A short story about breath:
Having become fully vaccinated against COVID-19 a month ago, I’ve begun taking regular trips to the movie theater again. Few topics are as perennially popular among cinephiles as the love/hate relationship with theatrical viewing. But since I’ve never lived in a big city, I don’t have very many negative experiences to recount, thankfully. The crowds I’ve shared a room with tend to be quiet, especially right now, with the idea of a full house still slightly out of reach. The “communal experience” has rarely amounted to much when I’ve gone to the movies; for the most part, I just like being in a dark room free of distractions. But two incidents, two weeks apart, reminded me why watching movies with people really is ideal. First, as the Disney logo came up at the beginning of Raya and the Last Dragon, a child a few rows ahead of me gasped in excitement. Then, as the closing credits of A Quiet Place Part II came up, there was an audible exhalation of relief from the row directly in front of me. I choose not to be cynical about these events. Movies can still do things to people, and this is something to celebrate. After a year of shielding our breaths from our neighbors, and metaphorically holding our breaths against possible disaster (for many of us, the metaphorical part lasted more like four years, if not longer), the specificity of these two reactions felt eerily symbolic. Since my own breath no longer poses any potential risk to anyone, I look forward to sharing it with even more people soon (still from a respectful distance, of course!).
I spent the eleven months before May watching movies new and old at home, as usual. Along the way, I saw my 4,000th movie. As I wrote in last year’s dispatch, my tendency to work backwards chronologically led to me not going much of anywhere. (“A reverse-chronological journey through the movies I own will probably be completed by this time next year,” I wrote last June, hilariously.) I continue to run into the paradox that the more I see, the more I realize I haven’t seen. The 2010s weren’t even quite done with me yet; seven more films from that decade appear on the list below. They’re all orphans, not receiving the honor of appearing in either of my two (!) compilation videos, so please pay special attention to them here. The seasonal interludes of October (aka spooky month) and November (aka Noirvember) gave me a reason to see some older films, as did an extended visit with the films of Frank Capra earlier this year. Finally, for the past month or so I believe I have finally broken free of the backwards motion by setting aside a week or so for various directors and performers (so far, Elvis Presley, Howard Hawks, Wilder and Wyler, Kurosawa and Kaurismäki). I already have roughly another two months planned for similar pursuits, after which I might start working backwards in time again.
The group of films I loved the most over the past year are, as always, a chaotic mix. They come from four different continents and range in time from 1928 to 2020. They testify that I have now seen my first Frederick Wiseman documentaries, and also that I’ve seen every movie in the Resident Evil franchise. Besides Capra, the best showings are by Don Siegel and Spike Lee, with three films each. Two of the titles are shouting at you, and eleven speak in complete sentences. In total, there are 73 movies, making this my smallest class since 2018. I don’t know if this means much of anything. My obsessive tracking of all these details will allow me to know if it becomes a trend (i.e., am I enjoying first-time viewings less and less, or did I just watch the wrong movies this time?). Adding these 73 to all my previous favorites yields a grand total of 996. Milestone ahead! I don’t believe I’ll be able to resist ranking all of them for much longer. In the meantime, I have a project brewing involving short films; it’s about time I gave them their due. Stay tuned. I don’t know how soon I’ll start blogging regularly again, but it’s still something I hope to be able to do in the future. The future, there’s a concept. I freely admit that the past year has taken practically nothing away from me personally. Countless others have been hit much harder, in various ways. Still, I’d like to take this moment to reaffirm that the movies are for everyone, and I hope we can continue enjoying them together.
