My 2019 in Movies

2019 was my second year of seriously tracking my movie watching and writing something about each movie I see, centered around my Letterboxd account. It was also the year of the Criterion Channel's debut, which has filled the Filmstruck-shaped hole in the hearts of cinephiles in the United States and Canada. So: would I be able to maintain the breakneck pace of viewing I had in 2018 (120), or collapse under the weight of the endeavor (so tired...)?

FRED'S 2019 YEAR IN REVIEW, VIA LETTERBOXD

I watched 17 short films, 5 comedy specials, 6 "other", and 130 feature films in 2019, and unless it was something I'd already written about on the site, I wrote a little bit about each of them. Early in the year, author and critic Gretchen Felker-Martin tweeted something that resonated with me, and that has become a touchstone when I try to think about my response to a movie:

Being a critic isn't about toeing a line, or picking a brand to stan for, or pointing out loudly what's problematic and what's Pure. It's about communicating what art makes you feel and then dissecting why it did.

It's a simple idea, but one that this amateur writer thinks about a lot.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 26 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 104 movies new to me
• 32 2019 releases
• 20 theatrical viewings
• 10 new-to-me Criterion Collection features
• 19 horror movies
• 16 animated films, 7 of them in the main Disney animated line
• 12 films distributed by A24
• 7 documentaries
• Setting aside multiple voice/Star Wars/Marvel performers, I saw 4 films each featuring Keanu Reeves, Michael Keaton, or Tilda Swinton
• 2 films from around WWII that I hadn't seen in about 30 years and liked much better than I remembered (The Wizard of Oz and It's a Wonderful Life)
• Ridley Scott's best film (Alien) and one of his worst (Alien Covenant)
• A little cycle of Charles-Manson-adjacent movies: first, Bad Times at the El Royale, which features fictional characters based on the Family; then Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, which directly covers Sharon Tate and the night of the murders on Cielo Dr.; and after that I listened to the season of "You Must Remember This" about Manson, which introduced me to Joan Didion, and in turn led me to watch Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. (Edit 1/19 late night: I realized there’s a fourth! In Her Smell, Becky Something sings Charles Manson’s song “Garbage Dump” during one of her drunken episodes.)
• One ridiculous 80s action movie that a critic I enjoy wrote 365 essays about, one per day, throughout the year.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite new film I saw this year was Safety Last!, a silent Harold Lloyd comedy from 1923. You're likely familiar with the image of him hanging off the face of a clock on the side of a building; I know I was. What surprised me was how modern the filmmaking techniques were, and how sophisticated the special effects. I was blown away, and I recommend the superb Criterion Collection transfer of the movie to anyone. The 4 and 8 year olds even got into it a bit.
• My favorite film of 2019 was Parasite, which is a masterful class satire with many of the pleasures of a con or heist film before things take a darker turn in the back half. The less said before you see it, the better, but I highly recommend it.
• Other older movies that I loved were 25th Hour and Frances Ha. Two very different movies about very different groups of people in NYC in the opening decades of the 21st Century, one melancholy, one charming.
• Saw two movies that overtook Isle of Dogs as favorites of 2018: The Favourite, and Into the Spider-Verse. The latter was just so joyful and clever about what a comic book movie COULD be, and did some really thoughtful and creative things with the animated medium.
• Other movies that have really stuck with me: Moonlight, The Clouds of Sils Maria, The Babadook (the terror here is, as a parent, what if I don't have enough for my child?), Under the Silver Lake, Midsommar, Margaret, and Us.

My 2018 in Movies

Early in January last year, I started my account on Letterboxd.com tracking my movie viewing and keeping my to-watch list. This was one of several factors (also including the opportunity to share in a friend's Filmstruck account -- RIP -- and the replacement of my ailing Blu-Ray player) that led to what I'm quite certain was a personal record year for film.

Letterboxd compiles a year-end statistics page, and here's mine:
FRED'S 2018 YEAR IN REVIEW.

In addition to 6 short films, 9 stand-up specials, and 6 miscellaneous shows (making-of features or tv documentary miniseries) contained in the Letterboxd database, I watched 120 feature films last year. I'm pretty sure this blows away the only other possible contender: 1998, when I spent my summer watching much of the AFI Top 100 American films list and various other movies that viewing suggested.

I also tried to write a little something on everything I saw. This was almost entirely for my own benefit, to try to work out verbally what I do or don't like and why. So for all 120 of those, and a few others, I wrote between a sentence and several paragraphs on each. You can see that writing if you click on any of the poster images at the bottom of the stats page. I've enjoyed seeing what friends and other Letterboxd users have to say about a lot of these, and the social aspect of the site has suggested a lot of viewing as well.

Breakdown of my viewing:

• 33 rewatches of movies I'd seen before
• 87 movies new to me
• 14 new Criterion Collection feature films (and 3 shorts)
• 13 features on Filmstruck (and 4 shorts)
• 13 theatrical viewings
• All 11 Star Wars theatrical feature films, all of them with Max, plus additional viewings of The Last Jedi and Solo, and two making-of-Star Wars features
• 5 Spielberg films (3 new). If you expand the year to include New Year's Day 2019, you get a 6th.
• 5 Scorsese films (4 new)
• 6 films written or directed by Lawrence Kasdan
• The list of performers is kind of overwhelmed by actors who were in those Star Wars movies, but there were also 4 Kevin Costner performances and 6 by Jeff Goldblum. Expand to 1/1/19, and you get 4 Richard E Grant performances.
• Two films featuring improv guru Del Close.
• A five-film cycle of Berlin-set films, spanning from the late Weimar Republic (Cabaret) to just post-war (Phoenix) to beginning of the Berlin Wall (Bridge of Spies) to late in the Cold War (Wings of Desire) to the fall of the Wall (Atomic Blonde).
• Several movies that had been on a little handwritten watch list I kept in my wallet for years starting in 1998
• One Polish mermaid horror sex musical.

