The first proper book I ever read (or, to be honest, had read to me) was The Hobbit, and I spent most of my childhood (plus, to be honest, my adulthood) wanting to be one. As I wasn’t allowed to outside without footwear, the primary appeal (and, to be honest, the secondary and tertiary appeals) of being a Hobbit was living a lifestyle devoid of footwear.

Earlier this year, I took my first-ever trip to Aotearoa (New Zealand), and stepping – with actual shoes – into Hobbiton was a life-altering experience. This wasn’t like seeing the outside of Scottie’s house from Vertigo (a thoroughly random example that just happens to accord with something I did in San Francisco a year earlier); this was immersive and expansive and real, the town seeming to go on forever, just like I imagined it. As close to a childhood fantasy world properly coming true before your eyes as is physically possible. Continue reading →

If the whole point of sharing lists of favourite films and artworks is to present a sort of mosaicked personal biography, then the list below absolutely and completely does not do that. It in no way reflects the entirely unclassifiable 2023 that I… I want to say “enjoyed”, but that’s not entirely accurate. Let’s say experienced. When I track the films I watched over the moments I lived, I find zero correlation. No pattern. A dearth of parallels. And I don’t really want to get into the personal, so telling you about the films I saw is the preferable route.

Speaking of routes, I spent much of this year visiting the world’s largest movie theme park – America – and over the course of about six months visited every state in the union, beginning with Hawaii and finishing with Alaska, and driving 21,000 miles (or 33,600 kilometres) around the remaining forty-eight states. Plus a bit of Canada.

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It’s possible I watched too many films this year. I’m really not sure how I managed that, given there were no enforced lockdowns and I left the house quite a bit. Yet somehow, I came pretty close to watching the same number of films as I did in both 2020 and 2021 combined.

A lot of that might be due to Paul Anthony Nelson roping me into bespoke games of Screen Drafts. You don’t need to know what that is; the only relevant information is that I have an obsessive personality and spent most of the year watching almost every film released in 1982, 1979 and 1976. (I am, by the way, now absolutely convinced there is no better way to engage with cinema. Forget focussing on a genre, following sequels, completing directorial canons: just pick a calendar year and go nuts. It’s revelatory.)

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