Mistakes were made

Remember how I planned out my viewing schedule to watch something special as my landmark 4,000th movie, even going so far as to have a guy I've never met loan me some of the movies from his collection to enable this special viewing?

Yeah, that was all for naught.

Due to the inherently fallible process of keeping lists, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise was not actually the 4,000th movie I'd ever seen. I now realize it was actually the 4,007th.

I'll explain.

Among the many movie lists I keep, which include year-by-year breakdowns in their own Word documents and a movie order document I've been keeping since 2002, are two master lists. One of these is the original Word document I have been updating for nearly 25 years, which is just a flat list of all the movies I've ever seen. The other is an Excel document that I introduced within the past 15 years, which is essentially an exact duplicate of the Word document, but with a bunch of supplemental information (director, year, whether I liked it or didn't) included to take advantage of the greater database-type capabilities of Excel. Because the Excel document is a duplicate and it's a more useful document overall, there's no real need for me to keep updating the Word document. But I continue to do it out of habit, and because I find it funny that this same document has followed me around for well over half my life.

Rather, it's supposed to be an exact duplicate -- and herein lies the problem.

In the lead-up to our move to Australia last summer, I got out of the habit of updating the Excel spreadsheet. Some of the numbers were off -- the total I'd seen in the theater vs. on video did not match the total of good movies vs. bad movies, and the total breakdown of movies by the first letter in their title did not match either of those. Instead of stopping to figure out which numbers were wrong and get it all sorted out, I backburnered the whole thing. In the meantime, I continued updating my other lists, including the master list on Microsoft Word. A simple list involving no formulas is much easier to stay on top of.

However, it also makes it a lot more difficult to tell when you're making mistakes. Like, forgetting to add certain movies to the master list.

I didn't realize this was happening at the time, of course, and therefore used the running total that I manually update at the bottom of this list as my indicator of how close I was to 4,000. But a running total updated manually is highly fallible, especially since you can't just consult the row number on the left side of the document like you can in Excel. If you think you've seen 3,999 movies and there are 3,999 rows in your spreadsheet, that's a nice a quick check of your math.

So how did I eventually realize I was off? Well, I've gotten some free cycles at work during school holidays, and don't mind telling you that I've been spending the time to finally get the Excel document caught up -- which means adding more than a year's worth of movies. I've had my Letterboxd diary up on one monitor and the spreadsheet up on the other, and have steadily caught up.

The problem arose when I noticed myself approaching 4,000 on the spreadsheet, but not approaching what I knew was my 4,000th movie on Letterboxd.

Oops.

So once I did fully catch up on the Excel spreadsheet, I copied the list from the Word document and pasted it next to the list from Excel. Scanning down the list, I was able to find seven titles that I had failed to include on the Word document but had added correctly on Excel, thanks to my pretty infallible Letterboxd diary.

Seven? How could I be off by that much?

Well, each time I see a movie, I update either four or five lists, depending on whether the movie is from the current year or not. Forget any one of these lists -- like the master list -- and something has slipped through the cracks that may not be detected for months, or even years.

But seven? Really? That much?

So -- if you are still reading this -- you are probably now curious: What was my 4,000th movie, after all?

It was:

That's right, the second film I saw for the Melbourne International Film Festival, a Chinese modern-day noir called Black Coal, Thin Ice. Which I gave a middling 2.5 stars out of 5.

Oh well.

Here's the thing, though -- it doesn't really matter.

In updating this list over the decades -- funny how I can say that now -- I have found various movies here and there that were simply not on my list. This is so obviously the case that I probably not need even say it. In fact, if I'm really being frank, I'd say that even the list I have now probably has 15 to 20 movies that are not on it. They'd be mostly movies I saw when I was a kid, and could not be sure I actually saw, or may not even remember seeing. Then there are also movies I do include on the list that I'm not sure I've seen start to finish. This is an inexact process at best.

Within the past two years alone I realized that Showgirls was not on my list. I definitely saw Showgirls, no doubt about it. But for whatever reason, it never made it on to the list. And since I saw Showgirls at the time it was released, it would have been among the first thousand movies I ever saw. Go back and retroactively add it, and it throws off not only the 1,000th movie I saw, but also the 2,000th and the 3,000th.

That's why it's best to see milestones as symbolic. Even when I thought Sunrise was my 4,000th movie, I knew in my heart of hearts that it was almost certainly not exactly the 4,000th. The most it could have ever been was an approximation of my 4,000th movie, a ceremonial viewing designed to celebrate the fact that I am reaching 4,000 movies sometime between the months of June and October in 2014.

And as such, it will remain, "officially," #4,000.

If Black Coal, Thin Ice has a problem with that, it can lodge a complaint with the front office.

MIFF: Sunshine jinx?

I headed out Friday night for the only one of my four Melbourne International Film Festival screenings taking place at a multiplex. Although I was looking forward to the Chinese detective thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice -- enough that I paired it with a themed dumpling dinner at a nearby restaurant serving Taiwanese street food -- I must admit that on some level it felt a little less special that I'd be rubbing elbows with the regular Friday night crowd out to see Guardians of the Galaxy and Hercules.

