Remembering Rob Reiner in 2026

After ten days of thinking intensely about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, I've managed to suppress it from the forefront of my thoughts in the next ten days. My regular life has been intervening in a big way since then, requiring most of my attention. In fact, after being up on every minute development of the story in those first ten days, I don't even know if there have been any new developments since then, such as a motive for the killings, beyond the sad reality of the mental instability of their son. 

While many people spent parts of that first week after his death revisiting favorites from his filmography, I did not. The pain was too fresh. 

I'm planning to make up for that in 2026, as I plan to devote significant time to thinking about the man I've recently called my favorite director, hoping only to occasionally dwell on the exact circumstances of him departing this earth, if I can help it.

As you would know from previous experiences with my blog, early January is when I usually tell you about my blogging series for the new calendar year. It's that lull between Christmas/the actual end of the previous year, and ramping up to reveal my film rankings later in January. During this time I devote one post each to telling you about my new monthly series and my new bi-monthly series.

I haven't told you about the new monthly series yet, though will probably post about that within the next week to ten days. It's an idea I came up with a while back, and has yet again pushed back two other pending ideas, which have been patiently waiting their turn for several years now. 

It was the bi-monthly series for 2026 that I had been stalled on. I had a flimsy idea, but I wasn't super excited about it. I won't tell you about that one because I may come back to it in 2027. 

Initially, though, the idea had been to return to the format of watching the final six movies I had not yet seen by a prominent director, which I have done previously with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow/Jane Campion (three each). I did it initially with Spike Lee, though I didn't really do it right in that case, because there were nine films I hadn't seen and I watched only six of them. (The remaining three remain unwatched to this day.)

I had Hirokazu Kore-eda in mind for this, since this is a director I love and there are a number of movies of his that remain unseen by me. However, that number was more than six, and I do like my round numbers. (Which is why I watched an extra Kathryn Bigelow film the year before I started watching her final three. I don't want to repeat the Spike Lee mistake.) So I was going to watch one or two Kore-eda films in 2025 so I'd get down to the final six unseen. Suffice it to say, that did not happen, and it's also a bit of a dangerous undertaking, considering that I haven't figured out whether I can even source all of his old movies. When I was supposed to watch his film After Life for a movie challenge a couple years ago, I had to order a DVD copy from the U.S. just to be able to see it. And that's one of his more prominent ones. 

Then Rob Reiner died on December 14th, and I got an idea for not only one 2026 bi-monthly series, but two. Confusingly, they will have the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner. 

"Isn't that just one monthly series, then, Vance?"

You might think so, and you might be right. But I'm thinking of it conceptually as two, and I'll explain what I mean by that. 

First off, though, I want to say that having two criss-crossing bi-monthly series on this blog is not unprecedented. I did it in 2023 when I criss-crossed Baz Jazz Hands, the series where I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's six feature films in the year after Elvis, and King Darren, the series where I rewatched six of Darren Aronofksy's films the year after The Whale made him my first director to direct two of my #1 films. It felt a bit hectic but it was really only six extra viewings over the entire year. 

This year will be a bit more focused, as it will be all about Reiner, but it will be about two different kinds of Reiner.

In one bi-monthly slot, I will be watching the six Reiner films that I haven't seen, all of which are from the past 14 years. This is imperfect because there will soon be a seventh film. Reiner's final feature as a director, Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale, will be released this year. When I first thought of this idea, I wasn't considering the fact that I wouldn't be up for watching Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in 2025. I'll still watch it within the next few weeks before my ranking deadline, with some trepidation, but I may not formally consider it a part of this series. 

This bi-monthly slot will include one movie that will be very hard to watch: Being Charlie. I will struggle with that one when I come to it. At this point I'm not sure if I will be going chronologically or not. 

However, a series devoted only to what are probably some of Reiner's worst films does not feel like a very good way of really celebrating him. And so this is where the other bi-monthly slot comes into play. 

During those other months I will be rewatching my six favorite Reiner films, many of which are from that acknoweldged stretch of dominance starting in 1984, and one of which is not. This corresponds perfectly with the fact that I have six Reiner films in my top 200 on Flickchart, which is the very thing that led me to conclude I can and probably should consider him my favorite director. 

Now, there is a wrinkle to this one as well. My seventh favorite Reiner film is The Sure Thing, which is "only" #396 on my Flickchart. It, along with A Few Good Men, are the two films from this pre-North Reiner imperial period that I have not seen since I started keeping track of my rewatches in 2006. But A Few Good Men is not a realistic consideration for me because it's around the middle of my Flickchart, and I don't feel like I have a lot new to glean from it. (I would kind of like to catch up with my eighth favorite Reiner film, The American President, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)

So what I will probably do is exclude both This is Spinal Tap, my favorite Reiner film, and its sequel, and watch them as part of a special double feature in the next few weeks. Then that will give me Reiner films #2 through #7 to join with what will be six unseen Reiner films by the time his last remaining film gets released. Does that math make sense?

