This year's release date asterisk

It Ends was a movie I looked for last year, when it was recommended to me by a friend who saw it and ranked it as part of his own year-end rankings. (Which means it could only be one friend. There's only one other person who would be willing to go on this crazy mission with me each year.)

So why will it be a part of my own 2026 rankings?

I have fairly hard-and-fast rules about release years and when I count a movie toward the current year. And it usually has to do with the film's U.S. release date. Even though I've lived in Australia for 13 years now, Australian release dates are sometimes way out of whack and I just don't consider them to be a reliable gauge of the current film year, not when I'm comparing my own list to those from people who live in other parts of the world. 

If a film has a release in the U.S. in a particular year, it's part of that year for ranking purposes. That allows foreign films, which were often released in their home country in the previous year, to qualify for ranking in that second year.

But if you go to IMDB for Alexander Ullom's head-trippy road movie -- in that it is literally about a road that seems to go on forever -- you'll see the following under the U.S. release:

"United States - December 10, 2025 (internet)"

And then on the very next line:

"United States - August 21, 2026"

Huh? 

A film may get only an internet release, or it may get an internet release after a theatrical release. In fact, I believe this second describes every movie that's been made in the internet era -- though to be fair, IMDB does not usually note the date a movie becomes available for streaming.

But an internet release and then a theatrical release? You don't usually see that.

What happened was that Letterboxd, for a limited time, had exclusive access to the movie as part of its Unreleased Gems series. I noticed in a recent email from Letterboxd that they're doing it again this year. 

In fact, the time was so limited that when I went to look for it a month later, in order to make It Ends one of my final half-dozen viewings of 2025, it was no longer available. I wrote it off as never rankable on one of my year-end rankings, a fate that befalls a large number of releases each year.

But most of those other movies burn their eligibility in that first year. Because of its unusual release schedule, I've now decided It Ends did not. 

It took another eight months to finally get a proper release, but It Ends came out in the U.S. last month, and washed up on our shows last week. I watched it Sunday night as a second movie after the family went to see Terminator 2, as discussed previously. 

I liked but did not love it. Not top 20 like my friend ranked it last year. To each his own. But that isn't really the point of writing this post.

No, the point is to talk about a sort of stretching of the rules that actually sort of pains me a little bit.

I know these are my rules and I can do whatever I want with them, but I also feel like it's good to be consistent. And the way it works out, only foreign films, not English language films like this one, usually get that "second chance" -- which is really just a first chance, since I literally could not have seen those movies in the year of their proper release, unless I'd flown to the country where they were released, or maybe caught them at a festival. 

If I had been a bit faster, I could have seen It Ends last year.

But then again I might not have even noticed it was a Letterboxd exclusive, might not have even had it recommended to me by my friend. And then it would have been like any other film that has a different release year on IMDB than the year of its actual release, a result of debuting at a film festival one year and getting a theatrical release the next. That's especially likely if the festival debut was a later festival, like TIFF. You can't expect all those films to get distribution in that first year, so you rank them in the second year.

And so I am treating the Letterboxd exclusive window on It Ends kind of like an online film festival. 

Hey, it works for me, and these are my rules anyway. Which doesn't mean I am always flexible enough to bend them. 

My first Letterboxd rental

I was going to say "And possibly my last," except I worked out the problem.

You may not think of Letterboxd as a source of video rentals, but it is. I was actually planning to rent a movie through Letterboxd back in January, through its Video Store application, but the movie a friend recommended that he'd rented there, It Ends, was not something I could find, for whatever reason. So I couldn't add that movie to my 2025 list, because it was a Letterboxd exclusive -- except not for me, apparently. 

When I saw that a movie from my 2026 watchlist, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (feels like there should be some punctuation in there), was available through Video Store, I felt the urge for a delayed scratching of that "new platform itch." I'm sure this movie is available to rent through other means, but that itch made me dive in for a Sunday night viewing.

A Sunday night viewing that almost wasn't. 

The rental went fine, it picked up my payment details and everything. Clicking the start of the movie registered the start of my viewing window, since it said I had 48 hours to complete my viewing.

But the movie wouldn't start. The little colored circle just kept on spinning, and this did not change through multiple refreshes, uses of the backward arrow on my browser and even a reboot. 

I was about to click "send" on a complaint message to Letterboxd, asking for a refund before quickly switching to another movie even though it was now 10:30 and we'd gone for a long hike earlier in the day, when I realized that perhaps the internet issues that had plagued me all weekend were a factor here. 

You see, my older son must be playing some sort of new game that sucks up the available internet, because starting with his student-free day on Friday, when I was at home working, I've struggled to complete normal tasks that involve the internet. And that's almost all tasks, especially since I am connecting in to remote servers for work, where I am accustomed to high-speed processing. He says this is a game he's been playing for weeks, but the evidence is pretty strong that something had changed, and that he was the one hogging our bandwidth.

He was still playing the game on Sunday night at 10:30, so I decided to switch to running my laptop off my phone, whose WiFi I would also turn off so I'd be running the whole thing just from mobile data. And suddenly, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was ready to play.

After this, no issues. Letterboxd is still in my good graces. Though I did check just now, and I could have rented it for the exact same price from Amazon anyway, so perhaps the novelty was only the new platform, not the scarcity of the movie's availability. 

