Reflecting On Movies Watched (Jan 1 2022 - Apr 8 2022)

At the time of writing, I have watched 98 movies this year, at the pace of one movie per day. I logged each movie on my letterboxd account and ingested them to a local database to gain some insights.

This is a way for me to share some of the movies that I enjoyed while analyzing my tastes in movies. Also, hoping this might help someone when making the ever frustrating decision as to what to watch.

Now, let's take a look at what genres I tend to gravitate towards more often.

Comedy being on top is not surprising. I tend to watch a lot of lighter movies as a way to wind down after a long day at work. Action, Romance and Adventure all pair well with comedy and hence taking a bigger space.

My Cousin Vinny stands out among the comedy movies I watched. It has a simple but interesting premise. Marisa Tomei is absolutely charming in it. It is also tagged as a Crime movie but is more of a courtroom comedy/drama.

Looking at the next big category Action, a couple stands out - Nobody and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. Nobody takes inspiration from the John Wick series, and I didn't expect Bob Odenkirk, of all people, to carry an action movie. The latter one is directed by Guy Ritchie. It is a period spy movie and one of the slickest ones I have watched.

Taking about Crime and Guy Ritchie, I watched Snatch. It is gritty, bold with an ensemble cast. And other notable Crime movies that managed to keep me engaged are Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino and Cruella. Cruella might be an unpopular opinion, but I thought Emma Stone was fantastic in it.

But this alone doesn't give us the whole picture because movies rarely fall into just one genre.

So I tried creating sub lists of two genres, in order to see which combination I prefer. For example, let's take the movie The Proposal.

> Raw Data -> 'title': 'The Proposal', 'genres': ['Comedy', 'Drama', 'Romance']

> Processed data -> 'title': 'The Proposal', 'genres': [('Comedy', 'Drama'), ('Drama', 'Romance'), ('Romance', 'Comedy')]

This did result in around 78 unique combinations. I used the top 10 after sorting the list based on the frequency.

Again, no surprises here, Rom-Com's topped the list. Some good ones but underrated in my opinion are Long Shot and Henry's Crime.

For Action, Adventure, the Robert Downey Jr starer Sherlock Holmes with it's amazing soundtrack (Discombulate!!) is still quite good.

Drama, Romance is next, West Side Story (2021) by Steven Spielberg and French Dispatch by Wes Anderson are great. I watched West Side Story (2021) without knowing anything about the original, and it was like a watching a car crash in slo-mo. And I know French Dispatch is in its own genre, Wes Anderson, but IMDB tags it as Drama, Romance for some reason. Nonetheless, it is one of the better movies, even though it is not Wes Anderson's best work.

I wanted to dig deeper and check how my rating is spread out for these genres. So I whipped up a scatter plot.

Comedy has an average of 2.5 over 60 movies. Which makes sense to me because comedy as such is incredibly hard to pull off but at the same time pretty easy to land in mediocrity. Action and Romance fare slightly better in a smaller sample size. It is interesting to see both of them land almost on the same spot. Drama, as expected, is a lot higher. Since, Drama as a category is aimed at evoking a reaction.

Other notable mentions are The Batman and Turning Red. I could talk all day about The Batman and why it is the second-best Batman movie to exist. Mask of Phantasm being the obvious choice for the best Batman movie. Turning Red may not be the best Pixar movie or even my favorite, but it is still a Pixar movie.

I also want to mention a few regional movies. Mostly Tamil or Telugu ones because I am from that part of the world. I did my annual rewatch of Alaipayuthey, Minnale and OK Kanmani. I rewatch these movies because they are pleasing, well directed and more importantly for the legendary songs. Maanaadu was a gamble in Kollywood, and I am glad it paid off. Mahaan proved Vikram's acting skills haven't declined and he can still carry a movie. As a cricket fan, 83 was special and will always be. Shyam Singha Roy was one of the better telugu movies I watched this year, so far.

And that's about it. I still have a lot of movies in my watch list. Most notable of them are Everything Everywhere All at Once and Drive my Car. And there are a lot more movies releasing this year. If you think I ought to add something to my watch list, please feel free to let me know.