Last January I spotted a link to a list of everything director Steven Soderbergh had watched and read in 2014 (Click here). It intrigued me to see that a) he had bothered to keep a list (in fact he’d been doing this for some time) and that b) his viewing habits were pretty run of the mill (we both love Girls, House of Cards and Veep #Besties). So I thought I’d try the same… in this notebook with an elephant wearing a beret on it (it felt like the right choice).

 

I decided to keep track of just the films I watched for 2015 (I thought I’d start small and build up to a list of everything I culturally consume).

…..So here is a list of all the films I saw in 2015.

OVERVIEW:
1) I watched 84 films in total (a few instances of multiple viewings – mostly stuff I was teaching with)
2) I watched 38 films in a cinema – indicated with a (C)
3) I re-watched some that I’d seen before – Indicated with a (B4)

THE FILM MEGA LIST 2015

1/1/15 – Bambi (1942) Algar, Armstrong et. al.(B4)
2/1/15 – Birdman (2014) Alejandro G. Iñárritu (C)
3/1/15 – Run Lola Run (1998) Tom Tykwer (B4)
4/1/15 – Thelma and Louise (1991) Ridley Scott
5/1/15 – Orlando (1992) Sally Potter
6/1/15 – Lost Highway (1997) David Lynch
9/1/15 – Torn Curtain (1966) Alfred Hitchcock
10/1/15 – Enough Said (2013) Nicole Holofcener
11/1/15 – Foxcather (2014) Bennett Miller (C)
22/1/15- Educating Rita (1983) Lewis Gilbert (B4)
28/1/15 – Thelma and Louise (1991) Ridley Scott (C) (B4)
29/1/15 – Pleasantville (1998) Gary Ross
30/1/15 – Chef (2014) Jon Favreau
31/1/15 – Ex Machina (2015) Alex Garland (C)
3/2/15 – Our Idiot Brother (2011) Jesse Peretz
4/2/15 – Torn Curtain (1966) Alfred Hitchcock (C) (B4)
7/2/15- Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) Max Ophüls (B4)
10/2/15 – Rashômon (1950) Akira Kurosawa (B4)
20/2/15 – Blood Simple (1984) Joel and Ethan Cohen
25/2/15 – Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) Max Ophüls (C) (B4)
28/1/15 – When Harry Met Sally (1989) Rob Reiner
28/2/15 – It Follows (2014) David Robert Mitchell (C)
1/3/15 – 8 1/2 (1963) Federico Fellini (B4)
1/3/15 – Gravity (2013) Alfonso Cuarón
4/3/15 – 8 1/2 (1963) Federico Fellini (C) (B4)
7/3/15 – The Red and The White (1967) Miklós Jancsó
11/3/15 – The Red and the White (1967) Miklós Jancsó (C) (B4)
15/3/15 – Still Alice (2014) Richard Glatzer (C)
17/3/15 – Locke (2013) Steven Knight
18/3/15 – Pleasantville (1998) Gary Ross (C) (B4)
21/3/15 – Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch (B4)
23/3/15 – Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcock (B4)
25/3/15 – Mulholland  Drive (2001) David Lynch (C) (B4)
3/4/15 – While We’re Young (2014) Noah Baumbach (C)
4/4/15 – The King’s Speech (2010) Tom Hooper (B4)
5/4/15 – Cinderella (2015) Kenneth Branagh (C)
6/4/15 – A Long Way Down (2014) Pascal Chaumeil
10/4/15 – The Ninth Gate (1999) Roman Polanski
11/4/15 – Wreck it Ralph (2012) Rich Moore (B4)
11/4/15 – Atari: Game Over (2014) Zac Penn
12/4/15 – Carrie (1976) Brian De Palma
18/4/15 – The King’s Speech (2010) Tom Hooper (C) (B4)
22/4/15 – Orlando (1992) Sally Potter (C)
2/5/15 – Whip It (2009) Drew Barrymore
4/5/15 – Force Majeure (2014) Ruben Östlund (C)
10/5/15 – Girlhood (2014) Celine Sciamma (C)
16/5/15 – Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Olivier Assayas (C)
17/5/15 – Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013) Declan Lowney
19/5/15 – Begin Again (2013) John Carney
30/5/15 – Carnival of Souls (1962) Herk Harvey (C)
31/5/15 – Pitch Perfect 2 (2015) Elizabeth Banks (C)
13/6/15 – Jurassic World (2015) Colin Trevorrow (C)
14/6/15 – London Road (2015) Rufus Norris (C)
19/6/15 – The Two Faces of January (2014) Hossein Amini
19/6/15 – Mr Holmes (2015) Bill Condon (C)
25/6/15 – The Wicker Man (1973) Robin Hardy (C) (B4)
27/6/15 – Tracks (2013) John Curran
1/7/15 – The Heat (2013) Paul Feig
3/7/15 – Amy (2015) Asif Kapadia (C)
11/7/15 – Before I Go To Sleep (2014) Rowan Joffe
12/7/15 – Touch of Evil (1958) Orson Welles (B4)
15/7/15 – The Fog (1980) John Carpenter
16/7/15 – Enemy (2013) Denis Villeneuve
24/6/15 – Inside Out (2015) Pete Docter (C)
25/7/15 – Fatal Attraction (1987) Adrian Lyne
30/7/15 – Love is Strange (2014) Ira Sachs
31/7/15 – A Single Man (2009) Tom Ford
29/8/15 – Side Effects (2013) Steven Soderbergh (B4)
5/9/15 – Trainwreck (2015) Judd Apatow (C)
24/9/15 – The Babadook (2014) Jennifer Kent
26/9/15 – 99 Homes (2014) Ramin Bahrani (C)
30/10/15 – The Intern (2015) Nancy Meyers (C)
2/11/15 – Suffragette (2015) Sarah Gavron (C)
21/11/15 – The Lady in The Van (2015) Nicholas Hytner (C)
14/11/15 – Steve Jobs (2015) Danny Boyle (C)
5/12/15 – Carol (2015) Todd Haynes (C)
15/12/15 – Another Country (1984) Marek Kanievska
18/12/15 – Mean Girls (2004) Mark Waters (B4)
19/12/15 – Sisters (2015) Jason Moore (C)
20/12/15 – A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) Brian Henson (B4)
21/12/15 – Gremlins (1984) Joe Dante (C) (B4)
22/12/15 – Senna (2010) Asif Kapadia
27/12/15 – Meet Me in St Louis (1944) Vincente Minnelli (C)
28/12/15 – Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) J.J Abrams (C)

