Thanks for reading, those of you who have done so. This was a weird project to put together. Ideally, a list of things to blog about should consists of fifty or one hundred items because those fill out a year pretty nicely, but my movie list kept landing in the 60s or 70s. I tried to come up with some guidelines that might narrow things down... and mostly failed. I came up with the "Double Feature" conceit and that helped, but those posts got pretty cumbersome, so I found myself doing a lot of culling around June. Things got dropped for any number of reasons. Some just can't be found for a rewatch. Some were dropped because they were breaking up double-feature groupings. There was at least one that I didn't remember until we were past its release date in the sequence.
So here are a handful of movies that I wanted to write about but didn't.
Purple People Eater - based loosely on the song by Sheb Wooley, and I have to imagine it's Mac and Me levels of bad. It starred Ned Beatty, Shelly Winters, and a couple of kids named Thora Birch and Neil Patrick Harris.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch - This movie is as bonkers as that Key & Peele sketch would lead you to believe. Of everything I cut, this one hurts the most. It's surprisingly enjoyable, largely because it's 100% aware of how bad it is.
The Clown and the Kids - 1974 retelling of The Pied Piper, that hinges on a plot point of a clown convincing all the parents at the circus to leave the tent so he could conspire with the children and the kids all going along with it and managing to keep it a secret.
Hopscotch - 1980 spy thriller comedy starring Walter Matthau. It hasn't aged completely well, but it's still got a lot of charm. I skipped this one because I don't think I saw it until I was a teenager.
Always - Spielberg's remake of A Man Named Joe that transplants it from the European theater of World War II to a modern (well, 1989) aerial firefighting operation. It doesn't hold together terribly well but has some winning performances from John Goodman and Holly Hunter. It was also Audrey Hepburn's last film role.
Hot Shots - one of the better movie parodies out there, this one specifically targeting Top Gun. I haven't rewatched it (or its sequel, which I actually liked better) recently, but I remember thinking Lloyd Bridges was hilarious.
Ernest Goes to Camp - I straight up forgot this movie even existed, but we sure rented it a lot.
And that's it for 2021's blog project. So what's in store for 2022?
I'm going to write about video games. I'm calling the series Memory Leaks, and I'm only going to post every other week, which will leave some space for me to blog about other things that are more germane to my life and interests. There will a total of 25 posts about my favorite video games across various platforms, presented in order of "as the spirit moves me". I'm not going to make myself replay them before posting, so this will be all coming from my recollections, as the title implies. As such, these posts will be less about the games than about my relationship with them.
Happy 2022, y'all!
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