1000 Movies
I have been working on a piece that I will hopefully be able to share next month, so this month will be a bit shorter.
Watching
After my last newsletter, I watched my 1000th movie! (It was Seven Samurai, which I was well overdue to watch.) I get that number from what I’ve logged on Letterboxd, and since there are a lot of movies from my childhood that I’ve never logged on there I probably really hit 1000 a few months ago.
I love an arbitrary reason to make some charts, so let’s learn a little bit more about the movies in question (click to enlarge):
Understandably, more than half of all the movies I’ve seen have been made after the year I was born. I regret none of my choices, but I suppose I ought to do something about the fact that I’ve seen more movies from the 50s than I have from the 70s. I could have sworn I’ve seen more movies from the 60s than that, although at least the makeup of what I’ve seen is more diverse than the libraries of most streaming platforms:
Where in the world are all these movies from?
The vast majority (542) are American productions or co-productions, while nearly half that number (251) are French or French-financed and half of that (129) have UK backing. The heatmap is a little more informative when you remove those three:
I can’t say that the gaps in Africa are in any way understandable, given that I have prime access to the AFI Silver’s New African Film Festival every year but simply choose to go to other movies. One more thing for me to work on over the next 1000.
The directors with the greatest representation will be pretty unsurprising if you’ve been reading me for years:
I will note that Terrence Malick and Ingmar Bergman are sitting right outside this group with 9 films each. What interesting company I’m sure they’d provide for each other.
Finally, only 87 out of these 1000 movies were directed or co-directed by women. I’ve got work to do, as does the film industry in general.
Reading
Just before D.C. started shutting down because of COVID-19, the Uptown theater in Cleveland Park shuttered for entirely unrelated reasons. It was the only theater within walking distance of where I live, and because it was large enough that you never had to worry about a show selling out in advance, more than once I would drop in to see a movie on a whim. Usually I’d go for blockbusters I wouldn’t have bothered to pay full price to see at the Georgetown AMC, and while the Uptown (which was itself operated by AMC) never upgraded its seats to the more comfortable recliners, the upshot was cheaper ticket prices.
Anyway, R.I.P. Uptown. Beatrice Loayza wrote you a fine obituary.
The Uptown first opened its doors in 1936. Cain and Mabel, a song-and-dance comedy starring Clark Gable and Marion Davies, was the first film to play at what was originally a Warner Brothers-owned theater. It would undergo several transformations throughout the years to sustain the latest Hollywood innovations. In 1956, the venue introduced a new 70mm Todd-AO format, early high-definition single-camera widescreen. A few years later, the projection booth was restored to install the dramatically wider, three-projector Cinerama format, which upgraded the venue from a mere neighborhood haunt into something singular and glamorous and worthy of the uptown trek. Several world premieres of legendary films took place in its hallowed halls: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dances with Wolves, Jurassic Park. In the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, commercial theaters across the nation made the transition to digital, and the Uptown was no exception—it retired Cinerama in 2010. That year, Tron: Legacy was the first movie shown digitally at the historic venue.
Film composer Ennio Morricone passed away earlier this month. He had a truly astonishing career:
Mr. Morricone never learned to speak English, never left Rome to compose, and for years refused to fly anywhere, though he eventually flew all over the world to conduct orchestras, sometimes performing his own compositions. While he wrote extensively for Hollywood, he did not visit the United States until 2007, when, at 78, he made a monthlong tour, punctuated by festivals of his films.
And while I have not had time to read any of the longer obituaries yet, know that Olivia de Havilland passed away yesterday at 104—peacefully in her sleep. May we all be so blessed.