(This past week I also watched Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but those reviews won't post until the next few days, so we'll have to count them in 2026's round-up.)
I've decided that for this next year, my goal is to cultivate the habit of being a reader, and any time spent watching screens (be it movies, TV or Youtube) is time that I'm losing out on reading.
...and I actually did stick to this the first half of the year. Aside from movies I had to watch because of work (i.e. movies that I had to show to a class of students when I was working as a substitute teacher), I didn't watch any movies for the first half of 2025.
But, by the second half of 2025, I started getting the urge to watch more movies again.
At the moment I'm writing this, I still have that urge. So maybe expect to see more movie reviews on this blog in 2026?
Also, as with every year, I watched a lot of Youtube videos. At one point I decided it would be worthwhile to keep track of what I was watching, and started posting all those videos to my blog...
In 2024, I tried to deliberately make time to watch more movies. When I could. It wasn't often that I had the apartment to myself, but when I did, I deliberately made a point of watching a couple movies.
His Girl Fridayis an old classic film, but it actually hold up surprisingly well. I'd recommend it as a fun film to watch.
Charade has tons of famous actors in it, but although it's an old film, I don't think it's particularly regarded as a classic. It's still fun to watch, even if it is completely forgettable.
This was my 3rd time sitting through Lawrence of Arabia. It has some amazing scenes, but the film sure is slow-paced. I mean, to be fair, it's deliberately slow-paced, so it achieves the effect that the film-makers are intending. If you like that sort of thing.
If you like history docu-dramas (and I love them), then Path to War is a fascinating film.
Berkeley in the Sixties has long been one of my favorite documentaries, although I've seen this film many times before, so it was not really a new experience for me. Still, if you haven't seen it yet, it's a recommend.
The 1925 The Phantom of the Opera was interesting as a time-piece. (It looked really impressive for its time.) But I think there's a reason silent films just aren't popular nowadays. Talking films are just way more interesting to watch.
These are really all recommends. They all do a good job of bringing the ancient Greek dramas to life. But my favorite was The Theban Plays by Sophocles the BBC, 1986. It does such a good job of making Sophocles plays really enjoyable for a modern audience. With a small caveat. It appears that this production added to the original words of Sophocles a little bit. That is, they add some sentences to the dialogue to make explicit what in the original play was somewhat ambiguous. But they never leave behind the original play entirely. They're always using the original dialogue as a base, just adding to it here and there. So if you're a purist, you're not going to like it. But I thought the revised dialogue actually worked really well, and that it made Sophocles' plays feel very modern.
And there were a couple movies I watched this year because I had read the books, and I wanted to see how the movies compared. So after reading Swamp Thing, I decided to check out the Swamp Thing movie. And after reading The Last Unicorn, I saw The Last Unicorn movie. Both of these movies are cult classics, and, as is often the way with cult classics, they both have some elements in them that are really interesting, but also have a few rough edges.
In a recent Youtube video, entitled Why we can't focus., Jared Henderson also shares my recent philosophy on movie watching--that is, when it comes to our powers of focus and attention span, social media and phones are the real enemy, and watching whole movies might actually help to lengthen our attention span. (Jared mentions movies at about 11:30). As I mentioned above, this has also been my philosophy the past 2 years, and the reason why I tried to make it a point to watch more movies both this past year and the previous year. All that being said, I don't think I'm going to continue this philosophy into 2025. I've decided that for this next year, my goal is to cultivate the habit of being a reader, and any time spent watching screens (be it movies, TV or Youtube) is time that I'm losing out on reading.
Which is not to say I won't watch any movies in 2025. I'll watch movies for all the usual reasons people watch movies (e.g. someone invites me to see a movie, or there's a movie I really want to see, or I'm just really tired and feel like watching a movie.) But this coming year I won't make it a point to watch movies just for the sake of watching movies--i.e. in 2023 and 2024, when the wife and kids were out, I thought, "I have some time to myself, I'm going to watch a movie." In 2025, if I have a similar situation, my plan is to say, "I have some time to myself, I'm going to get some reading done."
The line between movies and TV got a bit blurred this year. A lot of the movies I watched were actually TV movies. Now, a 2 hour TV movie is actually simple enough to classify (in my book, it counts as a movie). But what about a TV movie that is in two parts and was spread out over two nights, like The '60s? Is that a movie or a show?
I suppose I should explain a bit about my current philosophy watching movies.
For years I felt guilty about watching movies. Of course I still watched them. (I had, as I confessed in an earlier post, a television addiction). But I always felt guilty about it. I regarded movies as a waste of time. I was wasting my life watching things on screens when I should be out living life and having adventures and gaining experiences.
But my philosophy has changed as I've gotten older.
For one thing, now that I'm middle-aged, I've completely lost interest in going out and having adventures. A quiet night in front of the television sounds much preferable to me now than a wild night out on the town.
Secondly, I've decided that the real problem nowadays is not television or movie addiction, but Internet addiction.
Movies are actually an important part of our culture. They are also a work of art that can be analyzed, criticized, dissected, and discussed, just like any other work of art.
Watching movies, and discussing movies, can make you an interesting and cultured person in much the same way that reading and discussing books cans.
The real time waster these days is not movies, but Youtube. And if I'm not careful, I can catch myself wasting tons of time on Youtube. And Youtube videos are often completely deviod of value. Especially because you often catch yourself watching them without intention. (e.g. I wasn't intending to watch 5 videos of police body cam footage, but I just started clicking and then before I knew it 2 hours had gone by.)
