I caught up on Blank Check!

2022 was a banner year for cinema. Tons of smash hits and movies that will be lifelong favorites. It’s like all of that creative juice, compressed into cramped canisters by the pandemic exploded in a brilliant burst of output. To that point, I’d been a pretty TV-forward dude, but seeing all of those great movies1 made me want to expand my horizons and check off a ton of films I’d not seen.

After a couple of years of different TV projects, I looked to 2023 as a year to make movies my main focus. I’d watch at least one pre-2023 film per day and I’d have three (then four) guiding lights:

• The extant filmographies of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese
• The 2023 Criterion Challenge
• Any film covered by the podcast Unspooled (which covered the 2007 AFI Top 100 List)
• Any film covered by the podcast Blank Check with Griffin & David

For these, if there was any film I’d already seen, I didn’t force a rewatch unless I truly remembered nothing2. While I got the first three bullet points done (with time to spare), I always knew Blank Check would be a multi-year project. Even at one film per day *and* skipping what I’d already seen I couldn’t watch all of that podcast in a year. It would take extra time.

As of yesterday, though, I’ve officially caught up on everything the show has ever covered. Moving forward I only have to watch whatever they cover as they cover it. It’s been a long, two-and-a-half year road, with lots of ups and down, surprises, or what else have you. I still have a bunch of episodes left listenwise (I’m currently at the tail end of 2023’s episodes), but for now, the hard part is done…

Here are some categories and standout directors who fall into them…

Auteur theory

Directors who have a firm hand over all aspects of their production, including but not limited to a particular style and a sense of perfection that every detail is one they’ve perfectly honed…

Stanley Kubrick

One of the big kahunas of cinema history. Before this watch the only films of his I’d seen were The Shining and 2001 and that built in a sense of coldness to his films that kept me at arm’s length. As with a few others in this write-up, he was one I dreaded, but there were so many of his films that I flat out loved. Not everything was a total hit, but the potency of his cinema, his exacting perfectionism… it all really pays off. And… yeah. Film bros love his movies. Why wouldn’t they?

But Kubrick played in all sorts of different genres, and played in them so definitively that he never felt the need to go back and play in those spaces again. Be it historical like Barry Lyndon or ‘nam like Full Metal Jacket or dystopic sci-fi like A Clockwork Orange, he really tried a billion different things and made them all top of their category. It’s a singular task and it’s remarkable he did it.

• Best Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Worst Movie: Killer’s Kiss
• Favorite Movie: Eyes Wide Shut
• Recommended Movie: Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

David Fincher

Fincher’s output has dipped a bit since he fell into the Netflix hole of them giving him lots of money to do whatever he wants. And yet, basically everything he’s done since Alien3 is incredible cinema. Even something like Fight Club, which was totemic in its time has diminished somewhat in the last decade and a half… but when that’s your weakest movie? Like… my god. Gone Girl and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are phenomenal. But also his lesser-discussed films like The Game and Panic Room and The Killer are a blast to watch.

His attention to detail is meticulous and the perfection with which he approaches his work really pays off in films that are uniformly incredible. God. Just go watch a Fincher movie. He rules.

• Best Movie: Zodiac
• Worst Movie: Alien 3
• Favorite Movie: The Social Network
• Recommended Movie: Panic Room

David Lynch

What to even say about David Lynch? The dude was a madcap, complete and total genius. He was amazing at capturing indescribable empathy and compassion while also pulling out truly nightmarish imagery. Even something like Inland Empire, an inscrutable three-hour descent into a haunted narrative is just… an incredible experience. But… man… when Wild at Heart is his weakest (non-Dune) movie? Like… it was still terrific.

And then there’s The Straight Story, a completely insane G-rated movie about an old man traveling by tractor to visit his estranged brother. Even when he’s not doing his “traditional” trips into the strange and subconscious he still has incredible storytelling instincts and visual style. What an absolute legend. What a gift he was to all of us.

