About 4 or 5 years ago myself and some fellow movie-loving coworkers decided to have a friendly contest to see who could watch the most “new to us” movies in a calendar year. We kept a blog going with short entries of our thoughts on each one and quickly found that it was a fun way to keep ourselves in search of things we hadn’t seen before. That’s why we’ve decided to do something similar this year here.

Though I plan to have a regular schedule of posts updating the log this first entry is going to serve as a sort of “catch up” for what we’ve seen already this year. We’re not just logging anything though, there’s some guidelines as to what movies are going to count towards the total:

1. Any movie we’ve never seen before.
2. Haven’t seen the movie in so long that we don’t remember it.
3. There’s something unique about this particular screening of the movie.

Rich

Highlander 3

Oh, how I wish there could be only one Highlander movie. I enjoyed the original movie, and I am well aware of its corniness and how poorly it has aged. Highlander III has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Not only does it completely contradict the canon of the first and (shudder) second Highlander movies, it comes off as a lazy version of the first movie. Oh, and Mario Van Peebles is in it if that doesn’t drive it home. I think Jean Girard from “Taladega Nights” may have been referring to Highlander III when he said, “I saw your Highlander movie. It was shit!”

Kevin

The Company Men

Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones play employees of a huge shipping company that is struggling to keep its chief executives in their multi-million dollar mansions and gigantic offices by laying off huge numbers of their “normal” employees. It’s a morality tale that most people already know the punchline to but that didn’t stop it from being a mostly entertaining film despite its obvious message.

Moneyball

I love baseball movies. I love a lot of sports movies, for that matter. Brad Pitt plays real-life baseball personality Billy Beane who was the general manager of the struggling Oakland A’s in the early 2000′s. He couldn’t compete with huge payrolls so he helped usher in the stats-crazy way of thinking about America’s Pastime sport that we know today. It’s a great performance by Pitt in a really fun film.

Warrior

As much as I love sports movies I could give a rat’s ass about MMA. Any time I’ve been in a place where it’s on the TV all I’ve seen is a boring hugging match between too super macho dudes. That said, Warrior is a surprisingly good film about two brothers and a father who have gone their separate ways in life but are brought back together by a MMA tournament that actually makes the sport look watchable.

The Descendants

George Clooney turns in another great performance as a father struggling to reconnect with his two daughters after his wife enters a boating accident-induced coma. Other drama exists and enters their lives while we watch his character try to deal with everything at once. Alexander Payne does another fine job directing his actors in a funny and touching little film.

Pick-Up

Around Christmas time I picked up a $10 set of “32 Drive-In Cult Classics“. I love campy B movies from the 70′s and 80′s so this was a no-brainer for me. My plan is to watch every one of them through the course of the year, mostly while drinking heavily. The first movie on the first of the 12 discs was this skin flick from 1975 about two hippie girls who hop on a bus with a hippie dude hired to deliver it somewhere in Florida. Detours and storms cause them to get stuck somewhere in the swamps and go through the next few days hallucinating about clowns and priests, fucking and eating boars. Not fun, in any state of sobriety or inebriation.

Well, there you have it. Our initial tally for the year. I know next time we’ll have entries from at least Bryan and Ryan as well.

The Count So Far:

• Kevin – 5
• Rich –  1

We’d love to hear from you as well! What have you  been watching? Got any suggestions for things that we should check out?