Data dump from my year watching movies. I (re)started learning Japanese this year and that’s heavily reflected in my most watched actors and directors. My Is-That-Even-Possible? goal for 2026 is to watch more films in Japanese than English.

2020: Ammonite, Promising Young Woman 2021: Licorice Pizza, Spencer 2022: Bones and All, Top Gun: Maverick 2023: Poor Things, Suzume 2024: Civil War, Red Rooms 2025: One Battle After Another, It Was Just An Accident

My 6yo niece, who skipped Zootopia 2 because the snake was too scary, wants to come see Anaconda.

Why didn’t anyone warn me that Jimmy C’s multi-framerate bullshit was on the 2D version, too? The whole movie looks like a video game running badly.

8 minutes before this Avatar session on opening weekend and uh…. We are the only people here.

Wait. The Housemaid is 131 minutes long?

What a great surprise this was! I’ve been talking all year about what a great year it’s been for horror and this falls beautifully into that conversation. I had no idea what I getting into and I loved it. Don’t sleep on this one!

I just don’t understand how New Outlook keeps getting worse. It seems like every day a new feature stops working. I haven’t been able to save emails for weeks. Worked around it by drag-dropping to desktop and now THAT doesn’t work most of the time either! BASIC FEATURES ARE BROKEN.

Playing Doom Eternal and Doom: The Dark Ages back to back shows a pretty stark difference. Eternal seems to be constantly finding the most annoying thing for an enemy to do. Dark Ages just always wants the player to be doing the coolest possible thing. One of these games is great.

How’s that for a double-feature?

This is ~98% complete. There’s one cupboard left to check. I’ve seen 43% of these movies which is honestly better than I expected. Won’t be buying any more duplicates, and now I have a good idea what’s on the shelf that I still need to check out. boxd.it/Pe5wa

So this is why I’ve spent most of my weekend starting to put together a list of every single movie I own. This wasn’t even the only duplicate in last week’s order!

Delivered a few minutes ago. Looks like it went under a lawnmower on the way here.

Two of my last three parcels have, separately, by different companies, on different days, been delivered to the wrong house. How does this happen twice in a week? Weirdly it was two volumes of the same comic book.

Rarest feature film i've seen by decade: 20s: B/B 10s: Final Whistle 00s: Bondi Tsunami 90s: Return Home 80s: Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train 70s: Once Upon a Time in the East 60s: Capricious Summer 50s: Diplomatic Courier 40s: The Stolen Border 30s: Adventure in Sahara 20s: The Beloved Rogue

I hadn’t realised I was coming up to 4,000 logged on Letterboxd. It doesn’t make sense to me that around two thirds of the films I’ve ever seen have been since I graduated from university. That honestly still feels pretty recent. But that’s about when I started logging them, so I guess it’s right.

Doctor I trust more than RFK Junior

HIGHEST 2 LOWEST (2025) Streaming Now Apple TV+ #Highest2Lowest

Drove 5+ hours each way this weekend to see this year’s Palme winner It Was Just an Accident in Tamworth and, honestly? Worth it. Best thing I’ve seen all year. My nephew came along to his first ever festival session and also enjoyed it.

Delivered today. Backed on Kickstarter, but I hadn’t realised it was done and ready to ship! I really loved Trust, and really need to dig deeper into his films.

Enough people said they wanted to see the final slide deck, so I took the time to put it on my non-teacher github so I could share it. I didn't end up getting in trouble. I ended up being encouraged by a colleague to share it with my dept chair, and he liked it authorblues.github.io/lecture-slid...

This one hurts. After loving his shows for many years, I met David Stratton through his classes in Sydney. The very first night I nervously spoke to him. He realised we lived near each other and immediately offered me a ride home. This grew into a cherished friendship. 1/x

The time between me learning about Radiance’s upcoming Nagisa Oshima boxset and me ordering it was about 40 seconds.

There are too many movies I want to see opening here this weekend and I decided the only sensible thing to do was to see all of them at once. For some reason my 18yo nephew has agreed to come along. Wish him luck!

Estimated delivery on my Switch 2 stuff looks like tomorrow. I knew when ordering I wasn’t likely to get it launch day. Pro controller shipped later so might be Tuesday with the public holiday coming. Close enough!

There’s a moment in Richard Ayoade’s film The Double where an alarm goes off unexpectedly and I literally laughed so hard I blacked out. I woke up and it took about a minute to realise I was still in the cinema.

First VHS: Return of the Jedi First VCD: Tomb Raider First DVD: Battle Royale First HDDVD: King Kong First Bluray: Casino Royale First 4K: Life of Pi

Pretty stoked about there being a new Oliver Laxe film in the Cannes Competition! Loved Mimosas and Fire Will Come. Kelly Reichardt, too!

Well, I bought the new thing. Seems like I had absolutely no problem getting a Switch 2 for launch. That new Mario Kart game looks great, and I actively dislike Mario Kart. Donkey Kong shortly after launch looks good too.

I’M STILL HERE (2024) Streaming Now PVOD (Apple, Amazon, Fandango at Home, etc.) #ImStillHere

Five favourite genres: 1: George Clooney is very good at his job. 2: Someone is lonely in space. 3: A lovingly-crafted skillset is no longer useful. 4: Disproportionate sacrifice. 5: Matt Damon has purchased a zoo.

Heading out to see Mickey 17 while I can. I suspect flooding will block roads later in the week.

A Complete Unknown is my favourite of the BP nominees, with Anora and The Substance very close behind. I’m predicting Anora, though I can imagine Conclave getting in and making everyone mad.

I guess I talked about the Oscar nominations enough to pique my nephew’s interest. At his request we’re watching the ceremony today which I may otherwise have just skipped again. I think he’s mostly excited by the possibility of Timmy winning? I wouldn’t be mad.

From the New Yorker

The NYT asked me to write an op-ed on Musk and the Treasury and then took a pass. I hope it will still get read.

Uploaded two YouTube videos in a row with no audio and had to discover it myself because nobody’s watching to tell me about it. Not great! :)

I’ve been experimenting with YouTube. No idea if there’s an audience for this sort of thing but I’m having fun.

I’ve been experimenting with YouTube. No idea if there’s an audience for this sort of thing but I’m having fun.

I expected to enjoy A Complete Unknown, but could not have guessed it’d be one of my favourite movies of the last year. Wisely minimises the biopic-ing and just lets the music take centre stage. And what music it is. Found myself tearing up almost every time he sang. I LOVED this movie.

I liked Wolf Man more than most people did, but it’s still not as good as either Invisible Man or the previous Wolf Man film. (Which I also liked more than most people did.)

One for the box-quote hall of fame.

Any idea how I can turn this creepy garbage off in Messenger?

I understand why great filmmakers turn to streamers to get films and shows made, but it’ll never not be frustrating to see a titan like Hirokazu Koreeda have a new series that is just dumped on Netflix to near zero marketing or fanfare. They deserve better! Available now youtu.be/-FgZ7-f-iZ4?...

So far in 2025 I’ve been pushing really hard on 2024 catch-up. Still quite a few left on my list.

hoping it wins 🙏

The thing is there are just a lot of movies

I think I’m done with this game, but I would pay good money to see that film.