Jonathan Glazer's film-per-decade approach

I doubt it could be intentional or likely something he's ever considered -- he doesn't seem like the sort of person to dwell on superficial patterns -- but Jonathan Glazer appears determined to grace us with his talents only once per decade.

"But Vance," you say. "Glazer put out two films in the 2000s, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004)." (Yes, you include years in parentheses when you speak.)

Ah but did he?

If you believe all those smartypants who wanted to be pedantic when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, the 21st century didn't start until 2001 -- meaning that the year 2000 is technically the final year of the 1990s. No one actually really thinks of it that way, but if you are being as accurate as possible, it's true. (I didn't see and rank Sexy Beast until 2001, but it played festivals in 2000.)

In any case, the point is, Glazer does not make very many movies. And if he were to reveal after making his final film in 2042 that he had purposefully made only one film per decade, I wouldn't be surprised. If Quentin Tarantino can decide he's going to make exactly ten features, Glazer's hypothetical mission statement might not be much different in concept.

Which is why the fact that I didn't love The Zone of Interest is particularly disappointing.

Oh, I started out loving it. For about the first 30 minutes, I imagined the post I'm currently writing would be entitled "The movie that would have been my #1 of 2023." But Glazer made a couple choices in the direction the narrative went that just didn't really work for me. I don't oppose them on moral grounds -- I understand there is some outrage out there about how this subject matter is handled, but I haven't delved into it. I oppose them on storytelling grounds only.

If you want to read my full review now that the film has finally released in Australia, it's here.

Will I now have to wait until 2031 -- or, if we are considering the ten-year gap between Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest to be the new standard, as late as 2033 -- to get another of Glazer's incomparable conceptions of the world we live in?

It's hard to say. I'd hoped to be surprised and go to IMDB and see another project in pre-production. I mean, even Terrence Malick eventually started becoming more prolific, and then he became so with a vengeance. (On the music side, this can also be said for my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.)

Alas, no. And if we are to take his previous patterns as a prediction of future patterns, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with shorts and music videos and other bits of ephemera that occupy a creative person between major symphonies. 

Before I go, I should circle back on two bits of business:

1) You may recall that earlier in the month, I watched the aforementioned Sexy Beast as the inaugural film for my bi-monthly Audient Outliers series. At the time, I stated that I chose to watch that before Zone of Interest, even though I could have worked it out in the reverse order, because if I didn't like Zone of Interest, not liking Sexy Beast wouldn't be such an outlier. If you didn't follow the link to my review previously, you won't know that I ended up giving Zone of Interest an 8/10, only dropping from a 9/10 in the last 20 minutes of the film. (I actually may have dropped all the way from a 10/10, or five stars, in those last 20 minutes.) So at least you know Sexy Beast remains a valid first choice for that series. 

2) This is a potential future entry in another series, Audient Bridesmaids, but as discussed a few days ago in the post about The Prince of Tides, we don't actually know for sure that The Zone of Interest will not win best picture this year. So to save myself the hassle, I'll limit the reference to that series to the two sentences you are currently reading. 

Identifying the outliers in 2024

I'm going to ease up on my cinematic commitments in 2024. That's not to reduce my overall viewing of movies, but to give myself more flexibility, rather than three or sometimes four movies I'm compelled to watch each month for different reasons.

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.