And some of my favorites:

• My favorite film I saw this year was Phoenix, a 2014 German thriller in a Hitchcockian mode about a death camp survivor who, following extensive facial reconstructive surgery, returns to the ruins of Berlin to find her husband. The twists and turns and the knowledge of which characters know what information at what times makes it very satisfying.
• I fell absolutely in love with both Wings of Desire and The Age of Innocence. The latter I tried to watch in college, and just couldn't get into it. The former I knew was supposed to be wonderful, but I worried would bore me. Both knocked me on my ass. Both are romantic, and subtle, and reward patience.
• Also in my top 4 this year was It Follows, one of the scariest movies I want to watch again in the future. Its premise is tailor made to frighten me, personally, as it taps into a recurrent childhood nightmare. Its production design seems intended to be as disorienting as possible. And its use of the film frame is brilliant.
• My favorite 2018 film was Isle of Dogs. Wes Anderson has his limitations, but he's also got my number.
• Other standouts that are still occupying space in my brain long after watching them, even if they weren't my highest rated: Locke, Chungking Express, Annihilation, War of the Worlds, Speed Racer, The Witch, and Blade Runner 2049.

I don't know that I'll get anywhere near 120 films again this year, but I hope to continue writing as I watch, and if you're interested, I hope you'll follow along, join Letterboxd, sign up for The Criterion Channel when they start it up again, and let me know what you're watching!

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 4

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 4: "The Narrow Escape Problem" (5/10/17)

A relatively light week on references: good thing, since I've fallen behind!

• To begin with, we get Billy Bob Thornton (The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, Fargo Season One) narrating the introduction to Peter and The Wolf.
• Once again, as in the movie Fargo, we get a Gophers name drop.
  The bag (receptacle? vessel?) in Emmit's safe deposit box is labeled Luverne, also the MN town in which Season Two was set.
• The Luverne bag is, of course, filled with cremains, which Ray gets more willingly close to than The Dude with Donny's in The Big Lebowski.
• "Preferred nomenclature": "cremains" here, but not "Chinamen" in Lebowski.
• And speaking of Lebowski, New Chief seems just as eager to shoehorn in an Iraq War story about his compatriots "face down in the dirt" as Walter is to make everything about Vietnam and his friends "face down in the muck."
• In his interview with Gloria, Ray seems to be Jerry Lundegaarding it up (Fargo), but he is ably out-Lundegaarded by Sy in his encounter with Officer Winnie Lopez.
• "Dingus," again a Hudsucker Proxy word choice, but this time in its anatomical use.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Episode 3
Season 3 Episode 2
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 3

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 3: "The Law of Non-Contradiction" (5/3/17)

Gloria's trip to Los Angeles means we're in for a lot of Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski, with a a little Hail, Caesar for good measure.

• Barton Fink:
• This episode's themes of writer's block and of artistic promise curdling into frustration and failure have appeared a couple times in the Coen's work, most relatedly in Barton Fink, in which a young writer comes to LA, lives out of a hotel, and tries and fails to make it writing for the pictures.
• The bell on the counter at the WGA rings without attenuation until stopped by hand. I wonder if the WGA lady inherited it from Chet (Steve Buscemi) at the Hotel Earle in Fink.
• Similarly, the long down-the-corridor shots at the WGA are reminiscent of Fink's hotel.
• The Big Lebowski:
• "Moon Shadows on the Trail" echoes the use of cowboy song "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds" in the opening of Lebowski.
• The LAPD cop responding to the theft of Gloria's bag is about as optimistic about its recovery as his departmental colleagues were about the the tape deck (or the Creedence) from The Dude's car.
• Gloria telling Donnie to tell New Chief that she saw the ocean and it was wet has a similar folksiness to The Stranger's "I can't say I've seen London, and I ain't never been to France. And I ain't never seen no queen in her damned undies, so the feller says."
• As a function of being set in postwar LA, there's a lot of Googie architecture around. In Lebowski, this is exemplified by the bowling alley. Here, we get the diner where Vivian works, and the motel.
• Hail, Caesar:
• The date that Thaddeus and Vivian go to is set in a very similarly-arranged restaurant (Boardner's) to the one where Hobie Doyle and Carlotta Valdez go on theirs.
• The aforementioned cowboy song also recalls Doyle's song in his movie that he and Carlotta attend.

There's also a lot of A Serious Man this week:

• ...with the casting of Fred Melamed, who brings the same mellifluous tones to smoothing out his betrayal here as he did as Sy Ableman in A Serious Man. 
• The montage of Thaddeus' fall from grace is set to Santana. Not SantanaAbraxas, but Santana nonetheless.
• Ray Wise quips that ancient soldiers and their wives spent the war simultaneously in a state of married and not, a twist on Schrödinger's Cat Paradox, previously taught by Larry Gopnik to Clive and his classmates.

