Fifteen Years, 4177 Movies

I hit an interesting milestone back in January.  I started keeping track of all the movies I watched back in 2004, along with a few basic stats like year and format.  Now it's fifteen years later, and I have a massive amount of useless data to share. Some of the stats are included below for your amusement.

I decided to take the plunge and join Letterboxd, since some of their new data wrangling features caught my attention.  I took the opportunity to go back through my records and rerate some titles as I was inputting them into the site. It turns out that my views on individual movies can change massively in hindsight.  Did I really give Lee Chang-dong's "Poetry" and Peter Berg's "Love Survivor" the same rating when they came out? What could I have been thinking? I let my memory influence some of the adjustments - if I couldn't remember much about a highly rated title, I often docked it half a star.  My recall is admittedly pretty bad past seven or eight years in the past, but there were some fairly recent titles that I had to look up to spark any kind of recognition. What the heck was "Last Days in the Desert"? Or "The Machine"? Why are there so many movies called "The Square"?

I'll eventually input the rest of the movies I've watched prior to 2004 to get my lifetime stats - I'm estimating about two thousand additional titles - but I wanted to get a snapshot of the data for this fifteen year period recorded first.  

Movies watched: 4177

Hours: 7,682

Directors: 2,058

Countries: 96

Movies from the USA - 2620

Movies from the UK - 697

Movies from France - 620

Movies from Germany - 318

Movies from Italy - 227

Movies from Japan - 191

Movies from Canada - 141

Movies from Sweden - 77

Movies from Spain - 77

Movies from Belgium - 68

Movies from Australia - 68

Movies from China - 58

Movies from Denmark - 50

Movies from Russia - 45

Movies from Mexico - 36

Movies from Czech Republic - 35

Movies from Brazil - 28

Movies in English - 3334

Movies in French - 676

Movies in German - 343

Movies in Spanish - 324

Movies in Italian - 276

Movies in Japanese - 223

Movies in Russian - 174

Movies in Chinese - 110

Movies in Arabic - 73

Movies watched in class - 3

Movies watched on a bus - 2

Movies watched on a boat - 11

Movies watched on a plane - 20

Movies watched on VHS - 26

Movies watched in theaters - 160

Movies watched at anime conventions - 3

Movies made before 1920 -20

Movies made in the 1920s - 83

Movies made in the 1930s - 138

Movies made in the 1940s - 151

Movies made in the 1950s - 245

Movies made in the 1960s - 296

Movies made in the 1970s - 466

Movies made in the 1980s - 370

Movies made in the 1990s - 263

Movies made in the 2000s - 740

Movies made in the 2010s - 1410

Movies rated 5 stars - 66

Movies rated 4.5 stars - 210

Movies rated 4 stars - 813

Movies rated 3.5 stars - 1240

Movies rated 3 stars - 1149

Movies rated 2.5 stars - 472

Movies rated 2 stars - 183

Movies rated 1.5 stars - 27

Movies rated 1 star - 14

Movies rated zero or .5 stars - 3

Most watched directors:

Woody Allen - 26 movies                                   

Alfred Hitchcock - 23                                   

Ingmar Bergman - 19                                   

Werner Herzog - 19                                   

Fritz Lang - 18                                   

Martin Scorsese - 18                                   

David Cronenberg - 17                                   

Jean-Luc Godard - 17                                   

Akira Kurosawa - 15                                   

François Truffaut - 15

Highest rated directors:

Joshua Oppenheimer - 4.8/5

Michael Apted - 4.7
Lee Chang-dong - 4.6
Costa-Gavras - 4.5
Jan Troell - 4.3                                       

Stanley Kubrick - 4.2
James Ivory - 4.2
Ang Lee - 4.2
Fernando Meirelles - 4.2
Robert Benton - 4.2
Fred C. Newmeyer - 4.2
Sam Taylor 4.2
René Clément - 4.2
Satyajit Ray - 4.2
Akira Kurosawa - 4.2
Béla Tarr 4.2
Arthur Penn - 4.2
Peter Watkins - 4.2
Laurence Olivier - 4.2
Elia Kazan - 4.1

Most watched actors:

Johnny Depp - 36 movies                               
Willem Dafoe - 36                           
Michael Caine - 34                               
Samuel L. Jackson - 34                       
Robert De Niro - 29   

