Brandon's movie memory

Another good movie year. Lists to follow.

Progress on my massive must-see lists: I’ve now watched some 61% of the They Shoot Pictures list (up from 55 last year), approx. 50% of Rosenbaum’s list (46 last year), and about 57% of Criterion movies (was 54 and I watched a ton, but they just keep releasing ‘em).

Normally I have a long list I’d made myself a year before of specific movies I intended to watch this year, and I can disappointedly point out how few of them I ended up watching, but I didn’t do that this year, so no disappointment!

Movies I only watched in part:
Late Spring – will surely try this again
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – we’ll pick this up again, too
Uncle Meat – meant to watch a half hour at a time, but never returned.
The Prisoner – meant to watch on treadmill, but working out is hard
Bells of St. Mary’s – still plotting to finish, but I fell asleep a half hour before Katy turned it off, so our resume-points are out of sync.
A Christmas Carol – The Jim Carrey motion-capture version. Not planning to finish this ever, since its one of the worst movies we’ve ever (half) watched – a mishmash of visual styles, all of them ugly.

Anyway… on with the lists!

It’s the five-year anniversary of the movie journal! Since that first short post on a Seijun Suzuki movie which Katy so hated, I’ve chalked up over 1100 features and over 800 shorts, many of which Katy has hated. She married me anyway.

In celebration of five years of movies, I’ve rescued a pile of must-see lists from my email archive. After all, the blog was started partly because of my obsession with movie lists, and it has happily coincided with them ever since (via the sortable list of entries and various other must-see lists posted every few months, all collected here). So these are project or theme-month lists left uncompleted, with titles I actually watched removed, and overlaps kept to a minimum.

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Musicals Month

In October (and November) 2007, Katy and I watched a bunch of musicals. I even made a musicals-month soundtrack CD. There were some rocky selections – Katy walked out on Pennies From Heaven and declared that Red Garters was not a proper musical, but she got to pick Grease and Fiddler on the Roof. This looks like a list of my own leftover picks, with a few Katy-concession titles and a couple recommended by Joanna.

New York, New York
Hairspray
Tommy
Quadrophenia
Hallelujah
Performance
A Star Is Born
Topsy Turvy
On the Town
Funny Face
42nd Street
Top Hat
A Night at the Opera
I Love Melvin
Dangerous When Wet
Annie Get Your Gun
Bells Are Ringing
High Society
The Muppet Movie
Hello Dolly
Les Girls
Blackfly / The Cat Came Back
Rhapsody Rabbit
Dixieland Droopy

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Documentary Month

From June 2008. One of the more successful theme months – we watched nine.

anything by Ross McElwee
The War Room
Lessons of Darkness (Herzog)
White Diamond (Herzog)
The Big One
The House Is Black
Forgotten Silver
The Power of Nightmares
Salesman (Maysles)
Sorrow and the Pity
Darwin’s Nightmare
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
My Kid Could Paint That
Taxi to the Dark Side
Nanook of the North
One Day in September
In the Shadow of the Moon
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981 punk)
The Filth and the Fury
No Direction Home
Thin Blue Line (Morris)
God’s Country (Malle)
Calcutta (Malle)

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Documentary Month 2

This January Katy said she wanted to do another doc month, so I made this list of movies I’ve already got which we could watch, but then we ended up doing a political-films month instead, during which we only watched two movies (the three-part The Trap, and Standard Operating Procedure).

Bye Bye Africa
The Living Dead (Adam Curtis)
The Way of All Flesh (Adam Curtis)
Showman (Maysles)
Disgraced Monuments
Listen To Britain
Qallunaat!
Monitor: Elgar
Canal Zone (Wiseman)
High School (Wiseman)
Nollywood
VHS Kahloucha
Sisters In Law
The End of Suburbia
Gershwin
Kestrel’s Eye
Winged Migration
Antonio Gaudi
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

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2007 Movies

At the end of 2009 I thought I hadn’t seen enough 2009 movies to make any sort of best-of-year list, so I made a best-of-2006 list instead. At the end of 2010 I figured I’d do the same for 2007 movies and make it a tradition, but then decided that was boring and obsessive. This was my must-see list of ’07 movies to watch in ’10.

