The idea had been in our heads for a while and it took some time to make it real. We published our first post on July 20th 2012, and today we wish to summarize what we have accomplished in the first year.
Simple numbers first. In one year we have reviewed 330 movies and posted 14 articles, that is almost one post per day. With 87 comments that makes in average more than one new thing to read every day!
We have had more than 2300 clicks, but it is hard to differentiate between YOUR clicks and our own, the ones from search engines, from the blogger site or from the Facebook page linker.
More in details, the diagram below shows you the number of posts in the 52 weeks of the blog's existence. Peaks can be identified at Festival periods, and there were two big ones this year: The Munich Fantasy Filmfest (MFFF2012) and the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFFF2013). We have also posted after date the review of the movies seen at the Strasbourg Fantastic Film Festival back in 2011 (SFFF2011).
Dips are seen on quiter periods or when the weather is nice and we watch less movies.
From one year of posts we can also start to draw statistics on which kind of movies we are watching. For example the following bar chart shows that we majoritarily watch movies from the USA. But a good proportion is occupied by "Central" European movies (England, France, Germany, Spain and Italy). We also watch some English language movies from other countries (Australia, Canada, Irland, New Zealand), movies from Northern Europe (Sweden, Denmark, Norway but also Netherlands and Belgium) and Asian movies (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea).
Note that no less than 18 countries are represented by only one movie so are not shown on the chart.
Which genre of movies are we watching? The pie chart below indicates the main tendencies: Thriller, Comedy, Action, SF, Drama and Horror in equal share. It is interesting to compare those tendencies with the chart of percentage of films made in each genre by year published on a previous post and that showed all genres almost equally represented nowadays, except for Drama and Comedy much more present. Compared to the current movie production, we are biased towards Thriller, Action, SF and Horror and against Comedy and Drama.
The rest of the genres is less represented, but all in equal share: Adventure, Animation, Black Comedy, Documentary, Fantasy, Polar, Romance and War movies.
One could wonder about the meaningfulness of the categories Epic, Melodrama and Western as they are rarely represented.
Which period are we watching movies from? Mostly from the current year (movies we watch at their release in cinemas) and from the past five years (that we probably missed in the cinemas and watch in DVD or Blu-ray), which sum up to 218 movies from the years 2009-2013. We have watched a few oldies (one from the 20's and two from the 40's). It seems like the 60's start to interest us (8 movies), and we are definitely attracted to the 70's (17 movies) and 80's (25 movies). In comparison, the 90's seem to have been really poor cinematographically speaking (19 movies). We have also seen only 40 movies from 2000-2008, probably more because they are recent than because of the quality of that period.
And, do we like the movies we watch? We had selected a system of rating from 0/10 (worst) to 10/10 (best) with a specified meaning for each rating. For example an average movie gets 4/10, to leave us more steps to rank the better ones. What we call a good movie gets 6/10. The histogram below shows the ratings for the 330 movies we have seen. The average rating we gave is 6.03/10 and 68% of the movies get 6/10 or better. This seems optimistic but we often do choose the movie we watch, and we often choose movies that look good to us and finally we know our own taste in movies.
The histogram is not perfectly symmetric (as would dictate a random law) because of the reason just mentionned. Also it seems like there are too many movies rated 6/10 compared to the ones rated 5/10. This is probably because we always enjoy the experience of watching a movie, and this experience alone makes for the extra bit to reach from 5/10 to 6/10.
The 62 movies with rating 8/10 and above can be highly recommended. The movies with rating 3/10 and below helped us keeping a notion for good and bad, but cannot be recommended for people to watch.
Given the small amount of ratings 0/10, 1/10 and 10/10, those categories may be superficial and we could probably have chosen a scale with three categories less (from 0 to 7). On the other hand, it is not so bad to have extreme ratings that we do not meet often.
What are the best movies we have seen this year?
For my part [Jo], I digged into the ratings 8/10 and above, and selected among movies you may not know or consider:
- A History of Violence: very simple and very efficient
- The Sound of Music: not as cheesy as I thought, and superb in Blu-ray
- God Bless America: a nice satiric view of the TV brainwash
- Mientras Duermes: anguish spanish-style
- American Mary: original and sexy horror movie
- Mars et Avril: my favorite from the BIFFF2013
- The Cabin in the Woods: teenage horror flick that takes an unexpected turn
- Cloud Atlas: an original SF and humanitarian story
And for my part [Raf], I would like to highlight movies that otherwise would not be in the media.
- Beast of the Southern wild: for the poesie to tell a drama of a family
- Stille Seelen: for the way of showing the beauty in a culture
- Love exposure: for the crazy story and story telling
- Mr Nobody: for the philosophical and spiritual excitation
- Chico & Rita: for the nice story, nice music and nice language
- Dans la maison: because this shows that French can also do very good thrillers
- Frances Ha: for the simple and exciting story
What next? From the look of things, we believe we will continue maintaining this blog as long as we have something to say and share about movies.
In the coming year, we will continue reviewing all the movies we watch: new ones fresh from the cinema room as well as oldies, classics and special interest ones.
We have a few articles in preparation: continuation of the series of best of Mad Movies 2006-2013, articles about home cinema equipment, overview of the Udine Far East Film Festival from the first time we went to today.
We may participate to a few festivals this year, in order of decreasing likeliness: the Munich FFF 2013 end of August, the Motelx Horror Film Festival in Lisbon mid-september, the Karlovy Vary IFF in Czech Republic in July 2014, and the Udine Far East Film Festival in April 2014.
Until now the blog couldn't be found by search engines. We may change that soon to reach people beyond our friends circle.
Now, we would like to get feedback from YOU, so please write comments below this page to tell us what you like in the blog, what you don't like, what you would like to see.
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We wish you all an exciting cinematographic year. Jo & Raf
I just read some of your film critics and i`d like to ask you if you have certain criteria for choosing the movies you rate?
ReplyDeleteThat's a very interesting question, and we will soon write an Article to discuss about it more in detail. My short answer would be that I usually watch either recent Action or SF movies after a long day of work to relax, or I watch selected movies because of a certain director, actor, topic, time period, or also often because I heard about it in the making of of another movie or read about it in an article.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the basic rules are a bit different. I go every week to a sneak preview, so that somebody else did a choice and I get a surprise every week. On a festival, somebody does also the selection for me. Well often, it is a movie I would have liked to watch anyway.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise I select my movies according to the apparent storyline given on IMDB or in the newspapers. I try also to watch the few non-American movies shown in my town.