2016: Films Watched, Books Read
Ah, 2016, you horrible mess of a year, goodbye forever. Well, goodbye in just another moment. First I’d like to take stock of all the movies I saw and stuff I read. Then we can move it along to 2017.
Last February I wrote a bit about how I would try my best to track my viewing throughout the year. For the most part I managed to keep a decent log in Day One, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. Getting the films out of the app so I could organize them in a list proved frustrating. It made me wish I had stuck with Letterboxd all year.
Anyway, in that same February post I set the following goal for myself:
If I can do it, I’d like to try and keep a ratio of at least 6:1 in terms of old vs. new films I watch this year. In other words, for every six films I watch I should see at least one 2016 release.
How did I do? I saw 65 older films and 31 new releases, 2:1. Not bad! But 31 is way too low. Last year I saw 35 new releases, so this is kind of a let-down. I think the list of older films I saw this year is extremely well-rounded, but I feel like I barely saw any of the major new films of the year.
So let me just get this out of the way now: my goal for 2017 is to see at least 50 new releases and maintain that 2:1 ratio of older films.
I can’t really do a top 10 list this year since I feel like I missed so many great films. Films I enjoyed the most, in no particular order, would probably be Hail, Caesar!, Miles Ahead, Green Room, Little Sister and Morris From America. I was a huge Sausage Party booster when it premiered, but my enthusiasm wore off a bit when it came out in theaters.
If those films are any indication, it should be clear that smaller, more independent films are where all the action was in 2016. Rogue One is probably the best tentpole film of the year, but look at the competition… I know few will agree with this, but of the superhero films (set Rogue One aside for a moment) last year I probably enjoyed X-Men: Apocalypse the most. Pound-for-pound it felt the most visually interesting.
I was a voracious reader in 2016. Somewhere along the way I got into comics. I’m still working my way through older titles, though I dipped my toes into single issues with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run of Black Panther. I’m still not quite ready to be a guy who hits the comic shop up every Wednesday (single issues confuse the hell out of me) but I’ll keep reading what I can.
My favorite comic discovery was probably China Miéville’s Dial H, which is so, so good. That led me to his The City & The City, a wild concept executed perfectly.
I really tried to branch out my reading last year and I think the list below shows I did a decent job doing so. Some of the reading had purpose, scratching little itches about ideas I had at the time. Some was just a distraction. The Aeneid almost destroyed my reading streak for the year, but I powered through and I’m glad I did. A curiosity: why is The Odyssey perpetually filmed but The Aeneid is practically invisible in cinema. It seems the only movie version of the tale is Giorgio Venturini’s 1962 The Avenger. It’s on YouTube…
So here it all is in one place: stuff consumed in 2016. The films link to IMDb, the books and comics go to Amazon.1 I tried my best to keep the links as useful as possible, pointing to the info I would want to know. I indicated if I saw films at a festival. All of the new releases I saw this year were either DCP screenings or seen at home. I indicate if the older movies were seen on film or DCP; otherwise I watched them at home. Books and comics are in the order they were read.
