Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

IMDb plot summary: A television actress encounters a variety of eccentric characters after embarking on a journey to discover why her lover abruptly left her.

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Stars Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, and Julieta Serrano.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a film by Pedro Almodóvar about a woman who discovers that her lover is going on a romantic vacation with another woman. In trying to deal with this, she ends up getting involved in some unexpectedly wacky ways with the lover's wife, son, and new mistress, as well as a model friend who is on the run from the police for accidentally helping a terrorist group. Almodóvar doesn't always work for me as a director, but one thing that he always does beautifully is create these rich, fully fleshed-out female characters, and that is absolutely visible here in this film. Each one of these women is so distinct, but not in a way that feels overly broad. You get the sense that each one of them has a full life beyond what we're seeing in this film. I love how the colors of this film are bright and exciting and vivid -- it's just great to look at. The tone of the film also works more than I thought it might for me. I fully got on board with the silly melodrama of all these characters hiding from the police and covering up their accidental drugging of each other and trying to figure out how to exact revenge from the lover. This is probably my favorite from this director, and I think the lighter tone has a lot to do with it. I enjoy this kind of over-the-top emotion more when played for comedy. (It does make me wonder if I should go back and rewatch some of his others with more of an eye out for comedic moments.) This is definitely a good one. 

How it entered my Flickchart:

🎥 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

📊 Ranked #356/4007 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 91

beat Jeff, Who Lives at Home (#2000 → #2003)

beat The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (#1003 → #1004)

beat What If (#504 → #503)

lost to Babe (#249 → #247)

beat Adaptation. (#373 → #375)

lost to Star Wars: The Last Jedi (held at #311)

lost to Nativity! (held at #342)

beat Contagion (#357 → #368)

lost to Beginners (#349 → #347)

lost to Stranger Than Fiction (#353 → #352)

beat Wings of Desire (held at #355)

lost to Dick Tracy (#354 → #353)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

IMDb plot summary: When both he and a colleague are about to lose their job, Walter takes action by embarking on an adventure more extraordinary than anything he ever imagined.

Directed by Ben Stiller. Stars Ben Stiller, Kristen Wiig, and Jon Daly.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a film starring Ben Stiller as the titular Walter Mitty, a photograph developer for Life Magazine who spends much of his time daydreaming about being a more exciting adventurous person, despite not even having the courage to talk in person to his work crush. But when he discovers that an essential photograph has gone missing, he must go on series of real life adventures to try to track down the elusive photographer and find out what happened to that negative. I was familiar with the 1947 film, as well as the short story, and neither one of those fully grabbed me, but this one does a better job of getting me on board. There are moments where I can feel it being just a tad too deliberate in its messaging, but Ben Stiller grounds it fairly well, playing a relatable character in unrelatable circumstances and making it easy to root for him. There are not necessarily a lot of laughs I got out of this despite being built as a comedy, but there's a lot of warmth in this movie. It was satisfying to watch Mitty pursue his dreams even when he didn't mean to. It's a sweet movie that was worth a watch. 

How it entered my Flickchart:

🎥 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

📊 Ranked #501/4006 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 87

beat The Dissident (#2000 → #2001)

beat Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (#999 → #1005)

lost to The Basketball Diaries (#498 → #500)

lost to Black Christmas (#750 → #727)

lost to American Psycho (#874 → #420)

beat Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (#936 → #949)

lost to Flight (#905 → #437)

beat Ghostbusters II (#920 → #1074)

beat Twins (#912 → #917)

beat SubUrbia (#908 → #1015)

beat Anna Karenina (#906 → #980)

It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

IMDb plot summary: Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche, in this new feature film version of Don Hertzfeldt's animated short film trilogy.

Directed by Don Hertzfeldt. Stars Don Hertzfeldt and Sara Cushman.