And the movie did not disappoint -- or if it did, it only disappointed very slightly. How could this movie with a lofty 7.9 rating on IMDB disappoint? The only possible way is because Matt Johnson has such a successful track record with me. Of his three previous features, the one I rank lowest is Operation Avalanche, and that movie got four stars from me. The Dirties and BlackBerry were both 4.5 star movies on my Letterboxd. So when Nirvanna was "only" another 4 stars -- though I did consider 3.5 -- it couldn't help be not quite the level of achievement I was hoping.

But this is a very fun movie, which pulses with Johnson's trademark shaggy charm, not to mention an intense love of Back to the Future. Plus multiple scenes of people parachuting off the CN Tower in Toronto. Who could ask for more? In the end, I realized that it was a silly usage of the milquetoast 3.5 star rating on a movie with this much creativity, joie de vivre, and deployment of unsuspecting real Toronto citizens. 

A year with Alan Tudyk, part of it in "Zootropolis"

I'm always interested in what my Letterboxd Year in Review email has to tell me about myself and my viewing habits from the past year. You'll recall that in 2022 this email revealed to me that I'd watched a disproportionate number of David Dastmalchian films in the year just completed. This post is also about my most viewed actor of the previous year, but we'll get to that in moment. 

One thing this email tells me, which I already knew, is that I reviewed 0 films on Letterboxd in 2025. I'm sure this is very disappointing to Letterboxd and I know it is disappointing to some people who follow me on Letterboxd and use that site for its review function more than I do. (They could hardly use it less.) Truth is, I already have two other forums for reviewing movies, if you can say that some of the writing I do on The Audient can be considered movie reviewing, so I leave the pithy Letterboxd takedowns to the unwashed masses who do not have those other forums. I use the site to log my viewings and to submit star ratings, plus to keep lists, most of which are private. 

And it was the logging movies portion of my Year in Review that made me realize I had miscounted the number of movies I watched during the calendar year. As I mentioned in a post two days ago, I thought I had watched exactly 287 new-to-me movies for the second year in a row. But it turns out I'd missed one -- not in the recording of it offline in my Microsoft Word document that I use for that purpose, but in the manual updating of the numerical view count. Letterboxd told me my total was 288, and indeed, that turned out to be absolutely true. 

Then I also learned that Sunday is the day I watched the most new movies, with 51. That likely does not mean every Sunday but one, rather, I'm sure I watched more than one on several of those Sundays. That seemed strange to me, but I guess it's the weekend night I'm least likely to be out doing something else, and most likely to still want to hang on to the weekend with one more "fun" thing before the week starts again. 

The next piece of information I thought was interesting was that Paul Schrader was my most watched director of 2025. This is because I saw two Paul Schrader films: Oh, Canada and Hardcore. In a year where I was not watching the work of one particular director for one of my blogging series, it makes sense that two would be the maximum number of films I'd seen by any director, though I know there was at least one other: Dan Trachtenberg, whose two 2025 Predator films were both watched by me. (Don't forget Predator: Killer of Killers, the lesser known animated film.) Since I did also watch one new-to-me film written by Schrader, which was Rolling Thunder, it makes sense that they would have given him the tiebreak, though I know that was not the reason they did so. 

My most watched actor is the interesting one because it is Alan Tudyk, the actor more known for his voice than for his face. So to say that I "watched" him a lot in 2025 is not totally accurate, though I did hear him a lot. 

He was in four 2025 films that I saw, those being Playdate, Zootopia 2, Superman and The Electric State, the last three of which were all vocal roles. He was also in one 2024 movie that I saw in 2025, which also used only his voice: Moana 2. That last probably put him over the top over any other challengers, though I'm not really in any position to determine who those challengers may have been. Again in a tiebreaker Letterboxd could not have known about, I also saw Tudyk in a TV show, Santa Clarita Diet, as he took over the role of a severed head, first played by Nathan Fillion, in the show's third and final season. 

As I was looking through his IMDB to confirm his viewings and to make sure there wasn't another older film of his that I randomly saw in 2025, I at first wondered if he'd been in one of those Asylum movies. You know, like Snakes on a Train or Alien vs. Hunter or Transmorphers. Because here is what I saw:

But then I thought that looked an awful like the actual Zootopia 2 poster. What gives?

Somehow I never knew that Zootopia was not available as a title to be used in some places outside of the U.S., which apparently includes parts or most of Europe, and by extension, Australia. And Australia must be the default region for my IMDB, so when you click into Zootropolis 2, it lists Zootopia 2 only as the "original title."

AI led me expertly through this one, as I am reluctant to report AI usually is able to do these days. 

Apparently there is a Danish zoo called Zootopia, and this zoo already has rights within the EU -- which the UK was still a part of in 2016 -- for trademark and marketing. But it gets even stranger than that, because Zootropolis also has a conflict within Germany specifically, where the movie is known as "Zoomania."

What AI appears to get wrong is that Zootopia 2 is called Zootropolis 2 in Australia. Even though I said my IMDB must be defaulting to my region, which is why the title is presented this way, I know this was not how it appeared on marquees here when I saw it with my son the weekend it came out. Just to be sure I had not had some kind of episode with my perception, where my mind was expecting a certain series of words and so just translated it without my even thinking about it, I checked current cinemas where it is still playing, and they definitely have it lised as Zootopia 2. 