Watching a full movie, by contrast, requires intention. It's a choice you make to sit down and watch a full movie from beginning to end, and then when you finish it, you're left with an identifiable work of art that you can digest and discuss.
Similarly, another bad habit I can fall into is watching clips of movies on Youtube--i.e. not whole movies, but just the most exciting scenes. Whenever I catch myself doing this, I try to stop myself. Only watching highlights of movies (instead of the full movie) is a really bad habit for your attention span. So I tell myself, "Stop it, Joel! Don't waste time watching movie clips. Instead, wait until you have a free 2 hours some night, and then sit down and watch a whole movie."
[I wonder sometimes if watching full length movies is becoming a dying habit. Occasionally during the speaking tests, I'll ask teenage students what kind of movies they like watching. And many times now I've gotten the answer that they don't watch whole movies anymore, they just watch clips of movies on Youtube. It'll be interesting to check back in 30 years and see what the current state of movies is, and what the average attention span is like .]
Anyway, my current philosophy is that it's actually good to sit down and watch a few movies every year.
Despite writing a blog dedicated to book and movie reviews, I generally consider watching movies to be a complete waste of time. (I review them on my blog because my theory is that if I'm going to waste my time watching movies, I might as well review them as well.) So in that sense, the fact that I only watched 7 movies this year should make me happy about how little time I've wasted.
But the fact is, I've wasted SO much time this year mindlessly watching Youtube videos and television. And that REALLY is a waste of time.
By comparison, movies at least have an identifiable beginning, middle and end, and they have a plot structure you can critique. And so I'm beginning to think watching movies is probably LESS bad for my brain than my current habit of just mindlessly zoning out in front of the TV.
So my resolution for the new year is to actually try to watch more movies and spend less time just mindlessly watching TV and Youtube.
...I go through the trouble of explaining all this, because this philosophy is what explains why I made it a point to try to watch several movies this year, even though the selection wasn't great. My current situation is that I'm limited to only watching movies off of Youtube. Living out here in Vietnam, we don't have access to any DVD rental stores. We don't have Netflix or any streaming services. At the apartment we are currently living at, we don't have cable TV. Many of my colleagues just download pirated movies from the Internet, but I don't trust myself to do that without getting malware. (I'm not very sophisticated with these things.)
The good news, however, is that we do have a smart TV in the living room that connects to Youtube. So I can watch Youtube videos off of the television screen in the living room. (i.e. I'm not watching these movies hunched over my computer screen, I'm actually sitting in comfort on the living room couch--so at least there's that.)
[In years past, I used to take advantage of the streaming websites that were very popular in Vietnam--see HERE for one example of many--but I've grown more cautious about malware since then, so I don't use those website anymore. Also, and more importantly, the smart TV in our apartment isn't set up to access apps like Youtube, but not set up to access random webpages.]
Anyway, the choice of movies from this past year is influenced by the poverty of the selection. These aren't the movies I would have chosen to watch if I had complete free choice. For example, if I could have found a copy online, I would have much preferred to rewatch one of the original classic monster Universal monster movies instead of House of the Wolf Man. But I couldn't find any of the old classic monster movies on Youtube, so House of the Wolf Man it was.
And, of course, House of the Wolf Man, wasn't the greatest movie in the world. But I'm still glad I watched it. It was something where the filmmakers were trying to achieve something, and there was an interesting discussion to be had about why they failed to achieve what they wanted to, and what exactly went wrong. I still maintain it was time better spent than 2 hours of mindlessly watching Youtube. Similarly, Capricorn One, Riot on Sunset Stripand Barbarians at the Gatealso wouldn't ordinarily have been high on my list of movies to watch, and neither of them were great movies, but there were some interesting things to talk about for each one, and I'm glad I made the time to watch them.
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe was interesting. I'm not sure I could call it a good movie, but if you're interested in the history of pop culture, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. I'm glad I watched it.
In addition to the selection being limited, the other problem is that with two young children and a small apartment, it's very hard to find the space to watch movies. When the kids are awake, there's no peace and quiet to watch a movie. When they're asleep, I can't make any noise in the living room.
So, I was only able to watch movies when the kids were out. There were a couple weeks they were at my wife's parents house, which is when the majority of the movies from this-year-were-watched. Also one week in the hospital, in which I was able to sneak in a couple-more movies between hospital visits. And a got in a couple-more movies when my wife and her family went out to dinner, and I opted to stay home.
And I even managed to make one trip to the cinema this year. When Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. my wife, remembering how much I loved Indiana Jones, volunteered to watch the kids by herself for one night, and I got to go the cinema. (The movie itself was, of course, largely disappointing. But I'm still glad I saw it, just for nostalgia's sake.)
I would have loved to see Oppenheimer, but that one just didn't work out. The wife didn't volunteer to take care of the kids when Oppenheimer came out, and I didn't want to push it. (Plus the release date kept getting pushed back in Vietnam, which made it hard to make plans. Originally it was scheduled to be released for a week when the wife and kids were visiting the wife's parents, but then they changed the release date.)
It doesn't really matter, though. I'm sure I'll end up seeing that movie at some point. It doesn't matter if it's this year or next year or in 5 years.
The three Disney movies (Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp) were part of an attempt to get the kids to watch movies instead of Youtube videos. For the same reasons as above, I'm worried about my kids watching too many songs on Kids Youtube on the Smart TV, and thought it would be better for their attention span if we tried to transition them to watching animated movies on Youtube instead. Unfortunately, however, the kids weren't really interested in the Disney animated classics, and so this project got dropped.
(At some point in the future, I may make a project of trying to work through all the Disney animated classics just for my own nostalgia purposes. We'll see.)
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