A while back, someone whom I had recently met on Reddit introduced me to this neat little site called Letterboxd.

I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. I was immediately taken in by the metrics, the ability to record what I’ve watched and keep track of films, and later, the neat aesthetic and its many other functions really took me in. It’s really a social media site for cinephiles, like Tumblr but with less cancer I suppose. I was initially hesitant to use it because I would have to spend so much time to put every single film I’ve watched into the system, but after some egging from my friend, I got right stuck in.

Little bit more about my dear friend, and the context. We both got invited into this chatgroup on Reddit, and through the mess of hundreds of other fellas, our eyes locked on and we fell in love. We talked so much that they told us to shut up and put us in a separate chat room. Anyhow, we were both interested in film and we have watched a fuckton of them; even though we differed in tastes and we disagreed on almost every single movie, it was a joy speaking to him. I hope he feels the same way. It was bizarre in a sense.

Living on this sunny island, with absolutely no inspiration and with creativity buzzing timidly under the harsh academic surface, it’s hard to find someone passionate about film. And not only was there one right here, but right here was on that’s not a complete tosser.

Anyhow, it took a couple of days to log every single movie, and I did methods like chasing down a popular actor’s career like Will Smith or Tom Cruise, because more likely than not I’ve seen a film with them in it. I ended up somewhere in the 700s, and realised I was going to hit a thousand films very soon. Of course, I kind of cheated and included some short films and a couple of YouTube “films”, like Ahoy’s stuff, but arguably he makes mini-documentaries that deserve to be part of film.

The most popular users are: a) “I publicly announce that I’m terrible but I think I am the best and I wish for everyone to praise me as a result of me pretending to have low self-esteem” girls or b) “every single second of a film has a deep philosophical meaning and I love every movie that someone else decided is fucking awesome” folks, and sometimes c) I hate everything you love for the sake of it.

There’s something poisonous about the concept of social media that just brings out the nasty in people, at least for me. If you’re a normal, sane human who enjoys being around other people, the community might be more palatable to you.

Do check out the site before continuing, also. Just to familiarise yourself with the place and also so you can understand the pains I went through to type this post up.

See, the site is an excellent mine for data. It retrieves data from the TMDB API, which means it has metadata for runtimes, countries, genres, and such, as well as your ratings in the mix. So, I really wanted to analyse my viewing habits, find out what countries I preferred, what genres, et cetera.

Unfortunately, most of the data is paywalled off. At least, if you want to save some time and let the website handle it for you, you need to pay a cool $19USD a year, which arguably isn’t a lot but considering I’m a stingy motherfucker, $19USD is a lot. I would eventually buy it, just to say thanks to the Letterboxd team, but for now, I decided to do it all manually.

Count the ratings. Count the countries. Count the genres. Some of it already done on its own, but others needed some investigation. All in all, I did the best I could. It took two runs to account for the numbers, and both runs took two brain-sweating hours. But I’ve done it. And I’m here typing this. Good grief.

I hope you’ll stick with me throughout the journey. Before I start, here’s a table of contents:

1. The Statistics

1a. Nationality

1b. Final Films

1c. Favourite and Least Favourite Films

1d. By The Decade

1e. The Verdict

1f. On Genres

2. The Rest



2a. Conclusion

2b. Raw Data

***

1. The Statistics

1a. Nationality

Who wouldn’t be curious as to where the films come from? As a proud purveyor of world cinema, I’m curious as to which film industry is leading the charge. I mean, obviously the answer is Hollywood, but everything else that follows is a curiosity.

The way I categorised them was like this: Individual countries will be mentioned if they hit around 20 films; otherwise, they’ll be dumped into the container named “Others”.

The countries were decided by whichever country gets listed first on IMDB and Letterboxd, and if both websites can’t agree, then Wikipedia will be roped in for the final decision.

So, Cloud Atlas is listed as a German film, and Kubrick’s films are attributed to the Brits.

All that aside, here’s a neat little pie chart to show you the nationalities:

(Hey, wait a minute, that looks familiar…)



America:

So, the Americans can rejoice knowing that they have a majority shareholder, though it’s no surprise honestly. Being the largest manufacturer of English films, with so much money and talent flowing that way, who would be taken aback? I would honestly think it would be a feat and a half to have seen more movies from another country, but that might be a very far-off goal.

As it is, most of the American movies I’ve watched were not by choice. There’s a free-to-air channel in my country by our useless, government owned (pretty much anyway) media corporation (creatively named Mediacorp), called Channel 5 that airs very old movies during the primetime slot at 7pm. When it’s not airing movies, it has its uses in broadcasting the news and Wheel of Fortune.

Back then, I was an ignorant fool who was happy to see age-old reruns of films, like Jumanji or Hancock, that had an awkward ad-break every ten minutes.