In any case, Alan Tudyk is in it, and that made five Tudyk movies in 2025. 

I've seen three movies so far in 2026, so that means the likes of Alec Baldwin, Marlon Wayans, Frances Fisher, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn and Ice Cube are all the early frontrunners for 2026.

Mission: Letterboxd submission gag

This post could have also been titled "I finally saw: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part 1," because indeed, I'd been one of the last holdouts. 

I wasn't opposed to seeing it in 2023, even though the entries in this series since my favorite, Ghost Protocol, have underwhelmed me. It seemed especially likely that I'd see it since I saw the mini featurette about the making of Tom Cruise's motorcycle cliff jump about six times before other movies. But I just never worked it out, and the lengthy two hour and 43-minute running time certainly didn't help, though that is of course a standard running time for a blockbuster these days.

If you read the post I wrote yesterday, you wouldn't think it was particularly likely I'd be seeing a 163-minute movie now either -- but then my son was invited over to his auntie's for a sleepover last night, meaning his usual informal claim to the living room was non-existent. So I started watching it at just after 7, and still didn't finish until after midnight -- though that was also because I stopped for dinner and to watch a show with my wife, as well as, yes, have a short nap.

There are any number of things about the movie itself I could write a whole post about, given my low bar for writing a post, but I'll just touch on a few quick ones before getting to what I'm actually writing about today. 

One thing I wanted to know is, why doesn't Ethan Hunt ever think about his wife anymore? You know, the one played Michelle Monaghan? I'm not sure if she left the franchise on bad terms, but any time Ethan has to think about his past, he thinks about another woman who died (did we see her in other movies?) as well as Ilse Faust. What happened to poor Michelle? Maybe she didn't die (I don't think she did) which is why he doesn't need to think about her.

Also, I found some of the execution in this movie really hammy. I was really distracted by a scene near the beginning when a bunch of government bigwigs are telling the CIA director about this new "entity" that's the MacGuffin for this movie and for the one coming out next week, and there's one full line of exposition about it that goes on for about two or three minutes, with cutaway images showing the "entity" in the background -- efficient screenwriting you will agree. The thing I thought was hammy was that the characters continue one long thought about it, but they trade off who's speaking at intervals of about every sentence. And there are like five characters participating in this exposition. I know that's supposed to be more interesting than if just a single person were doing the exposing, but it's artificial as hell.

The thing I'm writing about is what happens when you add Dead Reckoning on Letterboxd.

I went to add it this morning, and as soon as I clicked the submit button, the whole screen was taken over by a black computer screen with green writing on it, coming in little bursts, as green writing on computer screens does. For half a second I was like "Oh shit, what just happened," which was probably the point. I quickly realized it was a movie tie-in as it started talking about my review self-destructing in five seconds, and then a notification that Ethan Hunt had short-circuited the self-destruction sequence.

Cute. But since it went on for about 15 seconds, eventually, kind of annoying.

It made me wonder if there has been any other movie that has partnered with Letterboxd for this sort of promotional tie-in, which, when you think about it, is kind of unnecessary. I mean, I'm adding it because I've already seen the movie. I resented it a little bit, because I was able to conflate the promo with Tom Cruise's ego, and I imagined that Letterboxd isn't getting anything out it. In reality, they probably are, but maybe I'm still a little bit annoyed.

Anyway, if you haven't added Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning: Part One to your Letterboxd yet, you might do it just to see this little bit -- which I am now myself promoting, I guess. 

I wanted to see it, I just don't remember why

Letterboxd has seemed to take a leap forward recently in terms of usage, or it could just be because two of my ReelGood writers have just started using it and have started to randomly tell me things like they were surprised about my 2.5 star rating for the original Dawn of the Dead. "Yeah, I don't like it that much," I told them. "But I love the remake and Night of the Living Dead."

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.

My year with David Dastmalchian and the sexism of Letterboxd

One part of that title is a joke and one part of it is true.

I haven't consumed all the year-end movie stuff you might expect a fanatic like me to consume. There are too many lists out there, too many videos, too many think pieces on the year just completed. At this point of my own year, with only 11 days left before I finalize my list, I do want to deepen my engagement with some of the year's top contenders, to decide where they go on my list, but I also don't want to burn out on 2023 postmortems and get sick of it all before then. 

Things that fall into my lap, though, are fair game -- especially when they have to do with my whole movie year just completed, including non-2023 movies.

A few days ago Letterboxd sent me a wrap up of my year in movies, which contained interesting stats I already knew (I watched 259 new-to-me movies in 2023) and some I didn't and which actually surprised me (my busiest day of the week for watching movies was Sunday, when I logged 44 movies in 2023). 

Two particularly interesting tidbits were presented to me, namely, the actor I watched most in 2023 and the director I watched most.

They didn't tell me how many David Datsmalchian movies I watched in 2023 -- I'd probably need the paid version of Letterboxd for that -- but they told me that I watched no actor more than David Datsmalchian in 2023. 

Checking IMDB for myself, I saw it was six movies, which is indeed quite a lot.

Five of those came out in 2023: Last Voyage of the Demeter, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Oppenheimer, The Boogeyman and Boston Strangler. If those movies weren't all over my chart, he'd certainly be a candidate for one of my "three who had a good year" in the piece I post the day after I post my list.

