2021 Movie Log in Review

It's that time again, when I post my my movie log in review for the previous year and reflect on another year's worth of movie watching. 2021 continued to be dominated by the pandemic, which affected my movie viewing in several ways. I saw exactly one new release in an actual theater in 2021, and that was the disappointing Marvel offering, The Eternals. Alabama has done almost nothing to curb Covid cases, and theaters just haven't felt safe or worth the risk. Vaccinations did allow me to return to my lifetime learners and retirement community residents for film programs in the summer and fall, and I really enjoyed being with them again. With my family still at home for much of the year, newer movies remained a more popular group choice in the evenings, and I had less time to squeeze in classics that I hadn't seen before. We also watched a lot of British murder mysteries and Disney+ TV series.

Here's the list for 2021 - let's hope that we'll eventually see some normalcy again in 2022!

January (15)

The Return of the King (2003)

The Enchanted Cottage (1945)

Valley Girl (2020)

Dragonslayer (1981)

The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (2003)

The New Mutants (2020)

Fisherman's Friends (2019)

Judy (2019)

Never Too Late (2020)

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Max Reload and the Nether Blasters (2020)

Evil Under the Sun (1981)

The Mirror Crack'd (1980)

House (1977)

The History of Future Folk (2012)

 
February (9)

Yojimbo (1961)

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)

Space Sweepers (2020)

Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella (1997)

The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934)

Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)

Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

Justice League Dark: Apokalips War (2020)

 

March (2)

Legally Blonde (2001)

Stagecoach (1939)

 

April (6)

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

The Gay Divorcee (1934)

So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

Mystery Men (1999)

Dark Shadows (2012)

The Reluctant Debutante (1958)

 

May (7)

Scooby Doo (2002)

In the Good Old Summertime (1949)

Summer Stock (1950)

The Harvey Girls (1946)

Separate Tables (1958)

Rachel and the Stranger (1948)

Bathing Beauty (1944)

 

June (11)

Streets of Fire (1984)

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

42nd Street (1933)

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

Dangerous When Wet (1953)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

In the Heights (2021)

Luca (2021)

Suicide Squad (2018)

Roxanne (1987)

Hidalgo (2004)

 

July (16)

Demolition Man (1993)

The Mummy (1999)

Black Widow (2021)

The Avengers (2012)

Pygmalion (1938)

My Fair Lady (1964)

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

She's All That (1999)

Victor/Victoria (1982)

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

The Opposite Sex (1956)

Miss Congeniality (2000)

Ocean's 8 (2018)

The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

Jungle Cruise (2021)

The Truman Show (1994)

 

August (7)

Ivanhoe (1954)

The Birdcage (1996)

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2020)

The Green Knight (2021)

Jurassic Park (1993)

Jurassic Park II: The Lost World (1997)

Cruella (2021)

 

September (4)

Cinderella (2021)

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

The 39 Steps (1935)

The Haunting (1963)

 

October (11)

They Drive by Night (1940)

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

The Duff (2015)

The Haunted Hotel (2021)

Death on the Nile (2004)

Good News (1947)

House on Haunted Hill (1959) - Again!

Carnival of Souls (1963)

The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962)

Monster House (2006)

Horror of Dracula (1958)

 

November (7)

The Sparks Brothers (2020)

To Have and Have Not (1944)

Free Guy (2021)

The Harder They Fall (2021)

The Eternals (2021)

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) - 2x this month

December (16)

Love Hard (2021)

The Big Sleep (1946)

Single All the Way (2021)

Mixtape (2021)

My Man Godfrey (1936)

A Castle for Christmas (2021)

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

Matrix Resurrections (2021)

Encanto (2021)

Scrooged (1988)

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Gremlins (1984)

Gremlins II (1990)

Love and Monsters (2020)

White Christmas (1954) 

Total film count for 2021: 111

2020, The Year Without Movies

2020 - a year of masks, not movies.

The last movie I saw in a theater was Onward back in March of 2020. It was spring break for my college freshman, who had brought a friend home for the holiday, and that week we were also finally closing on the sale of our old house, six months after moving into our new one across town. It should have been a celebratory week, but instead the pandemic loomed over us. The small talk at the closing was all about the virus, but in vague terms; nobody had really grasped what was about to happen. We had been to our usual theater earlier that week to see Onward with the kids, but it was never crowded there, and I didn't really think about it. By March 12th, when we closed on the sale and went out to dinner to mark the occasion, I was suddenly terribly aware of how crowded the restaurant was and for the first time felt a sense of panic about other people that has now become all too familiar. By the end of the week we were making a headlong rush back to the college in Florida to clear out the kids' dorms because the school was shutting down.

I haven't been inside a movie theater or a restaurant since then, and I don't know when I'll be back. The restaurant is still there - we've enjoyed their curbside service several times - but the movie theater is gone. I haven't driven by the spot where they're now demolishing it, but I feel its absence. I wonder what the friendly ticket seller we always chatted with is doing now. I hope she found another job before they officially closed the place and sold it. There are other theaters in town, farther from our house and more expensive, but I have no idea when I'll consider going to one of them. Vaccination is probably still months away for me, and by then, who knows what will be happening with all these new variants of the virus?

One of the last movie days with the retirement community.

2020 was a long year for a lot of reasons, but among the things we've lost are the movies. I don't mean streaming, of course. The streaming services had a banner year, and right now they're betting on another one. What we lost was the communal experience of movies that happens in a theater when people who might have nothing else in common gather to laugh, cry, scream, and shout at flickering images on a big screen. Somehow that seems even more precious when I consider the broken, divided state of our nation. We had movies in the Great Depression and World War II to see us through the dark days. They lifted spirits, brought people together, and showed us how to be resilient and brave. In 2020, when we really needed that experience more than most of us could remember, we couldn't have it. All of my film programs with lifetime learners and retirement communities were suspended indefinitely as the virus locked us down. The movie theaters closed, some forever. We had to watch our movies by ourselves, at home, and it isn't the same. 

Some of the new releases have been delayed again and again, waiting for the expected return to normalcy. Others were dropped to streaming services instead, either to lure new subscribers or to get some return on the investment through premiere access fees. Many movies that were in development had to shut down, which means the impact of the pandemic will be felt for years to come. Right now, as we complete the first month of 2021, we really don't know when movies or moviegoers will return. We don't actually know IF they will return, either. It's possible that the future will always be different from the past we've left behind. Perhaps I'll look at this blog post a year from now and feel relief. Perhaps I'll read it and laugh ironically at my naivete. Only time will tell.

I've missed the movies this last year. I've missed the people I shared classic movies with at the library and the retirement community. I've missed being able to think about movies and write about them, but the pandemic and the upheaval in the country have fractured my attention into sharp bits of crisis all coming down like glass. I'll post my 2020 review of films watched soon, but my comforts this last year were more cinematic popcorn than brain food. We'll see if 2021 restores our collective sanity.