The beginning of this year, after previous frustration trying to remember all the movies I saw in years past, I vowed to keep a list of everything I saw in theaters this year. So, as I kept the list, I just started putting the ones I liked better on the top, and worse ones at the bottom. Thusly, I now have a complete catalog of every movie I watched this year, from best to worst. Discussion below, comments encouraged.
MOVIES I SAW IN 2004:
1. City of God
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Hero
4. The Incredibles
5. Finding Neverland
6. Mean Girls
7. Garden State
8. Spider-man 2
9. Peter Pan
10. Big Fish
11. I Heart Huckabees
12. Kill Bill, volume 2
13. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
14. Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle
15. The Triplets of Belleville
16. Kinsey
17. The Village
18. Hellboy
19. Shaun of the Dead
20. Fahrenheit 911
21. The Ladykillers
22. A Very Long Engagement
23. Ocean's Twelve
24. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
25. The Manchurian Candidate
26. Dawn of the Dead
27. Blade: Trinity
28. Alien vs. Predator
29. The Bourne Supremacy
30. Control Room
31. Anchorman
32. King Arthur
33. Dodgeball
34. Napoleon Dynamite
35. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
36. Saved!
37. Alexander
38. The Terminal
39. Monster
40. Secret Window
41. Van Helsing
42. The Chronicles of Riddick
43. Starsky & Hutch
44. Taxi
Some comments:
As I started keeping the list, movies fell into subcategories pretty easily. The first eleven films are the tops, obviously. No contest there, I walked out ot theaters being able to place them, more or less. 12 through 16, again, really good, but not quite good enough to get into the winners' bracket. 17 through 22 were enjoyable, but flawed in some way or another. 23 through 31 or so, now there we start getting into the best of the bad. 32 through 39, getting into the 'really bad' category. There's only a couple in there I would watch again by choice. And then there's the real winners, 40 to 44. All astoundingly bad in their own right.
Within each subcategory, there's always a couple films that I kept switching back and forth. I know I described in detail to a great many people how I cannot decide which is worse, Van Helsing or Riddick (Van Helsing finally got the edge, because I think it was a bit more self-aware of its terribleness. I never got that sense of fun out of Riddick.) This is what surprised me the most, is that asides from a few exceptions (A Very Long Engagement, Ladykillers) there wasn't any real confusion about which subcategory they should go in. It was just a matter of degrees as to is A any worse than B.
This year, if I'm crazy, I might add hyperlinks in the file, to each of my initial LJ reviews of the movies I saw. And I hope to see *even more* this year. I can easily name ten movies off the top of my head that I wanted to see in theaters last year, but didn't for one reason or another.
So. Discussion? Think I'm really wrong about something here?