Written by dorrk | 02 January 2017 |
For the past two years, I've been using online lists to steer myself toward must-see movies that I've either missed or forgotten. This year, all of that stops. For 11 months in 2017, I've relinquished the curating of my monthly watchlists over to my friends. In a mammoth movie trust exercise, I'm letting them pick all of the movies I'll be watching for PopGap and then falling backwards into the uncertainty of their judgement.
Every month (except for October, when I will indulge in my traditional "Octoblur" insanity), a different handful of presumably trustworthy film fanatics will combine to assign me twelve (or so) movies that are missing from my Flickchart. It's just like a potluck, but with movies instead of food, and I don't have to do any cooking, just eat eat eat with my fat hungry eyes.
January's movies were mostly chosen by Dan Kocher and Hannah Keefer, both of whom I know through the movie-ranking website Flickchart. Dan likes challenging European dramas. Hannah loves the theater. A year ago when I watched my top unseen movies from the charts of my fellow Flickcharters, I watched Dan's top two movies, Sergei M. Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II, and Hannah's #16, Mary Poppins (a.k.a. Ivan the Terrible, Part III). This month I've given them each five slots to fill.
Additionally, every month, I'll be watching one movie each from a couple of knuckleheads whose taste only intermittently aligns with my own, Nigel Druitt and Ty Tag. I didn't want to leave them out, but I also figured I couldn't handle a full month from either of them, so they get twice as many movies as everyone else, only spread out one per month.
As movies are added to this list, I'll add them to Letterboxd, here:
https://letterboxd.com/dorrk/list/popgap-24-2017-involuntary-watchlist/
As I watch this month's movies I'll post screenshots and comments on these services: