Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL): Movies and TV Shows that I Watched in 2024

(Year End Movie Lists)

Movies:

1. His Girl Friday, February 19, 2024

2. Lawrence of Arabia, February 23, 2024 (rewatch)

3. The '60s, February 24, 2024

4. Path to War, February 27, 2024

5. Charade, February 29, 2024

6. Berkeley in the Sixties, March 01, 2024 (rewatch)

7. Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal, March 01, 2024 (rewatch)

8. Oedipus Rex (1957 film), June 07, 2024

9. Oedipus the King (1968), June 15, 2024

10. Antigone (1961), June 29, 2024

11. Medea by Euripides freely adapted by Robinson Jeffers (TV Movie, 1983), July 04, 2024

12. And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, August 14, 2024

13. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, August 19, 2024

14. Swamp Thing (1982), September 12, 2024

15. The Last Unicorn, October 24, 2024

16. The Phantom of the Opera (1925), October 31, 2024

Series or Shows:

* Lion's Den - The Outer Limits 1995 TV Series

* Time To Time - The Outer Limits 1995 TV Series

* Aeschylus' Oresteia, 1983 Television version, directed by Peter Hall

* The Theban Plays by Sophocles the BBC, 1986

* Alfred Hitchcock Presents S05E37 Escape To Sonoita

* Man from the South with Peter Lorre and Steve McQueen (1960)

* He-Man Official | Happy Birthday Roboto | He-Man Full Episodes

* Masters of the Universe: Revelation

Notes:

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.

This is continuing the philosophy that I started in 2023, which is that it was actually good for me to spend some time every year watching a whole movie from beginning to end. (As opposed to wasting time watching short clips of movies on Youtube, which is a bit habit I've fallen into lately.) I wrote about this philosophy at length last year, so I won't repeat myself by going through it all again. But that's the ethos that caused me to make time to watch a number of random movies this year. Films in this category are: His Girl Friday, Lawrence of Arabia, The '60s, Path to War, Charade, Berkeley in the Sixties, Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal, And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Of that list, the recommendations are as follows:

His Girl Friday is 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.

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song is half Pete Seeger biography and half hagiography. The biography part is really interesting, but the hagiography part is boring.

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.

In addition to trying to watch more movies generally, this year I also watched several filmed versions of Greek dramas to accompany my reading of Classical Tragedy - Greek and Roman. Stuff in this category are: Oedipus Rex (1957 film, Oedipus the King (1968), Antigone (1961), Medea by Euripides freely adapted by Robinson Jeffers (TV Movie, 1983), Aeschylus' Oresteia, 1983 Television version, directed by Peter Hall and The Theban Plays by Sophocles the BBC, 1986.

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.

Aeschylus' Oresteia, 1983 Television version, directed by Peter Hall is another series of plays that was also quite good, particularly the first play in that production, Agamemnon, was really dramatic and gripping.

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.

And finally, because I was listening to Mike Duncan's podcast on the Mexican Revolution this year, I watched not one, but two movies about Pancho Villa: Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal and And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself. Both of these movies had some interesting little historical tidbits in them for the history nerds, but both of these movies also got overwhelmed by their subject material, and struggled to create a clean narrative out of the messy story that is Pancho Villa.

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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."

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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?

Or what about a TV pilot, that is also sometimes packaged as a movie, like Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal?

Or what about a trilogy of Greek plays, like Aeschylus' Oresteia or The Theban Plays? Is this 3 separate TV movies that form a trilogy? Or one TV show?

To solve this little classification problem, I've just put everything from this year into one playlist: Movies and Series that I Watched in 2024.