By all accounts, the film industry is going through a bit of a lull right now. Some of that is no doubt due to the ongoing health and safety effects relating to the global pandemic, but there’s also talk of an issue around the huge television spectaculars (hobbits, dragons, superheroes and outer space, you know the type), plus certain streaming platforms snapping up their own VFX companies and thereby getting priority treatment.

Keeping track of what films are coming out when has been pretty difficult over the last couple of years, partly because of delays to release dates for obvious reasons, but also because it’s never quite clear how something is going to hit our screens. With a deep desire not to go to the cinema, I’m reliant on streaming options instead, and whilst it’s getting better all the time (Disney+ early releases, Apple TV rent it whilst in cinemas, etc), knowing when this stuff will be available is hard.

It’s fair to say, I watch a lot of movies. Since starting the Film Watch process back in 2009, as of yesterday, the total is 1273 and rising fast. Initially, the goal was to simply increase my knowledge of films, but soon it became bigger and bolder than that. The aim became to watch 100 movies a year, and then to try and beat the previous year’s total, and that was going well until 2020 - the year of lockdown, where the total rocketed to 142.

So I did this round up last year, quickly running through other posts that had already collected upcoming releases and pulling out films that I thought I’d be interested in. Turns out, I picked twelve films and only managed to watch half of them. Oh well! Let’s see how well I do this year. For reference, I’ve looked at the BBC, a selection from Total Film and a pretty long list on IGN.

I recently discovered the podcast Robot or Not which is an audio show where: “Jason Snell asks John Siracusa to rule on the meaning of various words and concepts. It’s not just about robots anymore.” I have been listening to the entire back catalogue, partly because the episodes are so short but also because they’re so fascinating. As the title suggests, the concept started out solely about robots but has branched out to food, ethics, religion and actually quite a lot about food.

Two recent conversations about movies have made me realise there’s a key component of the digital rental process that is missing and would make life so much better. At the moment, on Apple in particular, you can buy a film for a high price initially that drops the longer a film has been in the world. Or you can rent a film for a slightly lower price but only keep it for a certain amount of time.

Just a bit of inspiration from an old episode of Radio 1’s Screen Time podcast with Ali Plumb. As I’ve said to people on Instagram and Twitter quite a lot lately, don’t be ashamed of your opinions. If you happen to, for example, not like The Favourite, and everyone’s saying how amazing it is, but you’re like, I don’t like it. Don’t feel ashamed, don’t be like, oh I’ve got to watch it again so I can teach myself to like it.

So I’ve just binge watched all six Rocky films in a row, not all in one day, I’m not a maniac, but without watching other films in between. Somehow despite having the least interest in, and probably actively disliking boxing, these films grabbed my attention and became something of an obsession. The drama is brilliant. The dialogue nutty. The training montages legendary. What I loved most of all, though, was how inspirational Rocky is as a character.

An interesting piece about film credits aired on Marketplace last week, discussing why the in- and out- credits on films have gotten so much longer than previously. It explained why this has occurred and started with a look at the closing scroll on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. “The credits last a whopping nine minutes and thirty seconds, that’s an addition of more than three minutes over the original 1993 Jurassic Park…

There are lots of articles written at this time of year looking back on the months gone and looking forward to the next twelve, and I’ve been intrigued by the variety of “best upcoming films” that have been touted. How many of them am I looking forward to? I had a browse through a few articles (Wired and The Guardian, in particular) and picked out the films that stood out to me.