You can't judge a movie by its title

You're probably thinking this post is going to be about good movies with bad titles. 

It's actually a lot dorkier than that. Get comfortable, because this is another one of my project posts.

I keep a list of all the movies I've seen more than once, and that list is currently 960 titles long. I've got something big planned for #1,000. It won't likely be this year, but it should be next year. 

As I was adding Invasion of the Body Snatchers to that list (see Monday's post), I had an idea. It's an idea nobody but me would get. It's an idea definitely nobody but me would write about.

I wondered: 

What's the highest percentage of titles that start with any one letter that I've rewatched?

You're like "Um, what?"

I'll explain.

In my big spreadsheet in which I keep track of all the movies I've ever seen, I have a running total at the bottom for how many movies I've seen whose titles start with each letter of the alphabet. For example, right now I've seen 736 movies that start with letter S, or 10.17% of my total movies watched. There is no reason to keep track of this. I do it anyway. 

So I thought I would go through the smaller rewatch list, count up the titles rewatched that begin with each letter, and see what percentage of all the titles I've seen with that letter that I have also rewatched.

Still don't get it? I don't know if I can explain it in another way. 

When I first started, this was just a bit of a curiosity. I was writing the information down, but I didn't expect to do anything with it. 

Then after the letter B, I noticed something interesting: Both the A totals and the B totals were exactly, or could be rounded to, 15%. 

I started to get more curious.

Like any statistical exercise, there should be a fair amount of random noise. There should be one letter where I happen to have rewatched a way higher amount of movies than another letter. But there really wasn't. 

Oh they aren't all 15%. But they are all between 10 and 15%, which seemed strange enough to write about. 

Here's the total list:

A - 56/381 (15%)
B - 85/564 (15%)
C - 64/454 (14%)
D - 48/375 (13%)
E - 28/206 (14%)
F - 51/355 (14%)
G - 38/302 (13%)
H - 51/381 (13%)
I - 33/246 (13%)

I'll stop here to note that to this point, it's even more consistent than that five percentage point range. It's a range of only three percentage points. Which is not a lot of random noise at all. But after that the range widens a bit:

J - 13/132 (10%)
K - 14/135 (10%)
L - 35/360 (10%)
M - 58/528 (11%)
N - 26/195 (13%)
O - 17/178 (10%)
P - 48/363 (13%)
Q - 2/21 (10%)
R - 43/285 (15%)
S - 108/736 (15%)
T - 59/458 (13%)
U - 12/82 (15%)
V - 11/72 (15%)
W - 52/339 (15%)

And here it falls down, only because the sample size is so small:

X - 0/11 (0%)

When you've only seen 11 movies that start with the letter X, there isn't actually any number of movies you can rewatch that fall into 10 to 15% of that number. If you rewatch only one of the 11, it rounds to 9%. If you rewatch two, it rounds to 18%. So I was not going to hit on this regardless. As it so happens, I rewatched none of the 11, which means I have never rewatched an X-Men movie. I didn't consciously realize that until right now. Hence the poster for this post. 

Y - 4/51 (8%)

This is the only deviation. If I'd rewatched just one more Y movie, that would have been 10%. 

Z - 4/30 (13%)

It's kind of astonishing, isn't it?

But all it really means -- if it means anything -- is that a film's title has nothing to do with whether I want to rewatch it or not. Which you would have surely known without even reading this post. 

I do think it's kind of strange that there is not more randomness. But the range bears out even to the grand total, which is 960/7240, or 13%. Which I guess is not such a surprise, since it would be the average of all these other figures. 

Does this mean anything?

Hardly.

Was this worth writing a post about?

I don't know, but I sure did it.

My top ten five desert island movies from the same five years

That is a very complicated subject for this post. I will need to explain. 

Filmspotting recently (a couple months ago) tasked themselves with finding the answer to a specific question, the kind that my Flickchart puts me in a perfect position to answer:

"If you could take only five films with you to a desert island, and those five films had to come from the same five-year period, which five would they be?"

Now, my Flickchart would give me a very definitive answer to this question, if my ranking on Flickchart were an exact correlation to how much I want to rewatch a movie. If we assume that my #1 movie is the movie I want to rewatch the most, and each after that is a movie I want to watch progressively a little less each time, it's easy to come up with this answer. I just go down the list and cluster movies together until I get five from the same five-year period.

But we all know that this logic does not work perfectly. With this sort of thought experiment -- which the Filmspotting guys talk about in terms of an incinerator, as in, all films not chosen get sent to the incinerator -- it's never as simple as that. 

For one thing, you have moods. You want to feed all your different moods with as much of a diversity of options as possible. I mean, let's face it -- you will get sick of all of these movies long before you die on this desert island, but the idea is to forestall that for as long as possible, and variety helps accomplish that.

And then there are some films that you might like "better" than other films, but those other films are "better quality" films, so you have them ranked higher. We could get off track on a "best vs. favorite" argument here if we wanted to, but it's clear that in this particular thought experiment, "favorite" should win out. But is that how I've been ranking my Flickchart, with any consistency?

So instead of just choosing the first clustering of five that came up, I decided to give myself ten different options of five-year spans. 

Now, some of these clusterings actually cover multiple five-year spans. How is that possible? Well, I'll explain, and my first clustering is a perfect example of it. All five films in that first cluster come from three consecutive years, so that means they are the best five films of three different five-year spans: the one that ends with the last film, the one that starts with the first film, and then of course the one in the middle, where the first film is not the first year and the last film is not the last year. 

And as I was going through, I also came across films that couldn't strengthen any group because all the eligible year bracketings were already filled up with earlier films. 

So my top ten groups of films actually cover 15 different five-year spans, those that begin with 1981, and then begin with every year from 1983 to 1996. Sorry 1982 to 1986, your range got left out in the cold. 

These were expected results. In 1981 I turned eight and in 1996 I turned 23, and that last range would have covered films until the year I turned 27. All parts of my formative years becoming a cinephile. There may be plenty of cinephiles who are in love with periods of cinema long before their birth, but my cinephilia has always had a healthy dose of nostalgia, and I don't apologize for that. 

But how am I going to choose between these? I'll give you each of the options and then tell you what I settled on, with comments on each. I'll list them in order of how quickly they satisfied the five-film requirement on my chart, but I will list the films chronologically within each grouping. 

1. 1992 to 1996 or 1993 to 1997 or 1994 to 1998 - Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3), Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19)

Comment: So I can get five movies from three different five-year spans, all within my top 19 films on Flickchart. Obviously I could be happy with this group, but it's a little light on comedy -- though I suppose both Pulp Fiction and Fargo have their lighter moments. Plus the fact that it takes care of three different time spans could potentially give this an edge as a tiebreaker. 

1. 1995 to 1999 - Toy Story (1995) (#7), Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)

Comment: You'll see I've listed this as #1 again because Bound at #19 also completes this five-year span, which is just shifted one up from the previous group. So we lose Pulp Fiction but we gain The Iron Giant. Not sure if I need two animated movies though.

3. 1985 to 1989 - Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20)

Comment: This group is hard to resist because it contains my top two movies of all time. We'll see how much a factor that ends up being in the final analysis.  

3. 1986 to 1990 or 1987 to 1991 - Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11), Say Anything (1989) (#18) , Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), Goodfellas (1990) (#13)

Comment: This is a similar thing as my first two, where we're shifting forward one year. In this case the movie we're losing is my #2, Back to the Future, which is not great. But gaining Goodfellas adds a dose of real cinephile credibility and otherwise gives additional variety to the portfolio. 

5. 1996 to 2000 - Fargo (1996) (#8), The Cable Guy (1996) (#16), Bound (1996) (#19), Run Lola Run (1998) (#21), The Iron Giant (1999) (#10)

Comment: Same as 1995 to 1999 except we gain Run Lola Run in the middle of the range and lose Toy Story. I like the addition of the first foreign language film and don't mind losing one of the two animated movies from that group. 

