What I Watched in 2023

For the past eight years I have been tracking every movie, documentary, and television show I’ve watched. I didn’t do as good of a job in 2023 of writing everything down as I have in past years, so I’ll need to be more mindful of doing that next year. The two categories of movies that rarely get captured are films I end up watching on television while flipping channels, and films I only partially watch. This list is more about movies I sat down to intentionally watch and not things I happened to catch, especially in regards to television shows. I regularly watch Jeopardy, still watch Saturday Night Live, and must have seen 30 episodes of Seinfeld, but none of those appear on the list. Tracking every single show I watch would be impossible. Another thing I’m kicking myself over is not writing a description following every single entry. Sometimes I have nothing to say at the time and leave that field blank, which makes it incredibly difficult to remember what some of these movies were months later. I’ll do better about that next year.

With those disclaimers, let’s get to 2023’s list.

MOVIES

In 2023 I watched 80 movies, the lowest number of films I’ve watched in several years. (In 2022 I watched 103 films, in 2021 I watched 155). In 2023 I did a lot of podcasting and video editing and other activities that took away from my movie watching time. That number of 80 films does not reflect all the movies I started watching before drifting off to sleep in bed, otherwise I would have to add 200 more to the list.

The first movie I watched in 2023 was the 1954 sci-fi classic, Gog, and the last one I watched was The Great Rupert from 1950. The fact that both of these films are from the 50s is coincidental. Including those, I watched a total of 11 films that were released before 1970, and I enjoyed all of them. The oldest film I watched and the only one from the 1930s was 1931’s The Champ. I watched a couple of older horror movies including Scared to Death (1946), Tarantula (1955), The Spider (1958), and Carnival of Souls (1962. I finally got Susan to watch To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) with me and I watched The Quiet Man for the first time. I should watch more older movies because all the ones I watched were pretty good.

This year I watched 22 films that were released in 2023 and I didn’t love most of them. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was a bit of a let down. Five Nights at Freddy’s was pretty bad. Scream VI was okay but was unnecessarily convoluted. Dungeons and Dragons was okay. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was okay. Gran Turismo was okay. Super Mario Bros. was okay. Cocaine Bear was fun. Probably the most interesting film from 2023 I watched was Asteroid City, which was so strange I watched it twice in the same evening just to make sure I understood everything.

Some of my favorite movies I watched for the first time last year were The Drowning Pool (1975), Hopscotch (1980), The Whale, and The Menu (2022). There were several others that I enjoyed but didn’t love, like Everything, Everywhere All At Once and Quiz Lady. The winner of last year’s “you gotta see this in the theater” award goes to 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.

As always I ended up watching a few stinkers as well. A Town Full of Ghosts was a “found footage film” that would have been better left unfound. V/H/S/85 was a horror compilation of half-baked ideas. Close to the bottom of the barrel was was Fog City, which my dad and I have lots of fun discussing and picking apart. The absolutel worst movie I watched in 2023 was Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Absolutely dreaful; don’t (oh) bother.

According to my list I only watched five documentaries last year, which is a very low number for me. The most memorable ones were Muscles and Mayhem (the untold story of the American Gladiators) and Bob Ross: The Happy Painter. In 2022 I watched 23 documentaries, so this was a really low number for me this year. I just remembered that Susan and I watched Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields and then visited the Texas Killing Fields while on a road trip.

As always I did a pretty bad job of tracking movies I had previously seen, but a few of the ones I remembered to capture were most of the Friday the 13th and Scary Movie films, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Stripes, Super Fuzz, and National Lampoon’s European Vacation.

TELEVISION

In 2023 I watched a few seasons of television and Susan actually watched a few of them with me. The two of us watched all three seasons of Only Murders in the Building together and are looking forward to season four. We also watched Poker Face which was a fun show and I hope they make a second season.

I watched the third season of The Mandalorian and will keep watching the show even though the third season really lost its way. I watched the Muppet Show spin-off Muppets Mayhem which was really good. I heard it has since been cancelled, even though I assumed it was a one-and-done miniseries to begin with. I also watched the 2022 season of Unsolved Mysteries, which was very well done.

As I mention every year, I watched lots of televison episodes that I did not capture. I fell asleep almost every night watching old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries on Pluto.tv, and watched a lot of vintage episodes of The Price is Right and Jeopardy.

SUMMARY

A lot of the films I watched in 2023 were done while multitasking and working on the computer. Next year I’d like to use my movie room to it’s full capacity and start watching movies out there again. In 2022 I had a list of classic films I wanted to watch and saw almost none of them. In 2024 I’d like to be more intentional with what I watch and get through some of those classics I never watched.

Here is a link to the entire list.