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I started an email dialogue with our Receptionist (who just got a promotion and will start her new position next month, so she won't be the Receptionist much longer) yesterday about TV and movies. When she asked me for recommendations, I went to look at my working 2021 list of movie reviews, and noticed something that will just lend (supposed) credence to Gabriel's longstanding complaint: that I "give every movie a B+." I was looking for the last great movie I saw—A-minus or higher—and I haven't seen a great one since June 8 (a criminally underseen Danish film called Riders of Justice). That one got an A-minus. I haven't given a solid A since the spring, when I was still watching movies technically considered 2020 films and were Oscar nominees (the documentary Collective, about corruption in the Romanian health care system, is astonishing).
But, since June 8? I've seen and reviewed 36 new movies since then, and among those, 15 (42%) were given a B+; an additional 11 (31%) were given a solid B. Combining the two, nearly three quarters of the movies I saw since Riders of Justice have been either a B+ or a B. An additional five were a B-minus, and another five either a C or a C+.
That said, my longstanding response to this criticism remains the same: by and large, I can tell before I see a movie whether I'm going to like it—and I'm sure as shit not going to go out of my way to see a movie I can tell beforehand will be terrible, just to provide a bad review, especially if I'm not getting paid for it. So, given my approach, all of this tracks. If I have reviewed a movie at all, there's a roughly 75% chance it's going to have been good, or at least pretty good.
I only mention all this now because it's been unusually long since I saw one that was great. (And, mind you, "really good"—a B+—is still plenty qualified to recommend it.) The expectation was that the fall would yield some of the year's great movies, but, so far the track record hasn't been particularly good. Granted, we're only a third of the way through the fall as of right now, but, there have been movies released already that were hotly anticipated and did not quite live up to expectations. I just hope people like P.T. Anderson or Pablo Lorrain come through. I'm ready to some outliers again, but in the direction of greatness rather than in the direction of mediocrity.
As for last night, I took myself to see the documentary The Rescue, about the Thai soccer team of boys that was stuck I a cave for 18 days in 2018. And guess what? B-plus! I mean, at least it was better than the previous documentary made by the same filmmakers, Free Solo, which focused on a guy who really annoyed me. This movie didn't annoy me at all.
I walked the rest of the way home from Regal Cinemas, had the Costco lasagna Shobhit had heated up for dinner, and wrote my review. I updated several playlists in iTunes, which I'll be doing for the foreseeable future. A bunch of playlists are suddenly missing tracks or fully empty, something that has happened before and is beyond annoying. I could almost certainly just restore it from Time Machine, except that would also restore the issue I believe caused it this time: my many issues after attempting to move the Apple tracks to the external hard drive has resulted in many albums showing the tracks duplicated between two and four times. The only thing to do is delete the duplicates, so that I can actually listen to an album without each track just repeating over and over again, but, I also never know which version of those tracks happens to be in a playlist, so deleting them fucks up playlists.
Granted, I'm seeing playlists fucked up on tracks from albums I am almost certain I never touched. I suppose I could be wrong. In any case, once I get this fixed again—and this will take a long time, as I have playlists in the dozens that I have been maintaining for 15 years—I'll know not to make this particular mistake again. I now know never to try moving my iTunes files to an external hard drive. So much for trying to do that as a means of freeing up space on my computer.
At least today I could finally listen to my Fiona Apple playlist in its proper form.
[posted 12:26 pm]