• Best Movie: Mulholland Drive
• Worst Movie: Dune
• Favorite Movie: Mulholland Drive
• Recommended Movie: Blue Velvet

Short, but brilliant runs

Those who only made a few films or made a lot of films in an extremely compressed timeframe…

Buster Keaton

While Keaton’s [directing] filmography was quite extensive, it was only one decade of his career. He burned so brightly, but his work is such that a lot of it holds up until today. His stuntwork is still unparalleled and you’ve almost certainly seen examples of his work because watching some of the shit he did in the name of entertainment is magnificent. Silent film is great to watch and a good way of celebrating the visual style of cinema.

These films are usually quite short and a lot of Keaton’s work is in the public domain (albeit each listing is gonna have a different score because there was never a set score to these films). The go-to recommendation is The General, but Steamboat Bill Jr., Seven Chances, and One Week (a short) are all magnificent and worth your time. But… Sherlock Jr. is one of the greatest, most incredible films ever made. It’s only like 45 minutes but it’s the beset 45 minutes you’re gonna spend watching anything in the month that you watch it. It’s going to blow you away.

• Best Movie: Sherlock Jr.
• Worst Movie: College (boo blackface!)
• Favorite Movie: Sherlock Jr.
• Recommended Movie: The General

Elaine May

Most of May’s claim to fame is as a screenwriter known for working closely with director Mike Nichols (The Graduate). After her four forays into directing, she retreated to writing3 and hasn’t gone back. She’s in her 90s now and so that ship has probably sailed.

Her use of Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid is fantastic, while working with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk in Mikey and Nickey was a great exploration of one of the great acting duos of their time. You probably haven’t seen A New Leaf, but that movie is wickedly, wickedly funny, and I usually dislike films that operate on that level of comedy at all costs. Even something as weird as Ishtar has merit. It’s just too bad that Warren Beatty took that film over and the process scared her off directing forever. Boo.

• Best Movie: The Heartbreak Kid
• Worst Movie: Ishtar
• Favorite Movie: The Heartbreak Kid
• Recommended Movie: A New Leaf

Bob Fosse

Before this, Fosse was a style of choreography with jazz hands and such. In watching his films, he’s a terrific visionary, one obsessed with great artists and the burdens of said greatness. Everyone knows Cabaret, but Star 80 is a black, cynical true story of one shitheel taking full advantage of a small could-have-been-literally-anything talent and the tragic, horrible ending to all of it. Hardly a recommend, but if that’s what you want, All That Jazz is one of the great films ever. Just an amazing piece of work, that one.

• Best Movie: All That Jazz
• Worst Movie: Star 80
• Favorite Movie: All That Jazz
• Recommended Movie: Cabaret

Satoshi Kon

I could easily include Miyazaki on this, as he’s the most famous anime director of all time. But… I’m shouting out Satoshi Kon because his filmography is tragically short. He only made a few before his death at the age of 46.

Unlike Miyazaki, whose films are wonderfully imaginative and celebrate beauty, try to recapture childhood, and so many other things, Kon’s films are darker, playing as thrillers or horrors. Everything he made was great, be it the taut paranoid thriller of Perfect Blue, the survey of a person’s remarkable life like in Millennium Actress, an Inception-like delving into dreams like Paprika, or even his anime series Parnoia Agent, which explores groupthink culture as a mindless gestalt, a spontaneous phenomena can capture and haunt the minds of all those who touch it. Everything he made was truly amazing. Can’t believe we’ll always have so little to celebrate.

• Best Movie: Millennium Actress
• Worst Movie: Tokyo Godfathers
• Favorite Movie: Paprika
• Recommended Movie: Perfect Blue

Burned bright and early but diminished returns…

Those who started off strong but flagged as time went on for… varied reasons…

Cameron Crowe

Crowe is the poster child for a dude who burned bright early and has withered as time as gone on. People swear by Jerry Maguire but it didn’t really do much for me. There’s also people in my generation who love Almost Famous, but it seems like those people always wanted to be in a band. Can’t relate.

There are two major problems with Crowe, the biggest and most glaring one is his central, male characters. It’s no coincidence that his best films involve deeply sensitive male leads who eschew traditional concepts of masculinity. I love Tom Cruise, but he’s a specific brand of manhood that doesn’t fit into the John Wayne mold or what have you. By the time he makes Aloha, he’s cast Bradley Cooper for his lead, and the resulting wild bro energy has such a toxic alpha energy that it tanked what was already a bad movie.