6. 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988 - WarGames (1983) (#22), This Is Spinal Tap (1984) (#9), Back to the Future (1985) (#2), Raising Arizona (1987) (#1), The Princess Bride (1987) (#11)

Comment: New additions are WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap, the latter being my #9 but not having fit into one of these ranges yet. Strong on comedy, and I think the addition of WarGames could quicken my pulse, but maybe I don't need to contemplate the end of the world too much when I'm already on a desert island and have lost 99.99999% of the films ever made. 

7. 1988 to 1992 or 1989 to 1993 - Do the Right Thing (1989) (#20), When Harry Met Sally (1989) (#26), Say Anything (1989) (#18), Goodfellas (1990) (#11), Unforgiven (1992) (#25)

Comment: Welcome to the show, When Harry Met Sally and Unforgiven. A much-needed influx of comedy for this range, offset by Unforgiven being particularly humorless. I might need more comfort and smiles than this group can give me. 

8. 1981 to 1985 - Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (#4), Time Bandits (1981) (#27), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) (#23), This is Spinal Tap (1984) (#10), Back to the Future (1985) (#2)

Comment: Our earliest range of five years gets in a whole host of new titles, plus This Is Spinal Tap and Back to the Future. I love the diversity some of the new titles bring, but this group may be a little laugh deficient as well.

9. 1990 to 1994 - Goodfellas (1990) (#13), Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3)

Comment: A few new titles here doing good work, but again this group won't be getting a lot of guffaws from me, and I'm going to need them. (I think we have to assume a neutral emotional state, even though I mentioned earlier the idea of despairing about the end of the world.)

9. 1991 to 1995 - Defending Your Life (1991) (#30), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) (#31), Unforgiven (1992) (#25), Pulp Fiction (1994) (#3) Toy Story (1995) (#7)

Comment: And here's the same as the previous group, only it gains Toy Story and loses Goodfellas.

I might be able to keep going down and eventually come across a perfectly diverse group of five. And I'd be interested to see what my first date range from the 21st century would look like. But I can't sit here and do this all day.

So ... what to choose here? And how to choose it?

I'm tempted to tell you why I'm ruling each one out, but instead I'll just tell you what I decided to rule in and why:

If I had been a guest host on this episode of Filmspotting, I would have chosen 1983 to 1987 or 1984 to 1988.

Although I've said throughout this exercise that humor would be important to me, I've decided that lightness of tone might be even more important, and this span has five movies with light tones: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona, This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. (Yep, I am down with the comedic sensibilities of 1980s Rob Reiner.) All of those movies will make me laugh, but more importantly, they'll also make me feel good. And then WarGames can jangle my nerves a bit whenever I need a little bit of that.

Plus the fact that this time bracket also includes my #1 and my #2, which is hard to compete with. 

The cherry on top was when I added up their Flickchart rankings -- remember we're going golf scores here, where the lower the score, the better -- and you get a 45 for these two year ranges. The next closest is 52, which is the next group up, 1985 to 1989.

These two groups have three movies in common: Back to the Future, Raising Arizona and The Princess Bride. The group I've gone with gives me WarGames and This Is Spinal Tap on one side, while the group I didn't choose gives me Say Anything and Do the Right Thing on the other. I'm essentially choosing the first two over the second two.

When Adam on Filmspotting was talking about how he chose his date range -- a much harder task when you don't have a Flickchart -- he started out by reviewing their previous episode in which they presented their ten choices for the Sight and Sound list, to see if there was chronological consolidation among his choices. A good way to start the process, and it ended up being the way his co-host, Josh, settled on a range. 

Adam said he ruled out one particular range because the movie he loved so much that might have helped anchor him to that range -- Grave of the Fireflies -- is not a movie he wants to watch over and over on repeat. It's too glum. If you've seen it, you know what he's talking about. 

And that's my problem with Do the Right Thing, I guess. Even though the range I've chosen gives me no real credibility with cinephiles as they are classically defined -- where the selection of Lee's movie would have -- I have to be honest with myself that I don't want to watch on repeat a movie where people spew hatred for an entire movie until it boils over into chaos and death. This probably explains why I've only seen Do the Right Thing once in the past 25 years, whereas all the movies in the group I've chosen have gotten multiple viewings during that period, some as many as four or five. 

Arbitrary? Perhaps. Defensible? Absolutely.

For the record, Adam chose 1979 to 1983, and he selected one film from each year: All That Jazz (1979), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The World According to Garp (1982) and The Right Stuff (1983). I can get behind this list because three of these films are also in my top 150 and I really like the other two. When I get around to ranking The Right Stuff, which I only just watched in August, it'll do very well on my chart. Adam clearly went for the comfort of nostalgia picks, though he won't be laughing a lot. (The most humor might be in The Right Stuff, actually, which I characterized as a comedy when I wrote about it on The Audient.)

Josh? He went arthouse, or rather, cinephile, as the period he chose reached its completion two decades before he was born. His range of 1951 to 1955 allowed him Ikiru (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Rear Window (1954), Ordet (1954) and Pather Panchali (1955). Rear Window and Ordet are both top 150 movies for me, but I found Gentlemen significantly inferior to the similar Some Like It Hot and I couldn't crack Pather Pachali. I haven't even seen Ikiru, but I've seen its remake, Living. I think he will be starved for films with more entertainment value after a couple watch throughs of these films. 

Anyway, this was a fun exercise, and I hope it was at least sort of fun for you to read. 

The average length of movies is 106.91 minutes

As you would know if you've been keeping up with The Audient, I recently started going back and filling in all the movies I had not yet added to my big movie spreadsheet, which I stopped updating in 2022 while continuing to update its Microsoft Word counterpart. Keeping up that one is much easier as it is just a giant list of titles. I won't go into again why I stopped or why I started again, but if you want to catch up on that discussion you can find it here. 

What I do want to get into is that this project has seemed to help me find a potential universal average length for movies. Not just the movies I've seen, but all movies.

One of the pieces of data I keep about each movie is its running time. I did this primarily for a silly project that I posted about here, when I wanted to choose my favorite movie at each length. Now I just do it out of habit and because it's easy enough to keep doing, though it does mean I have to go to IMDB for each movie I add, which is just the sort of thing that might make this catch-up project seem daunting enough to discontinue it. In many cases I can remember the release year and the director of the movie, and of course whether I liked it or not, but rarely if ever will I actually remember its exact length. Fortunately, so far it has not seemed like a disqualifying hardship to do this, and I'm down to less than 600 movies I still need to add (starting at more than 800). 

Because I was keeping track of the length anyway, I also created a calculation that would add up all the minutes and divide it by the total number of values, so I could see a running average of the length of the movies I watch.

And this average length is always, or immediately comes back to if it strays from it temporarily, 106.91 minutes.

In fact, so often have I added another movie and seen this as the total running average that I have several times checked to make sure that the calculation hadn't stopped calculating for some reason.

When you get to a certain number of samples in any group -- and at this writing I am at 6315, with 587 still to go -- the statistics you can derive from it are long past the point of significant. So the fact that new titles cannot move this number much one way or another means that this is a true representation of the average length of movies I see.

And really, that would also make it a true representation of the average length of movies everybody sees.

We can put some asterisks on this. There are some people who watch largely romantic comedies and don't have the stomach or the attention span for big epics that run more than three hours. They undoubtedly have a lower average running time. Then there are those people who only like the latter and don't like the former, which means they are seeing much longer movies on average.

But we aren't trying to find out this number for viewers who profile one way or another. We're trying to find it for a hypothetical viewer who watches anything, regardless of length or subject matter, with no preference for movies in any particular genre.

Such as a critic. Such as myself.

The fact that it keeps coming back to this 91/100ths of this minute -- not 89, not 93 -- means that there seems to be a sort of granular accuracy to this, almost one we can take to the bank. I'll be curious to see how close we are to it after I add the other 587 titles I still have to add, which are also drawn from a random period of time in my life in which I did not consciously err toward one type of movie over another (which describes every large sample size from my viewing life, larger than a few months anyway). But I suspect we'll be right on it or fairly close.

