I finally saw: The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings

And oh by the way: Happy Opening Day.

Of the baseball season, silly.

I had to watch my Opening Day Eve baseball psych-up movie a night early this year, which was two nights ago now, because I'm out of town on another baseball-related endeavor: a three-day tournament for over 40 players. This is just a once-a-year thing for me since I no longer play regularly, and we'll see if it's just a one-off or actually once-a-year since it's my first time.

You've figured out the movie I watched if you're good at reading movie posters. Or in this case, DVD covers.

Yes it's John Badham's The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976), and if you're wondering why I'm saying that I've "finally" seen this movie you may have never heard of, well, I'm about to tell you.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the second of an eventual four fantasy baseball leagues in which I've participated -- this is the 16th year of my current one -- a friend from college named his fantasy baseball team after this movie. His last name was, still is, Bond, so he called his team The Bondo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings. (Yes, I believe the software we used gave him a sufficient character count to fit the whole thing.) 

Like you, I had never heard of the movie, but the naming of his team after it certainly piqued my interest. 

And then I proceeded to do nothing about that for the next three decades.

But this year I thought "I like baseball" and "I need a movie to watch the night before the baseball season starts, and I've watched a movie I'd already seen in that slot like three straight years, and this is a movie I have not seen" and I put two and two together.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this story of a barnstorming Negro League baseball team in the late 1930s/early 1940s, and it starts with the cast. Especially with the recent passing of James Earl Jones, it was great to see him up there on the screen with the long-passed Richard Pryor and the still-with-us Billy Dee Williams. I bet the first of that group and the last of that group would never have guessed they'd appear on screen together, of sorts, in one of the most iconic movies of its era, The Empire Strikes Back, just four years later. Maybe if Richard Pryor had played Lobot, we could have had a full reunion.

Right away I knew I was where I wanted to be with this movie -- and that the fact that I have never seen a movie that properly focuses on the Negro Leagues is an oversight I seriously needed to correct. Then again, maybe they just do not exist. Yes, movies like 42 spend some time in a Negro League context, but a movie about the Negro Leagues generally or any specific Negro League team? Other than this, I can't name one. 

Before Williams' title character forms the titular team, the players he amasses are either on other Negro League teams or not on any team at all, working regular jobs despite their ample talent. We see Long, a pitcher, facing off against Jones' slugger Leon Carter in one game, and we are immediately immersed in all the on-field rituals: players leading chants with the crowd, people juggling baseballs and otherwise clowning, sass flying freely between players on opposing teams (or sometimes even the same team) without the umpires interfering. In other words, it was a joyous environment in which competition was taken seriously but fun was never sacrificed. I would have loved to be there in those stands. 

And if I was, I would have been one of the only white faces. Because the other thing this movie immediately reminded me was how much Black Americans used to love baseball. We see how much the crowd adores these players and this pastime, and then we go out to the sandlots outside the park to see young kids pitching and swinging a makeshift stick to approximate their heroes. The fact that a sport that was once somewhere around 50% Black, probably reaching its height in the 1970s and 1980s, now has 5% or less players fitting that demographic is sad indeed. I wish Black kids still fell in love with baseball at an early age the way they obviously did back then. This could also be why we haven't had a younger Black filmmaker make the definitive Negro League baseball movie, which could be an excellent project in the right hands.

But let's not get sidetracked by the negative. This is a highly enjoyable, episodic adventure in which the titular team travels through the south in a couple fancy cars bearing their name, which they parade down the streets of the towns they are visiting to great interest by the locals, sometimes even getting out of the cars and hot-stepping it down main street in a synchronized group. At least, that is, when the cars are not being repossessed as payment for hotels and the like, as the team becomes cash poor through mishaps and usury by the people they encounter. Since they are trying to fight the Negro League owners who use and abuse them -- one of whom docks from their salary in order to pay for team financial needs for which they are not responsible -- they are constantly playing David to someone else's Goliath, even as they are always putting on a great show and presenting a great brand of the sport.

Even as this movie is always fun, it doesn't shy away from the realities of racism in the south and elsewhere in the U.S. at this time. We hear the N-word dropped on multiple occasions here, though because it was a different time, the usage is more incidental than employed specifically to drive home these racists' perniciousness. Badham and company want to show what these guys were up against, but also that it did not overly dampen their spirits. After all, it was just their reality, nothing exceptional.

As I watched this team go through its antics and have a hell of a lot of fun out there -- plus employ "novelty" players like a one-armed first baseball and a little person catcher (who is actually credited as "Midget Catcher") -- I was reminded of what the Harlem Globetrotters provide us nowadays. (Yes, I believe they are still touring, though obviously with new membership.) Black athletes have a history of being great entertainers, and if we ever see one of them showboating in a way that may seem out of sync with our modern ideas of how athletes should comport themselves, we should remember the sort of lovely history we see in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, and that they came by it honestly. 

From feast to famine to Friends

In just under two weeks, I've gone from finishing a streak of 65 straight days posting something new on my blog, to having to force up a post just to break a five-day streak without a post.

When it rains, it pours -- or maybe I should say when it doesn't rain, it doesn't pour. Both, either, could be true in this case.

Actually, I'm not forcing this post as it's something I've been wanting to mention for a while.

Sometime last year -- it might be as long as a year ago -- I decided to undertake a rewatch of Friends. It isn't the most novel idea in the world, as it's something people who could be my -- grandchildren? yes I could technically have teenage grandchildren -- have already been doing for years now. In case you didn't get the memo, young people love Friends these days. I don't know that they've caught onto old sitcoms generally, but they've definitely caught onto this one specifically. 

My inspiration really came, though, from another cinephile, a guy only four months younger than me who I have known my whole life. He undertook this sort of rewatch maybe five years ago? ten years ago?

I couldn't believe it at the time, because this guy is also the most prolific watcher of movies I know. How could he fit in both and still be a dad, a mover and shaker in his career, and also as big a fan of baseball as I am? Especially since he has to watch baseball at night, whereas here in Australia, it's on for me during the day?

The answer: You have more 20-minute pockets of availability in your day than you might think. It's much easier to fit a Friends into the rest of your routine than it is to fit in a movie. It's only when you string four or five of them together that it actually begins to take up the same amount of time, but neither is it as onerous a commitment as a movie can be, because you are always re-upping for one more at your pleasure, and you can "quit any time." I suspect the snackability of the show is what makes it appeal to today's young people.

For the remaining ten days of this month, I'm going to test exactly how snackable.

See, a few weeks ago, I was greeted by a disappointing discovery: Friends is leaving Netflix on March 31st. I think it may already be gone in other parts of the world, but in Australia, it had still been here. I'm not sure if I subscribe to its new home, or even know what that new home is.

If I were almost done with that rewatch, this might be okay. But I was in the comparative infancy of the rewatch. I discovered the imminent departure near the beginning of the month, when I was only on the first episode of Season 3. 

There are ten seasons.

It seemed like folly to still pursue the full rewatch. And I'm quite sure it still is. After all, my intention with this rewatch was to slow-walk it, to fit it into my schedule, not to fit myself into the dwindling weeks of its availability. In fact, I was slow-walking it so much that there were months when I might watch only a single episode or two.

