I saw Synecdoche, New York again. I saw it once before in 2015 and called it my favorite movie. Starting in my early teens, my answer has been Ratatouille (most of the time) or Synecdoche (a year).
I still don’t have a better answer than those movies. I’m kind of adrift. I’m looking for something to make me feel the way I felt when I first saw Ratatouille, or when I kept coming back to it.
part of the problem is we’re looking at 70 years of massive factors in favor of cars (public and private), and look at the outcome and decide the world is built around cars. we built it (mostly the US) around cars and we can rebuild it around mass transit and more local stuff. look at every other country. they are way denser because they pursued policies that made it that way.
In March 2020, I noticed my movie watchlist had grown to an unmanageable 179 movies. I calculated that it would take over 12 days of nonstop watching to see everything. I have watched it grow and grow over the years. It wasn’t serving any purpose, so I examined what I want out of a watchlist and how I want to use it.
What is a watchlist? Some of this will sound basic, but I found that I was subconsciously making assumptions that fall apart under scrutiny.
Before computers got cheap, movies had to use physical effects. Filmmakers had to think about how their movies would look before filming was over. Completely changing the aesthetic with a new green-screen background was not possible. Do-overs were known as re-shoots, and people physically built sets that reinforced the themes of the film. One movie used every one of these tricks while lightly stepping into the CGI era: 1997’s Batman & Robin.
Alone in the Wilderness is the movie of our time. Even though it was filmed and largely written in 1968, and edited in 2003, it speaks to the isolation of the coronavirus era. I want nothing more than to get the fuck out of my town, where merely walking down the sidewalk puts me in danger from unmasked assholes. I’m leaving soon, but not soon enough.
Dick Proenneke was able to leave.