The Second Annual TDYLFie Awards

It's a major award!

The end of the year is just around the corner, which means it’s time for a bunch of lazy journalists to do their year-end best and worst lists of 2011. But why should they have all the fun? I’m lazy too. And I already established an award for this last year–the TDYLFie. I’m going to capitalize on that laziness for an easy article. But first, let’s establish some scope. I don’t see nearly enough new releases to make any sort of reasonable “Best/Worst of 2011” list. Thus, this list will be comprised of movies that I’ve seen in 2011, which will run the gamut from era to era, genre to genre, and on and on. In reality, this is more of a list about my own experience watching movies in 2011 than it is about anything that was released in 2011. Moreover–and this is a serious problem that I plan on rectifying in 2012–I don’t have a thorough means of keeping track of what I’ve seen. I can see what I’ve received and rated from Netflix and Facets in 2011, and the rest of this is based on memory of what I’ve actually seen. There’s a very real chance that I’ll miss something. Whadayagonnado? Without further delay, here is the awards program for the 2nd Annual TDYLFies.

Iron Director: Billy Wilder vs. Preston Sturges

I’m going back in time to my first entry in the Iron Director series, borrowing the same theme. My first entry was about two directors who I’d become obsessed with in 2010–François Truffaut and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This entry will focus on two more directors I’ve developed an obsession about over the last 18 months–Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. When you’re a hardcore film nerd, you spend too much of your time trying to spackle in the cracks in your film knowledge. Hollywood’s 1940s and 1950s heyday was certainly a crack for me until somewhat recently. As such, I’ve started slowly tackling various actors and directors from the era. Wilder and Sturges have emerged as directors whose style resonates with me–both comic, both deep, both mastering the dramedy in ways that few (if any) directors have done since. Which one is better?

First, let’s take a quick look at which films I’ve seen from Wilder and Sturges and how I’ve rated them. Note that all films are rated on Netflix’s five star system. Here’s an infographic:

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die: The Update

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A few months back, I mentioned my discovery of a book called 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. At the time, I was at 459 films seen out of the full 1,079 (78 other movies have appeared in updated editions of the book; ergo 1,079 and not 1,001). I’ve managed to tackle a few more since then, hopefully alleviating at least a few occurrences of “HOLY MOSES IN CHOCOLATE UNDERPANTS, YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THAT?!?!” that I hear occasionally. Since the first listing, I’ve seen: