Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Personal

2023 In Movies

Aw, that’s cute, I thought I wasn’t going to watch as many movies as I did in 2022. Instead I went from 423 watched to 508 watched. Remember when I said “I want to spend more time following my whims”? That worked out really well. In 2022, I did a weekly challenge plus a weekly movie watching club plus another weekly movie watching club — it got to be a grind. In 2023 I was more varied about my tastes and I had more fun.

I also went to not one but two film festivals, SIFF and Fantasia. S. came with to Montreal! Including shorts, I watched 36 movies at SIFF and 45 movies at Fantasia, so that’s a pretty big chunk of the additional movies right there. The festivals were immensely fun and I really, really need to remember how much I enjoy that kind of thing.

My time spent watching movies was absolutely worth it. My top ten movies of 2023 were excellent, and there were way more good ones than just those ten. Plus this was the year I really discovered Iranian cinema (A Separation, Certified Copy, No Bears), I got that Bergman boxed set and watched a ton of it, and I dug into 1970s American film in a more serious way.

Directors who were largely new to me who I really liked: Bergman, as per the above; Claire Denis, as a direct result of watching Trouble Every Day and Stars at Noon as a double feature at the Grand Illusion; and Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, thanks to the 2023 Hooptober challenge. I also kept watching more than my share of Aki Kaurismäki.

Oh, and while I only watched one Bela Tarr/Agnes Hranitzky movie in 2023, it was in fact enough to cement them among my very favorite directors. It gets no more grim than this. I’m very glad I got to watch Werckmeister Harmonies on the big screen, and I made a point of making Satantango the first thing I watched in 2024.

My most watched actor was Juliette Binoche, thanks to Claire Denis and a rewatch of Three Colours and a bunch of other good movies. After her it’s a lot of Shaw Brothers character actors — we finished the first volume of the Arrow Shawscope set, and got started on the second — plus some 70s Italian actors which I chalk up to a lot of poliziotteschi. Huh, I watched nine of those grimy nihilistic Italian crime flicks in 2023! Not bad. I did say I was more varied about my tastes.

How about 2024? For the second year running, I’m going to watch more TV. One reason I held off on this post for a month was because I wanted to test that theory out, and in fact I only (ha) watched 24 movies in January. Six a week is a lot of movies, but I also caught up on some Slow Horses and got started on a couple of other shows. It feels good.

S. and I won’t be attending Fantasia, barring something pretty unusual. I do plan to hit SIFF harder, since I got a pass this year, and I’ll be doing Noir City at SIFF this month. I also got a subscription to Radiance Films‘ releases for 2024. Not cheap! But I think of all the boutique Blu-ray labels they come closest to hitting my sweet spot, and S likes the look of the upcoming releases. So that’ll be cool.

All in all, if I had to guess, I’ll probably see close to 400 movies… but no weekly challenges again, other than our beloved Boofest.

As is perhaps obvious, I’ve stopped copying Letterboxd reviews to this blog. I finally figured out how to script downloads of my Letterboxd data, though, so over the course of the next month or so I’ll be writing code to pull my reviews into Datasette, which accomplishes my goal of making sure I control my own words without clogging up a mostly inactive blog.

And just like I said last year, the best video store in the country makes it possible for me to watch a huge range of movies I couldn’t see otherwise. If you have a local video store, and you like movies, support them. They need you.

Goodbye, Nixie

This is another belated post. As with Maggie, I didn’t have the heart to write it immediately. I finally wrote my post saying goodbye to Maggie because we were pretty sure Nixie didn’t have all that much time left; I’m writing this one because we’re going to visit a lovely pair of foster kittens this weekend, and one way or another I expect we’ll have new cats soon. Happier moment, same desire to speak before new emotions arise.

2022 in Movies

Something weird happened in 2022: I watched 423 movies.

This is pretty atypical for me. It’s over 20% of the movies I’ve watched in my life. I’ve never watched as many as 100 movies in a year before. I’ve been trending up a bit recently, particularly during the pandemic, but 423? Sure, some of them are shorts, but that’s balanced by the 7 hours of Les Vampires and the 5 hours of Fanny and Alexander (TV version) and the 4 hours of Ludwig. At the end of the day — uh, of the year — we’re talking 730 hours of movies. WTF?