This project has one other average that I can sort of take to the bank, though I think this one I may have mentioned at some point before. (I don't want to go digging for it, but it's long enough ago that you likely won't blame me if I repeat myself.)

Namely, I seem to like exactly 68.12 percent of the movies I see.

I am also keeping a running list of the total liked vs. the total disliked, which at this writing is 4302 pro and 2013 con. (Yes, it seemed like a landmark moment when I passed 2000 movies I didn't like, but since I was adding my movies in reverse chronological order, it was not possible to know which was my 2000th disliked movie.) 

Every time I add a new movie, I notice whether this percentage goes up or down. But in the time I've been adding these titles over the past week or so, it is have never gotten above 68.17% or below 68.05%. And as soon as it heads toward one of those extremes it immediately reverts back to the norm.

I actually kind of want it to go down below 68% because the lower it gets, the more it means I am holding movies to a higher standard and not just giving them a pass with a milquetoast thumbs up. Then again, the more movies I watch that I like, the more it means I am making positive use of my one wild and precious life, so I am happy to just let the numbers go where they will.

So I guess the real takeaway is, for you in the reading audience, if you are watching a movie that is 105 minutes or shorter, think of it as a win, because you're watching a shorter than average movie. 

And let's not delve too deeply into the reality that we love movies but that we rejoice when we discover they will take up less of our time. 

Murder on the dancefloor, stolen glory on the Hottest 100

The following rant is about rankings and countdowns, not about movies. It's also pretty long. However, I can, and have, given it a movie tie-in, if that's your thing.

In the years since I've moved to Melbourne, I've become invested in three beloved Australian institutions, the latter two of which came to a head this past weekend: the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Australian Open (also held in Melbourne) and the Hottest 100 countdown from radio station Triple J, which actually has no home city and is broadcast around the country. I didn't get to go to the Open this year -- have not been since 2021, in fact -- but Saturday night we watched the thrilling three-set victory of nice American Madison Keys over villainous Belarusian (and consecutive two-time winner) Aryna Sabalenka, who stomped around in a fit and trashed her racquet after losing. Stay classy, Aryna. We also watched the men on Sunday, though that was not as thrilling, and I turned it off after two sets won by Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokavic's successor in terms of never making mistakes. He ended up winning the third just as easily. Yawn. 

The Hottest 100 countdown, an event preceded by untold amounts of hype that is a true representation of how much people care about it, also is revealed on the long weekend associated with the January 26th Australian Day. Since they always do it on the Saturday, this year it occurred on the 25th, the same day Keys won her first-ever grand slam title at age 29. It's actually a big day around Australia, which I've had friends confirm for me. Though I've never attended one of these parties myself, people do throw listening parties that allow them to get "loose" (an Australian term for whatever form your insobriety may take) over the course of the afternoon. 

The way the Hottest 100 works is that starting in early January or possibly even late December, Triple J listeners are free to submit a ballot of ten qualifying songs from the previous year for placement in that year's countdown. The eventual ordering of these songs is determined entirely by fan voting. I can't remember the precise ways the voting works, although I did submit a ballot myself at least once. But if I'm not mistaken, you give preferential status to one of the ten songs, so your vote for that song counts more than the rest. This system may have also changed slightly over the years.

The system may make it similar to how Oscars voting works, though I know that has also changed. There are some songs that everyone likes a little bit, even though it may be no one's favorite, so if that song shows up on a plurality of the ballots, it has a chance to finish very high in the Hottest 100 -- even at #1. This actually happened a few years ago when, of all things, a cover by Australian kids band The Wiggles of the song "Elephant" by Australian band Tame Impala became the #1 song of the year. That's absurd and it leads into what I want to say about this year's Hottest 100.

The 2024 Hottest 100 was not won by this year's version of a cover song by The Wiggles. The 2024 champion was the much deserving Chappell Roan, who had only one song technically released in 2024, so only one song that fans could vote on. (In the voting, you are limited to songs entered into the system as eligible.) Her 2024 song was "Good Luck Babe," which I would have put on my 2025 mix (also finished this past weekend) if this past year I had not also discovered, and liked more, her song "My Kink is Karma." We've listened to a lot of Chappell Roan in my house, and she's the best thing to come along in some time. 

However, the #2 song was one of these songs.

Another Triple J institution is their series "Like a Version," in which bands -- usually Australian bands -- will come into the studio for the morning show and play a cover of a well-known song. Some of these covers -- like, I suppose, "Elephant" -- are quite good and have some reason to endure as their own distinct entities, beyond the confines of the morning show. 

That does not, however, mean I think they should have a chance to win the Hottest 100.

The #2 song of 2024, as voted by fans, was by Australian band Royel Otis with their cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor's 2001 single "Murder on the Dancefloor," which was having a moment about a year ago as a result of its prominent placement in the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. (Now you understand the poster above.) 

I listened to this song as I was listening to the Hottest 100. I listened live to about the last 35 songs of the countdown, having been up to other business for the first 65. (They start at noon and finish at 8.) It was fine. There is nothing particularly interesting about their cover. It is essentially a straight cover of the song.

Not, I would venture, worthy of nearly being enshrined as the greatest song of 2024.

As you can tell from Chappell Roan winning, the countdown is not limited to Australian artists. That would be a way to go about it, but it would likely make it less interesting. It would also justify someone like Royel Otis winning with a song that they did not write and that they did not even interpret in a way that was very challenging. 

I guess that never came very close to happening. The DJs -- or "presenters," as they call them here -- said something about "Good Luck Babe" getting more votes than any other Hottest 100 victor ever, which seems strange to me. I guess the song was a bigger part of the zeitgeist than I thought, having a life on TikTok and itself being covered by a number of prominent artists.

But let's just say there had not been such a strong contender for #1. You take "Good Luck Babe" out of 2024, and suddenly, for the second time in a couple years, the winner of Triple J's most august of traditions is a band who covered a song that was only having a moment because it was in a movie.

Talk about stolen glory. That's like two levels of stolen glory.

What put me off further was Royel Otis' reaction to getting the #2. In order to fill time between songs and continue to goose the hype, the presenters would regularly interview bands who had just earned a spot in the Hottest 100. I don't want to know how the interviews with the lower bands might have gone -- awkward -- especially if the interview with Royel Otis was any indication. Although they were certainly appreciative of the spot, they kept on making jokes about feeling "silver" -- as in the silver medal. Like they thought they really should have won it all with their arbitrarily conceived stolen glory. (I say "arbitrarily conceived" because they acknowledged they had initially been planning to cover a different song for their appearance on "Like a Version.")

That wasn't nearly the only "Like a Version" song in the Hottest 100. I didn't go back and parse the 65 songs I missed, though I did scan the list for titles I recognized, but in any given year there might be a dozen "Like a Version" versions of songs that don't otherwise have anything to do with the year in question -- just because the Triple J audience was allowed to vote on anything they wanted, as long as it did not exist before the year in question. Which I think is a flawed system indeed, and one wonders if they would even do it, if not for the narcissism of supporting their own series of morning show cover songs. Another spot in the top ten was also taken out by a "Like a Version" song, as Australian singer/band G Flip covered Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" this past year, landing her the #9 spot. 

Me saying these songs should not qualify for the Hottest 100 is not the same as saying they are unworthy to exist. I love a good cover, and there are certain songs I have learned through cover versions, meaning I vastly prefer the cover to the original. But that doesn't mean I think a countdown that analyzes the music of a particular year should have them anywhere near it. 

Let's take this out a step and see how we can translate this to movies. It would be like if a bunch of people made Sweded versions of movies -- to use the term coined by Be Kind Rewind -- and those movies ended up making the shortlist of best picture nominees. We'd all cry foul, wouldn't we?

This is not my only complaint about the Hottest 100.

