What value is there in examining the Movies of My Lifetime?
Plus is there any such thing as an Oscar snub?
So that was a weird digression last week, huh? The Nostalgia doesn’t pop up often, but I hope you enjoy the occasional visit. If you read the version you got in your email, there were a few weird typos, but I’ve fixed them for the archived version. Sorry about that!
As I mentioned in that piece, I like to start projects. One of the things I’ve tried several times here is to create some sort of ongoing series about important or significant or special films. I tried it at HitFix with The Motion-Captured Must-See List, and I’ve been trying it here with The Hip Pocket. I think anyone who writes about movies for any period starts thinking at some point about the canon and what that means. When I was young, I thought there were movies that were universally agreed upon and that you could definitively say “This is good” or “This is bad,” but the longer I have spent making films and writing about them, the less true I think that is.
Ultimately, we are all just discussing our taste. We are shaped by a thousand different influences, and what we love and what we hate is often a fluid thing based on who we are at any given moment. Films and filmmakers I did not care for at all when I was first exposed to them now stand among my favorites and films I thought I would hold dear forever have ended up almost completely forgotten by me. One of the reasons I write about film is to sort through my own feelings about these films and the way those feelings have evolved and changed over time. Another reason is to try to make sense of the world in which these films were made and released. Understanding everything around the release of a film is just as important as the film, and one of the jobs of a film critic is to provide that context.
When I write about films that were released during my time as a filmgoer, I can provide a radically different context than I can when I am talking about a film made before I was an active filmgoer. I think every critic has certain strengths or interests, but in general, our greatest value comes from writing about a film scene in which we were active participants. When I am writing about the films that were released during my lifetime, I am the context that I am offering you. I certainly love and appreciate thousands of films that were made before I was alive, but my greatest authority comes when I’m talking about films that were released while I was an engaged and enthusiastic film fan.
For example, when I started ‘80s All Over with Scott Weinberg, we discussed a number of other ideas first. We initially thought about doing the show as if it were actually the 1980s, but the more we talked about it, the more we realized how much value there was in looking at the films from two perspectives. Yes, we talked about how it felt to see the films when they first came out, but we also talked about how the films have aged and what influence, good or bad, they’ve had since their release. When I decided to restart the project as a newsletter, it was because I wanted to write about the decade that I felt defined me as a film fan. I was nine years old when the decade began and nineteen when it ended, and those ten years were perhaps the most important for me learning about my own likes and dislikes and for sheer influence on me. I love the work I’m doing on the ’80s newsletter. It is pushing me in a variety of ways as a writer and I’m enjoying it enormously.
I was playing around on Letterboxd last year and decided to make some lists of my favorite films from every year I’ve been alive. I picked an arbitrary number… thirty films per year. That feels like it gives you a real snapshot of a year. You get some of everything, and you can enjoy all of your eccentric favorites if you want to, and it was a great exercise for me during a very stressful holiday period. I realized, though, that there are so many great films that I’ve never written about, and being a working film critic for new releases often feels like panning for gold in a whooooooole lot of mud. It can wear down your affection for the entire art form. One of the ways you can rekindle that love is by writing about the movies you adore, the movies that have shaped you. It’s often surprising which films we’ve never written about considering the influence they have on us, and I realized I want to fix that.
So this year, I’m going to start another long-term thing that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to really finish, but that will be great fun to try to do. I’m going to write about my favorite films from my lifetime, starting with 1970. I’m going to use those Letterboxd lists I created, so if you’re really curious, you can look at my lists and see what films I’ll be discussing, or you can just wait and read the pieces here. Each article I publish, I’ll include five films, so each year should take six articles to cover fully. So many of these are foundational, important pieces of cinema that I have never had any reason to review directly, and I am excited to be able to finally tackle some of these films.
Obviously, when I get to the ‘80s, I’ll be doing some overlap with the newsletter, but we’ll be on to the ‘90s before the ‘80s newsletter is anywhere near finished. It’s going to be a great chance to cover a lot of different artistic ground, and unlike the ‘80s newsletter, I’m not dreading any of these revisits. We’re talking about 30 great movies from every year. It’s an embarrassment of riches. I get why Roger Ebert created his The Great Movies series. It was for him as much as it was for any of his readers. It feels restorative to be able to focus on writing about these things that have shaped you, in many cases for the first time ever.
This is never going to be the primary point of the newsletter, the exclusive focus of what I do here. I want to cover a lot of ground this year. Next week, I’ve got a whole grab-bag of new stuff to talk about, including a book by Ed Zwick, some recent 4K releases, and more, and the week after that, I’ve got the first Pierce Brosnan entry in the James Bond Declassified series. So clearly, I’m going to keep mixing it up here. But in three weeks, I’ll be back with the first entry in the Movies Of My Lifetime series, covering El Topo, Five Easy Pieces, The Bird with Crystal Plumage, The Conformist, and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H.
I am wildly excited about that, and I hope you guys enjoy it.
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