One of the features I like most about Letterboxd came into focus for me last night when I watched the Australian film Birdeater.
Birdeater has been on my watchlist for some time, and only because I'd seen it on my watchlist regularly as I scrolled through the list did I know I wanted to watch it, when I saw it pop up on Amazon Prime, and that it would count for the current year's film rankings.
See, I use my watchlist as many people do, I assume, which is to add a movie they hear about somewhere so that they can remember later on that they wanted to watch it. My modification of that standard process is that I clear mine out each year after my list closes, in preparation for the new list year, leaving only those movies I had added but which had failed to get released that year. (One example that will carry over from 2024 to 2025: Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17, which was once thought to be coming out in 2024 but now will not debut until next year.)
The only trouble with this system is that I often forget why I added a film to my watchlist in the first place.
I would not say I am particularly choosy about what I add, but I do have my standards. I'm not going and adding every film that shows up as a future release on Netflix, in part because there's less a chance I will forget about them, but in part because only a small percentage of them seem like must-haves, while many others are filler. My watchlist is no place to keep track of filler.
But even with those standards, the list can be quite long, full of quite a number of titles I don't expect to ever get to. Just to give you some idea, Birdeater was the 125th film I've seen this year that I will count for my year-end rankings, and there are still 81 titles remaining on my watchlist. (A movie leaves your watchlist once you've chosen a date you watched it and/or submitted a star rating for it.) If I were to rank 206 films this year, that would be more than 30 higher than my previous record, and of course there are films I'll see before the end of the year that I have not even heard of yet.
This is perfectly expected. I'm adding movies throughout the year, when I see a trailer for them, when I hear them talked about on a podcast, when they're listed as part of a festival lineup, when they're personally recommended to me.
But after the initial point of contact, I often forget why I added them in the first place. And as I later discover that movie in the wild and am watching it, I can only trust the earlier version of myself from that moment, and assume he knew what he was doing when he added it to the list.
This was the experience I had last night as I was watching Birdeater. I certainly did not remember that Jack Clark and Jim Weir's film was Australian. That eventually gave me the key to determining why I added it, but initially I was stumped. I don't hear a lot of Australian films being discussed on my movie podcasts. It's possible I could have gotten it as a rec from one of the writers discussed in the first paragraph of this piece, but it didn't seem familiar.
There are clues to be had from the placement of the film within your watchlist, though. Unless you purposefully re-order the watchlist, which I never do, it shows the oldest movies you added first. If you find that you added a certain movie right around the time that you added another movie -- and you remember why you added that other movie -- there can be useful context clues. Then again, since the movies do vanish as you see them, this can also be of limited value.
So I decided to review Birdeater's positioning on my watchlist to see if that helped solve the mystery.
Because I've never shied away from being a bit ridiculous on this blog -- and because it's something you can read fairly quickly -- I'm going to include my entire current watchlist below, listed in the order that I added them, so oldest first. (It actually appears on Letterboxd in the reverse order, newest first.) I'm just going to give the titles, not the directors or (obviously) poster art, because that most closely approximates the experience of actually scrolling through the list, where you have often forgotten who is directing a movie or why it was significant to you in the first place.
Also worth noting: At the time I added these films, I was also not checking to ensure their release dates qualify them for my current list, according to my own specific rules. I always check the release date before I actually watch the movie. As I'm going through now, I see some of them with a year 2022 after them. That could still represent a true journey between their first debut at a film festival and the time they were available for the general public to consider, or they could just be wrong.
The End
Kraven: The Hunter
About Dry Grasses
La Chimera
The New Boy
Birdeater
Club Zero
Nosferatu
Presence
Wolfman
The People's Joker
Mufasa: The Lion King
Mickey 17
Out of Darkness
Back to Black
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Lisa Frankenstein
The Crow
One Love
The Great Escaper
Glitter & Doom
The American Society of Magical Negroes
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
The Antisocial Network
Janet Planet
The Grab
Evil Does Not Exist
Aggro Drift
Gasoline Rainbow
The Dead Don't Hurt
Horizon: An American Saga - Part 2
I Used to Be Funny
Good One
The Coffee Table
Am I OK?
