I’ve taken to posting lists of movies I’d like to watch on this blog, which is unnecessary since I already keep a master list of movies I’d like to see in a database. Keeping extra lists here just means I’ve made everything less efficient. But no matter. A month or two ago I declared The Auteurist Completion Project, with aims to watch the last few remaining titles by directors I care about whose complete works I’d almost seen. Here’s the status report for that particular goal.

P. Anderson: The Dirk Diggler Story
W. Anderson: Bottle Rocket (short)
Anger: Invocation of My Demon Brother, Lucifer Rising, Anger Sees Red, The Man We Want to Hang
Arnold: Deanimated
Bahrani: Man Push Cart, Plastic Bag
Baldwin: Spectres of the Spectrum
Bong: Memories of Murder, Barking Dogs Never Bite, Influenza
Cocteau: Eagle Has Two Heads, 8×8
Cronenberg: From the Drain, Italian Machine
Dante: Second Civil War, The Hole
Fuller: Day of Reckoning, Crimson Kimono, Verboten, The Command, The Tanks are Coming
Gilliam: Storytime, Tideland
Gondry: The Letter, Thorn in the Heart
Guest: For Your Consideration
Hartley: Fay Grim, shorts vol. 2
Haynes: Poison
Hillcoat: Ghosts of the Civil Dead, To Have and to Hold
Jarmusch: Permanent Vacation, Year of the Horse
Jodorowsky: Santa Sangre, The Rainbow Thief
Keaton: The Navigator, Battling Butler
Korine: Trash Humpers, Julien Donkey-Boy
Kubrick: Fear and Desire
Lang: Harakiri, The Wandering Image, Four Around a Woman
Leone: Duck You Sucker, My Name is Nobody
Linklater: Me and Orson Welles, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow…
Lynch: On The Air
Marker: Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer, The Last Bolshevik, Level Five
Moore: Pets or Meat, Slacker Uprising
Murnau: Haunted Castle, Burning Soil, 4 Devils
Panahi: White Balloon, The Mirror
Park: Chicken Run, Creature Comforts
Quays: Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Songs for Dead Children, Inventorium Sladow
Raimi: Within the Woods
Soderbergh: King of the Hill, The Girlfriend Experience, And Everything Is Going Fine
Svankmajer: Jabberwocky, Sileni, Surviving Life
Tarkovsky: Nostalghia, Mirror, Steamroller and the Violin
Tarr: Macbeth, Almanac of Fall, Damnation
Tati: Jour de Fete, School for Postmen, Trafic
Taymor: Juan Darien, The Tempest
Welles: Around the World, Chimes at Midnight, Fountain of Youth, The OW Show
Wong: In the Mood DVD extras

Deleted from list because I was missing more titles than expected: Miike, De Palma, Dreyer, Tashlin, Van Sant, Varda, Demy, Bunuel, Cassavetes, Kieslowski, Kitano, Powell/Pressburger, Sally Potter, Dennis Potter, Renoir, Resnais, Rivette, Scorsese, Watkins.

If I was planning to make my annual end-of-year list of movies which I simply must watch next year (which I’m not, since I feel like having a freeform 2011), those titles would probably be on there. Though it would be more fun to tackle famed filmmakers whose works I’m largely (or in most cases, completely) unfamiliar with, so here’s a handy list of those, too.

