Olivier Assayas' The Wizard of the Kremlin -- which I saw on Wednesday via a screener for its Thursday release in Australia, in order to review it (see here) -- is the 5,000th film that I've ever liked.
To put that in a better context, it's the 7,311th film that I've seen at least once, according to my carefully manicured list, meaning there are 2,311 movies that I don't like. Or, that I don't like enough to give them a thumbs up in my spreadsheet, which is usually equivalent to three stars. Of course, only half or so were movies I saw when I was even giving out star ratings.
If you want to go by percentages, it means I like 68.39% of the movies I've ever seen. It's been hovering at just over 68% for some time now, and this is about the highest it's ever gotten. Considering that I am probably a little easier, if anything, on movies the older I get, this number will probably continue to go up slowly, but likely will never get over 69%. (Never say never. Maybe the movie industry will just become unfathomably brilliant in the coming years.)
I'm not sure what to make of the milestone, and I should say that The Wizard of Kremlin only just barely qualified. I started out liking it at about a 7/10, 3.5 star level, before eventually tiring of it and landing it at only 6/10 and 3 stars. Although there is at least one Assayas movie I love (Personal Shopper), I find myself disappointed by his movies a lot more than I am ... um, appointed by them. And perhaps unsurprisingly, Personal Shopper might be the movie he's made that's most unlike him.
I know it's hard to tell from the poster, but that's Paul Dano next to Jude Law's Vladimir Putin -- an uncanny casting choice if ever there was one. (Law, not Dano.) Even being the star of two of my former #1 movies of the year, Dano could not elevate this one above middling.
For the sake of fairness, I should say I am not uniquely qualified to discuss what is or isn't like Assayas. This is his 20th feature over 40 years, and I've seen only six of them, and all but one of those since 2012. So it may be that there are hidden Assayas gems that would be exactly what I wanted from him. Among those I've seen, I like Kremlin better than The Wasp Network, Something in the Air and Clouds of Sils Maria, in any case. One of his most famous works is probably Carlos, a TV mini-series that I also haven't seen, but which I suspect to be very similar in structure to this newest one.
But back to the milestone. I suppose it's more of a milestone of total movies seen, though I wouldn't be celebrating #7,311 on its own. It just so happens that I once decided to mark every movie I'd seen as either good or bad and then keep a running percentage as I went.
It did take a little while to finally arrive. I noticed when I got to 4,999 thumbs up (it was The Odyssey, which would have been thematically perfect for the milestone), and then the next three movies were all close but no cigar, coming in at 2.5 stars each. I might have even been a little harder on them than I would have ordinarily been -- I said I was close to giving Crossroads three stars in a post earlier this week -- except I wanted #5,000 to be, I don't know, distinctive. But I finally gave in and decided that The Wizard of the Kremlin was slightly more good than bad, rather than slightly more bad than good.
And so I release you. Nothing more to see here today.
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