The second is more subtle, but it’s that Crowe (especially as his career has gone on) has fallen into what I can only describe as “screenwriter traps.” There are lessons common in screenwriting about how to make scenes interesting, usually by layering multiple complications onto them. Crowe’s work gets so broad that these stick out at odd angles. For example, Almost Famous opens with a joke that amounts to the main character’s mother telling him “you think you’re 13 but lol jk that’s a lie you’re actually 11 because your sister basically lied to you at an early age and I never bothered to correct her”. It’s a wild thing to put in a movie, especially early on. So broad and just for the wtf of it all. I’m still not over how much it shatters the logic of that reality. Like completely.

All of this adds to a dude who’s really wrapped himself so hard around his own particular proclivities that it’s really made his movies rather noxious.

• Best Movie: Jerry Maguire
• Worst Movie: Elizabethtown (for the record, if anyone asks me what the worst film I’ve ever seen is, this is my go-to answer. I’m not kidding).
• Favorite Movie: Say Anything (though I would love to cheat here and say Fast Times At Ridgemont High because he wrote it and it’s really just fantastic; he didn’t direct it, though so… I’m mentioning it here as a cheat)
• Recommended Movie: Almost Famous

John Carpenter

While I’m arguing that Carpenter’s career diminished as it hit the mid-late 90s, the only reason he’s in this category is because his post They Live! work is (with the exception of In the Mouth of Madness) far less than his run from Assault on Precinct 13 thru the aforementioned film. It’s like he lost whatever groove was keeping him going through that full decade and a half of just insane output.

It’s easy to look at his career and only go for the highs. Sure, nothing in there touches The Thing or Halloween, but those are two of the greatest films (not even horror films) ever made. Even Christine is astonishing as a Stephen King adaptation while Big Trouble in Little China manages to avoid being the tokenist yikes-racism movie you’d expect it to be. And god Prince of Darkness is phenom.

• Best Movie: The Thing
• Worst Movie: The Ward
• Favorite Movie: The Thing
• Recommended Movie: Escape From New York

Tim Burton

I’ve never been a huge Tim Burton fan, but his run of films from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure through Ed Wood is stunningly, undeniably untouchable. His voice and kookiness bursts in every frame, and it’s easy to see why his aesthetic inspired an entire generation of filmmakers and also a bit of Hot Topic.

But the problem with Burton is his lack of taste. Burton has spoken frankly about his inability to discern what makes a good screenplay, and it’s probably a byproduct of his early years that enough studios were telling him what was or wasn’t working on a script level that it made his films work. At a certain point that sense of “Tim Burton’s gonna sell” probably took over and the care got less from those Burton had to listen to.

This lack of capacity has done serious damage to his career, leaving him making bad scripts that are all flash and no substance. There have been moments of lucidity, scripts he’s found that have been good enough to be good-enough films. Maybe a strong producer is what he’s been missing, or people who can help consult on the writing he has no quality control for. Too bad. Tim Burton is, in the end, a case of a dude with incredible imagination sunk by a weakness he never took the time to buttress.

• Best Movie: Ed Wood
• Worst Movie: Alice in Wonderland
• Favorite Movie: Big Fish
• Recommended Movie: Beetlejuice

Robert Zemeckis

What is there to even say about Robert Zemeckis? His run of Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future Part II, and Back to the Future Part III is a six-year, four-movies-in-a-row run that basically no other director has matched.

But…….. then there’s all the ways he’s a Boomer filmmaker with rather aggravating interests. Be it his forays into motion capture with The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol or the revisionist “weren’t things just great” of Forrest Gump and Here to his perplexing moves like Welcome to Marwen or Pinocchio… Zemeckis has made some half-decent movies over the last two decades, but most of the output since Cast Away has really damaged his overall reputation in ways from which it’s difficult to recover.

Yes, a lot of the troubles come from his fascination with advances in film technology and related interests, but that pushing the medium forward has come at the expense of the elegant storytelling of his 80s work that made for great movies amidst those advancements.

• Best Movie: Back to the Future
• Worst Movie: Pinocchio
• Favorite Movie: Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• Recommended Movie: Death Becomes Her

James L. Brooks

Brooks won an Academy Award on his first film out. Terms of Endearment is an incredible movie even if you know the twist is coming. Just insane to see that much quality spring forth in real time.

