A brief overview - basically I keep track of all the films I watch (I’ve been doing this since 2006) on a monthly basis over the course of the year, just so I can post the list up here at the end of December.

During the course of 2011 I watched only 88 film, during 2012 I appear to have seen 102 – still some way behind 2010′s 145 films.
The reason for no films during September is because I was moving house and pretty much all my free time was taken up with that.

Anyway, enjoy the list.

January
Red State
Apollo 18
Sherlock Holmes A Game of Shadows
Creep
Jonah Hex
True Grit
The American Astronaut
The Fountain
Another Earth
The Beaver
Melancholia
Green Lantern
Underworld : Awakening

February
Infernal Affairs III
Yamada – The Samurai of Ayothaya
Horizon
Cemetery Junction
Killers
Cargo

March
Rambo 4
Dogma
Jennifer’s Body
Failure to Launch

April
Kung-Fu Panda
The Adventures of Tintin
Snake in the Dragon’s Shadow
M:I : Ghost Protocol

May
A Perfect Getaway
Avengers Assemble
Cabin in the Woods
Die Hard
Iron Sky
Sharktopus

June
Marvel’s Avengers Assemble
Cabin in the Woods
Definitely Maybe
Unbreakable
Hancock
Hugo
The Divide
Beyond the Black Rainbow

July
Iron Man
Mad Max 2
The Crazies
Priest
Mesrine : Killer Instinct
Bad Teacher
Snow White and the Huntsman
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
Cowboys and Aliens
Highlander
30 Minutes or Less
Battleship
Immortals
Take This Waltz
Clash of the Titans
Wrath of the Titans
Mirror Mirror
Legion
Extraterrestrial
Your Highness

August
The Hangover part 2
Shame
The Inbetweeners Movie
Saving Private Ryan
Bridesmaids
Man on a Ledge
Black Swan
The Green Hornet
Contraband
Gamer
Cars 2
Rango
Contagion
Real Steel
The Ides of March
The Collector
The Devil’s Double
Wild Wild West
Inspector Gadget
Treasure Guards
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The Expendables 2
The Fog (original)
Sinners and Saints
Resident Evil

September

October
The Taking of Pelham 123
The Book of Eli

November
Transformers : Revenge of the Fallen

December
Savage Grace
Bandaged
Die Hard 2
Rare Exports : A Christmas Tale
Kung-Fu Panda 2
Tangled
The Dark Knight Rises
The Amazing Spider-Man
Ted
Suicide Kings
Heywire

RIP Sir Patrick Moore

I felt a great disturbance in the Force… as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Well, apart from the ‘suddenly silenced’ bit, that’s a bit of a prophetic quote now, given recent news.
Instead of suddenly silenced, social media and the blogosphere kinda-sorta exploded with the news that George Lucas has indeed sold his beloved LucasFilm division to Disney.

I was somewhat taken aback by this news initially, but I held off from either declaring it a good or bad thing, instead I did that rarest of things where the Internet is concerned, I sat back and tried to carefully consider how this could play out.

I’m from the generation that saw Star Wars at the cinema before the title was appended with the words ‘Episode IV : A New Hope’, so I literally grew up with the characters and planets that populated this particular cinematic universe.
I had friends that had the toys (and we actually played with them!), these films were very much part of my childhood.

I’ll gloss over the dismay that descended upon me after watching The Phantom Menace, and I’ll skip to the present day.

In my humble opinion, Disney has got itself a bit of a bargain here.
Let’s try and break things down a little … $4.01bn For LucasFilm, which owns Star Wars, Indiana Jones, ILM, Skywalker Sound … there’s so much more to this deal than just the Star Wars film rights.
The Star Wars merchandising alone generates over $215 million a year.
It’s been estimated that, converting to today’s markets, each of the last three films made would have generated $1.5 billion each, so the announcement by Disney to want to continue on with the originally proposed trilogy of trilogies makes total financial sense.

I’m not crying foul at the deal, but I will say that in my opinion, George Lucas started tinkering a little too much with originally excised footage, and adding unnecessary CG sequences.
It does seem as though the creativity in the universe he created and brought in to being by sheer force of will had been somewhat diminished over time.

I can’t imagine history judging him too harshly, though.
He may have messed it up towards the latter stages, but hopefully Disney can pull something back and redeem the whole series of films.

Try and think of the Avengers film as a testing ground for what could possibly happen with the future Star Wars films : all the individual super-hero film outings have done pretty well, and the Avengers film itself did pretty OK business.

I can’t see Disney wanting to screw this up at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Star Wars fans are some of the most loyal genre fans there are, and if Disney knows what’s good for it, it’ll learn from the miss-steps that George Lucas took when making eps I-III (hint, there were many).

Now he rests among the stars

I was all “stop raping my childhood” not long ago, but there’s been so many reboots and re-imaginings recently that I’ve started to look at things a little differently.

The original Robocop will still be the original Robocop. The original Total Recall will still be the original Total Recall. The original Highlander will still be the original Highlander.
These remakes will only go to strengthen the impact that those originals had on the individual and the culture at that time.
The impact of the originating films won’t be lessened by an inferior remake, it’ll be strengthened and reaffirmed. And if the remake is good, then what?

I guess I’m just trying to say that instead of seeing the remakes and reimaginings as that, try and see it as a continuation of the original, because if they tank at the box office (see the recent Conan remake) then they’ll be forgotten and ignored, like tears in the rain, and everyone will still think of the original film.

Listed here are ten upcoming films that are based on already existing films.
Some may be good, some may not be, but either way, the original film will still be the original film.

Would you rather have a time machine you can’t control, or a spaceship you can?

This was asked by someone on my Fb timeline.
It’s an interesting question. And one I still find I’m having an internal debate about, despite living with the question for a few days now.

With a time machine, you’re stuck with the same geographical area in which the machine is situated yet can travel to any point in history/the future.
With a spaceship, you can basically visit anywhere in the known (and unknown!) universe(s) but are stuck in the same plane of existence.

A fully functional spaceship would (in my scenario) have a teleportation device, so at least you would be able to take planetary-side excursions.

It’s a tough call.

Quite a few of what’s contained in the link at the bottom of this post would be there, but not all of them, and of the ones that I would have in my list, the position is likely to be different too.

It’s just so damn hard coming up with a definitive listing of the best anything. I’ve been trying to compile a list like this for the past five years or more, on and off, and it’s always a case of “but what about this film” or “what about that film” and “but this film had this really cool so-and-so” or, well, you get the picture.

Maybe I should just STFU and get on with it one of these days. *shrug*

The link which started all this nonsense … Top 10 Science Fiction Films