Films

My Mexican Bretzel (2019)
[#250 in 100 Films in a Year 2020]
+ the Q&A that followed the film on AMPLIFY!, which you can also watch on YouTube.

Plus, I finally got round to watching some of the festival's shorts programmes. Across these I watched 26 short films today, so I'll list the programmes rather than every individual short...

Cornwall Film Festival South West Regional Shorts
[#249a–k in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

Cornwall Film Festival International Shorts
[#249l–s in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

New Voices Shorts
[#249t–z in 100 Films in a Year 2020]

this week on 100 Films

2 new reviews were published to 100 Films in a Year this week...


The IMDb New Filmmaker Award 2020

Why would you watch an awards show after its happened? Well, in this case, you get to hear the judges’ musings on what makes a good film — and when those judges are BAFTA-nominated director Coky Giedroyc, Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning producer Amanda Posey, and the CEO of IMDb, Col Needham, those are opinions worth listening to. Even better, you get to watch the five nominated shorts in full, and they’re good a bunch. But don’t just take my word for it: take my, er, word for it, in the form of these reviews…

Read more here.


Some Beasts (2019)

Sometimes, one thing can ruin an entire movie. Depending on how harsh a critic you are, I’d say that’s quite rare. Unless it’s threaded throughout the entire film (like, say, a terrible lead performance, or a consistently poor cinematography decision), a small constituent part would have to be truly horrendous to take the entire rest of the movie down with it. Some Beasts is one of those films. The problem arrives in the final 20 minutes, which makes it a massive plot spoiler. Out of some lingering respect for storytellers, I provide this spoiler warning; others would argue content of this nature doesn’t deserve such courtesy.

Read more here.


More next Sunday.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

I went a bit crazy with orders from the US recently (thanks to Barnes & Noble's Criterion sale being price-matched by Amazon.com), and that's bearing fruit now as they start to arrive. Every title is a Blu-ray, but it's a real mix of upgrade types (including DVD-to-BD, DVD-to-4K, BD-to-4K, BD-to-BD, and BD-but-I'm-keeping-the-DVD-too), as well as plain ol' new acquisitions. Consequently, the net title increase doesn't tell the whole story -- though even that's higher than normal. I really need to learn some self control...

Number of titles in collection: 2,478 [up 9]
Of which DVDs: 1,082 [down 3]
Of which Blu-rays: 1,396 [up 12]
— of which Ultra HD Blu-rays: 87 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 6,388 [up 14]
Number of films: 2,843 [up 10]
Number of additional cuts: 197 [up 3]
Number of TV episodes: 8,982 [no change]
Number of short films: 771 [no change]

See you next week, faithful reader.