And some other miscellaneous connections:

• "Hold up the dingus!": Extruded plastic dingus. (The Hudsucker Proxy)
• UFO imagery returns to the Coen universe. (The Man Who Wasn't There)
• Gloria almost has a Brad-Pitt-hiding-in-the-closet moment in her motel room. (Burn After Reading)
• The giant poster of a raven suggests Howard Zimmerman is a fan of Poe, though perhaps not as much as Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr, Ph. D. (The Ladykillers)
• The quantum mechanics talk comes back in the same scene with the elderly Zimmerman, this time more in tune with Freddy Reimenschneider's discussion of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in The Man Who Wasn't There.
• Something about Gloria's floral shirt strikes me as being just as out of place in her terrible date with the LAPD cop as Marge's maternity blouse in Fargo.
• And, like Marge or any other good Minnesotan cop, she can appreciate some hard-earned Arby's.
• The poster for THEY CAME on Howard's office wall seems to depict a scene from Fargo Season 2 as a UFO descends on a 2-story motel courtyard.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Episode 2
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2

Coen Brother Ephemera Remixed in Fargo Season Three - Episode 2

If the first two seasons of Fargo are any indication, series creator Noah Hawley and his writers and directors will have littered the scripts and the corners of the frame with references to the Coen Brothers' entire catalog. As with last year, I will be taking notes on these connections during each episode and sharing them here.

If you see that I've overlooked one, please let me know in the comments (but please wait until after I've added a given week's episode, as I watch with a day or two of delay, and would like to see it fresh. By the same token, spoiler alert!).

Episode 2: "The Principle of Restricted Choice" (4/26/17)

• A lot of Big Lebowski DNA in this episode:
• Eden Valley's number-two cop shares a name, and a general befuddlement, with The Dude's bowling pal Donnie. I pray Hawley named him that just to set up a "shut the fuck up, Donnie" down the road.
• In his overly-loquacious greeting to the parking lot attendant, VM Varga says "guten tag, if German's your thing." Since brevity is clearly not Varga's thing, I guess he'd call The Dude "El Duderino."
• Things "micturated" upon: The Dude's rug, Ray's boots.
• Nikki Swango seems to have the same gifts for strategy, tactics, and jumping to an over-reactionary conclusion, that Walter Sobchak does.
• That said, Walter tends to underestimate his opponents ("these fucking amateurs!"), and Nikki to overestimate hers ("oh, he's good!").
• Her... gambit... with the tampon... reminds me of Jackie Treehorn's thug Wu peeing on The Dude's rug in the first place. Same sort of instinct.
• The conversation in the funeral home recalls The Dude and Walter's encounter with the mortician after Donnie's death. Hawley doesn't put too fine a point on it, though: the urn is a "vessel," instead of a "receptacle."
• Sy Feltz taking out his anger on Ray's red Corvette echoes Walter's crowbar beating of little Larry Sellers' red Corvette.
• Red Corvettes! Another connection!
• And Sy's anger ends up damaging a bystander's car, as the Corvette wasn't really Larry's but his neighbor's.
• And several connections to Fargo (the movie):
• More overhead parking shots this week.
• Stan Grossman! Jerry Lundegaard's father-in-law's lieutenant (his Sy Feltz) Stan Grossman is still apparently bouncing around the commercial real estate game in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area 23 years after the events of the movie.
• The gas station clerk watching the Gophers is, I suppose, only as much of a connection as any other marks of Minnesota life. But it's there.
• Ray's boss Scottie shares a name with Jerry and Jean Lundegaard's kid. Head canon: the nerdy accordion-and-hockey-playing kid turned into this douchey parole officer.
• Gloria's interview of the gas station clerk comes from a line of awkward convenience store proprietor encounters, stretching back to Raising Arizona and including the station owner's near miss with Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

Not Coen connections, but some stray observations:

• Random signs that we are in Alberta, and not central Minnesota:
• The UFA (United Farmers of Alberta) gas station.
• The google.ca URL when Irv Blumkin ill-advisedly tries to lookup VM Varga online.
• Wherever the Oak Bridge lot (ground lot, under the highway) is supposedly located (St. Cloud?), it seems to have an elevated commuter train nearby.
•  Miscellaneous thoughts:
• There appears to be one of Emmit Stussy's parking ramps right out the window of Ray's boss Scotty's office. Can't be fun for Ray.
• Goran Bogdan (pictured above, on the left), who plays the violent Cossack Yuri Gurka (which is the same name as the missing East German murder suspect in the season's opening scene -- can't be the same kid, right? He'd be too old in 2010, right?), is listed in the credits as a series regular, like Ewan McGregor and Carrie Coon, as opposed to a guest star, like Michael Stuhlbarg. Seems to suggest he'll be a major presence this season. Maybe he's the unstoppable force of evil this year.

To be continued...

Erstwhile:
Season 3 Intro and Episode 1
Season 2

The Artcrimes of George Lucas: those prequels

Hey, stop the presses, I'm a white 30-year-old male and I'm about to complain about the Star Wars prequels on the internet.