In any case, it will be a fitting, and hopefully not too mournful, send-off for a director who meant so much to me when I was coming of age, like his characters in Stand by Me were coming of age. Actually, that's the other of these film #2 through #7, along with The Sure Thing, that I haven't seen in the last 20 years. 

And by the end of 2026, I will be a Reiner completist -- at which point maybe I'll go back and watch All in the Family if I haven't yet had my fill.

A year with Alan Tudyk, part of it in "Zootropolis"

I'm always interested in what my Letterboxd Year in Review email has to tell me about myself and my viewing habits from the past year. You'll recall that in 2022 this email revealed to me that I'd watched a disproportionate number of David Dastmalchian films in the year just completed. This post is also about my most viewed actor of the previous year, but we'll get to that in moment. 

One thing this email tells me, which I already knew, is that I reviewed 0 films on Letterboxd in 2025. I'm sure this is very disappointing to Letterboxd and I know it is disappointing to some people who follow me on Letterboxd and use that site for its review function more than I do. (They could hardly use it less.) Truth is, I already have two other forums for reviewing movies, if you can say that some of the writing I do on The Audient can be considered movie reviewing, so I leave the pithy Letterboxd takedowns to the unwashed masses who do not have those other forums. I use the site to log my viewings and to submit star ratings, plus to keep lists, most of which are private. 

And it was the logging movies portion of my Year in Review that made me realize I had miscounted the number of movies I watched during the calendar year. As I mentioned in a post two days ago, I thought I had watched exactly 287 new-to-me movies for the second year in a row. But it turns out I'd missed one -- not in the recording of it offline in my Microsoft Word document that I use for that purpose, but in the manual updating of the numerical view count. Letterboxd told me my total was 288, and indeed, that turned out to be absolutely true. 

Then I also learned that Sunday is the day I watched the most new movies, with 51. That likely does not mean every Sunday but one, rather, I'm sure I watched more than one on several of those Sundays. That seemed strange to me, but I guess it's the weekend night I'm least likely to be out doing something else, and most likely to still want to hang on to the weekend with one more "fun" thing before the week starts again. 

The next piece of information I thought was interesting was that Paul Schrader was my most watched director of 2025. This is because I saw two Paul Schrader films: Oh, Canada and Hardcore. In a year where I was not watching the work of one particular director for one of my blogging series, it makes sense that two would be the maximum number of films I'd seen by any director, though I know there was at least one other: Dan Trachtenberg, whose two 2025 Predator films were both watched by me. (Don't forget Predator: Killer of Killers, the lesser known animated film.) Since I did also watch one new-to-me film written by Schrader, which was Rolling Thunder, it makes sense that they would have given him the tiebreak, though I know that was not the reason they did so. 

My most watched actor is the interesting one because it is Alan Tudyk, the actor more known for his voice than for his face. So to say that I "watched" him a lot in 2025 is not totally accurate, though I did hear him a lot. 

He was in four 2025 films that I saw, those being Playdate, Zootopia 2, Superman and The Electric State, the last three of which were all vocal roles. He was also in one 2024 movie that I saw in 2025, which also used only his voice: Moana 2. That last probably put him over the top over any other challengers, though I'm not really in any position to determine who those challengers may have been. Again in a tiebreaker Letterboxd could not have known about, I also saw Tudyk in a TV show, Santa Clarita Diet, as he took over the role of a severed head, first played by Nathan Fillion, in the show's third and final season. 

As I was looking through his IMDB to confirm his viewings and to make sure there wasn't another older film of his that I randomly saw in 2025, I at first wondered if he'd been in one of those Asylum movies. You know, like Snakes on a Train or Alien vs. Hunter or Transmorphers. Because here is what I saw:

But then I thought that looked an awful like the actual Zootopia 2 poster. What gives?

Somehow I never knew that Zootopia was not available as a title to be used in some places outside of the U.S., which apparently includes parts or most of Europe, and by extension, Australia. And Australia must be the default region for my IMDB, so when you click into Zootropolis 2, it lists Zootopia 2 only as the "original title."

AI led me expertly through this one, as I am reluctant to report AI usually is able to do these days. 

Apparently there is a Danish zoo called Zootopia, and this zoo already has rights within the EU -- which the UK was still a part of in 2016 -- for trademark and marketing. But it gets even stranger than that, because Zootropolis also has a conflict within Germany specifically, where the movie is known as "Zoomania."

