Here we are.
2024.
In 2026.
Brandon has spent many, many hours watching films from 2024. Me? Not so much.
I reviewed my watching yesterday. Nine films.
Here's my Top Three list.
1) Eephus
2) Vulcanizadora
3) Cloud
The rest:
Bird
Friendship
Inside Out 2
Nosferatu
O, Canada
A Real Pain
Nine films. Three of them great. The rest from okay to bad. 33% isn't that bad of a hit rate for a year. I think it helps that I avoided pretty much every Hollywood film and have instead belatedly been checking out recommendations from Brandon. This seems like a good strategy moving forward. Let Brandon do the grunt work down in the gutter and wait for him to point me towards the gems.
I saw three of the films listed above in the theater. (Friendship, Nosferatu, A Real Pain). I didn't love any of those three, but I don't regret any of those theater trips. It's unfortunate that we rarely get great theatrical releases here in the Greater Binghamton Area. But I feel like I did a decent job picking titles to see out of all of the mainstream Hollywood junk that does play here.
Even so, I didn't like any of the films I saw in theaters. I liked the stuff I watched at home alone. Well, not all of it. O Canada Dry is so bad. Bird is just okay, and Inside Out 2 bored me.
But.
I loved Eephus, recommended to me by Brandon. Watched on MUBI.
I loved Vulcanizadora, playing on the Criterion Channel.
I loved Cloud, also playing on the Criterion Channel.
As has always been the case, if you want to see great films in the Binghamton area, you don't get a chance to see them in the theater. You see them at home on whatever screen(s) you've got. That was my experience. My three favorite films of the year were streamed to me. Good enough video quality. Good enough audio quality. Not so big TV screen. Nothing special. Watched alone at home.
But even if we got great movies here in the area, who could afford to go?
Brandon:
bummed that the theater experience costs so much fucking money.
Yeah, me too. I miss the Cinema Saver so much.
I took my entire family to see Labyrinth in January. Before the concession snacks (that I did buy), the ticket price for my family was $160. After all the spending was done, it was over $200.
Granted, my family is larger than most. But as Brandon notes, he paid $60 to bring his family to the movies. My parents took us to the movies often when I was a kid, at least twice a month. Even if the movies didn't completely suck now, I couldn't afford $60+ a couple of times a month. I definitely can't afford $200+ as anything more than an extravagant special occasion (because I love Labyrinth and wanted to see it on a big screen with my family). The cost of the Fathom movies pisses me off the most. Instead of being cheaper, the price is jacked up. I don't understand it.
Regal does do a good job with their Summer Matinee $1 series. I wish the films being screened were better, but it's still cool that they do this. My family went to see Paddington in Peru last month and are going to see Muppet Treasure Island this month. Of course, the matinee timing (which I love) means that I can't join them, but I'm glad that they get to go to a movie theater.
Eh, none of that is specifically about 2024, except maybe to confirm the fact that I rarely "go to the movies" anymore, a process that started in 2020 and continues now. Contra Lynch, I have watched "films" on my phone. I watch "films" on my tablet. I watch "films" on small TVs and larger TVs. I occasionally get to watch "films" digitally projected at work. When I do "go to the movies" two or three times in a year, I see more digital projection. What are we talking about when talk about films? Film is dead. Long live movies?
Listening to the Every Year Ever podcast and watching a lot of super-short silents from the 1890s and 1900s had me re-evaluating TikTok, which I still hate, but I created an account on July 18th and fooled around with it. Posting stupid videos is kinda fun (and reminded me of my brief past flirtation with Vine). But I still hate the app itself. As soon as you open it, it assaults you with moving images and sounds. You don't press play. You open the app and you get an immediate surprise video that you did not pick, something that the algorithm thinks you want. No, I don't want that. No, no thank you. I dislike animated gifs. I dislike any app that starts playing something I did not ask for and do not like when I open it.
Again, not about 2024 except that maybe I think that cultural attention has moved to alternate forms of motion pictures. What is a "movie" in 2024? Why do Letterboxd and IMDb allow me to log a short film from 1901 that I watch on YouTube on my phone but I can't log a short film from 2024 that I watch on TikTok on my phone in 2026? In another 100 years, will "film" historians talk about how many lost TikTok videos there are in the same way that we talk about lost silent films?
I don't know. One of my favorite films that I've watched this year is the documentary Listers (from 2025). Instead of allowing a studio to purchase the film and play it at festivals (and they had serious offers to do this), the filmmakers released the film for free on YouTube. It has an IMDb entry, but because it was released on the internet, it's listed as a video instead of a film, so Letterboxd has no entry on it. I tried submitting a new entry using the process for doing that, but it did not qualify to be listed there. I don't really understand any of this, how Listers is different from something like Connor O'Malley's Stand Up Solutions that was also released on the internet on YouTube and is listed on Letterboxd.