There's a guy on Youtube, with the handle RedLetterMedia, who specializes in video reviews of sci-fi movies. He came to prominence with his reviews of the Star Trek series, and has recently gained more attention for his lengthy takedowns of the first two Star Wars prequels and Avatar. Lengthy. Like 70 minutes for each of the Star Wars prequels. That length of time could be easily spent on a laundry list of nit-picks and internal inconsistencies, and while there's plenty of nits being picked, he mostly gathers his commentary into thematic sections around larger-scale ideas. Each is an indictment of what George Lucas has become and what he has turned the Star Wars films into. The bottom line that in the intervening 22 years between trilogies, Lucas traded art for commerce, story for plot, and character for plot delivery device. He illustrates most accurately how Lucas' characters do not behave as real people, but like blank-faced zombies, which isn't surprising given how little they had to act with and react to in the films. None of this surprises, but all points are effectively made. They should be required viewing for all aspiring film makers or critics.

• RedLetterMedia's Phantom Menace Review
• RedLetterMedia's Attack of the Clones Review
• (Language and some imagery NSFW on both)

If you grew up loving Star Wars, both are worth watching in full, but if you must watch only selections, watch the first and last video of each. The reviewer, in the guise of his disturbing Harry Plinkett character, is incisive, funny, and devastating. It's safe to say that many Star Wars (and Indiana Jones!) fans lost a fair amount of respect for Lucas' sensibilities starting in about 1997. These reviews obliterated whatever was left of mine.

[The one complaint I have about the reviews is for elements of the Plinkett character. The joke is that he's a social maladjust who is definitely a kidnapper and is probably a serial killer. This got pretty tiresome in the Phantom Menace review especially, but was improved upon in the second, in which Plinkett and his hooker captive find a common bond in bitching about Attack of the Clones' awfulness.]

I really didn't like the prequels, but like many my age I convinced myself for a long time that they were maybe kind of sort of ok. I recently watched The Phantom Edit and its sequel, Attack of the Phantom, in which a professional editor makes very careful and thoughtful changes to both movies, improving both significantly. Watching those versions, I decided that there were indeed better films buried within Lucas' theatrical releases. But you can't really polish a turd, and the Phantom Editor, in his commentary, makes clear his own disdain for what George Lucas has created.

This was on my bedroom wall for 15 years.

For me, the worst thing about the new trilogy, besides everything, is that it shook my appreciation of the original trilogy. I grew up loving those movies, and long considered Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back among my favorite films of all time, even as I grew up and expanded my cinematic horizons. With how terrible Episodes I-III were, I started to doubt those earlier films, and wonder if maybe they were worse than I remembered. I avoided rewatching them. This is going to sound weird, but I found the RedLetterMedia reviews somehow helpful. They crystallized my thoughts and feelings about the Star Wars trilogies in a way that I hadn't quite been able to put into words. They affirmed the reasons I loved the originals, and the reasons why the prequels were different and worse. Thanks, Plinkett. I feel much better.

The upshot of all of this is that I've come to a decision: I'm going to get rid of my DVD copies of Episodes I-III. We've got limited real estate in our DVD cabinet, and I don't need that crap on hand for future viewing.

Inlouriouser and Inglouriouser

[UPDATED 5/4/10 SEE BELOW]

Been meaning to write this one up for a while. There's a feature on the DVD of Inglourious Basterds, my favorite film of last year, about Geraldine Brezca, who operated the clapboard for Tarantino during its making. She apparently enjoys introducing the takes with non-sequitur words and phrases, often with the effect of making actors laugh as the scene starts. Names of arthouse directors from around the world seem to be one of her primary idioms. So if you would find it amusing to hear a woman say things like "Emeric Pressburger" and "Wong Kar-Wai" in a disaffected tone and Italian accent, now's your chance. Thanks, YouTube!




[NOTE ADDED 5/4/10 12:17PM! Reader "Nels" writes to note that every single phrase or word she uses starts with the letter or letters in the SLATE number cell on the slate itself. Dumbly, I wasn't even looking at the numbers. So there is a method to her madness.]

Incidentally, there's another tradition on Tarantino's recent shoots, and that is for the actors to send greetings to Sally Menke, who has edited all of his films. I seem to recall that the Kill Bill DVD may also have had a "Hi Sally" reel on it:



Here's the thing: in the top montage there are at least a couple of shots being clapped that didn't actually make the cut into the movie. There are two in particular that I'm thinking of. The first is of Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz, as SS Colonel Hans Landa and August Diehl as Gestapo Major Hellstrom sitting next to one another watching a movie. I suspect that this scene was cut from the "German Night in Paris" chapter, and that they are watching "Lucky Kids" with Goebbels to evaluate Shosanna's theater.

The other is a shot of Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, sitting in a genteel living room in a stupid-looking suit and tie, smiling pleasantly and holding a cup of tea. Now, granted, I thought Eli Roth was the weak link among the cast, and would love to have seen the original casting choice, Adam Sandler, in the part.* But I'd also be interested in seeing this scene that was cut. The rough draft of the screenplay, which is available online, has it: before shipping off to Europe, Donny buys his baseball bat in his Boston neighborhood, then takes it to his Jewish neighbors to have them sign the bat in the names of their relatives still stuck in Europe under the Third Reich. The scene we see here is his sit-down with a Mrs. Himmelstein, played by Cloris Leachman, who also writes, and misspells "INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" on the bat, giving the guerrilla unit and the movie their title.