Anora
The Apprentice
Mothers' Instinct
Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution
The Bricklayer
Problemista
A Real Pain
The Surfer
Kill
Cuckoo
Heretic
Ezra
The Beast
Teaches of Peaches
Afraid
Sing Sing
She Loved Blossoms More
Kneecap
Reagan
Survive
War Game
Conclave
Pavements
Close Your Eyes
Paddington in Peru
Slingshot
We Live in Time
The Outrun
The Front Room
Piece by Piece
Emilia Perez
Omni Loop
The Piano Lesson
Nickel Boys
Blitz
Apartment 7A
The Life of Chuck
Color Book
Greedy People
Carry-On
The Room Next Door
Dahomey
Red Rooms
Nightbitch
The Critic
A Complete Unknown
Joy
The last two of which were added just yesterday. Of course, I had heard of The Complete Unknown -- the Timothee Chalamet-starring biopic of Bob Dylan -- but had not previously added it to the watchlist.
The oldest film on the list, Joshua Oppeheimer's The End, is worth calling out here as a specifically funny example. This movie has been on my watchlist since at least 2022, and possibly before that. I hope it is not an indication of the film's quality, but I heard about it at least two years before it was ultimately released. IMDB does finally say its U.S. limited release will be in two weeks, so whether I see it or not, it's going off the list one way or another.
Just to give you a sense of how murky it can get, of the 82 titles above -- my earlier number of 81 was correct, but I have not yet logged Birdeater for the purposes of this experiment -- there are a full 26 titles whose origins on the list are completely unknown to me, which means I don't know who's directing them or why I added them in the first place. That's nearly a third, and it does include Birdeater, for the purposes of this analysis.
However, the unique placement of Birdeater on the list was instructive in terms of figuring out the origins of the self-recommendation.
There are only five titles ahead of it, which means there is at least some chance it carried over from 2023. My process in late January each year, especially with titles I don't remember, is to check IMDB to see if their release date disqualifies them from the upcoming year, which is usually if the movie has already gotten released in the U.S. If it has not, it stays on the list. So Birdeater was probably also unknown to me at the end of 2023, and it stayed on the list as not having yet gotten released in the U.S. In fact, it possibly still has not gotten released in the U.S., as the IMDB release date area is incomplete, not even showing the Australian release of the movie.
If I first heard about it in 2023, that means either someone was talking about it on an American-based podcast well in advance of its release -- not likely -- or an Australian friend had recommended it -- not likely because it did not get released outside of festivals until 2024. But that last qualifier is the clue to what it really was: It played at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2023, and though I obviously did not see it, I must have considered it strongly enough to add it to my watchlist.
This is somewhat unusual. There are certainly plenty of times I've added a movie based on seeing it was playing at MIFF, but that's usually because it's my first time hearing about a new movie from a celebrated director, which I know will factor in to the year-end conversation in terms of best of the year. It's not because two Australian directors I've never heard of have made a movie with a provocative title. But indeed it did play at MIFF, and clearly it intrigued me enough to make the cut.
So how useful was it to have Birdeater sitting on my watchlist for something like 16 months?
In the end, not terribly. I try not to hold Australian films to the same standards as their Hollywood counterparts in the same genre, though of course in many cases they end up better, and it's their comparative authenticity that gets them there. However, there were a few problems that kept me from fully connecting with Birdeater and in fact from fully following what was going on. The largest of these was that the mix between the music and the dialogue was off, such that any time someone was talking over the music, the music was really talking over them, and I couldn't hear what they were saying. The movie does me no favors in that at least a couple of the characters have fairly heavy Australian accents, meaning that even after 11+ years in the country, even I could not understand everything they were saying. And then there's the fact that what I did follow about the story came up short of my expectations. From that title you might expect sort of a grotesque horror replete with animal guts, but this leans a bit more toward a heightened social drama than a genre exercise, to its detriment.
But the point is not the quality of Birdeater, which I gave a Dawn of the Dead-like 2.5 stars, because adding a movie to your watchlist is certainly no guarantee that you will love or even like it. It just makes a good case study of my use of my watchlist, the occasional shortcomings of that use, but the overall crucial role it plays in helping watch a wide array of potentially relevant films before I tell you what I think of all of them in mid-January.
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