Because this is a purely democratic system -- which in principle I support -- there tend to be other sorts of chart trends that I consider in violation of what a good countdown should look like.

Any song from an artist who released an album in 2024 is theoretically eligible, though I suspect there are some artists who are too far afield from Triple J's playlist to be worth entering them in the database. The artist had to get some sort of play on the station for them to think it's possible for enough of their own listeners to vote for them. There are some strange entries, though. I would not have thought a song I despise because I despise Morgan Wallen would have made it into the list, but there was "I Had Some Help" at #25. (The song is actually credited to Post Malone, who I like better, but it's got Wallen's stink all over it from his feature work.) I was gratified to see "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" by Shaboozey, another surprise for this station, beat it by a couple slots at #19.

But what it means for all the songs from an album to be eligible is that it seems like the sheep in the Triple J audience do vote for all the songs. Something happened this past weekend that shines a light on the shortcomings of this system. Not only did one artist break the record for the most singles appearing in the Hottest 100 in one year, but two broke the record -- in the same year. That's right, both Charli XCX and Billie Eilish scored eight entries into the countdown -- which in some cases was the same song since they worked together. That surpassed the record of seven held by the aforementioned G Flip. (The same names seems to appear year after year, which is another thing that makes my eyes roll a bit.) 

I can't get a movie equivalent to this phenomenon, but I can get a TV one. Let's say there was a countdown where fans were able to vote for their favorite TV shows. But instead of just voting for the show, they'd vote for individual episodes. So in one year, 13 of the top 20 might be episodes of Succession, just because it was a year where everybody watched and loved Succession. That's not only stupid, it's insular and boring.

So it sounds like I have a lot of complaints about the Hottest 100. Why, then, am I so invested in it?

Ah, but the complaints are the proof of my investment. 

It can be hard to pick up new things when you move to a new country. I have yet to really care about the biggest sport in the state of Victoria, Australian Rules Football, and only understand slightly more about cricket than when I first got here. 

But when you see something that you think is very close to being great -- close enough that you do pick it up and you do hold it close to your chest -- you want to make it a more perfect version of itself. For me that's the Hottest 100.

I suppose if it were just a countdown of the biggest hits on the Billboard chart, or whatever the American equivalent would be, that would also be boring. I like that it's a little quirky and that Australian bands are disproportionately represented. I like that it means that Australian radio listeners have a pride in the cultural output of their country, one that translates into genuine love that causes them to give Australian bands one of the cherished ten spots on their list, when an international artist might seem more "deserving" according to the actual quality or prominence of their work.

When you have a system like this, though, there are weird things that happen, weird things that seem to undermine the validity of the whole thing. Weird things like a cover song being enshrined as the best song of a given year. Weird things like two artists taking out nearly 20 percent of the countdown all by themselves. 

Maybe some year, this list will more closely resemble what I think it should look like, and that will make me happy.

The whole conversation, though, feels fairly academic. The truth of the matter is, though I do listen to Triple J, it's one of only a few different ways I spend my time driving, and almost never when anyone else is in the car because no one else seems to enjoy the station like I do. And though I do Shazam Triple J to get songs for my mix each year, the fact is, I am pretty out of sync with what's getting played most and, more to the point, what people younger than I am actually like the most. Out of this year's Hottest 100, I was probably only really familiar with about that same 20 percent of the songs. And the majority of the songs in the top 35 that I listened to were not songs I would have Shazamed if I came across them in the wild. In fact, I only jotted down one song as a candidate for next year's mix, and I did it belatedly, not one of those hurried Shazamings in the moment for fear of losing the song and never finding it again. Which maybe should not come as a surprise. I listen to enough Triple J that I had probably actually heard many of these songs before, I just didn't consider them worth Shazaming at the time, so would not now either. 

In the end, I am a 51-year-old trying to make sense of what teenagers and twentysomethings like and want to reward. That task is doomed to fail in any year. 

The year with the most best movies

Don't worry, friends. I haven't suddenly lost my grammatical abilities, or reverted to an excited teenager who talks about things being the "mostest bestest."

That subject line simply refers to the year that had the most movies that were the best movie I'd watched on the day that I watched them.

Um, I'm not sure if that helped.

So I need to tell you something -- remind you, actually, since I've discussed it before -- about one of my obsessive movie lists that I keep. This list, kept in Microsoft Word, has dates listed from January 1 to December 31, and then a list of movies I saw on each date and in what year I saw them. 

Probably better if I show you than tell you. So if we are going for today's date, for example, it looks like this:

January 25 = 8
Big Fan (2010), Oklahoma! (2013), Knights of Badassdom (2015), Cake (2016), Patriots Day (2019), Look Who's Back (2020), Big Time Adolescence (2022), Halloween III: Season of the Witch (2024)

That's actually quite a low number for January in particular, and a low number for any date really. My data of what day I saw something only goes back to 2002 (or 2003 in the case of January 25th, since I started keep track of the dates I watched things in March of 2002), but that means I had to not watch a movie on January 25th in any year from 2003 to 2009. Which is very strange especially by my current standards. 

There is, however, an explanation for that. January 25th is usually after my ranking deadline, so I may still be taking a few days off, or may be watching old favorites that I had been denying myself while cramming at the end of the previous year. This document only captures new viewings, not repeat viewings. (I keep track of the dates of repeat viewings as well, but not in this manner.) In fact, of those eight titles listed above, only Big Fan was watched in time to rank it that year. 

You may have noticed that one January 25th title is bolded, which is David Wnendt's Look Who's Back, a 2015 film that I didn't see until 2020. It's a comedy about a return of Hitler, the actual Hitler, in modern-day Germany, and it lacerates just as well as it makes us laugh, ultimately finishing on an extremely ominous note. I bet watching it today would feel especially relevant, though it felt relevant in 2020, when Trump had already been upon us for nearly four years. 

Look Who's Back is my favorite of those eight movies I've seen on January 25th, and that's why it's bolded. The bolding can change as soon as I see a better movie on January 25th, but that has not happened yet. (And probably won't happen tonight as I am taking this weekend to watch old favorites ... just as I earlier said I did on this date.)

I've been keeping this list for, I don't know, ten years? Longer? Not as long as I've been keeping track of the dates I watched movies. I had to backfill based on that list, which is the sort of project I love.

The point is, in that time it never occurred to me to do what I have now done: see which year has the most movies that were my favorite that I saw on that date.

The subject of this post make a little more sense now?

And I'll tell you I found the results of this little exercise very interesting.

But it's not "just" an exercise. In other words, it's not a project I'm doing just to see myself project. Or worse, just to make you see me project.

What it's actually doing, in a way I find compelling, is helping me identify the period of my life over the last 20+ years where I was watching the most movies that increased my love of the cinema. And that might help me answer the question of why that period was so fruitful. 

Now I should say, there is obviously quite a bit of luck involved with this. Some dates have a fairly pedestrian movie as the best movie from that date, just because I happen to have only seen other pedestrian movies on that date. And then there are the days where I have to choose the best from among three five-star movies. It's just how it goes. Still, I think that luck should even out over 366 days.

So what I will do here is list the years in decreasing order of which days had the most, and then just for fun, I'll go into detail about the titles that allowed the top ranked year to win. (I won't, however, include the other movies it beat out to win that title. Too tedious.) And then I'll close with some thoughts about what it all means. 

So here we go (newer years listed first in ties):

2014 - 23
2017 - 22
2013 - 22
2009 - 21
2018 - 20
2016 - 20
2019 - 19
2020 - 17
2011 - 17
2010 - 17
2023 - 16
2022 - 16
2012 - 15
2021 - 14
2008 - 14
2024 - 13
2005 - 10
2004 - 10
2003 - 10
2006 - 8
2002 - 8
2025 - 3

Yes, I've already seen enough good movies in three-plus weeks of 2025 to put it solidly on the board.

