January 15, 2022:
Hitchcock's "Vertigo" is of course misnamed. Scottie doesn't have vertigo, he has acrophobia. Which would never do for a movie title, granted much of the potential audience would think it means fear of spiders.
The opening credits though are accurately vertiginous. Rotating counterclockwise: check. Through patterns that look like they were made with a Spirograph: remember those? I had one.
Quirkily enough the sequence which resonates for me is the episode at Mission San Juan Bautista. I lived a few years just over the hill from there, visiting the mission frequently to light candles for my mother. So that the camera placement in the stoa, the interior scenes, the imagery of the preserved hotel are all familiar.
It's unclear though why this particular flick makes so many critics' "best ever" lists. Sight and Sound's "greatest film ever", 2012. Certainly, it's entertaining and all. But it's no "Plan 9 From Outer Space".