And here’s another of the myriad things that frustrate the crap out of me: my utter inability to stay on top of this blog to my satisfaction. The first month of 2012 is nearly over and I still haven’t gotten around to tying up the loose ends from 2011. Not that anybody else cares about what movies I watched during the past 12 months, I’m sure. But I care — I’ve been keeping lists of this stuff for years, and I find it interesting and sometimes even useful to track my media-consumption habits — and if I was doing this blogging thing right, I would’ve had this post up shortly after New Year’s, if not before. Yes, I’ve had a lot going on during the month of January 2012, but I know my situation well enough to know it wouldn’t have mattered either way. I’d still be playing catch-up regardless. Because that’s just the pattern I’ve lapsed into in recent years. A quick check of the Simple Tricks archive reveals I have 74 unfinished, unpublished entries on this blog. Seventy-four. And nearly every single one of them has followed the exact same pattern: some subject catches my interest, I start composing an entry, and then I get distracted by some mundane matter of daily life and a day or two (or five or ten) passes, and in the meantime more subjects of interest come down the pike and then the moment is lost and that poor orphaned scrap of writing slips into blog-entry limbo. Sometimes I can come back to them later, but usually the topic has lost its relevance and I can’t rekindle the creative spark to get back into it anyhow. Nobody knows or cares about these unfinished things except me, but they drive me batshit crazy.

So, this topic may be well past its sell-by date, but I’m going to do it anyhow. If you’re not interested, I understand. Lists below the fold…

FYI before we begin: An asterisk [*] indicates something I’ve seen or read before. Bolded items in the home video section are titles I own. S’alright? S’alright. Let’s get started…

Movies Seen in a Theater

1. TRON: Legacy *
2. Thor
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
4. Green Lantern
5. Super 8
6. Captain America: The First Avenger
7. Jaws *
8. Cowboys and Aliens
9. Labyrinth *
10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2
11. Boys of Bonneville: Racing on a Ribbon of Salt
12. The Help
13. The Rum Diary
14. Real Steel
15. North by Northwest *
    

I think this is the fewest theatrical movies I’ve seen in a 12-month period since before I got my job at the multiplex (and that was in 1989!). And it’s telling that three of the 15 were special screenings of favorite classics, and one of them was a repeat viewing of one I’d seen in 2010 (TRON: Legacy). A big part of the problem, I think, is that I’m simply no longer the target demographic for most Hollywood films being made these days — I’m too old — and so the stories being told and the style in which they’re presented don’t appeal to me. And of course real life has been finding more and more ways to eat up my time and attention this past year. Sometimes being a grown-up really sucks.

For the record, my favorite new movie this year was Captain America, a fun adventure flick that took itself just seriously enough to sell the earnestness of the biggest square in comic books, but not so seriously as to become either ridiculous or grindingly bleak (or both), as so many superhero movies do. The best time I’ve had at the movies in a long time. My runner-up this year was Real Steel, a thoroughly formulaic film that nevertheless wins your heart through good old-fashioned storytelling and un-ironic sentimentality. Not to mention some refreshingly competent editing without all the damn shaky-cam crap. I also enjoyed Thor (I seem to be one of the few who did), The Help, and the final Harry Potter movie. I recall liking the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean, Green Lantern, and Super 8 at the time I saw them, but I have no memory of them now, so make of that what you will. Big disappointments this year: Cowboys and Aliens and The Rum Diary, neither of which were anywhere near what I was hoping they’d be. And in case you haven’t heard of it, Boys of Bonneville is a nifty documentary about Ab Jenkins, a Salt Lake building contractor who set numerous land-speed records and popularized the Bonneville Salt Flats as the place to set them. If you can find a copy of that one, I highly recommend it.