Joseph Losey
Anthony Mann
Rainer Fassbinder
Josef von Sternberg
Cecil B. DeMille
Roberto Rossellini
Otto Preminger
William Wyler
Alexander Dovzhenko
King Vidor
Luc Moullet
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Mikio Naruse
Jean Eustache
Marcel Carné
Raoul Walsh
Derek Jarman
Elia Suleiman
Julien Duvivier
Terayama Shuji
Luchino Visconti
Aleksandr Sokurov
Fatty Arbuckle
Ritwik Ghatak
Masahiro Shinoda
Yevgeni Bauer
James Benning
Stanley Kwan
Carlos Saura
Maurice Pialat
Jacques Becker
Marguerite Duras
Theo Angelopoulos
Marcel L’Herbier
João César Monteiro
Herschell Gordon Lewis
Humphrey Jennings
Otar Iosseliani
Chantal Akerman
Lee Chang-dong
Paul Leni
Hiroshi Shimizu
Albert Brooks
Rene Clement
Whit Stillman
Jean Epstein
Bertrand Tavernier
Tran Anh Hung
Barbet Schroeder
Zhuangzhuang Tian
Andrea Arnold
Marco Bellocchio
Pere Portabella
Vera Chytilová
Anthony Asquith
Basil Dearden
Mark Rappaport
Hong Sang-soo
Takashi Ito
Jan Sverák
Youssef Chahine
Karel Zeman
Bruno Dumont
Francesco Rosi
Karel Reisz
Don Siegel
Roger Vadim
Guy Debord
Mara Mattuschka
Henry Hills
Andy Warhol

Months after the entire Internet had already posted its lists of best films of the decade, my favorite print magazines, Cinema Scope and Film Comment, added a hundred more lists to the mix. Here are about seventy more titles that should probably be on my “movies to watch in 2010” page. But they missed their chance, so they’ll have to stand alone over here instead.

13 Lakes
À Travers la forêt
Alumbramiento
Assassination of Jesse James
Batang West Side
Birdsong
La Blessure
Bluebeard
The Bridesmaid
Cafe Lumiere
La Captive
Chunhyang
Come and Go (monteiro)
Cosmetic Emergency
Crank / Crank 2
Crying Fist
Demons (mario o’hara)
Deux (werner schroeter)
Dog Days
Dor (kukunoor)
Dying at Grace
Election/Triad Election
Evolution of a Filipino Family
Faceless Things
Flame and Citron
Flying with One Wing
Footnotes to a House of Love
The Garden (wiseman)
Greendale
Gulabi Talkies
Harmful Insect
In Vanda’s Room
An Injury to One
Jimmywork
Last Days in a Lonely Place
La Libertad
The Long Holiday
Lot 63, Grave C
Manderlay
Margot at the Wedding
Medicine for Melancholy
Memories of Murder
Mid-Afternoon Barks
Phantom Limb
Phoenix Tapes
Pine Flat
The Pool (chris smith)
The Rebirth (masahiro)
Secret Sunshine
Shara
A Short Film about the Indio Nacional
Sleep Dealer
The Sky Crawlers
Space Disco One
Sweetgrass
The Taste of Tea
Textism
To Die Like a Man
Todo Todo Teros
Triple Agent
Turning Gate
Twentynine Palms
We Want Roses Too
When It Was Blue
Who Is Bozo Texino?
Wild Blue, Notes for Several Voices
Workingman’s Death

At the turnover of every year I like to comb my must-see list (4000 titles and growing) and make a shorter goal list of movies to watch in the next year. The list is no big deal – usually I’m over-ambitious and I don’t make it to a quarter of them, forget to even check it after April. This year, though, I’ve got a Project. I’ve been reading lots of best-of-decade lists and culling titles I haven’t seen, planning to watch those in 2010. After all, if a movie makes a respected critic’s yearly top-20 list it’s worth considering, but if it makes his DECADE top-20 list I’ve just gotta see that. So here are the 155 movies I feel I’ve gotta watch in 2010 (that’s three a week, unrealistic as ever). Maybe I’ll cross ’em off this list as we go.