There is another entire performance that was apparently filmed and cut, that of Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung as Madame Mimeux, the previous owner of the cinema, ownership of which Shosanna inherits along with an assumed last name. The screenplay draft also includes the scene of their meeting, when Shosanna is homeless in Paris having fled the scene of her family's murder by Landa's death squad.

I do wish Tarantino was in the habit of putting more deleted scenes on his DVDs. He's given us a handful here & there in the past, but he's been weaning us: whereas Pulp Fiction's DVD included a handful of scenes removed from the movie, Kill Bill Vol. 2 included a single additional scene of Bill on an assignment, and now the Basterds DVD includes only extended versions of scenes that were in the final cut of the film. Considering that the cut that screened at Cannes early last year was several minutes longer than the theatrical release, I'd be fascinated to see the other bits, if only to see how shortening a movie can strengthen it. Certainly, reading the screenplay, you get the impression that even the over-the-top final product was an exercise in restraint for the writer/director and his overflowing brain full of movies.

*Incidentally, I'm very glad for the other casting changes that became necessary. Though I like Simon Pegg an awful lot, I'm very glad that his role ended up going to Michael Fassbender, who is terrific. And I cannot imagine Leonardo DiCaprio (!) as Hans Landa. Nor, I suspect, can Christoph Waltz.

What you like is who you are

So suggests High Fidelity, which is apparently my favorite film of 2000. Specifically, Rob (John Cusack) says, "what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films -- these things matter."

You may already be familiar with Flickchart, a site that applies the mechanic of Kittenwar to the rating of motion pictures.* You are shown the posters of two films, and you click on the film you prefer. You do this a lot and it slowly, over time, builds a list of your favorite movies.

Sometimes, you are presented with movies that should never be compared (The Passion of Joan of Arc vs. Bio-Dome). Sometimes you are presented with a difficult choice based on which one you love more (a common one on the site for this is Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future, which is easy for me: Ghostbusters by a mile). Sometimes, you can't decide which movie you dislike more (Star Wars Episode I vs. Episode II) Sometimes, because a particular movie just hasn't been put up against movies you prefer, it might stay artificially high on your list for quite a while. V for Vendetta is nowhere near my favorite movie, but it was positioned as such for about a week after I first signed on (it now sits at #283, which still feels stupidly high).

As my list took shape, I started to worry a little bit about the picture that was emerging. If what you like does define who you are, then according to Flickchart, I am a nerdy male in his late 20s or early 30s. Dingdingdingding!

I consider myself someone who enjoys movies and has sought to see a wide variety of films. Yet I am struck by how parochial my list of favorites is turning out to be. My top 20 matches in large part the current top 20 aggregated from all users both at Flickchart and at the Internet Movie Database (I do have my limits -- The Dark Knight or The Shawshank Redemption as the greatest movies ever?**); let's just say there is a high incidence of Tarantino and early Lucas.

Even looking year-by-year, I'm finding my favorites very predictable when considering the "nerd canon" of films. I'm feeling like I have a demographic predisposition.

I've decided that my second-favorite movies of these years tend to be somewhat more eclectic and unpredictable. So, subject to a handful of gigantic caveats***, here are my second-favorite movies of every year since I was born:

1979 - Alien
1980 - Airplane!
1981 - The Great Muppet Caper
1982 - E.T.
1983 - Trading Places
1984 - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom [Seriously?]
1985 - Clue
1986 - Ferris Bueller's Day Off
1987 - The Untouchables
1988 - My Neighbor Totoro
1989 - Do the Right Thing
1990 - The Hunt for Red October
1991 - Beauty and the Beast [yeah, that's right]
1992 - Hard Boiled
1993 - Groundhog Day
1994 - The Shawshank Redemption
1995 - Seven
1996 - Swingers
1997 - Austin Powers
1998 - Dark City
1999 - Rushmore
2000 - Magnolia
2001 - Memento
2002 - Infernal Affairs
2003 - City of God
2004 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005 - Caché [which I've seen twice, but only on an airplane]
2006 - Casino Royale
2007 - Michael Clayton
2008 - Wall-E
2009 - A Serious Man

Based on these and my above comments, you may very well be able to extrapolate my favorite movies in many of these years.

Please share some of your second-favorite movies in the comments!

---

* A tip-of-the-hat to fellow Grinnellian Adam Kempenaar and his cohost Matty Robinson at Filmspotting for making me aware of the site.

** I realize I'm making a false equivalence of community-proclaimed favorite and "best," but that's unfortunately how Flickchart, at least, describes it. The IMDB at least just calls it "Top 250 as voted by our users."

*** Caveats:
1. Remember, these are in terms of "movies I enjoy and hold as favorites," not "movies I think are 'better' movies."
2. Several of my yearly lists aren't really settled yet.
3. Flickchart defines the release dates of some end-of-year Oscarbait movies as being the beginning of the next year. Thus they call There Will Be Blood, for instance, a 2008 rather than 2007 film.

On the Oscars

1. My favorite comment of the evening, regarding the five-former-winner, "This Is Your Life"-style presentation of the acting awards:

"This town hall meeting format favors McCain. "
- Caleb McEwen

I joined the liveblog/chat that Mike Fotis hosted over on his site. 'Twas a fun time.

2. It is clear that members of the Academy as a whole don't understand how sound design and editing work, or Wall-E would have won both awards. I wonder if there's a good sound design blog or message board I can find to read all the nerdy outrage.

