Alien

My four

My Letterboxd four is an actual four, for the first (fourst?) time. Also: fall is great; writing for no reason is, if possible, even more great.

Lia Matthew Brown

Lia Matthew Brown

— 4 min read
My four

I love these days the most. I love these days so much I’m almost afraid of them — how fast they go, how few they are, how quickly the shiver goes straight through me; and then it’s balcony under blankets, and laying away the Christmas pudding. The back half of the year — my favourite — is one long, first plunge of the roller coaster. More reading and more tea and more whiskey, I think, when it’s just too delicious not to.

Meanwhile, last week, Ridley Scott offering up his Letterboxd Four — including one of his own movies on his own list, like the absolute lunatic that he is — seemed to finally clarify whatever part of my mind was keeping me from posting mine, so I did, and I felt strange and glowy about it, so I think I got it right.

They are:

1. Return of the Jedi:

This is the one that was the only film in my four, pretty much from the first moment having a four became a thing on Letterboxd (which might have been the actual beginning, though I can’t precisely remember). Everyone else has a four? Not me! I have a one! The best one! Because you never love any movie so well as the one that was your favourite movie when you were seven.

And for a very, very, very long time, I was very happy with only having one in my four.

2. Naissance des Pieuvres:

Now, though, we’re into the new ground, and an idea of how to do this starts to take shape. I started to think of it like: what if this grid was four movies that had the most profound effects on my moviegoing life.

I’m sure if I gave that premise a lot more thought, I would find it hard to narrow things down to four (well, three actually — Jedi certainly had a profound effect on my moviegoing life, and wasn’t going anywhere); but off the dome, at least two possibilities (this one and Distant Voices) came into the list extremely quickly.

As I wrote once about Naissance des Pieuvres, it “changed the way I look at movies, changed the movies I am looking for, changed how I look at and understand myself. Not bad for a little flick I saw at TIFF [X] years ago, and didn’t think I particularly liked the first time.”

That latter detail: true, and very important. Not that I disliked it on first watch by any means; just, it was one of many in my 50-films-per-festival era at TIFF, and it wasn’t till the film was very much alive in me weeks later — I lay awake listening to that soundtrack for ages — that I began to understand what it had done. And it expanded outward from there, as all the best things do.

3. I Saw The TV Glow:

This one is a bit chancy, because I’m still sorting through what exactly it means to me, except to say that it does, like the others, have an undeniable claim on having changed my relationship to cinema forever.

4. Distant Voices, Still Lives

And finally, this was one of a multitude of great films that I was shown in film school (kicking and screaming the whole way, probably, little twerp I was) and which, like Naissance above, probably didn’t fully communicate its impact upon me until later (although I recall really being impressed with it the first time, especially given it was so far afield of what I “normally” enjoyed in movies). Now Distant Voices feels sepulchral to me, in a way I can’t quite describe. I’ve seen it twice.

The trick where a film expands in the mind and the soul in the hours, days, and weeks after it has ended — a list which is, thankfully, far larger than a Letterboxd Four — is perhaps my favourite thing that movies can do, and I don’t know if I know why it seems to be movies, only, that can have this effect on me, among all the other artworks. Perhaps this, simply, means that they remain “my thing,” like they’ve been from the beginning.

And now, to other matters

On the weekend, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I wrote a science fiction short story, and I am quite in love with it; perhaps, even more so, with the naked pleasure of just writing a thing, without a lot of thought about it.

Now, I have become 1000% convinced that outlining and preparation and beat sheets and so forth are, indeed, a better way to undergo this work generally than freeballing it, as I (quite stubbornly) always did with my earlier writing. But this experience was also a reminder that, uh, freeballing it feels really good; it exercises different muscles; and it is extremely low-stakes creative play. Perhaps we’d all be best served (and I would, most certainly, be better served) by finding more regular time for free writing.

Writing the science fiction short story also made me realize I have a whole other short story, horror in that case, that has been sitting on the shelf. I had been tinkering with it for some time now but not really landing it (and it’s been through a few medium switches, besides). I’ve decided to get off my duff on that one, too, and submit it to a few publications to see what happens.

And other matters still

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