Meryl Streep - 29   

Matt Damon - 28                               
Bill Hader - 28

Philip Seymour Hoffman - 27                               

Max von Sydow - 27

Most watched writers:

Woody Allen - 26 movies                                   

Ian Fleming - 21                                   

Billy Wilder - 18                                   

Ingmar Bergman - 18                                   

Akira Kurosawa - 17

Highest rated writers:

Michael Herr - 4.8                                   

Calder Willingham - 4.7                                   

Lee Chang-dong - 4.6                                   

Paddy Chayefsky - 4.5                                   

Adolfo Franci - 4.5

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - 4.5                                   

Walter Reisch - 4.5                                   

Vittorio De Sica - 4.5                                   

Budd Schulberg - 4.5                                   

Kazuo Ishiguro - 4.5

Animated films - 240

Documentaries - 277

Horror - 304

Sci-Fi - 390

Westerns - 93

Finally, the least popular title I've watched is apparently "Master Q: Incredible Pet Detective," a Chinese animated film from 2003 that was screened at an anime convention I attended many moons ago.  A grand total of seven people have logged it on Letterboxd, including yours truly. It's also available on Youtube, but I do not recommend it.

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Rank 'Em - The Roald Dahl Films

Netflix recently announced that they'll be adapting work from Roald Dahl into multiple animated streaming series.  I figured it was a good time to take stock of the film adaptations of Dahl's books we've had so far. Because of his popularity and very specific style, not many Dahl projects have ever gotten off the ground, but the ones that did have all been very memorable.  

I'll be leaving off the made-for-TV movies, so no "Danny, the Champion of the World," or traditionally animated "The BFG."

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) - Gene Wilder's most famous and beloved role is Willy Wonka without question.  And he's the anarchic force that elevates one of the most daring children's films ever made. Nobody is safe, everything feels a little dangerous, and you clearly can't trust Wonka or the sinister Oompa Loompas.  The satirical elements, the art direction, and the hummable songs offset some of the more humdrum business in the opening acts. Once the factory tour begins, however, it's unapologetically weird and wonderful.

James & the Giant Peach (1996) - This is a very faithful adaptation of a very short and simple book, done in stop-motion animation by Henry Selick and much of the team from "The Nightmare Before Christmas."  The visual inventiveness on display here is on par with anything else that Selick has ever done, bringing to life a bevy of wonderfully nightmarish creatures who inhabit a world of wonders. I especially love the pessimistic earthworm and the femme fatale spider.  My only complaint is Randy Newman's music - I'm just not much f a fan.

The Witches (1990) - Now here's an adaptation that embraced being dark and scary, though the ending was famously changed to Dahl's extreme displeasure.  The witches in this movie are nasty creatures, lead by Angelica Houston playing a deliciously evil Grand High Witch. They do some deeply upsetting things to children, and the terrible revenge visited upon them is satisfying stuff.  Like "Willy Wonka," "The Witches" existed in a truly dangerous universe, one where that more challenging ending would have been perfectly appropriate.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) - This is definitely more of a Wes Anderson film than a Roald Dahl film, though that's not a bad thing in the slightest.  Dahl's work is all here, just with some added character dynamics and couched in themes of Mr. Fox's self-doubt and continuing maturation. The unorthodox animation has grown on me over time, and I love some of the little touches like the song lyrics being taken directly from the book.  Anderson's super-meticulous style and nostalgic aesthetics mesh with Dahl's boisterous characters surprisingly well.

Matilda (1996) - I struggled with this one, since it's a childhood favorite, but I have to dock it a lot of points for failing to capitalize on the material in the book.  Nearly everything with Matilda's terrible parents, her love of books, and Miss Honey's house is missing. Instead, this version of "Matilda" is really a story about an exceptional girl matching wits with a monster principal.  And it's a perfectly fine, if unusually gross kids' movie. However, it's not very good as a Dahl adaptation, never really reaching the ridiculous heights that it could have.

