Streak, interrupted

I don't know if I'd have any way of accurately checking this -- I could laboriously go through Letterboxd, back to 2002 -- but I've just finished my longest ever streak of watching movies that I gave the same star rating. 

Predictably, that star rating was the all-purpose, ever-reliable, ever-milquetoast 3.5 stars.

And it was a rating I gave to every new movie I watched between May 29th and June 2nd, which in this case was seven movies.

Not a huge number? Maybe. Not a huge time period? Definitely. But as I was looking at it on Letterboxd, it felt gigantic.

Now, this is the sort of streak that is utterly within my own control. I decide the star rating I'm going to give a movie, and if I were between two different star ratings, it would be easy to select 3.5 stars instead of 3 or 4 stars just to keep the streak going.

But no, I feel like each of those star ratings of 3.5 was given fairly, with no shenanigans. 

If you want to know the seven movies in this streak, they were:

Eleanor the Great
My Dead Friend Zoe
Ever After
Americana
The Crash
Fay Grim
The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

I don't need to spend any additional time discussing them. Two of them I've already discussed. 

When I started watching Girl, Interrupted for the first time ever on Thursday afternoon, I sensed the streak was going to "finally" (too short to use that word) end. But I thought that's because I was going to give James Mangold's film four stars. Yes, despite reservations about the probable overwrought nature of this movie, which had kept me from watching it for 27 years, I was vibing with it well in its first half. 

It might have been around the time our heroine, played by Winona Ryder, tries to insult a nurse played by Whoopi Goldberg by talking in a racist take Southern Black accent that my feelings on the movie started to turn. (In 1999, perhaps this was not disqualifying of our sympathies, plus the movie was set in the 1960s.)

Or maybe it was during a suicide sequence that is so drawn out in the narrative that the audience is ten steps ahead of the characters during the entire staging, including the episode of verbal abuse leading up to it by co-star Angelina Jolie.

Whatever the case, Girl, Interrupted did morph into the movie I thought it would be at that point, and instead of a half-star above that 3.5, I went a half-star below. And probably could have gone lower, but I did retain the positive feelings from the first half.

Jolie? I'm not sure it's an Oscar-worthy performance, especially during the climax.

I know I'm not starting another streak because the next movie I watched, the idiotic "sharks in a hurricane" movie new to Netflix called Thrash, received a rare 1 star from me.