Now it looks like I'm going to try to watch all the episodes in one month.

To be clear, I'm not really trying to get through Friends before March 31st. Even with increasing the pace after learning the news, I still only just finished episode 14 of Season 4. We're right in the thick of Chandler's relationship with Kathy (Paget Brewster), and he and Joey just switched apartments with Monica and Rachel. There's still a loooooot of Friends to go.

But sometimes I string together four or five in a single day -- and realize I've got a grin from ear to ear as I do it -- and I think "May-be ..."

So I just looked it up, and there are 236 episodes of Friends. I've watched 87 of them. The math really doesn't work out in my favor. 

If I want to try to watch the whole series, I will need to watch an average of 14.9 episodes per day, from now until the end of the month, which is basically between five and six hours of Friends each day. Not gonna happen. 

Or is it?

I mean, it's probably not going to happen. But my wife and I have already talked about how we need to have a really quiet day this Sunday, especially as we are going out to a concert on Saturday night. I can watch waaaaay more than five to six hours of Friends on a really quiet day.

I don't need to watch the whole series before Friends leaves Netflix. I can just put a pause on my viewing and pick back up the next time it materializes on a streaming service I have. It's not like I'm never going to subscribe to a streaming service that has Friends on it again. I even considered how I could buy it, if I really wanted to. With that much content, there comes a certain point where you get a price break, and it's probably not even that expensive on a per-episode basis. 

Until then, though, it could be fun to give it a go, and see how far I get -- as long as it doesn't start to feel like a chore and ruin my experience of the show. But that's what bingeing it has taught me: I don't burn out on consecutive Friends ad infinitum. Which is one of the proofs of its greatness. Yes, I can binge Bing until the cows come home.

But not without a toll on movies, and that's the part that's really relevant to this blog, and also explains my sudden drop in my usual viewing vigor. There are a couple viewing obligations I still have for the remainder of this month, and there's always keeping up with new releases. But until March 31st comes and goes and Friends just goes, I might as well lift my foot off the pedal of my usual frenetic movie pace. It'll be there for me to resume in April.

So random weekend nights when I'd usually find something appropriately weekendy on one of my streamers? Random weekday nights when I'd usually stream something less weekendy? A short time slot in the morning when I'm drinking my coffee and eating my breakfast?

Friends will get those time slots for the next ten days, and we'll just see how far we get.

I will post here as the time and the inclination allows. 

Reflections on five years as editor

We just passed the five-year anniversary since the start of COVID.

Which means we also just passed five years with me sitting -- in the editor's chair? at the editor's desk? -- at ReelGood.

Both things happened at basically the same time, which I can assure you was not planned. Of course COVID was not planned, but I should clarify that the onset of COVID had nothing to do with the transition. 

My previous editor, founder of the site and good friend had, in the months beforehand, told us he intended to discontinue doing the ReelGood podcast, and then that he wanted to step away from the site entirely. He was happy to hand it off to me, or to let it go the way of the dodo if I did not want it. I didn't necessarily want to be the editor, but I did not want the site to go the way of the dodo either, especially since it is part of a brand that includes the ReelGood Film Festival. And since if I let ReelGood die, I didn't know if there was as legitimate of a way to continue thinking of myself as a critic -- or to get the benefits of membership in the Australian Film Critics Association (AFCA), through which I see movies for free.

It is rather remarkable, however, how closely aligned in time they were. On Thursday, March 12, 2020, I posted my first review where I was the guy updating Wordpress and publishing. I was also the writer on the piece. The movie was Downhill, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash's remake of the Ruben Ostlund film Force Majeure.

On Saturday, March 14, 2020, I attended my last pre-COVID public event, a concert by New Order at the Sidney Meyer Music Bowl.

I think it was that Monday, March 16, 2020, where we didn't come into the office for the next, I don't know, six months. Perhaps it was longer than six months. It's all a blur at this point. We either didn't come in that Monday, or that Monday or Tuesday was the last day and then we stopped coming in. Basically, I am posting on pretty much exactly the five-year anniversary of that date. 

Now, it is possible that COVID helped get me up to speed on this extra responsibility. If I had been going into the office every day, it might not have been quite so easy to cut my teeth as the editor and achieve lift-off. However, "lift-off" would have to be a relative term because at the same time, movies also stopped coming out. So that first year was a hell of a lot of Netflix movies. 

Since the Downhill review -- in other words, during my time as editor -- I have written 410 reviews. That's compared to the 239 reviews I wrote in the five years prior to then. Conveniently, my time at ReelGood is about ten years and five months, meaning the time is almost perfectly bifurcated between when I was both a writer and editor and when I was just a writer. Obviously, I'm doing a lot more writing now.

And that has largely to do with losing my editor's regular output as a writer. He wrote as many, if not more, reviews as/than I did. And then dropped it cold turkey.

In the time since, I've had trouble getting someone as consistent as he was. I've had six to eight people write at least one thing for me during that time. The person who has written the most out of that group has written 34 reviews. So, about 8% of what I've written. 

I'd say "It's hard to get good help," but really, I haven't tried very hard. I don't mind mostly keeping this thing afloat myself. Most of the time I don't mind.

The truth is, however, that it is good help. The two people who write for me the most often, I basically don't have to edit their work at all, and then with the others I'm still not having to overhaul them. Sure, I may also not be applying the same standard of editorial severity as they would at a big newspaper, magazine or website -- though lately, it's only the last of those things that really exists -- but I also can't abide by publishing something that isn't publishable. 

So strictly as an editor, I've been fairly hands off, and occasionally feel proud of edits I do make to increase the clarity. And I'm very careful, when I do edit something written, not to add anything in my own voice. In fact, I'd be more likely to remove or combine than to produce something that didn't originate from the author, and I think that's what a good editor should do.

As a visionary, though, I'm pretty lacking. 

When I started writing, the types of things posted on ReelGood were varied. There were reviews, of course. But there were also opinion pieces, listicles and posting of trailers or other film-related YouTube videos. Except for the videos, I did some of each, before I was editor. I certainly think the site benefitted from not being "just" a review site.

But to be honest, I don't have the energy to assign pieces like that to writers or to write them myself. Listicles can actually be quite a lot of work, if you want to do them well, and there's also a lot of bad examples of listicle clickbait out there. I'd really like to differentiate this site from that clickbait, even if the result is that I don't do them at all. 

As for opinion pieces, well, part of my disinterest in doing that is that I already have an outlet for that here, through this blog. On a site like ReelGood, I feel like an opinion piece needs to meet certain standards of timeliness or public benefit, while on The Audient, I'm comfortable writing whatever creeps into my brain because you've already signed off on it by coming here. ReelGood readers have not signed off on my personal, highly eccentric whims for topics to write about, and I don't want that site to become just a reflection of my personality -- even if my previous editor encouraged me to write about anything I'd write about on The Audient, there. I think you can probably understand why I never thought that was a great idea.

But at five years, I'm kind of wondering: Am I really an editor, or am I more of a shepherd?

