The Boaz Movie Tally of 2015

(EDITOR’S NOTE: There are Easter eggs peppered throughout this entry. Click on the hyperlinks to enhance your experience – or be lame and don’t bother…)

I post on every single movie I see, right? MAN I wish it were true…

The most recent post was almost a full year ago, February 11th, 2015, and it was about my movie theater recommendations in LA, not even a movie review! While I immerse myself in self-flagellation, let’s see how I did with the goals I set myself in last year’s tally:

1. See more movies – GOAL ACHIEVED. Last year was my all-time low of 103 theatrical movies, so I suppose I only had up to go. This year my final number was – wait for it- 121 movies in the theater. I reached my goal but I still should have done much better. To give some perspective in 2012 I saw 139 and in 2013 I saw 135.
2. Blog more – GOAL FAILED. No question about this, I blogged just twice in 2015, and neither was an actual movie review. Pathetic.
3. “Forget” to leave the toilet seat up once or twice – GOAL BARELY MET. Fairly certain there were 1-2 circumstances where she almost fell in, but her reflexes have obviously improved because there was no actual splash. I can definitely do better in my role as husband-saboteur.

My life in 2015 – This past year was nuts. In January I finally achieved my lifelong goal of letting someone shoot a laser into my eyeballs, and as the photos shows, I’m finally glasses-free!

About 6 weeks later we were off on our honeymoon in BEAUTIFUL New Zealand and Fiji. As amazing as it was – and it really WAS incredible – this is what happened…

Yup, broken elbow thanks to the saddle sliiiiding off the horse I was riding. This resulted in no swimming/diving in Fiji, Adi carrying ALL of the luggage herself, returning to LA, being told I didn’t need surgery, months later being told I DID need surgery, months later finally GETTING surgery, and months later…going back to work! Yes, I was out of work for 7 long months thanks to my honeymoon injury, and God bless union contracts, because I returned to a job that was not only waiting for me, but I had gotten a nice raise while I was away. (Thanks, Obama!)

2015 was an amazing year for movies that friends of mine created. I saw THREE theatrical movies that were both written AND directed by friends!

1. The Wedding Ringer (Jeremy Garelick)
2. Get Hard (Etan Cohen)
3. 1915 (Alec Mouhibian)

All 3 were worth seeing: the first two were silly, raunchy, and hilarious; whereas 1915 was an extremely bizarre, moving and creative tribute to the Armenian genocide 100 years earlier. Awesome that as a movie-lover I’m also connected to some of the creative people behind the very things that stoke my obsession!

If there is one single post I WILL write in 2016 (other than this one) it will be my interview with Jeremy Garelick, performed oh so many months ago, but put on the back-burner for ages thanks to my injury and inability to type for much of the year.

Anyway, I think it’s time to return to the movie tally, and all the juicy tidbits. For the first time ever I counted every movie I saw DURING 2015. It didn’t matter if it was released the previous year – this is about what I saw during the 12 calendar months. The 121 movies, and the people I saw the most with, along with some memorable highs and lows were…