Have a nerdy new year

Happy New Year, peoples. As has been my trend in recent years, I will ring in the coming of 2009 at the Brave New Workshop. My lovely wife works front-of-house there, but is typically off-duty by midnight, so I've usually shown up just in time for the festivities, but had a mess of unstructured time to fill beforehand.

Last year I filled this time by watching Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface Helvetica.

Let me repeat: on New Year's Eve, 2007, I happily elected to watch, on my computer, an 80-minute movie about a font.

I had actually wanted to see the movie for some time. It came to the Walker Art Center a few years back, but I missed it and didn't really want to pay to see it. Then it became available on Netflix, crucially as a "Watch It Now!" title. That meant I could watch it without the outlay of additional monies, and without having to anticipate when I would want to watch a font flick. Which is apparently on the biggest party night of the year.

The movie was great. In addition to showcasing the development of the font and how many major public uses it has had over the years (answer: lots and lots, including Target, 3M, AT&T, NASA, Microsoft, airports, the NYC Subway...), it used the font as a through-line to follow the history of graphic design and typesetting in the past century or so. Being who I am, I ate this up like candy.

Tonight I don't know what exactly I'll be up to until 11, but I can guarantee you, it will be nerdy.

"My God, it's full of stars"

I've never believed that the synchronicities between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and the movie The Wizard of Oz were anything but a really interesting coincidence. I've watched the combination a couple of times, including one time that some coworkers and I set it up in our Hollywood Video store. There are some cool moments, to be sure, but not enough lines up for me to believe the band structured the album to work in this way.

That said, there is a synchronicity I do believe is intentional: I believe that "Echoes," the last track from (and entire second side of) Pink Floyd's Meddle, was written as an alternate soundtrack to a portion of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So here's the theory: in 1967 or early 1968, at the height of the band's psychedelic period, Kubrick allegedly approached them to score 2001. They refused, for some reason (Wikipedia says they'd had a bad experience scoring another film, but the first movie scored by the band, More, wasn't released until 1969, so I'm not sure I buy that), and later regretted this, after having seen the film. So later, when they were assembling Meddle for
a 1971 release, they rescored the last segment of the film.

The evidence is compelling enough that I believe it. The planetary alignment / eclipse imagery would become prevalent in the band's subsequent work, especially the afore-mentioned Dark Side of the Moon. The length of the song exactly matches the last section of the movie. And each scene within the finale matches with an equivalent, and tonally appropriate, shift in the music.

Ideally, you can set this up at home with a DVD of the movie and a CD of the album. Cue up the film to the title card reading "JUPITER AND BEYOND THE INFINITE" in that Futura font so favored by Kubrick (and in bold form by Wes Anderson). This will be a chapter stop on the DVD. Cue up the album to the beginning of "Echoes." Unpause both simultaneously. Be amazed. But if you haven't seen the movie before, prepare for spoilers, to the extent that a notorious head-scratcher of an ending can be spoiled.

If you don't have access to the movie or the album, some helpful somebody on YouTube has done the heavy lifting. Check it out below. And I suspect this version will miss some of the most excellent, split-second matches between the media, when Floyd's musical hits line up precisely with inserted freeze frames of hapless astronaut Dave Bowman (above) contorting his face in agony. Oh, and it's almost half an hour long. So watch it at home or be prepared to explain things to your boss.

Jams! #2: The Ecstasy of Gold

Happy Friday, people.

Ennio Morricone's music for the Sergio Leone spaghetti western "The Good, the Bad & the Ugly" is amazing. Everybody recognizes the opening theme, of course, and it is great, but the best stuff comes at the end of the movie. The music in the last half hour is not only my favorite stuff of Morricone's, not only some of my favorite film music, but some of my favorite music, period.

On the soundtrack album, the last two tracks are called "The Ecstasy of Gold" and "The Trio," and I love them both. I got the album when I was in my first year of grad school, and would listen to these tracks, plus the opening theme, on my discman immediately before tests to get myself pumped up. It worked. Structural analysis never felt so epic and purposeful. I would categorize these pieces as "get shit done" music.

The segment from the movie with "The Trio" in it kind of gives away the end of the movie, so those who don't mind spoilers can check it out here. So good. Meanwhile, here's The Ecstasy of Gold:



And here's an excellent concert performance of it:

Quantum of Solace

Updated, see bottom.

I saw Quantum of Solace on Sunday with Carson. It was ok. I give it a FOT on the FOTIS scale.

Here's the quick rundown of my complaints:

One of the things I liked about Casino Royale was that it de-cartooned the series. No invisible cars or nuclear scientists played by Denise Richards. Also, I liked the fact that for the most part, the plot from the novel was intact. It had been fleshed out a bit, but it was all there. The fights felt realistically brutal, like the violence in Ian Fleming's books. And with that came the real sense that Bond could be hurt or die. Quantum director Marc Forster seems to have decided that brutal hand-to-hand combat and chase scenes were what made the first one work, and he amped those up. My main complaint is that the movie's action got a dose of the fast cuts and shakycam used in the Bourne series. Chris Orr, in his generally favorable review in The New Republic, put it best:

Following the temper of the time, Foster presents the movie's many action sequences in a wash of choppy, hyperedited shots, but he pushes the tendency to such extremes that he makes the Bourne films (on which Quantum is clearly modeled) look like Rope. The result is a near-total lack of spatial continuity--I have fifty dollars for anyone who can put salt shakers on a table and show me what took place in a particular boat chase--but an unmistakable visceral intensity.