See, the company was so broke and poor all they could afford was the old films, and to add, the government only wanted nice, family friendly movies with positive message to reach the citizen’s eyeballs. And back then? No complaints. It was free. It was easy. Unfortunately in the modern advent of streaming, not even my dad has the patience. The company is on the verge of collapse, and they recently merged the children’s/sport’s channel with it.

Seriously? So, from being the nation’s channel for English programmes (we have one-ish for each national language), now it’s the country’s children’s/sport’s/English programmes channel. No idea how they will pull it off.

But that’s a really big tangent and what I really want to say is that — most movies I’ve seen wasn’t by choice, and most of them happened to be American. Now that I’m seizing the means of torrenting, I would like to bring that percentage down to 50%. As I’m writing this, the percentage currently stands at 52.83%, a sharp 6.37% decrease, which I’m quite proud of.

Why am I so obsessed with this non-issue? I don’t know, I guess it’s an indicator of whether or not I’m being lazy. It’s easy to watch an American movie; it’s harder to scrounge for a copy of a foreign flick and to sit down and enjoy it properly.

Britain:

Swiftly moving on, looking at the next contender, it’s no surprise the Brits are next at 13.4%. They’re the next largest industry when it comes to English-language films, at least, I think so anyway. And I love the Brits! Perhaps it’s because they colonised my country, but I click well with their ideas. The way they approach politics, comedy, and their way of life. All of these shows in their films and I enjoy that experience.

Other Countries:

After the Brits comes “Others” at a strong 10%, a collaborative effort between so many countries from all over the world. Southeast Asia with Indonesia and Singapore; Scandinavian countries, like Norway and Sweden; and even Iran (thanks to Mr. Asghar Farhadi). It’s always fun to watch another foreign movie and add another country to the roster. You would be surprised by how many films other countries put out, and the films that they put out itself! Usually, it’s quite very special, and will never be manufactured in the likes of the titans in Hollywood or the British equivalent. Like A Serbian Film.

Unfortunately, I did not count the individual countries making up the 10% then, but I have been keeping track right now and here’s the list as it stands with 184 films in the list (as opposed to 100):

Indonesia (3), Singapore (35), Australia (9), Norway (2), Sweden (6), Thailand (7), Russia (2), Soviet Union (1), Spain (6), New Zealand (6), Canada (18), Germany (14), Greece (4), Denmark (10), Serbia (1), Belgium (2), India (4), Mexico (4), the Netherlands (10), Italy (13), Switzerland (1), Uganda (1), Vietnam (2), Iran (2), Austria (1), Hungary (1), Poland (2), Czech-Slovakia (1), Ukraine (1), Iceland (1), Malaysia (1), Brazil (1), and the Philippines (1).

Hong Kong/China:

Then comes the the the other Asian film industries. Chinese films, then comprising of just Hong Kong and Mainland China films as I hadn’t touched on Taiwan yet, made up a strong 9.5%. Most of it were the classic action thrillers from HK starring the usual roster: Andy Lau, Aaron Kwok, Simon Yam, Lam Suet, Sean Lau, et cetera. There’s also a healthy number of kung-fu movies from the old Jackie Chan era, as well a whole array of Stephen Chow comedies.

Another TV story — during Chinese New Year, our cable network would give us free channels, and some of them were movie channels. One of them is called Star Movies, and another Celestial Movies. Watching bits of random Hong Kong films really sparked an interest in me, and I knew I had to watch them for real. Instead of trying to read the Chinese subtitles with the clashing of mahjong tiles ringing in my ears.

For the future, I would love to expand my horizons by going through the ancient Shaw Brothers era. On top of that, Taiwan is an unexplored oyster and Mainland China itself has had some interesting output that I would like to poke about.

Japan:

Then you get the 3% that is Japanese films. Again, I have not gone too in-depth here, but I would really want to explore more. So many movies, so little time I’ve recently started exploring the Zatoichi, Gojira, and Lone Wolf and Cub franchises, and delved into a few Japanese-specific genres, like women-in-prison (Female Prisoner Scorpion).

Korea, France:

Then you’ve got the two countries I have woefully neglected but plan to watch a lot more of. Korea at 2.9%, and France and 1.8%.

So that’s that for Nationality. Again, exact numbers are way below.

1b. Final Films

So, which film was my 1000th film?

It’s a French parkour film called District 13, a really cool film with a lot of great action sequences that I’ve been meaning to see for a while. It’s a little old, but there hasn’t been another good parkour film since and it’s an absolute delight to see. Besides the awesome parkour sequences, it has a tight dystopian/sci-fi storyline too.

And, while I’m not sure if it’s so good that it deserves to be in my 1000th spot, it’s definitely a lot better than 999th entry Lan Kwai Fong, a PG13 sex comedy by HK. Just imagine American Pie except not a single boob is shown in the entire film. Blue balls to the max.