1. Adi – 86 movies (previous year 71). Not bad, that means 71% of the movies I saw were with my beautiful wife, a slight improvement over last year’s 69%, a far more entertaining number…I’ll honor my wife by saying that 2015 was an incredible year for horror movies, her FAVORITE genre. It’s safe to say that most horror flicks are terrible, but there must have been something in the water recently, because last year we saw The Babadook, It Follows and Goodnight, Mommy. These weren’t just great horror movies, they were great movies, period. I’ll also mention that the thriller (her second-favorite genre) Secret in Their Eyes got absolutely SLAMMED by critics, and nobody saw it in spite of an A-list cast, but it caught us off-guard with how intensely good it was!
2. Helen – 12 movies (previous year 0). The girl moved from NY and I got my claws in her early! Living right by The Grove didn’t hurt. We really book-ended the year nicely by seeing The Imitation Game early on, and then Creed on December 31st. Some real gems, and yes Creed should have been nominated for more than just Stallone’s solid performance.
3. Jared – 11 movies (previous year 12). Predestination. It’s not even close. What an unbelievably cray cray movie. There is just about no way to describe it without spoiling it. Let’s just say it starts off as a weird and interesting drama, and then your brain becomes a Jackson Pollock splatter from trying to follow what the hell just happened…
4. Josh – 6 movies (previous year 5). Two of the most surprisingly funny movies were seen with this new baby-daddy – Spy and Trainwreck. Oh, and both were starring hilarious women and made tons of money. All this while Adam Sandler made multiple movies that were huge critical and financial bombs last year. Does pointing this out make me a feminist?
5. (TIE) Cindy – 5 movies (previous year 4). One of the dumbest comedies I saw all year had to be Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. Who knew that a sequel to an awful movie could be even more awful? We did see one really good little indie though, While We’re Young, a much better cast role for Adam Driver than Kylo Ren. (Don’t get me wrong, I loooooved Star Wars, I just didn’t like that every second he was on the screen all I could think to myself was, “that’s the guy who has bizarre sexual proclivities on Girls“. It just wasn’t much of a stretch to see him prancing around in leather and a mask.)
6. (TIE) Patrick – 5 movies (previous year 1). Some awesome movies here. My favorite has to be Goodnight Mommy, one of the previously mentioned FANTASTIC horror movies last year. The movie is in German, we saw it at the Nuart theater right before the Rocky Horror crowd arrived, and the theater was packed with people reacting LOUDLY to the crazy stuff that happens in this movie. Wow. We also saw A Most Violent Year together, an absolutely under-appreciated drama that should have been nominated last year, but nobody saw it. To be fair, Patrick hated it and disagrees strongly with me, but I stand by it as being a fantastic movie starring a subtle performance by Oscar Isaac.
7. (TIE) Arnon – 5 movies (previous year 0). Wow, this talented filmmaker not only saw 5 movies with me, but I absolutely LOVED 3 of them. Star Wars, The Martian, and It Follows. Such great movies, loved loved loved all three of them. Star Wars was the sequel I was wishing and hoping for when the awful prequels came out. The original actors were still alive and kicking, the special effects were phenomenal, the old-school Jim Henson effects were honored, and it was just…so…much…fun. It’s often criticized for being an unoriginal rehash of the first one. So what? It was a respectful passing of the torch and making up for the “original” but awful prequels. If the next movie is a rehash I’ll join in with the criticism, but I truly believe this was appropriate, and the next one is gonna take things in a very different direction. (I have faith because it is written and directed by the guy who made Looper, one of the most creative movies in the past decade!)
8. (TIE) Talia – 4 movies (previous year 0). Let me take a minute to thank Talia (and Helen), who are NOT fans of horror movies, for willingly going to see It Follows with us that night. This movie was another one of the absolutely incredibly great horror movies of 2015. You think black people were snubbed this year at the Oscars? Well, they were (Straight Outta Compton and Creed were as good as anything out there this year). But so were horror movies. They always are ignored. Nobody respects the genre, and this was absolutely one of the best 8 films of the year.
9. (TIE) David B – 4 movies (previous year 2). Oh man, Jupiter Ascending, talk about a disappointment. You take the people who made The Matrix and you come up with a piece of garbage that could have been made for the sci-fi channel? Oh how the mighty have fallen.
10. (TIE) Kara – 4 movies (previous year 2). A completely trashy movie that few people went to see, American Ultra was simply a ton of fun. It’s a real example of misleading advertising though. It really looked like a comedy peppered with action from every preview I watched, but man, this Jesse Eisenberg movie was dark and violent (not that I’m complaining).
11. (TIE) Mittelman – 4 movies (previous year 9). Tsk tsk, we saw far less movies together this past year, the inevitability of him moving 20 minutes further away…we saw Avengers: Age of Ultron together, and I definitely enjoyed that comic book extravaganza…but I have to say, my favorite one with him was probably Shaun The Sheep; DAMN those Aardman folks know how to make a funny and creative piece of claymation.
12. (TIE) Abe – 4 movies (previous year 1). Ant-Man managed to make a comic book movie that non-comic book fans could actually enjoy. It pulled off the same light, funny tone as Guardians of the Galaxy, though I’d give it a B+ whereas Guardians was truly awesome. Nonetheless, my most MEMORABLE experience would have to be McFarland, USA. I made a deal with Abe (and Farnaz) that we would only see this movie IF I would walk out midway if it sucked. While me and Adi were enjoying ourselves, they were bored out of their minds, and I obviously did NOT want to leave a movie before the end (I’ve never done that!). Abe then gave me a new deal, run around the movie theater doing a few laps and yelling “weeeeee”, and I could stay. I was too chicken to even do this, so ultimately he let me off the hook by running from my seat down the stairs to the entrance of the theater and back up like a relay race. Embarrassed, I upheld my end of the revised bargain, and got to watch the end of the movie. “Uno dos tres, Mcfarland!!!”
13. (TIE) Avish – 4 movies (previous year 9). Ooh, tough call, I have to give a shout-out here to two amazing movies that were criminally overlooked by too many people…Love & Mercy was an incredible biopic about Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Just an unbelievable depiction of music being created from both genius and insanity. The movie should have been nominated for so many things. And possibly the smartest comedy of the year was Top Five. Chris Rock wrote, directed and starred in an amazingly funny, clever and insightful movie. If he can write the Oscars even half as well as this movie, we’ll be in for a treat on the big night.

That’s enough but I’ll give an honorable mention to my brother Zachary, my father-in-law Mark, Harwin, Damast, Kristina and Farnaz – all of whom watched 3 movies with me. All of you help me enjoy my greatest passion, and I couldn’t do it without you. I actually mean that – I refuse to see movies alone. After 36 years and thousands of movies, the ONLY time I’ve see a movie alone was when my brother Zachary ditched me midway through the Madagascar sequel – granted this was 3 days before his wedding and there was a lot going on – but I was suddenly alone in a movie, and I felt…naked. I had nobody to watch reacting to the movie, nobody to whisper jokes to, nobody to talk to about it after… The irony of the situation is that I was in New York and had nothing else to do, so after it ended I didn’t leave, and instead snuck into two other flicks!

-The movies I am most upset about NOT catching last year? The Walk, The Duff, Self/Less, Z For Zachariah, 99 Homes, Freeheld, Crimson Peak, Burnt, The Peanuts Movie, and Krampus.

-Additional good/great movies that I have not at some point mentioned? Spotlight, The Gift, Grandma, Vacation (so dumb and so funny), Mr. Holmes, Me and Earl & The Dying Girl, Dope, Southpaw, Infinitely Polar Bear, Black Sea, Paddington (GREAT kid’s movie!), Unbroken, Wild, Mr. Turner, Still Alice, End of the Tour and Ex-Machina.

Oh, and my absolute most FUN movie-going experiences this year (not the same as the best movies of the year)? Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World , Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Into The Woods, Furious 7, Inside Out and San Andreas.

The opposite of seeing a movie alone comes annually on my birthday, when I get to watch a movie not only with friends, but with most of the audience being there for me. Here below is my annual birthday movie theater photo, when we saw the awful(ly) entertaining San Andreas. LOVE. THIS.