December/Year in Review

I've never done one of these top 10 lists, not for anything. I don't really care much to read them and I never cared much to do one, but for some reason I figured, since I'm keeping a log of movies I'm watching and stuff, I can compile one at the end of the year and see what happens. I started off this year kind of strong, but wound up falling behind in the new releases quite a bit, so this list is really like one third of the new releases I saw this year. Still, it's a LIST, you guys! You guys!

01) Brick (Rian Johnson)
02) When the Levees Broke (Spike Lee)
03) The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky)
04) Inland Empire (David Lynch)
05) Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Michel Gondry)
06) Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski)
07) Volver (Pedro Almodovar)
08) The Departed (Martin Scorsese)
09) Unknown White Male (Rupert Murray)
10) Miami Vice (Michael Mann)

Pretty unextraordinary list, really. Note the lack of foreign films. Gonna have to remedy that next year. Anyway, here's the stuff I saw in December. Also pretty lax, but it's been kind of hectic lately. I head out for Los Angeles in 5 days and I'm trying to get an internship going and figure out last-minute medical stuff and yadda yadda. Here's barebones December:

Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky. [.] december 1st 2006.
[I hate myself for being so tired during this. The most pristine print I've ever seen, it was like being inside the movie and I couldn't stay awake. I tried pounding coffee, but it didn't really work out for me. Probably my biggest New Years resolution is to stop letting insomnia ruin my life. Anyway, that's the period.]
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Alain Resnais. [B] december 4th 2006.
Ménilmontant, Dimitri Kirsinov. [A] december 5th 2006.
The Fall of the House of Usher, Jean Epstein. [A-] december 5th 2006.
The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky. [A-] december 7th 2006.
The Big Carnival, Billy Wilder. [B] december 9th 2006.
Three Times, Hou Hsiao-hsien. [/] december 11th 2006.
[We watched an awful VCD copy in class that was literally unwatchable for a third of the movie, didn't come close to finishing the other two thirds, either. It was really disappointing, because I loved what I saw. I look forward to seeing it properly sometime.]
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F.W. Murnau. [A-] december 12th 2006.
Inland Empire, David Lynch. [B+] december 17th 2006.
Being There, Hal Ashby. [A-] december 25th 2006.
Volver, Pedro Almodovar. [B] december 30th 2006.

Weak post, weak month, although certainly not in content, just quantity.

The rundown for the year?

173 features, 29 shorts (Not counting repeats, but counting individual viewings of films I've seen before.)

Not bad, but I think I can do better. Here's looking forward to a great 2007.