It's Such a Beautiful Day is a short experimental animated film following a stick figure character named Bill as he goes about his life dealing with some sort of unexplained neurological symptoms that cause seizures and memory loss, among other things. This is truly a fascinating film that does some very unique things, not only in its simplistic visuals, but also in the way that it chooses to tell the story of this character, with an omniscient narrator telling Bill's story from a third person perspective, rather than giving dialogue to individual characters. Its unique format hit me on a strange emotional level. I found it deeply unsettling, to the point that I think I maybe had a mini panic attack during the movie. Given that, it's a little bit hard for me to evaluate this on any kind of objective level, at least not without a little bit more distance between me and the film. It's certainly very effective at putting the pieces together to evoke an emotional response and provoke deep thought and questions about life and death and purpose. I did find the shaky camera focus on the animations to be a little tough on my eyes over the course of an hour, but fortunately it is only an hour so it was workable. This is definitely one that should be seen, but it's going to be a while before I can articulate exactly why or what about it was so powerful.

How it entered my Flickchart:

It's Such a Beautiful Day (2011)

beat Be Kind Rewind (#2000 → #2002)

lost to Widows' Peak (#998 → #999)

beat Hook, Line and Sinker (#1498 → #1514)

beat Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (#1247 → #1262)

lost to A Midsummer Night's Dream (#1122 → #773)

beat Suspicion (#1184 → #1185)

beat Whip It (#1153 → #1159)

beat The Railway Man (#1137 → #1211)

beat It (#1129 → #1137)

beat The Last Seduction (#1125 → #1128)

beat Gone Girl (#1123 → #1126)

📊 Ranked #774/4005 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 81

Such is Life (1930)

IMDb plot summary: Realistic portrait of a poor working family in late 20s Prague: the washerwoman mother whose burial is held after she scalds herself; the alcoholic father; the manicurist daughter who becomes pregnant.

Directed by Carl Junghans. Stars Vera Baranovskaya, Theodor Pistek, and Mána Zenísková.

Such is Life is a silent 1930 Russian drama about a poor woman, her lazy husband, and her adult daughter, and how difficult their lives are. This one did not have any dialogue title cards, only chapter titles, and I did not have translations for those title cards, so it's possible that some of this literally got lost in translation, but I didn't get much out of this one. There is one interesting sequence where the woman gets burned by some boiling water that I think is edited extremely well with some unique techniques to show the danger and the pain of the situation, but that is really the only thing I remember about this. Silent movies can be tough for me to process, so I'm happy to believe that this was a "me" problem, but there just didn't seem to be a lot going on in the story other than just seeing these characters be miserable over and over again. Maybe that's the purpose of this, but it didn't work for me very well.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Such Is Life (1930)

lost to Air Force One (#1997 → #1993)

lost to Avanti! (#2997 → #2990)

beat For Love of the Game (#3500 → #3501)

lost to What Lies Beneath (#3236 → #3222)

beat Life with Father (#3372 → #3375)

lost to On the Town (#3308 → #3226)

beat Petulia (#3339 → #3342)

lost to Superman Returns (#3324 → #3310)

lost to From Here to Eternity (#3331 → #3258)

beat The Blue Dahlia (#3335 → #3338)

beat Bad Teacher (#3333 → #3335)

beat All Dogs Go to Heaven (#3332 → #3334)

📊 Ranked #3333/4004 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 17

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

IMDb plot summary: A spaceship arrives in 1873 Arizona to take over the Earth, starting with the Wild West region. All that stands in their way: a posse of cowboys and natives.

Directed by Jon Favreau. Stars Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde.

Cowboys and Aliens is a western sci-fi that features a group of feuding townspeople and criminals in the old west, including Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, who suddenly must band together to save themselves from an invading alien horde. This is a mix of one genre I really don't like and one genre I really do, so I was curious to see where this would land. I wish it was a little bit more playful in how it approached the combination of genres. This is far more western than sci-fi, and it gets very serious with its western tropes and characters approaching the incoming threat. The sci-fi element is truly just tacked on as a small twist -- this could be any western movies about fighting off unknown invaders. It's fine, but it feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity. Because they're taking the western part so seriously, any of the fun or creativity that I wanted to see in matching these two together gets lost. Overall, I like the idea much more than I like the actual execution. 

