Cinema Wellman's 2023 Unspooled

 Cinema Wellman’s 2023 Unspooled

Hello and welcome to Cinema Wellman. Today we are stealing directly from our dear friends at Spotify and presenting “Cinema Wellman’s 2023 Unspooled.”

As a self-proclaimed “stats geek,” it should come as no surprise that I keep stats on my movie viewing. The fact that I maintain a database of every movie I’ve ever seen kind of cements the stats geek status.

So today, on the final day of 2023, I will share some of our viewing statistics for the year. And now that I think of it, I may be the only person interested in anything that follows, but here I sit on New Year’s Eve (Amateur Night) anyway. So…

We screened a total of 794 movies in 2023, which is 4th highest all-time. The record of 1,000 (set in 2020) will never be broken. Not on purpose at least.

The all-time total is now 8,778 putting us 1,222 from the goal of 10,000 movies screened.

Those 794 movies added up to 70,723 minutes or 1,178 hours or 49 days of movie watching which is admittedly a lot of time, but I enjoyed a vast majority of it.

The oldest movie screened was George Melies’ Four Troublesome Heads from 1898, the newest was a tie since I saw 74 movies made in 2023.

The average year for the 794 movies was 1982.9, or 1983 which proves I continue to watch older movies that I want (or need) to see.

The shortest movie I watched was David Lynch’s Premonition Following an Evil Deed whose title takes almost as long to read as its 1-minute runtime.

The longest movie this year was Abel Gance’s magnificent 1927 film Napoleon, which was one of this year’s highlights. 

The average length of this year’s movies was 89.0 minutes, which suits me just fine. 

2023 saw the checking of two rather large movie boxes. 

I saw 7 “Must See Movies” which means I have now seen all of the movies included in my “Must See” movie book.

I also saw 15 “Cult” movies, which means I have now seen all of the cult movies in my four “Cult Movie” books. Parts of that list were difficult, but I made it!

The 794 movies were nominated for a total of 549 Academy Awards, winning 51 Oscars, not all deserved, I may add.

As far as our official Cinema Wellman ranking system (👍/💣) goes, 231 (29%) were given a thumbs up, 98 (12%) got the bomb, and 466 (59%) were given the blank space which means it was okay. Not a waste of my time, but not something I’d suggest you all watch. That’s not a bad pie chart there. I’ll take that on a consistent basis.

The 794 movies came in a variety of ratings, 12 to be exact. There aren’t 12 ratings anymore, but some of them don’t exist today, as you know. 

48 different countries were represented this year as were 613 different directors.

Directors who popped up 5 times this year included Allan Dwan, William Beaudine, and Robert Siodmak.

The “Six Timers Club” for 2023 included Leah Shore, Cecil B. DeMille, and Wes Anderson.

Cinema Wellman’s “Director of the Year” if there was such a thing would go to George Melies. I enjoyed 8 of George’s films this year, and they were delightful!

Genres are always an interesting category to look at, especially when you consider that many movies blur several genres simultaneously. The final tally for 2023 was 17 genres, with way too many sub genres for even me to be concerned with.

If you’re going to screen over two movies a day for an entire calendar year, you’re going to utilize a lot of platforms to get the job done.

In 2023, we got our movies from 24 different sources, a vast majority of which were legal and above board!

The top 5 for 2023 were:

5) HBO/MAX (or whatever it’s called) 51

4) Criterion 77

3) TCM 98

2) Netflix 103

1) Plex 272 (Thanks to Quin for making that possible!)

Something else that I also keep track of is cost per rental when it comes to Netflix. I certainly get my money’s worth when it comes to Netflix. In the old DVD days, I must have been in some kind of file of theirs under rental surveillance as it were. 

This year’s Netflix bill was $1.80 per rental. Can’t beat that.

And that is a wrap for this Unspooled episode, our 49th, and final, episode of 2023.

Thank you so much to all of my friends and family that make up 99% of my audience. It’s fun knowing that there are people out there willing to spend 20 minutes or so of their week here with us at Cinema Wellman.

Thanks, always, to Quin in our Tech Department who keeps things running and puts out any and all fires, Andy in our Musical Department who is always cooking up fun things for us, and Chet our sound man who makes us sound like a real podcast on a weekly basis.

I’d also like to welcome Dakota to the staff for Season 3. Dakota will head our wardrobe department and has come up with some interesting designs for our “signature episodes.” We’re looking forward to debuting a few of those very soon.

We will be back at our regular Friday launch time next week for Episode 1 of Season 3 of Cinema Wellman!

The Best and Worst of December!

We hope you’ll join us for that, and we also hope that you have a very happy and healthy and safe 2024.

Until next week, take care.

 Cinema Wellman’s Holiday Wish List

Hello and welcome to Cinema Wellman. Today we will be reading our letters to Santa Wellman in order to find out what our cinematic “Wish List” looks like this year!

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As you probably fully realize, just because you wish for something doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.

Letters to Santa (and Santa Wellman) included. 

When you were a kid, did you ever ask Santa for a pony for Christmas? 

Did you ever get a pony for Christmas?

I rest my case. 

If you’ve been with us since the start, you’ll know that this is our 2nd “Cinema Wellman Holiday Wish List” episode, and we hope to make it an annual thing whether we get our wishes or not.

Last year, our wish list included some wonderful suggestions, NONE of which were realized in 2023. 

But let’s not get discouraged! We can’t be the only people who want these things to happen (or in today’s case, stop happening). Hopefully filmmakers will get the idea one of these days. 

Our first letter is from little Johnny K. from Fairfax, VA who has quite a list for Santa Wellman.

