Saturday, January 18, 2020

How the sausage gets made: My 18-month road to the decade's best

Thanks for reading my best of the decade post yesterday. Now, to take you farther behind the scenes than you ever dreamed or wanted.

You don’t really need to know all the ins and outs about how I run my blog or, more to the point, how I make my movie lists, but I thought you’d be interested in learning about something I’ve been up to for the past 18 months without ever telling you about it. 

I enjoyed so much the project of identifying my best of the last decade in late 2009/early 2010 that I have been looking ahead to the end of this decade for several years now. That list was put together under some duress, over a period of maybe a couple weeks and no more than six weeks at the very longest. That meant maybe only ten rewatches to confirm my ongoing affection for the contenders, and then a bunch of movies I just slotted in based on my memory of them. Even rewatching those ten was complicated by the fact that I was also trying to finish watching 2009 movies, and I remember my wife getting annoyed at my lack of availability during those several weeks.

I wanted to be a lot more scientific -- or maybe just a lot more exhaustive -- as well as more available to my wife -- this time around.

So sometime in the summer of 2018 (winter of 2018 in Australia), I put together a list of contending films to rewatch for this best of the decade list. I did this by combing my year-by-year list of movies seen. Not my rankings, since those included only movies I saw in time to rank them, but rather, the ongoing lists I keep adding to every time I see a movie from a given release year. Some of those – particularly the years when I was watching movies for the Human Rights & Arts Film Festival (HRAFF) – have upwards of 230 titles in them, or maybe 80 more than I actually ranked that year.

My goal was to identify this list of contenders and then spend the year 2019 watching at least one per week. But the list of contenders was nearly 90 films long, or ended up at nearly 90 films after I inevitably added 2019 films and contenders seen for the first time in 2019. So I had to start earlier than this past January if I wanted any hope of fitting them all in.

So I started watching them not long after I came up with the list, even though it was not yet 2019. Hey, no time is too early to start on a project like this, even if means I might want to watch some titles a second time before all was said and done. I actually ended up watching three of these movies -- mother!, First Reformed and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse -- twice, though sometimes for other reasons. I didn’t hold myself to the standard of at least one per week until the start of 2019.

So instead of giving you a total alphabetical list, I’ll show you the movies I watched in order and with the date I watched them, then follow that up with the ones I couldn’t reconsider for whatever reason. I've only listed one of the two viewings, the "official viewing," for the movies I rewatched twice. If you’re curious, this also functions as sort of an extended honorable mentions from yesterday’s post, though as it turned out, my feelings toward certain films dropped enough on rewatch that I liked them less than certain titles I chose not to consider. Hey, my initial estimate of movies is not always unimpeachable.

So here that is:

