— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सैंतालीस —
My weekend was kind of all-movies, all the time—and then a one-hour pivot to a TV show last night. I watched four movies between Friday and Sunday, or maybe more like four and a quarter movies. Of the four I watched in their entirty, Laney joined me for three of them.
Friday night was the one movie I took myself to see, after bussing home for a quick dinner and then bussing right back down to Seattle Center, to see the movie at SIFF Film Center:
Orlando: My Political Biography, an extremely high-concept quasi-documentary about trans people, all of them contextualized as endless versions of the title character in Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel
Orlando: A Political Biography. I thought it was . . . fine. A little challenging in its tediousness at times. It might have been helpful to have some trans people to talk to about it, see what their average reaction to it was. Critics, for their part, are falling over themselves to praise it, but the movie's esoteric approach just didn't always do it for me. Maybe one of these days I should read that Virginia Woolf novel, though.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सैंतालीस —
Saturday was a Braeburn Condos Theater Double Feature with Laney: we watched the 1971 film
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and the 2005 film
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, back to back. I don't think I had ever done that before, and it was certainly an interesting experience. I love both movies, and have a slight preference for the latter, just because of its distinctly Tim Burton-esque visual style. I also love Johnny Depp's performance, which is very different from Gene Wilder's performance in 1971, which was itself fantastic. As far as I'm concerned, people who declare the 2005 film to be "dogshit" (a word used by one Letterboxd member) in comparison need to get a life. There's no reason these two films can't co-exist, because—guess what—
they literally do.
I think one thing Laney and I would absolutely agree on is that both films are far superior to last year's
Wonka, which we all felt was kind of . . .
blah.
Speaking of Letterboxd, another task I finished: all of my scheduled at-home movie nights and double features, which had been added to my Google Calendar as far back as 2006, are now logged on Letterboxd. I have logged over 3,200 films now, and by and large it's a pretty accurate overview of all the films I've watched or rewatched, at least since 2006—exclusding any history of what I watched on HBO or Hulu, both of which frustratingly offer no such feature.
My Letterboxd Project is now basically done, from now on mostly just to be maintained. I may yet go through old journals to log movies I saw when I was younger, but I'm not prioritizing that right now. Instead, I've actually embarked on something new: a complete log of all the movies Laney and I have watched together. We've had too many instances of forgetting we already watched a movie together before, and I think having this as a reference will be helpful. I already have a Word document log of recently completed double features and a ton we have on our list to get to. This new document is a Excel spreadsheet, and I will eventually transfer the data in the Word document to a second tab on the Excel sheet, for future double features to get to.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सैंतालीस —
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सैंतालीस —
So that brings us to yesterday, when Laney and I had to bus together to SIFF Cinema at the Uptown—which we had just done two weeks prior for
American Fiction—to see
The Zone of Interest, an excellent film that will stay with both of us for a long time.
This now makes
three films that are technically 2023 films, and, had they actually opened locally before the end of the year, very likely would have made it on my top 10 for the year.
American Fiction is somewhat borderline as far as that goes, but it seems very likely that both
All of Us Strangers and
The Zone of Interest will be on my top 10 for 2024. And we're only about three quarters of the way through the first month of the year. I really hate this practice of national release strategies.
A surprising lot of people were going to see this movie. We got to the box office about ten minutes before showtime, and there must have been fifteen people waiting in line. I hadn't see a line like that at the Uptown, excepting SIFF screenings, since before the pandemic. It took a little while to make it to the one perso working the box office, and by then the trailers were nearly done. We barely had time for Laney to use the bathroom and for me to get some popcorn.
After the movie, Laney wanted to walk for a bit, provided the rain had let up. It was still sprinkling, so we still both used our umbrellas, but we chatted about the movie while walking through Seattle Center, then heading down to 3rd Avenue where we waited for maybe ten or twelve minutes for a #2 to take us the rest of the way home.
Once I was home, I wrote the review, then had my dinner, and this was where the one-quarter of a movie came in: I started watching the HBO documentary
Time Bomb Y2K on my computer while I was in the kitchen. The film isn't quite what I was expecting, as it seems to cosist exclusively of footage from the time, rather than anyone contemporary looking back on it all. I still found it a fascinating window into the past—my mom had even convinced me to have $500 in cash in case the world shut down when the clock struck January 1, 2000, which I stashed beneath my silverwear drawer for several months—and intend to finish it at some point.
But, I got interrupted by a phone call from Gabriel, who I then spoke with for about an hour. He and Lea had just seen
Poor Things over the weekend, and he was really eager to talk about it. We also talked a little bit about
The Zone of Interest.
That took up the majority of the phone call, which, according to my iPhone, lasted 61 minutes.
Once that was done, though, I tried watching more of the documentary, only for Shobhit to get home moments after that. He dished up his own dinner and then we watched last night's episode of
True Detective: Night Country.
— पाँच हजार पाँच सौ सैंतालीस —
[posted 12:32 pm]
