Midweek Update: Movie Resolutions

Viewing goals for the year ahead.

Happy New Year! I hope 2023 is a great one for you and yours.

As usual, I’ve loaded up on resolutions since I find that I tend to keep them as long as I lay out a path to accomplishing them, keep them fairly specific, and remind myself to check on my progress. I have assorted goals for 2023, but among them are movie resolutions, which were inspired by ScreenCrush editor and critic Matt Singer. While I typically have broad goals of trying to watch as many movies as possible and trying to squeeze in streaming stuff before it vanishes from its respective service, I’ve decided to get a bit more focused by zeroing in on a few directors whose work I want to revisit and complete.

In addition to my overarching movie goals for 2023 (watch at least 400 movies, knock my IMDb Watchlist down from 353 films to 300 films), I also want to watch specific movies from these directors:

Martin Scorsese will gift us with a new feature this year with his adaptation of David Grann’s true crime novel Killers of the Flower Moon. While Scorsese’s filmography is too vast to take on in its entirety (sorry folks, but I am not watching Vinyl), I do find it manageable to focus solely on his features. (I also tossed in The Last Waltz because even though it’s a documentary, it’s too interesting to pass by.) Here’s what I’m planning to watch and re-watch this year for Scorsese. Films I’ve never seen are marked in bold.

• Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967)

• Mean Streets (1973)

• Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

• The Last Waltz (1978)

• Raging Bull (1980)

• After Hours (1982)

• The Color of Money (1986)

• Goodfellas (1990)

• Cape Fear (1991)

• Casino (1995)

• Kundun (1997)

• Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

• The Aviator (2004)

• The Departed (2006)

Moving on, David Lynch has always loomed large, even though his stuff is sometimes hard for me to wrap my mind around. Still, he’s an essential filmmaker and I feel out of the conversation, especially since I’ve never watched Twin Peaks (I know it’s a TV show, but these are my resolutions, so I’m flexing them where I feel appropriate). Here are the Lynch works I want to watch this year:

Laura Harring and Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive | Image via Universal Pictures

• Twin Peaks

  • Original Series (1990-91)

  • Fire Walk with Me (1992)

  • The Return (2017)

• The Straight Story (1999)

• Mulholland Drive (2001)

• Inland Empire (2006)

Then there’s Michael Mann, whose take on masculinity consistently fascinates me. He tells stories about guys who are deeply broken and yet move through the world with some semblance of authority, one that typically breaks any hopes of domesticity they may have. But then there are also films like Last of the Mohicans and Ali that don't fit neatly into that description. In 2023, I’ll be watching:

• Manhunter (1986)

• The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

• Heat (I saw this one fairly recently, but then they released a new 4K and I am a sucker) (1995)

• The Insider (1999)

• Ali (2001)

• Collateral (2004)

• Miami Vice (2006)

• Public Enemies (2009)

• Blackhat (2015)

We’re also due to get a new Hayao Miyazaki movie this year, and after swinging by the Miyazaki exhibit at the Academy Museum last April, I’ve been eager to return to his movies and see the couple I’ve never watched before:

• The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

• Castle in the Sky (1986)

• My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

• Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

• Porco Rosso (1992)

• Princess Mononoke (1997)

• Spirited Away (2001)

• Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

• Ponyo (2008)

• The Wind Rises (2013)

Because I’m always interested in what other folks are watching, I’m making use of Substack’s chat feature for the first time—so chime in with your movie resolutions for 2023 if you have any. If you’d like to keep up with my progress, be sure to follow me on Letterboxd.

What I’m Watching

Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby in Our Flag Means Death | Image via Warner Bros. Discovery

Over the last week of 2022, I finally wrapped up a couple TV shows I’d been dragging my feet on. My wife and I finished watching the first season of Our Flag Means Death, and while it didn’t pull us along (we started watching around May and took long breaks), we enjoyed every episode. It’s an immensely charming rom-com set in the world of famous pirates, and every episode works. After the season finale, we chided ourselves for not finishing the show sooner, and we’re excited to follow it week-to-week when it returns later this year.

