I hate to tempt fate, as it is currently 5:45pm on New Year’s Eve, but if you are reading this, you made it through 2022 alive. Congratulations and I’m sorry. The arbitrary allotment of time known as the year 2023 is full of new possibilities and we should all leap on them with gusto (unless it is crypto. Please don’t buy into ponzi schemes.).
My movie-watching was way down from 2021 going into December. I should have factored in that I’d be done with class for the semester (and for the degree!) and that I’d end up with a lot more free time, as I watched sixty-four (64!) movies in December. That still left me about 30 movies short of 2021’s absurd numbers, but jeez.
2022 in Summation
Creative output was slower in 2022 than in 2021 and 2020. I went back to work full-time for several months, but it tanked both my writing and my schoolwork. So I quit the job so I could finish my degree, and some of the extra time then splashed over to this site.
I started two new features of which I’m quite proud. The first was the monthly Curated Beef lists, where I make recommendations on new releases (or newly available old releases) for the upcoming month. The amount of movies, shows, streamers, and other creative content is staggering, and it is easy to miss something even if it is something that is perfect for you. So Curated Beef was a chance for me to share my anticipations with others, and I received a lot of positive feedback on it. I plan to resume monthly curated lists in the new year.
The second feature was placing some important film or literary character within the larger historical context. I’m a fiend for history, systems, and career retrospectives, and this was an opportunity to share that with others. Streaming services are organized to highlight what they think will get the most views and most new subscriptions. Which is fine: you do you, ya know? But it tends to decontextualize art in a way that I find frustrating. Placing art within the context of when it was released, what it influenced it, what it influenced… I feel this is important. Obviously an art can stand on its own in a vacuum and still be enjoyed, but with filmmaking especially, an art form that is entirely collaborative, I think context enhances the experience. So the Cozy Mystery Pub and Connective Tissue features are two sides of the same coin, one taking a famous fictional character and highlighting that character within film and TV, the other taking a film and discussing its antecedents and the films that it influenced. I learned a lot while researching for these articles.
Total number of articles published (excluding this one): 20
Total number of “monthly” curated lists: 7
Total new followers on Instagram, Facebook, and Letterboxd (excluding bots): 120
Favorite of my articles: “A Man Sits in Silence, Looking Passively at a Crumbling Wall: On the Legacy of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï“
Alleged Beef Awards
2022 marks the first installment of our Alleged Beef Awards, or All-Beefies. I wanted to highlight favorite performances and movies of the year. I’ll be adding retroactive All-Beefies for 2012-2021 over the next few months.
Plans for 2023
I will be continuing the Connective Tissue, Curated Beef, and Cozy Mystery Pub features. Ideally I will have monthly installments of Curated, and will alternate monthly between Connective Tissue and Cozy Mystery Pub. There are plenty of fictional characters within the Cozy Mystery genre, and even more if I stretch the definition to include famous characters with adaptations across the decades, like James Bond, OSS-117, Sherlock Holmes, and Lone Wolf and Cub. Connective Tissue requires a good bit of shoe leather on my end, especially as I chase influences not immediately obvious (that is, not immediately web searchable).
My preferred way to review new releases is the 5 Thoughts On… format, so look for that to continue. This gives me a concrete framework and lets me highlight what I feel are my most relevant thoughts about the movie. As this site is a work of love and not profit, I can’t write in-depth analyses of everything and I don’t know that my audience wants to read them. Check out a (paid) writer like David Ehrlich if you want 5000 words on every Whitney biopic and awards bait ode to Olde Hollywood.
The biggest aesthetic change in 2023 will be the addition of a gallery page that accumulates all of the art that I’ve drawn for the site.
Anyway, Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in 2023.