The last was a 2022 movie, which I caught up with in 2023, that being Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

Since Dastmalchian is a character actor, it's possible for him to work a bit more than a lead would. He's a really good character actor, the kind who had prompted me to learn his name (though probably not how to spell or pronounce it) long before 2023.

It was the director I watched most in 2023 that causes me to issue the joke sexism charge.

That was Guy Hamilton, whose three Bond films Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun won him this honor. (Incidentally, the week I attended the Bond marathon was also identified by Letterboxd as my busiest watching week of the year.)

The thing is, I also watched three movies apiece directed by Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow as per my bi-monthly series Campion Champion & Bigelow Pro.

I suppose if you have to choose one, there has to be some sort of tiebreaker, and maybe that's recency. I watched the three Bond films after I had entirely completed watching the movies of both female directors. But forgive me if I don't register just a little bit of skepticism here. (I mean, "guy" is even part of his name, ha ha.)

In the past, this would certainly have been dominated by a director in this bi-monthly series, since I was watching six of their movies. I'm quite sure Martin Scorsese took home the award last year when I finished off his filmography. 

By getting only three in each, Bigelow and Campion were subject to tying with Hamilton, whose three movies were for an entirely different reason. And I guess Bigelow only co-directed the first film of hers I watched last year, The Loveless. Campion's got a legitimate beef though.

Or the tiebreaker could have been how much I liked the films. Each of Hamilton's three films got at least 3.5 stars from me, and two of them got 4. Sadly, Campion only managed one 3.5 stars and she had a two-star film in there. Bigelow's track record was even worse.

So I guess if Letterboxd is erring on the side of showing me the movies I preferred, I rescind even the joke accusation ... and may have to point the finger at myself instead.

Stop yelling at me, Letterboxd

Inu-oh is just the latest movie Letterboxd is telling me to spell with all capital letters.

Whether it's someone's overly literal interpretation of this poster -- "well, the title is in all capital letters so I guess that means something" -- or something they've gotten from the press materials, Letterboxd serves up the eccentric anime from director Masaaki Yusua with five capital letters. 

For some reason, I'm inclined to go with two capital letters: Inu-Oh. I don't know why I feel like there should be another capital after the hyphen, but it looks better to me that way. I think it's a carry-on effect from thinking that Korean first names should get a capital after the hyphen, like "Park Chan-Wook" rather than "Park Chan-wook." I mean, I already know it's a whole different culture from the ordering of the names. I should not be trying to apply French rules ("Jean-Pierre") to it.

IMDB, which I always find the ultimate source on these sorts of issues, goes with Inu-oh, so that's what I've decided to do too.

But this seems to be a consistent thing on Letterboxd. As follows:

And:

Each of these titles bothers me for an additional reason.

Not only is Alejandro G. Inarritu up to his normal hifalutin titular word salads with this one, but the capitalization of only "BARDO" seems to suggest it's an acronym, rather than a Buddhist word indicating "an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth." Maybe BARDO could mean "Bring Alejandro Richly Deserved Oscars."

With Tar, it's the accent. I'm not going to go to the trouble to find that accent on my keyboard whenever I want to talk about this movie.

All of these movies have normal mixed capitalization on IMDB, so it really seems to be a Letterboxd thing.

I do have one fully capitalized title among my 2022 films, because like last year's CODA, it really is an acronym. RRR stands for Rise Roar Revolt, and in this case, I'm very happy for the abbreviation.

I can't even with all these movies

Cinema is dying? In what universe?

It's gotten to the point where I can't go on the internet without learning about a new movie that's coming out before the end of the year. 

A statement like that can never be anything but an exaggeration -- I'm on the internet anywhere from multiple to four dozen times a day, depending on what you consider a distinct browsing session -- but in this case it really feels close to being true.

My Letterboxd watchlist is supposed to be dwindling at this time of year, not ballooning outward toward triple digits. Remember that the watchlist no longer includes movies I've already seen, which number exactly 120 for 2022. Emancipation, whose poster I have included here, is nothing special -- it's just the latest to get added to the list. (Though I suppose, being Will Smith's first release after the Oscars, it could turn into something special, an object we will all want to gawk at.)

If I were to watch all the movies on my watchlist -- which, realistically, never comes close to happening -- I'd be well over 200 for the year. Which would be more than 30 movies higher than the record total of 170 I set last year ... which was already 19 movies higher than my previous record. 

However, I do usually get down to only movies that didn't actually get released this year after all, movies I can't access because they haven't been released in Australia yet or I don't have the right streaming service, and a dozen stray others that just get overlooked. This year, I can't see how I will have any fewer than 50 still on the list when all is said and done ... and it'll probably be more, considering that I don't think I'm anywhere near done adding to my watchlist.

You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not. There are currently 90 films on my watchlist. 

