I rate every film I log on LetterBoxd 5 stars. I think I always did this. Why? I am a student of buddhism and also there is a book by Eckhart Tolle called the power of Now which is a lot of buddhist and even christian sort of lessons. One of them is that the past and future do not exist, that there is only the present moment and that the moment is eternal and ever changing.
So this had a big impact on me and I still see it to be true to this day. I also got really into meditation at this time and was spending a lot of time in total silence completely still, without any external stimulus and was finding it profound in all kinds of ways. Anyways from then on, every moment I was breathing was something I could consider perfect and complete. There was no such thing as a waste of time and everyone and everythning that existed was a miracle to me. So in that way, every film I saw became an extension of the amazing beautiful perfect moment that was already there.
I soaked up films like a sponge. All kinds. I made a point to go see everything on the schedule especially if I didn't know what it was, just because I knew it could be something that could be poetic or educational or beautiful. and if it wasn't any of those things It was still great, just because I was there and got to see it. Just because I and it exist in the same moment.
Boy, I am really getting in the weeds here. I promise I'm going to arrive at a point. So here I had a spiritual framework for the existential beauty of all art, no matter what the quality or circumstance. But why MOVIES, why not paint or music or architecture. And what if it exists, is the point of trying to make something good, or great? These were new questions for me at the time. Was there such a thing. What was the point?
I already had trouble with the idea of ranking movies on a list and rating them using stars. Because what I had expeienced in my moviegoing adventures were films that seemed too serve all kinds of purposes that I got many different kinds of value from. It was impossible for me to use a stars to rank a movie because to me the only thing that could represent what the movie was qualitatively was the film itself. The only wasy to know what the films effect was , was to watch it. Only then could you fully understand what exactly it was. I thought stars were simly insufficient to express the impact of the film on me.
So I go with five stars because I really do philosophically subscribe to the idea that every moment is 5 stars. That life is five stars and that includes these films, even cats.
But that's not all. now there is a new unkown, and with it new problems. I read the book Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky. Van Neistat became my favorite filmmaker. Werner Herzog said we're filmmakers, not garbage collectors. Life started to get harder and at the same time I started to really understand the sacrifices and the actual logistical challenges of making a 'worthwhile' film. And that's when I decided that If life was going to end up the way I wanted it to, that I wanted to make the movies I wanted to make and that I was going to make them at the scale that I wanted to make, and that it was going to require a LOT more dedication and a hell of a lot of work and a fuck ton of mother fucking money. And then it started to really be unnacteptable for me to be treating my film or anything that I did for that matter as if it was a practice run for someother time in the future. Nuh uh. This was the only time I ad and if I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it now. No more fucking around.
This is getting hard to explain and I'm about to pass out so I think I'll come back to it after I've thought about it more.