Well, 2026 is getting on and I guess it's time for the year-end wrap up. In Japan, there's a tradition called Bonenkai - a Year Forgetting Party, where you gather with coworkers or classmates to forget the trials of the last year. I forgot to do that this year.
It wasn't a great movie year for us. I only blogged about 77-80 movies, the least ever. We watched more than that, but without Netflix DVDs, we have resorted to re-watching old favorites. Some of these, I even blogged about, if I had seen them first before the blog started.
We did watch a lot of recent movies - 20 from 2025, more than most years. I got to see some of the big comic book movies, which I still love, and enjoyed them, mostly. Like Thunderbolts*, Superman, and Fantastic Four. Not so much Kraven the Hunter.
We also watched some old movies. We got the complete set of Hildegarde Withers movies, mostly starring Edna Oliver and James Gleason. Miss Withers is a tart-tongued schoolteacher who solves crimes. We also got a few Glenda Farell/Joan Blondell team ups. These are mostly about two broke party girls looking for wealth and romance, and usually ending up with one or the other.
I also wound up watching a lot of kung fu movies. As I often mention, Ms. Spenser can't always take the night off to watch a movie. She doesn't mind if I watch one, as long as it isn't something she's interested in. So, kung fu. Some were good, some less good, none that really stuck with me. Although I did find out where Ghost Face Killer comes from.
As a result, we didn't get to watch as many good, quality movies as we might have wanted to. I'll propose The Phoenician Scheme as my favorite. I'm not sure how good it is as a movie, but I loved it. Sinners was definitely a good movie, that we also enjoyed - maybe tied for first place.
One trend I noticed is a bunch of Nobody clones - ordinary guy gets pushed to far, and turns out to be more dangerous than anyone imagined. Take, for ex, Novocaine, The Amateur, and Love Hurts. They were all pretty enjoyable - at least I liked them. More than a bunch of women led action movies, like Ballerina. Not that it was that bad, but it didn't raise the bar on the John Wick movies. I don't think it even cleared that bar.
Our first movies of the New Year were the Hobbit trilogy. We'd watched them earlier this year, found them better than we remembered, and swore to watch them first thing in 2026. Done.
For cocktails, I'm actually drinking less. It just seems a little boring, and too much work. I don't mind a nice cocktail on a night out, but my consumption has dropped below three drinks a week. We'll see if that lasts.
But I did make a celebratory cocktail: I call it the Nameless.
- 1 shot dark rum
- 1/2 shot Galliano
- 1/2 shot lime juice
- 2 dashes Angostura bitters
- Top with sparkling wine
It's weird but I kind of liked it. Besides, I'm trying to use up a bottle of Galliano.
We'll leave it there. The state of movies seems precarious and troubled, the state of the world much more so, but I hope for a better 2026. But I'm not so naive as to think it can't get worse.
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