I haven't consumed all the year-end movie stuff you might expect a fanatic like me to consume. There are too many lists out there, too many videos, too many think pieces on the year just completed. At this point of my own year, with only 11 days left before I finalize my list, I do want to deepen my engagement with some of the year's top contenders, to decide where they go on my list, but I also don't want to burn out on 2023 postmortems and get sick of it all before then.
Things that fall into my lap, though, are fair game -- especially when they have to do with my whole movie year just completed, including non-2023 movies.
A few days ago Letterboxd sent me a wrap up of my year in movies, which contained interesting stats I already knew (I watched 259 new-to-me movies in 2023) and some I didn't and which actually surprised me (my busiest day of the week for watching movies was Sunday, when I logged 44 movies in 2023).
Two particularly interesting tidbits were presented to me, namely, the actor I watched most in 2023 and the director I watched most.
They didn't tell me how many David Datsmalchian movies I watched in 2023 -- I'd probably need the paid version of Letterboxd for that -- but they told me that I watched no actor more than David Datsmalchian in 2023.
Checking IMDB for myself, I saw it was six movies, which is indeed quite a lot.
Five of those came out in 2023: Last Voyage of the Demeter, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Oppenheimer, The Boogeyman and Boston Strangler. If those movies weren't all over my chart, he'd certainly be a candidate for one of my "three who had a good year" in the piece I post the day after I post my list.
The last was a 2022 movie, which I caught up with in 2023, that being Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Since Dastmalchian is a character actor, it's possible for him to work a bit more than a lead would. He's a really good character actor, the kind who had prompted me to learn his name (though probably not how to spell or pronounce it) long before 2023.
It was the director I watched most in 2023 that causes me to issue the joke sexism charge.
That was Guy Hamilton, whose three Bond films Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun won him this honor. (Incidentally, the week I attended the Bond marathon was also identified by Letterboxd as my busiest watching week of the year.)
The thing is, I also watched three movies apiece directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow as per my bi-monthly series Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro.
I suppose if you have to choose one, there has to be some sort of tiebreaker, and maybe that's recency. I watched the three Bond films after I had entirely completed watching the movies of both female directors. But forgive me if I don't register just a little bit of skepticism here. (I mean, "guy" is even part of his name, ha ha.)
In the past, this would certainly have been dominated by a director in this bi-monthly series, since I was watching six of their movies. I'm quite sure Martin Scorsese took home the award last year when I finished off his filmography.
By getting only three in each, Bigelow and Campion were subject to tying with Hamilton, whose three movies were for an entirely different reason. And I guess Bigelow only co-directed the first film of hers I watched last year, The Loveless. Campion's got a legitimate beef though.
Or the tiebreaker could have been how much I liked the films. Each of Hamilton's three films got at least 3.5 stars from me, and two of them got 4. Sadly, Campion only managed one 3.5 stars and she had a two-star film in there. Bigelow's track record was even worse.
So I guess if Letterboxd is erring on the side of showing me the movies I preferred, I rescind even the joke accusation ... and may have to point the finger at myself instead.
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