New Releases
- Jimmy Vestvood: Amerikan Hero, Jonathan Kesselman,
AFF 2014
- Creative Control, Benjamin Dickinson,
SXSW 2015
- Hail, Caesar!, Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, February 13
- Presenting Princess Shaw, Ido Haar, March 11
SXSW
— My Review - Little Sister, Zach Clark, March 12
SXSW
- Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols, March 12
SXSW
- Don’t Think Twice, Mike Birbiglia, March 13
SXSW
- Hardcore Henry, Ilya Naishuller, March 13
SXSW
- Keanu, Peter Atencio, March 13
SXSW
- Sausage Party, Greg Tiernan & Conrad Vernon, March 14 & August 14
SXSW
— My Review - Carnage Park, Mickey Keating, March 15
SXSW
- A Stray, Musa Syeed, March 16
SXSW
— My Review - Morris From America, Chad Hartigan, March 16
SXSW
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zack Snyder, April 3
- Deadpool, Tim Miller, April 9
- Dough, John Goldschmidt, April 28 — My Review
- The Invitation, Karyn Kusama, April 17
- Captain America: Civil War, Anthony Russo, Joe Russo, May 26
- X-Men: Apocalypse, Bryan Singer, June 4
- The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015, July 9
- Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier, July 13
- Ghostbusters, Paul Feig, July 16
- Amanda Knox, Rod Blackhurst & Brian McGinn, October 7
- The Girl on the Train, Tate Taylor, October 8
- Weiner, Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg, November 26
- Zootopia, Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush, November 26
- Sing Street, John Carney, November 28
- Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle, November 30
- High-Rise, Ben Wheatley, 2015, December 6
- Sing, Garth Jennings, Christophe Lourdelet, December 26
- Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gareth Edwards, December 29
Older Films
- The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino, 2015, January 3
70mm
- Straight Outta Compton, F. Gary Gray, 2015, January 9
- Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962, January 22
- The Man Who Loved Women, Blake Edwards, 1983, January 28
35mm
- American Dreamz, Paul Weitz, 2006, January 30
- A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson, 1956, January 30
- Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino, 2009, January 31
DCP
- Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979, February 1
- Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, Rob Hedden, 1989, February 2
35mm
- Irrational Man, Woody Allen, 2015, February 5
- My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki, 1988, February 8
DCP
- The Man Who Loved Women, François Truffaut, 1977, February 9
- Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975, February 9
- Mistress America, Noah Baumbach, 2015, February 10
- The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Preston Sturges, 1944,
- Candyman, Bernard Rose, 1992, February 16
35mm
- Smorgasbord, Jerry Lewis, 1983, February 19
- Confidentially Yours, François Truffaut, 1983, February 20
- Fury, Fritz Lang, 1936, February 23
35mm
- The Invisible Man, James Whale, 1933, February 23
35mm
- World of Tomorrow, Don Hertzfeldt, 2015, February 26
- Spotlight, Tom McCarthy, 2015, February 26
- Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes, 1998, February 29
35mm
- Zombie, Lucio Fulci, 1979, March 1
35mm
- Ponyo, Hayao Miyazaki, 2008 March 2
DCP
- Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater, 1993, March 4
- Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., Leslie Harris, 1992, April 8
- House, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977, April 12
35mm
- What We Do in the Shadows, Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, 2014, April 15
- The Trial, Orson Welles, 1962, April 26
- Amy, Asif Kapadi, 2015, April 28
- All the Way, Jay Roach, May 25
- The Comedy of Terrors, Jacques Tourneur, 1963, June 9
- Loves of a Blonde, Miloš Forman, 1965, June 21
35mm
- Prince of Darkness, John Carpenter, 1987, June 21
35mm
- Anomalisa, Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman, 2015, July 12
- Big Night, Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott, 1996, July 13
- The Big Short, Adam McKay, 2015, July 16
- Hannah and Her Sisters, Woody Allen, 1986, July 19
35mm
— Hannah came up in a post later in the year. - The Lost Boys, Joel Schumacher, 1987, July 26
35mm
- Tenebre, Dario Argento, 1982, August 2
35mm
- After the Fox, Vittorio De Sica, 1966, August 4
- The Naked Kiss, Samuel Fuller, 1964, August 4
- The Big Lift, George Seaton, 1950, August 6
- Zero for Conduct, Jean Vigo, 1933, August 6
- Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas, 2014, August 7
- Persona, Ingmar Bergman, 1966, August 9
35mm
- Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966, August 9
DCP
— I wrote about seeing these two films back-to-back. - The Red Shoes, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948, August 11
35mm
- Pete’s Dragon, Don Chaffey, 1977, August 12
- Bob Roberts, Tim Robbins, 1992, August 12
- The Wrong Box, Bryan Forbes, 1966, August 17
- Point Blank, John Boorman, 1967, August 18
- Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, August 20
35mm
- Pretty Maids All in a Row, Roger Vadim, 1971, August 23
- The Americanization of Emily, Arthur Hiller, 1964, August 27
- The Phynx, Lee H. Katzin, 1970, August 31
- The Verdict, Sidney Lumet, 1982, September 1
- Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley, 1992, September 2
- A Woman, Charles Chaplin, 1915, September 3
DCP
- A Night In The Show, Charles Chaplin, 1915, September 3
DCP
- Police, Charles Chaplin, 1916, September 3
DCP
- Another Woman, Woody Allen, 1988, September 23
- Identification of a Woman, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982, November 27
- Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg, 1993, December 18
Books Read
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
- Hasidic Jew Night at the Roller Rink, Keith Ruckus
- Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction: Popular US Novels, Modernism, and Form, 1945–75, Tom Perrina
- Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, A.O. Scott — Some thoughts from April.
- Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?), J. Hoberman
- The Assistant, Bernard Malamud
- Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf
- The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
- The Circle, Dave Eggers
- On Photography, Susan Sontag
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
- The Natural, Bernard Malamud
- The City & the City, China Miéville
- The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami
- Stealing God’s Thunder: Benjamin Franklin’s Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, Philip Dray
- The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
- The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, Brooke Gladstone
- Indignation, Philip Roth
- The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, Gretchen Bakke Ph.D.
- South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami
- Jelly Roll: A Blues, Kevin Young
- Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, Gene Wilder
- Field Work: Poems, Seamus Heaney
- Aeneid Book VI: A New Verse Translation, Virgil, Seamus Heaney
- Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life, Michael Lewis
- Walden, Henry David Thoreau
- The Aeneid, Virgil
- Design as Art, Bruno Munari
Comics
- Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition Book One, Brian K. Vaughan
- Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition Book Two, Brian K. Vaughan
- Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition Book Three, Brian K. Vaughan
- Y: The Last Man, Vol. 7: Paper Dolls (Y: The Last Man, #7), Brian K. Vaughan
- Y: The Last Man, Vol. 8: Kimono Dragons (Y: The Last Man, #8), Brian K. Vaughan
- Y: The Last Man - The Deluxe Edition Book Five, Brian K. Vaughan
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street (Transmetropolitan, #1), Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 2: Lust for Life (Transmetropolitan, #2), Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard (Transmetropolitan, #3), Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 4: The New Scum (Transmetropolitan, #4), Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City (Transmetropolitan, #5), Warren Ellis
- Black Panther #1, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Black Panther #2, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 6: Gouge Away, Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 7: Spider’s Thrash (Transmetropolitan, #7), Warren Ellis
- Dial H, Vol. 1: Into You, China Miéville
- Dial H, Vol. 2: Exchange, China Miéville
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 8: Dirge (New Edition), Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 9: The Cure, Warren Ellis
- Transmetropolitan, Vol. 10: One More Time (Transmetropolitan, #10), Warren Ellis
- Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke
- Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit, Darwyn Cooke
- Richard Stark’s Parker: The Score, Darwyn Cooke
- Richard Stark’s Parker: Slayground, Darwyn Cooke
- Superman Archives, Vol. 1, Jerry Siegel
- Superman, Volume 1: What Price Tomorrow?, George Pérez
- Superman, Volume 2: Secrets and Lies, Dan Jurgens
- The Flash, Volume 1: Move Forward, Francis Manapul
- The Flash, Volume 2: Rogues Revolution, Francis Manapul
- The Flash, Volume 3: Gorilla Warfare, Francis Manapul
- Superman, Volume 3: Fury at World’s End, Scott Lobdell
- The Flash, Volume 4: Reverse, Francis Manapul
- The Flash Vol. 5: History Lessons (The New 52), Brian Buccellato
- Superman, Volume 4: Psi War, Scott Lobdell
- Superman: Red Son, Mark Millar
- Superman, Volume 5: Under Fire, Scott Lobdell
- Superman: The Men of Tomorrow, Geoff Johns
- Dark Night: A True Batman Story, Paul Dini
- Kill My Mother: A Graphic Novel, Jules Feiffer
- Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Alan Moore
- Superman, Volume 1: Before Truth, Gene Luen Yang
- Superman, Volume 2: Return to Glory, Gene Luen Yang
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