I'll continue my monthly Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta viewings, which pair me randomly with another person in the group and give me that person's highest ranked film I haven't seen to watch. That's separate from this blog and it's something I enjoy.
But in six of the 12 months last year, I had two other movies to watch for two of my three bi-monthly series, as well as one to watch for my monthly series. Because two of the three bi-monthly series were rewatches, as was the monthly series, that's 24 movies I rewatched rather than watching something new. Which is not a problem, since I love revisiting favorites, but it does almost exclusively explain why my 2023 new viewings dropped from 282 in 2022 to 259 in 2023.
So only one bi-monthly series this year and one monthly series, and today I'm here to tell you about the former, which will begin in February.
There'll be no "finish up the filmography" bi-monthly series in 2024, as there has been each of the past three years when I polished off Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and the tag team partnership of Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion. I'll probably resume that in 2025.
Instead in 2024, my bi-monthly series will be a rewatch series, and I'll be figuring out what it is about one particular movie I don't love by a director whose other work has been a hit with me.
I'm calling it Audient Outliers, and basically, I'll take six directors whose work I love and rewatch the one of their movies that doesn't work for me.
The series was supposed to be inspired by the release of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, one of 2023's most praised films that I will likely not have a chance to see before my list closes. With how I've felt about Glazer's last two films, Birth and Under the Skin, I thought Zone had a decent shot at my #1.
Thinking about the three films -- the two I love and the one I was anticipating watching -- it brought my mind to the one of his four that I really dislike, also the first I ever saw, Sexy Beast. A friend and I went to see it in L.A. and we both though it was sort of laughable, when it wasn't too boring by half.
Deciding Sexy Beast was worth a revisit within the context of the other films he's made, I decided to find five other films that fit this criteria of serving as an outlier relative to the rest of the filmmaker's work. I actually found 16 others that fit the description in one way or another, though none as perfectly as Sexy Beast -- either because there isn't only a single film in the filmography I don't like, or because the director has made too few films for the concept of an outlier to make sense.
Nonetheless, I will choose five more from these 16, and watch and write about them every other month from February onward. I won't reveal them in advance because I'm enough of a big boy to know that you won't watch them along with me in order to get the most out of my blog. I wouldn't expect you to, but that's the only purpose served by revealing them in advance.
I will indeed start with Sexy Beast in February. And now the question is whether I will try to wait until after the February 22nd Australian release of The Zone of Interest before I watch Beast ... at which point, it conceivably might not even be an outlier as the only Glazer film I don't love.
Well, I guess we'll see how flawed a premise for a series it is as we go.
I'm looking forward to it, anyway.
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