Too Many Movies, Or Just Too Many At The End Of The Year?

EE #4:How many stupid things can one industry do?

Ecosystem Examination #4: If you are like me, you’d like your world to be your own personal pleasure planet. Right? And I don’t want a big pile of goodies, just a nice steady flow. Enough with all this other stuff already, just give me what I want on a regular cadence. Do you hear me Mr. Film Business?

I am at the point in my life — or at least my movie viewing life — that when I fly I generally have seen every movie that’s offered on the plane that I have an inkling of desire to see. And when it comes to plane rides, I like everything. My ideal movie theater would replicate the air pressure on a plane because somehow it makes me both more emotional and more viscerally engaged; the things Jaded Ted would normally scoff at, the tears are streaming down for. So imagine the crisis I have finding nothing to watch. But that’s on a plane, and that’s not my pleasure planet or even the real world.

Let’s look at the real world, shall we? If you’ve been with me for awhile, and not just here, but on the other blogs and platforms I played around on, you probably already know this next story. One day, about 15 years ago now, I was in the shower. La de da. Rub a dub dub. But also: eureka! Okay, let’s quickly rewind my life and fill in some gaps. I am a list keeper. And the first list was of course my “To see / To watch” list. My queue. So there I was, Mr. Listkeeper, in the shower and I realized that even if I could maintain my maximum rate of consumption (once I hit 300+) , the titles I had on that TS/TW list nonetheless surpassed my life expectancy. There was no way I would see everything I wanted to see in this lifetime. And of course I was adding more titles to my list almost daily too. As this was so, what did I need new movies for when these I had already selected were virtually guaranteed to satisfy me? Why risk my precious time on something new? There’s many answers to that, but best to save that for a future post, yeah? But for now that speaks of how the history of cinema has created a pile up in my life here on earth. But history has had about 125 years to get to the point that maybe I don’t really need anyone to make any more movies, even with an appetite like mine.l

But for this moment, forget history, and let’s look at the here and now. Back in the present, I am trying to determine my favorite film experiences for 2022, but I have a big problem. I still have 75+ movies on my “Want To See” list and I see far more movies than most of my friends, and most of my friends are also in the film business. We watch both for pleasure and work, and thus can make twice the time for viewing than the average bear. Even if I watched three movies a day until the end of the year I would fall short. What’s wrong with this picture? An awful lot!

Why can’t our distributors allocate the movies on an annual schedule? Surely they can have new and better ways to help us anticipate new titles, and perhaps even prioritize them (I have some ideas for that I hope to share with you). Why do they have to drop them all at the end of the year? Sure everyone wants a gold statue, and the audience have been trained to anticipate the “important” films at the end of the year, but even for fans such as I this sort of swarm of titles inevitably leaves many on the ain’t-never-going-to-happen side of the ledger. The new crop of Sundance and Berlin are already revving their engines. Releasing titles with similar appeal at the same time as the competition is how you spell stoopid in my book. Or is it just misguided. Stuck in the rut of legacy bias yet again!

and for movies it could be the same thing, if…

I am sharing my TO SEE list here as a way of demonstrating the problem. And they are on the list because something about them interested me. There are a lot of films that I am not interested in, like frankly, most blockbusters and crowdpleasers. I wait for those until the plane rides. It’s also a little embarrassing to show you mine, as I have films there that friends made and I wish I had already seen. There’s even films I wanted to make on this list. And just because something is NOT on the list doesn’t mean I HAVE seen it. Maybe I just forgot to add it. Or never wanted to see it in the first place. Anyways, we have an epidemic of titles. The good news is it is curable and preventable. We are just doing it wrong right now.

