I’m Ready to Go Back

Time moves slowly when you’re young. My childhood felt like an entire lifetime. My 30s are going by in the blink of an eye.

One of the silver linings about the pandemic* is that time has slowed down. Being home for the past year has given me time that otherwise would have been spent commuting and doing a million other things.

One of the things that helped pass the time is watching movies. There’s been a list of movies that I’d meant to see, but I just couldn’t find the time. I’ve used this last year to fill in the things that I hadn’t gotten to for whatever reason. These are the movies I saw this year for the first time broken out by decade.

My plan was to go back in time and see movies I would never have had the chance to, like Casablanca and the Graduate. I’m not sure how, but it looks like I gravitated more to movies that came out in the last year or two.

And overall, those movies weren’t very good. I rated every movie I saw on a scale from 0-10, and the average rating from 2019 and 2020 are way lower than they’d been historically. This is mildly upsetting. New movies just aren’t as good as they used to be.

The table below breaks down the movies into 9 different categories ranging from all-time great to I’m genuinely mad I saw this. Luckily, only one movie belongs to that last category.

This pie chart breaks down my movie viewing habits. It turns out I like a good drama. Nearly 1 in 4 movies that I saw falls into this category.

Which is sort of interesting because I tend to enjoy thrillers and mysteries more.

The last year allowed me to fill in some of the gaping holes in my movie viewing, but I’ve had enough. I love that I was able to watch Godzilla Vs. Kong this weekend on my couch, but it’s just not the same. I can’t wait to go back to the theater.

*I want to acknowledge the obvious. The pandemic has been devastating. Unimaginably painful for people who lost loved ones. Crushing for people who lost their jobs. And extraordinarily difficult for people who are crammed into a small living space. I’m very lucky that I have been unaffected over the past year in any meaningful way.