JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

After watching the remake of Fame I thought, That’s it, that has to be the worst movie I’ve seen all year. I’ve seen movies that should be condemned as violations of the Geneva Convention, but Fame has to be the nadir: a movie about striving for excellence that really celebrates mediocrity.

So I consulted my list. In January I said I’d watch a movie a day, and started recording the titles and the names of the directors. That didn’t work out: amazingly, there are times when one just doesn’t feel like watching a movie. As of Wednesday, October 7, there were 191 movies on my list, or about 0.67 movie a day. The stat would be higher if I counted each time I went to see a movie, but a title can only be listed once. However, my favorite movies—the ones I watch over and over again—can appear on the list once a year.

Of the total of 191, I saw 33 at the cinema and 158 on dvd or downloads. 173 were seen for the first time, and 18 were favorites that I watch every year. These include To Be Or Not To Be and Ninotchka by Lubitsch, movies starring Cary Grant (I plan to see all of them, I even saw the one about the dancing caterpillar), Preston Sturges’s killer trio Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Lady Eve, Manhattan and The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen’s loveliest movie), and the moral tales of Eric Rohmer, because I like movies in which people are yakking yakking yakking and nothing seems to be happening and then you realize something was happening all along.

Cary Grant hands Joan Fontaine a glass of milk that may contain poison in a scene from Suspicion by Alfred Hitchcock. In a later Hitchcock-Grant collaboration Notorious, it’s Ingrid Bergman who gets the milk laced with poison.

The breakdown by language spoken in the film: English – 131, French – 24, Tagalog – 16, Italian – 7, Others – 13.

It’s not easy deciding which movies were the best, but I can name the ones I hated. Fame – Execrable. Transformers 2 – Made so much worse by the fact that I enjoyed 1. Terminator Salvation – Turns out Christian Bale’s rant during the shoot was the best thing about it. The remake of Brideshead Revisited starring Matthew Goode – Evelyn Waugh should rise from the grave and slap everyone involved in the production. The Reader – Exculpates murderer because she learns to read. Last Year At Marienbad – Alain Resnais movies make me violent, I don’t know why.