The 2021 Movie Scramble Season

My PVR is filled with old movies.

My streaming services have a slew of blindspot movies that I've never got around to seeing.

I have goals to review many classic and older movies including those that will be a part of my Disney Animated Theatrical Releases and MCU Movie review series.

The urge is strong, but it is very likely with a few exceptions that all those movies will be ignored for the next month and half.

I've now been smacked by the end-of-the-year catch all the major current year releases scramble season.

As a film critic with a website and podcast that I'm desperately trying to grow, I feel obligated to do end-of-the-year lists including a Best of the Year. In order to have a list with any respectability, I need to watch a decent amount of current year releases. Since this year is 2021, that means I need to try to track down and watch and review a slew of 2021 releases.

Obviously, I do that throughout the year. But living in a smaller city means that my local theatre tends to only release the big studio movies, and many of the really good independent and the studios' smaller but high-quality movie don't come anywhere close to me. On top of that, since I don't get screeners (yet?!?), I need to purchase all my tickets to the movies I review in the theatre and even with Scene points and such, it adds up, so I tend to avoid renting most movies. This means I rely on them either coming up on streaming or have an excess of Scene points to justify a few rentals (or wait for when there are the 99 cent sales). 

On top of that, the big studios tend to save their big high-quality movies and Oscar contenders for the end-of-the-yeae, which means the next two months is when a good portion of my potential Best of the Year movies show up.

All that to point to the fact that the last two months is usually overstuffed with movies that I need to see in an attempt have a strong top ten list to end the year. Even with a goal of trying to catch as many good movies as possible, I tend to miss a lot of the big ones, such as Parasite wasn't seen by the time that I made my Best of 2019 list.  I've accepted I can't see every movie and not even every great movie. 

But I will at least try to catch some of the significant movies or at least the ones that are available to me and seem like they have a good chance being something I love. 

Outside of a few older movies that we have scheduled for The Movie Breakdown, expect a slew of 2021 reviews in the coming weeks as I try to create my Best of 2021 list. My goal will be to cram in a decent amount, but I also know that I risk some burn out if I don't pace myself or accept that I can't watch and review two movies every single day.

I also intend to do as many full reviews as possible and I do have hopes of revisiting some of the movies that I've already seen but never wrote a full review.  In order to pull all that off, there will be some very short snippet style reviews of some movies and I'll try to delve deeper into the movies that connect to me in some way.

Let the 2021 cramming begin!