How it entered my Flickchart:

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

lost to Swingers (#1999 → #1955)

beat The Doorway to Hell (#2996 → #2999)

beat The Boston Strangler (#2498 → #2508)

lost to Dunkirk (#2248 → #2236)

lost to The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (#2373 → #2195)

lost to Anna Christie (#2435 → #2383)

beat Fast Times at Ridgemont High (#2466 → #2465)

beat Marathon (#2450 → #2463)

beat Once Upon a Time in America (#2442 → #2475)

lost to The Party (#2438 → #2403)

lost to Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (#2440 → #2430)

beat Ice Princess (#2441 → #2445)

📊 Ranked #2517/4003 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 37

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

IMDb plot summary: In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America's greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.

Directed by Mike Cheslik. Stars Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, and Doug Mancheski.

Hundreds of Beavers is... maybe a little difficult to explain. The plot is about a man in Old West trapper territory who learns how to sustain himself through the winter by hunting, trading, and working toward his goal of winning over the woman he loves. In structure, it is very much like a Looney Tunes cartoon, with sound effects and zany impossible physics moments and broad slapstick. There's almost no speaking in the entire film, as it uses sound effects and visual gags to communicate everything that's going on. I had so much fun with this. I kept waiting to see if the gimmick was going to get old, but they kept finding new and creative ways to play with the story and to amp up the stakes in a really engaging way. I laughed out loud more than I have in any movie that I can think of in recent history. It just kept surprising me with its ridiculous visual gags. This is either going to be something that you're going to love or hate, but you will absolutely know which within the first 15 minutes. Personally, I had a blast with it. There's nothing else like this out there right now and it is a ridiculous delight and I'm so glad I watched it. 

How it entered my Flickchart:

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

beat Gothika (#2004 → #2006)

beat Stage Door (#941 → #942)

beat Star Wars: The Force Awakens (#510 → #512)

lost to Ruby Sparks (#252 → #251)

lost to Umberto D. (#375 → #374)

lost to Best in Show (#443 → #435)

lost to Christmas in Connecticut (#482 → #481)

beat Clerks (#416 → #418)

beat Grease (#497 → #495)

lost to Edge of Tomorrow (#486 → #485)

beat Short Term 12 (held at #488)

beat Portrait of a Lady on Fire (#487 → #503)

📊 Ranked #502/4002 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 87

Argylle (2024)

IMDb plot summary: A reclusive author who writes espionage novels about a secret agent and a global spy syndicate realizes that the plot of the new book she's writing starts to mirror real-world events in real time.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Stars Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Sam Rockwell.

Argyle is a spy action thriller featuring Bryce Dallas Howard as a woman who writes a series of spy novels that turn out to be a little too good at research -- to the point where she's predicting actual espionage conflicts in the real world. As a result, she is kidnapped by some of the real life counterparts of the organizations she writes about in her book. This film started off silly but enjoyable, and then devolved into silly but unenjoyable, at least for me. There are a couple of big twists throughout the film that are clearly supposed to be fun mind-blowing moments but they just strike me as goofy in a way that fights the suspension of disbelief I had already agreed to. As it went on and we learned the true backstory of so many different characters, I was less and less invested. By far the most engaging moments were the ones where we see simultaneous presentation of her interacting with her imaginary characters and their real-life counterparts. There was some really engaging and fun editing employed in those scenes. But overall what started with a great idea became kind of a dull movie that went on far too long.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Argylle (2024)

lost to The Sparks Brothers (#1998 → #1973)

beat Where Eagles Dare (#2994 → #2989)

lost to Rebecca (#2497 → #2494)

lost to Hamlet (#2745 → #2669)

beat The Limey (#2869 → #2860)

lost to Happy Christmas (#2807 → #2651)

lost to The Unsinkable Molly Brown (#2838 → #2702)

beat Whatever Works (#2853 → #3012)

beat Those Who Wish Me Dead (#2845 → #2846)

beat Grace of Monaco (#2841 → #2835)

beat Resident Evil (#2839 → #2833)

📊 Ranked #2706/4001 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 33