The 2nd runner-up would be Bullet in the Head, another HK film, by the talented John Woo. Solid action-thriller that I would highly recommend.

Going by country, with French and Chinese films aside, the last films I’ve watched leading up are as follows:

American — Final Destination 2; pretty shit film honestly. I started watching the entire franchise, but I stopped after the fourth film because it’s just not worth it. This is supposed to be horrific and scary? It’s just cheesy and trying so hard. I did like the original concept, but it’s run thin after so many uninspired sequels.

British — Dr. No; the very first film in the grand James Bond timeline. It’s a cool glance backwards at how the franchise started, but the random jump cuts for no apparent reasons are curious. I’m still trying to complete the franchise, but this was a good start.

Others — A Separation (Iran); pretty good drama, I’m not at all a fan of the genre but the dialogue and story is just so gripping. And, don’t let the country of origin deceive you. It’s surprisingly normal, no bombings or women beating — and it’s genuinely hard to imagine a Middle Eastern country so serene. It goes to show the effect media has had on us, and how far we have to go to deprogramme ourselves.

Japanese — Ikari; Pretty meh film honestly. I’ve already forgotten what it was about.

Korean — The Client; Slick legal thriller, again, pretty forgettable in a sea of similar films.

1c. Favourite and Least Favourite Films

Of the 1000 films I’ve watched, which are my favourites, and least favourites?

Going by the countries, again:

America:

Most Favourite — Donnie Darko; Look, it’s pretty bloody difficulty, alright. My other options were Falling Down, Dark City, Sky Captain, and the Naked Gun trilogy, all of which are fantastic options and I might actually pick another film a year from now. But right now, Donnie Darko is a really good film and I’m a sucker for some Gyllenhaal being a psycho. If you haven’t watched this film yet, please do yourself a favour and go and watch it.

Least Favourite — Suicide Squad; Again, look, there are much worst films out there. But this film truly pisses me off for numerous reasons. First, the enormous budget and amount of people working on this; nobody stopped to say, “Hey, this sucks, even by DC standards?” Or maybe they did, and some cunt of an executive just ignored everyone. Maybe he was planted by Marvel. Anyhow, it also pisses me off that this film turned a profit and some people are actually fans of this film. This film, that challenges the audience’s intelligence, with its blatant character removals. This film, with its paper-thin plot. This film, with effects worse than movies with a smaller budget. Good fucking grief.

Britain

Most Favourite — Moon; Again, hard choice. Locke, Eden Lake, Four Lions, In The Loop, are all tough contenders. But I have to say Moon, it’s my favourite movie of all time because everything about it is wonderful. The acting, script, effects, setting, dialogue, and philosophical knick-knacks. I’ve done a write-up about it on this blog. Go watch it. Now.

Least Favourite — 2001; Whoooooa, there, controversial much? No, seriously, this film bored me out of my mind. There are definitely worse films out there, but I’ve never watched them, and I’ve watched this one, and I hated it. Sorry.

Other Countries

Most Favourite — The Fall; no competition honestly. This film just has everything perfect. It’s a passion project by an Indian man who flew all over the world just to film everything as is, without CGI or anything. He would personally fly his actors over, and do some commercials in that country to get some funds for his movie. There is even an instance where he handed out blue paint to a village just so they can refresh the colour on the walls of their houses. And then he shot it in all its beauty. The whole thing was done over a few years, and it’s absolutely beautiful. You have to watch it for the sake of it. There’s no other film like it. Even if you hate the scenery, the story and editing is marvelous, and one of the best examples of a match cut is exemplified in this film. My only regret is that I’ll never be able to watch this in full 4K IMAX and experience the scenery as if it were real.

Least Favourite — Ah Boys to Men 3: Frogmen; If you’ve never heard of this movie, I don’t blame you. Made by my own country, it’s a nasty piece of work. A propaganda machine to garner support for the mandatory, sexist two year jail sentence for men (or military conscription for the politically correct). Even disregarding that, it has no cinematic merit. Blatant product placement, terrible script and effects, and the fact that it’s just wearing the “franchise” thin. I would put the fourth film in its place, but fortunately I have not seen that yet. And to think a fifth film is rolling out.

China/Hong Kong

Most Favourite — Infernal Affairs; It’s a bit cheaty putting a trilogy here, but this is pretty much peak HK cinema. Gritty thriller that blurs the line between white and black, a frantic, hopeless look at a cat and mouse chase between gangsters and the police force. If you look it up and read an excerpt, you may find the plot familiar. That’s because this trilogy inspired the much worse movie (IMO anyway) The Departed. I plan to do a write-up on the trilogy soon, so I’ll save my thoughts for then.