I assume you believe me, but just to prove I'm not lying, and to demonstrate exactly how ridiculous it's gotten, I'm going to list them for you, in reverse order of how I added them:

1. Emancipation
2. Descendant 
3. Till
4. The Son
5. Aftersun
6. Dead for a Dollar
7. Spirited
8. Hellraiser
9. Speak No Evil
10. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
11. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
12. Breaking
13. Bones and All
14. The Whale
15. Not Okay
16. Slumberland
17. Confess, Fletch
18. The Night of the 12th
19. Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul
20. Master Gardener
21. Women Talking
22. Wendell & Wild
23. God's Creatures
24. Tar
25. Nanny
26. Eo
27. Weird
28. Is That Black Enough for You?
29. She Said
30. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
31. See How They Run
32. Goodnight Mommy
33. I Wanna Dance With Somebody
34. The People's Joker
35. Disenchanted
36. Babylon
37. Glass Onion
38. Sharp Stick
39. White Noise
40. You Won't Be Alone
41. Blaze
42. Inu-oh
43. Mad God
44. Paris, 13th District
45. Triangle of Sadness
46. Something in the Dirt
47. The Silent Twin
48. R.M.N.
49. The Pez Outlaw
50. Incredible But True
51. The Humans 
52. Emily the Criminal
53. Broker
54. Dual
55. Vengeance
56. Fire of Love
57. Dear Mr. Brody
58. Fire Island
59. Playground
60. The Fallout
61. Where Is Anne Frank?
62. Mothering Sunday
63. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
64. A Chiara
65. The Menu
66. Strange World
67. The Forgiven
68. We're All Going to the World's Fair
69. I Love My Dad
70. Both Sides of the Blade
71. River
72. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
73. Pinocchio (del Toro)
74. The Deer King
75. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
76. Poor Things
77. The Eternal Daughter
78. The End
79. The Fabelmans
80. Showing Up
81. Avatar: The Way of Water
82. The Killer
83. Asteroid City
84. Disappointment Blvd.
85. Infinity Pool
86. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
87. Killers of the Flower Moon
88. The 355
89. Belle
90. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

There are so many titles, I am not even going to go back through and italicize them. Do me a favor and please imagine the italics.

Before you say "Wait a minute, not all those movies are coming out in 2022," I'll say "Yes, I know." But when I added them, I thought they were. And I don't like to remove them, because I'll just have to add them back next year. So yeah, you can chop about ten titles off that list for that reason.

But that still leaves 80 for 2022, and just as I'm going through I'm noticing the films I haven't added, like one of two Claire Denis films this year, Stars at Noon. There, I've just added it. That makes 91.

And before you say "I've never even heard of a lot of those films," I'll say "Neither have I." I mean, I obviously heard them mentioned at some point during the year, which is why I added them in the first place. But many of them were movies I heard of once that have since disappeared from my or anyone else's radar. Every year has some of those too.

I still feel overwhelmed by what's left. 

Let's look only at my perceived obligations for the coming week or so. I've watched but not yet reviewed The Wonder, but I noticed the new Will Ferrell-Ryan Reynolds Christmas movie, Spirited, has also opened on AppleTV+. Then Glass Onion hits Netflix in time for Thanksgiving. But She Said is also now open in theaters. And so on. And so forth.

It's too much for one cinephile to handle.

Of course, the choice that most sane and rational people would make is just not to worry about it. See what absolutely interests you the most, and let everything else fall by the wayside. You'll see it eventually, or maybe you'll never see it, but either is okay. You can still have a definitive year-end list even if you don't see every movie that some person out there may love.

I'll try. Really I will. But I never said I was sane and rational.

What I don't get is that movies are supposed to be in decline. When we all bemoaned the pandemic-hastened closing of some big movie theater chains and historic single-screen cinemas, we seemed to believe it was the form itself that was in trouble, not just the venue in which that form was once most frequently viewed. People wanted TV that spun out over six seasons, not characters you were done with after two hours.

Today I won't ponder what has changed that. It feels a bit like year-end contemplation material. I'll save it until I need it then. 

Today I'll just stick with the glut of titles -- a glut I should want, since it indicates the health of an industry I dearly love -- that currently feels like it will bury me.

I've worked to rein in my viewing this year, both the total number of titles I see for my year-end rankings, and the total number of new movies I see in the calendar year. In the latter area I am at 242, meaning I would have to see 36 more new films in the 41 remaining days of 2022 to exceed the 277 new-to-me movies I saw in 2021. Probably won't happen because I would expect to watch at least five more movies I've seen previously before December 31st. But at this point it's clear that it won't be a significant reduction from last year. I am sure to break 270, which would still make it the fifth most movies I have ever seen in a year. (The 325 and 303 I saw in 2016 and 2015, respectively, are safe for the foreseeable future.)

I probably won't eclipse the 170 movies I ranked last year, but at this point I wouldn't rule it out. That'll take only 51 more viewings in a longer period of time than December 31st, going all the way to January 24th. 

In the past few years, my other friend who releases his year-end list and I have had to break with the Academy on revealing our lists on the same day they reveal their nominations, because those have not happened until February (last year) and March (the year before). This year, we've decided to take their January 24th release date, even though it's a few weeks after the date on which they had been revealing the nominations prior to 2021. It's close enough that it's worth restoring our previous alignment of the dates, even if it means the slog of watching as many movies as we can will carry on for most of the month. It's even a week longer than last year, when I smashed my previous record after we sort of arbitrarily chose a date of January 17th. (Which was January 16th U.S. time.)

I suppose I might end up being able to use the extra time. My dad and his wife will be visiting us in Australia from December 20th to January 20th, so at least this January 24th date clears me for a last bingeing of movies after they leave. Truth is, we'll separate from them early enough on most nights that it won't severely limit my viewing, though chances are still that I could lose two to five viewings I might ordinarily make during that time. And probably it won't be quite as easy to get out to the theater, which is usually a crucial component of the final stretch. 