The Mourning Forest
Silent Light
Control
Aleksandra
The Last Mistress
Breath
Beaufort
Secret of the Grain
L’Aimée
Christopher Columbus, The Enigma
Go Go Tales
You, The Living
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Gone Baby Gone
Trapped in the Closet
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie
Dr. Plonk
Nightwatching
In the City of Sylvia

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2005 Movies

Apparently I’d had the same idea in 2008, to watch a bunch of movies I’d missed from three years before. Looks like a list of stuff I thought I’d like, stuff I thought I’d hate, and critical favorites.

Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
The Sun
The Wild Blue Yonder
Sileni
The Bow
The Constant Gardener
Brick
Alone in the Dark / Bloodrayne
Manderlay
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
La Moustache
Junebug
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Thank You For Smoking
The Baxter
Don’t Come Knocking
Fearless Freaks

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1930′s Month (August 2008)

Between Trouble In Paradise and Rules of the Game, Katy and I watched seven 1930′s movies, and I watched one more when she wasn’t around. These are the others I tried getting her to watch, along with my brief descriptions. I hardly ever give descriptions… must have been trying especially hard that summer.

Enthusiasm (groundbreaking russian experimental drama)
Gabriel Over The White House (angel-as-president drama)
Daybreak (french romantic tragedy, dir. of children of paradise)
Land Without Bread (bunuel’s mountain documentary)
L’Idee (30-min pioneering animated film)
À Nous la liberté (french left-wing satirical comedy)
Movie Crazy (harold lloyd wants to be in the movies)
Man’s Castle (pre-code spencer tracy romance)
The Milky Way (harold lloyd talkie, milkman becomes a boxing star)
Edge of the World (ahead-of-its-time british drama, scenic, tragic)
Grand Illusion (french war drama often voted a top-ten-ever film)
The Blue Angel (the musical that made marlene dietrich a star)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (renoir comedy w one of my fave french actors)
Sylvia Scarlett (cukor/grant/hepburn romantic comedy!)
Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (some kinda japanese masterpiece)
Threepenny Opera (musical from director of pandora’s box)
Scarface (howard hawks’ original gangster drama)

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Christmas Movies

Christmas Movie Week comes every December – this is the 2010 list, in descending order by how much I thought Katy would enjoy watching them.

The Bells of St. Mary’s
Comfort and Joy
I’ll Be Seeing You
Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey
A Midwinter’s Tale
Christmas Holiday
‘Til We Meet Again
Bad Santa
Jesus of Montreal
In Search of a Midnight Kiss
Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
A Tale of Winter
The Ref
Frozen River
‘R Xmas
A Midnight Clear

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Westerns Month (Dec. 2010)

A very enjoyable six-movie theme month with Katy. And eighteen left on the list I made, so we only got to a quarter of it, which still seems an unusually high ratio. Other lists I make (things to fix around the house, albums to buy, restaurants to try) are just as unrealistic and unrealized as my way-too-long movie lists. Westerns are tough because all their titles sound the same to me.

Big Sky
Duel in the Sun
Annie Get Your Gun
The Gunfighter
Wagon Master
The Lusty Men
Silver Lode
Wichita
Man of the West
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Fort Apache
Red River
Bend of the River
The Far Country
The Misfits
Ride the High Country

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Late Films (Dec. 2010)

For the Shadowplay Late Films Blogathon I watched a week’s worth of final or near-final films by writers, directors and in one case, actors. These are others that I considered:

Lang: The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
Franju: Shadowman
Chaplin: A King In New York
Nick Ray: Lightning Over Water
Walerian Borowczyk
Demy: Trois places pour le 26 or Varda’s Demy double-feature
Corman: Frankenstein Unbound
Jarman: Blue
John Hubley: The Cosmic Eye
Lubitsch: Cluny Brown, That Lady In Ermine
Melville: Un Flic
Oshima: Taboo
Satyajit Ray: The Visitor, Branches of the Tree
Sturges: Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, The French are a Funny Race
Borzage: The Big Fisherman
Borzage/Ulmer: Journey Beneath the Desert/Siren of Atlantis
Jerry Lewis: Hardly Working, Cracking Up

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Russian Movies

Just last month I decided I need to see all the silent Russian masterpieces, and a bunch more Russian movies for that matter. I only watched one feature and a short. Anyway, I’ll get to it later.