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Dear Santa Wellman,

I’ve been a relatively good boy this year and would like movies to STOP doing ALL of the following things:

*Stop making movies over two hours

*Stop making sequels, and while you’re at it, stop making prequels!

*Stop making superhero movies AND Star Wars movies

*Stop making movies about people who are still living

*Stop letting Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner make (or be in) movies

*And ENOUGH with animated movies based on products

I also have a list of things I want movies to START doing, but I figured this part of my list was enough for this year.

Don’t eat the yellow snow,

Johnny

I have to be honest with you Johnny, I agree with just about everything you included in your list. You know you’ll never get all of that, but I hope some of your wishes come true. 

We here at Cinema Wellman have gone on record many times with our loathing of long movies, sequels, prequels, and the comic book movies. (Not to mention Costner!)

I’d agree with you about the ban on movies based on products after seeing Battleship, but Barbie has turned me around on that for the time being. Let’s see how long that lasts.

Thanks for watching, and Happy Holidaze!

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Our next letter comes from Chet Jr. who lives in Littleton, MA. 

We know Chet Jr. is forced to watch since his dad works here, but thanks for the letter anyway!

Dear Santa Wellman,

Could you please use your influence to have the movie industry stop the practice of feeling the need to end every movie they think may make money with a final scene that teases a possible sequel?!?!

We KNOW you are out of original ideas, stop hedging your bets that every movie deserves a sequel!

Thanks,

Chet Jr. 

You are not alone with this feeling! Our previous letter alluded to stopping the sequel train, and I like that you added to that by wanting them to put an end to even teasing a sequel! Here here! So annoying.

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We have one more letter before we get up on our own Santa Wellman soapbox and air our grievances! Speaking of the airing of grievances, Happy Festivus, to those of our viewers who celebrate the holiday. 

Jason, from Edison, NJ, sends us the following letter:

Dear Santa Wellman, 

I enjoy movies about time travel, aliens, ghosts, and interplanetary travel experiences as much as the next guy, BUT…

During all of this craziness and lunacy that’s going on and is being seen by all sorts of people, why is there always a character who has a theory that’s also lunacy, but THAT character is treated like they belong in an asylum for bringing up such a thing! All of a sudden, with everything going on, and after everything that everyone has seen, nobody believes them. 

“Everyone just saw the ghost of an alien from 1950s Mars, and you don’t believe MY story?!!?”

And, of course, please let’s get rid of the old, “We don’t have time for that right now.”

I know you only asked for “movie wishes,” but could you also do something positive for my Washington Commanders?

Thanks, 

Jay

Sorry, Jay, but Santa Wellman has zero control over your football team of choice. Cinema Wellman’s squad is terrible as well, so you are not alone in your misery. 

I do agree with your suggestions, though, and in addition to getting rid of the “We don’t have time for that right now,” we also need to eliminate the “You need to take a look at this,” cliche that our friends at Cinema Sins have been griping about for years. Stunning how many movies those two lines are in when you’re looking for them. 

Just lazy, lazy screenwriting. At best. 

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Thank you for the letters, and thanks for watching! If you think of suggestions during the year, please write them down since you know we’ll be asking for more material next year. 

Unless, of course, all of our dreams come true. 

The staff here at Cinema Wellman have come up with a few items of our own that we’d like the cinematic world to cease and desist!

*First off, can we get rid of the old “I’m supposed to kill you, I have a weapon and you don’t, but I’m going to drop my weapon and fight you barehanded to the death anyway cliche.”

Seriously. This would NEVER, EVER happen in a real-life scenario! If you needed to kill the other person, and they were unarmed, you WOULD KILL THEM! You wouldn’t give them a chance!

Come on, that’s Hired Killer 101 there!

NEXT!

*Do me a favor. The next time you drive past a construction site, make sure you look for the ramp. 

What ramp? The ramp at every movie construction site that launches vehicles into the air, of course.

Spoiler Alert: The launchpad ramp won’t be there. It’s there in every movie, but it’s never there in real life. 

Stop making that a thing. 

And, one more thing on our list before we go, and it’s something we asked movies to stop last year…

STOP HAVING CHARACTERS VOMIT ON SCREEN! We know what it looks like by now! Have them make the noises, have them barf offscreen. We don’t want to see any more vomit!

I even watched a short, animated film this year that featured a vomiting character that was an inanimate object!! Balls of yarn do not possess a digestive tract or stomach from which to expel “content.” 

It happens so often that I’m actually going to keep track of how many “Vomit Movies” I see in 2024. If it’s not too many, I won't mention it again. 

While I’m on vomit, can we also stop having characters do their own stitchwork with needles, pins, fish hooks, etc. to close up gaping gunshot and knife wounds?

We get it. The characters are wicked tough. Isn’t there another way to show that aside from DIY Surgery?!

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Well, that’s a wrap for our 2023 Cinematic Holiday Wish List! There weren’t any suggestions of things we want movies to start this year, which means we’re determined to have them stop doing what we hate first.

Fair enough!

We hope you join us next week for a very special New Year’s Eve (Amateur Night) episode when we do our best Spotify imitation and present “Cinema Wellman’s 2023 Unwrapped!” Or since it’s film, should it be Unspooled? I like that! 

Everyone here at Cinema Wellman would like to wish you and your families a safe, healthy, and happy holiday season.

Make the best of the quality time you’ll hopefully spend with those you love. 

Maybe you can watch a movie together! That’s always a nice experience. I have a couple queued up already for my brief holiday trip. 

I’ll see you on the other side of that, and…

Until then, take care.