Least Favourite — Bleeding Steel; Not much to say, honestly. Jackie Chan is in this. The action scenes are shit. The acting and plot is shit. The effects looked so bad, my eyes were the things that were bleeding. It’s just sad that Jackie Chan is resorting to this shit.

Japan

Most Favourite — Confessions; God, this film was such a journey the first watch. Every single disgusting plot twist sent my mind in a tizzy. I can’t reveal much without spoiling it, but this film is just fucking amazing and the story is just so damned good. The acting and cinematography just adds to the effect. The ending is also so bloody good too. I know I’m cussing a lot, but I don’t know how else to convince you.

Least Favourite — Izo; It’s a Takashi Miike film. I like films by him, like Zebraman. I did not like this film. It’s godawful. It started off with some diagrams of a penis or whatever, and some Nazis, then there’s this time-travelling samurai or something. I really wanted to like the crazy randomness of this film, but it got so grindy trying to follow what was going on. Every time you blink, something else is happening.

Korea

Most Favourite — No Mercy; Oldboy is pretty good, but this is the film that really has my heart. This crime thriller is as brutal as it gets, and I can’t say anymore without spoiling the crazy plot twist the film has. It’s an incredible, gut-wrenching experience that’s a must watch if you’re exploring Korean cinema.

Least Favourite — The Mayor; in a sample size of 29 films, this spot could’ve belonged to anyone, even The Client. But honestly? This film was just as forgettable. It’s about corrupt people in Korea, surprise surprise. That’s all there is to it.

France

Most Favourite — Ernest et Celestine; Hands down. Best fucking film I’ve ever seen by the French, might be my favourite animated flick too. I’m not a soft-hearted fella, but this film is just so fucking cute and gorgeous it moved me. It’s not complicated; the animators even did the whole thing in Adobe Flash. But it’s the thought and effort hat counts and is so dearly missing in newer, 3D animated films. I always preferred the hand-drawn stuff, because an animator had to sit down and care for every corner of the frame and setting, before setting it off. It’s sadly a one-time effort by a bunch of French dudes who would probably never make another film. They did make an hour long special with the same characters but it was shown once in some bumfuck festival and it’s forever irretrievable, which makes me very sad indeed.

Least Favourite — Revenge; even in a sample size of 18 films, this film pisses me off to no end. First of all, it’s some dumb feminist flick. Which I am fine with, if the film was any good. It’s not. I was taken in by the cinematography and colour grading, which is absolutely gorgeous, but any semblance of respect I had for the film fizzled out as it morphed into a typical slasher film. Through impossible scenarios, the chick kills her male “oppressors”, and the kill scenarios aren’t even that satisfying, or even barely plausible. It’s messy and annoying, and kept reminding me that the only reason why people like this film is because of its political message.

1d. By The Decade

I thought this would be interesting to look into as well.

As you can see, I have a clear biasness when it comes to movie newness. I hate old movies. Absolute abhor them. I refuse to see anything black and white, I refuse to see anything older than the 60’s. There’s something so dull and boring about black and white, it’s an instant switch off for me. I know this is an incredibly uneducated thing to say from a cinephile’s point of view, but please forgive me. I need colour. Colour makes film, well, colourful. It gives my eyes pleasure.

And don’t get me started on silent films.

I know they’re historically significant, but I don’t want to watch them. Speaking in terms of utility, it does help eliminate a good number of films to watch. With a gargantuan watchlist of 2600 and counting (excluding names of people and companies I need to investigate), I need every help possible.

Anyway, other trends — yeah, I love films from the 90’s onwards. I’ve got to say my favourite “era” is from 1990 to 2010. A transient, rapidly changing period of time. New technology, new ways of making film, new ideas. I’m sure you can say the same of every other random period of time, but man, the 90’s was just such a good time for classics and the 2000’s was just such a good time for modern classics. Plus/minus a few years, I think so many of my favourite films were made around 2010.

Here are my favourite films from 2010, 2000, and 1990 respectively, just to illustrate the greatness of the period:

(Top Row, 2010: Cold Fish, Four Lions, Confessions, No Mercy, and I Saw The Devil)

(Second Row, 2000: Requiem For A Dream, Battle Royale, Memento, The Emperor’s New Groove, Gladiator, and American Psycho)

(Third Row, 1990: Misery, Bullet In The Head, Dick Tracy, All For The Winner, Her Fatal Ways, God Of Gamblers II)

And it must mean something that I was born exactly in the middle of all this chaos in the year 2000. Except it’s arbitrary luck, but boy, what a coincidence.

Anyhow, I do hope to bolster the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s eras, with some old Japanese flicks as well as all those Shaw Brothers kung-fu flicks. So the curve should hopefully be less drastic. Though, it is inevitable. Older films have it harder; new films have the aid of social media and so many streaming services to help, as well as the commercialisation of film equipment, making it cheaper to film a movie than ever. So, not only will there be more films these days, it’s easier to find said films too.