I now present the class of 2021:
| Title | Director | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Da 5 Bloods | Spike Lee | 2020 |
| The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | Alfred L. Werker | 1939 |
| All Quiet on the Western Front | Delbert Mann | 1979 |
| American Madness | Frank Capra | 1932 |
| And the Ship Sails On | Federico Fellini | 1983 |
| Antiporno | Sion Sono | 2016 |
| Audition | Takashi Miike | 1999 |
| La Belle Noiseuse | Jacques Rivette | 1991 |
| The Big Combo | Joseph H. Lewis | 1955 |
| Boys State | Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine | 2020 |
| Bring It On | Peyton Reed | 2000 |
| Calamari Union | Aki Kaurismäki | 1985 |
| Cause for Alarm! | Tay Garnett | 1951 |
| Charley Varrick | Don Siegel | 1973 |
| A Christmas Carol | Clive Donner | 1984 |
| Claire’s Camera | Hong Sang-soo | 2017 |
| David Byrne’s American Utopia | Spike Lee | 2020 |
| The Day I Became a Woman | Marziyeh Meshkini | 2000 |
| The Death of Mr. Lazarescu | Cristi Puiu | 2005 |
| Dick Johnson Is Dead | Kirsten Johnson | 2020 |
| Dry Season | Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | 2006 |
| First Cow | Kelly Reichardt | 2019 |
| First Name: Carmen | Jean-Luc Godard | 1983 |
| Five Graves to Cairo | Billy Wilder | 1943 |
| Flaming Star | Don Siegel | 1960 |
| Frantic | Roman Polanski | 1988 |
| Hospital | Frederick Wiseman | 1970 |
| How to Steal a Million | William Wyler | 1966 |
| I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians | Radu Jude | 2018 |
| I’m Thinking of Ending Things | Charlie Kaufman | 2020 |
| I’m Your Woman | Julia Hart | 2020 |
| The Incredible Shrinking Man | Jack Arnold | 1957 |
| Johnny Guitar | Nicholas Ray | 1954 |
| Juvenile Court | Frederick Wiseman | 1973 |
| Kajillionaire | Miranda July | 2020 |
| The Kid Detective | Evan Morgan | 2020 |
| Kind Hearts and Coronets | Robert Hamer | 1949 |
| Ladies of Leisure | Frank Capra | 1930 |
| The Lost Patrol | John Ford | 1934 |
| Malmkrog | Cristi Puiu | 2020 |
| The Man with the Golden Arm | Otto Preminger | 1955 |
| The Man Without a Past | Aki Kaurismäki | 2002 |
| Meet John Doe | Frank Capra | 1941 |
| Minari | Lee Isaac Chung | 2020 |
| The Miracle Woman | Frank Capra | 1931 |
| Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Terry Jones | 1979 |
| My Twentieth Century | Ildikó Enyedi | 1989 |
| Night and Day | Hong Sang-soo | 2008 |
| No Regrets for Our Youth | Akira Kurosawa | 1946 |
| Old Yeller | Robert Stevenson | 1957 |
| On the Rocks | Sofia Coppola | 2020 |
| One, Two, Three | Billy Wilder | 1961 |
| Personal Problems | Bill Gunn | 1980 |
| Private Hell 36 | Don Siegel | 1954 |
| Raw Deal | Anthony Mann | 1948 |
| Resident Evil | Paul W.S. Anderson | 2002 |
| Resident Evil: Retribution | Paul W.S. Anderson | 2012 |
| The Secret Life of Walter Mitty | Norman Z. McLeod | 1947 |
| Seven Beauties | Lina Wertmüller | 1975 |
| Sibyl | Justine Triet | 2019 |
| Sicilia! | Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet | 1999 |
| Soul | Peter Docter & Kemp Powers | 2020 |
| Stop Making Sense | Jonathan Demme | 1984 |
| Da Sweet Blood of Jesus | Spike Lee | 2014 |
| Tesla | Michael Almereyda | 2020 |
| Tokyo Sonata | Kiyoshi Kurosawa | 2008 |
| Tread Softly Stranger | Gordon Parry | 1958 |
| Viva Las Vegas | George Sidney | 1964 |
| Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? | Michael Fengler & Rainer Werner Fassbinder | 1970 |
| Why We Fight: The Battle of Britain | Frank Capra & Anthony Veiller | 1943 |
| Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia | Frank Capra & Anatole Litvak | 1943 |
| The Wind | Victor Sjöström | 1928 |
| Zorns Lemma | Hollis Frampton | 1970 |
And here’s my top ten ranking from that group:
| 10. No Regrets for Our Youth |
| 9. First Name: Carmen |
| 8. Monty Python’s Life of Brian |
| 7. The Kid Detective |
| 6. David Byrne’s American Utopia |
| 5. Personal Problems |
| 4. The Miracle Woman |
| 3. Dick Johnson Is Dead |
| 2. I’m Thinking of Ending Things |
| 1. Johnny Guitar |
Geppetto's Clocks 