Moviiiiies! My off-and-on life obsession, and my faves of the 2010s list

I’ve always loved movies, always always, but I’ve also kind of fluctuated with how big a part of my life movies are. My whole family was always big into movies… in fact, my brothers loved horror movies from an age way too young to actually watch them! They just loved the idea of horror movies and like the trailers/commercials and pictures, and would dress up at Halloween every year as characters from movies they hadn’t seen. When I was 10 or 11 (?) I was Garth from Wayne’s World (which I’m pretty sure I also hadn’t actually seen), Matt (8ish) was some kind of horror villain dude, and Ben (6ish) was The Terminator. (Ben is now a cinematographer, and has worked on horror movies like Bone Cold, Dylan’s New Nightmare, and 13 Fanboy. Paul is also a filmmaker!)

So I lived in a movie-loving household, and in high school I would go to the movies pretty much every weekend, then in college I stopped for a few years because I lived on campus without a car and it was a big deal to go see a movie, but also I started taking film classes so I was learning about older movies and watching different kinds of things that were new-to-me. In my last year of college I worked at Blockbuster Video so I rented tons of movies and was going to the theater a bit more too. Then for a few years after that, money was tight and I didn’t live near any cheap second-run theaters so my main movie consumption was Netflix DVDs… until we moved to Portland in 2007 where (at that time) there were a bunch of awesome cheap second-run theaters!! So we started seeing tons of movies all the time, basically up until 2020. (The Laurelhurst theater below is one we used to go to a lot, back when it used to be second-run, mocked up with movie posters I designed for graphic design school!)

Also, in that time, post-2007 until I went back to school in 2016, when my full-time job was knit designing I would watch tons of movies while knitting for work… I got into several film podcasts—I’ve been listening to Filmspotting since I lived in California in 2006, and am still a regular listener; my number one fave film podcast now is Maximum Film! since I discovered it around 2019 I think. In 2011 I even did a year-of-movies thing on the blog where I watched 365 for the year and kept track of them all (like a proto-Letterboxd-Diary). Over the years I had phases when I’d watch lots of old stuff, criterion-type stuff, etc, although when I was designing I couldn’t really do subtitles because I needed to look at my knitting/notes.

These days, I knit a lot of more basic things just for fun, so I can knit to subtitles, and I’ve been watching lots of movies in other languages this year! I was initially going to have this blog post be catching up on movie stuff up to the present but that got WAY too long, so I’ll be posting again soon with my 2022 best-of list and more present-day movie stuff.

In January of 2020 I put together a list of my top films of the past decade—my top two of each year 2010-2019. So, it’s a bit different from what my actual top 20 of the decade might be. I also only allowed myself one film per director on the list, to help narrow things down. Below is my resulting list!

I’ll say where each movie is currently available to stream at the time I’m writing this, but most are also available for digital rental, and where they are streaming might change by the time you’re reading this. I highly recommend JustWatch (I use the app on my phone but you can just use it in a browser) where you can search any movie (or TV show) and see where it’s available to watch.

My Faves of the Decade:

2010 number 1: Never Let Me Go (currently streaming on Starz); number 2: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (currently streaming on Netflix). I loved Never Let Me Go so much that after I saw the movie I read the book, then I got the movie on DVD and watched it again, then years later I listened to the audiobook. (I’m not usually a big rewatch/reread person—too much new stuff!!) One of my top favorite movies and books of all time. If you haven’t seen or read it, I recommend doing whichever you prefer to do first—I really think the book and the film are both worth anyone’s time. If you have no idea what it is, I’ll tell you it’s a kind of soft-sci-fi drama, but I actually went into the movie knowing nothing about it, not even the trailer or plot summary, and I’m glad I did, so I’d recommend not reading anything at all about it!

2011 number 1: The Cabin in the Woods (currently streaming on Roku, Tubi, Pluto—all free with ads); number 2: Bridesmaids (currently streaming on Peacock). I loved Cabin in the Woods so much when I first saw it that I saw it twice in the theater! I can’t think of another movie I went to twice in the theater since Titanic when I was 15. I don’t know how well it holds up now though because I haven’t watched it in probably ten years.