Couple more tidbits: Oldest film I’ve ever watched is, excusing a bunch of ancient short films like Sally Gardner at a Gallop, Dr. No (1962). Not every exciting, honestly. I would tell you the 2nd oldest film I’ve watched, but I did not record it. Sorry.

The newest film is Triple Threat of this year, a massive disappointment. All of these amazing kung-fu actors like Iko Uwais (Headshot) and Tony Jaa (SPL 2), and Jesse V. Johnson produces a flop. His other films are pretty good, like the recent Avengement, but this film is a massive bore. It’s still fairly entertaining, but I’ve been spoilt by much better action films.

1e. The Verdict

Preface:

A very exciting segment! I wanted to know which country produces the worst films, and whether the bell curve meant that the average movie rating I handed out was 2.5, as mathematics would dictate. Are you ready?

Well, before I show you the stuff, let me just tell you about the rating system on Letterboxd. You can rate movies between 0.5 and 5 stars, in half-star increments. Most people stick to the extremes and avoid the middle, some people avoid using the half-star increments, but I try my hardest to utilise every single one of them in a fair and justifiable manner. As such, I have the following criteria:

.5 — Hated it with vengeance

1 — Hated it

1.5 — Disliked it

2 — Mildly disliked it

2.5 — Average film

3 — Mildly liked it

3.5 — Liked it

4 — Really liked it

4.5 — Loved it

5 — Perfection

I judge movies by one of two criteria as well: a) personal enjoyment, as personal as possible; and b) cinematic merit, as objectively as possible.

If I like the movie but it’s not a groundbreaking piece of cinema, I might give it a max of maybe 3 or 3.5 stars. For example, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, which I had fun with but it’s not very well made, except for the practical effects. I gave it three stars. On the opposite, I didn’t like King Hu’s Legend of the Mountains, but I had to salute the effort went into creating the film, and the techniques used, so I gave it two stars.

In a way, a) sort of outweighs b) a little, because honestly if a film pisses me off too much I can’t even begin to analyse whether or not it’s a good piece of cinema. Sorry about my human qualities.

To add, if a film ticks both a) and b), it gets 4.5 or 5 stars, like Marquis at 4.5*, but if a film does not tick either a) or b), it gets a sordid half or one star, like Poultrygeist at 0.5*.

Overall:

Okay, that’s enough prattle, here’s the bell curve!

Why are bell curves important?

I… don’t know, but it’s satisfying, alright? A good bell curve kind of means you have a good distribution of points, and it also respects that the absolute middle means “average” as it should be.

So, is what I thought to be the average, really the average? Sort of.

The mean score of all movies, that is, every single star added up and then divided by the amount of films, is 2.7865 stars. Which is pretty good! It’s close enough to what I expected, a 2.5, but seeing it lean towards 3 is a good indicator that I’m trying to watch films I like instead of forcing myself to watch garbage I don’t care about. This does mean the bell curve should shift towards the right side, but short of torturing myself, I don’t see a way to prevent that.

Recently, the score has been around 2.8, so I’m treating myself better.

And, while the mean score is fun, we shouldn’t forget the other two mathematical M’s — median and mode.

Mode is pretty simple — it refers to whichever factor that occurs the most, in this case, that’s three stars, since I use it more than any other ratings, at 28.9%. Which does make sense; I’m quite very picky so it’s hard for me to really like a film, but at the same time, i try my best to pick films I like, so I wouldn’t really rate a lot of films on the other extreme end.

Median, that’s where the 50th percentile lies, on either side. It lies on three stars, closer to the lower end. In a bigger, messier data set, the median might be something different, and might actually mean something, but here, it doesn’t mean much. Ouch, there goes your ten seconds.

Okay, that was fun, but how about the other countries? Time to make, I don’t know, another five or so line graphs…

America

American films have pretty big sample size, so the bell curve is still there.

A trend you might see is that the bell curve here is heaver towards the left, with lower ratings, as opposed to the right side, especially if you compare the percentages. And if we extract the average, you’ll see that American films aren’t that great.

With an average of 2.64*, I don’t seem to be enjoy films from Eagleland too much. Though, to be fair, most of the American movies I’ve watched aren’t by choice, as lengthily explaiend earlier. So, perhaps they are unfairly represented, so we’ll have to see what happens during round 2, whether the ratings improve, or if I just fucking hate their movies.

Personally, I tend to be very reserved when it comes to American films, and I always prefer the international variants. Comedy? Leave it to the Brits. Crime? The Asians. Action? The Asians, too. Indie? Many other countries do it as well. To me, the Americans seem to be quite like the default character in a video game, the everyman with no specialties.

They show odd sparks of brilliance here and there, but you know what? Hollywood has one thing that can never be emulated — money and big CGI punch-fests.

