Let Yourself Go ... To Old Hollywood

2019 Year-in-review

Time for another year-in-review post. It appears my movie watching in 2019 broke the record I had set in 2018. I watched 261 films, 233 of which were new to me. This compares to 2018's number of 226 films total and 202 new to me.

The decadal breakdown of the new-to-me viewings:

• 1910s: 1
• 1920s: 8
• 1930s: 88
• 1940s: 80
• 1950s: 47
• 1960s: 6
• 1970s: 1
• 1980s-present: 2

The 1930s still won, but were substantially less dominant than in 2018, with the 1940s and expesially the 1950s making gains relative to last year.

And once again, my rate of watching modern films has fallen to virtually nothing. The only film from the 2010s I watched this past year was a great documentary on the classic Hollywood actress Marsha Hunt: "Marsha Hunt's Sweet Adversity". The only other post-1980 film was the 1994 documentary "George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin". So even when I watch relatively modern movies, they are still about the 1930s-to-1950s.

2018 year-in-review: a record!

2018 was a record year for movie watching for me: I watched 226 films over the course of the calendar year, starting with The Man Who Came To Dinner (1942) and finishing with The Man I Love (1947). The similarity of those titles is purely coincidence, I'm sure.

Of those 226 viewings , 202 were new-to-me. The corresponding numbers for 2017 are 145 total film viewings, 125 new-to-me.

I've only been tracking my movie watching since 2015, so my data does not go back too far. Yet I'm confident those 202 new-to-me films for 2018 are a record for a single year in my life. The largest factor leading to this high number of viewings is our subscription to TCM (via the Sling streaming service). I started that service in August 2017 to be able to see a rare Ginger Rogers film, "Twenty Million Sweethearts", with the idea that it would be temporary. But I discovered that there are so many good films available on TCM that I've never stopped the subscription.

Other streaming services available in 2018 also made viewing classic Hollywood films very convenient: Warner Archive Instant and FilmStruck. Sadly, as 2019 begins both of those services are defunct. WAI merged into FilmStruck early in 2018. And FilmStruck shut down late in the year, due to a notorious decision by Warner Media after the merger with AT&T.

Breaking the 202 new-to-me films from 2018 down by decade clearly shows my preference for the golden era of Hollywood:

• 1910s: 2
• 1920s: 4
• 1930s: 104
• 1940s: 62
• 1950s: 23
• 1960s: 5
• 1970s: 1
• 1980s-present: 1

Breaking all 226 viewings down by how I had access to the films shows the dominance of TCM:

• TCM (via Sling): 120
• FilmStruck (defunct after Nov 2018): 44
• Purchased DVDs and Blu-rays: 39
• Warner Archive Instant (defunct after Apr 2018): 10
• iTunes: 7
• Netflix DVD: 2
• Amazon Prime: 2
• YouTube: 2

A subsequent post will contain my favorite and least favorite movie discoveries from 2018.