A by-the-numbers look at my 2015 movie viewing year

The main character in Home, one of a number

of animated Hollywood movies I viewed in 2015

Screening times for a cinema showing -- count 'em! -- four

Hong Kong movies over the Chinese New Year period last year :)

At various points in my life, I've had jobs which -- I'd tell people -- had me "watching lots of bad films so that you don't have to".  A few months into 2015, I decided that I had spent too many hours of my life watching movies I didn't really want to.  Since then, there have been weeks when I've not watched a single movie.  

But even while my film viewing total looks to have peaked in 2014 (with 204 feature films viewed for the first time that year, and few repeat viewings of favorite movies), I'm still going to the cinema pretty often -- more than most people, I reckon! -- and, actually, clocking up numbers comparable to previous years' (check out my by-the-numbers posts for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 to see what I mean)!

2 -- The total number of Malaysian films I viewed last year (i.e., Chiu Keng Guan's The Journey (2014) and Edmund Yeo's River of Exploding Durians (also 2014))

2 -- The total number of films I viewed in 2015 from countries that no longer exist (i.e., East Germany and the USSR)

3 -- The number of times I got to see my favorite actress of all time, Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia, on a big screen in 2015 (For the record, she starred in The Bride with White Hair, which screened at the 2015 Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Swordsman II, one of the selections for the Hong Kong Film Archive's "100 Must See Hong Kong Movies" series, and features briefly in 2014 Taiwanese documentary The Moment!)

3 as well -- The total number of movies starring the great Setsuko Hara (whose death in September at the age of 95 years was announced only in November) that I viewed in 2015

3 also -- The total number of films I viewed in 3-D last year

8 -- The number of movies I viewed on board a plane last year

9 -- The number of animated films I viewed for the first time last year

14 -- The number of films from Britain that I viewed last year 

19 -- The number of movies I viewed at the 2015 Hong Kong International Film Festival

25 -- The total number of 2015 Hong Kong feature films (including Mainland Chinese co-productions) and short film anthologies that I viewed last year

30 -- The number of films I viewed for the first time in 2015 that I'd rate as a 8.5 or higher on the brns.com scale (with these being: 12 Golden Ducks (Hong Kong, 2015), An (Japan-France-Germany, 2015), Boat People (Hong Kong, 1982), Boyhood (USA, 2014), Conflagration (Japan, 1958), Daughters, Wives and a Mother (Japan, 1960), Dersu Uzala (USSR-Japan, 1975), Grave of the Fireflies (Japan, 1988), It Happened One Night (USA, 1934), Kingsman: The Secret Service (Britain, 2015), Leviathan (Russia, 2014), Little Big Master (Hong Kong, 2015), McFarland, USA (USA, 2015), Our Little Sister (Japan, 2015), Parasyte (Japan, 2014), Pride (Britain, 2014), Princess Jellyfish (Japan, 2014), Prophecy (Japan, 2015), Song of the Sea (Ireland-Denmark-Belgium, 2014), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (USA-UK, 2015), St. Vincent (USA, 2014), Still Alice (USA, 2014), The Imitation Game (Britain, 2014), The Moment (Taiwan, 2014), The New Rijksmuseum -- The Film (The Netherlands, 2014), The President (Georgia-France-Britain-Germany, 2014), The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Mainland China-Hong Kong, 2014), Timbuktu (Mauritania-France, 2014), Tokyo Olympiad (Japan, 1965), and Veteran (South Korea, 2015)) 

30 also -- The number of films from Japan that I viewed for the first time last year (the same as in 2014!) 

31 --  The number of different territories whose films I viewed last year (And for the record, they are, in alphabetical order: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, East Germany, France, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Mainland China, Malaysia, Mauritania, Japan, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Russia, Taiwan, The Netherlands, the USA, the USSR, and Ukraine)

32 -- The total number of movies from the USA that I viewed for the first time last year 

33 -- The total number of Hong Kong feature films (including co-productions with Mainland China and other countries, and one unfunished work) and short film anthologies that I viewed for the first time in 2015

59 -- The number of feature length films and short film anthologies that were first released in 2015 that I viewed in 2015

96 -- The total number of movies from other than Hong Kong that I viewed in 2015 

129 -- The total number of feature length films and short film anthologies I viewed for the first time last year 

1934 -- The original year of release of It Happened One Night, the Hollywod classic that was the oldest movie I viewed in 2015

1941 -- The original year of release of Follow Your Dream, the oldest Hong Kong film I viewed in 2015