Alli Hates Movies

I don't actually hate movies. I love movies. I adore movies. But when I got a job that had regular hours and a long commute, it became difficult to dedicate time to watching movies when a lot of what I was seeing was kind of trash.

I'm not going to pretend that I'm not a snob; I like artsy films that make interesting use of the medium, I like films that are moody and alienating and will make you think about them months or years later. But I also like a good popcorn flick or monster movie.

Unfortunately it seems like a lot of those have gone away too and instead we've got films with massive budgets and scripting committees and actors hovering in front of green screens reciting lines they learned that day; it feels like a lot of movies kind of suck now, which is why I kind of stopped watching them. I recently got into an argument with my dad about how film scores are boring now and he responded "well how would you know, you don't even watch movies!" and you know what, fair point pops. It's time for me to catch up.

I'm going to be watching the movies that I missed from 2011 to the present day and documenting my reactions and reviews (in one format or another - I'm not certain yet what that format will be, but it will definitely be linked on this website). I suspect there will be a lot that I find frustrating, but I also suspect that there are some good movies I missed.

Thanks for following along if you're interested!

The List

I will not be adding things to this list. I will not be taking recommendations or criticisms on the list. The list is fairly arbitrary, it is not a "top films of X year" list, it is a list of movies I missed. Some of those are the top 10 highest grossing films of a given year (per box office mojo) and some of those are critically acclaimed and well-reviewed films, and some of those are films that ended up on other people's year-end lists and made me go "Oh! That's right! I wanted to see that!"

If I want to find good movies, I am perfectly capable of finding good movies. The purpose of this project is not to find good movies. I do not need movie recommendations.

In fact, before I started this project, I watched kind of a lot of movies. I used to go to the movies two or three times a week (sometimes two or three times a day on a good release week) and I used to watch a ton of movies on the satellite channels when that was a thing. If you absolutely positively must recommend a movie, please make sure that it's not on The List and is not one of the 1600-ish films I've marked as "viewed" on letterboxd.

There are a few movies on the list that are there because they were big films from that year, but that I will not be reviewing because I vetoed them. I just don't want to see some movies, I'm just not interested in seeing more of some franchises (Star Wars has been comprehensively destroyed for me, I don't want to see more Star Wars, I am mad at Star Wars, we are fighting), and I cut myself a little slack to know that there's no chance I was wrong about Wicked, that movie most assuredly sucks. They are on the list for two reasons: to acknowledge that they are films that I missed rather than things I just forgot to put on the list, and to potentially be used as a torment nexus by people following along with the project (it is entirely possible that you could someday force me to watch Top Gun Maverick in spite of my initial veto).

I have also already seen some of the movies on the list - even when I "wasn't watching movies" I was still watching a couple new releases a year, and there were only two years (2022 and 2023) in which I actually didn't see a single new movie. Movies I've vetoed and prior watches will be noted, movies I've watched for the project will be updated with a link to the review when such a review exists.