2021 was a rough year, given a pandemic that kept many of us at home for much of the year. There were also public conflicts over people refusing masks and vaccinations. In my home, we wondered:
- Could we go out to eat?
- Could I teach classes in person?
- How could we keep the vulnerable around us safe?
- Could we still go to the movies?
For my family, 2021 really started in December of 2020. Many of you may know that my wonderful mum-in-law lived with Dear Wife and me for the last 22 years. MIL’s taste in movies for much of that time matched mine much more closely than my wife’s does, and so until hear health deteriorated several years ago, MIL was my frequent movie-theater-going companion.
I say that 2021 started in December of 2020 because that was when MIL started her final decline with multiple ambulance rides to the ER that would end with her moving into nursing care in April and dying in July.
This is where we watched most of the 236 movies we viewed between the beginning of December 2020 and Dec. 31, 2021
Because we had an invalid at home, and because I’m vulnerable as a diabetic, most our time for the pandemic years has been either at the office or at home. So in December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to returning to normal life anything soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately.
Some of these movies were repeat viewings (I watched Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In The Heights four times last summer. It was my favorite movie of the year.), a few of them were watched in movie theaters (mostly our wonderful community The World Theatre), but most were older movies we watched at home (close to half of the movies we watched were on the classic movie cable-channel/streaming service Turner Classic Movies).
I’m a big fan of the little Field Notes notebooks, and so I decided to start keeping a record of every movie we watched last year. Over the next several weeks, I plan to talk about all these films and how this year of movie-watching transformed our lives in so many ways.
Our movies for December 2020 started out with a couple of old favorites of my mum-in-law:
- 1982 – Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, directed by Guy Hamilton and starring Peter Ustinov as detective Hercule Poirot, along with Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg. We are all Christie fans in the house, but DW and MIL much prefer David Suchet’s version from the BBC to that of Ustinov. (Watched by MIL and DW.)
- 1973 – The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Robert Shaw. This was quite possibly MIL’s favorite film starring her favorite actor – Paul Newman. She would watch anything with Newman in it, but this timeless caper film with the Scott Joplin ragtime piano soundtrack was her go-to movie when nothing else would make her happy. As you will see, we watched a number of other Newman films during the year, almost always at the behest of MIL. (Watched by DW and MIL.)Little known fact: Bob Seeger wrote his piano ballad “We’ve Got Tonight” right after watching The Sting.He saw a scene in the film where Redford puts the moves on a waitress, who says, “I don’t even know you.” Redford replies: “You know me. I’m the same as you. It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.”
“That just hit me real hard,” Seger told during his 1994 interview with the Detroit Free Press. “The next day I wrote ‘We’ve Got Tonight,’ this song about two people who say ‘I’m tired. It’s late at night. I know you don’t really dig me, and I don’t really dig you, but this is all we’ve got, so let’s do it.’ The sexual revolution was still going strong then.”
Up next: A pair of 1980s movies and modern Christmas film