Mainstream Movie Memories of 2022

I see that I've missed out again in the New Year's Honours list.  Still no OBE for services to sleaze.  We're once more at that time of the year where we are all supposed to be doing retrospectives of 2022.  I've never seen the point of that - I mean, we've all just lived through the bloody year, so we know what happened - but this year it seems even more pointless as, from a personal point of view, it has been the most uneventful year I can remember.  Which is a good thing, as I've had far too many eventful years, where 'eventful' has, in reality, meant 'traumatic' or even 'disastrous'.  I like my life to be quiet these days, with the absolute minimum of interaction with the rest of the human race.  So, while Russia invaded Ukraine, Elon Musk bought Twitter and we endured a merry go round of Prime Ministers here in the UK, I've been taking it easy.  I've watched a lot of movies, though.  Many of which I've already written about here, so I won't rake over them again.  As well as all the schlock I chronicle here, I've also caught up with a number of more contemporary mainstream movies, several through a streaming channel of highly dubious veracity - the fact that several of the recent releases they claim to have rights to have Mandarin sub-titles is, I think, a pretty good indicator that they aren't entirely kosher.  But hey, I'm only watching them - no money has exchanged hands, (they are ad-supported), accepting on good faith that they really do have the rights to stream these movies.

Watching these movies has just reinforced the feeling that I'm clearly not the target audience for much modern cinema.  Particularly superhero franchises.  Aquaman might as well have been an animated film, so much of it consisted of CGI fishes, while Black Adam left me shrugging, not just at the fact that it added nothing new to the genre, but also in mystery as to The Rock's continued popularity as a movie star.  (To be honest, I never really liked him as a wrestler, either - I was firmly in the Stone Cold Steve Austin camp).  About the only superhero movie I've seen recently that I particularly liked was Shazam, although I still find it frustrating that, for legal, reasons, he can't be called Captain Marvel any more - although they do make capital out of that fact in the film.  (I'm sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, the Marvel Captain Marvel is an imposter).  Frankly, the most entertaining superhero film I saw this year was that Turkish Batman movie.  Another one I saw on a dubious stream was the most recent Fast and Furious film, number nine, I think - they all start to meld together after a while, I find the best way to tell them apart is by who is in each one.  This one had Vin Diesel, but not The Rock or Jason Statham, who had their spin off around the same time.  Like all of the films in the series, it was reasonably entertaining while it was on, but quickly became indistinguishable from all the others in my memory.  Though I do recall that some of them went into space in this one.  In a car.  I'd say something about the series 'jumping the shark' at this point but, you know, we're talking about the 'Fast and Furious' franchise here...