And… it was going okay for a little bit, but then it all kinda falls apart. Whatever his method for the first chunk of his career has basically collapsed for the second. It’s been a series of “hey maybe this was a huge mistake”. It’s hard to look at something as genius as Broadcast News and know that that guy turned around and made I’ll Do Anything or (even worse) went from As Good As It Gets to Spanglish. Dude definitely has another great film in him, but like… I don’t know what it would take to get there.

• Best Movie: Terms of Endearment
• Worst Movie: Spanglish
• Favorite Movie: Broadcast News
• Recommended Movie: Broadcast News

The not what I expected…

Filmmakers who I walked in with pre-conceived notions but who ended up being genuine surprises…

Ang Lee

It’s easy to look at Ang Lee at his biggest and see the sequence of events that started with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk lead the way to his more brash blockbuster fare like Life of Pi and Gemini Man, but what that misses is that Lee is a fabulous humanist. Everyone might know Brokeback Mountain (because it’s fabulous!) but his other films like The Ice Storm and The Wedding Banquet are incredible studies of fascinating characters and the generational differences between them.

• Best Movie: Brokeback Mountain
• Weakest Movie: Taking Woodstock
• Favorite Movie: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• Recommended Movie: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Jonathan Demme

Most know Demme for Silence of the Lambs, but it’s atypical of the rest of what he does. The film that introduced Anthony Hopkin’s Hannibal Lecter to the masses is a crime thriller so incredible it’s difficult to imagine he’d want to go back and do another because like… how could you even top it?

His filmography is insanely long, dating back to a handful of Roger Corman-produced cheap ass indie movies in the 70s. But Demme’s fascination with capturing complex characters via boundless empathy is why a hot-button movie like Philadelphia can smash as hard as it does. It’s why a movie like Swing Shift completely falls apart when a producer like Goldie Hawn strips him of his vision of its bite and changes it from a complex film about a complex woman into something about… nothing.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Rachel Getting Married, a film I loved so deeply that anytime anyone mentions Demme it’s the first movie I tell people they should wathc. Mostly because they’ve already met Grace Starling and it’s a dice roll if they’ve heard of the Talking Heads.

• Best Movie: Silence of the Lambs
• Worst Movie: A Master Builder
• Favorite Movie: Silence of the Lambs (but really, huge shoutout to Stop Making Sense, which is the movie I’ve most rewatched in the last few years. And it’s not even close).
• Recommended Movie: Rachel Getting Married

Paul Verhoeven

Crazy Dutch maximalist Paul Verhoeven has made some truly out there and extreme films. He plays in a world of sex and violence through the prism of bleak satire and black comedy. He’s usually too smart for the sort of low-brow movie it seems like he’s making… and yet. And yet I loved almost everything I saw of his. Even the bad stuff. There’s a grotesqueness to it, a bleak cynicism… It’s easy to look at Robocop or Total Recall or Starship Troopers as dope as maximalist sci-fi films, but they’re far more than that. They’re works of tremendous, scathing satire as can only come from a mind as genius and warped as Verhoeven.

His films are not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. But Verhoeven is the filmmaker in this category I keep revisiting jthe most. Without Blank Check I probably wouldn’t have made it to seeing his films, let alone all of them. While Elle was a deeply unpleasant experience and Showgirls was a lascivious mess, they were fascinating for how they approached their subject matters. And Benedetta and Basic Instinct were batshit insane in the best of ways. God. I love Verhoeven. Before this, I never would have thought that possible.

• Best Movie: Robocop
• Worst Movie: Flesh + Blood
• Favorite Movie: Robocop
• Recommended Movie: Starship Troopers

True Blank Checkers

The filmmakers who most live up to the name…

M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night is a total joke, and has been since The Happening. And yet, for all that he’s deeply, deeply mockable, there is something glorious about how, since The Visit, he funds his own films by mortgaging his house. These movies are exactly the result he wants to acheive, spurred as they are by financial ruin should they fail. Not everything since he started doing this has been a hit, but the audacity to make these films on a responsible budget is the sort of thing more filmmakers should do.