  1. Moonlight (7/16/2018)
  2. Animal Kingdom (7/27/2018)
  3. Meek’s Cutoff (8/29/2018)
  4. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (9/11/2018)
  5. Melancholia (9/28/2018)
  6. Coco (10/13/2018)
  7. Beyond the Black Rainbow (10/19/2018)
  8. mother! (11/23/2018)
  9. First Reformed (11/30/18)
  10. Queen of Earth (12/13/18)
  11. Tangerine (1/6/19)
  12. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (1/9/19)
  13. Your Sister’s Sister (1/16/19)
  14. Edge of Tomorrow (1/26/19)
  15. Hell or High Water (2/2/19)
  16. 127 Hours (2/8/19)
  17. Zootopia (2/10/19)
  18. Toni Erdmann (2/17/19)
  19. Sicario (2/22/19)
  20. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (3/1/19)
  21. The Last Five Years (3/5/19)
  22. What Maisie Knew (3/13/19)
  23. Lincoln (3/19/19)
  24. Moneyball (3/28/19)
  25. Nocturnal Animals (3/29/19)
  26. Isle of Dogs (3/30/19)
  27. Inside Out (3/31/19)
  28. Before Midnight (4/8/19)
  29. Boyhood (4/8/19)
  30. Like Father, Like Son (4/16/19)
  31. Whiplash (4/24/19)
  32. A Ghost Story (5/1/19)
  33. Gimme the Loot (5/7/19)
  34. A Separation (5/15/19)
  35. La La Land (5/19/19)
  36. The Lost City of Z (5/20/19)
  37. Climax (5/24/19)
  38. Love is Strange (5/28/19)
  39. Exit Through the Gift Shop (6/5/19)
  40. Take Shelter (6/12/19)
  41. Winter’s Bone (6/18/19)
  42. Ida (6/24/19)
  43. The Handmaiden (6/28/19)
  44. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (7/1/19)
  45. The Social Network (7/9/19)
  46. In a World … (7/16/19)
  47. Under the Skin (7/20/19)
  48. Beyond the Hills (7/24/19)
  49. The Hateful Eight (8/2/19)
  50. Berberian Sound Studio (8/7/19)
  51. BlacKkKlansman (8/13/19)
  52. Ruby Sparks (8/23/19)
  53. Everybody Knows (8/31/19)
  54. Rabbit Hole (9/3/19)
  55. Looper (9/13/19)
  56. Other People (9/17/19)
  57. Red State (9/27/19)
  58. Another Earth (10/3/19)
  59. Stories We Tell (10/7/19)
  60. What We Do in the Shadows (10/12/19)
  61. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (10/18/19)
  62. Wonder Woman (10/18/19)
  63. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (10/19/19)
  64. The Breadwinner (10/19/19)
  65. The Skeleton Twins (10/20/19)
  66. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (10/25/19)
  67. Upstream Color (11/1/19)
  68. Enter the Void (11/2/19)
  69. The Hunt (11/10/19)
  70. Creed (11/14/19)
  71. Parasite (11/14/19)
  72. If Beale Street Could Talk (11/22/19)
  73. Killing Them Softly (11/28/19)
  74. Your Name. (11/29/19)
  75. Four Lions (12/6/19)
  76. Inside Llewyn Davis (12/7/19)
  77. Tanna (12/9/19)
  78. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (12/14/19)
  79. The Past (12/21/19)
  80. Crazy Rich Asians (12/27/19)
  81. Tangled (12/30/19)
  82. Spring Breakers (12/30/19)
As you can see, that made for a total of 82 films I was able to rewatch before I cut it off at the end of 2019. I had an alphabetical list I was working from, and each time I’d see one I’d cross it off with the strikethrough feature on Microsoft Word (fun) and add it to the list you see above. If you examine those dates closely, you can see there were some times I was able to binge decade rewatches, such as my birthday weekend in October, when I watched five of them. And if you really do want to audit those dates, you’ll see I never failed to watch at least one movie in a calendar week, which I defined as Monday to Sunday, including the weeks I was out of the country on vacation or for family purposes. Go me.

As you can see, I saved my ultimate #1 and #2 for a double feature on the second-to-last night of the year, knowing they would be my #1 and #2 but not knowing which would be which.

I also short-listed but couldn’t watch the following:

The Arbor (2011, Clio Barnard) – One of my top ten of 2011, I simply could not find this anywhere. Unwilling to pirate, I left it out. Probably not a realistic contender anyway.

BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017, Robin Campillo) – This I fully intended to rewatch, even though I’d only just seen it for the first time earlier in the year. However, I brought only its case with me to Tasmania at Christmastime, a fact I realized only once I’d gotten there. I had taken that DVD out of its case to test our DVD player when we were having a problem with it, and I never returned it. This meant I missed my window of opportunity to see BPM and also that I had to find a substitute or else risk not successfully seeing at least one contender every week of the year. Fortunately, our Tasmania holiday house had Crazy Rich Asians, a film I loved and had already seen twice, but had considered too frivolous to seriously consider it for my top 25 of the decade. But it actually deserved to be considered and it ended up advancing to the next stage, as you will see shortly. As for BPM, I really liked it but if I'm being honest with myself, it was not going to make it to the final 25.

