While many people spent parts of that first week after his death revisiting favorites from his filmography, I did not. The pain was too fresh.
I'm planning to make up for that in 2026, as I plan to devote significant time to thinking about the man I've recently called my favorite director, hoping only to occasionally dwell on the exact circumstances of him departing this earth, if I can help it.
As you would know from previous experiences with my blog, early January is when I usually tell you about my blogging series for the new calendar year. It's that lull between Christmas/the actual end of the previous year, and ramping up to reveal my film rankings later in January. During this time I devote one post each to telling you about my new monthly series and my new bi-monthly series.
I haven't told you about the new monthly series yet, though will probably post about that within the next week to ten days. It's an idea I came up with a while back, and has yet again pushed back two other pending ideas, which have been patiently waiting their turn for several years now.
It was the bi-monthly series for 2026 that I had been stalled on. I had a flimsy idea, but I wasn't super excited about it. I won't tell you about that one because I may come back to it in 2027.
Initially, though, the idea had been to return to the format of watching the final six movies I had not yet seen by a prominent director, which I have done previously with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow/Jane Campion (three each). I did it initially with Spike Lee, though I didn't really do it right in that case, because there were nine films I hadn't seen and I watched only six of them. (The remaining three remain unwatched to this day.)
I had Hirokazu Kore-eda in mind for this, since this is a director I love and there are a number of movies of his that remain unseen by me. However, that number was more than six, and I do like my round numbers. (Which is why I watched an extra Kathryn Bigelow film the year before I started watching her final three. I don't want to repeat the Spike Lee mistake.) So I was going to watch one or two Kore-eda films in 2025 so I'd get down to the final six unseen. Suffice it to say, that did not happen, and it's also a bit of a dangerous undertaking, considering that I haven't figured out whether I can even source all of his old movies. When I was supposed to watch his film After Life for a movie challenge a couple years ago, I had to order a DVD copy from the U.S. just to be able to see it. And that's one of his more prominent ones.
Then Rob Reiner died on December 14th, and I got an idea for not only one 2026 bi-monthly series, but two. Confusingly, they will have the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner.
"Isn't that just one monthly series, then, Vance?"
You might think so, and you might be right. But I'm thinking of it conceptually as two, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
First off, though, I want to say that having two criss-crossing bi-monthly series on this blog is not unprecedented. I did it in 2023 when I criss-crossed Baz Jazz Hands, the series where I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's six feature films in the year after Elvis, and King Darren, the series where I rewatched six of Darren Aronofksy's films the year after The Whale made him my first director to direct two of my #1 films. It felt a bit hectic but it was really only six extra viewings over the entire year.
This year will be a bit more focused, as it will be all about Reiner, but it will be about two different kinds of Reiner.
In one bi-monthly slot, I will be watching the six Reiner films that I haven't seen, all of which are from the past 14 years. This is imperfect because there will soon be a seventh film. Reiner's final feature as a director, Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale, will be released this year. When I first thought of this idea, I wasn't considering the fact that I wouldn't be up for watching Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in 2025. I'll still watch it within the next few weeks before my ranking deadline, with some trepidation, but I may not formally consider it a part of this series.
This bi-monthly slot will include one movie that will be very hard to watch: Being Charlie. I will struggle with that one when I come to it. At this point I'm not sure if I will be going chronologically or not.
However, a series devoted only to what are probably some of Reiner's worst films does not feel like a very good way of really celebrating him. And so this is where the other bi-monthly slot comes into play.
During those other months I will be rewatching my six favorite Reiner films, many of which are from that acknoweldged stretch of dominance starting in 1984, and one of which is not. This corresponds perfectly with the fact that I have six Reiner films in my top 200 on Flickchart, which is the very thing that led me to conclude I can and probably should consider him my favorite director.
Now, there is a wrinkle to this one as well. My seventh favorite Reiner film is The Sure Thing, which is "only" #396 on my Flickchart. It, along with A Few Good Men, are the two films from this pre-North Reiner imperial period that I have not seen since I started keeping track of my rewatches in 2006. But A Few Good Men is not a realistic consideration for me because it's around the middle of my Flickchart, and I don't feel like I have a lot new to glean from it. (I would kind of like to catch up with my eighth favorite Reiner film, The American President, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)
So what I will probably do is exclude both This is Spinal Tap, my favorite Reiner film, and its sequel, and watch them as part of a special double feature in the next few weeks. Then that will give me Reiner films #2 through #7 to join with what will be six unseen Reiner films by the time his last remaining film gets released. Does that math make sense?
In any case, it will be a fitting, and hopefully not too mournful, send-off for a director who meant so much to me when I was coming of age, like his characters in Stand by Me were coming of age. Actually, that's the other of these film #2 through #7, along with The Sure Thing, that I haven't seen in the last 20 years.
And by the end of 2026, I will be a Reiner completist -- at which point maybe I'll go back and watch All in the Family if I haven't yet had my fill.
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