In any case, the cavalcade of newly discovered titles leading up to the writing of this post has changed my thinking on an intentional viewing slowdown. Whereas I had been taking one and sometimes even two nights per week off from movies recently, I think that's probably going to stop. My cinephile lizard brain requires me to keep current, either because I'm reviewing the movies themselves or because I want to stay up to speed on the discussion. 

So as I start thinking about how to watch two new movies today, records will fall where they may. 

The long wait for Tim's Vermeer

Tim's Vermeer has been on my Letterboxd watchlist for longer than all but a couple of 2014 movies.

I use my watchlist as a means of keeping track of which movies from the current release year I'm trying to watch prior to my ranking deadline, which arrives on January 15th (as I have started mentioning in just about every post). I keep adding to that list as I hear of new titles that interest me, so I basically never make a dent in it. It's at 85 films right now, and that's probably about where it's been since April or May.

Tim's Vermeer is sixth from the bottom, meaning that it's been on there since January or February ... and I have yet to get my hands on it.

The reason this surprises me is that I've developed an assumption about which movies will be available for streaming on Netflix sooner than later. Tim's Vermeer seems like exactly the type of title I should have been able to find shortly after its video release.

Yet like its writer-producer-directors, Penn & Teller, Tim's Vermeer remains elusive, the star of its own disappearing act. Or, never-appearing-in-the-first-place act.

I suppose what I really want to talk about is not the rather banal topic of a particular movie not being available for streaming on Netflix, but rather, the underlying assumption of which movies you expect to be available. Which is only slightly less banal, but hey, not every post can be earth-shattering.

I consume probably 90 percent of my documentaries by streaming them on Netflix. Then I probably see five percent in the theater and watch another five percent through some other a la carte rental option.

In fact, Netflix is so good at making the documentaries I want to see available that it's enough to prompt a post like this one, expressing surprise when a particular title does not eventually rear its head.

Since early on in the year I've been periodically checking Netflix for this title, considering it exactly the sort of movie that Netflix has excelled at making available. I have now probably checked a dozen times, and still, it's nowhere to be found. I am starting to think I might have to actually (gasp) pay to rent the movie if I want to see it before January 15th.

Which dovetails well with a discussion of just how much we're willing to spend on particular types of movies ... perhaps the worthiest discussion topic this post will yield.

Call me a philistine, but I don't tend to think of documentaries as the type of movie I want to spend much money on. It's rare that I will go to the theater to see one, though it certainly does happen. Two that I saw in the theater in 2013, though -- Blackfish and 20 Feet From Stardom -- were movies I snuck into as the second half of a double feature. If the doco promises to be a little more distinctive -- say, Stories We Tell or The Act of Killing -- I will pay for it as a single theatrical admission. Let it be noted, though, that I spent only $6 apiece on Stories and Act, since I saw them before 5 p.m. on discount Mondays at Cinema Nova.

It's also worth noting that without my matinee Mondays available to me in 2014, when I've been working nearly the whole year, I haven't seen a single documentary in the theater this year.

Earlier this year I did spend a full iTunes rental price on Mistaken for Strangers, and more recently, Life Itself. But that's rare. And that was in part to make up for the documentaries I'm not seeing in the theater this year, while still trying to see around my usual quotient of non-fiction films.

The weird thing is that documentaries are a much safer bet in terms of quality than fiction films, yet we are much more willing to gamble our money on the latter. Fiction films have higher highs and lower lows, and are also much more likely to benefit from being seen on a big screen. Documentaries, to us, feel barely more cinematic than television. So even if they're good -- which most of the ones we see are -- they don't have that certain oomph that makes us prioritize a theatrical viewing.

So although I'm incredibly eager to learn how an untrained artist can use science to produce a nearly perfect, nearly indistinguishable version of a Johannes Vermeer painting -- so eager that I've specifically sought it out a dozen times -- I'm too cheap to just go purchase the thing from one of the sites where it's available for rental.

I'll give Netflix a couple more weeks to comply. If my hand is forced, we'll see whether I drop the coin on Tim's Vermeer ... or just let it be lost to history, like all the other films I'll never see.

Too much good stuff

Or, "The Breakdown of my Personal Star Rating System."

If I look at my month of July so far on Letterboxd, it is nearly collapsing from the weight of all the stars.

I've seen seven movies in the young month, and only two of them have received a rating of lower than 4 stars (out of 5). In fact, the number that have received 4.5 stars, which was once reserved for movies that reached my personal cinematic stratosphere, exceeds the number that received 3 or 3.5 stars (three to two). And the one I gave 3.5 stars -- in other words, the second-worst of the month -- is one I'm still thinking about three days after I saw it.

This is good. It means I'm spending my time on good movies.

But this is also bad. It means I'm losing my grasp on which movies get which star ratings.

Take Mistaken for Strangers, a very good documentary that I saw last night. Is it a great documentary? It might be. But I'm not sure about that. I have to think about it a bit longer.

I gave it 4.5 stars, not necessarily as a sign of its absolute quality, but to differentiate it from the heap of movies I've been giving 4 stars.