So 2014 wins. More on why that might be in a minute. But first, let's look how 2014 got there. Here are the list of dates where I saw my favorite movie on that date in 2014, and that movie:

January 29th: The Hunt (2012, Thomas Vinterberg)
March 1st: All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse)
April 8th: The Lego Movie (2014, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller)
April 17th: Mr. Nobody (2009, Jaco Van Dormael)
May 6th: Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford)
June 14th: TiMer (2009, Jac Schaeffer)
June 23rd: Edge of Tomorrow (2014, Doug Liman)
July 1st: Enemy (2014, Denis Villeneuve) 
July 3rd: The Orphanage (2007, J.A. Bayona)
July 7th: Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)
July 15th: Cheap Thrills (2013, E.L. Katz)
August 16th: The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson)
August 27th: Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002, Phillip Noyce)
September 7th: Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)
September 17th: Unhung Hero (2013, Brian Spitz)
September 27th: Joe (2013, David Gordon Green)
October 18th: Gone Girl (2014, David Fincher)
October 26th: Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
October 27th: Whiplash (2014, Damien Chazelle)
November 8th: Life Itself (2014, Steve James)
November 17th: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
November 30th: What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Taika Waititi)
December 23rd: The Babadook (2014, Jennifer Kent)

Pretty solid year.

Note: A lot of those movies listed with 2013 release years were actually ranked in 2014 by me, because the IMDB release year in many cases indicates a festival debut. 

So first some general comments on the results, then specifically about 2014.

It's not surprising that the older years on the list were less represented. I've realized that although I don't think I've become a bigger movie fan over the years, at least not recently, my move to Australia did allow me to watch more movies, because I suddenly had way fewer conflicts at night. When I lived in the U.S., I spent many nights watching sports, as well as socializing with friends. In Australia, American sports are on during the day ... and I have fewer friends. (But also we're all older and would socialize less anyway, even if I were still living in Los Angeles.) Also the easier availability of "free" movies on streaming understandably increases my totals significantly. 

As an example of how much things have changed over the period we're looking at here, in the year 2003 -- the first complete year on my list keeping track of my viewings in order -- I saw only 114 new movies. The next year, it was only 105, which remains the lowest total since I started keeping track of this stuff. (I don't include 2002 because it was only a partial year, and understandably did not fare very well in this exercise.)

Those numbers are to be contrasted with the 287 new movies I saw in 2024. It's simple math: the more movies you see, the more chance any individual movie has of being better than other movies you saw on that same date in other years. 

Then of course the more years it has been since you've seen something, the more chances there are for you to use recency bias to get all hot and bothered about a new movie and elevate it above a movie that might be better. 

However, if the higher quantity were truly a hard and fast rule, you'd easily expect the year with the most movies seen to have the best shot at having the most best movies, if all else is equal. My results don't bear that out. 

In fact, in 2014, I saw only 211 new movies -- which is the fewest for any year since 2008, when I got married and when I saw only 193.

How the heck do you explain this?

I shall endeavor to try, but each explanation has evidence that counteracts it.

For starters, I was unemployed until mid-March that year, when I finally got the job that I still have today. That might suggest I had more time to watch good movies, but consider:

1) Only two of the 23 days were from before I got my job (January 29th and March 1st).

2) I had specifically decided to limit my watching to three movies per week while I did not have a job, so as not to distract any more than necessary from my job search. I guess that worked.

It's possible that with fewer movies on my schedule, I was more selective in what I watched. I also know I was first enjoying the benefits of the generous Melbourne library rental periods, which allowed you to take out movies for three weeks at a time -- as opposed to the two days (!) you could borrow movies when I lived in Los Angeles. Probably those movies were higher quality, classics I hadn't seen before ... but then again you don't really see those titles represented to a higher degree among the titles listed above. Only two of them are from the 20th century. 

But I think there is something interesting about the fact that there were only two favorite movies in the first three months of 2014 ... and then 21 after I started my job on St. Patrick's Day, the first one coming on April 8th. In fact, each month from June through November includes at least two dates where I still have yet to see a better movie. 

Could the massive relief of getting a job have injected an immediate sense of equanimity into me, which made it easier for me to relax and enjoy movies?

I think that's very possible.

I was quite stressed out when I was first looking for jobs. I couldn't even look for one for the first three months I was here at the end of 2013, because my visa didn't allow it. Then once it did, it was almost already Christmas and no one was hiring then anyway. Early in 2014, I got so frustrated at one point that I shouted out "Nobody in this fucking country wants to hire me!" My wife and I still laugh about that now and again.

When your life is not settled, when you are depressed about something, when you are anxious about something, when you are mourning ... these are not good times to consume movies. You just can't give them your full heart and mind like you would at other times. It's a key reason why I try not to watch anything I think I might like immediately after Donald Trump wins an election. 

But as soon as that negative condition is relieved ... well it may just be that you are even more inclined to give your full heart and mind than in an ordinary time where nothing particularly interesting is happening one way or another. The relief itself creates a high, maybe a heightened sense of engagement. 

That first year in Australia still remained hard for me, even after I started work, as I was still feeling unsettled, still missing my friends back in LA, still staring off into the distance, a thousand yards at a time. However, getting this job -- which I still have and which I still love -- clearly started to pave the way to greater calm. And I think the continued introspection of a big move like this, and all the changes it entails, blended with that increased sense of calm to allow me to really interface effectively with the movies I saw, both intellectually and emotionally.

Or, maybe it was just a really good year for new releases. 

Yes, the fact that some of these films happen not to have been eclipsed by better films in the intervening years is partly due to luck. Not all of the titles listed above are movies I would consider personal favorites. The Lego Movie, The Orphanage, Cheap Thrills and Joe, in particular, figure to have a pretty flimsy hold on their titles.

But as I said earlier, this sort of luck tends to equal out, the larger the sample size gets. I may have a fixed sample size, as it will always and forever be 366, but it's large enough for these purposes. Plus the individual movies themselves create that larger sample. 

And whatever the reality, this exercise has shown me something interesting about myself and how I may react to particular periods of unusual activity in my life ... and how my experience of movies improves or suffers as a result. 

Preventing the ossification of my top ten

The end of the calendar year does not represent the end of my movie watching from the previous year, as I allow myself until the Oscar nominations are announced (January 17th this year) before finalizing my rankings of movies from that year. But it does have a symbolic value, in that it seems to be the point where I am starting to get very comfortable with my top ten as it is. 

Too comfortable.

Based only on movies I've seen since Christmas, I have already had to kick two movies out of my top ten that I had thought (and hoped) would be there at the end of the year. (I'm not going to tell you what they are, nor the movies that replaced them.) This is not a final placement, of course, as I am still likely to shuffle movies from where I initially placed them in my in-progress list. 

But having this system of placing them as I go means that they are hardening -- ossifying, if you will -- into a certain place of elevated entitlement, before all is said and done. 

And what does this mean for all the contenders I haven't yet watched?

It's a problem. And if I suggested from the title of this post that I knew the answer, well that's not correct.

I'm including the poster for Juror #2 with this post not because it necessarily makes for an example of the problem. It's mostly because I'm writing this post today and this is what I watched last night. 

I'll divulge one spoiler by saying that Juror #2 is not going to make my top ten of 2024. However, I did have the conversation again with myself last night as I was watching it and really liking it. (Reminding myself, speaking of top tens, that the National Board of Review saw it fit to include Clint Eastwood's 117th film as one of their top ten.) 

Especially during the first half, I asked myself "Okay, how can I possibly fit Juror #2 into my top ten?"

Cooler heads prevailed by the end of the movie, and though the movie will get a quite respectable ranking on my list, it won't be in the range of this most august partition of the rankings.

The trouble is, by already knowing quite clearly what it's up against, Juror #2 -- and the approximately ten more movies I will watch before next Friday -- doesn't necessarily get the fair shake it should if it were just being watched in a vacuum.

There is an obvious solution to this, which is not to make a draft of my list at all until a day or two before my ranking deadline. That's what my friend who does this with me does, though his task is herculean compared to what mine would be, as he will rank close to 500 movies this year. And I used to do it, too, though I think only that first or second year. I know for sure I did it in 1996, not having even gotten the idea to rank my movies until the end of the year, but by 1997 I may have already switched to my current system.