Britain

On the other hand, I fucking love British movies. I’ve mentioned this earlier in this post, so I won’t retread ground.

As you can see, they’ve managed to avoid getting an angry 1/2* rating from me, but have managed to net three of three 5* ratings. Quite evidently they are leaning towards the right side, with a stellar average of 3.1*. I’m always on the lookout for more British flicks — they tend to be very low budget but that’s the brilliance of it. With the question of money aside, more focus tends to be put on other factors.

Writing and dialogue is something that I’ve always enjoyed in a British film. The sharp wit found in so many movies that you could make a movie with just that (The Trip to Spain/Italy), or insert in clever twists (Shallow Grave), or simply the treatment of grave subjects (Shame).

I’m already lusting for another British film, just thinking about it.

Others

(Here, we see the limits of using PowerPoint to do your graphs. It somehow got the smart idea of adding negative numbers on the y-axis, and I have no clue how to get rid of it)

As the sample size shrinks, we see the bell curve collapse into itself. This double-humped camel of a graph does illustrate my opinion of movies by scattered foreign countries though: wildly hit and miss. Some movies are just fucking great, some movies are so awful I want to gouge out my eyeballs.

Besides the Singaporean movies I’ve mentioned, some artsy-fartsy movies like Naked Lunch gets thrown to the 2-star and under realm, while other sparks of uniqueness and brilliance, like Voroshilov Sharpshooter, gets hurled to the other end.

Really, though, what really makes me watch movies from all these countries is the experience. Being transported to another country and attempting to live and breathe a new environment. It’s boring to see another film set in some generic metropolitan city in America; but show me some dirty, crowded landscape in Thailand (Ong Bak), some backwater rural landscape in Uganda (Who Killed Captain Alex?), or just some sweet Scandinavian scenery (Melancholia), and I’ll instantly be tuning in.

A great bias, but honestly, after seeing so many films, they sort of blend in so anything to bring them apart would be great help.

With newfound attention on the graph itself, quite surprisingly, the math works out — the average is 2.77*, which is very close to the overall average of 2.78*. Closer than you would ever expect just glancing at this monster.

Over time, though, I hope the curve will sort itself out naturally, as I find more and more movies and expand my horizons.

China/HK

This is an interesting one! I wasn’t expecting to have loved Chinese movies so much, but they have a pretty good average at 3.22*, even more than the Brits. Partly, it might be because I’m Chinese and I associate myself with the culture better, but mostly, I think it’s because of all the great work done by Johnny To, Stephen Chow, Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, and all the early pioneers of Hong Kong cinema.

It’s a strange duality, honestly. The Cantonese tongue works well for a dark crime movie, but can be incredibly comic when jammed into an absurdist comedy. In any case, I like both of these genres in their Chinese incarnation, whose Hollywood counterpart I detest.

I spoke of this earlier in the American section, and I’ll repeat myself in the Korean section, but what I liked about the Infernal Affairs trilogy is the grey areas it provides, as opposed to the direct black and white depicted in The Departed.

I also liked the absolute brutality of these films, where you’re constantly wondering who’s gonna die next, unlike the plot armour that most American characters get. It’s more realistic and much more tense. It’s so boring to see Sylvester Stallone or Dwayne Johnson or more recently, Keanu Reeves gallop around mindlesly as none of the bullets ever find their targets. Or if they do, it means nothing. There’s no thrill. No payoff. When the hero faces off the villain, I’m just thinking, meh, whatever.

But what Jackie Chan faces off Benny Urquidez, the bigger, brawnier man, you do get a sense of tension. It always starts off with Jackie getting his ass handed back to him, some dangerous scenario, and then he brings it back with his wits. Because we know Jackie could never outmuscle someone like Benny.

And, I don’t know, I find Chinese humour more fresh. The jokes tend to be newer, while I’ve experienced American humour too many times and I don’t even like the style of humour they pull. This is a unfortunately a matter of subjectivity; I can’t rationalise this, as much as I would like to, I just find Chinese humour funny, and that’s the end of it.

Though, modern Chinese movies tend to be a lot worse, speaking as the guy who has watched about 400 more movies. We’ll talk about that next time.

Japan

Japanese films… As you can see, most of them coalesce into the 3, 3.5 and 4*, and I’ve neglected to use four of the ratings even once. The average rating here is 3.3*, which is pretty high! Some of it can be accounted for by brilliant directors like Takashi Miike and Sion Sono, while others can be credited to studios like Ghibli as well.

Japanese films can be pretty hit and miss, from a retrospective point of view. On one hand, they can be pretty crazy and unique and indulgent, and that’s why it’s always a joy diving into a Japanese film, but on the other hand, those three factors can easily backfire. I know that in Love Exposure, there were some weak moments where Sono was indulging and having the characters engage in philosophical babble, when I wished the film would move on since the runtime was just so long.

