Oh, once again a topic that is of no interest to anyone outside of myself. Fun.

First, movies end up on my watchlist if I feel I might need to do some work to see them. Big Hollywood movies never do, and neither do movies I can just watch on the streaming services I use (which are limited to free ones and MUBI, although I’ve been keeping an eye on MUBI since it was bought out, so we’ll see). These are movies that I’m not sure if they’ll get a proper release near me or, for older ones, they are not readily available to me.

I’m a weird movie watcher in the sense that I’m at the same time discerning and I watch a lot of movies, so I also need to churn through a lot of stuff, which means that I can’t really be that discerning. At the same time, huge parts of my watchlist are pretty static. Some movies have been there for years, because they are only available to me as very expensive used physical copies.

But here are the rules on how movies actually get there:

1) If it’s from a country I haven’t seen a movie from, I’ll add it. I want to expand my horizons regarding movies and this is a way to do it.

2) If a movie is from a country where it needs some amount of velocity to break into my consciousness, I’ll add it. What I mean by this is that Hollywood movies will often have enough marketing power behind them that I will be aware of them. But if a movie from, let’s say, Hungary reaches me, there must have been a reason for it. Clearly there’s a reason why people pay attention. This is more organic.

3) If critics love it, but audiences hate it. I’ve talked about this recently, but to explain myself a bit more, critics often have perspectives audience doesn’t. After you’ve seen five thousand movies (the number I’m around), you don’t want movie number 5001 to be just the same thing in a bit different makeup. You want something different. Critics are often in this position. Sure, some of them try to be “neutral” (which doesn’t work) or try to gain an audience by trying to cause controversy, but mostly they are just people who love movies and want to see them evolve as an artform. And while my movie criticism is purely from an amateur point of view, I still feel the same way about it.

4) If a book or a video essay or similar mentions a movie as an example of a specific thing. Like, this is a movie with good queer presentation. Okay, I’ll add it. Or this is a movie that’s good example of how editing can be used to tell a story in this specific way. Okay, I’ll add it.

5) If a director I like has an upcoming movie. Yorgos Lanthimos has kind of graduated into the Hollywood bracket, so his work is no longer necessary, but people like Peter Strickland or Celine Sciamma still require a bit of work to follow.

Well, honestly, there’s 73 on my IMDb watchlist currently. I have no memory of how most of them ended up there. I can only assume some of them are there because someone just recommended them to me or they were on a best-of list somewhere or they just looked like fun. I would have thought that there would be movies from my early days of IMDb still there, but the first movie on the list is Labyrinth of Cinema from 2019. I would have guessed it got there because of rule 3, but apparently audiences have warmed up to it, and it does appear that I do manage to churn though the movies faster than I would have thought.