Rebellion (Lie$) (Patreon)

There's no sense in which Sneakers losing a heads-up battle could be deemed a huge upset, but this week's request-poll winner is still delightfully improbable. My friend Victor has been prodding me for many years to see an obscure documentary (I think—my vague impression is that there's something fishy about it) called Forbidden Lie$, which had a minuscule NYC run in 2009 and has rarely been spoken of since by anyone but Victor. I actually suggested to him that he request it here (he'd been going exclusively with silent films, as a counterbalance to recency bias), fully expecting that it'd take a year to automatically qualify, since nobody's likely to vote for a film that they haven't seen. Happy to be proved wrong (and here's further evidence that making the case for your choice in the comments can be highly effective). Not only did Lie$ advance to the heads-up round, but it positively clobbered poor Sneakers, receiving 63% of the vote—again, almost entirely from people who haven't seen the film and may know as little about it as I do. Warms the heart. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be legally available anywhere, but it looks as if maybe you can watch it in pieces on YouTube. (I'll be using an invaluable source of Kultural Goods.)

Both of November's random selections, on the other hand, are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel (and one of them's also available on Max; don't strain yourself trying to guess which). I can't promise to watch Happy Hour by the end of the year—this is a rough time to carve out five hours, and I'm about to spend a full month away from home, between the holidays and housesitting for my sister again (she's now engaged to a tour guide she met in Africa and planning to move there soon)—but I'm sorta looking forward to it, even though I bailed after nearly two hours back in 2016 (and haven't loved any of Hamaguchi's subsequent films). What I saw was intriguing, but it still hadn't firmly hooked me after 105 minutes, which is the length of your entire average movie. So I cut my losses, but it's now clearly something I should fully reckon with. And, y'know, Watership Down. Never read the book, even. Don't know the plot apart from: rabbits. 

As I noted on Bluesky—so most of you won't have seen it, 'cause ain't hardly nobody there still—one of you, I don't know which one, recently became this endeavor's 1000th subscriber. That's a milestone I never expected to reach when I launched this sucker in sheer financial desperation five years ago (not sure I expected to hit 100), and I remain deeply grateful for your quite literal patronage. Now if I can just multiply that by ten somehow... (Actually, even just doubling it would get me close to my Time Out New York salary, albeit unadjusted for inflation.) Anyway, thank you.