My New Book is Out, and Here's a Free Sample
And you can get the complete book for free with a modest paid subscription here
People are always asking me for movie recommendations. Most of the time, I’m never quite sure what to say.
So I said it in a book, my new one, subtitled “100 of the Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of But Must See.” Since I’m self-publishing and self-promoting, I couldn’t avoid a clickbait-like title. On the Internet, it’s get attention or sit on the sidelines.
I’ve just given a free copy of the e-book to subscribers of this Substack. They are paying $5/month, or $30/year, which are the absolute lowest rates that Substack allows me to charge.
So if you subscribe, monthly or yearly, you’ll get it, too. I am tempted not to say that the monthly subscription price is less than the e-book price on Amazon.
Here are the links to each version of the book:
For your pleasure, here’s the preface to the book, on what it is and why I spent time with it:
The Preface, or What This Book Is and Where It Came From
Besides my five years of making 500-plus videos on Youtube, I’ve posted extensively on letterboxd.com. My routine has been to watch a film, most of them new to me, and then write for 10-20 minutes on each experience.
Those have resulted in hundreds of quick posts, some of which seemed worthy of polish and clarification. As well, two years ago I created a Substack that I regularly post to, which has added up now to dozens of film-analysis pieces — see my original material, via Learning About Movies, on both Youtube and Substack.
Thus this book, which is a curated grouping of letterboxd.com and Substack posts.
I have edited and updated all of them by my own hand — no A.I. writing allowed. They are all much more readable and uniquely different than what’s now available for free online. Please forgive any typographical errors; I am my own editor.
For this collection, I have picked the 100 most substantial writings about relatively unknown films, writings that needed the least amount of editing. That’s resulted in a wonderfully haphazard grouping of films.
Besides the likelihood that many of these films aren’t known to you, there’s no other patterning or order to this collection. But there are trends. The collected films here correlate with my various viewing projects in the last several years — i.e., the complete filmographies of several master-directors, all of the major films of the 1980s and 1990s, A24’s releases, and new releases from 2017 to the present.
Thus the collection heavily tilts towards films from the last 40 years, especially the last 15.
But that’s not to say that there aren’t hundreds of Great-Unknowns in the more distant past. I imagine that this collection could be expanded almost infinitely. It’s titled 100 of the Great Unknowns, not The 100 Great Unknowns. It’s therefore Volume 1 of a potential set.
What is a Great Unknown?
I play loose with terms and definitions here.
First, the Great Unknown reflects my posture at the beginning of each movie-viewing experience. A new film to me has the potential to widen my vision for reality and life itself. That can result in the greatest movie experience, one combining hypnosis, insight, and wisdom. Sometimes that happens through technical means, sometimes through story and character, and rarely through the inexplicable magic of cinema, which is that ultra-complicated combination of everything that cinema can offer.
I go into every new movie, even those that seem as if they have a low-floor and low-ceiling for excellence, submitting myself to the Unknown of the film’s experience. That’s the Great Unknown. Occasionally this results in tremendous surprises and experiences, which are reflected in this volume.
But also, I think most films in this collection are really unknown — especially to casual moviegoers. I realize that if you’re a cinephile, you may know many or most of these films. Yet I know few cinephiles in my personal life, even though nearly everyone else I know thoroughly enjoys the films they love. Looking for movies to watch, they need help. This collection represents various recommendations for the casual and the experienced moviegoer.
Be warned: you likely won’t agree with my point-of-view, even mostly. If you take all of my recommendations, that will result in swings and misses for you. I’ve found that a 40% success rate — if 40% of any recommended list or short-story collection generates for me films or stories I like, even though 60% of it I dislike, that list is still very valuable — that 40% success rate is quite a high number.
This is how it should be. Films have been made to reflect and create idiosyncratic humans.
So please read carefully. If you do so, you’ll likely figure out which films you should watch for yourself, and which you should avoid for now, so that you can have the Great-Unknown experiences that we all search for in encounters with the great works of art.
Because this collection tends toward analysis that reflects my eclectic interests and reading experiences, I’ve focused on the cultural and philosophical implications of films. Technical evaluations of the films, I believe, would back me up in most cases where I promote a film, though that’s not the purview of this book.
If you wish for more of that, see my Youtube channel, where I can actually show you the way that a movie works in real-time, with sight and sound, in dynamic video.
Lastly, a collection like this, admittedly hodge-podge, nevertheless finds itself cohering into a kind of order with many possible meanings.
I reflect that such a work as this is the most oblique kind of memoir, a statement of the critic’s life as much as anything. If you look hard, you can clearly see my middle-aged, Gen-X, midwestern American ethos shine through. Many of these films come from places of weariness, echoes from somewhere between Dante’s canto 1 of Inferno — being lost in a dark wood midway on the journey of life — and his canto 31 of Purgatory, in which he is cleansed of past sins when passing through the river Lethe.
As well, then, the collection probably contains oblique statements about the sociopolitical climate of my lifetime. I don’t think the critic’s job is to espouse ideology via discussion of artworks. However, ideological concerns are inevitable, mostly subtle or hidden from view, since I come from my own eccentric position of strong biases, as we all do.
The bulk of the films seem to add up to a kind of social malaise about the modern world, so many films being reactionary against injustices, whiplash cultural and technological changes, and existential crises.
Nevertheless, several films discussed here offer alternatives or paths out of the malaise — metaphorical climbs up Mount Purgatory itself, towards the stars.