondering if there is an ineffable holistic quality to a particular movie release year that gets thrown out of whack when the biggest movies of one year can't get released until the next. The four Marvel movies we got in 2021 are a good example of that, and may have had something to do with the exhaustion I experienced when Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings came out. And also why I might not even see The Eternals before my list closes. (Though you can count on a Spider-Man viewing as soon as I watch the first two Holland movies with my kids, the viewings of which will keep my record number of 2021 movies slightly more modest.)

It's not just me setting personal records. My oldest friend, who does these lists along with me, is expecting to see a staggering 275 films released in 2021, with 300 being an outside possibility. In 2012, I had him write a guest post on my blog when he saw a then-record 212 films, because we considered it worth exploring how he was able to see such an unfathomably large total. He's basically guaranteed of seeing 60 more movies than that in 2021.

On the one hand, this is an encouraging sign for the health of the film industry. Even though methods of distribution are changing, the total number of movies available has not gone down, and may have even gone up. The sun is not about to set on film as an art form, as the most fatalistic among us have worried.

On the other hand ... viewing more movies than I have ever seen is feeling more perfunctory than it has ever felt. 

Maybe a decrease in the total number of films would be a good thing, as it will spread the talent less thinly and make better movies. Maybe. Or maybe the overall contraction of the industry would have deleterious cascading effects we cannot anticipate.

Or maybe all we really need to get things back on track, both in terms of quality and quantity, is to have a "normal" 2022. The thrice-or-more-delayed Top Gun reboot is the only pandemic casualty I can think of that has yet to premiere, so maybe that will finally ride us out of this danger zone.