Last night I watched the 26th and final of my former #1s, finishing off a whole calendar year of doing that, and now I can start dueling them against each other in a special Flickchart account devoted to just those 26.
When I got down to my final three, I had envisioned either First Reformed or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which were two of the three I'd happened to watch in 2021 before deciding to start this project, as my last movie. Instead, logistical considerations caused them both to jump ahead of Beyond the Hills, which finished things off last night.
When it became clear I was going to need to miss a day of work (which ended up becoming two) following my tooth extraction a couple weeks ago, I thought that made a perfect opportunity to watch the 2012 Cristian Mungiu film that runs two hours and 32 minutes. I had already requested to borrow it from the library, but the tooth issue actually prevented me from getting into the city for work that week, meaning I also couldn't get to the library where it was held in reserve for me.
But surprisingly, it wasn't available for rental via either iTunes or Amazon, so I'm glad there was indeed a DVD copy floating around the Melbourne Public Library system. I'd already watched First Reformed, and I watched Eternal Sunshine on day two of tooth extraction convalescence, which left me Beyond the Hills for last night.
It might have suited me to wait until a different night, given that I was coming off watching two-plus hour movies on each of the previous two nights (Tar and Emancipation), the former of which I didn't finish until the following afternoon despite a valiant effort to stay up for it, the latter of which I did finish, but at nearly 2 a.m. Another extremely long movie -- one in a foreign language, no less -- could have killed me.
But as I told you yesterday, I'm seeing Avatar tomorrow night, and tonight will be a blissful respite from watching movies to catch up on Survivor and write Christmas cards. So Monday night was the night.
Besides, I'd like to give myself at least two weeks to duel these movies before I post my rankings of #1 to #26 somewhere around New Year's.
I won't tip my hand about where Beyond the Hills might land, but I will note that it is one of my most obscure #1 movies. If you know a film by Mungiu, you're much more likely to know 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. His follow-up -- a 2012 release in Romania, but a 2013 release elsewhere, making it my #1 in 2013 -- was certainly critically acclaimed, but I just don't think it was that widely seen.
I've seen it four times now -- the second time in 2015 for pleasure, the third in 2019 to consider it among my top 25 of the last decade (it landed at #11) and this time for this project. But only once before now have I even tagged it on this blog, which was for that year-end post in early 2014 where I named it my #1. I'm not going to check right now, but that might be my fewest tags for any movie I've named #1, making it comparatively obscure for me as well.
Well, I'm glad to come to the end of this viewing project without any misses. I had some close calls. I had to buy a copy of Todd Solondz' Happiness and have it shipped from America in order to watch it. I already owned a copy of Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (which I hadn't watched in nearly ten years of owning it), but I might have had similar sourcing issues there as well. Many of the films were available for free on a streamer to which I already subscribed, but a surprising number were not -- in fact, I couldn't find the aforementioned Eternal Sunshine on any of about five services, so I had to pay for a rental. (Which meant I was pretty lazy that night, since I own a Region 1 DVD, but in my state of tooth extraction recovery, it seemed easier just to pay for a rental rather than hook up my tired old laptop that's been set up with Region 1 as its DVD region.)
Now I look forward to some intense ranking to see what surprises this project still has in store.
Tune back in near the end of the month to have all the answers revealed!
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