A reasonable argument could be made that if you are in a position of power or leadership in a publication, and you aren't pushing it forward, you are essentially overseeing its demise. And that is a reasonable thing to wonder about ReelGood. Am I just rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic that will inevitably, eventually, sink? Do the readers we do have silently judge me for just giving them a steady stream of reviews and no other* content of any kind? (*Barely any. We do also preview the ReelGood Film Festival and have special coverage for MIFF.)

I don't really know, and at this point, I'm not trying to worry too much about it. The webhosting fees and the fees for our podcast service (which I still pay for even though we haven't done a podcast in more than four years) come out of my own wallet, and though they are fairly minimal, it does give me the right to determine just how much or how little I do. So really, if I'm "letting anyone down," it can probably only be myself. However, I consider it the price I pay to continue to get my critics card (thereby also offsetting some of the benefit of the critics card) and to continue to be able to call myself a "professional critic" ... whatever that means these days.

If I were monetizing the site and benefitting from that, while someone else paid the bills, well then, that might make me feel shittier. But it has never been the least interest of mine to monetize this site, in part because I know how much work would go into it for such little gain, and in part because that would mean a slew of ads and paid content that isn't actually related to whatever our core identity is. And those options are there ... I get emails from people all the time about it. But I don't want someone to pay me $200 (or whatever it would be) to write a post that very loosely ties movies into an advertisement for some gambling website, or other unsavory things that come to me.

In an ideal world? I find some young person, maybe someone who already works for the film festival (in which I am not involved other than promoting it), who has the vision that I lack, and wants to take the site and make it into something special and new ... or at least to what it was before my editor resigned. That person may be out there. But I am not looking very hard for them. For some of the same reasons I'm not looking at improving the site myself. It all takes work, and I am happier to just muddle along at status quo than to launch some initiative that calls on reserves of giving a fuck that I don't really have. I've got a lot of other things going on in my life and am in my busiest period ever at work, so this stuff has to take the time and mental space I can allot to it. 

When I talk about my lack of vision, though, I don't think I'm really pointing an accusatory finger at myself. There's no judgment. If I wanted to have vision and lacked it, well, that might be sort of a tragedy. But all I really wanted to do, when I took over this site in 2020, was to keep it from going dark. To keep the brand alive. To keep an online home for my reviews, one that lends them -- and, by extension, me -- validity. This last seems particularly important now that all my reviews are gone from AllMovie, as I wrote about here. 

And I can say I have succeeded in that mission. I have written 410 reviews in those five years, and that's not nothing. In fact, that's a lot, an average of 82 per year. The site is still going. It's still being paid for and it almost never goes more than ten days without an update. That would have to be an unusual situation, though, because updates every four days is much more typical. 

In many ways I have been doing the minimum, but there has been a certain maximalism in that minimum. There are a lot of places in life where you get points for showing up, just for being there, and I have been showing up for ReelGood for five years now, when no one else would. 

Has it been downhill that whole time? (A good writer always calls back to his opening thought.) Maybe. And there were times I thought about quitting. When I was approaching the milestone of 500 total reviews for the site, I thought, maybe I could just stop there, and put it in the rearview mirror.

But I haven't. Instead I blew past 500, and as another sort of milestone, now I'm at exactly 650. With no end in sight. 

So if it's been downhill -- for the site, if not so much for my needs from the site -- then it's been only slightly downhill. We still have readers. We are still a known name. And I know that's not just from the now far more visible ReelGood Film Festival ... which would not even exist if not as an outgrowth of this site that I am keeping on life support.

But as life support goes, it's pretty good support. As it turns out, I am a pretty good supporter. 

And there's no end in sight for that either. 

Other directors whose names are (or should be) adjectives

When David Lynch passed earlier this year, I described him as the man whose name became an adjective. That was suggesting a sort of exclusivity that may not actually exist. Lynch may have been on the leading edge of that trend, but there are plenty of other directors whose names we use that way -- or might, based on a couple criteria:

1) They have something very distinctive about the sorts of movies they make in either approach or subject matter, which might lead us to name drop them when we see another movie with those characteristics by some other director;

2) They have to be well enough known that you recognize their name when you weren't necessarily expecting it to come up, and when that name is turned into an adjective;

3) Their name can actually be turned into an adjective with reasonable ease.

It's that last one that helps us narrow down our list a bit. You might think that a particular movie bears the traits of a film made by Francis Ford Coppola, for example -- though Coppola has made different enough movies that he might actually fail the first test -- but "Coppolaian" or "Coppolan" just do not work as adjectives. They don't pass the sniff test. Quentin Tarantino has the same problem, though I'd argue you might break the rules a little bit and come up with a word like "Tarantonian" just to get around it. (And I think maybe some actually have. In fact, I think I have used that word before.)

On Wednesday night I watched a movie by a director who definitely does qualify in at least two of the three respects -- to be honest, I didn't think of the one I've listed as #2 until after I started writing -- which was the inspiration for this post. And after talking about him, I'll get into some others that I think we either use or should use. 

The movie was Fireworks Wednesday, the oldest movie I've seen in the directing career of Iranian master Asghar Farhadi, and seventh overall that I've seen. I've seen the last seven now -- in reverse order, that's A Hero, Everybody Knows, The Salesman, The Past, A Separation, About Elly and Fireworks Wednesday, taking us back to 2006 -- leaving only two other features I haven't seen: Beautiful City (2004) and Dancing in the Dust (2003). 

I wasn't sure at what point he found his particular voice, which I will expound on in a moment, so I thought this film from 19 years ago might be in the vein of other Iranian masters whose names you would know, like Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami, though both of those directors have films that are replete with formal challenges, while Farhadi's are not. Or maybe I just thought it would be more like the most common form of Iranian film, by any director, that we saw in this period, in which children were often the stars as a way of avoiding the scorn and potential censorship and/or retribution of the government. 

Nope. Even in Fireworks Wednesday, Farhadi was making intricate social dramas that play more like mysteries, where semantic disagreements and misunderstandings among characters lead to escalating consequences that result in (usually minor) tragedies for everyone involved. Simply put, this was Farhadi's dominant mode in all the movies listed above that I've seen -- you might say it was his only mode if that didn't sound like a criticism. With a filmmaker like Farhadi, we cherish each new instance of this and would not ask him to vary up his style in the slightest. 

So I think "Farhadian" is an adjective that should definitely enter our vernacular among cinephiles ... and even more so if there were a significant number of other directors making films like the films he makes. (Though it's possible that only in cinephile circles would his name be recognized completely out of context ... which is why I said I'm not sure if he meets criterion #2.)

Who else we got?

1) Hitchcockian - Films like this feature clever narrative suspense, interesting camera tricks, ordinary people out of their depth and possibly a cameo by the director. 

2) Spielbergian - Films like this feature a sense of childhood wonder, often set in and around suburbia, which is endangered by the mysteries of our world (or others), often supernatural in nature. 

3) Andersonian - Films like this feature a quirky ensemble of characters, often against lovingly fussy sets and backdrops, usually involving some sort of Russian nesting doll narrative structure. (Note: There is a slight risk of confusing Wes and Paul Thomas, but context should usually help sort that out -- and it also means Paul Thomas has to give up his claim to having an adjectival name, because he is just not as distinctive in style as Wes.)