And this is where my true crisis lies: the loss of my understanding of what makes a 4-star movie.

Let's go back a few months.

When I came out of Nebraska and gave it a 4-star rating on Letterboxd, a friend of mine wondered what my problem was with it. "Problem?" I thought. "I gave the movie 4 stars!"

The same has happened with a couple other movies, with the same friend (I'm not picking on him, it's just that I talk movies with him a lot), to the point that I started to think of 4 stars as some sort of "insult" to a great movie. The rating I used to give to a movie that did a lot right, but not everything, was 3.5 stars. Three-point-five indicated that I thought a movie did quite a good job, but it wasn't a personal favorite.

So -- are you sitting? -- when I finally saw 12 Years a Slave a few weeks ago, and was underwhelmed by it relative to what I was expecting, I felt the only "responsible" star rating to give it was 4 stars. Three-point-five would be like some sort of slap in its face. So even though my primary instinct after seeing 12 Years was to pick at the things I thought it could have done better, there I was giving it a ranking of 4 stars on Letterboxd.

And if I gave this movie that I found somewhat problematic 4 stars, then how could I give the same rating to Mistaken for Strangers, which I may have loved?

Four stars is a tricky rating. On its own it looks quite impressive, all those stars lining up together in support of a movie. But it's still two notches below the maximum. It still means there's something wrong with the movie, flaws you can clearly pick out -- or maybe just that it wasn't in your wheelhouse, so it had a maximum potential enjoyment factor just based on its subject matter.

I don't mind being the type of cinematic optimist that's implied by giving out so many high ratings. I mean, clearly I love movies, so I would rather enjoy watching them and shower them with praise than to spend all my time grumbling about how they could have been better. I'm comfortable with the fact that on Letterboxd, I've given 174 films the highest possible rating (5 stars) and only 20 the lowest possible (1/2 star).

But I don't want one of my most reliable ratings -- 3.5 stars -- to become too weak for me to employ it without worrying that it means I don't really care for the film. Four stars is really creeping up on 3.5, with 653 movies that now hold a 4-star rating on Letterboxd and only 804 ranked 3.5. You'd think that 3 stars should be the highest represented, because that's the midway point between the lowest and the highest rating. But it's only second at 730.

And if damage has been done to the 3.5-star rating, just think how much damage has been done to 3. Three stars means I barely liked it. Some people use 2.5 to indicate that, but I use 3. If I give that out less and less, then what kind of terrible sins does a movie have to commit in order to get 2.5 and lower? There are a whole five star ratings down there that need to get their share of the love.

I do have to consider the possibility that 2014 has just been a really good year for movies. I've seen 18 films this year, and only one of those have I disliked -- and even then only mildly (2.5 stars). Only seven of those 18 films (including the 2.5-star Veronica Mars) have been given a rating under 4 stars, in part because I used the above logic to inflate the 3.5-star Lego Movie to 4. To counterbalance that, though, I'm wondering if I might have given 4 stars to both Frank and Blue Ruin, if at the time I ranked them I didn't already feel I'd been giving out 4 stars too much.

See? I don't know what anything is anymore.

And at this point, I feel almost desperate to see something that is just unambiguously god-awful.

This whole discussion just lends further weight to my appreciation of the Flickchart model, which duels movies against each other to create a customized list of favorite to least favorite. The Flickchart guys have identified the weaknesses in star ratings, and their mission statement can be summarized in this slogan that appears atop the site: "If they're all 5-star movies, which is the best?"

If I keep going in the direction I've been going, pretty much all the movies I see will be 5-star movies.

A nice problem for a cinephile to have, I guess.

Distant past, distant future

I just finished watching The Croods, the latest Dreamworks movie to not be as good as I think it should be, though still good enough to tug at my heartstrings a little bit.

I went to add another three-star entry for an animated movie in Letterboxd when I discovered that I could actually add either The Croods or The Croods 2.

As I have discussed before, Letterboxd is again catering its services to time travelers.

In my previous post on the subject, I talked about how the site's open-ended date field allows you to go back to -- well, to the era the Croods actually lived to say you watched The Croods. I gave up going backwards around 400 or 500 B.C., anyway.

Now, it's the site allowing me to say I've seen a movie that won't even be released for another six years.

That's right, The Croods 2 is listed on Letterboxd as a 2019 release. 

It's admirable, if you are a movie website, to get your database ready to go as early as possible, so you are right on top of things when a movie starts being shown in advanced screenings and film festivals and the like. Someone can legitimately say they've seen one of those movies a year or even two years before its general release.

The Croods 2? I'm sure they are only just starting to work on the script.

There are two things I find funny about it already being a database entry in Letterboxd. One is that they added it. The other is that Dreamworks has already both settled on, and publicized, a 2019 release date. I don't know of any other movie whose release date is projected so far in the future.

How hard can it really be to make a Croods sequel, that they'll let the iron get that cold before finishing the movie? I guess it's not that the movie would take that long to make, if that were the only thing they were working on. Rather, it's probably that the pipeline is so full of other middling Dreamworks crap that 2019 is the first vacant slot on the schedule.

