♫ Diddly-dum diddly-dum diddly-dum ooo-wee-ooo… ♫

If you somehow missed the news, Doctor Who hit the big six-oh this month. (It feels like only a couple of years since I was reviewing the 50th anniversary special. You don’t need a TARDIS to reach the future at astonishing speed — life will just do it for you.) As a lifelong Whovian, naturally I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to celebrating that milestone — something I’ve mentioned before in these monthly reviews, because it’s surely had an effect on my film viewing, simply by dint of eating up so much of my free time. (Were my time my own, I would’ve been able to syphon off a smaller amount for my Who celebrations; but gotta put bread on the table ‘n’ all that.) To give you an idea of just how much more Doctor Who-ing I’ve been doing than film watching, this month I’ve included a section all about it, and it’s taken over the header image too.

Before I come to that, it’s business as usual. I did still manage to watch some films; and with this having been the penultimate month of the year, obviously my Challenge is getting towards the pointy end. Am I within sight of completing it this year? Well, let’s take a look…

#81 Quiz Lady (2023) — New Film #11
#82 Doctor Who (1996) — Rewatch #11
#83 The Killers (1946) — WDYMYHS #9

• I watched three feature films I’d never seen before in November.
• Two of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with one rewatch.
• And that rewatch was how Doctor Who even managed to invade my Challenge viewing! #82 is perhaps better known by one of its official subtitles: The Movie (on DVD and Blu-ray releases) or The TV Movie (on novelisations and its iPlayer listing) — but, of course, the onscreen title is simply Doctor Who. Does a TV movie count as a movie? Especially as it was produced as a “backdoor pilot”, i.e. although officially a one-off, the intention was it would lead to a series. Well, back in 2008, I counted the 24 TV movie (which they made between seasons 6 and 7, and whose story leads directly into season 7), so if that counts, this one has no problem, right? Well, I make the rules (literally), so I say it does (especially as it’s ‘only’ a rewatch, a designation I feel a little more lax around).
• If you really object, maybe just imagine I counted my rewatch of The Day of the Doctor instead — another feature-length TV special really, but one that actually had a theatrical release, so is arguably even more of a film (certainly, I counted it as one back in 2013).
• This month’s WDYMYHS film was Robert Siodmak’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers. It’s been filmed at least twice more since this, but it’s hard to see why they bothered when the original is so good.
• Nothing from Blindspot, though, which leaves me with a helluva lot to catchup next month — not least because three of the four outstanding films run over three hours each.
• From last month’s “failures”, I failed to watch anything. Oh dear.
• All told, that means I go into December with 17 films left to complete my Challenge. The most films I’ve watched in a month fullstop this year was 17 (hurrah!), but my monthly average is closer to 10½ (boo!), and all the inevitable Christmassy family stuff to come means I won’t really have a full month left to finish it off. Oh dear…
• Last year I abandoned the Challenge at #89, so I’m hoping to at least surpass that. Six films is certainly a more feasible goal than 17.

Favourite Film of the Month
My WDYMYHS film noirs have been doing very well in this category so far in 2023, and that continues this month, with The Killers being a pretty easy pick. With three WDYMYHS films left to hopefully squeeze in next month, the category might have another victory yet to come.

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Well, this feels harsh. I only have three films to choose from this month, and I liked them all. I guess the loser, almost by default, is the 2015 version of Far from the Madding Crowd. It’s a good film, but not as exceptional as The Killers, and not as entertaining as Quiz Lady.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
As has been the case almost all year now, just two posts battle it out for this award this month: my October review and my October ‘failures’. Neither challenge the upper echelons of the overall chart, either (still dominated by old TV reviews, the first two Harry Potters, and — bizarrely — a little-seen Chilean film that I only saw because we were screening it at a festival I worked on). Anyway, of the two posts in contention, it was the overall October review that narrowly, but definitively, came out on top this time.

As I mentioned at the start, I thought I’d just include a rundown of all the watching, reading, and listening I’ve been doing to mark Doctor Who‘s 60th birthday, as an indication of just how much time I gave over to this — time I’d often (though, in fairness, not always) have spent watching films. These are more-or-less in the order I progressed through them, which is more-or-less in chronological order within the Whoniverse (as it’s now officially called).

To briefly outline what was going on here: I wanted to choose one piece of media I’d never experienced for each official TV Doctor. That sounds kinda highfalutin’ written down, but it’s because I was keeping it broad. Doctor Who may primarily be a TV show, but it’s also existed in books, comics, audio drama, and more down the decades. I wanted to include as much of that as possible; and because there’s so much of it I’ve never seen/read/heard, I wanted to keep it all-new (to me). With that in mind, this is what I ended up with…

And that doesn’t even include the stuff that’s been on TV and radio during this period — like series two of podcast drama Doctor Who: Redacted; Radio 2’s Doctor Who @ 60: A Musical Celebration concert (on both radio and TV); the archive-diving Talking Doctor Who documentary; multiple radio documentaries, covering topics like the Wilderness Years and the A-Z of fandom; the Children in Need sketch; classic serial The Daleks re-edited and colourised; the (revised) repeat of An Adventure in Space and Time; Channel 5’s cash-in documentary on the programmes’ “secrets and scandals”; and — of course — the first of the brand-new episodes starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor… and the three-and-a-half hours (yes, really, that much) of official behind-the-scenes content released in its wake.

Crikey.

There’s still more Doctor Who on the telly (two more specials with David Tennant, then Fifteenth Doctor Ncuti Gatwa debuts in a Christmas special), but it’s going to be less all-consuming going forward.

But its damage may already be done. As I mentioned at the end of my Viewing Notes, with 17 films still to go to hit 100 — and most of them very specific ones, constraining me either by type (giallo) or to a set shortlist (Blindspot and WDYMYHS) — and not even a full month to watch them in — I’m not sure it’s even physically possible to complete my Challenge for 2023.

Well, within the entire realm of physics, yes, of course it is. But within the realm of physical reality (where I also have to spend time with family, and doing my day job, and eating, and sleeping, and so on and so forth)… yeah, I’d err on the side of “it’s probably not happening, is it?”