–
Decade list:

11’09″01
Afterschool
All About Lily Chou Chou
All The Real Girls
As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Battle In Heaven
Beau travail
Best of Youth
Birth
Blissfully Yours
Bourne trilogy 1 2 3
Bus 174
Chuck & Buck
La Cienaga
Colossal Youth
Corpus Callosum
Darwin’s Nightmare
Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Divine Intervention
Domestic Violence
Esther Kahn
Eureka
La face cachee de la lune
Failed States (henry hills)
Fat Girl
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir / West of the Tracks
Five Dedicated to Ozu
Frontier of Dawn
Gerry
The GoodTimes Kid
Good Morning, Night
Half Moon (bahman ghobadi)
Headless Woman
Head-On
House of Mirth
I’m Going Home
In Praise of Love
In the City of Sylvia
Innocence (lucile hadzihalilovic)
The Intruder
Jonestown: Life and Death of People’s Temple
Kandahar
Kings and Queen
Lady and the Duke
Late Marriage
Let Each One Go Where He May
Lilya 4-Ever
M/Other
Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
Magic Mirror
Michelangelo Eye to Eye
Morvern Callar
Night and Day
Oasis
The Other Half (ying liang)
Ou git votre sourire enfoui? / Sicilia
Platform
The Queen
Raja
RR
Secret of the Grain
Silent Light
Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4pm
The Son (dardenne)
Songs from the Second Floor
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring
St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions / Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised for Parabolas (lynn marie kirby)
Star Spangled To Death
Syndromes and a Century
Tarnation
Tearoom (william e. jones)
Ten
This Is England
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Three Times
The Tracey Fragments
El Valley Centro
Waltz With Bashir
What Time Is It There?
When the Levees Broke
The White Ribbon

–
Unseen movies by favorite filmmakers:

Bunuel
Illusions Travel By Streetcar
Susana
El Bruto
Criminal Life of Archibaldo del Cruz

Gilliam
Tideland
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Herzog
Strozek
Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Kurosawa
Guard from the Underground
Serpent’s Path

Marker
The Owl’s Legacy
The Last Bolshevik

Resnais
La Vie est un roman
Love Unto Death

Rivette
Le Pont du Nord
Merry-Go-Round
Va Savior

Tashlin
Rock-a-Bye Baby
It’$ Only Money

Varda
Jacquot de Nantes
La Pointe Courte
Lions Love

–
Unseen DVDs:

Adventure in Sahara
Scandal Sheet
Elena and Her Men
The River
Lucky Star
They Had to See Paris
Young America
Song o’ My Heart
Liliom
Bad Girl
After Tomorrow
Four Devils
City Girl
Madame de…
Fanny & Alexander
The Navigator
Battling Butler
A King in New York
Sin of Harold Diddlebock

–
Brand new hotness

Mock Up on Mu
Mother
Nymph
Mary and Max
It Felt Like a Kiss
Film Ist: A Girl and a Gun
Liverpool
Eccentricities of a Blonde Hair Girl
Guy Maddin’s new shorts

–
Old ones I’ve been excited to finally watch:

Battleship Potemkin
Queen Kelly
Make Way for Tomorrow
The Best Years of Our Lives
Brief Encounter
Johnny Guitar
The Naked Spur
The Apartment
Deanimated
Daisies
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
The Wind Will Carry Us
Actress

–
…and to rewatch:

The Nun
Fire Walk With Me
The Crimson Kimono
Underworld USA
The Steel Helmet
Fixed Bayonets
Spider
Point Blank
Vagabond
Yi Yi

The reason I make lists of the top movies I’ve seen in a particular year rather than the top movies released worldwide in that year should be obvious – I don’t have access to most movies until a year or two after their release.

For example, in 2006 I watched 32 feature-length movies which the IMDB would count as original 2006 releases, but since then I’ve seen 35 more theatrically – that’s more than twice the number before even considering stuff I caught on video, which adds another 80.

So three years late, it seems right to make a best of 2006 list.

Pruning the ’05 titles from my original ’06 list and shuffling a couple others, this is how things would stand at the beginning of 2007:

1. Children of Men
2. A Scanner Darkly
3. A Prairie Home Companion
4. Slither
5. Borat!
6. The Fountain
7. Shortbus
8. Inside Man
9. The Hills Have Eyes remake
10. The Science of Sleep

Adding stuff I’ve seen since, and reassessing, I get:

1. Children of Men
2. Black Book
3. Bamako
4. Inland Empire
5. A Scanner Darkly
6. Brand Upon The Brain
7. The Host
8. Offside
9. The Screwfly Solution
10. Miami Vice
11. The War Tapes

A much better list! In the future I will be making best-of-year lists for every year at the end of every year!