From the perspective of Letterboxd, can't someone just set up a calendar reminder on their computer to add it to the database sometime in, I don't know, late 2017? Because now it's one of those things that just makes the site look silly. If I say that I've already watched The Croods 2, then it will appear to my Letterboxd friends as recent activity on my part. They'll wonder how I've already seen this movie that is probably only just being storyboarded, if that. Or more likely, they will just immediately know it's a mistake on the site, something that should have been locked down but wasn't.

Of course, my own Letterboxd diary is so sacrosanct that I can't actually punk them by saying I've watched The Croods 2. I've got my standards ... even if they don't.

I watched The Rookie before Christ was born

I haven't written about it much, but one of my new cinematic websessions is called Letterbox'd (www.letterboxd.com).

I'm sure it does the same things as a hundred other movie database websites. It allows you to rank and review movies, then use the reviews of a network of friends to determine which movies you might like. It also allows you to make lists and keep a running diary of the order you watch your movies, including day and date. Nothing earth-shattering -- but I like it for the simple reasons that it's got a nice design and it serves a need.

See, if I record the dates of all the movies I see, I don't have to worry about the many movie lists I keep on my computer at home, if my computer dies and I don't have a recent backup. The list I'm most directly duplicating through Letterbox'd is a Microsoft Word document called "movie order," which has the date of every movie I've seen since February 22, 2002.

I have a number of other lists I keep, such as an alphabetical listing of all the movies I've seen, lists of movies I've seen by release year, etc. But only the list of movies I've seen in order would be necessary to help me rebuild these other lists in the event of a catastrophic data loss. That's essentially the "list of record," where every movie I see is delineated in order -- reminding me both what I saw, and what secondary lists I therefore need to update.

And so for the past nine months I've been steadily adding the contents of "movie order.doc" into Letterbox'd, going in backwards chronological order from January of this year, when I first discovered the site. I made quick and steady progress back to the end of 2005, then took a break for a couple months. Just lately I've picked up again, and am now back to July of 2002, with only a couple dozen more titles to enter before I'm all caught up. At which point I will begin the process of adding the many titles I watched before I started keeping track of the dates I saw them -- just to be completist.

See, when you add a new movie, you are given the choice of whether to specify the date you saw it. Once you click that box, it defaults to the current date -- the most relevant date for most Letterbox'd users, who probably add new movies as soon as they've seen them. But to add older movies, you can drill down into the date field and move back in time -- a day, a month, a year, a decade. Which has all been very useful in my current project.

Only yesterday afternoon, when adding John Lee Hancock's The Rookie -- which I watched on July 8, 2002 -- did I realize how far back you can go.

For my purposes, I hadn't needed to go back beyond the page that includes the years from 1994 to 2005. But I assumed (correctly) that you could go back earlier than that. Don't forget about my list-obsessed, film-obsessed predecessors, who have been keeping movie lists for decades longer than I have. Letterbox'd would need to cater to them as well.

So I clicked back 12 years at a time and saw that indeed, the days and dates went back through the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, 1930s and so on, all the way back to when the Lumiere brothers were first introducing us to a concept called "moving pictures." Never mind that this gives you the option of saying that you saw a movie decades before it was made. So what if you want to say you watched Inception in 1914? That's your business.

I did, however, find it funny to note that they've programmed calendar dates back to a time before movies even existed. It's one thing to say you watched a particular movie before it was made. It's another to say that you watched a particular movie before any movies were made.

Yet here was Letterbox'd, honoring my request to go back through the centuries. The 1800s went by in a flash, and then it was on to the 1700s, back to before the Revolutionary War. And soon, here was The Rookie, a movie about a baseball coach who gets to pitch in the major leagues for the first time after his 40th birthday, being watched by the pilgrims as they were landing on Plymouth Rock.

But it didn't stop there. Here was Columbus making his own North American landfall. Here was the Magna Carta being signed. Here was Lief Ericson sailing the seas and landing in North America 500 years before Columbus. (Incidentally, why does so much of the history I know have to do with who landed in North America, and when?)

And then came a thousand years where who knows what the hell was going on, and finally, back to the year zero: the birth of Christ. I tell you, The Rookie was a real hit with the shepherds and wisemen, who shared myrrh-flavored popcorn while watching the film projected on the side of the manger.

I decided to give this little exercise a rest around 350 B.C. Then I went forward and set my viewing of The Rookie as December 25, 0000. Which was a Monday, in case you were wondering.

The site wasn't entirely able to comply with my request. In my diary, it showed the viewing as occurring on December 25, 0001. Then when I clicked in to adjust the date, it assumed I must have been talking about 2001 and gave me dates from that year to adjust. Except, duh, The Rookie didn't even come out until the spring of 2002. Stupid website!

Okay, going back to when Christ was born was too much. So I decided on a more reasonable, yet still ridiculous, date: February 1, 1852. A good 40 years before anything like a movie was seen by anyone.

Yep. It took it that time. When I went in to edit the date, I did indeed have the option of admitting I'd made a mistake, and that I had in fact seen The Rookie on February 2nd, 1852, not February 1st.

Letterbox'd at least does have rules when it comes to the future. Although you can sail forward as many centuries into the future as you want -- I stopped at the year 3000 -- you don't have the ability to select any of the days. In computer parlance, they are "grayed out." So you can't actually say you watched a movie on a day that hasn't occurred yet.

So to summarize:

Time travel into the past? Entirely possible. We're withholding judgment pending further inquiry.

Time travel into the future?

Now that's absurd.