Movies Seen on Home Video

1. Tron *
2. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
3. Flashdance
4. Grand Canyon *
   
5. Mean Streets
6. Man on Wire
7. Blaze *
   
8. The Outlaw Josey Wales
9. Cadillac Records
10. Police Story (VHS)
11. Jackie Chan’s First Strike (VHS)
12. Mother Lode *
    
13. The Desperate Hours
14. Me and Orson Welles
15. Hunter Prey
16. Jesse Stone: Thin Ice
17. Jesse Stone: No Remorse
18. The Long Goodbye
19. Jason and the Argonauts (1963 version) *
20. Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
21. The Tourist
22. Morning Glory
23. Jeremiah Johnson *
    
24. Bonnie & Clyde *
25. The Ice Pirates
26. One Crazy Summer
27. The Freshman *
28. Man from Atlantis
29. Man from Atlantis II: The Death Scouts
30. Flash Gordon (1980 version) *
31. The Shining *
32. The Rocketeer *
33. Phantasm *
34. The Fog (1980 version) *
35. Kingdom of the Spiders
36. The Molly Maguires
37. Man from Atlantis III: Killer Spores
38. National Lampoon’s European Vacation *
39. Space Battleship Yamato (2010 version)
40. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec
41. Fletch *
42. The Thing Called Love
43. Charlie Chan at Treasure Island
44. Videodrome
45. Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise
46. Charlie Chan in Panama
47. Blow Out
48. Romancing the Stone *
49. Patriot Games *
50. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation *
51. Airplane! *

Not much to say here, except to note that a friend of mine recently told me he thought it was a waste of money and floorspace to collect DVDs, because you watch them once and never touch them again, or you never watch them at all. Um, please observe how many bolded titles are on this list…

TV Series on DVD

1. Michael Palin’s New Europe
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981 version) *
3. Happy Days: The Complete First Season *
4. The Beast: The Complete Series
5. Doctor Who: The Ark in Space *
6. Doctor Who: The Sontaran Experiment *
7. Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks *
8. Doctor Who: Revenge of the Cybermen *

Books

1. Late, Late at Night: A Memoir — Rick Springfield
2. Hunt at World’s End — Gabriel Hunt (Nicholas Kaufman)
3. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency — Douglas Adams
4. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul — Douglas Adams
5. Where Is Joe Merchant? — Jimmy Buffett
6. Tales from Margaritaville: Fictional Facts and Factual Fictions — Jimmy Buffett
7. The Cannibal Queen: An Aerial Odyssey Across America — Stephen Coonts (ABANDONED)
8. Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut — Astronaut Mike Mullane
9. Danger–Heavy Goods: Driving the Toughest, Most Dangerous Roads in the World — Robert Hutchison
10. Cairo: A Graphic Novel — written by G Willow Wilson, art by MK Perker
11. Baghdad without a Map and other Misadventures in Arabia — Tony Horwitz
12. The Shining — Stephen King *
13. Different Seasons — Stephen King *
14. The Postman Always Rings Twice — James M. Cain

And finally, the number of books I read this year was way down, owing to my bogging down in a couple of them and only managing to get through a few pages a day. One of them, The Cannibal Queen, actually became so resistant to my efforts to read it that I finally had to give up, something I almost never do. (Man, was that one a disappointment! I bought it clear back in college and never got around to reading it until this year. I was expecting a travelogue filled with colorful characters and adventures in charming, off-the-beaten-path locales, but it ended up being a lot of tedious and redundant tech-talk about the idiosyncrasies of flying a biplane, dry descriptions of small-town airstrips that were hard to distinguish from each other, and an occasional dollop of right-wing bullshit.) The Douglas Adams and Jimmy Buffett books were also disappointments, as was Danger–Heavy Goods.

Riding Rockets, however, was fantastic… an incredible memoir by a born storyteller, filled with insider details, gossip, pathos, and a rare case of honest self-appraisal and growth. If you have any interest at all in the space shuttle program, or just in the drama of an eventful human life, I highly recommend it.

I also recommend Late, Late at Night, the painfully frank memoir by my main man, Rick Springfield. This book got a lot of attention on its release because of the surprising (to some) revelations of Rick’s lifetime of sexual escapades, infidelities, and struggles with depression. I know the book offended some casual fans who couldn’t reconcile their image of cuddly Dr. Noah Drake from General Hospital or that cute teen idol whose poster used to hang on their bedroom doors with the self-destructive asshole Rick has often been in real life, but those people just weren’t paying attention, in my opinion. The details had always been secret, of course, but the broad strokes of who Rick really is and the demons he’s fought have always been there in his music. For me, the book just made my appreciation of his work and of him personally even deeper; after reading it, he’s more human to me, more relatable. Maybe that’s just because I have many of the same problems he does. Not the scads of meaningless one-night-stands, but the insecurities, the self-doubt… I think there’s a reason why I’ve always been drawn to his music, even when I was very young. And I was delighted to learn that he collects Star Wars toys!