What I do understand is that the two movies mentioned above, Listers and Stand Up Solutions, are both available to me via the Internet, which is the exact same way that I watch "real" films on the Criterion Channel, via the internet.
The older I get, the grumpier I get (is this possible to get any grumpier asks the longtime blog readers) about films. I often recall a story I read about Manny Farber walking in and out of films in the middle of a film. Brandon's call for more Termite Art is one that I echo. What's most interesting to me these days are arresting images, sustained use of audio in new ways, etc., etc. Plot-heavy anything bores me. Repeated tropes bore me. I'll bring Ben into the conversation by echoing his praise of Until the End of the World, a nearly 5 hour film that earns its every minute, that is effortlessly Termite without a trace of White Elephant. Wenders' work is allusive, in conversation with other filmmakers, other painters, other musicians, but despite the vastness of its canvas and its incredible ambition, the large budget that he was able to secure for it, the film feels as deeply personal and meaningful as Potrykus working on a film with his friends in the woods of Michigan for $7,000.
Farber ended his essay with a comment on Kurosawa's Ikiru.
It sums up much of what a termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.
It reminds me of a section near the beginning of one of my favorite novels, The Devil is Dead.
We will not lie to you. This is a do-it-yourself thriller or nightmare. Its present order is only the way it comes in the box. Arrange it as you will.
Set off the devils and the monsters, the wonderful beauties and the foul murderers, the ships and the oceans of middle space, the corpses and the revenants, set them off in whatever apposition you wish. Glance quickly to discover whether you have not the mark on your own left wrist, barely under the skin. Build with these colored blocks your own dramas of love and death and degradation. Learn the true topography: the monstrous and wonderful archetypes are not inside you, not in your own unconsciousness; you are inside them, trapped, and howling to get out.
Build things with this as with an old structo set. Here is the Devil Himself with his several faces. Here is an ogress, and a mermaid, both of them passing as ordinary women to the sightless. Here is a body which you yourself may bury in the sand. Here is the mark of the false octopus that has either seven or nine tentacles. Here is the shock when the very dead man that you helped bury continues on his way as a very live man, and looks at you as though he knows something that you do not. Here is a suitcase with 36,000 pieces of very special paper in it. Here is Mr. X, and a left-footed killer who follows and follows. Here are those of a different flesh; and may you yourself not be of that different flesh?
Put the nightmare together. If you do not wake up screaming, you have not put it together well.
Lafferty's novel works (very well) from front to back, read like any other novel, but it is also astoundingly easy and delightful to pick it up and go to any chapter, any paragraph, any sentence, and just enjoy the prose, enjoy the language at use. In this way, in its success as a "do-it-yourself thriller", it can be repeatedly re-read and offer new delights.
I only bring this up because, following Farber, I think that this is true of the best films. Eephus could be played on repeat, could be watched out of order, could be watched backwards, and it would still be as good. The same is true of Vulcanizadora (though it is much more emotionally demanding). The same is true of the 5 hours of Until the End of the World.
Chesterton once wrote an essay in defense of "the ephemeral" in which he chastises "the people who take literature seriously."
It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.
Farber:
Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.
The problem with so much White Elephant Art, whether it's a Truffaut film (Farber is vicious!) or something like Godzilla vs. Kong (which takes itself so seriously in its appeal to broad American audiences) or formula fantasy fiction from the 80s (sorry, that's another conversation), is that they are too "solemn" in what they're attempting to do (yes, even when they're attempting humor).
Farber:
The common denominator of these laborious ploys is, actually, the need of the director and writer to overfamiliarize the audience with the picture it's watching: to blow up every situation and character like an affable inner tube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion.
In 2026, I'm more interested in Termite Art than ever before. All I care about are accomplishments that are taken so lightly that they can be forgotten about. These movies that we love matter in the same way that a backyard flower matters. They are beautiful and they will be forgotten. All is expendable. I'm interested in what can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin, those bright images and perfect sentences. Those are the sort of books I want to read. Those are the movies I want to watch. It's the way I want to live my life.
Is this still about 2024? Was it ever about 2024? I don't know.
My favorite part of Brandon's post is that The Day the Earth Blew Up made it on the Top Ten list and on the Honorable Mentions list. :-)
Yesterday, after reading Brandon's post, I discovered that YHPL had a copy of The Day the Earth Blew Up in its children's DVD collection. I borrowed it yesterday and am looking forward to watching it with the kids later today. That's how I'll end this post. With hope and anticipation.