The BFG (2016) - I  wonder if I was too old for this film when I first saw it.  I love the book and this is a very faithful and well mounted adaptation, but I came away totally unimpressed.  The content feels very sanitized, with little of the dark edge that I always appreciated about Dahl's work. Mark Rylance is as good a Big Friendly Giant as you could ever hope for, and the CGI is pretty good, but only a few sequences really stood out.  I wouldn't be surprised if it found a more receptive audience later, though, the way most of these films have.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) - Looking back, this movie isn't as bad as I remember it being.  The kids are great, Danny Elfman's music is fun, and I enjoy some of the additions to the story. The elements that I really have trouble with, however, are big ones: Johnny Depp's performance and the ghastly amount of dodgy CGI.  Depp's Wonka with all the weird mannerisms was off-putting from the start, but over time the effect has actually gotten worse now that everything about one of its biggest influences - Michael Jackson - has come out.

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"Glass" Half Full or Half Empty?

Okay, so I'm going with the most obvious gimmick here.  "Glass," the M. Night Shyamalan movie that fully ties together his prior films "Unbreakable" and "Split" into one big cinematic universe has arrived.  And it is alternately wonderful, terrible, audacious, laughable, exactly what I wanted, and a total catastrophe.

Let's start from the top.  David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the unbreakable man from "Unbreakable," now runs an electronics store with his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark).  He's been crime fighting on the down low, and is now actively searching for the serial killer with dissociative identity disorder and 23 different personalities, Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) from "Split."  Both of them end up under the care of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychologist who seeks to convince them that their superhuman abilities aren't real, but rather the product of delusions from mental illness.  She's also treating Dunn's old nemesis Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), who has long been institutionalized for his crimes. Staple also recruits Crumb's former victim Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) to help her with Crumb's treatment.

What I love about "Glass" is that it gives me more of the wildly improbable characters I enjoyed in "Unbreakable" and "Split."  Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy's performances are especially strong, catching us up on what their characters have been up to since we saw them last.  Crumb's internal power struggles are still fascinating, and easily the best thing in the movie. Mr. Glass is a ticking time bomb with a real sense of pathos to him.  Willis is noticeably less involved, but David Dunn is still an enjoyable presence too. Best of all, these characters work pretty well together, easily sliding into the roles and relationships of these larger-than-life comic book heroes and villains on the verge of a momentous clash.  The trouble is that the any wonder or mystery keeps being undercut by Shyamalan's insistence on shoving the comic book motif in our faces over and over again.

In "Unbreakable," Jackson's Mr. Glass would go on these extended monologues about the nature of comic book characters, and that worked because it was an extension of the nature of that character and his obsessions.  Here, multiple characters have those monologues, and superhero trivia keeps being brought up at random, to the point where it becomes ridiculous. Sure, the idea that believing you're a superhero might be a new subtype of mental illness has some potential.  However, it's implemented so badly. Sarah Paulson is stuck with the awful job of playing the shrink who tries to convince the other characters that they aren't living in a comic book by grandiosely raving about comic books and superheroes incessantly. It's way, way too much.

What's worse, it takes attention away from the parts of the story that needed it.  I would have loved to see more time spent on the Dunns' relationship, or Casey and Kevin's relationship, or more Mr. Glass backstory.  Heck, setting up Dr. Staple as more than a two-dimensional character would have made that last act twist (we all knew there was going to be a twist) play out better.  Shyamalan has some good ideas in the mix, and I absolutely respect him for making some choices that no other superhero media would dare try, but the execution is so lackluster that few of them land with much impact.

Part of my frustration with this aspect of the film is that  it feels like Shyamalan hasn't been living in the same world as the rest of us, where superhero movies and shows are so prevalent and widely accepted.  He insists on explaining the rules of comic books to the audience as if they're totally unfamiliar with the mythology. I have to wonder if the script for "Glass" has just been sitting in a box somewhere since "Unbreakable" came out twenty years ago, and Shyamalan didn't bother to update it.  Or it could be that he got carried away trying to put into dialogue all the things that he couldn't figure out how to put on screen.

I should point out that Shyamalan is working with a very limited budget here, and we were never going to get the full superhero action showdown that some viewers were hoping for.  "Glass" is operating mostly in the realm of a supernatural psychological thriller. Sure, it's also a superhero movie, but in the same way that "Logan" was a superhero movie because the main characters are superheroes.  At least the movie looks great, despite its scant resources, and manages some good moments of suspense and excitement - but in the end it's a very small film, and its limitations show.