I was really lucky to be able to see so many up on the big screen – the film narrative module at SHU, on which I was delivering seminars, holds all lectures and screenings in a cinema to enable this (The Showroom).

The films that stood out for me this year were Carol, which I loved, 99 Homes and Amy, but also Force Majeure (which many did not enjoy… including the box office guy at HOME who, when selling me a ticket for another film, noticed on my records I’d seen it recently and gave me his pretty brutal appraisal of it). The central moment of the film really stayed with me. The film explores a close call with an avalanche and the repercussions of fight of flight behaviour – the abandonment in the moment as terrifying as the near natural disaster itself.

Interestingly for me Steven kept a list for 2015 too (Click here) although it seems he was really into Magic Mike XXL…. so maybe not besties after all.

The first film I saw this year was The Danish Girl, which I was a bit disappointed with. More importantly on the way in (AMC Manchester) I was given a survey by some idiotic cinema marketing company…. first question on the survey (no kidding)… bear in mind The Danish Girl is a film about the complexities of gender identity…..

So not even worded as ‘How would you describe your gender identity?’ and no 3rd box, really, in 2016?!! Gender is not a binary issue as explored IN THE FILM YOU ARE SURVEYING ME ABOUT.

Also question 18 on this form was ‘rate the following characters…’ with absolutely no indication of what you were supposed to rate them against. Height? Fashion sense? Believability?

The marketeers need to enrol on the Research Methods course I did as part of prep for my research…. then they’d learn not to ask so many stupid questions.