Looking Back: At the Movies (2022)

Movies Watched in 2022

On Location: photo by Cliff Hutson

1. The Cheap Detective 
2. The Angry Red Planet
3. Lowriders (2016)
4. Rushmore
5. Ghostbusters: Afterlife 
6. Jesse Stone: Night Passage
7. Sahara (1984)
8. Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs 
9. Jesse Stone: Stone Cold
10. Fantastic Mr. Fox
11. Coyote Waits
12. Silverado
13. The Grand Budapest Hotel
14. Sherlock Holmes:  The Sign of  Four
15. Hell or High Water (2016)
16. Alan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold
17. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
18. Sheena (1984)
19. Fugitive Nights: Danger in the Desert
20. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
21. Sushi Girl
22. The Tragedy of  MacBeth  (2021)
23. The Lost City
24. Kiss the Girls
25. Skyfall
26. Savage Island
27. Monster Trucks
28. The Day The Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's 'American Pie'
29. King Solomon's Mines (1985)
30. The Ghost and the Darkness 
31. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
32. Legend of the Lost
33. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
34. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
35. Samaritan 
36. Shanghai Noon (2000)
37. MASH
38. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
39. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
40. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
41. Harlan County, USA (1976, Barbara Kopple)
42. American Factory
43. Salesman (1969, Maysles Bros.)
44. The Fog of War (2003, Errol Morris)
45. Hearts & Minds (1974, Peter Davis)
46. They Shall Not Grow  Old
47. Battle of the Little Bighorn  (Smithsonian) 
48. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 
49. Inside Job 
50. Twenty Feet from Stardom
51. The Hunt for the Skinwalker
52. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
53. Smokey and the Bandit
54. Don't Look Back 
55. Gimme Shelter
56. Space Cowboys
57. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
58. The Decline of Western Civilization 
59. The Rundown 
60. The Wolf of Wall Street
61. Die Hard 

I watched sixty-one movies, which is fairly typical for me. However, much unlike previous years, only two of them were from my personal collection, Silverado, and Hell or High Water. They are among the half dozen films that in the past I have made a point to watch every year. So, this year was almost completely different. 

Many of the films that I did watch were as a result of my belonging to a Skirball Cultural Center movie group. Among those were four by the director Wes Anderson and ten documentaries - there is a different focus for each series of sessions. Most of those movies were new to me and the group discussions were very stimulating. 

The rest of the list was derived from suggestions by Apple TV+, Amazon Prime, Paramount +, reviews in the publications I follow, and random mentions in other media.

The Good:

The best of these that were new to me was Harlan County, USA (1976, Barbara Kopple). A documentary film covering a 1973 strike of 180 coal miners and their wives against the Duke Power Company-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, southeast Kentucky. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for 1976.

However, I must (if I haven't already) give a shout out to both Hell or High Water and Silverado. They are, in my opinion, among the best Western (my favorite genre) films ever made.

The Bad

This distinction goes to another documentary - The Decline of Western Civilization (1981). All in all, it was not badly done and almost everyone else likes it. And, I learned quite a bit about a subject matter that I do not care for. But, it seemed to me like taking a dose of bad tasting medicine. 

The Ugly

There are two movies that cry out to be included here.

The first is Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs in which dinosaurs run amok in a present-day Western town. I like Westerns and I like SciFi, but it all goes wrong in this film. It garnered a which got an audience score of 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so I am not alone on this one. 

The second is another documentary (or is styled as one) - billed as science confronts the unexplained at a remote ranch in Utah. It is The Hunt for the Skinwalker.  It is such tripe that I turned it off about half way through as it seemed it was only going to get worse. 

That is a wrap for 2022!