Starewicz 1912 Cameraman’s Revenge :13
Bauer 1914 Child of the Big City :37
Bauer 1915 After Death :46
Protazanov 1924 Aelita 1:51
Eisenstein 1925 Potemkin
Vertov 1926 A Sixth Part of the World 1:14
Vertov 1926 Man with the Movie Camera 1:07
Kuleshov 1926 Dura Lex 1:18
Eisenstein 1927 October
Dovzhenko 1929 Arsenal
Dovzhenko 1930 Earth
Vertov 1931 Enthusiasm 1:05
Dovzhenko 1932 Ivan
Kuleshov 1933 The Great Consoler
Pudovkin 1933 Deserter 1:45
Medvedkin 1938 New Moscow 1:16
Eisenstein 1945 Ivan the Terrible
Kalatozov 1959 Letter Never Sent 1:32
1967 Viy, Spirit of Evil 1:12
Protazanov 1969 The Queen of Spades 1:03
Tarkovsky 1975 Mirror 1:48
Sokurov 1979 Sonata For Hitler :43
Parajanov 1984 Legend of Suram Fortress 1:28
Klimov 1985 Come and See 1:13
Sokurov 1988 Days of Eclipse 1:06
Muratova 1990 Asthenic Syndrome 2:33
Petrov 1992 The Cow :10
Mikhalkov 1994 Burnt by the Sun 2:15
Sokurov 1994 Whispering Pages 1:17
Petrov 1999 Old Man and the Sea :20
Iosseliani 1999 Adieu Plancher 1:52
Fokin 2002 Metamorphosis 1:24
Muratova 2004 The Tuner 2:35
Sokurov 2007 Aleksandra 1:31
Zvyagintsev 2007 The Banishment 2:30

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SHOCKtober 2010

Going along with my plan to watch some of the “best films of the decade“, I thought for SHOCKtober last year I’d confine myself to horror movies from 2000-2010. But I didn’t end up doing that at all. So here’s the list I’d planned to use:

Taxidermia
Fear(s) of the Dark
In My Skin
The Orphanage
Inside
Wendigo
The Last Winter
Mother of Tears
Mysterious Skin
The End of Suburbia / Darwin’s Nightmare
Demons (Mario O’Hara)
Memories of Murder (bong)
Anatomy of Hell
They Came Back
K Kurosawa: Seance, Bright Future, Doppelganger
The Devil’s Backbone
Irreversible
Twentynine Palms
13 Tzamedi
Deanimated
Demon Pond
Vital

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SHOCKtober 2009

Told myself I’d watch stuff that I’d bought and rented, but of course that never happens – I just rent new ones. I think this is a mash of lists from 2007-2009.

Dr. Caligari 80min
Organ 104min
Vampyres 88min
The Baby’s Room (2006) 76min
Crawlspace 80min
To Sir With Love (2006) 93min
The Old Dark House 72min
Death Bed (1977) 78min
2000 Maniacs 84min
Mansion of Madness 84min
Midori 49min anime
Atrocity Exhibition 102min
Haxan Witchcraft 76min
Rubber’s Lover 91min
Cthulhu
Fear Itself episodes
Possession by zulawski
Tideland
The Woods (2006)
Wizard of Gore
Sheitan
The Hunger
Necronomicon (1993)
Dr. Caligari
Curse of Frankenstein 1957
The Mummy 1959
Strange Circus
Season of the Witch

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Shorts Month

November 2009 was Shorts Month, when I watched so many shorts that I’m still kind of sick of them. Here are some (not counting the ones that ended up on the auteur list) I’d intended to watch that month before I took a less focused approach and just devoured all the ones on my laptop.

Philips-Radio (Joris Ivens)
Un Chant D’Amour
more Chaplin
Borzage: Nugget Jim / Pilgrim
Free Cinema DVDs
Entr’acte (René Clair)
La Villa Santo-Sospir (by Cocteau)
Paris du par (anthology)
Godard/Mieville DVD
Greenaway: 26 Bathrooms, Fear of Drowning, Writing on Water
Herzog: Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Unprecedented Defence of Deutschkreuz, Nobody Wants to Play with Me, Handicapped Future
Hubleys: The Hat, Moonbird, Whither Weather
Kiarostami: Breaktime, The Chorus
Rohmer: Changing Landscapes
Ken Russell: From Spain to Streatham, London Moods, Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, Prokofiev, Variations on a Mechanical Theme, Antonio Gaudí
various by Terayama Shuji

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TCM Essentials Month (Feb. 2011)

This was short-lived because Katy didn’t have much time to waste on movies, but we’ll come back to it. She missed having cable, so I looked up lists of Turner Classic’s “essentials”, then after each movie we’d read their online article explaining why it was so essential.

