— पांच हजार पांच सौ बयालीस —

I'm reading the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by perennial favorite podcast host Joanna Robinson, along with Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards—and, I'm actually really enjoying it, in spite of the largely uncritical look at a whole lot of superhero movies that never rise above the level of mediocrity. In any event, it's a very popular book, with many other holds on it, which prevented me from renewing it when it became overdue on December 21. That means I have only a solid month to finish reading it and return it, before the library charges me the cost of the book. And, enjoying it though I am, I am taking a long time to get through it, as is typical, and I'm just hoping to get it done before I have to return it. My account has already been suspended due to it being overdue.

I had a Grand Plan to get a bunch of it read last night. Instead, I spent the evening engaged in different types of obsession in both Apple Music and on Letterboxd. In both cases, it had to do with movies.

I had really hoped to find a soundtrack album with a collection of the great pop songs featured in the movie All of Us Strangers, which Laney and I went to see together on Tuesday. Much to my disappointment, there is only a film score album available, and not so much a soundtrack—which is increasingly the case these days, when albums don't really sell anymore, only streaming music subscriptions.

I did find multiple other people who had, indeed, created playlists of songs from the movie. The problem there, though, was that it seems like one person created a 31-track playlist, and a bunch of other people seem to have duplicated it. I actually found one with all the tracks I definitely wanted to see included, and have listened to it in full three different times. But, I am still looking for a playlist of more reasonable "album length," meaning about an hour. And there's no way all 31 tracks from that person's huge playlist are all featured in the movie.

I did finally find one person's playlist, after far too much time Googling, on Amazon Prime Music, with only about fifteen tracks. I also literally found the full screenplay to the movie online, and did several keyword searches to find which songs are specifically called out in the movie. I then created my own, idealized "soundtrack" playlist, with what I feel is better track sequencing—I don't think the importance of sequencing can be overestimated.

Thus, I finalized a playlist on Apple Music, with 13 tracks and a run time of 56 minutes. A few of the tracks, I am still unsure if they actually appear in the film, but they are tracks I still really like from the longer playlist I found. At some point I want to rewatch the movie and get a more definitive sense of songs that are actually in the movie, at which point I may tinker with the playlist a bit.

I know for certain that tracks 1-4, 7, and 10-13 are in the movie; I'm pretty sure track 9 is. The rest I'm kind of guessing, but overall I think this is a pretty solid collection.

I then duplicated the playlist to Spotify, and emailed it to Laney, unsure how into it she'd be. She later responded with far more gratitude than I really expected.

I've already listend to the personalized and standardized playlist I created another three times, so far. I really like this collection of tracks a lot, especially given the way most of the songs are memorably contextualized in the movie.

— पांच हजार पांच सौ बयालीस —

— पांच हजार पांच सौ बयालीस —

So then, I moved on to Letterboxd. I didn't have a lot left to get to this point, as I was already about halfway through 2005, but still working backward, I got all the way back to logging all of the films for which I ever wrote a review, back to when I started at the end of 2004. I've now surpassed 2,500 logged films. (As of this writing, it's specifically 2,530.) And mind you, I also had full logs of all the films I went to see in 2004 and in 2003, which I also need to get to still—I just don't have links to reviews to copy and paste into the specific film logs anymore.

I decided I wanted my "all time stats" to reflect more accurately the movies I have actually seen the most: you can scroll down that page and find "most watched," and now the #1 and #3 spots are appropriately occupied, respectively, by Batman Returns and Jurassic Park. I actually looked up the dates I saw both of them, in 1992 and in 1993, when they were first released in theaters, and then later when they were released on home video.

It was sure interesting to look up my teenage journal entries about when I first watched both of those movies. The day I saw Batman Returns for the first time, I literally wrote that "the first one was definitely better," which I have not felt for many, many years. And still, somehow, I went to see that one in theaters three times. And then, when Jurassic Park was released, I went around telling people it was my favorite movie I've ever seen, a sentiment I stayed consistent with for a few years, I think. I never thought of it this way, at least not that I can recall right now, but I think perhaps I shifted Batman Returns to the #1 position sometime after I came out, when I realized Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman was an icon to me not because I wanted to fuck her, but because I wanted to be her. Ever since I made that shift in rankings of favorites, however, I have kept Jurassic Park as my second-favorite movie ever.

According to the current state of Letterboxd, I've logged Batman Returns 13 times (ranking it above even Airplane!, another movie I've seen an insane number of times), and Jurassic Park eight times. It should be noted, though, that in both cases logged viewings have a big empty span, between 1994 and about 2007, during which time I would have watched both films many times. I've easily seen both films probably three times as many times as I currently have actually logged on Letterboxd.

This does also mean, though, that considering I have journal records of movies I've watched, both in theaters and from video rentals, as far back as 1990, and currently with some logged as far back as 1992. I've now got a logged history of movie watching on Letterboxd that spans 32 years.

I texted Gabriel that I was up to over 2500 films logged, and that it included every film I've reviewed. He replied with kind of surprising earnestness: That is legit a monumental feat. Impressed. Also...proud to have encouraged that mania.

He's not wrong about having encouraged it. I've known about Letterboxd, and even had an account, for probably more than a decade, but for some reason, it wasn't until Gabriel suddenly got into it last fall that I did too. This website is basically tailor made for people like me, so why I didn't click with it the way I have now, ten years ago, I honestly have no idea. Maybe I just thought ten years ago that I didn't have time for it, and that I already tracked my movie watching enough on my own website.

Here's the thing, though: ten years ago, I could far more easily use Google to find one of my own old reviews. I could Google, say, "cinema-holic.livejournal.com" + "Seven Psychopaths," and a link to my review would reliably come right up. However Google works seems to have changed, though, and this has become an impossible way of finding old reviews—that sort of search just never brings up what I'm looking for.

Enter Letterboxd, basically to the rescue. I can now find all of my old movie reviews through that: all movie titles are easily searched, and then I can find the logged date of when I saw it, the record for which includes a link to the review. Perfect. This creates an ease and efficiency of cataloguing and collating my own reviews that I haven't had in ages.

I still have much left to do with my Letterboxd account, much more movie logging to do, as I want to include as much as I can from other sources, so I can see how many times I've seen a given movie, whether in the theater or not. I have a document of my entire watch history on Netflix that I intend to go through, and Prime Video has a similar resource. Eventually I may actually even flip through my old journals some more, as I discovered last night I used to watch movies really often even back then, and even went to the movie theater pretty frequently. The only disappointing aspect of all this is that the assholes at both Max (HBO) and at Huly do not provide a full watch history as a resource. That's very annoying, but I'm doing the best I can with what I've got to work with.

— पांच हजार पांच सौ बयालीस —

In completely unrelated news, we're enduring an unseasonable cold snap this weekend, starting today. It even snowed a little bit last night, with no real accumulation. It was about 20° on my commute to work this morning, which included the standard one-mile walk from my bus stop at 3rd & Pike downtown to the office. I was immensely grateful I had the wherewithal to wear a winter cap with flaps covering my ears; I'd have been miserably cold without it. Even my legs got uncomfortably cold, indicating I should have worn long underwear. I walked the whole way singing along to Madonna's Music album, though, which I have no listened to in a while, and that warmed me up a tad.

Above the waste, I had on four layers: long-sleeve T-shirt, under sweatshirt, under hoodie, under my pea coat. I was sufficiently warm from waist to neck. I'm tempted to say my balls practically shiveled up into my neck, except that if they'd done that they might have actually been warm.

— पांच हजार पांच सौ बयालीस —

[posted 12:29 pm]