Twenty twenty-one is an expansion forward in that regard, as I'm not going to get six months out of the year to rest comparatively easily.
That's right, I could not decide between two different bi-monthly series for 2021, so I decided to do both of them, intertwined. One will consist entirely of repeat viewings, while the other will be my first time seeing the film in question.
The first will start this month and is called I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, a riff on my #1 movie of last year. Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things struck me as a kind of culmination of all the films he'd written or directed before it, though to be fair, you could probably say that about each of his films. Also "culmination" is not the correct term, since he's only 62 and could have another couple decades of films in him.
But given how many themes contained in I'm Thinking of Ending Things have appeared first in other Kaufman works, I thought it would be a good time to go back and revisit those other works, all of which I've seen, in chronological order.
It'd work out great if Kaufman had exactly six films before now, but that's not the case. Between his work as a screenwriter and his work as a director, he's got eight total films to his credit.
So here's how I've decided to handle it. I won't watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things again at the end of 2021, as I saw it twice last year and it's still fresh in my memory, so that cuts out one movie. And the two of his films I'm most familiar with -- which were also my favorite films of their respective years, just like Ending Things -- also happen to have been consecutive works in his filmography, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So I'll squeeze those two into the same month at the midpoint, leaving myself with the following schedule:
January - Being John Malkovich (1999)
March - Human Nature (2001)
May - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
July - Adaptation (2002)/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
September - Synecdoche, New York (2008)
November - Anomalisa (2015)
The sticklers among you will note that Confessions of a Dangerous Mind technically came out about three weeks after Adaptation, so I can't really call Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine consecutive releases. But the fact that there were two Kaufman movies in December of 2002, when he has only eight total movies in the past 22 years, is an oddity to begin with, so I think it'll be okay. (In fact, when I first envisioned this series, I had forgotten he even wrote Confessions. It made me grumpy when I realized that as it meant I had to combine the other two movies into one month.)
The symmetry of the series does work out pretty well otherwise, though, as half of the months will be movies I've seen only once (Nature, Confessions and Anomalisa) while the others will be movies I've seen at least twice, and more than four times in the case of my July movies.
In each post I'll try to reflect on how the movies relate to each other, and to I'm Thinking of Ending Things in particular.
The other half of the year -- the months in which I usually do my bi-monthly series, starting with February -- will relate to another great director who was in our minds last year, and who would have directed a #1 film of the year for me if I'd been around back in 1941. That of course is Orson Welles, whose greatest film was the subject of the movie Mank last year, though Welles himself played only a bit part.
It was actually well before I saw Mank that I was thinking one day about how much I like Welles, if not always every movie he made, then at least the idea of him. And then I got to thinking about how I still had not seen his final, uncompleted movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which was released to Netflix in 2018.
At the time, I decided against seeing it that year in order to resolve the problem of how to rank it, as a "new release" in 2018 or just a relic that had been dug up and finished. I wrote about that dilemma here. I figured I would get to it pretty soon in 2019, but that whole year and the next both passed without me doing so. By the time this occurred to me near the end of 2020, the movie was almost totally off my radar.
So I decided to reverse engineer a series leading up to the watching of The Other Side of the Wind, which would have the added benefit of making me an Orson Welles completist.
Because you know how I like my clever series titles, this one will be called All's Well That Ends Welles. The purpose will be to "end Welles," in other words, to see the remaining films of his I haven't seen.
As with I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, though, the numbers don't work out perfectly. There are more than six Welles films I have not seen. I tried to whittle down that number with a 2020 viewing of his version of Don Quixote, also an uncompleted patchwork that was finished in 1992. I had already watched The Stranger a month or two before that. But I didn't whittle any further than that, leaving me with the following titles still to watch:
Journey Into Fear (1943)
The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
Macbeth (1948)
Mr. Arkadin (1955)
The Trial (1962)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Immortal Story (1968)
F for Fake (1973)
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
The series is a bit problematically conceived, because I am actually closer to the beginning of Welles' filmography than I am to the end of it. Plus, it's unclear how many of these things are actually really considered feature films, and how many will even be accessible to me. Then there's also the fact that I kind of want to watch a movie I've already seen, The Magnificent Ambersons, a second time, to get a proper grasp on my feelings toward it.
But if Welles wanted to have a messy career full of fits and starts and incomplete projects, I don't know why a bi-monthly series devoted to him should be any less messy. In six installments spaced about every 60 days, I will reach my own idea of what constitutes "ending Welles" by the time 2021 is done.
Although I didn't plan this, I think Kaufman and Welles actually have a fair bit in common. They are both exceedingly ambitious in the scope and themes of their projects, and are both fascinated with existentialism, insofar as it affects the psyche of men. I would not say their films are made to the exclusion of women, but their perspectives on and relationship to women are things I'm sure I'll grapple with -- things I'll be thinking of, if you will -- as I visit and revisit their work over the coming 12 months.
So I may have bitten off more than I usually chew, but I think it will make for good chewing.
Come have a bite with me, if you like.
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