Ted’s To See / To Watch ao 12/9/22

1. “A Chiara” (Jonas Carpignano) 

2. Ahmed’s Knee / Nadav Lapid 

3. All That Breathes (doc) (Shaunak Sen)

4. Avatar: WOW

5. “Apollo 10 ½” / Rick Linklater 

6. Athena / Romain Gravas

7. Babylon

8. Beba / Rebeca Huntt (doc)

9. Both Sides Of The Blade / Claire Denis

10. BOY FROM HEAVEN | Cairo Conspiracy Sweden | Tarik Saleh 

11. “Bowling Saturne” (dir. Patricia Mazuy) (Cahiers du Cinéma #9)

12. Broker / Hirokazu Kore-eda 

13. Ricky D’Ambrose / “The Cathedral,” 

14. Catherine Called Birdy / Lena Dunham

15. Causeway / Lila Neugebauer (Apple)

16. Clytaemnestra/ Ougie Pak

17. Daliland / Mary Harron 

18. “Donbas” (Sergei Loznitsa); 

19. “Dos Estaciones” (Juan Pablo González)

20. ‘Down With the King’ (Diego Ongaro) 

21. Dreamin’ Wild / Bill Pohlad

22. Emancipation/ Anton Fuqua (Apple)

23. EO / Jerzy  ;Sideshow / Janus)

24. The Eternal Daughter / Joanna Hogg

25. ‘Flux Gourmet’ (Peter Strickland) 

26. Framing Agnes (doc) /Chase Joynt 

27. Free Money (doc)

28. God’s Country

29. Good Night Opy

30. The Good Nurse / Tobias Lindholm (Netflix)

31. The Grab / Gabriela Cowpertgwaite

32. The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” Peter Farrelly 

33. Hit The Road / Panah Panahi

34. The Holdovers / Alexander Payne

35. Hustle (Netflix)

36. Il Buco

37. I Like Movies

38. In Front Of Your Face / Hang Sang Soo

39. The Inspection (A24)

40. Introduction/ Hong Song Soo

41. Lady Chatterley’s Lover | LAURE DE CLERMONT-TONNERRE (Netflix)

42. ‘Lost Illusions’ (Xavier Giannoli) Mubi 

43. The Lost King / Stephen Frears

44. Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blue (doc) / Sacha Jenkins 

45. Kōji Fukada’s “Love Life,” 

46. Marcell The Shell With Shoes On 

47. “Marx Can Wait” (Marco Bellocchio)

48. “Master Gardener,” Paul Schrader i

49. The Menu /Mark Mylon

50. ‘Mr. Bachmann and His Class’ (Maria Speth) MUBI 

51. A New Old Play / Qiu Jiongjiong

52. Jafar Panahi's No Bears 

53. The Novelist’s Film / Hang Sang Soo

54. Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Other People’s Children,” 

55. Albert Serra's "Pacifiction" (Cahiers du Cinema #1)

56. “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

57. Retrograde (doc) / Mathew Heineman

58. Riotsville

59. RMN / Christian Mungiu (IFC)

60. Saint Omer / Alice Diop 

61. Salvatore Shoemaker Of Dreams / Luca Guadagnino

62. Sanctuary/ Zach Wigon

63. Saturday Fiction (2019) / Lou Ye

64. The Son

65. The Swimmers / Sally El Hosaini (Netflix) 

66. The Territory* (Audience Award)doc 

67. Three Thousand of Years of Longing / George Miller

68. Till / Chinonye Chukwu

69. Tsugua Dairies / Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes

70. Turn Every Page (doc) / Lizzie Gottleib 

71. Un Couple

72. Utama

73. The Whale / Daron Aaronofsky

74. Wild Cat (Amazon)

75. Woman King

76. “X” (Ti West)

Don’t take this wrong though. This is that infamous exquisite torture that you’ve heard so much about but not yet understood. I am pained by having so much of what I want. Each new movie I haven’t seen but want to see already gives me another 100 minutes to live for. At this rate I am going to have to get bit by a vampire to come close to satisfaction. The fact is we are extremely lucky to be living at this time. But we could enjoy it more. And filmmakers and their supporters could earn more. And all it takes is a serious look at alternative release schedules. We are eating ourselves alive and undermining the market for art film worldwide.

PS. I am sorry that this is my 3rd post this week. I am like a child with a new toy. I really have planned to only post once a week, but no one seemed to object to two, so why not try three. And what with the weekend here, you might want to know what to watch, or even better yet, let me know what you thought of some of these.