A Face in the Crowd
A Place in the Sun
A Star is Born (’54)
An Affair to Remember
An American in Paris
Ben-Hur
Black Orpheus
Bonnie and Clyde (’67)
Brief Encounter
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Duck Soup
Fort Apache
Gaslight
Gilda
Grand Illusion
Gunga Din
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
Imitation of Life
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Jezebel
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Lawrence of Arabia (’67)
Leave Her to Heaven (’46)
Lolita
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Notorious
Now, Voyager
Out of the Past
Paper Moon
Paths of Glory
Psycho
Rebecca
Ride the High Country
Saboteur
Seven Samurai
Some Came Running
Stalag 17
Strangers on a Train (’51)
Sweet Smell of Success
The Bad and the Beautiful
The Big Sleep
The Four Feathers
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Escape
The Hustler
The Letter
The Maltese Falcon
The Manchurian Candidate
The Merry Widow
The Misfits
The Mouse that Roared
The Quiet Man
The Sea Hawk (’40)
The Snake Pit (’48)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
They Were Expendable
To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
Tom Jones
Tootsie (1982)
White Heat
Winchester ’73
Witness for the Prosecution
Wuthering Heights

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Bonus List: Criterion Laserdiscs

I found a list of movies Criterion released before the DVD era, made note of the 80-ish I’ve never seen. I have an ongoing urge to watch everything the company puts out (as do many cinephile/collectors, I’m sure), but between their main label and Eclipse, I’ll never actually catch up to the point that I need to worry myself over these. It’s still an interesting group of films, though.

High Noon
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Sabotage
Secret Agent
Young and Innocent
The Asphalt Jungle
Scaramouche (george sidney)
Show Boat (whale)
Forbidden Planet
Zulu
Darling (john schlesinger)
West Side Story
Shampoo
Miracle in Milan (de sica)
La Cage aux Folles
Burn! (gillo pontecorvo)
The Lacemaker (claude goretta)
King of Hearts (philippe de broca)
Silverado
Last Tango in Paris
The Big Chill
Dr. No
From Russia with Love
Goldfinger
Bad Day at Black Rock
Here Comes Mr. Jordan (alexander hall)
Lady for a Day (capra)
Carnal Knowledge (mike nichols)
Tootsie
Sunday Bloody Sunday (john schlesinger)
Blackmail
The Prince of Tides
Jason and the Argonauts
A River Runs Through It
Damage (malle)
City of Hope (sayles)
Confidentially Yours
Edward II (jarman)
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (bertrand blier)
Evergreen (victor saville)
Macbeth (polanski)
Polyester
Salt of the Earth (berbert biberman)
Bodies, Rest & Motion (michael steinberg)
Menace II Society
Two English Girls
The Prince of Tides
Woman Next Door
Soft Skin
Dersu Uzala
Three Cases of Murder (david eady)
In Which We Serve (noel coward)
Odd Man Out
Once Were Warriors (lee tamahori)
The Atomic Cafe
Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?
Waltz of the Torreadors (john guillermin)
El Cid (anthony mann)
Diva
The Entertainer (tony richardson)
Swept Away (lina wertmuller)
The Return of Martin Guerre (daniel vigne)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Montenegro (makavejev)
Purple Noon
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
Supercop
Olympia I and II
Pink Flamingos
Five Corners (tony bill)
Breaker Morant
Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
Godzilla vs. Mothra
Godzilla vs. Monster Zero
Godzilla’s Revenge
Terror of Mechagodzilla
Sonatine
Switchblade Sisters

Click here for a sortable index of all titles and directors covered in this journal.

I mostly watch/write about movies, which all get neatly indexed here. Sometimes I make lists of movies I’ve seen or of ones I’d like to see, which get gathered here. But sometimes I’ll watch some TV episodes/seasons or the last ten minutes of some crappy movies, and write notes on those. Here’s a collection of links to those.

Television:
The Wire season 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
30 Rock season 1-2, 3-4
Parks & Recreation season 1
The Mighty Boosh season 1, 2, 3
Arrested Development season 1
The Thick of It season 1
Mr. Show season 1
Screenwipe seasons 1-2
Human Giant season 1, 2
Flight of the Conchords season 2
Saxondale season 1
The Armando Iannucci Shows
Time Trumpet
Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace

Note that some miniseries and individual show episodes have been classified as movies.