I am tempted to try that one year, but I just don't think I can do it. My brain is now too old in this respect to be rewired. If I were watching movies only with a star rating in mind -- which is another thing I can't help -- I might be so accustomed to, addicted to, my usual way of doing things that I would give up the experiment by February, March at the latest.

So the real only solution I can think of is to be honest with myself. To look at the movie currently at #10 and say "Is this movie I just watched better than this?" And if it is, well, I'll do the same thing with movie #9, and so on, until I find the right spot. It's a Flickchart-style dueling method that is informally how I handle this task.

The good news is, great movies make arguments for themselves quite easily. If I love a movie, it should mean I want to elevate it relative to another movie I might not like quite as much. If I can't imagine my top ten without Movie A, it should be even harder to imagine my top ten without Movie B, which I have determined I like better. And if I don't like Movie B better than Movie A, well there's the answer there too.

I guess the answer to this is really that the movie-ranking season is long. I mean, it is as long as it can possibly be, considering that I will start ranking 2025 movies before the end of January. But it's really the endgame I'm talking about here that's long. By the end of the calendar year, I am ready to be done with this and pack it away for the year. In fact, so is my friend I mentioned earlier, who is planning on closing his list a week earlier than I do this year -- and may still get his record of 500 movies.

In short, I guess the system works, or works as well as any system would work. But it doesn't mean it doesn't cause me these quandaries that eat away at me and prompt me to write blog posts about them.

In the end, my top ten list is what I want to present to the world about the movies I loved in the previous year. I can make it do whatever I want it to do, for whatever reason I want it to do it. If I want a movie no one liked to make my top five, because I loved it and I think they're crazy for not loving it, then that is an important part of it for me. If I want to squeeze in a beloved movie that I may not love as much as its most ardent supporters, that's what my #9 and #10 spots might be for -- depending on the year.

Because though the whole list matters -- a list that will be close to, if not more than, 175 movies this year -- we all know there's something special about that top ten. It's the standard all other critics use in sharing their own thoughts about the movie year. And in my own year-end post, each of the top ten titles gets a special write-up from me, just to honor the way it was able to bring movie magic into my heart.

In just eight days, I'll know for sure which movies I'll be writing about in that way for 2024.

And if movies I haven't yet seen, but expect to see -- like A Real Pain, Conclave and A Complete Unknown -- don't end up making my top ten, you'll know that the system doesn't work ... or maybe that I just didn't care for them all that much. 

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.

2022: A whale of a year

I'm back in sync with the Oscars.

After two straight years where the pandemic screwed up the unveiling of the Oscar nominations, they're back to January this year -- in fact, dropped just a few minutes ago -- and that means my friend and I who do this together are back to finalizing our lists when the Oscar nominations are announced, as we had been doing for nearly 25 years prior to the last two.

Of course, the January 24th unveiling of the nominations (January 25th in Australia) is still a week later than the arbitrary date we chose last year, meaning that we have again both set personal records. He's up over 370 -- and this from a guy I had write a guess post ten years ago when he had reached the then-astonishing record total of 212.

My record is modest compared to his, but still impressive by my standards, considering that it is indeed the most I've ever ranked: 175 films, which is five higher than last year's record of 170. 

I still want to contract in the future, not expand, but as I've written about previously, the streamers are making it harder and harder for me to do that. The more legitimate talent they attract to making or appearing in their movies, the more I need to make time to see them, while still including eccentric personal choices I've ferreted out or seen at MIFF -- and of course all the big tentpoles that drive the public conversation. 

With so many titles ranked this year, it's good to remind you that just because I've ranked a movie lower than 100, it doesn't mean I didn't like it. In fact, there are films I gave 3.5 stars on Letterboxd that couldn't crack my top 100 -- in part because some three-star films finished ahead of them, due to the quirky nature of this process. So if a film you really liked is in triple digits, just remember that I'm grading on a curve here, and I may have liked it just fine as well.

And as always seems to be the case, there are enough weird personal choices in my top ten to make me wonder if I'm doing this whole thing correctly. Sure I've got my critical favorites like I do every year, but the films in my top two spots in particular seem to have controversy attached to them, controversy that caused some critics and audiences to out and out dislike them. I do have my supporters for these choices, but a large quantity of cinephiles might be looking at me askance as they read them.

But before you read them, here are some you won't be reading about, what I've determined are the five most prominent titles I either didn't or couldn't see in time for my deadline ... though the "couldn't" group is smaller than it's ever been, given the quantity of high-profile releases that were available to me in some capacity prior to January 24th, whether that's a theatrical release here in Australia, an advanced screening, or a U.S. rental.

5. I Wanna Dance With Somebody - I like Whitney Houston. I had access to see this film. But yet another standard-seeming biopic ... I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm for it.

4. Bones and All - I intend to see every Luca Guadagnino film, but this one, released a few months ago, just got lost in the shuffle, and I wasn't willing to buy it for $19.99. 

3. Women Talking - With two previous Sarah Polley films making my top ten, I hated not to find this one, but it just isn't available to me anywhere yet. 

2. Broker - This only got released a few weeks ago in the U.S., so even with my love of Hirokazu Kore-eda, there was just no way for me to catch this. I wasn't even going to consider it part of 2022, but then I heard it mentioned on a year-end podcast, so I guess I need to include it as a regret here rather than kicking it forward to 2023.

1. Weird - A spiritual successor to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story that was free to any American who wanted it was just not available in Australia, because Roku Channel is not available in Australia. Boo. 

Okay here we go with my top ten:

10. Dual - As I mentioned in this post, movies involving clones have been really working for me lately, with one making my top ten last year as well. But just being about clones would not be enough to elevate Riley Stearns' third feature this high, after I really liked Faults (#20 of 2015) but didn't care for The Art of Self-Defense (#110 of 2019). It's the deadpan humor that really does it for me here, which is funny because almost the exact same tone didn't work for me in Self-Defense -- maybe the deliveries of Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul are just superior. In an age largely devoid of comedies, this was some of the hardest I laughed in 2022, though under it all there's a real sort of existential dread and sorrow that combines with the humor to make this a movie that really sticks with you. The premise is that a terminally ill Gillan goes into full remission, but she's already commissioned a clone to replace her and live out the rest of her life. When both can't exist simultaneously, society has determined they must duel to the death. It's a big idea executed with humor that I've already lauded several times now, and Dual has one of my favorite final shots of the year. (Plus the scene in this photo, which I won't spoil.) That's certainly all the ingredients you need to squeak into my top ten.

9. Athena - If I judged movies on technical merits alone, Athena would be my #1 movie of the year. Simply put, this story of a citizen uprising against the police in a French housing project has some of the craziest cinematography I've ever seen in a movie, and I've seen Children of Men. It's not nearly the only example, but let's take the opening 11-minute unbroken take. It starts at a press conference in a police station that gets quickly put to an end by a Molatov cocktail, then descends into the basement of the police station, continues out in a stolen police truck that travels several kilometers away (with the camera viewing from inside as well as from another vehicle) before ending up at the titular housing project, where it is set aloft on a drone to look back on the housing project and splash the title. Romain Gavras is the director here, but the team of dedicated camera operators -- whose thrilling mission was captured in a 37-minute making of documentary, also on Netflix -- deserve special mention, particularly DP Matias Boucard. The story of three brothers torn apart in the wake of the death of a fourth at the hands of police is stirring stuff as well, but maybe not stirring enough for me personally to vault it any higher in my top ten. But for a tense 90 minutes in a cauldron of righteous indignation, you can't do much better than this. 