I didn’t spend all of 2009 obsessively watching ’06 releases (although I considered it) so there are still plenty of unwatched acclaimed movies (Colossal Youth, Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Half Nelson, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone), award-winners (Indigènes, Red Road, Flandres, The Queen, An Inconvenient Truth) less-acclaimed movies that I expect to like anyway (Tideland, Perfume, Nacho Libre, Rescue Dawn, The Last Winter) and others (The Decay of Fiction, Klimt, Three Times, Cafe Lumiere, The Boss of it All). But that’s more the subject of the next list…

I wasn’t going to do this because it seems all too obvious, both to myself and to anyone who’s talked to me about movies since these are the ones I mention way too often. But I do love lists, so in the spirit of the 2006 Redux list I’ll do it anyway so ten years from now I can look at this, cringe and say “I can’t believe I used to have such crappy taste.”

25th Hour
2046
Bamako
Black Book
Children of Men
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Heart of the World
The Incredibles
Mulholland Dr.
The New World
Pulse
The Royal Tenenbaums
Shaun of the Dead / Hot Fuzz

This might be the final year for the retrospective-theatrical category. I hardly see anything at the High anymore and Emory has slashed their free film programs. I hope Film Love and the Plaza can take me through one more year… will suck if the only movies in theaters in 2010 are movies from 2010.

1. Do The Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)
This is fast becoming one of my favorite movies. I was hanging out with good Emory folks, the projection was great (and loud as hell), the Fox was sold-out and reacting loudly to certain scenes (oh the laughter when Martin Lawrence was onscreen). This would’ve been number one even if Spike and cast members hadn’t also shown up for a Q&A.

2. Amarcord (1973, Federico Fellini)
The touring restoration print (I wonder how long those will keep coming) at Landmark. Most beautiful movie ever.

3. The Age of Innocence (1993, Martin Scorsese)
A “great adaptation” chosen by Salman Rushdie. I never would’ve watched this near-perfect film, and in such clarity, if Emory hadn’t played it.

4. Bizarro Sat. Morn: Halloween Edition
This was good fun and good company at the Plaza. The Ultraman episode really brought it over the top.

5. Roger Beebe program
Film Love presents an independent (avant-garde? why not.) filmmaker with a good sense of humor who runs up to eight projectors at once. The kind of thing that can’t be replicated on video. I bought the DVD anyway, just in case.

6. Ceddo (1977, Ousmane Sembene)
Watched at Emory, preceded by an announcement that the film’s distributor just went out of business, making movies like this harder to watch on film in the future, and that Emory is cutting back on film screenings. A double-whammy. If you gotta go out, though, this was an eye-grabbing way to go.

7. Toy Story 3-D double-feature
A low-key empty late-night screening with Katy at Phipps

8. Wise Blood (1979, John Huston)
Weird-as-fuck Southern pro/anti-religion drama introduced by Salman Rushdie at Emory, a few months before the DVD release when nobody was talking about this movie. Rushdie picked it as an excellent film adaptation of a novel, so I read the book and appreciated it that much more. Rushdie himself, it turns out, had misremembered the movie. He hates it.

9. The Round-Up (1965, Miklos Jancso)
Chilly Hungarian paranoia film screened at Emory

10. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! (2001, Susuke Kaneko)
The Plaza gave us a rare opportunity to see a giant monster movie on 35mm with a cheering crowd.

Runners-up were Jeanne Dielman and Dracula, both at Emory. I’m sorry, but a 3-hour Belgian art film and a slow old-timey horror flick are no match for the computer-generated wrath of giant monsters.

I watched an awful lot of shorts this year, culminating in Shorts Month, during which I watched way too many. Loved the hell out of all these.

