This is why this Article will be focused on comparing the first two years of JoRafCinema with the last two. Here is what happened until July 20th 2018. Feel free to click on the plots to enlarge them.
Movies per genre
One of the possible questions about our change of habits is whether our taste has changed. The pie charts above show that we do watch much more Drama, Documentary and Romance, and much less Horror, Comedy and Thriller.
Digging deeper we noticed that all of Drama, Romances, Comedies and Thriller reviewed in the first two years were rated similarly to the ones seen in the last two, to within +/- 0.2. However the ratings of Horror movies increased by 0.5 and Documentary dropped by 0.4! This could mean that we now better select Horror films before watching them, while on the other hand we watch more Documentaries (because of an easier access: Netflix) but of lower quality.
Interesting... Let's see what else we can find.
Movies per Country
Another possible question is whether we watch movies from different countries? After all, going to less Festivals and watching more Netflix could have changed the repartitions.
The pie chart below shows that on the contrary we watch less American movies (although still a vast percentage), less French as well but more from smaller producing countries like Germany, Sweden, Great Britain and what constitutes the Rest of the World.
Movies per production year
The change of viewing medium could obviously also lead to us watching only recent movies. This is pretty obvious looking at the numbers from the last year on the histogram below that we have barely watched any movie older than the 1960's, only a few from the 70's to 90's and rather focused our attention on the 00's and the past two years, but not even the rest of the 2010's. Is it because we have already viewed and reviewed all there is in that period?
Number of posts
Back to a basic question: do we review less movies? Movies per se and number of posts: yes, it is obvious when looking at the number of posts we publish per months which now averages 10-15 while during our first years it was in excess of 30!
But looking at the concept of movie-equivalent introduced last year, in which we noticed that watching a season of TV-series takes as much time as eight movies in average, in fact it seems that we always spend as much time in front of a screen. Indeed TV-series are a big part of JoRafCinema now and we have reviewed a steady 25 seasons per year in the past two years.
Another striking decline visible on the plot above is in the number of Articles we post: only three last year including the anniversary one!!! What is going on? Well, writing an article takes a lot of time, one needs an interesting subject to write about and those come scarce when we visit less Festivals.
Still, we should strive at improving that to provide our readers with more insightful Articles. In fact several have been in preparation for a while and we shall complete them soon:
- One is about a beautiful book I own entitled The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney's Movie Magic. Herman Schultheis is rather unknown but he participated to creating the magic around classic Disney movies like Fantasia. His life was quite exceptional as well. I may read the book again soon and finally complete the article. Note that another Cinema book I shall review is Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, about the famous movie poster designer to whom we owe the one of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.
- The Article Topical series of films on JoRafCinema - Actors will complement the one released in 2017 about Directors.
- In another Article we would like to share a lifetime experience of visiting Cinema locations in the USA and around the World
- An Article we have recently prepared is about several Cinema Review video channels we have recently discovered on internet
- The last Article in preparation may deal with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (now at a good summary point with Avengers: Infinity War) or with movie series and franchises in general
Recommended movies
Finally, like every year, let us provide you with our Top Ten (approximately) recommendations, not only because we gave them the best ratings, but because all of a sudden we may remember them above others, which is a sign that we found something in them that lasts.
[Jo]:
- I Origins, for its refreshing and unexpected story
- The Aristocats, a Disney classic that took me back into childhood
- Ready Player One: Steven Spielberg playing with our 80's nostalgia in a delightful roller-coaster
- Annihilation, the best SF/Horror B-series of the year
- Midnight Special, for its intimate SF/Drama and the acting by Michael Shannon
- Avengers: Infinity War. I have to admit that after ten years of Marvel build-up, the nerd in me likes where it took us.
- Modern Times, the Charlie Chaplin classic that hasn't lost of its meaning, and is easier to watch than I though for an 80-year old movie
- Death Becomes Her, the forgotten 80's UFO by Robert Zemeckis with a young Bruce Willis.
- Wargames, 80's nerd classic with a teenage Matthew Broderick
- A beautiful Mind, with great performances by Russel Crowe and Jennifer Connelly
- Inception and its twisted reality
- Some star-oriented movies from around the turn of the millennium: The General's Daughter (1999) with John Travolta, The Manchurian Candidate (2004) with Denzel Washington and Mercury Rising (1998) with Bruce Willis
- The best series watched this year were: the first two seasons of the acclaimed Breaking Bad, The Defenders for it TV-Avengers spirit, and the British Black Mirror (season 1-2 and season 3) that takes us to the darkest corners of our connected future.
[Raf]:
- Baby Driver, for its energy, its epic atmosphere and its humor
- The Square, for the force of its leitmotivs and the many very troubling and beautiful scenes, a master-piece
- Liebe Oma, Guten Tag, showing that it is worth looking at the family story and accepting telling it
- Night of the Living Dead, for the new genre created in a cinematographic excellence
- Perfect Blue, for the complex dramaturgy and the creative graphical ideas
- The disaster artist, for the hours of continuous laughter during and long time after the movie by just listening or saying some quotes as simple as "Hi Mark"
- Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, for its very black humor, the excellent dialogues and the great acting
- Blade Runner 2049, because Denis Villeneuve has the genius to build up on a master-piece another excellent movie, keeping the atmosphere and transferring the story in the 21st Century
- A quiet place, for the great idea, giving a tense atmosphere and focus on the acting
- Lady Bird, for the great encounter of Greta Gerwig as director and Saoirse Ronan as actress giving a punch of authenticity to a normal life story with many dialogues that reminded me a piece of city kid
- The rider, for another punch of authenticity close to nature and people without need of much talk
- Walesa, for the balanced insight (for a non-Polish like me it looks balanced) into a piece of European history that is seldom on screen, the fall of Soviet Empire
We wish you all a happy cinematographic year 2018-2019.
Jo&Raf
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