8. Beast - Baltasar Kormakur first got my attention as more than just a Euro action hack with Everest in 2015, but then took a step backward with Adrift in 2018. For some reason, this rather unassuming man vs. lion movie that was released at the pivot point between the summer movie season and the fall movie season was the thing that pushed him over the top, into the director of a top ten film. One of my favorite genres is the movie where average people try to get themselves out of messed up situations, and Beast delivers big time in this regard. Idris Elba plays a father showing his daughters their mother's homeland, and has to keep them safe from a marauding lion while stuck in a crashed SUV, with only his injured friend (Sharlto Copley) knowing anything about the landscape or the lion. The combination of terror and courage these characters produce feels real at every turn, and Kormakur stages an exciting series of close scrapes and desperate gambits to try to resolve the situation with everyone intact. Sometimes the most satisfying movies are just a tight collection of thrilling set pieces underpinned by relatable themes of trying to keep your children safe. Beast didn't need more than that to crack my top ten. 

7. Elvis - Yes I'm a Baz apologist. I'm not a native Australian so there's no bias there, though I sometimes think the bias against this native son is stronger than the love for him. I just like what the man does. Give me his cinematic jazz hands any day of the week. I liked Elvis enough, despite not naturally being a huge Elvis fan, that I didn't even mind Tom Hanks' performance. I also didn't let the legitimate concerns about Presley's problematic and indebted relationship with the Black community, particularly as depicted here, sidetrack me. I just really like the kaleidoscopic explosion of exuberance that is this movie, grounded by a central performance that is possibly the best combination of Elvis impersonation and essence distillation that has ever been seen. Austin Butler deserves all the accolades he's been getting, and Hanks doesn't deserve the Golden Raspberry nomination he probably just got (I don't know for sure, since I wrote this a few weeks ago upon deciding the movie was a safe enough lock for my top ten). I enjoy this sort of grand narrative design, one that reminds me of my favorite Luhrmann film, Moulin Rouge!, one of two previous Luhrmann films (along with The Great Gatsby) to end its year ranked at #15. Probably my new second favorite Luhrmann, Elvis is his first top ten. 

6. Prey - It's so boring to praise an unexpected hit by saying "Who would have thought that ...," but I guess I'm boring sometimes: "Who would have thought that the fifth movie in the Predator franchise -- seventh if you include the Alien vs. Predator films -- could make my top ten of the year?" I've actually only seen the original and its sequel, but you don't need to see any of the previous movies when this one is set approximately 250 years before they were. I thought the idea of a predator facing off against a tribe of Comanches sounded pretty cool, but I've been burned by similar mashups before (Cowboys vs. Aliens). I had no idea how seriously director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison would take the assignment, so much so that they actually produced a Comanche language version of the film. (I've seen Prey twice, but the second was to show it to my wife, so I'll save the Comanche version for the inevitable third.) The film gets the 1719 American Plains just right, every respectful detail about this tribe feeling spot on, at times even recalling something like The Revenant. Top it all off with a terrific heroine who also qualifies as one of this year's best introductions of new talent -- Amber Midthunder, who shares a spitfire attitude and a determined stare with Aubrey Plaza -- and you've got one of 2022's tightest and most fun movies, with no guilty aftertaste. 

5. The Banshees of Inisherin - No 2022 movie had I heard discussed more extensively before seeing it than The Banshees of Inisherin. With all the talking I'd heard on several podcasts, it seemed impossible I could still be taken off guard by it -- a necessary component to the cinema we love. Well, I suppose a great film still registers as such even after you know a fair bit about it, and that was my experience with Martin McDonagh's second film to make my top ten after In Bruges. The clipped witticisms of the Irish -- or funny ways of saying things they might not have intended to be funny -- got me off to a good start with the movie, even knowing it would turn a lot darker as it went. And darker it turns, with the very landscape starting to feel post-apocalyptic, occupied only by the ghosts of a promise long gone. As my #1 of 2013, Beyond the Hills, proved, I really like a movie that functions as an extended metaphor for a bad breakup. Like Colin Farrell's Padraic, you ball your fists in impotent frustration as the person who loved you yesterday has decided to shun you entirely today. And when that happens, you just never know what the consequences might be. Banshees explores those consequences, extracting from them a blistering emotional truth even when they seem like things that operate primarily as metaphor and might never actually happen. 

4. Everything Everywhere All at Once - The second Daniels film to make my top ten after Swiss Army Man, EEAAO never spent any time atop my 2022 rankings, even though I saw it back in March. I saw it about five days after my #3 on this list, and their relative positions never switched. But there has always been an argument that this was the film of the year, bursting as it is with so much oddness, so much creative vitality, so many memorable performances, so many laughs, and just so much pure cinematic gusto. I'll admit that all that gusto did leave me exhausted at certain points, so I never entertained any realistic notion that Everything would climb all the way to #1. But it does prove that Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have an absolutely unique cinematic vision, and also a gift for using actors as we would never expect. In Swiss Army Man it was the erstwhile Harry Potter as a farting corpse, and here it's Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis in all their various incarnations -- not to mention unearthing Ke Huy Quan for the comeback we never knew we wanted. If I spent this short amount of space talking about specific things I loved about the movie, I'd be wasting both of our time because you've seen it and you know. (I'll limit myself to one: hot dog fingers.) So instead I'll just say that this may have been the biggest blast I had in a movie theater in 2022. 

3. Turning Red - When I watched Turning Red earlier in the year, I didn't imagine it would finish so high in my top ten. It's probably only just narrowly in my top half of Pixar films. But that just goes to show how excellent a well-made Pixar film really is -- and in a year in which we also had Lightyear, it's a reminder not to take excellent Pixar films for granted. Turning Red benefits from a specificity of time (early 2000s), place (Toronto), character (a teenager from a family of Chinese immigrants) and theme (the metaphor of blossoming into womanhood by becoming a large red panda). While some trolls found that specificity an alienating turnoff, it invigorated me. (And I wasn't one bit grossed out by an extended menstruation metaphor, which also bothered some people.) I love how Domee Shi's film has no relationship to established IP, and how eccentric it got to be. (The focus on boy bands and the influence of anime were both spot on.) And like all of Pixar's classics, the film's final stages put that lump in my throat that brought home the totality of what I had been experiencing. An accumulation of sweet details and nice moments pays off in a truly satisfying climax that's both epic in scale and gentle in its emotional imprint. I think I might have just described what makes a good movie. 

2. Don't Worry Darling - I'm glad that one of the year's most talked about films -- for the wrong reasons -- didn't end up as my #1. Lots of podcast chatter and a second viewing revealed to me the film's imperfections from a story perspective. But I can't and won't forget that when I first saw Olivia Wilde's film, it left me feeling I'd be satisfied if it finished the year as my best. If visuals were the primary artistic merit you were judging, there's no doubt Don't Worry Darling delivers like few other films this year, from its immaculate 1950s production design to the camerawork of Matthew Libatique. But the much-derided story is what actually does it for me -- in addition to the always spectacular work of Florence Pugh, of course. I won't go into detail for those who still haven't seen it, but if you reduce the movie to a critique of [current right-wing movement] or a ripoff of [classic science fiction film] then you miss the ultimately moving analysis of the roles each person plays in a partnership, and what they can and will do to provide for the other -- even when it's woefully misguided as a result of unclear thinking inspired by emotional spiraling. As a husband who has often gotten it wrong about how best to be a partner to my own wife, I got huge resonance from these themes -- and the fact that it also takes a big swing on the concept side is a bonus, even if that swing does not always make perfect contact. 