4) Scorsesian - Films like this are epic in length, showcase audacious camera technique, use classic rock in memorable ways, and contain organizational infrastructures that either are, or resemble, organized crime.

5) Kaufmanian - Films like this involve a no-confidence schlub as a protagonist and likely a deconstruction of the ordinary rules of filmmaking and/or narrative structure, with an emphasis on the self. 

6) Gondrian - Films like this feature a lot of DIY technique involving construction paper or the equivalent, and often a bit of dream logic.

7) Fincherian - Films like this involve sleek camerawork and editing, and look into the darker parts of our souls. 

8) Hughesian - Films like this involve teenagers coming of age in situations usually involving high comedy (context helps for this one). 

9) Von Trierian - Films like this involve masochism and possibly mild to heavy misogyny. 

10) Shyamalanian - Films like this feature a labored twist, a high concept, some amount of horror ... and possibly a cameo by the director. 

I could keep going, but the adjectives might get more obscure and ten is a good place to stop. 

I'd like to include someone like Robert Altman for his very distinctive style and subject matter, and "Altmanian" does sort of work as an adjective ... but I just don't think I could ever see myself using it. You just know if it works or if it does not work. I think "Burtonian" has the same problem. (Which is probably why I didn't think of this post idea a few nights earlier, when I rewatched Edward Scissorhands for the first time in a quarter century.)

I also thought of Orson Welles, and "Wellesian" certainly does work ... but I don't know that I could focus in on a signature Welles style that would warrant the use of the adjective.

In fact we may have more examples of directors (or directing duos) with distinctive styles who don't work than who do. "Bergmanian" and "Coenian" also don't work, though we would absolutely want to use those adjectives if we could. Single-syllable last names often don't work. Just try "Croweian" or "Leeian" and you will see what I'm talking about. Then again, David Lynch has a one-syllable last name. Or, had. 

Overall I guess it is a select group that meet all three criteria, possibly not including the actual inspiration for the post. So while in many cases, we might still be inclined to make the comparison when writing about film, but we are more likely to have to use the more ungainly phrasing "it resembles the films of Joel and Ethan Coen" than that it is "Coenian."

Someone for everyone

Here is the first of the two things I thought to blog about on Sunday night, the only of the two I decided was actually worth writing about. (It's debatable, at least on the topic of taste. You'll see what I mean in a moment.)

The best makeup Oscar win for The Substance (yes, here I am writing about The Substance again, even though I said I was putting it in my penalty box) has become an effective universal spoiler for the end of the movie. This happens sometimes and I guess is inevitable. Whereas if you win for best makeup for a movie about dwarves and elves, it's not such a surprise because everyone knew from the trailers there are dwarves and elves in the movie. Not so much for Monstro Elisasue, who was a surprise to all of us when we first saw The Substance. 

By necessity, that surprise no longer exists for anyone who watched the Oscars. I guess there comes a point where you've either seen the movie, or you're never gonna see it in its pure, unspoiled form.

While watching Scoot Cooper's Antlers -- a movie where a human being transforms into a wendigo, a Native American creature with the titular antlers -- my mind drifted back to the climactic transformation in The Substance. What can I say, The Substance, I just can't quit you. (Or maybe I'm doubling down because since the last time I wrote about it, a friend told me that he had hated it.)

And it got me thinking of another favorite, this time an old favorite, which I'll reveal in a moment. 

Although Elisabeth Sparkle's romantic life is a secondary consideration in The Substance -- she is more concerned with the love of the public than the love of a single romantic partner -- the subject is actually touched on in enough ways for us to consider it an underlying theme. 

The first potential romantic partner we get for her is someone she sort of dismisses out of hand before circling back to him. That's her awkward, balding, unattractive classmate who is nice but -- as my wife pointed out -- serves as an embodiment of the world's reaction to Elisabeth, because he continues commenting on her looks. He's played by Edward Hamilton-Clark, who looks like this:

(And thanks again, Stan, for having this movie so I can easily get this and the following two pictures.)

Of course, Elisabeth ends up standing up this man -- Fred by name -- not because of him, but because of herself. It's right before she's supposed to go out that she has her breakdown at the mirror and starts trying to scrub her face off. 

When Elisabeth is moonlighting as Sue, there's an unsurprising uptick in the caliber of men she's with -- at least in terms of looks if not character. Here is what the two guys we see her with, played by Oscar Lesage and Hugo Diego Garcia, look like:

The penultimate transformation for Elisabeth occurs while the second guy is in the house with her. It is implied though never stated -- this movie does not need to state anything when it can show us so much -- that the craggy, troll version of Elisabeth we have now will never be capable of a romantic relationship again. 

But why should that be the case? The old saying is that there is someone out there for everyone. 

Even as Monstro Elisasue, she's still delicately trying to pierce various ear-like appendages on what passes as a head with earrings. She still fancies herself someone who can be beautiful.

So why couldn't she still hook up with this guy?

(It probably would have been best just to drop the mic there -- albeit feeling a slight bit of poor taste over the implied body shaming of people with birth defects -- but because some of my younger readers might not know who this is, I thought I had to tell you that this is Sloth from The Goonies, as played by John Matuszak.)

A personal blogging streak that will probably never be broken

You may recall -- though it's far more likely that you don't -- that at the start of 2020, I was having such a prolific period on The Audient that I posted on 41 consecutive days, accounting for the last 27 days of January and the first 14 of February. I wrote about the end of that streak here. 

In retrospect, it's funny that this was just before our world turned upside down with COVID. Since one ended before the other was really beginning, they are totally separated in my mind, and it took looking it up just now to remember that both things happened at the start of 2020.

Forty-one consecutive days seemed like an impressive thing at the time, especially after some really lean periods in the year immediately leading up to it.

Nonsense.

At the start of 2025, I've felt a similar sense of having a lot to say, and not always the space I need to say it, considering that I have a rule of never posting more than once in the same day. As it did in 2020, this led to certain periods when I had four, five completed posts backed up and waiting for their turn, which I would often need to juggle just so, to allow the time-sensitive ones to go live ahead of the evergreen ones that might have been written earlier.

Only this time it didn't go for 41 straight days. It went for 65. 

That being the last 29 days of January, all 28 days of February (the first complete month in the history of this blog), and the first eight days of March.

Sometimes when you break a record, you blow past it. Earlier this week, after a fish and chips dinner on the beach, my younger son and I threw around a frisbee, seeing how many catches in a row we could get. We worked our way up through various low records, like 7, then 9, then 11, then 17. But we were stuck on 17 for a really long time, and we were not even getting close to beating it. Then when we started getting tired and ready to wind down for the night, we said we'd make one more attempt, which would qualify as our last attempt if we completed at least five passes in a row. That time, we got 43 consecutive catches before we dropped it again. 

This is a bit like that. 

Of course, it could have gone a lot longer, if I'd forced it. But the thing I thought was impressive about this streak in 2020, and again in 2025, is that I did not need to. I never wrote some stupid observation just because I wanted to get something up on one particular day. Oh, I wrote stupid observations, don't get me wrong -- they were just organic in nature, not forced. In other words, I never wrote a post for any other reason than that it tickled that same place in me that tickles Jerry Seinfeld every time he writes a "Did you ever notice ..." joke.