In general, any given Bond movie could be improved by subtraction or simplification of some sort, and Quantum is no exception. Cleaning up the direction & editing of the action scenes would have made them much more interesting. The opening song by Jack White and Alicia Keys would have been better for the absence of either performer -- doesn't matter which. Also, everything that graphics house MK12 did could have been done less distractingly and better. For starters, the opening credits sequence they did was far less interesting than the playing-card-suits-meet-fractals opening of Casino Royale. It felt like they'd asked: ok, what's this movie got in it? A desert? Is it sandy? It isn't? More of an antiplano? No, wait, screw it, we're going with sand. Now throw in some naked ladies and DONE! They also apparently did all the iPhone-on-crack table/wall display interfaces in the film, which were too cute by half and served only to distract from and thereby muddy the expository dialogue going on.

But the thing that struck in my craw the most as a needless flourish was that every time there was a change in location, the new locale was announced with a country-appropriate font. "Siena, Italy" is displayed in flowery script. "Bregenz, Austria" is rendered in a modern, geometric face. "La Paz, Bolivia" looks like it just fell off the poster of The Wild Bunch. Again: distracting. Again: doesn't serve the story. Just a bunch of graphic designers needlessly dicking around.

So, although the film is a highly competent and enjoyable action film with some cool spy touches, and Daniel Craig is fantastically cool but also makes Bond seem like he does, in fact, have a soul, I liked it much less than its predecessor. The Bond series has always been in tension between efficiency and intrigue on the one hand, and over-the-top spectacle on the other. The films that lean more towards the former (the earlier Connerys, the first two Brosnans, Casino Royale) are pretty great. Those tending toward the latter (uh, most of the rest) are, as far as I'm concerned, utterly disposable. Please keep it together, EON, and learn from the mistakes of the past.

Now, on to the next movie. Will they, as they did with Quantum of Solace, mine the remaining Ian Fleming Bond short stories for an unused title? If so, Bond 23 , starring Daniel Craig and with a song by The Killers, will be called one of the following:

• Risico
• The Hildebrand Rarity
• The Property of a Lady
• 007 in New York

My money's on Risico.

Update: in his comments on the film from a geopolitical/intelligence community perspective, Matthew Yglesias brings up something else that bothered me. In the film, all the conspirators in the Quantum group, who seem to be plotting regime changes as a means of locking down private control of natural resources, wear little lapel pins of the letter Q in the font of the movie's logo. That'll make it easier for Bond and M to clean up the rest of them, eh? Idiotic.

'Cause what you see you might not get

Today's topic: lessons in narrative swiped from Russian formalism -- the syuzhet and the fabula.

So have you guys seen this movie Primer? Excuse the language, but it is a mindfuck. The main characters, engineers working on potentially patentable projects in their garage as a side business, discover that they've created a time machine. They use it at first to get rich daytrading, but then one of them gets involved in re-engineering social situations (in particular an incident with a gun at a party). Subsequently, both try to prevent each other, or other versions of themselves from completing certain actions, sometimes taking the place of themselves in conversations they previously experienced and reciting their earlier lines from recordings or notes they've made, sometimes taking an extra time machine inside the time machine to make loops within loops, and so on. On top of all of that, the movie portrays these events in both non-chronological and non-sequential order. Good God.

I saw this movie on DVD a few years ago, and liked it, even though it made my head spin. My head didn't spin for the reason it might watching a movie like Mulholland Dr. (a favorite of mine) or some other Lynch flick that's mindbending for being oblique. Rather, it's mindbending because it's complicated. It's smartly written by guys with backgrounds in math, physics and engineering, so the jargon is convincing. And it doesn't hold your hand to explain anything, even as the plot seems to quintuple back on itself and pile paradoxes upon paradoxes.

A current or recent Grinnell College student who I do not know recently posted on her Plan (text-only blog accessible to people in the larger Grinnell community) her intention to rewatch the movie until it all made sense. She posted a link to this paper (spoilers!) by one Jason Gendler that analyzes the film and attempts to iron out its narrative. The paper repeatedly, and centrally, uses two words with which I was not familiar, fabula and syuzhet. Context suggested that each were somehow components of narrative structure, but to really understand what Gendler was writing, I did some digging.

Neither term had a dictionary.com or wikipedia entry, though they were mentioned in the article on Russian formalism, from which the terms originate. Google brought me to a helpful table from a Penn State comparative lit course that explained them well: the syuzhet is what is presented by the creator of a narrative, what you perceive directly by watching or reading; the fabula is your interpretation of the actual story, of what happened, which may expand beyond what you are told or shown. Here's the table, which is great...

Fabula	Syuzhet
Story	Plot
Constructed by Reader/Viewer	Constructed by Writer/Teller
Chronological Order	Order of Recounting
What we interpret	What we perceive
As many different ones as there are readers	Generally only one, agreed upon by all
Mental	Perceptible

And some examples off the top of my head (spoilers abound!):

Star Wars: In the syuzhet, Greedo tells Han Solo that Jabba doesn't take kindly to smugglers who dump their cargo at the first sign of an Imperial patrol. Han responds that even he gets boarded sometimes. In the fabula, the viewer imagines further the incident described.

