My 2024 Letterboxd highs and lows
The highest-rated-on-Letterboxd movie I watched this year was: Seven Samurai
You should watch Seven Samurai.
The lowest-rated-on-Letterboxd movie I watched this year was: Jack Frost (1997)
You should not watch this film under any circumstances.
The most-popular-on-Letterboxd movie I watched this year was: Dune Part 2
I quite enjoyed it. I had a lot of big thoughts about how interestingly it adapted Dune, a very difficult-to-adapt book with a deep streak of cynicism which doesn't and shouldn't play well with modern audiences. Herbert was a doomer, and a boring one, too. Villenueve is clearly a huge Dune Head who figured out how to embrace the source material while also changing it in interesting, successful ways. I was glad to have seen it, but I think I enjoyed it mostly as an exercise in adaptation. As that, it's really something tremendous.
The least-popular-on-Letterboxd movie I watched this year was: La Course en tête/Leading The Race
La Course en tête is a documentary about Eddie Merckx. I loved this movie because I really like watching old 1970s cycling documentaries. If you are interested in the history of cycling as a sport, in the history of broadcast sports storytelling, etc, I recommend watching this movie as well as A Sunday In Hell.
The newest movie I watched in 2024 was: Nosferatu.
I wrote about this one yesterday!
The oldest movie I watched in 2024 was: A Sixth Part of the World
A fascinating, definitely-pretty-propagandistic documentary about life in the USSR, filmed only shortly after it was founded. It focuses on the way that life is changing for people involved in agriculture and industry, with a lot of crazy animal husbandry footage and trade/export footage of boats loading up with grain and stuff. It's very interesting and sad to watch this movie and think about how hopeful its creators were... and what they might have predicted would happen to themselves and all the communities depicted in this documentary over the next hundred years. I super recommend checking this out.
The longest movie I watched was: Lawrence of Arabia
Damn! 228 minutes! Glad to have seen this one again - I get so much more out of it each time I watch it. I think the last time I saw it was nearly a decade ago.
The shortest movie I watched was: Meshes of the Afternoon
Glad to have finally seen this! Weird stuff. Sometimes I feel like I am watching a Film 101 curriculum these days. Is it edifying? Not sure. I did like this one, though.