The streak ended on a weekend out of town to go a water park with my kids. We alternate between the two big ones in Victoria, and we missed last year entirely, so it had been three years since we'd been to Adventure Park in Geelong. That itself wasn't the reason the streak ended, because I had plenty of time to do computer things in the hotel room. But maybe not watching a movie on either Friday or Saturday night -- it's hard to watch a movie when you're sharing a room with two kids who are going to bed by 10:30 -- meant that I didn't have any new material occurring to me organically.

Actually, I am writing this post on the 66th day -- though of course it doesn't count as the 66th straight post, because I can only post a post like this after the 66th day passes. I did wait for long enough to ensure I didn't have something else to write about. Nope, this is it.

Because I think it will really feel stupid to write yet another post on this blog to mark the end of a consecutive day streak of blogging, I'm really hoping this 65-day streak holds. However, what evidence do I really have that it won't happen again? The end of one year, start of the next is always a fruitful time for me. I know I'm going to get excited and write a lot of things about movies, whether you want to read them or not. Who's to say I won't start another one at the end of this year and it will run, I don't know, 79 days?

I suppose if that does happen, I will have to write about it again -- and think of yet a third variation on this subject, because another rule I have is never to repeat a subject.

It's a bit of a relief now that it's over. But the fruitfulness will likely continue. In fact, as I am now finishing this post on the actual day I'm posting it, I thought of two more things to write about while watching Scott Cooper's Antlers last night. I'm not sure if either of them really rises to the level of post-worthy, though -- even with the minimal standards I apply to that. 

Tune in tomorrow, I guess, to see what I decided. After all, I still have the record number of posts written in a calendar year -- 264 in 2010 -- to shoot for. 

The banal movie conversations of ordinary people

If you're like me, your ears always prick up when you hear strangers start talking about movies. 

However, if you're like me, they also shrivel up again in no time at all.

I might not have written about the phenomenon of being utterly unstimulated by other people's movie conversations, except that in the last 48 hours, I caught two such conversations, with two predictably dispiriting sets of results.

The first was after I got out of Mickey 17 on Thursday night, and if you want to hear my thoughts on that particular disaster, you can go here. 

I was waiting for the train and I heard a couple talking on one of the benches a few down from me. It was after 11 p.m. so there were no other conversations into which theirs could disappear. She had her head in his lap.

He was saying something about how there were three characters in the movie, and the city was like a third character. While that is, in fact, a banal observation within cinephile circles, it's not a bad way for an ordinary person to stretch themselves and try seeing what we all see in the power of movies.

However, then it did get banal.

"See one character is Bruce Wayne, and then the second is Batman," he explained.

I kind of tuned out from there. So I'm not really sure which of the many Batman movies he had to choose from felt to him particularly like the city was a character. 

Then Friday morning I was in the doctor's office. This time the conversation was between the two in-take ladies behind the desk. 

"Is the movie from this year?" I heard one of them saying. 

Ears at attention. I could only hear her half of the conversation, so I couldn't tell if she was on the phone or if the other woman was just really, really quiet.

"Because I really liked the one where she was pregnant," she continued.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Although the second comment would have been a reference to Bridget Jones' Baby. 

I tuned out again.

(And while we're here: How does the critic in the poster above know this is the best Bridget "ever"? Has he or she looked into the future?)

Look, I'm not trying to be a snob. I'm really not. In fact, I fight movie snobs on a regular basis. If not literally, then at least metaphorically.

But there was something deflating about two people trying to interact with the world of cinema and confirming so clearly our worst fears: The movies better pander to our most basic instincts or we will not see them, let alone talk about them in banal ways with other banal people. 

Understanding Editing: Sergeant York

This is the third in my 2025 monthly series Understanding Editing, where I try to improve my appreciation of the art of editing by watching winners of the best editing Oscar through the decades, six of which I've seen before and six of which I haven't.

I'm not sure how much more I understand about editing after watching Howard Hawks' Sergeant York, the 1941 winner of the Academy Award for best editing. (No that's not a misspelling in the poster I've chosen. It's just the French spelling.)

In fact, I feel pretty certain that the film won the Oscar for editor William Holmes largely on the basis of a comparatively few nicely edited battle scenes in the film's second half. I say "comparatively few" because, despite the poster, this is not mostly a World War I movie. It's mostly a story about a guy living in rural Tennessee, and only gets to France fairly deep into its second half, and only for maybe 20 minutes of a 2 hour and 14 minute film.

Winning the Oscar certainly did not open any doors for Holmes. Although he edited 52 films in the 14 years leading up to his win, including Dark Victory, he cut only two films after that. You'd think maybe the Academy Award was just the crowning achievement on a legendary career that was approaching its conclusion, but Holmes was only 37 when he won his Oscar, and he lived to be 73. There's a story there, but Wikipedia doesn't tell it and I don't care enough to dig any deeper on my own.

The editing during these war scenes is, indeed, good. I noticed specifically what seems like a forward-thinking decision to cut shots a little shorter than had been the norm, creating a sense of frenzy that is how most of us would definitely feel if caught in a firefight. I would say these were Oscar-worthy scenes especially if the competition in 1941 was not great. 

However, there's something about the year 1941 you should note. What has, for much of the time since then, been considered the greatest film of all time was also released in 1941. It's #5 on my Flickchart. I'm talking, ladies and gentlemen, about Citizen Kane, whose editing by Robert Wise was also nominated -- and certainly beats the editing in Sergeant York by a country mile. Then again, Citizen Kane got accustomed to disappointment that night, as it won only one of the nine Oscars for which it was nominated (best original screenplay) and lost the best picture statue to ... How Green Was My Valley. Yawn. 

But back to this film. During all the scenes not set in France -- some at boot camp, most in the valley on the Tennessee-Arkansas border where the title character has lived all his life -- I tried to focus on anything the editor might have been doing that really pushed the craft forward. I didn't find it. I suppose there are winners of Academy Awards that do so for some particular stretch of superlative technique. I would not, for example, be surprised to see that the best cinematography Oscar had gone to many a man (I'm not sure if that award has ever been won by a woman) for a few outstanding sequences in one film, not for how he shoots shot-reverse shot conversations.

I did notice one other scene that was nicely edited, in a modest way, that reminded me of a similar shot in last month's movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood. This shot was of hunters and dogs chasing wild turkeys, with the action cutting back and forth between the dogs pursuing the turkeys and the hunters pursuing the dogs (albeit just to keep up with them). It sort of reminded me of the nicely edited horse chase in Robin Hood. 

Overall, the movie is pretty corny, but I guess I should not be surprised by that either. It's based on a real World War I hero who received numerous accolades for his feats in battle. Because this man was a conscientious objector (and also a great shot), he combined both ruthlessly efficient killing power with a tendency toward mercy, with the latter in larger supply, and that resulted in the saving and capturing of as many of his enemies as he killed. Probably more.

I was in some ways reminded of Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge while watching this, though of course the only reason for listing the reminders in that sequence was because I saw the newer film first. Both films feature a deeply religious war hero, though York had to come by his faith only after a lot of rabblerousing, carousing and drinking that initially made him a bit of a community menace. The character in Hacksaw saves a lot of his own men while York saves a lot of Germans, though implicitly, also his own men by ending the fighting before the Germans had a chance to kill them. Although I do not love Sergeant York by any stretch of the imagination, I do like it considerably better than Hacksaw Ridge.

I said it was corny, and that includes the scenes back home with York and his love interest, played by Joan Leslie, who I did not otherwise know. Their scenes are played in pretty broad strokes as she alternates between playing the demure target of his affections and a woman weeping over his imminent departure for the war. He's trying to buy a plot of land for them to live on, and this is played with a fairly high cheese factor, with gobs of heartland sentimentality. 

I also thought it was pretty funny that Gary Cooper was playing a man who was about 20 when he was sent off to war. Cooper was 40 when he made Sergeant York. I'm sure they could have gotten someone a lot closer to the appropriate age, but the studio star system at this time had an emphasis on proven names over up-and-comers. Maybe today he would have been played by Timothee Chalamet. Anyway, the character has a "gee whiz mister" quality to him that makes it seem similar to his character from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. (I also thought a bit of Forrest Gump.)

My last comment on the film is that it also stars Walter Brennan as the town pastor, who may not have been someone I knew about much except they always talk about him on Filmspotting when guest Michael Phillips comes on, because Michael has done a Walter Brennan impression for them before. (They also talk a lot about another Brennan film, Rio Bravo, which they all love.) Just from hearing the Phillips impersonation -- he may have only done it once, and may now be regretting it for the amount of times they mention it -- I enjoyed watching Brennan here.

Sorry, one more: I noticed in the credits that John Huston was one of four credited screenwriters.

In April I'll watch my second movie for this series that I've already seen, the 1946 best editing winner The Best Years of Our Lives, which will take us from World War I this month to World War II next.

The only information in the credits you can't trust

I was fishing around for something to watch on Sunday night and I saw on Kanopy, in a promotional section on Oscar-nominated or -winning films, the film The Teachers' Lounge from 2023, directed by Ilker Catak. It was nominated for best international feature last year, but I remember hearing it come up in 2024 conversations about the best of the year, possibly due to its 2024 American release. Actually, it had a limited U.S. release -- which likely describes the full ultimate size of that release, given that this is not the type of film that plays multiplexes -- on Christmas 2023. But in many countries, it only debuted in 2024, and some people who discuss their best of the year don't use the same rules I do in determining what qualifies where. 

So why, then, was the release date on Kanopy listed as 2022?

While I was watching, I got curious enough to indeed check these release dates. IMDB always lists the earliest one first, and in this case, that was a February 18, 2023 debut at the Berlin International Film Festival. 

You'll see on various streaming services, especially Australian ones, a later release year than the generally accepted release year for a movie, if they are giving the year it first appeared in Australia. (One example having been discussed here.) 

But an earlier release year? A movie cannot meaningfully be said to exist prior to its first festival screening.

"Must be a misprint," I thought, and was set to write a post with that as the thrust.

Then for some unknown reason, while I was putting things away and preparing to go to bed, I paid attention to the credits down to the very last words on screen, even though I was not expecting a Marvel-style post credits sequence. And then I saw the year listed as MMXXII.

So that's where Kanopy got it.

Which, if you think about it, makes sense. I have argued in the past that a movie's title should be listed as it appears in the movie, and for sure, you are meant to take every other credit listed anywhere at face value.

But the year that appears in the credits is the one piece of information you should look upon skeptically.

I'm not sure if the same rule of thumb would be followed in every instance, but I have to think the year you put in here is whatever year it currently happens to be at the time you are making the credits. That may not be true with a big Hollywood blockbuster, whose credits may be finished in one year even though they know for sure the film's release date is the following year. I suspect they would definitively forward-date it in that case.

But with a smaller movie about a conflict among staff and students at a school, whose exact debut is uncertain at the time the credits are completed, you would put in whatever year it was and then let the rest take care of itself, knowing only pedants like me would ever notice and take issue with any of the decisions they've made.

Of course, I don't take issue with anyone involved with The Teachers' Lounge putting in 2022 (or MMXXII) in the credits, because that made the most sense in the moment. I take issue, only slightly, with a streaming service like Kanopy using that as the release year on their site, when consulting any other source (such as IMDB) would have disabused them of any confusion.

That's it, I'm never using Kanopy again. 

Lucky #26

When I said that was it for Oscars talk, I meant it ... but then after going to bed I thought of a couple things that I hadn't fit into my hurried reactions post. (Plus, it's not like I've been talking your ear off about the Oscars. In fact, they barely got a mention on this blog after I initially reacted to the nominations.)

Whichever film finishes 2025 as my 26th favorite movie of the year, they should feel happy, because it means they've got a good shot at winning best picture.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that Anora was my #26 of 2024 ... but so too was Oppenheimer my #26 of 2023.

It's a recent phenomenon for sure. If I glance over the other best picture winners since I started ranking my movies in 1996, they fall into three categories: much higher than #26 (I've had three #1s win best picture, which are Titanic, Birdman and Parasite), much lower than #26 (Nomadland was #82, Green Book was #69), or not seen at all by the time of the awards (12 Years a Slave and CODA, both of which I could not see in time to rank them). 

Number 26 is an interesting middle ground. It acknowledges that I think the film is good, maybe even very good, but there are usually at least a handful of best picture nominees I like better. This year, there were seven, as I had a whopping six in my top ten. Only A Complete Unknown did I dislike more, if you want to put it in the negative rather than the positive sense. (I still haven't seen I'm Still Here.)

But there's also a kind of message to it, whether intentional or not, and I appear to have been sending that message to both Oppenheimer and Anora. The top 25 makes an interesting cutoff, or at least, I think of it that way because my friend who does the ranking exercise with me used to highlight his top 25 before sending his whole list. He's scaled that back to his top 20 now, but the line of demarcation between #25 and #26 still feels like it means something. And to the extent that I apply intentionality to anything I do with my bigger list, making a movie #26 says to me "I get this movie is respected, and I liked it quite a lot too, but I have problems with it."

Apparently, that is the type of movie that wins best picture.

Since we own Anora, my wife is going to watch it this weekend when I'm out of town. So we'll see what she thinks.

A Complete shutout

Only two best picture nominees did not pick up a single Oscar: Nickel Boys, my #10, which wasn't nominated in enough categories to have a real chance, and A Complete Unknown, which received eight nominations ... and won not a one of them.

Sweet, sweet justice.

You may remember that I did not care for A Complete Unknown. It was my 128th ranked movie of the year, out of 177. Granted, it was also the last movie I ranked. But I don't know if my opinion would have improved significantly if I'd been given more time to think about it. Maybe 119th. 

So like what happened a couple years ago when The Fabelmans, which I also did not like, didn't win anything, I'm feeling like a necessary correction occurred here. I was bracing for Timothee Chalamet to win the best actor statue, and although I tend to prefer when the wealth is shared for Oscars, meaning I would have supported that win, I'd much rather have the (better) work by Adrien Brody recognized, even if means his second turn in that spotlight.

Then there were three nominations for ACU, other than best picture, that I thought were completely unwarranted: best supporting actress for Monica Barbaro, best supporting actor for Edward Norton, and best director for James Mangold. All of those were long shots and none of them happened.

