At the beginning of the year, my wife and I decided that we'd like to watch more movies. There are 52 weeks in a year, 2 of us, and 26 letters in the alphabet. What better way to choose some movies than to go alphabetically? The only rule: Where possible, it should be a movie that one or more of us had never seen before. Oh, and ideally it should be part of one of the copious online streaming services we're already subscribed to, because why bother paying for a rental when we're not short of options?
Incidentally, if anyone from the big online streaming service providers is reading this (your Notfluxes or your Prims, for example), please make it easier to search for/sort movies alphabetically. Thanks.
Also, fair warning: There may well be movies that appear on this list that you'll find hard to believe I haven't seen before. It happens.
Previous letters are here: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V
THE WITCHER: NIGHTMARE OF THE WOLF Director: Kwang Il Han Stars: Theo James(voice), Mary McDonnell(voice), Lara Pulver(voice)
Synopsis via IMDB: Escaping from poverty to become a witcher, Vesemir slays monsters for coin and glory, but when a new menace rises, he must face the demons of his past.
I have some familiarity with The Witcher as a franchise; I've played a couple of the games and found them to be pretty entertaining but never persevered enough for me to get really engaged. My wife and I tried to get into the Henry Cavill series and just...haven't managed to do so. Anyway, with that said I understand enough of the franchise universe to take a reasonable guess that I'd be able to follow the story of this one just fine.
This turned out to be pretty bang on the money, in hindsight. Granted, there will no doubt be references and such that completely passed me by, but I picked up on a couple of the main nods and even wondered aloud about some aspect of the story that turned out to be absolutely spot on.
The question, of course, is whether with all that said the movie is any good. I think so. It's short and sweet at just under 90 minutes, and tells a well-paced story with enough exposition to tell the story without any deep dive of the surrounding lore required. The voice performances are pretty broadly strong, and visually it's beautiful; the animation is really crisp and the anime format brings out some frankly incredible colour palettes and looks gorgeous in motion. It's not at the level of genre-reinventing, but it's a really nicely executed movie.
W won't win any prizes for the best letter, as the movie covered was serviceable but nothing genre-defining, but worth a watch. I'm so close to getting this done! Looking at the remaining letters, I have a strong idea of what I'm likely to go for in Z and an idea I *can* use in Y (though I'm still open to other options), but X is still proving elusive. I'm not averse to watching XXX, but I might go off the wall on this one and gamble on something a little out of left field (not a sporting movie clue). While the final writeup might drop in January as Christmas/New Year might make sitting down to write trickier, I am determined to complete the alphabet during 2021. I have an idea for a couple of final posts to round this off, as well.
Did you enjoy the roundup? Let me know! If you have thoughts on the movies chosen and their respective writeups above, you know where to find me. Maybe you don't, but there are buttons everywhere to make that happen. Comments, Twitter, you name it. Moreover, if you want to make use of this movie night format, bearing in mind you're a few weeks in and might have to double up to get up to speed, feel free to do the same - I'd love to know what you chose too!
Rob Wade
Rob Wade blogs about stuff he likes. Whether it's video games or geek media for Emotionally14 or writing about speculative theories for future films on Talk Star Wars, the focus has always been on the stuff that brings the most pleasure to his life within media.
Rob is the editor of Emotionally14, and showrunner of the E14 podcasts "The Crazy Train", "The E14 Gamecast" and "Talk Star Wars", as well as the host and guest of a number of pieces on E14's Youtube channel over the years.
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