Capharnaum (2018, Nadine Labaki) – I turned on this a little after my fellow podcasters did not like it as much as I did, but I ultimately never found this available for rental. I did not want to purchase it when I thought it probably was not that strong of a contender in the end.

Three Windows and a Hanging (2014, Isa Qosja) – This was a film I watched for HRAFF, but it was always obscure, and predictably, I could not find it. Again, not a serious contender, maybe, but something I wanted to shortlist nonetheless.

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) – As you saw if you read yesterday’s post, this has not had a theatrical release yet and I’ve already decided I might consider it for the best of the 2020s.

I also briefly had Toy Story 3 on my list, but removed it when I was honest with myself and decided that outside of the very ending, which makes me cry like a baby, I don’t love this movie enough for it to be a serious contender.

Just a few words on the watching itself. I plucked movies from a number of different sources, from my own collection to Netflix to iTunes to Stan (our Australian streaming service) to Kanopy (the free streaming service associated with the public library system) to library rentals themselves. Perhaps my most innovative rewatch was seeing Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio when it played at MIFF as part of a retrospective of Strickland's work, which I wrote about at the time. Strickland was a big surprise omission from decade-end honors as he got two films in my top ten in the years of their release (Berberian and The Duke of Burgundy) but I steadily soured on those films just a bit (it occurred on my second viewing of Burgundy but not until my third of Berberian). Perhaps fitting as he ended the decade with what I consider to be sort of a turkey, 2019's In Fabric.

So the next step in the process was to whittle this list of 82 down to 50 films that I would duel on Flickchart in order to determine my top 25, with the next ten being my alphabetical list of honorable mentions. I eyeballed the list and eliminated the 20+ movies I knew had not impressed me enough on rewatch, then more regretfully shaved of the remaining strong titles that I knew were not quite strong enough to be serious contenders.

In order to begin dueling the remaining contenders, I created a Flickchart account specifically for the purposes of this project, containing only those 50 films. As it turned out, it ended up being 51. That’s because just a couple hours after I finalized this list of 50 on the morning of December 31st, I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which ended up as my #2 of 2019 and actually ended up making my top 25 of the decade, as you will remember if you read yesterday’s post. Instead of bouncing one of the other contenders, I just added it.

Once I had these films added to Flickchart, I dueled them in my down moments for the next two weeks. It took a while to get the films in a semblance of the correct spots, in part because Flickchart’s algorithm is a bit goofy sometimes, meaning it will present the same duels several times within a space of 50 duels, and then never duel certain other films. For example, I got Tangled to be my #2 and Spring Breakers to be my #1, but a duel between those two movies never came up organically, so Tangled never had its natural opportunity to beat Spring Breakers and leap-frog into the #1 spot. (As this was something I’d already decided after that double feature on the final night.) The only way I finally got that to happen was by choosing the option to re-rank Tangled, which results in a series of duels involving Tangled and another movie, and is the only surefire way to force a particular film all the way to #1 on your chart. Using this same method helped fix the correct rankings for other films.

I had set my sights on duelling these films 5,000 times. That would remove any doubt that I had really thought this through. But as it turned out, I either didn’t have enough time or didn’t budget enough time. I also started to lose some of my enthusiasm when I had duelled two particular films for the 37th time, while still never getting certain other duels. But by this point, I had arrived at the correct relative position for my films either by chance or by force, so the full 5,000 were not needed.

After 2,196 duels, I came up with the following order. The top 25 should look familiar to you. The next ten are honorable mentions, but this shows you the order that they appeared, which you didn’t get from yesterday’s post. And then the last 16 are films I hated not to recognize in any way. They are now getting their moment in the sun.