Anyway, as I said, justice prevailed against a very overrated movie.

My personal scorecard

Although, as usual, I didn't pay much attention to the pre-Oscars discourse on likely winners (though I did pay some), and, as usual, I made my selections just before the show (actually after it had already ended, but I had seen no results), I did quite well on my picks this year, picking 15 of the 23 categories correctly. And that's even without guessing any of the random ones (the shorts) correctly to help boost my score. So it was 15 out of 20 on any categories I had a reasonable chance of getting correct, which is better than I've done in a long, long time.

My only really big miss: best actress. And this one stings a bit. I felt like I really had a dog in that race this year, and Demi Moore losing to someone like Mikey Madison, who is like 23 years old, just seems a bit of a travesty of the normal rules of Oscar fairness. Moore will never get another shot. I feel a bit how I felt when Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke, who were both nominated as best actor for my #1 movie that year, both lost Oscars to Sean Penn ... speaking of two-time winners. 

Anora honored

When I first heard all the buzz about Anora, I thought, "Wow. Well, Sean Baker has been making good films for a long time now." (A few exceptions aside. *ahem* Red Rocket *ahem*)

Then I saw it, and though I liked it (my #26 of last year), it did not really seem like best picture material. Not in filmmaking quality, but in subject matter. 

Oscar voters thought differently, and Anora cleaned up. Even Mikey Madison won. In fact, only Yura Borisov missed. Anora won in every other category where it was nominated. 

Interestingly, I own this film, as I had to buy it in order to fit it into the best available viewing slot between Christmas and New Year's. So, whenever I want, I can watch it again to see what I (sort of) missed. 

Now, on to my thoughts, recorded in real time as I was watching, which is maybe not the best way to do it. (But makes it easier to remember and to publish more quickly.)

This post is not going to receive any Oscars for best editing as I am leaving in all the thoughts I wrote down while watching the show, even though they are boring. Enjoy! 

 - My 11-year-old is starting out on the couch with me, which is nice -- and which makes me feel bad that I couldn't start watching until 20 minutes after I got home from playing tennis.

- I thought my son might be nonplussed by Cynthia Erivo's bald appearance, but he did not mention it. Glad I'm raising a good one. 

- I liked Wicked as much as the next guy -- it was my #2 of the year -- but the opening was a bit long. 

- The orchestra is in the sky! Interesting. I dig it. (Rather literally defying gravity.)

- Conan coming out of Demi. Good one. 

- Missed a joke from Conan because my son is asking me questions. Worth it. 

- The thing at the back of the stage looks like a Marvel superhero's breast plate.

- Yes, my son was still sitting there for Conan's orgasm joke. Just one of the reasons the opening monologue could have been 40% shorter. 

- Okay, I am officially dying now. We're 22 minutes in and there has not been an award announced yet.

- 24:50 - "Without further delay, let's get started." Well, nope. The time-wasting song is the last nail in my coffin. 

- Edward Norton's wrinkles have wrinkles.

- "Going long disorder" is apparently contagious. Robert Downey Jr. and Kieran Culkin have contracted it. 

- Andrew Garfield fawning over Goldie Hawn continues the feeling of excess. I don't know if I can continue mentioning all these things. 

- Is Nick Offerman the Oscars announcer?

- The woman who won the best animated short is adorable. But why is her co-director reading the thing she's already said? There really are no controls on the length of this show.

- I like the idea of giving extensive praise to people like the costume designers, but not the reality of it. 

- (I just dared look it up while potentially risking exposing myself to the spoilers. Yes it's Nick Offerman.)

- (And another lengthy bit with Conan has made this abundantly clear.)

- Until now I did not know what Sean Baker looked like. Thanks, Sean, for giving a professional speech and trying to bring this unwieldy beast back on track.

- The June Squibb Bill Skarsgard bit was funny.

- Well my #1 of 2024 gets at least one Oscar. Indeed, my viewing on Friday confirmed for me how good the makeup was in The Substance. And, I guess, the hair, or sometimes, lack thereof. 

- Halle Berry is not 60 years old. She is not. (It's true. She's only 58.) But is now really the time for a random Bond tribute? And what does Margaret Qualley have to do with it?

- Oh no, the Bond tribute is going into its second song. I really should not have waited 20 minutes after getting home from tennis to start watching. 

- If Baker also wins as director, that'll be some kind of record. Different tone from his first speech but still under budget (quick and funny). 

- Da'Vine Joy is giving Robert Downey a lesson on how this should have been done.

- Glad Emilia Perez (my #4) did not get shut out. Saldana was great in it and I loved her heartfelt acceptance speech.

- Ben Stiller, star of past Oscar bits (remember when he was dressed as a Na'vi?), pulls off a good one here. 

- Mick Jagger is more alive than I thought he'd be. 

- "El Mal" wins. Take that, everyone who thought the music in Emilia Perez was bad. (And nice shoutout to the presenter in their acceptance speech. Probably thought of that on the way up to the stage.)

- My stream of the Oscars, which crapped out during one of the ad breaks, is starting to skip the ads for some reason. Thank goodness for small miracles.

- Now that the show has picked up its pace, I don't mind the musical sand worm as much as I did the first time.

- Nice to get the best of both Palestine and Israel in one acceptance speech. Samuel L. loved it when the Israeli delivered a broadside to the Trump administration.

- Good bit with the firefighters. Worked. Is this show saving itself? Just a little?

- The third sound winner ate nothing but orchestra. Thanks for the number about wasting time, Conan.

- Is Gal Gadot really tall or is Rachel Zeigler really short?

- The late announcement of these technical awards makes it seem like Dune is gathering momentum. It is not. (Scarier realization: It's not actually that late in the show.)

- What is "Ovation Hollywood"?

- Ana de Armas pronounced "robot" like "robutt," which is how Dr. Zoidberg says it on Futurama. (Also, this means I was officially shut out on the "random guess" categories of live action short, documentary short and animated short.)

- Best conceived "in memoriam" in a while. 

- Does Lol Crowley get sick of people asking him if he's laughing out loud?

- Okay, Conan's zing of Trump via Anora finally has me on his side.

- I had started to hear that Timothee Chalamet was going to win best actor, but went against that and picked Adrien Brody. And that happened. And while I never really thought of Brody as someone who would win two Oscars, he deserved it. Great thoughtful speech, too -- a bit long. So winning twice earns you extra time?

- Christopher Nolan CBF to show up and present best director.

- Yep, this post is getting a picture of Sean Baker. I certainly know what he looks like now. 

- Oh no. Demi didn't win. Biggest upset of the evening so far?

- Nice to see Billy Crystal on stage after he lost his house in Pacific Palisades, the one where he had lived since the 1970s. And Meg Ryan looked better than I feared.

- As was obvious by this point, Anora wins.

Well that's it everybody. It's after 1 a.m. even though the show finished around 3 p.m. my time. And now I must sleep.

The streaming culprit has been identified

The only "Oscars homework" I did over the weekend was for pleasure. 

No, I didn't put in a last-minute viewing of any movies I might not have seen, in order to better make predictions about tonight's Oscars, or to feel myself more engaged in them.

