2012 Year in Review! (Part One)

I'm breaking this into parts this year because it's too long. Here goes:

For the first time in 5 years, I fell short of the 365 movie goal. Not even my 50 movies in December for the second year in a row were enough to catch me up. I also had 50 in July and a nice 38 in April after giving myself a little more free time with my horrific accident. Unfortunately, life got busy August through October when I watched a combined 36 movies.

I did see a lot of good movies though. The average rating this year was 13.4, up .4 from last year. August was the highest-rated month at 16.1, but with only 8 movies, that doesn’t mean much. September’s 14.8 and June’s 14.6 were the next highs while October was the low at 10.7. Happy birthday to me. I gave 55 movies a 14/20 and only a single movie (the Manos winner for 2012) a 1/20. It was the first time 16/20 wasn’t my most popular rating for a year.

One interesting statistic: I watched 26 movies where a character urinates prominently, and about 1/3 of those featured one character urinating on another character. You can go through the year and verify this for me if you want.

Saddest statistic: I now have more years that I’ve done this blog (5) than readers (4 ½).

And here are my shane-movies awards for 2012:

The Billy Curtis Award (Most Outstanding Performance by a Little Person): The field’s limited, but the competition’s tough this year! Billy Curtis himself showed up in The Wizard of Oz (somewhere) and very briefly and almost perversely in Eating Raoul. Skip Martin tumbled his way into my heart and caught a guy in a gorilla suit on fire in The Masque of the Red Death, and former Billy Curtis winner Peter Dinklage was terrific in The Station Agent and the not-so-good Pete Smalls Is Dead. And Joseph Barry is unforgettable in Johnny Suede as a little cowboy who uses a wire to look up Catherine Keener’s skirt. His work is Johnny Suede is terrific, but it’s trumped this year by the work of Harry Earles. Hans with his little temper tantrums in Freaks and a member of the Lollipop Guild? Tough to beat. Congratulations, little fella!

Best Weapon: What could possible top the penis gun in Tokyo Gore Police? Lefty scissors in Moonrise Kingdom!

Most Memorable Performance by a Wrestler: Roddy Piper was surprisingly good in They Live while Amy Weber’s terrible performance was buried beneath a metric ton of other terrible performances in the terrible Transmorphers. This is all Hulk Hogan vs. Hulk Hogan though, and although his small part in Rocky III is so impossibly stupid that it’s impossible to forget, his work as the titular Santa in Santa with Muscles is almost too bad to be true.

Best Wrestling-Related Movie Moment: Terry Kinney watches wrestling on television in Fly Away Home.

Best Penis: A tie! Schwarzenegger’s little Terminator and Robin Williams’ impressive member in World’s Greatest Dad.

Most Touching Moment in Movie History: It’s gotta be when Evel Knieval heals an orphan in Viva Knievel! “You’re the reason I’m walkin’, Evel. You’re the reason I’m walkin’!”

Biggest Personal Disappointment: I saw David and Keith Carradine’s nipples in Deathsport and Thieves Like Us and was positive I’d be able to complete the impressive Carradine Nipple Trifecta with Robert. It was not to be.

Best Puppet: Mel Gibson had a beaver, Her Master’s Voice was a documentary that featured a scene with a ventriloquist dummy swimming, Audrey II hilariously killed everybody, and that bird in The Giant Claw was about the best thing I’ve ever seen. I also saw a couple movies with Muppets, and although you might think it’s impossible to pick a “best” puppet from one of those, that would only be because you have not seen hip-hop Fozzie with his “Wakka Wakka.” The Swedish Chef with his “little friend” reference is a very close second.

Reader Comment That I Want to Remind Everybody About: Matt said, “If Project Nim doesn’t win an Oscar, I will burn down the Motion Picture Academy.” Just have to make sure that’s not forgotten.

Movies I Saw That Had Will Ferrell in Them: 3

My Favorite Movie Quotes of the Year: (Feel free to guess the movie if you want!)

“Die, you dinosaur dick!”

“Put all hope out of your mind. And masturbate as little as possible.”
“Blame is for God and small children.” (same movie as the above quote)
“Start the Whoopie machine!”
“Whoa! I hear a mountain lion!”
“I am an expert on tits—tits and peanut butter!”
“Narcotics will make you blow all to hell.”
“Ok, we all know these [standardized] tests are gay.”
“Where is pancakes house?”
“You polluted bitch hound!”
“When you put your heart and genitals into something, it always ends up personal.”
“I’m just wondering what to do with your corpses.”
“Gentle? This is a God-damned rape scene and you want me to be gentle?”
“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!”
“How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders?”
“Does daddy monkey have hard bones, too?”
“Do I look like an ickyologist to you? Big ol’ bugs—bugs as big as a peanut butter and banana sandwich. What do I care? I got a growth on my pecker.”
“Sometimes God just turns his back on his people and breaks wind, and the stench clouds the globe. I am the high-voltage man!”
“It’s Screaming Jay Hawkins and he’s a wild man, so bug off.”
“What’s that—horse? Fiendish! I won’t eat it.”
“There’s no way that you came from my loins. Soon as I get home, first thing I’m going to do is punch your mama in the mouth.”
“Give me a call whenever you want to cut off my head. I can always crawl around without it.”
“We’ll make Rock Ridge think it’s a chicken that got caught in a tractor’s nuts.” (The great Slim Pickens!)
“A clock with no hands is my kind of thing.”
“Now you’ve gone too far! Goddamn heads bouncing off of cars while families are singing ‘Found a Peanut’!”
“First, I have to wash this guy’s asshole off my face.”
“Your butt is wider than your mouth.”
“Jim got kicked in the head by a horse in February. He went around killing horses for a while. Then, he ate the insides of a clock and died.” (William S. Burroughs)
“You ever fight a dinosaur, kid? They can cause a variety of damage.”
“I didn’t mean that you literally had to chew his buttocks off. I meant it metaphorically.”
“The most beautiful failure is the pursuit of individuality.”
“But it is pointless!” “That’s my point.”
“You always giggle falsely. You don’t have a decent giggle in you.”
“If you stand with your intestines in your hand, will you know what to do?”

Best Conversation I Had about Movies All Year:

Me: Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein—greatest performance in movie history.

Jen: Gene Wilder? What happened to his career?
Me: He had cancer.
Jen: That’s not funny.

Thing That Still Needs to Catch On: A 10/20 rating being referred to as a “Goonie”—Barry’s idea.

Best Masturbation Scene: Yes, this is still an award. Daryl Sabara in World’s Greatest Dad, probably because he was one of the Spy Kids. Gainsbourg’s great work in Antichrist. My brother’s favorite in The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence. Mr. Cohen gets the award this year for his masturbation scene in The Dictator, one that manages to incorporate Forrest Gump in a way that still makes me giggle.

Stay tuned for Part Two!