2024 in Review
Happy New Year, folks!
Even though I’m a couple weeks late, I’m taking this opportunity to fully convert this status report into a Christmas letter. My earlier annual updates were fun, I hope, but also very analytical. I’m not about that anymore. As “AI” takes a more integral role in all of our lives, it’s time to embrace being human. Here’s how my 2024 went:
Family Moments
- My wife finished her first year as a surgery resident and is halfway through her second year. So proud of her!
- My son started Taekwondo and earned a yellow belt. He also got big into Pokémon cards and won 1st place in a local Pokémon League tournament.
- I ran a 5K in September and placed 75th out of 186 runners.
- Cleveland was in the path of totality in April 2024. My son and I took a tram to a park where a crowd had gathered to experience the eclipse together.
- My son spent weeks staying after school with his whole class to prepare for a production of Beauty and the Beast Jr. We went to every show!
- I saw My Brother, My Brother and Me live during their Twenty Fungalore tour. 🍄
- My wife and I went to The Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s grand opening after it had been under renovation for years.
- I took my son to the Greater Cleveland Aquarium and saw sharks!!!
- We got into LEGO and worked together to build the Super Mario 64 Question Mark Block, the Sanderson Sisters’ Cottage, the Medieval Town Square, and more.
Beyond these, 2024 was primarily a year of travel and film.
Travel
Early in the year, I bought a Fujifilm X-E4, my first camera beyond a phone. I packed it for all our trips, capturing moments from Michigan to Hawaii.
March: Hawaii
This was our second trip to Hawaii, my son’s first, and he adored it. While we went whale-watching and horseback riding, his favorite part was just hanging out on the beach.
June: Disney World
I’m the only one in my family who had been to Disney World, so we took the rare Cleveland direct flight down and spent five days exploring each of the parks. Highlights were Rise of the Resistance, Remi’s Ratatouille Adventure, and Flight of Passage.
June: Michigan
We drove up to Michigan to visit my family and enjoyed some great weather and fun outdoor activities. In the evening, we played the board game Splendor.
August: New Mexico
Finally, we flew down to Albuquerque to visit my grandmother. We went to the zoo and took a tram up to the top of the Sandia Mountains.
Film Highlights
CIFF48
In 2023, I discovered the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF) after wandering past its headquarters. This quickly escalated to me becoming a member and attending the festival in April. I saw a ton of great movies, including the French film Infested, Ghostlight, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, and my favorite of the festival, Secret Mall Apartment. This last one is a documentary about a group of artists who find an open but difficult-to-access space within the negative space of a mall structure and decide to move in. Equal parts protest cinema and performance art, I had a lot of fun watching it and even had the good fortune of chatting with the primary subject and star of the film, Michael Townsend. My review:
Secret Mall Apartment
My journey with CIFF did not end there. Later in the year, I had the honor of joining CIFF as a screening judge, helping to select films for CIFF49. It’s been a rewarding experience.
The ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ Great Lakes Roadshow
Yes, this deserves its own dedicated section in my 2024 review. I’d been anticipating this film for months, maybe even years, obsessively rewatching the trailer when I discovered it would be playing at our local cinematheque as a part of a tour they deemed the Great Lakes Roadshow. I immediately bought a poster and tickets and dragged my family out to see it. The director and star were there for a Q&A alongside a collection of costumed animals running around, causing a ruckus. We had so much fun, and I have the signed poster hanging next to me on the wall as I type this right now.
Hundreds of Beavers (2022)
Buster Keaton
After years of watching Buster Keaton’s films on repeat, I finally saw Sherlock Jr. on the big screen—exactly 100 years after its release. My son was the youngest attendee by far, but he loved it. Seeing it in a theater was magical, especially since the film itself takes place in a movie theater.
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli
Our family loves everything Miyazaki and made it out to see a couple of his films in theaters this year thanks to Ghibli Fest 2024. We saw Princess Mononoke in July and Ponyo in August. I snuck in a viewing of The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness before rewatching The Boy and the Heron with my son. Ponyo, in particular, really popped for me on the big screen.
Ponyo (2008)
Princess Mononoke →
1997
Ponyo →
2008
The Boy and the Heron →
2023
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness →
2013
Letterboxd Lists
I created several Letterboxd lists that detail out the rest of my film activities for the year.
- #BongHive – 2024: My film group picked out a diverse list of films, a few I hadn’t heard of before. I enjoyed them all! We’re kicking off 2025 with The Worst Person in the World (2021).
- O. Knepprath’s Favorites – Star Wars: We watched all nine episodic Star Wars films plus Rogue One as a family in 2024. Our son also played through LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga as we watched them and loved it.
- Films in Sherlock Jr.: As mentioned earlier, 2024 marked one hundred years since the initial release of Sherlock Jr., and it ended up being my most-watched film of the year. During one of these viewings, I noticed all the movie posters on the theater wall that opened the film and decided to track down as many as I could.
- The Knepprath Collection: This list has grown quite a bit this year as I’ve been building out my physical collection. I most recently added the new Godzilla (1954) Criterion 4K.
- M. Knepprath’s 100 Favorite Films: I filled out my top favorites list to be a nice, clean one hundred films. Miyazaki is the most represented director with five films.
- CIFF48: Everything I watched at the 2024 Cleveland International Film Festival.
- Thirsty Cat: I’m slowly moving Dane’s movie reviews from his blog to Letterboxd.
Stats
Okay, I can’t help myself. Here’s an abbreviated version of my annual progress report.
- My Review of The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
- Sunsquints
- The Vanilla Layer
- Load Creep
- “Life in Sometown, U.S.A.”
Books
- Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton
- Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur Vol. 1-8
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula
- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
- Co-intelligence by Ethan Mollick
- Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
“Lumet is a candid and entertaining writer and this book is dense with raw insights from his career as a filmmaker. Absolutely worth diving into his head for a few days.”
Games
I put 20+ hours into Star Wars Outlaws at this point and am about two-thirds of the way through. Having a great time with it. I also picked up a PlayStation VR2 and have been working through Horizon Call of the Mountain.
Onward!
We have some big family plans for 2025, so I’m excited for that! I fell off of social media a bit over the past year or two, and I’m happier for it. Quite the change after starting out my career as a social media manager. If you can get away with it, I highly recommend it. More in-person connections, less doomscrolling. How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?