1. Agnès Varda: Du côté de la côte, L’ Opéra mouffe and Ulysse
Between her features, her shorts and her Beaches, Agnès basically won my whole year.

2. Dave Fleischer: Koko’s Earth Control, Snow White and Betty Boop’s Halloween Party
Much as I love the Looney Tunes, there must’ve been audience members in the 30’s sighing, thinking of these Fleischer cartoons and saying “they don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

3. Buster Keaton: The Playhouse, One Week, The High Sign

4. The Telltale Heart (1928 Charles Klein and 1953 Ted Parmelee)
It’s always fun to see different adaptations of the same work, but super-rare for them both to be this brilliant.

5. Osamu Tezuka: Broken Down Film and Jumping
6. L’Apparition (1986, Pascal Aubier)
7. Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005, Peter Tscherkassky)
8. Nostalgia (1971, Hollis Frampton)
9. The Man Who Planted Trees (1987, Frederic Back)
10. A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008, Nick Park)
11. The Strip Mall Trilogy (2001, Roger Beebe)
12. Chess Fever (1925, Vsevolod & Shpikovsky)
13. Motion Painting No. 1 (1947, Oskar Fischinger)
14. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946, Robert Clampett)
15. PES: Western Spaghetti and Roof Sex

Runners-up: Vivian, The Perfect Human, Passionless Moments, Organism and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish

What a great movie year here at Casa Brandon. Generally good hit-to-miss ratio, skipping most of the crap (except of course during SHOCKtober). I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of the 42 titles on this here top-30 list.

1. Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder)
2. Powell/Pressburger: I Know Where I’m Going! / A Matter of Life and Death
3. My Winnipeg (2007, Guy Maddin)
4. Agnès Varda: Le Bonheur / 101 Nights of Simon Cinema
5. Orlando (1992, Sally Potter)
6. Pontypool (2008, Bruce McDonald)
7. John Ford: Judge Priest / The Sun Shines Bright
8. Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992, Craig Baldwin)
9. Black Cat, White Cat (1998, Emir Kusturica)
10. Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)
11. The Young One (1960, Luis Bunuel)
12. The Power of Nightmares (2004, Adam Curtis)
13. Frank Borzage: Seventh Heaven / Lazybones
14. The Naked City (1948, Jules Dassin)
15. The Color of Pomegranates (1970, Sergei Parajanov)
16. Werner Herzog: Fitzcarraldo / Burden of Dreams
17. Johnny To: Mad Detective / Exiled
18. Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003, Joe Dante)
19. Jacques Demy: Donkey Skin / Lola
20. Black Dynamite (2009, Scott Sanders)
21. Time (2006, Kim Ki-duk)
22. Frank Tashlin: Hollywood or Bust / Susan Slept Here / Son of Paleface
23. Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980, Alain Resnais)
24. Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara)
25. Raoul Ruiz: Comedy of Innocence / Zig-Zag
26. Joan the Maid (1994, Jacques Rivette)
27. Takashi Miike: Big Bang Love / Bird People in China
28. Nashville (1975, Robert Altman)
29. Claire Denis: Trouble Every Day / Friday Night
30. The Good, the Bad and the Weird (2008, Ji-woon Kim)

Some good runners-up: Magnificent Obsession, Dance of the Seven Veils, Suspiria and three by Oshima.

This year’s Edward Burns Memorial Award, given to the movie I saw this year which I have already mostly forgotten, goes to Finye (The Wind), which Katy says she remembers just fine.

The Alien Resurrection Award, given to a movie I liked which nobody else did, is proudly presented to Takeshi Kitano for Achilles and the Tortoise, indeed for his entire career-self-destruction trilogy. Back when I saw Kitano’s Fireworks in the late 90’s I’d been hearing about what a great artist he was and I started to agree, but then acclaim mysteriously intensified after his mediocre Zatoichi remake, then it died off completely when he made this daring, exciting trilogy.