Also, the Japs are also pretty innovative. Besides their fresh ideas, they have a bunch of old movies I have yet to explore but have began to put my feelers out for. There are many sub-genres as I had mentioned, and many different movements that sparked a lot of different copies that still holds merits.

As it is, it’s a good effort by the Japs.

Korea

This is a wild graph. So wild PowerPoint decided to dip the straight line before charging straight upwards at the 1.5* mark.

And, wow, 3.84* is the average rating I assigned a Korean film!

I don’t recall loving Korean films this much, but it does make sense. So many brutal, violent movies that are an absolute joy to watch. It’s like what the Chinese do, but much worse. Movies like Asura and The Chaser go all out in painting a hopeless picture, and continue to make it bleaker.

I heard that it was due to how much corruption Korea used to have or might still have, and that’s why their movies always focus on it, but in any case, it’s really a joy. There are other things I have to say, but I’ll save them for next time.

Postface:

This is a mighty long section, and I promise it’s ending. Two more graphs I had to make. The first compares the curves across everything:

And of course, the two big outliers fucks everything over, so here’s the graph without Americans or the total count:

It’s cool to see right? No? Okay, sorry.

1f. On Genres

One last bit. Genres. Letterboxd does this a little funnily; it assigns more than one genre to movies, and this is OK, but since Letterboxd is powered by TMDB, using crowdsourced info, most movies tend to me miscategorised.

For example, The Little Drummer Girl (which is not in this dataset but is an example I can readily recall), is a crime/drama/thriller show, but it shows up as a pure Drama. Additionally, foreign, obscure flicks tend to be neglected or done by a single soul, and might be horribly miscategorised. As such, the following graph has limited use but may still be interesting nonetheless.

(Excuse the design, I used this template because it felt so archaic. I can imagine some CEO in the 90’s presenting this in a boardroom going, “Woo, guys, we have THREE DEE MODELLING techniques now! And opacity rendering! WOOW!” Also because I’m too lazy to do an actual design)

So yeah, I like Action/Thrillers apparently, but those are arguably as generic as Drama itself. I’ve also seen a surprising amount of comedies, even though I don’t really like the genre or recall seeing so many of them, so god knows what Letterboxd is counting.

What I’m eyeing is “Crime”, which has a paltry 7% of the share, which could be a result of something like A Little Drummer Girl‘s issue. And, since I’ve seen so much foreign cinema, obviously most of them are categorised incorrectly. Nonetheless what is accurate is that romance, war, western, and musicals are listed so lowly — because I hate these genres, each for different reasons.

Romance? Too unrelatable. War? Too loud, bombastic, and boring. Western? Just boring. Musicals? Awkward to sit through.

These are horrible reasons, very personal indeed. I’m trying to fix this a litte, planning to watch some more war films to see if I have an unnecessary prejudice, but I’m not going to touch romance or musicals ever.

Anyway, that’s that section. It’s more for closure than anything, and it’s kind of cool I guess.

2. The Rest (a.k.a. I Realised I Have This Section Format Thing Going On, So Here’s Number Two To Justify It)



2a. Conclusion

Holy crap this post is long! What kind of loser sits here and collates the date, and then writes this long-ass post about it? What kind of loser is still reading this shit‽ God bless your soul wherever you are.

Anyhow, I hope this has been an entertaining/informative read for whatever reason. These kind of posts work better if it’s written by someone important and whose opinion people actually care about, but nonetheless I wrote it anyway so there you go. I might do this again when I hit 2000 films, but that’s a while away and I’m not sure if I want to subject myself to the same torture once again. Writing this thesis was just as painful as it was to collate the data.

Thanks again for reading and if you’re interested, you can check out my Letterboxd to catch-up with what I’ve been watching to get some recommendations: https://letterboxd.com/ColinHexr/

Otherwise, you can check out my lists for some specific recommendations!: https://letterboxd.com/ColinHexr/lists/

Let me know below what you think! I would love to hear your thoughts on the statistics, what you think of some of the films mentioned, or maybe just how your day has been. It gets lonely on this site sometimes.

