100 Films in a Year is precisely five years old tomorrow!
I’m aware my fifth year ended in December, but here we’re talking about the fifth anniversary of my first ever post, from 28th February 2007, where in one fell swoop I covered most of the year to date. Sometimes I’m tempted to go back to those teeny-tiny reviews…
Anyway, in celebration of me managing to stick at something for so long, I thought I’d have a little week of it: five top five lists (see what I did there?), culled from the films officially counted as part of 100 Films during those first five years. So that’s the 545 films covered on these five lists, not the 585+ on here.
So what five top fives have I come up with? Well, there’s perhaps the obvious two: the five best and the five worst. There’s also my five favourite (distinct from best — essentially, one being Worthy Films and one being Entertaining Films), the five I think are the most underrated and, conversely, the five I think are the most overrated. The only rule is that films are only allowed to appear on one list — so nothing can be both a favourite and underrated, say. These lists are too short to go duplicating things like that.
And at the weekend I may post some statistics, if I can think of something suitably different to say than in my last regular year-end one. I hope I can — I do love some statistics.
If you’re not interested in any of this (party pooper!), normal service will resume next week. And also on Wednesday night, when I post my summary of February.
Before I get on to today’s inaugural list, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to ‘officially’ announce this shiny new ‘simul-blog’. Y’see, I say new — I’ve been updating it with new posts for most of the year (it’s currently got everything going back to January 2012), and if you’d known to look (or happened to see me mention it on twitter) it’s been publicly available too.
As FilmJournal sadly seems to be slowly slipping away, I thought it time to start something new. I’ve no intention to stop posting there — hence “simul-blog” not “new blog” — but, yeah, this new one’s here now. It’s got some advantages, like a pretty front page and cool big banner pictures at the top of every page, which I’ve taken the opportunity to customise for every single review (goodness knows how quickly that’ll eat through my WordPress storage allowance, but it doesn’t half look good), and some disadvantages, like my lack of familiarity (and the fact I’m still formatting the posts for FilmJournal first) meaning the pictures sometimes look a bit awkward. But that’ll surely get ironed out in time.
I’ve not been able to export my blog in a way the new one will accept, for some reason, so transferring will have to be done manually. Which has its advantages — I can re-do all links and re-format pictures as I go — but also its disadvantages — over 600 posts! (Golly!)
Another advantage is that you can easily subscribe to get an email every time I post something new: there’s a little box to the left on the front page, just pop your address in there. That goes some way to getting over the lack of FilmJournal front page (I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s always been my main way of keeping up with other FJ blogs). Emails aren’t perfect right now — I’ve always uploaded pictures at a bigger size then used HTML to make them fit the page nicely, but the emails seem to ignore that and just bung them in full size — something I need to see to going forward. And when I begin back-posting it’s going to flood people with 600+ emails unless I find a way to stop it. Oh dear.
Anyway, please check it out — the URL, in case you somehow missed the link above, is 100filmsinayear.wordpress.com. Any thoughts welcome. (First one: I’m intending to change that big ol’ logo to a banner of thumbnails, a bit like the one on the old blog.)
And with that said and done…
Alone in the Dark
The first Uwe Boll film I saw, and quite possibly the last. It’s not just bad, it’s impressively bad — how do you make a film this shoddy? Of course there always has and always will be bad writing, bad acting, bad directing, but how do you create something with so little awareness of how to tell a story? It baffles me.
AVPR – Aliens vs Predator: Requiem
If you saw Alien vs. Predator when you were about 14 then you might love it. More or less everyone else hated it. That is, until you see this. It’s dull, it’s poorly constructed, it’s so dark you can’t even tell what’s going on… What a waste of the franchises. Bonus disgust for dragging the once-great Alien series so low.
Cube²: Hypercube
I love Cube; it might be one of my most favourite films. It doesn’t need a sequel, but if it was going to have one it really shouldn’t have been this. The original was great because of its simplicity and ambiguity; this ditches both, being over-complicated and with a woeful explanation ending. Pretend it doesn’t exist.
Flight 93
I despise this film. I think it’s disrespectfully bad. Maybe its poorness has been hyped up in my memory, I don’t know. Thankfully we also have the exceptional United 93, which is an absolute must-see to my mind. Funny that a single true story has inspired both one of my most reviled and one of my most esteemed films.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
Comedy should be funny, but not everyone agrees what’s funny — that’s why some love Frankie Boyle and some wish he would die (insert the name of any comedian/’comedian’ you like there). I quite like Silverman, which is why I was disappointed by this. I don’t think I even laughed once. Maybe out of desperation.
Tomorrow I’ll list the five films from my last five years of viewing that I consider to be the most overrated.
100Films.co.uk 
Initially I thought you were talking about United 93. There’s another film… ick….
They’re not the worst films of the last five years but I’d agree that they’re probably the worst of the films you’ve reviewed.
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I think it’s the good fortune of the amateur blogger over the professional critic that we don’t have to suffer quite as many poor films. Though obviously some slip through the net, for one reason or another!
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