The Jubilee Mark

Last night we reached a milestone on this blog -- our 50th review. According to IMDb, we have at least six to go, but most of these are obscure titles that even the librarian-sleuth in this duo has not yet been able to find. So we will pause at this moment to summarize the results so far. 

(And yes, I did make a spreadsheet to keep track of all this. By our  count, we have viewed 51 of 56 listed works.)

We introduced our unique rating system when we introduced this blog just over three years ago. Both the icons and the top rating are based on Noni's most important work, the very dark comedy Heathers. Strictly speaking, it might not be the best movie ever made (that is probably Wizard of Oz, with Miss Judy Garland), but it remains the best showcase for Miss Winona Ryder and her unique talents.

In watching or re-watching fifty of her works (films, shorts, and television episodes), we have found only one other in which Our Noni's star shines equally brightly, and it is a very different kind of film: Little Women. 

- 3

Was this directed by her parole officer?

- 6

Must be one of her comebacks.

- 20

Good enough for non-fans.

- 19

That's our Noni!

- 2

Heathers

Of course, even Winona's biggest fans have to acknowledge that her off-screen life has been problematic. We have not spent a lot of time on the question of how such a wealth individual (2015 net worth is about $14,000,000) would be shoplifting. In doing this project, however, we did gradually come to the conclusion that something changed around the time of her 2001 conviction. Two very strong (4-croquet-ball) works were released that year: her Friends episode and Zoolander. 

Of course, those would both have been in production before the conviction. I put a grey bar across those entries in the spreadsheet, and we can see a clear difference pre- and post-shoplifting. I've not run complete stats yet (I'm not that much of a nerd), but the mean ratings before and after are quite distinct: 3.7 and 2.5, respectively. More importantly, although there have been a few very good performances since 2001, we did not find any turkeys (1- and 2-croquet-ball ratings) until 2008, and they have dominated her work since then.

We close this update with a link back to some fun at Our Noni's expense -- parodies we included in A Very Winona Christmas in 2014.