The biggest misconception of M. Night is that he makes movies of some Academy Award caliber. The dude doesn’t make films; he’s strictly a flick guy. Even something like The Sixth Sense works best when we view it as an elevated B-movie (like Get Out) rather than as some towering achievement to cinema a la Amadeus or something. Trap is an outrageously silly movie. So are Old and Glass and (obviously) The Happening.

The hardest thing is figuring out if his weird sensibilities play as he intends. Does he know that it’s more gross than horrifying when the grandfather smears his shit-smeared diaper on the kid’s face in The Visit? It’s a high camp moment. When we see security camera footage of evil Josh Harnett in Trap enticing a victim into his van, is it a moment I’m supposed to cackle at? Is he aware? I am still trying to engage in these questions well after I’ve seen these movies. Not sure if that’s a good thing.

• Best Movie: The Sixth Sense
• Worst Movie: The Last Airbender
• Favorite Movie: The Village
• Recomennded Movie: The Visit

Steven Spielberg

People have written enough about Spielberg that you don’t need to hear it from me. The thing about Spielberg, though, is that his filmography has so many ups and downs that the ups really do blow the downs out of the water. There are few filmmakers better at casting insanely well. His composition is top notch. And for all that his movies go for popcorn, there’s a reason he’s one of the greatest to ever do it. The dude was born to make films, and he’s made so many truly, astonishingly good ones. Highly recommend his entire filmography if you get the chance.

• Best Movie: E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
• Worst Movie: 1941 (so bad it should have killed his career)
• Favorite Movie: Jurassic Park
• Recommended Movie: Bridge of Spies

Christopher Nolan

Honestly, the highest profile blank check director out there right now. The dude has yet to miss in that respect. This has granted him the ability to make just tremendous films at insane budgets. He’s also one of those directors whose cinematic voice and vernacular harmonizes with exactly what I like to see. The aggressive way he cuts his movies and moves through his narratives is unlike anyone else, and the way he navigates a movie like The Prestige is unlike anything I’d seen to that point. That’s true with all of his movies from Memento to Oppenheimer.

And thank god he’s just churning out movies once every three years. Man. Inception and Tenet rip so hard while Dunkirk and Oppenheimer are clever ways to tell those stories and only Nolan could do it like that. Living legend.

• Best Movie: Interstellar
• Worst Movie: The Dark Knight Rises
• Favorite Movie: Interstellar
• Recommended Movie: Tenet

The Wachowskis

God I love The Wachowskis. The Matrix has been my favorite film for many years, and the one film of theirs they’ve made that I don’t like (Jupiter Ascending) is one I think I might get a re-eval on when I do revisit it in the near future.

Still, it’s easy to see them as just The Matrix etc., but Speed Racer is great, Cloud Atlas is a film I’ll be talking about on here real soon, and Bound is a fantastic contained crime thriller that everyone should watch. Especially because it’s Pride.

The problem with the Wachowskis is that The Matrix is basically their one universal hit and everything they make utilizes an imagination that requires a level of budget only doable at massive scale. Their sense of vision is really unparalleled and everything they do is fascinating if also quite esoteric. I know the two sisters are off doing their own individual work for now, but goodness. When they’re on…

• Best Movie: The Matrix
• Worst Movie: Jupiter Ascending
• Favorite Movie: The Matrix
• Recommended Movie: Speed Racer

James Cameron

For my money, the grand poobah. A dude who just keeps taking those checks, cashing them, and paying off dividends. The one that doesn’t pay out (The Abyss) is still a phenomenal film, and his run since then has just been a limitless ride upwards. His Avatar sequels are true phenomena. But… more on him soon.

• Best Movie: Titanic
• Worst Movie: Piranha II (or if he gets pissy about that, True Lies)
• Favorite Movie: Aliens
• Recommended Movie: The Abyss

Films are cool!

Catching up on Blank Check and finishing these various projects has really opened my eyes up to film. Since this all started I’ve become more of an authority on film, thought there’s still vast depths I’ve yet to plumb. That said, the bottomless abyss to which you could descend infinitely is too much for me. The current plan is to take all of this effort and knowledge base and slowly build on it moving forward while focusing my attention back to television, books, etc. That’ll be happening more in a few months, but for now… gosh it’s good to have this accomplished.