1. The Whale - It's regrettable when you have to start a blurb about your favorite movie of the year with a defense. But not long after I saw, and was shattered by, The Whale, I learned that some people -- and maybe not a small number of people -- consider Darren Aronofsky's film to be fatphobic. I can't dispute that perception if it's real to them, but to me, this is a case of radical humanism by Aronofsky, one that is knowingly in conversation with our latent instinct to be fatphobic, with the intention of utterly exploding it. As I wrote in my not-yet-published review -- the movie doesn't release here until next week, but I was fortunate enough to attend a screening in December -- this is not a movie about a morbidly obese man, but rather a gay man, a lover of literature, a father who unwittingly abandoned his daughter and his ex-wife after falling in love. This is one of the most intense character portraits I've seen in ages, centered on a truly astonishing comeback performance from Brendan Fraser, but one that wouldn't work so well without the brilliance of the supporting cast, who deserve to be named here: Hong Chau, Sadie Sink, Samantha Morton and Ty Simpkins. If this film "manipulated" me, it did it in the ways I want any movie to do it, in the pursuit of the best possible use of Roger Ebert's famed empathy machine. All I can tell you is that I blubbered like a baby multiple times in this film; yes, I was crying ugly. I left the theater quivering, so whatever Aronofsky was doing, it worked on me like gangbusters. And in an accomplishment I will certainly talk about further in the coming days, after The Wrestler in 2008, Aronfosky becomes the very first director to have directed two films I've named my best of the year. 

And before we get to the full list, here are my five worst:

171. Last Seen Alive - If you're hoping for Gerard Butler to make a Colin Farrell-like comeback into critical acclaim, Last Seen Alive is the sort of film that convinces you to stop dreaming. It's a shittily made revenge fantasy film where a man has to save his kidnapped wife from various hick miscreants. Yes, I also thought they stopped making this sort of film.

172. Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Did there really have to be another limp retread of this material with some half-hearted social media age messaging thrown in? This movie was bleak and glum and boring and completely uninspired, not to mention totally ridiculous. 

173. Pinocchio - I usually eat up whatever Robert Zemeckis does. Not this time. This was downright painful to watch, seeming even worse if you waited a couple months and saw Guillermo del Toro's invigorating take on the material. This has disturbing visual effects and the true worst Tom Hanks performance of the year, making his Elvis turn seem Oscar worthy.

174. The Sky is Everywhere - Josephine Decker, how could you miscalculate so totally? This movie farts colors and flowers and twee whimsey at you for the better part of two hours, all in the name of a coming of age grieving story that hits its points about grief repeatedly and with a sledgehammer. I've never seen so many unlikeable characters in a movie that's supposed to be sprightly and magical. 

175. Moonfall - The joke is that Roland Emmerich makes the worst movie of the year every time he makes a movie, but I've supported some of those more typical movies (2012) as well as his big artistic swings (Anonymous). He's well and truly lived down to his reputation with this one, one of the more absurd disaster movie concepts ever committed to film, with a cast of likable actors looking completely lethargic, and everyone charged with saving the world separated from one another by only a single degree. Every moment is terrible, and there isn't even good destruction to distract us.

Okay here's all 175. Do some eye warmups before you start if you think that will help.

1. The Whale

2. Don't Worry Darling

3. Turning Red

4. Everything Everywhere All at Once

5. The Banshees of Inisherin

6. Prey

7. Elvis

8. Beast

9. Athena

10. Dual

11. She Said

12. The Lost King

13. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

14. Nope

15. RRR

16. The Sea Beast

17. Aftersun

18. Spirited

19. Till

20. Emergency

21. Look Both Ways

22. Wendell & Wild

23. Causeway

24. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

25. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

26. Bodies Bodies Bodies

27. Triangle of Sadness

28. Fire Island

29. After Yang

30. Kimi

31. The Eternal Daughter

32. Avatar: The Way of Water

33. The Wonder

34. Fire of Love

35. Hatching

36. Bros

37. White Noise

38. I Love My Dad

39. The Bubble

40. I Want You Back

41. The Black Phone

42. Thirteen Lives

43. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On

44. Hit the Road

45. Vengeance

46. Moonage Daydream

47. Muru

48. Luck

49. Flux Gourmet

50. Bigbug

51. Windfall

52. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

53. Happening

54. Descendant

55. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

56. Our Father

57. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

58. "Sr."

59. Persuasion

60. Emily the Criminal

61. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

62. Ticket to Paradise

63. My Sunny Maad

64. Fresh

65. Fall

66. Lady Chatterley's Lover

67. All Quiet on the Western Front

68. Emancipation

69. Incredible But True

70. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

71. Three Thousand Years of Longing

72. God's Creatures

73. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile

74. X

75. We're All Going to the World's Fair

76. Death on the Nile

77. Is That Black Enough for You?!?

78. Barbarian

79. Studio 666

80. Top Gun: Maverick

81. Raymond & Ray

82. The Batman

83. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

84. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

85. Senior Year

86. Samaritan

87. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers

88. Tar

89. The People We Hate at the Wedding

90. The Greatest Beer Run Ever

91. Smile

92. Plan 75

93. Scream

94. The Curse of Bridge Hollow

95. Master

96. The Stranger

97. Spiderhead

98. Sharp Stick

99. The Silent Twins

100. Inu-oh

101. Morbius

102. Men

103. Hustle

104. The Tinder Swindler

105. Day Shift

106. Choose or Die

107. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania

108. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

109. Crimes of the Future

110. A Christmas Story Christmas

111. The Menu

112. My Best Friend's Exorcism

113. Sundown

114. Vortex

115. Enola Holmes 2

116. Nanny

117. Cha Cha Real Smooth

118. The Adam Project

119. The Lost City

120. Decision to Leave

121. Neptune Frost

122. Armageddon Time

123. Poker Face

124. Stutz

125. Troll

126. The Gray Man

127. Strange World

128. The Woman King

129. Babylon

130. Hocus Pocus 2

131. Watcher

132. Gold

133. Everything in Between

134. The Weekend Away

135. Lou

136. The Good Nurse

137. Do Revenge

138. Blonde

139. Ambulance

140. All the Old Knives

141. Where the Crawdads Sing

142. Thor: Love and Thunder

143. The Man From Toronto

144. Father Stu

145. The Bad Guys

146. Lightyear

147. The Fabelmans

148. You Won't Be Alone

149. Marry Me

150. Umma

151. Firestarter

152. Amsterdam

153. Jurassic World: Dominion

154. Uncharted

155. The Perfumier

156. See How They Run

157. The Northman

158. Sissy

159. On the Count of Three

160. Deep Water

161. Stars at Noon

162. Asking For It

163. Luckiest Girl Alive

164. A Madea Homecoming

165. Home Team

166. Violent Night

167. Not Okay

168. Me Time

169. Metal Lords

170. Sonic the Hedgehog 2

171. Last Seen Alive

172. Texas Chainsaw Massacre

173. Pinocchio

174. The Sky is Everywhere

175. Moonfall

And finishing with ten movies I thought required clarification at the spot where I ranked them, so you don't say "What???" and "Huh???" and "Are you crazy???" (You can just think it instead.) "Wait Vance, I thought it was only five movies last year?" It was, but everything was bigger in 2022. 

39. The Bubble - I know this is generally disliked and just scored Judd Apatow a Razzie nomination for worst director, but I laughed a lot. 

43. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On - I know, right? I felt myself urging myself to love it more, but you can't urge love.

78. Barbarian - Everyone told me to love this but there were just too many holes in it for me to give it my full embrace.

80. Top Gun: Maverick - Planes go vroom. A little of that goes a long way for me.

88. Tar - I actually tried to get in a second viewing before my listed closed, but I just couldn't justify another $6.99 rental, on top of my original $19.99 rental, just to not get what all the fuss was about a second time.

101. Morbius - I am very slow to the realization that everyone thinks this movie is awful. I enjoyed it well enough.

111. The Menu - A lot to like at the start, but in the end, this did not tell me anything I didn't already know, or that Pig didn't tell me last year.

120. Decision to Leave - Movies should never appear to be ending 45 minutes before they actually end.

129. Babylon - I could like this more on a second viewing, but will I ever make the time?

147. The Fabelmans - I'm sorry, it just really didn't work for me, and Michelle Williams was awful.

That's enough to digest for now. Leave comments please. Tell me how The Fabelmans was your favorite movie of the year and Don't Worry Darling was your least favorite. Let's fight, in that productive way cinephiles fight to draw the best out of each other.