The Searchers: In the syuzhet, Ethan Edwards grabs his left arm as he walks out a silhouetted doorway. In the fabula of certain viewers, Edwards is having a heart attack.

The Sopranos (NELS, SKIP THIS ONE!): In the syuzhet, in the final moment of the show, as "Don't Stop Believing" plays on the jukebox, Tony Soprano looks up in response to the dinging bell at the front door of the diner where he and his family are eating. The screen and music cut abruptly to black silence. In MY fabula, Tony has just been shot to death by the guy in the Members' Only Jacket who went into the bathroom moments before.

Memento: In the syuzhet, at the end of the film, Leonard has been looking for the man he says raped and murdered his wife. He has been telling the story of Sammy Jankis, a man who like him, suffered from a loss of any short-term memory. A man who claims to be acting as an ally, but who Leonard killed at the beginning of the film (which comes chronologically last), accuses Leonard of lying to himself, that Sammy was a con-man. In a montage of shots playing under the audio of this conversation, Leonard is shown giving his wife insulin shots, something Sammy did in the earlier stories. In the fabula, it is up to the viewer to decide whether Leonard killed his wife by unintentional insulin overdose, whether he had in fact already had his revenge, whether Sammy was a con-man, and indeed, whether Leonard was what he claimed.

I find these concepts very intriguing and potentially useful for understanding and discussing films. It draws a bright line between what you saw when you watched the movie, and what the film was "supposed" to be about. Thus, David Lynch isn't being an ass when he refuses to explain what the hell was happening in one of his movies. He's just letting the syuzhet speak for itself and leaving the fabula to the viewer. They also help explain my reaction to Oliver Stone's JFK, which Melissa and I watched a couple weeks ago. I find the film's syuzhet masterful: it's well-plotted, scripted, cast, acted, shot & edited. But my version of the fabula is somewhat different from the one Stone presents through the author's voice character of Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner). Granted, this is based on the intrusion of the real world into my interpretation of the narrative, but there it is.

Thanks, Russian formalism!

Meet Kumail's film blog

Hi. I want to take a quick moment to single out a recent addition to my blog links in that right-hand column. It's a movie blog written by my friend and Grinnell College roommate Kumail Nanjiani (pictured). It's very funny, and has gotten some fun discussions/arguments going about films.

The blog is entitled The Wilhelm Scream, and is named after a long-used Hollywood sound effect of the same name. First used in the film Distant Drums in 1951, and likely voiced by actor/musician Sheb Wooley of "Purple People Eater" fame, it was resurrected and popularized by sound designer Ben Burtt for Star Wars in 1977. Since then, it's been used in six Star Wars films, four Indiana Jones films, at least two Tarantino films, and countless others. You've heard it, trust me.

Anyway, if you like movies and/or words that are placed together in humorous combination, do check out Kumail's blog. And if you're in NYC, seek out Kumail's stand-up comedy performances.

April is the bloggingest month

Just wanted to drop a quick note here to note the passage of a milestone: my StatCounter for this site has just today ticked over the 1000-page view mark. Hot damn. I have a pretty good sense of how many of those were me checking the StatCounter, so with that in mind, I'd like to thank the dozens of you who have visited.

Also, April will have been the month with the most posts I've written since I started, due in no small part to the content generator that is the Weeklypedia quiz. I will end April with 12 posts, 5 more than in November, the second-place month. Hoo-plah.

As thanks for your patience while I pat myself on the back, here's a link to a site that's collecting the title sequences from movies and TV shows. The files are big, but if you've got a good, fast connection, they're pretty fun. Based on the content, you get the impression that the late-90s into the new century have been something of a renaissance of style of the form (Se7en, Domino, Smoking Aces, Casino Royale), a rebound to the glory of the 60s (Bullitt, Vertigo). Neat. Enjoy.

Me & Finch

According to a variety of independent sources who started telling me so sometime around the turn of the century, I am apparently a dead ringer for actor Eddie Kaye Thomas, who played Paul "Finch" Finch in the American Pie series of movies. He's the one who had to go home to use the bathroom (ahem, "shitbreak") in the first one, and ended up in a tryst with Stifler's mom, played by the hilarious Jennifer Coolidge. This film of course also popularized the term "MILF".

Anyway, at least a dozen people have independently approached me over the years and either asked me if I know who I look like (that guy from American Pie?), or asked if I am, in fact, Eddie Kaye Thomas (I'm not). I find it somewhat fascinating how many people have come to this conclusion on their own, often having, just seconds before, laid eyes on me for the first time. In fact, I recall being called out for this in 2001 by the guy tearing the tickets when I went to see American Pie 2 with my friends Dan & Whitney in 2001.

The reason I bring this up now is that Eddie Kaye Thomas has a supporting role in the surprisingly delightful Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and the new sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. And he's also co-starring in the Brad Garret vehicle sitcom on FOX, 'Til Death, which is execrable. Neither of these roles is high profile enough, thankfully (?), to get people a-recognizin'. Also I wear glasses now.

Usually I don't see the resemblance, but every once in a while... Here's a picture of Dan and me in 2001, outside Mitch Hedberg's hotel in Grinnell:

Something was happening slightly to the left, and it made everybody happy. How young we looked. Also: holy crap! I had sideburns?

And here's Finch and Stifler in American Wedding, the third film in the series:

I guess I see it.