I think it's worth seeing for some of the performances, especially if you enjoyed the previous films.  Unfortunately, it doesn't work nearly as well on its own, and as a grand finale it's sorely disappointing.

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"Quixote" Lives

Terry Gilliam's "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" is one of the more incoherent films I've seen lately, but this isn't all that unusual for Gilliam.  The narratives of "Tideland," "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," and "Zero Theorem" have all been rather muddled to some degree. And this is a movie about Don Quixote, after all, literature's favorite Spanish madman who famously got lost in his own fantasies.

But of more interest to cinephiles is that "Don Quixote" is Terry Gilliam's notorious white whale, a movie that encountered so much misfortune on its way to the big screen, that it took him nearly thirty years to complete it, and a very good documentary was made about its production troubles way back in 2002.  It would be hard to make the case that the finished product was worth all the effort, but it is an interesting film, and a significantly different one than Gilliam originally envisioned. I think this is also one of those cases where knowing about all the behind-the-scenes chaos actually improves the viewing experience.

Toby Grisoni (Adam Driver), is a feckless young director shooting a commercial in rural Spain, and comes across the old village where he made a student film about Don Quixote de la Mancha ten years ago.  The actor who played Quixote, a shoemaker maned Javier (Jonathan Pryce), has since gone off the deep end and believes that he really is Quixote. He insists that Grisoni is Sancho Panza, and the two go off to have adventures together, fleeing the law and Toby's boss (Stellan Skarsgaard), fighting giants, and saving fair maidens like the lovely Angelica (Joana Ribeiro).  

Shot in Spain without much of a budget, "Don Quixote" nonetheless looks fantastic.  In many scenes, Gilliam fills the screen with elaborate sets and costumes, tons of artfully arranged debris, and a couple of good instances of special effects.  It's wonderful to finally be able to see the giants in all their glory. In other scenes, however, it looks like the filmmakers just hastily threw together whatever was available on short notice.  There are sequences that look oddly patched together, and clearly some of the pieces are missing. Much of the editing is very abrupt, especially the ending, .

I can only guess at the state of the script, but my guess is that it wasn't in the best shape.  This is the only reason I can think of for the usually dependable Adam Driver delivering one of the worst performances of his career, playing a spoiled brat of a director who is eventually redeemed by his friendships with Don Quixote and Angelica.  There are multiple scenes where he shouts and screams for no discernable reason, delivers awful dialogue, and is in a constant state of whiny agitation. Little attempt is made to give him things like a backstory or a clear motivation.

Jonathan Pryce makes an excellent Don Quixote, however, a self-important, tragically noble figure who exists out of time.  Every time he's onscreen, he exudes so much charisma that the film seems better than it actually is. The best parts of the movie are where he insists on riding headlong into catastrophe, or mightily chastises Toby for his boorishness.  I wish Gilliam had given him more of the spotlight, or made a version of this movie that was a more straightforward "Don Quixote" adaptation. As is, "Don Quixote" is worth a watch just to see Pryce's performance, but it's a bit of a pain to get there.     

Earlier versions of the film contained a time-travel element, where Toby would have travelled to the real Don Quixote's age.  I think that the removal of this was a wise choice, since it avoids an unnecessary level of complication. Tying Quixote to a state of madness that afflicts various characters is a perfectly good alternative, and allows for memorable visuals as reality and fantasy clash.  I suspect that Gilliam planned more elaborate spectacle along these lines, but the final film only gives us fleeting glimpses of Quixote's mad visions.

In the end, the movie is a mess, but it's a mess on its own terms.  I was satisfied with it, having expected much worse. Gilliam's films have been getting more and more indulgent and inscrutable over time, but this one still has those occasional moments of wild genius that I adore.  And if this turns out to be Terry Gilliam's final feature, there really couldn't be a better one for him to go out with.

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"Escape Room" and "Isn't It Romantic"

At the time of writing, at the end of May, the three highest grossing films of 2019 at the domestic box office, that are not based on any pre-existing media, are the horror movies "Us" and "Escape Room" and the romantic-comedy spoof "Isn't it Romantic."  And I figured that the latter two deserved some recognition for that. Jordan Peele's "Us, " of course, has gotten plenty of attention and I'll write it a separate post for it later.

