Year Recap--the awards post

Important things first--2008's Midget of the Year was a tight race. After all, out of 365 movies, 52 of them had a midget. The candidates:

Don't Look Now had one creepy midget. So did The Brood, but that movie was absolutely terrible.

The Holy Mountain and Simon of the Desert both had crippled midgets, and both movies were a whole lot better than It's a Wonderful Life which had no midgets.

The Terror in Tiny Town had all midgets, and early on, I figured Billy Curtis was a shoe-in for Midget of the Year. He was terrific as the diminutive cowboy hero.

But the prize goes to Peter Dinklage from Death at a Funeral. I still can't think of that scene without laughing hard enough to fall down and hold my stomach. I did just that last night at a grocery store, right next to the pickles, and an elderly woman asked me if I was ok. I said, "Yeah, just laughing at the exploits of a midget." She looked up and down the aisle and, seeing no midget, scooted away, likely figuring that I was a drug addict. It's a scene that has to be seen to be believed. And set your vcr's, for Dinklage is going to be on the upcoming episode of 30 Rock which is a show everybody should be watching anyway. He also played the bad guy in Underdog which was a movie I had forgotten that I watched this year. So he's sure been busy. I'm sure winning my midget-of-the-year award is a highlight of his career though.

Other stuff:

I saw 22 Japanese movies which seems really low. I saw 27 French movies, 11 Italian movies, and 10 movies from Hong Kong.

I saw 36 documentaries on a wide variety of subjects. 32 movies I watched were animated or had animation. I saw 48 comedies, another 37 movies that were supposed to be comedies but weren't funny, and 14 movies that were funny but weren't supposed to be. I saw 22 horror movies and another 15 that were supposed to be horror movies but turned out to not be scary at all. There were 33 science fiction movies and a large bulk of "romantic" movies, 88 to be exact. According to the labels, I only saw 21 silent movies, but it sure seems like a lot more than that. 32 movies I labeled as "surreal" and I really tried to use that term correctly. I saw 7 movies with Vincent Price, 1 movie with Shirley Temple in black face, and 1 Sylvester Stallone movie that he actually wasn't in (Ran). I also saw 23 kung-fu movies and 11 samurai movies.

Looking at the other labels--I saw 17 movies with handlebar mustaches, 84 movies with ill-fitting pants/underpants, 15 movies with eyepatches, and 17 movies with cannibalism. The 79 movies I watched with nudity lends credence to my wife's claim that I seek out movies with nudity. The fact that I saw 27 movies with male frontal nudity (if I gave an award, Ewan McGregor's junk in that dull Peter Greenaway movie) and only 23 kung-fu movies likely means that I'm a homosexual. Suprisingly, I only saw 8 movies with puppets. I saw a whopping 224 movies with violence but only 154 movies with blood.

Jen only picked out 10 movies, including the huge surprise that was The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. My children picked out 12 more.

I paid for only two movies this year--the new Indiana Jones movie cost whatever two tickets costs, and I got the poker comedy The Grand from the dollar rental machine at the grocery store. Wall-E, by the way, is only the second Pixar movie I haven't seen in a theater.

I gave out three 20's, but two of those were for El Santo movies. The rating I gave out the most was a 16. I gave 57 movies a rating of 16. I only gave two 1 ratings. My average rating, assuming my math is correct, was a 12.978.

One of those was the worst movie I saw all year, the dreadfully offensive Facing the Giants. A runner-up, even though it had a rating better than Manos: The Hands of Fate, would be the terrible remake of The Wicker Man.

My best personal discovery of the year--The Lone Wolf and Cub series. Also worth mentioning would be the movies of Guy Maddin, Mario Bava, and Preston Sturges.

Here are the best movie experiences of the year. I'm including only movies that I had either previously not seen or have not seen bunches of times. That elimates favorites like Rear Window, The Gold Rush, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Duck Soup, The Triplets of Belleville, The General, and The Big Lebowski. And The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly which I didn't want to include in the above sentence because it would have forced me to use semicolons.

The best bad, all highly entertaining and highly recommended:

Manos: The Hands of Fate
Night of the Ghouls, which I watched on my birthday because I couldn't find The Big Lebowski and continue my tradition.
The Beast of Yucca Flats
The Happening

The best good:

The Passion of Joan of Arc
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
The Falls
The Holy Mountain
Viridiana
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Woman in the Dunes
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Days of Heaven

Finally, one last statistic. Amount of shane-movies readers? Four! I hope to double that in 2009!