The Last Ten Minutes:
in which I watch the endings of bad movies on netflix streaming.

Volume 1:
Delgo (2008, Adler & Maurer)
Pandorum (2009, Christian Alvart)
The Alphabet Killer (2008, Rob Schmidt)
Righteous Kill (2008, Jon Avnet)
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009, Patrick Tatopoulos)
Lies and Illusions (2009, Tibor Takacs)
Angels & Demons (2009, Ron Howard)

Volume 2:
Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005, Dario Argento)
The Card Player (2004, Dario Argento)
Phantom of the Opera (1998, Dario Argento)
First Snow (2006, Mark Fergus)
Noise (2007, Henry Bean)
Lakeview Terrace (2008, Neil LaBute)
Obsessed (2009, Steve Shill)
It’s Alive (2008, Josef Rusnak)
Simon Says (2006, William Dear)

Volume 3:
Seven Pounds (2008, Gabriele Muccino)
Blindness (2008, Fernando Meirelles)
Swing Vote (2008, Josh Stern)

Volume 4:
Howling VII: New Moon Rising (1995, Clive Turner)
Ghost Ship (2002, Steve Beck)
Day of the Dead Remake (2008, Steve Miner)
Shrooms (2007, Paddy Breathnach)
Machine Girl (2008, Noboru Iguchi)
American Psycho 2 (2002, Morgan Freeman)
The Signal (2007, Bruckner/Bush/Gentry)
Subspecies (1991, Ted Nicolaou)
Subspecies 2: Your Sister is a Vampire (1993, Ted Nicolaou)
The Astro-Zombies (1968, Ted V. Mikels)

Volume 5:
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009, Stephen Sommers)
Horsemen (2009, Jonas Akerlund)
Supernova (2000, Walter Hill)
John Q (2002, Nick Cassavetes)
Hollow Man 2 (2006, Claudio Fäh)
Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow)

Volume 6:
Prince of Persia (2010, Mike Newell)
The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009, Grant Heslov)
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009, Niels Oplev)
Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (2009, Nishimura & Tomomatsu)
Factotum (2005, Bent Hamer)
Ondine (2009, Neil Jordan)
The Day The Earth Stopped (2008, C. Thomas Howell)
2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)
Salt (2010, Phillip Noyce)
Red Dragon (2002, Brett Ratner)

Volume 007:
Thunderball (1965, Terence Young)
You Only Live Twice (1967, Lewis Gilbert)
Diamonds Are Forever (1971, Guy Hamilton)
Live and Let Die (1973, Guy Hamilton)
The Man With The Golden Gun (1974, Guy Hamilton)
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, Lewis Gilbert)
Moonraker (1979, Lewis Gilbert)
For Your Eyes Only (1981, John Glen)
Octopussy (1983, John Glen)
Never Say Never Again (1983, Irvin Kershner)
A View to a Kill (1985, John Glen)
The Living Daylights (1987, John Glen)

Volume 8:
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010, Jon Turteltaub)
Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002, Jay Roach)
Mercury Rising (1998, Harold Becker)
Starship Troopers 3 (2008, Edward Neumeier)
The Funhouse (1981, Tobe Hooper)
Blood Creek (2009, Joel Schumacher)
Stone (2010, John Curran)
War of the Worlds (2005, David Latt)

Volume 9:
The Haunting In Connecticut (2009, Peter Cornwell)
.com For Murder (2002, Nico Mastorakis)
The Forgotten (2004, Joseph Ruben)
The Crazies Remake (2010, Breck Eisner)
Cabin Fever 2 (2009, Ti West)
Skyline (2010, Bros. Strause)

It’s my thousandth post! Coming up on the four-year anniversary of my movie blog – I celebrated the first and second but missed the third – time to take stock of things.

62% of my web traffic comes from Google image search and 99.9% of my comments are from spammers (much thanks to the Defensio plugin for auto-deleting those). So not a lot of regular readers. But let’s face it, if this wasn’t my own blog I wouldn’t read it either. I guess I will never be a famous film writer, damn it all.

Almost half the movies covered here are from the last decade (that percentage will only increase in the next 11 months, what with my best-of-decade project currently in progress).