  1. Tangled
  2. Spring Breakers
  3. Rabbit Hole
  4. The Social Network
  5. Tanna
  6. Like Father, Like Son
  7. Inside Out
  8. The Blackcoat’s Daughter
  9. First Reformed
  10. Under the Skin
  11. Beyond the Hills
  12. A Ghost Story
  13. Parasite
  14. Boyhood
  15. A Separation
  16. If Beale Street Could Talk
  17. 127 Hours
  18. Zootopia
  19. What Maisie Knew
  20. Toni Erdmann
  21. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
  22. Red State
  23. Inside Llewyn Davis
  24. BlacKkKlansman
  25. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
  26. Before Midnight
  27. The Breadwinner
  28. Tangerine
  29. The Skeleton Twins
  30. Ruby Sparks
  31. The Last Five Years
  32. Hell or High Water
  33. Whiplash
  34. mother!
  35. Other People
  36. The Lost City of Z
  37. Coco
  38. Wonder Woman
  39. Melancholia
  40. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
  41. Your Sister’s Sister
  42. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
  43. The Past
  44. Creed
  45. Four Lions
  46. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
  47. Everybody Knows
  48. Climax
  49. Enter the Void
  50. Exit Through the Gift Shop
  51. Crazy Rich Asians

I especially hated not to recognize my two Gaspar Noe films, Climax and Enter the Void, though as #48 and #49 their top 25 prospects were pretty clear, and my #2-ranked genre films from 2015 and 2017, Creed and Wonder Woman, which were very important to me in their respective years but have suffered just a tad on further reflection. Shout out also to Coco and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the two animation stragglers in what was truly an excellent decade for animation.

Okay, almost done here, but I did want to finish with a few stats, since there is no better place to put them.

Top 25 by year:

2010 – 4
2011 – 2
2012 – 1
2013 – 4
2014 – 3
2015 – 1
2016 – 3
2017 – 2
2018 – 3
2019 – 2

Films from 2010 made up three of my top four of the decade, giving credence to the notion that having the time to allow a film to sit with me is an important factor in my love for it. However, this theory is not necessarily borne out over the rest of the top 25. The years 2011 and 2012 yielded only three movies combined before we jump back up to four in 2013. Plus, every year from 2016 onward had at least two films, so maybe that’s the point where recency bias starts to play more of a role.

I didn’t specifically set this as a requirement this time, but last time I ensured that each year of the decade would be represented among the top 25 at least once. I was grateful to see that this occurred organically. I should say, however, that each ranking year was not represented at least once. By relegating my #1 of 2012, Ruby Sparks, to only an honorable mention, making it my only #1 not to make the top 25 (just like last decade when only Gosford Park failed to make the cut), 2012’s list got shut out of the top 25 entirely. However, because my #1 of 2013 (and #11 of the decade), Beyond the Hills, was a 2012 release in Romania, that got it in on a technicality as a representative for 2012. The funny thing is, I was really passionate about my movies in 2012, so much so that I was inspired, for the very first time, to write the wrap-up post that is now my traditional day-after follow-up to announcing my best of the year. So who knows.

Some more extraneous info:

Movie year represented most in my top 25 – 2010 & 2013 (4 films)
Movie year represented least in my top 25 – 2012 & 2015 (1 film)
Movie year represented most in the 87 films I had hoped to rewatch  – 2013 (13 films)
Movie year represented least in the 87 films I had hoped to rewatch  – 2019 (2 films)
Movie year represented least in the 87 films I had hoped to rewatch, without the asterisk of being the last year of the decade – 2012 (7 films)
Only film in my top 25 that I did not see in time to rank it in its ranking year (though I did see it in the theater): If Beale Street Could Talk
Only film in my top 25 that I only saw once: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Lowest original ranking for a film I considered a best of the decade contender – What We Do in the Shadows (#41 in 2014)
Top 25 films I saw for the first time in the theater – 21
Top 25 films I saw for the first time on video – 4, but three in my top ten

If you’re still reading, you may be my mother, or a stalker I’ve never known about. But assuming you are not one of those, I’ll let you go now.

Thanks for reading. One final decade wrap-up post tomorrow, then we’re on to 2020 and back to normal posts.
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