Instead, I rewatched my favorite best picture nominee with my wife, which happened to be my #1 movie of last year.

And it looked great.

Yes, yet another post about The Substance on this blog, but I will probably retire the topic for a while now. I don't expect to talk about it much in the next piece, my annual "Oscar thoughts" piece, which will come many hours after the ceremony ends. Which is because for the first time in three years, the Oscars do not coincide with Labor Day here in Australia. That means I'm working today, and even after I finish work, I have two different sporting events to attend, one in which I'm just a spectator and one in which I'm participating. My 14-year-old has a basketball game at 6:05, and about a half-hour after that ends, I'll be playing tennis with my tennis partner. Then, sometime after 9 p.m. local time, I will finally watch the show.

Anyway, The Substance will come up in that post I'm sure, but possibly only in the context of Demi Moore winning, which I predict will happen. (And was reminded why she should win when I watched the film again.) After that, I'll probably put it in my personal penalty box for a while -- a term used by the hosts of Filmspotting when they've been talking about a particular movie too much. (This is my sixth post on The Audient to have gotten "the substance" as a content label.)

Before getting sidetracked, I said a few paragraphs ago that Coralie Fargeat's film looked great, and that's what I want to come back around to explain now.

A couple times in the past few weeks I have made mention of The Substance's pending arrival on my Australian streaming service Stan, and how I wasn't sure if I could watch it because the stream on Stan looked so shit. Of course, proper scientific testing ruled out Stan as the culprit, and seemed to rule in another culprit, Fetch, which is a sort of AppleTV-like product through which you play other streaming apps, such as Stan.

Wrong again.

On Thursday night I decided to do some further testing, as I really didn't want to have to hook up somebody's laptop to the TV through an HDMI cable in order to watch The Substance with my wife on Friday night. She had agreed to the viewing -- even to starting it just after 8 o'clock due to the length of the movie -- and this was my chance to get it right and make the experience involve as little pain as possible. Other than, that is, the pain, both physical and emotional, we would be seeing on screen.

So I took another stroll through my TV's various settings, both the TV itself and Fetch, and I just could not get a better idea of what to do. My 11-year-old was on the couch with me, and he put in his two cents as well. But not even the advanced technical knowledge of today's youngest generation could figure out the issue. 

Then I finally got the brainstorm that cracked the case: I needed to connect Fetch to a different HDMI port on my TV. HDMI 3 was available, as we only ever use it when the kids connect their Nintendo Switch to the TV, which they do less and less these days, as they are generally happy to just hold it in their hands. 

And suddenly, all of it -- Stan, Fetch and The Substance -- looked great. 

I do not, as of now, know why HDMI 2 looks so terrible and HDMI 1 and 3 look so great, but I also do not care. I just switched it to another port and voila, problem solved. That night I watched an old favorite, Shattered Glass, that was streaming on Stan, just to prove it was all better. And the movie looked good -- well, as good as a movie made in 2003, which was not particularly focused on looking good, could look.

I do know, now, that there is probably a setting I could tweak that relates to that HDMI port itself, a setting that is currently out of sync with the same setting on the other HDMI ports. But I have not bothered to figure that out yet.

The reason I know this is that HDMI 3 was once the red-headed stepchild of this TV's HDMI ports, because an incorrect setting in the aspect ratio was once cutting off some of the image on that port. For a long time I thought this was just a hardware error in the port, until one day I finally saw I could make an adjustment, and the port was back to performing at the same level as its brethren.

I know that HDMI 2 will someday be redeemed, but for now, it can just take a little break and sit in the corner to think about what it's done.

For a post posting on the actual day of the Oscars, I thought I should probably write a bit more about The Substance itself, so I will. However, as I was watching, I didn't know how I'd limit my thoughts to just a few. Things kept on popping up into my head, ways to name the piece, etc. I ultimately went with naming the piece after fixing the streaming issue, and I'll try to keep the rest of my thoughts fairly limited as well.

1) First, the rejected titles for this post, which I don't need to explicate at length, but you can probably imagine the things I might have said about the movie based on these titles. One was "The weirdest best picture nominee ever?" Which indeed, The Substance might be. It's crazy that a critical mass of people in the film community embraced this movie as a standard bearer for their brand. One was "A constant state of exhilaration," which was, indeed, the way I watched this movie. I think there was one other but I am forgetting it now.

2) On this viewing I particularly noticed some of the regular motifs that seem to be beyond the film's most obvious themes. One of my favorites was how Fargeat keeps going to insert shots of palm trees at night, which ends up being the final thing Elisabeth Sparkle lays her eyes on in this movie. They are at once an encapsulation of the glamor of a place like Los Angeles, and a sense of how it is distant, out of your reach. If you want to start spinning off into theories about this, it could be the idea that most of what's taking place in the film is a flashback, and the shots of the palm trees are what's occurring in Elisabeth's present tense as she confronts what happens to her at the end of the movie. This viewing convinced me that the movie is even more totally metaphor or totally fantasy even than I first thought.

3) If we are looking for more direct visual embodiments of the themes, I love the shot where Elisabeth sees the fly that landed in her former boss' glass of wine at their final dinner as colleagues. The fly is making strokes in the liquid at first, dutifully trying to escape from its watery death bed, until it inevitably consumes more sugary broth than it can handle and stops swimming. This is a world where you greedily drink in everything that is offered until it kills you, perhaps without even noticing that's about to happen.

4) The oppressive score stood out to me more on this viewing as well. The sort of harrowing metallic scratches that sound a bit like a biohazard alarm, those kind of sounds were the foundation of my now three-decade love affair with industrial music. (We're talking mostly Nine Inch Nails here, but I appreciate the imitators as well.)

5) Another rejected title for this post deserves its own separate entry. The title would have been something like "No problem with a big ending," because during the film, I realized that wild endings that don't work for everybody -- which is how my wife felt about this ending, despite saying she "really, really liked" the film -- don't seem to sidetrack me too much. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but I think both my #1 of 2018 and my #1 of 2020 -- First Reformed and I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- ended in ways that left some viewers perplexed, and may have ultimately turned them against the movie. For me, the ending of First Reformed is perfect, though I am a little less sold on both Ending Things and The Substance. With Charlie Kaufman's film, it's more "I love it despite the perplexing ending." With Fargeat's film, it's "I don't know if she needed to go that extra step" -- you'll know what I'm talking about if you've seen The Substance -- "but I'm glad she just decided to go all out." And this viewing made me sure I was glad. 

I actually think I had other things to say, but some of them have escaped my head. Besides, you know I love this movie. I thought it was important to let you know, though, that I may love it even more on the second viewing.

Because second viewings of favorite films do create some trepidation in us. What if it's not as good as I thought it was?

In the case of The Substance, it was as good as I thought it was -- in fact, it was better than I thought it was. All that time I spent slightly fretting about whether a better 2024 movie would come along was wasted fretting, because it should have been evident to me that this was my #1 from the moment I saw it. In fact, I'm now wondering if it has a serious leg up on other films from this decade -- something I think of now that we are closer to the end of the 2020s than the beginning. 

And fortunately, I had an excellent stream of it on Stan to help confirm that. 

Okay, now it's really time for The Substance to go in the penalty box.