2b. Raw Data

This is what I’m looking at while I’m typing this. Some very poor sod spent so much time organising it:

1000 films; 24 March

General Statistics:

Nationality:

592 American (59.2%)

134 British (13.4%)

102 Others (10.2%)

95 Chinese (9.5%)

30 Japanese (3%)

29 Korean (2.9%)

18 French (1.8%)

Final Hurrahs:

100th film: District B13

999th film: F

998th film: Bullet in the Head

Last French Film: District B13

Last Chinese Film: Lan Kwai Fong

Last American Film: Final Destination 2

Last Korean Film: The Client

Last Japanese Film: Ikari/Rage

Last British Film: Dr. No

Last “Others” Film (Iranian): A Separation

Award Ceremony:

Favourite American Film: Donnie Darko

Favourite French Film: Ernest et Celestine

Favourite “Others” Film (Indian?): The Fall

Favourite Chinese Film: Infernal Affairs Trilogy

Favourite Korean Film: No Mercy

Favourite Japanese Film: Confessions

Favourite British Film: Moon

/

Least Favourite American Film: Suicide Squad

Least Favourite French Film: Revenge

Least Favourite “Others” Film (Singaporean): Ah Boys to Men 3: Frogmen

Least Favourite British Film: 2001

Least Favourite Japanese Film: Izo

Least Favourite Korean Film: The Mayor

By The Decade:

10’s 478 (47.8%)

2019 8

2018 68

2017 66

2016 55

2015 47

2014 49

2013 54

2012 39

2011 53

2010 39

/

00’s 292 (29.2%)

2009 42

2008 39

2007 34

2006 35

2005 20

2004 30

2003 25

2002 26

2001 22

2000 19

/

90’s 139 (13.9%)

1999 22

1998 13

1997 18

1996 11

1995 12

1994 16

1993 19

1992 11

1991 11

1990 6

/

80’s 57 (5.7%)

1989 3

1988 12

1987 5

1986 6

1985 8

1984 6

1983 5

1982 5

1981 4

1980 3

/

70’s 25 (2.5%)

1979 2

1978 6

1977 2

1976 1

1975 4

1974 0

1973 3

1972 4

1971 2

1970 1

/

60’s 5 (0.5%)

1969 1

1968 2

1962 2

/

Oldest Film: Lolita (21 June 1962)

Newest Film: Triple Threat (22 March 2019)

The Verdicts:

Total

22 .5 (2.2%) 11

28 1 (2.8%) 28

64 1.5 (6.4%) 96

115 2 (11.5%) 230

188 2.5 (18.8%) 470

289 3 (28.9%) 867

199 3.5 (19.9%) 696.5

82 4 (8.2%) 328

10 4.5 (1%) 45

3 5 (0.3%) 15

Avg: 2.7865

Korean:

1 4.5 (3.45%)

6 4 (20.7%)

2 3.5 (6.9%)

14 3 (48.3%)

6 2.5 (20.7%)

Avg: 3.84

Japanese:

1 4.5 (3.33%)

6 4 (19.98%)

9 3.5 (29.97%)

10 3 (33.3%)

3 2.5 (9.99%)

1.5 1 (3.33%)

Avg: 3.3

British:

3 5 (2.25%)

1 4.5 (0.75%)

19 4 (14.25%)

34 3.5 (25.5%)

39 3 (29.25%)

26 2.5 (19.5%)

5 2 (3.75%)

4 1.5 (3%)

3 1 (2.25%)

Avg: 3.1

French:

1 4.5 (5.26%)

2 4 (10.52%)

4 3.5 (21.04%)

3 3 (15.78%)

4 2.5 (21.04%)

1 2 (5.26%)

1 1.5 (5.26%)

2 1 (10.52%)

1 .5 (5.26%)

Avg: 2.71

Chinese

1 4.5 (1.05%)

13 4 (13.65%)

21 3.5 (22.05%)

33 3 (34.65%)

15 2.5 (15.75%)

5 2 (5.25%)

3 1.5 (3.15%)

2 1 (2.10%)

2 .5 (2.10%)

Avg: 3.22

Others:

13 4 (12.87%) 52

25 3.5 (24.75%) 87.5

19 3 (18.81%) 57

13 2.5 (12.87%) 32.5

17 2 (16.83%) 34

8 1.5 (7.92%) 12

4 1 (3.96%) 4

2 .5 (1.98%) 1

Avg: 2.77

American:

4 4.5 (0.68%) 18

23 4 (3.91%) 92

106 3.5 (18.02%) 371

172 3 (29.24%) 516

121 2.5 (20.57%) 302.5

87 2 (14.79%) 174

46 1.5 (7.82%) 69

17 1 (2.89%) 17

16.5 (2.72%) 8

Avg: 2.64

On Genres:

398 Dramatic Films (39.8%)

342 Action Films (34.2%)

309 Thrillers (30.9%)

298 Comedy Films (29.8%)

237 Adventure Films (23.7%)

201 Crime Films (20.1%)

190 Sci-Fi Films (19%)

144 Fantasy Films (14.4%)

129 Animated Films (12.9%)

124 Family Films (12.4%)

109 Horror Films (10.9%)

108 Mystery Films (10.8%)

46 Romance Films (4.6%)

38 History Films (3.8%)

31 Documentary Films (3.1%)

23 War Films (2.3%)

5 Westerns (0.5%)

6 Music Films (0.6%)

1 TV Film (0.1%)

~