Now, both "Escape Room" and "Isn't it Romantic?" are deeply derivative.  "Escape Room" follows the pattern of "Saw," with a group of characters working their way through a series of deathtraps to escape a fiendish mastermind.  However, it's much tamer than "Saw," with a PG-13 rating, and more emphasis on puzzles and mind games rather than grisly kills and jump scares. The characters are stock types, but decently fleshed out.  There's the shy brainy girl, Zoe (Taylor Russell), high powered executive, Jason (Jay Ellis), directionless grocery store stocker, Ben (Logan Miller), scarred war vet, Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll), jovial middle aged white guy, Mike (Taylor Labine), and an escape room enthusiast nerd, Danny (Nik Dodani).  All are lured to participate in the escape room under false pretenses.

What I like about "Escape Room" is that it really embraces its gimmick.  I had a brief fascination with real escape rooms around the time I was trying out online puzzle box games last year.  I know enough about them that the film's depicted gameplay felt mostly right. There's a certain pattern to how the puzzles and cyphers work that is translated pretty well to the screen.  Of course, this being a movie, the escape rooms are far more elaborate than anything seen in real life, to the point where most are wildly improbable. Also, there's a little too much hand-holding and way too many convenient coincidences to fill in backstory and set up the big reveals.  There's no reason for the escape rooms to be personalized, for instance, except that it gives the characters an excuse to talk about themselves.

Still, for what it is, the movie mostly works.  There are some good thrills and some cerebral satisfaction in seeing how the puzzles are solved or defeated.  The different rooms are well constructed and each one has some wow factor to them. The characters are thin, but still likeable enough that it's sad to see some of them get killed off.  A lot of the execution is very sloppy, especially the ending, but the premise is sound. I expect that it will be able to sustain the several sequels that are no doubt on their way, along with all kinds of convoluted melodrama about the sinister nogoodniks behind the game.  And I don't think that's such a bad thing, since I'd happily watch another installment or two with smarter writing.

On to "Isn't it Romantic," where Rebel Wilson's Natalie is a single New Yorker who hates romantic-comedies and all their unrealistic tropes.  So, naturally, she suffers a head injury and wakes up in a picture perfect rom-com universe where she's the improbable star. The movie takes aim at common tropes like the gay best friend, embodied by Natalie's neighbor Donny (Brandon Scott Jones), the evil co-worker/rival, Whitney (Betty Gilpin), the lifestyle upgrades, and the random musical numbers, before inevitably getting down to the business of actually being a romantic-comedy and having Natalie choose between the hunky Blake (Liam Hemsworth), and her sweet bestie Josh (Adam DeVine), who is about to get married to a stunning yoga ambassador, Isabella (Priyanka Chopra).   

The trailer for "Isn't it Romantic" is better than the film itself, because the gimmick of Rebel Wilson being exasperated with being stuck in an airbrushed PG-13 universe wears out its welcome, and the movie isn't nearly as thorough with its skewering of the rom-com genre as I wanted it to be.  Still, the movie does a very good job of selling the joke. A lot of time is spent establishing Natalie's baseline reality in a recognizably grungy New York, before she's whisked away to the fantasy version of it. And Rebel Wilson is a great fit for the material, because you understand immediately why she has such a grudge against this kind of fantasy.  The ensemble is also very strong, with Hemsworth and Chopra being very good sports playing superficial caricatures, and DeVine keeping Josh down to earth.

The humor is clever, but it's just not as clever as I wanted it to be.  There are some strong individual gags like Natalie never being able to properly consummate her relationship because the movie keeps cutting away to the next day, and the art direction is full of funny visual touches.  However, the plot pivots too quickly to following the beats of a typical rom-com once Natalie decides to play along. "Isn't it Romantic" only bothers mocking most of its targets on a surface level, because it relies heavily on plenty of rom-com tropes itself to get to a happy ending.  To be fair, this is what most genre satires like "Shaun of the Dead" do - they follow the usual formula while pointing out the sillier parts of it. "Isn't it Romantic" just doesn't offer as much insight or subversion as some of the better ones. It's still fun, and plenty romantic, but I wouldn't go on a second date.         

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