Included in the 1690 titles (including shorts):
8 by Takashi Miike, Sam Fuller, Charles Burnett, Pedro Almodovar, Howard Hawks, Peter Watkins
9 by Fritz Lang
10 by Stuart Gordon, Brian De Palma
11 by Luis Bunuel, Werner Herzog
12 by Joe Dante, Eric Rohmer
13 by David Lynch, Guy Maddin
16 by Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, Buster Keaton
25 by Chris Marker

Taking stock of big movie-list quests:
The IMDB changed their search so I can’t simply list the top-250 films I haven’t seen, and it doesn’t seem worth counting by hand. Wasn’t such an interesting list, anyway. I’m around 427/1000 (up from 380 in 2009) on Rosenbaum’s list (with 65% of his top 100), 554/1000 (up from 500) on the They Shoot Pictures list (helped significantly by a site update which replaced some more obscure titles with popular ones), 266/515 (52%, up from 47%) on the Criterion list and a piddling 10/95 (13%) on the Eclipse list. Those should continue to keep me busy for a good while.

It continues to give me pleasure to watch my little movies, write these little posts, and track them in my fancy, sortable index. Carry on, then.

Wow, I wrote too much last year so I’ll keep this short. How am I doing on my ongoing quest to see every great movie?

- My 2008 goal to watch movies I already had (mainly purchased, never-watched DVDs but also rented/copied DVDs and downloads) was not a complete success, somewhere around a third complete. I’m allowing myself to start buying DVDs again with the condition that I watch at least one off the shelf for each new one I acquire… seems reasonable.

- Filmmaker-oriented goals, to see all the movies by Rivette, Resnais, Marker, Bunuel, were well explored and advanced in 2008, but are on hold now, since I’ve decided to ban all foreign-language films (except theatrically and in certain other cases) until I’m at least halfway through my long-long-delayed French lessons.

- Made my list of movies I definitely have to watch in 2009, but I overdid it as always, so it’s 270 titles long. Still, unrealistic goals are better than no goals at all.

- And of the best-movies-ever lists that I often refer to, I’m up five to 211/250 on the IMDB list (will never hit 100% as long as Crash 2004 is still on there), up fifty to 500/1000 on the They Shoot Pictures list, up forty to 380/1000 on the Rosenbaum list, up a mere five on the 1977 list, and up one percent (242/519 from 205/450) on the Criterion/Eclipse list (the hardest one to keep up with).

There are other new years goals and resolutions and lists and everything, but they ain’t movie-related so they are of no concern here.

So I was playing around on my custom movie database and realized I could pretty easily make an index of all the titles (now over 1,000!) covered on this here blog, and so I have done that. Look over there to your right and you’ll find it.

EDIT: A side-effect of the database: now you can see which movies I’ve recently watched before the journal entry goes live, so you can more effectively anticipate new posts.

You, before: “I wonder what Brandon will watch next!”
You, after: “OMG Brandon just watched Loft! I wonder what he thought about it!”

Hooray, it’s the two year anniversary of my movie journal. I have now covered 807 films in 531 journal posts. Contemplation time!

———–
Some Things Change:

– I discovered keyword tagging! All the posts now have clickable keywords, and if you click on the title of a post, it will use these keywords to calculate which posts/movies are the most similar. Therefore I now know that The Fury is similar to The Savages and Sukiyaki Western Django is similar to Zazie dans le metro. I never could’ve drawn those connections on my own.

– I have three sometime-readers (up from last year’s one). That’s three more than I ever intended to have, but I’m still gonna leave the sucker online and searchable instead of taking it private, because I like the idea that if someone’s googling something obscure like Red Garters or Gran Casino or that episode of a cop show that Joe Dante directed, there’ll be something written online about it, even if it’s something snarky and uninformative and poorly written.

– People whose articles I quote can also find me on google and make me feel bad for having attacked their writing style, so I’m going with the first-initial last-name approach in my credits these days to avoid further embarrassment. I’m not obscuring the names of directors however, so I’m sure the filmmakers of yesterday’s experimental shorts entry will find and rebuke me soon enough.

———–
…And Some Stay The Same:

– I’m still way behind on all my viewing goals, but that’s because my viewing goals are still unachievable. I guess they’re technically achievable if I were to stop watching new releases and anything arbitrary, methodically viewing only films on my current must-see list. But that’d take all the fun out of everything, wouldn’t it?