Well, I quit playing World of Warcraft, and that’s a huge time sink right there. I also just got into a rhythm. On any given weekday night, it’s easy to catch a movie after dinner. If you’re not doing anything else during a weekend, what’s a movie after each meal? I joined a couple of subreddits that watch a movie a week collectively, I took on a challenge to watch 52 Criterion movies, and about halfway through the year I realized I was on pace for over 350 movies. All those neurons I’d been using on making WoW numbers go up got dedicated to making my movie count go up. Whoops. Fortunately S. is supportive of my whims and obsessions.

An aside: Letterboxd, which I am linking to throughout this post, is amazing. Also a total enabler of my numbers go up obsessions. Worth every penny I pay them as a patron, which is not all that much. It’s been a great way to find movies I might want to see, it’s way more comfortable to use than IMDB, and I just love them to pieces.

At times it was a grind. The trickiest month was October, because S. and I took on a horror movie challenge together. I didn’t love the way I was engaging with challenges in general; I love movies but I want to watch them because I love them, not because they’re leaving my favorite streaming service or because I need to finish a checklist. I am not taking on any challenges next year, although S. and I made a list of 50 date night movies. (Each one has a connection to the one before, and we swapped picks. It was really fun making the list.)

But you know, it’s like anything. If you spend a lot of time on something you love, you’ll discover new depths and new joys and new preferences. Or I guess you’ll start hating it, but that wasn’t me and movies. I’m still not a guy who can breezily analyze Kurosawa in terms of his shot choices, but I know which directors and actors make me happy, which is good enough for me.

Covid Conclusions

Feeling mostly better other than being a bit more tired than usual. The final timeline:

  • 10/29: almost certainly my initial exposure — I was at a loud crowded event without a ton of mask usage.
  • 10/31: light symptoms.
  • 11/1: first positive test (all my tests were at home).
  • 11/2: Paxlovid course started.
  • 11/6: Paxlovid course ends; maybe a couple of negative tests in the next few days? Can’t recall.
  • 11/11: testing positive again; feeling sick but able to focus.
  • 11/13: negative test (probably because at-home tests are not 100% reliable).
  • 11/15: positive test again; able to focus well enough to deliver budget presentations.
  • 11/19: able to write code again! A surprisingly important milestone.
  • 11/23: negative test again, and this time the negative tests stuck. Haven’t tested positive since.
  • 11/27: still getting a bit tired here and there, as noted, but I feel pretty much OK otherwise.

All told that was three and a half weeks of positive tests, and I felt pretty sick during most of that. Able to focus but definitely not great. Please get vaccinated and boosted.

Covid Update

One of the ways I knew I was getting sick was that my ability to code dropped through the floor, so I’ve been fiddling with things from time to time as a test.

I’m still veering between faint positive tests and negative tests, but I got a wild hair and wrote some Python today. Credit for the underlying text and mechanics goes to Oliver Darkshire. I have taken the liberty of skipping assassination attempts when there’s no chance of success and decided that you can’t try an assassination attempt after an ending is reached.

./ldor.py
Lions are released onto the streets in an attempt to calm the population.
Flames: 1
Desolation: 1
Relocation: 0

You might want to assassinate the emperor, but there's no chance.

<snip>

Work continues on a house made of pure gold. It keeps melting.
Flames: 5
Desolation: 3
Relocation: 3

You might want to assassinate the emperor, but there's no chance.

There are no goods at market. "If you have no bread, then eat shit" is the word from the palace.
Flames: 5
Desolation: 4
Relocation: 3

Would you like to assassinate the emperor? [y/n]: n

The emperor sits in front of the flame and commands it to obey. It does not.
Flames: 6
Desolation: 4
Relocation: 4

Would you like to assassinate the emperor? [y/n]: y

You failed to assassinate the emperor with a roll of 11, and you are dead.

Obviously my play is sub-optimal. Don’t expect too much from me yet.

Status Update: Covid

Well, “no big Paxlovid bounce” remains true, but last week was certainly a small one. I tested positive again on Friday and the weekend was pretty much no fun; no huge symptoms but I’ve just been tired and a bit fuzzy. Testing negative again today, which hopefully will continue. S. is still fine. We’re masking diligently, we have house zones we keep to, and we have air purifiers running.