I was going to title this post “2006: The Year Without Movies” because it really felt like I hardly ever went to the movies last year. When I sat down today and began checking off the number of movies I saw in the theaters I came up with 15. This caused me to pause and consider whether that’s an abnormally low number or merely an average number. I’ve never sat down and made such a list in the past so I really have no frame of reference. Therefore, I decided to change my approach. I broke the list down into the following categories:

Movies I saw in the theater and enjoyed

Movies I saw in the theater and hated

Movies I want to see but didn’t see in the theater (i.e. ones I will rent or have rented)

Next I selected two years that I consider to be exceptional years for film. I did not count any years before 1996 since that was the first year I had total access to a car and I was more or less free to go to the movies as often as I wanted. I settled on 1998 and 1999. For some reason I feel like I saw a lot of movies those years. Those years had the Matrix, Fight Club, Adam Sandler when he was still funny, Office Space, The Big Lebowski…I could go on. Suffice it to say, they were good years.

Here’s how it breaks down:

2006:

Saw in theater, liked: 4

Saw in theater, disliked: 11

Will rent or have already rented: 10

1998

Saw in theater, liked: 9

Saw in theater, disliked: 2

Rented: 10

1999

Saw in theater, liked: 9

Saw in theater, disliked: 0

Rented: 12

So, from that data you see that I actually saw MORE movies in the theater in 2006 than I did in 1999. Unfortunately I hated most of them. Included in 2006 is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, Lady in the Water. In ‘98-99 I was actually enjoying the moves I was plunking down 8 bucks to see. Even the ones I skipped and rented later were overwhelmingly good.

In conclusion, Last year Hollywood took my money and left me with little but a foul smell in my nostrils. Maybe it’s similar to the smell of old sweaty taint air that Sacha Cohen referred to in his Golden Globe speech. I don’t know what that smells like but it can’t be much worse than last year’s crop of films.

Consider running this little experiment on your own movie attendance. You can cruise over to wikipedia to find a list of movies released in a given year.