I have more mixed feelings on Season 1 of The Sandman. I felt like the first half of the season works wonderfully as does the the bridge episode, “The Sound of Her Wings.” Where the show falters is also where the book struggles in its second volume, “The Doll’s House,” which is visually stunning on the page, but narratively a bit of a slog. The concepts of “dream vortexes” and the serial killer convention just read as super-dumb and convoluted, and the Netflix adaptation doesn’t do them much better. Thankfully, the season doesn’t end on a sour note as the 11th episode, “Dream of a Thousand Cats/Calliope,” is the show at its finest.

Overall, there’s enough strong work to make Sandman worth continuing, especially since I think Tom Sturridge is crushing it in the title role. It also helps that the source material gets stronger as it goes along as well.

Elsewhere in TV land, I’m aiming to watch all five episodes of Chernobyl before The Last of Us premieres on January 15th because apparently I can’t get enough of Craig Mazin’s dark HBO dramas.

What I’m Reading

An adaptation of The Dark Tower is finally in the right hands. After the disappointing 2017 movie, there was an attempt at a TV series, but it didn’t get picked up. Now the rights are with director Mike Flanagan, a filmmaker who has repeatedly shown himself to understand not only emotionally-based horror, but a knack for adapting Stephen King (he’s already tackled Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep). If there was ever a time to try and read King’s magnum opus, this would be it. I started reading The Gunslinger, but I’m glad that others have cautioned me that the books don’t really pick up until the second volume, The Drawing of the Three.

For shorter reads, here’s what I recommend:

‘Scorsese threw a desk over and ran out the room’: The tortured making of Gangs of New York, 20 years on by Tom Fordy [The Independent] - I recently rewatched Gangs of New York for the first time since it came out, and while many of my issues still remain (mainly that there’s too much story crammed into the film’s runtime and that DiCaprio isn’t yet a strong enough actor to anchor the film), this was a fun read that helps explain why the film came out the way that it did.

The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It. by Sarah Andersen [The New York Times] - Sarah Andersen’s webcomic, Sarah Scribbles, is one of my favorite things. I faithfully buy every collection she releases because her comics speak to me about feeling like an introverted weirdo and how that’s okay. This thoughtful op-ed from Andersen raises serious issues about how automation is coming for creatives. It won’t be tomorrow or maybe even next year, but if you’ve got A.I. generating art and words, it won’t be long until capital sees a cheap route to mass production of content. I don’t have a solution to this problem, but I’m glad Andersen is sounding the alarm.

Behind the Fantasy of the 1997 Movie Cop Land by Bilge Ebiri [Vulture] - I feel like Cop Land is one of the best movies of the 90s that most folks haven’t seen. It has an amazing cast (on top of big stars like Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, the cast happens to include a bunch of future Sopranos actors) and its social commentary about police brutality and corruption remains sadly relevant. Sadly, it sunk like a stone at the box office, caught between audiences who expected Stallone in action-mode and critics who felt like Stallone was slumming it for an Oscar (it didn’t help that Miramax didn’t seem to know how to sell the picture). In retrospect, it’s not only one of James Mangold’s best movies, but it has arguably Stallone’s best performances. Watch the film (currently streaming on HBO Max) and then read this interview with Mangold.

Substack Recommendation

Ashley Clark is the Curatorial director for Criterion, so yeah, I care about what he has to say! He’s already a great follow on Twitter, so it wasn’t much of a leap to subscribe to his Substack.

What I’m Hearing

A couple years ago, I resolved to listen to every album on Rolling Stone’s The 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time. Now I’m going to work my way through their 500 Best Songs of All-Time list, which they published in September 2021. If you care to join me, here’s the Spotify playlist I’m using:

What I’m Playing

I’m very slowly making my way through God of War: Ragnarok. Every time I pick it up, I love it and want to play more, but the problem is, as you can probably surmise, is I’m trying to do a lot of other things as well. But I intend to finish it by the end of the month, which seems doable.