– My writing hasn’t gotten any better, any more rigorous, any funnier. I haven’t improved at analyzing films or even analyzing my own reactions to films. As a “movie memory”, I am doing a fine job, blandly marking my reactions to every single movie I watch (except for Mystery Science Theater movies, which do not count). Since I never really intended to be a Famous Film Critic or a brilliant writer, I guess that’ll do fine.

– Still haven’t learned any French. Didn’t I mean to begin learning French two years ago?

– I am currently working through my thoughts on the “Finding Forrester effect”, especially after having just wasted my time on some Atlanta Film Festival screenings. Can’t eliminate risk entirely and only watch critically-proven films, but there must’ve been some way I could’ve known to avoid Fugitive Pieces.

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My most enjoyable posts from the past year:

There’s little record in the posts themselves of my week-long mailing-list argument over Charlie Wilson’s War vs. Twilight’s Last Gleaming, but it made a deep impression on me. I enjoyed watching The Story of Marie and Julien, writing about it, then reading some articles and having my whole perspective on the film change. My illustrated interpretation of Glory to the Filmmaker! was fun to assemble. Three
different shorts programs were a blast to do, but time-consuming to get all the screenshots. Histoire(s) du cinema was a baffling adventure. Recently I had fun writing about Southland Tales than watching it. Also pleased with posts about Werckmeister Harmonies, Dog’s Dialogue and, since they are so exciting to watch and learn more about, the latest string of movies by Marker and Resnais.

Movie-wise, I’ve too many goals lately. Original quests to see every movie by Samuel Fuller (still got 1 or 2 left) along with as many films as possible from the IMDB list (206/250) and Rosenbaum list (about 340/1000) got a bunch more quests added to them:

Fritz Lang films (just two left)
Joe Dante (watched six this year, bought The Burbs and got some TV episode he did)
Stuart Gordon (a spur of the moment thing for shocktober, just two left, not counting his new one)
Jacques Rivette (saw seven great films, and got some more all lined up)
Luis Bunuel (just three this year, plus a half-hearted screening of “Land Without Bread”)
Alain Resnais (watched or re-watched eight of his earliest films and the recent “Coeurs”)
Chris Marker (watched/loved his first six films this year, up to the rocky 60′s-70′s period where everything’s either super-rare or untranslated on video)
Films from 1977 (watched maybe three features and a bunch of shorts)
The Criterion Collection (about 205/450)
“They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” top 1000 list (about 460/1000)
NOTE: they updated the list in December so now I’m closer to 450.

For 2008 I’ve got a new movie quest, one which will help all the above-listed movie quests as a side-effect… to watch movies I already have… as many as possible!

The “just two left” films by Fritz Lang mentioned above? Got ‘em. Same for Stuart Gordon. Probably around 40 Criterion movies, everything available by Marker and Resnais and Rivette, and tons of titles on the Rosenbaum list. But more importantly, I find myself buying treasured DVDs (how much longer can I hold off on Kino’s second avant-garde collecton and Criterion’s “Days of Heaven”?) and filing them carefully on the shelf unwatched amongst all the other unwatched discs, then going off to rent “Saw III”. It’d make more sense to save this particular quest for some time when Videodrome has burned down or Katy has gotten a job and moved us both to Nebraska, but it seems like a good thing to start now.

That said, there are still plenty of 2006-07 films that I’d love to see on video, or when they finally roll out to Atlanta theaters, such as:
– Syndromes and a Century
– Guy Maddin’s “Brand Upon the Brain” and “My Winnipeg”
– Belle toujours
– Whatever Miike has been up to
– Don’t Touch the Axe
– Klimt, in its original cut
– My Blueberry Nights
– The Man From London
– Paranoid Park
– Go-Go Tales
– There Will Be Blood
– and the Coens’ missing short from “Chacun son cinéma”

JR Jones:
“And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown much less tolerant of movies that waste my time, a development I call the Finding Forrester effect. By most accounts Gus Van Sant’s 2000 drama about a reclusive literary icon is a listless hack job; I’ve never been able to watch it myself because it was the last movie my father saw before he took ill, went into the hospital, and died. When I’m sitting in a press preview I sometimes think, “If I had only a few days left, would I want to spend two hours watching this?” That may seem like an absurdly high bar for a filmmaker to clear, but whoever said a filmmaker is entitled to two hours of your life? Anyone who wants those two hours has a responsibility to make the movie meaningful in some way.”