2012 number 1: Safety Not Guaranteed (currently only available for rent); number 2: Frances Ha (currently streaming on Kanopy—free with library card, Netflix, Mubi, Criterion, AMC+, and Tubi—free with ads). If I rewatched both of these now I’d probably switch the order. I loved SNG so much when I first saw it in the theater, and then I bought it on blu ray and rewatched and haven’t seen it again since; whereas Frances Ha, for some reason, I didn’t see when it was new, and I actually didn’t see until I was making this list in 2020 and looking for blindspots. I absolutely loved it, and I’ve since bought the Criterion blu ray, but it felt weird to put a movie I’d just seen for the first time as my number one fave from 8 years earlier.

2013 number 1: Only Lovers Left Alive (currently only available for rent); number 2: Her (currently streaming on Max). I’ve seen each of these only once and really need to give them both a rewatch! I think I’ll still love them both.

2014 number 1: What We Do in the Shadows (currently only available for rent); number 2: The Grand Budapest Hotel (currently only available for rent). Another pair I think I’d flip now, or I actually think I’d probably choose a different film instead of WWDITS just because I feel like that one was really of its time, and there are a few others I like better than it now, shrug.

2015 number 1: Inside Out (currently streaming on Disney+); number 2: The Witch (currently streaming on Kanopy—free with library card—and Max). Yet another I’d change if I edited the list now—I haven’t seen The Witch (or the vvitch) since the theater, so I’d want to rewatch. I did actually rewatch Inside Out a couple years ago and I feel like I didn’t love it as much I did the first time… and I think there were some other 2015 releases that have risen higher for me now.

2016 number 1: Arrival (currently streaming on Hoopla—free with library card, Paramount+, and Pluto); number 2: 20th Century Women (currently streaming on Kanopy—free with library card—and Max). Love these both so so much.

2017 number 1: The Florida Project (currently streaming on Kanopy—free with library card, Hoopla—free with library card, Showtime, and Paramount+); number 2: Lady Bird (currently streaming on Kanopy—free with library card, Netflix, Paramount+, and Showtime). So good.

2018 number 1: Blindspotting (currently streaming on Max); number 2: Annihilation (currently streaming on Hoopla—free with library card, Paramount+, and Pluto).

2019 number 1: Us (currently streaming on Netflix); number 2: Parasite (currently streaming on Max). These two are kind of tied, and I need to watch Parasite again because I only saw it in the theater, then I might flip them… but there’s something weird about my personal number one movie of a year also being the Best Picture Oscar winner, you know?

Looking up JustWatch for beloved older movies to see where they’re streaming is reinforcing my commitment to buying movies I love on physical media! I own all the movies on this list except three and I’m on the lookout for those. I buy a lot of used DVDs and blu rays and also Criterions during sales and I’ve started buying more recent releases new if I really love them, to support the films and to support physical media continuing to exist! Best Buy announced they will no longer have physical media next year; Barnes & Noble still does and they are my favorite chain store to buy from (online or in-store). Of course I prefer buying from a local non-chain when possible, but sadly most of the places where I used to buy them either closed or have little to no movies anymore, and the place where I love shopping for used ones barely has any new. Anyway, I love having a physical collection!

If you like lists, I also have best-of lists on Letterboxd for 2018 (above), 2019 (below), 2020 & 2022 which I’ll do a separate blog post about, and an in-progress list for this year, which I’ve basically been using to drop in all movies that I give 4 stars or higher, making it easier to form my list at the end of the year.

I joined Letterboxd around 2018 I think, but started using the Diary to log everything I watch in 2021. I love having that record, and the longer I do it the more I can use it to look back and see if I’ve already seen something (and if I liked it, etc), since my movie memory gets foggy after awhile. I love Letterboxd so much that I wanted to include it as a social media link on this blog, but the WordPress template doesn’t have a logo for it, so that generic link at the top after the twitter bird goes to my Letterboxd profile. If you love movies, I highly recommend it! I love looking at reviews on there after watching a movie, especially if I really loved it (or really didn’t)!

So all this kind of leaves off at the end of the previous decade. I’ll do a separate post with my more recent lists, because (spoiler alert) I made a top 28 faves list for 2022!! And since it’s so recent I wanted to really list them all out. If you’re here for knitting content, that’ll come too eventually. It’s what I do while I’m watching all these movies, after all. It’s all connected!