They call me the suburban Žižek1

What you’ll get here is plain-language film reviews with some political, cultural and economic context. No bullshit about singular authorial brilliance, no movie-star mystique, no gullible ‘actors studio’ flannel - a materialist critique of the immaterial joys of the movies.

Is a popular film necessarily a good film?I love the movies but I don’t know enough about the early days and about the evolution of the form - about the explosion of creativity and innovation that produced the whole global film business - Hollywood, of course, but also the many national cinema economies that have been providing entertainment for us all for over 120 years.

So, as a low-effort way to grasp the whole span of cinema history I’m watching every top-grossing film since 1913 and reviewing them here on Substack.

I chose 1913, because, as far as I can tell, that’s when they started publishing movie box office incomes, at least in the Hollywood system, which was the most advanced commercial cinema in the world back then, as it is now. Movie theatres reported their ticket sales to distributers and they passed the information back to the studios. Industry publications - like Variety (founded 1905) and the Hollywood Reporter (1930) - began to tabulate the numbers and now they’re taken as the most reliable measure of a film’s success, even though they still don’t satisfactorily reflect DVD sales, streaming, piracy and all the other important ways to think about how well a movie did.

It’s not an arduous task - I love the movies and there are only about 110 of them - but in some cases it’s an impossible one: 1914’s biggest hit was a 23-part serial called The Million Dollar Mystery and 1917’s a film called Cleopatra: both are now thought to be lost. Films from as late as 1926 have been lost.

I like this approach because it takes the burden of curating the list of films away from me. I hate having to choose and with GROSS I don’t have to - I just have to work through the list (with some substitutes for the lost ones) and I can take the odd diversion if I feel like it.

GROSS is free for the time being but there’s a $5/month option for generous people who want to help me justify sitting here at my computer typing all these words. Tell your movie nut friends!

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.