Upon arrival, my concerns were alleviated ... but then replaced by other concerns of a decidedly superstitious nature.

See, the Hoyts theater at Melbourne Central has what one might call a "prestige wing," containing just two very large screens, each with a very large seating capacity. In fact, as this theater was renovated within the last decade or so, it wouldn't surprise me if these screens were designed expressly to enable participation in MIFF (which has been around since 1952, making it one of the world's oldest festivals).

But as I approached my theater, I got a bit of a sense of deja vu about this prestige wing, and this theater in particular.

It turns out, this was the same screen for my fateful showing of Danny Boyle's Sunshine back in 2007, on my first trip to Australia.

Why fateful? Well, what started as an incredible opportunity to see Boyle's latest movie six months before it opened in the U.S., with the director himself and one of the stars (Rose Byrne) in attendance, quickly turned into a disaster when the reels were in the wrong order from about the fourth one on, and one of them even started playing backwards. Long story short, despite 45 minutes of trying to fix the problem, they never got it right and we had to abandon the film unfinished. Boyle still talked to the audience about it, but it must have put him in a difficult position, as we had not technically seen the film.

I'm of course exaggerating if I imply that my arrival at this theater resulted in flop sweats and a recurrence of PTSD, but I did find it funny enough that I texted my wife about it being the same theater. "Hope that's not a sign!" she texted back.

Well, it was and it wasn't. I mean, Black Coal, Thin Ice projected fine, as you might expect in an era of mostly digital projection. Unfortunately, the narrative sometimes played as though it were being shown out of order, and ended rather abruptly.

But first, one more quick observation about the scene. I noticed something this time I hadn't noticed the previous Saturday at White God: what a production the festival volunteers considered this to be. It wasn't necessarily that there were at least three volunteers allocated to this screening, it was that all they really seemed to be doing was showing people to their seats. These not being assigned seats, it was something the audience could have probably figured out how to do quite well themselves. Yet the task required constant convening between the three volunteers to discuss strategy and other logistics. One of them was even speaking through an ear bud to someone elsewhere, presumably in a control room of sorts (more likely, the projection booth), and often looking quite intense. While it did provide me some level of amusement -- enough to write about it here, anyway -- at least the phenomenon you sometimes see in this situation did not rear its head: the volunteers getting all power-hungry and suffering from an inflated sense of their own importance.

Finally: Despite a somewhat poor sleep the night before, I turned out not to be at much risk of falling asleep, but I did have a whole bag of Starbusts with me just in case.

Okay, on to the movie.

It's got a pretty promising setup: A small clump of human remains wrapped in a blanket is found among a mountain of coal being processed at a plant in a town in northern China, and word soon spreads that other parts of the body are appearing at other coal plants. While following a lead, the detective assigned to the case (Liao Fan) is caught in a sudden shootout and hospitalized, leading to a downward spiral in his personal life that finds him pulling security detail five years later, and spending most of his time drunk. His ability to solve the cast becomes wrapped up in his distant hopes of redemption, and also involves trying to save the widow of the coal plant victim (Gwei Lun-Mei), whose subsequent romantic partners keeping dying in a way that can't help but seem related.

Black Coal, Thin Ice is one of those movies that absolutely sings during some of its finer moments, replete with beautiful camerawork, unexpected turns of events and a grimly engrossing wintry mood. Unfortunately, the collection of those moments never adds up to anything close to a whole. Oh, there's a beginning, a middle and an end, which gives lie to my previous claim that it felt shown out of order. But key narrative revelations are not properly set up, causing them to arrive abruptly and preventing them from feeling the least bit satisfying. The movie constantly tantalizes and almost never delivers. This grows frustrating the closer you get to the end, and the more certain you are it's never going to pay off.

I might be okay with the so-called "narrative chicanery" described in the write-up for this movie on the MIFF website if the movie weren't also dwelling in an area I find distasteful, which is its sexual politics. Some of this may be cultural, but even then it seems a bit morally irresponsible. Namely, most of the men in this movie are lechers. That would be okay, I guess, if this movie were taking a hard feminist tack and trying to put its finger on the vile repugnance of men. That's not what it's doing, though. The men here are almost incidental gropers and other creeps, as the hero himself is seen mistreating no fewer than three different women, including his ex-wife at the very beginning of the movie -- immediately after sleeping with her. This, mind, you is before he has fallen from grace, and things only get arguably worse after that. This is to say nothing of how Gwei's character is the constant object of the lascivious male gaze, resulting in acts of both physical and emotional violence against her, as well as forcing her to pay apparently undeserved consequences for her resistance to that gaze. But less academically, after a while it all just felt too icky to keep countenancing.

I guess you could say I liked the Black Coal part but not so much the Thin Ice part. I'm meaning that metaphorically, of course, but there's a literal application as well. The movie gets all caught up in a thematic tangent involving ice skating, which is probably its least well-fitting of a lot of ill-fitting parts.

Monday brings my first American film of the festival, Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves. So stay tuned for my next MIFF update, coming soon.