The Projector #92: Mr. Completist (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Are you a completist? When you latch onto a director or actor or writer or whoever, do you feel the need to see all the films with which they’re associated? I think I am by temperament but not in practice. More often, I’m likely to have seen a lot of work by people whose work I admire, but rarely everything, even if I wish I had.

But do I really? Here’s something that’s stuck with me: In the intro to a Philip K. Dick collection Jonathan Lethem notes that he hasn’t read all of Dick’s novels. Lethem’s an expert on Dick and, if I recall correctly, there’s only one of Dick's books he hasn’t read — an early, seemingly minor work — and that he’d skipped it because he wanted there to be a Philip K. Dick book out there he’d never read so he could look forward to reading it at some later point. I understand that feeling. I kind of like that there are at least a few Fellini movies I’ve never gotten to and items like David Cronenberg’s Fast Company waiting for me to watch them someday. (There’s even a single Nicolas Cage thing I didn’t touch for the book, because a brief cameo in an animated version of A Christmas Carol that nobody saw — no, not the Zemeckis one, you haven’t heard of this one — didn’t seem worth it.)

Here's the catch, though: When is someday? Rather than more uninterrupted time to watch whatever I want, I get less as I get older. Life demands a lot of non-movie-watching time (and non-book-reading, and non-music-discovering time etc., etc.). It’s a fair trade, but at what point do you have to start thinking about a movie bucket list? The Gene Siskel Film Center is doing a Fellini series next month. Should I see 8 1/2 on the big screen again (a film I’ve had the pleasure of seeing projected at least four times), or buy a ticket to The White Sheik or Roma and finally get around to them? And if not now, when?

What’s your approach to this sort of thing? Or am I just overthinking it and better off floating from movie to movie like a toy boat being bumped from rock to rock as it floats downstream?

Of course, some films pay off being watched over and over again, even if that bumps others down the queue. I’m already looking forward to revisiting Summer of Soul, the subject of our most recent episode, for a third time. And some films benefit from some time between viewings. We’re covering Crumb next, and our discussion includes some talk about changing standards and changing expectations for documentaries.

Reading! Here’s some items, including one that’s sort of an expansion of a Projector newsletter I wrote a while back.

• For The Ringer, Keith Phipps asked where have all the sports movies gone?

• The master of the anniversary beat, for The Guardian, Scott Tobias looks at Ghost World at 20 and Brian DePalma’s Blow Out at 40.

• For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri had a long talk with Eric Bana.

• There’s been a lot of talk about the Anthony Bourdain documentary Roadrunner. In one of the most insightful articles, our friend Sam Adams talks to several documentary filmmakers about the line between what’s fake and what’s real.

• At Polygon, Jesse Hassenger considers the way Looney Tunes have influenced comedies that in turn influenced Space Jam: A New Legacy.