PopGap #01: Movies of the 2010s

It's 2015 and the official start of PopGap. PopGap is a new project we're starting in which we try to redress and paper over the sometimes considerable holes in our pop culture literacy. I'm not sure why this matters so much to us, but it does. Maybe we just don't like being left out.

Each month I am going to take a topic and an allegedly authoritative (or crowd-sourced) list and try to fill in the gaps by watching the movies and listening to the music that I have heretofore ignorantly excluded. Also, I am a nerd and I like lists.

January will generally be the time of each year in which I try to catch up on the "important" items I missed from the previous year. However, this year I am expanding January to cover all of the 2010s to-date, because I've been fairly neglectful in some key areas. I don't make it out to the movies often enough, and at home I often opt for smaller (and shorter) indie movies, which seem less of a chore than the big releases. So I've missed a lot of ballyhooed movies over the last 5 years.

Using the handy, crowd-sourced FlickChart as my guide this month, I am going to try and watch the Top 20 Movies That I've Missed So Far in the 2010s, as long as they are currently available on home video in some format.

For reference, here's my list of top 20 favorites, according to Flickchart, so far this half-decade:

1. American Hustle (2013)
2. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
3. Life Itself (2014)
4. True Grit (2010)
5. The Descendants (2011)
6. Django Unchained (2012)
7. Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
8. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
9. Winter's Bone (2010)
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
11. The Way, Way Back (2013)
12. 13 Assassins (2010)
13. The Avengers (2012)
14. 50/50 (2011)
15. Kick-Ass (2010)
16. Nebraska (2013)
17. A Hijacking (2012)
18. A Royal Affair (2012)
19. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011)
20. Goon (2011)

Not bad, but a little light in places, and nothing in there would be counted as among my all-time favorites. And here are the movies that Flickchart users rank as the best of what I've overlooked:

1. Interstellar (2014)
2. Gone Girl (2014)
3. Argo (2012)
4. Warrior (2011)
5. Boyhood (2014)
6. Before Midnight (2013)
7. A Separation (2011)
8. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
9. Shutter Island (2010)
10. Take Shelter (2011)
11. Lincoln (2012)
12. Blue Valentine (2010)
13. Shame (2011)
14. Snowpiercer (2013)
15. The Intouchables (2011)
16. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
17. I Saw the Devil (2010)
18. Nightcrawler (2014)
19. The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)
20. Cloud Atlas (2012)

I think most of those should doable, with the exception of a couple from the late-2014s. I can say right now that I'm not looking forward to Shutter Island (I am semi-phobic about prison/asylum movies AND reality-or-fantasy mysteries),  Lincoln (yawn), Blue Valentine (sounds like a total downer), Shame (I've actually seen this, but didn't like it at all; will try it again), Snowpiercer (sounds extremely stupid and annoying), The Intouchables (sounds to me like a French Beaches or Radio) or Cloud Atlas (sounds like my worst nightmare: pretentious, disorganized and precious).

The others already on home video I've missed largely because I wanted to watch them with my wife, but they are too long to fit into a single kid-free viewing window, so we usually opt for hour-long episodic TV. Now I have an incentive to watch them without her. Sorry, toots. PopGap is calling.

Sort of like we did during Octoblur, we'll be making frequent updates on this blog as well as on our new Twitter account: @PopGap.