What AI appears to get wrong is that Zootopia 2 is called Zootropolis 2 in Australia. Even though I said my IMDB must be defaulting to my region, which is why the title is presented this way, I know this was not how it appeared on marquees here when I saw it with my son the weekend it came out. Just to be sure I had not had some kind of episode with my perception, where my mind was expecting a certain series of words and so just translated it without my even thinking about it, I checked current cinemas where it is still playing, and they definitely have it lised as Zootopia 2. 

In any case, Alan Tudyk is in it, and that made five Tudyk movies in 2025. 

I've seen three movies so far in 2026, so that means the likes of Alec Baldwin, Marlon Wayans, Frances Fisher, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn and Ice Cube are all the early frontrunners for 2026.

My son's birthdays with Paul Rudd

Whenever we can, we go to a movie on my son's birthday, which is also New Year's Day. He's 12 now.

More often than not, Paul Rudd is also there. 

We couldn't go last year, because -- pity us -- we spent the day at Universal Studios Hollywood instead. But this is now three out of the last five years (I don't know why we missed 2023), and in two of those, it's been a Paul Rudd movie.

The most successful was 2024, when we saw Next Goal Wins, making my son the noted soccer fan very happy -- and the rest of us very happy as well. Paul Rudd is not in that. Paul Rudd is, however, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2022) and Anaconda (2026). We enjoyed Ghostbusters quite a bit too, at least that first reboot. 

Four years ago when he was only eight, my son didn't know Paul Rudd from a hole in the ground. Now, however, he recognizes all of his Avengers. We saw a trailer before Anaconda for Crime 101, which stars two of the original six: Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo. He identified Hemsworth straight off, but I had to point out Ruffalo. I didn't bother to tell him that Halle Berry had been in the original X-Men movie, because I don't think that's a reference for him.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure he knows Paul Rudd is Ant-Man and he definitely knows Jack Black, who has been in a disproportionate number of movies he's seen, most recently A Minecraft Movie.

I was hoping Anaconda would be as fun as that, even if it weren't going to be as R-rated as the original. 

Unfortunately, Anaconda was not fun. It was not funny, and it was not fun. In fact I found it quite painful. In fact I couldn't believe, after it ended, that it was only 99 minutes long.

I don't really plan to give you a full Anaconda takedown in this post -- I'll probably have a review up on Monday if you want to read it -- but I did want to express my disappointment with not keeping the birthday win streak alive for my son. 

Oh, I think it stayed alive for him -- he said that he really liked it, though I think he ventured this a little reluctantly, while the credits were still rolling. I said "Yeah!" in an encouraging tone, which walked the line between enthusiastically endorsing his perspective while also not saying it was actually my own. In fact, I did not speak another word about the movie, positively or otherwise, which seemed to work without being awkward. We just talked about other things on the ride home.

I couldn't tell if my wife shared my perspective, though she certainly laughed a couple of times -- which I think was partly out of a desperate desire to laugh. It's been a rough year concluded by an especially rough past few weeks. 

The 15-year-old? I couldn't tell what he thought. He didn't offer up a perspective either way, he just kept his mouth shut, which maybe shows wisdom beyond his years. 

I'll still go back to the Paul Rudd well if he has a new, age-appropriate movie coming out for my son's 13th birthday, but this does feel like another reminder that we can't have nice things. It's just a bit of a rotten time right now, and maybe proof of that is a disjointed, intermittenly diverting but ultimately soulless Anaconda meta reboot with weakly drawn characters and tangential bits that should have been left on the cutting room floor. (The whole part where Steve Zahn has to pee on Black's leg after Black gets bitten by a spider? CUT IT.)

I guess 2026 can only get better from here? 

A New Year's Eve movie on New Year's Eve, and deja 287

New Year's Eve isn't the type of holiday that pairs with movies. If you were to sit down and try to think of five movies where the plot revolves significantly around December 31st, you'd be hard-pressed to do it. They exist, but they haven't entered into the hallowed realm of the classics, the type you'd throw on every December 31st.

Oh you can think of movies that have a scene on New Year's Eve. Especially this year you might be thinking of When Harry Met Sally, where "Auld Lang Syne" is playing over Harry and Sally's ultimate reconciliation. But that doesn't mean you would watch the entire When Harry Met Sally just to ring in the new year, when that's only five minutes of the whole movie. 

Just off the top of my head, the movie 200 Cigarettes takes place on New Year's Eve, at least I think -- but the fact that this was the second movie I thought of is certainly saying something. (Although that movie's release year, 1999, is something that will come up in just a minute -- twice, in fact.) 

Given that we do, as a culture, love New Year's Eve, the lack of movies celebrating it seems a bit counterintuitive. Then again, maybe it's more intuitive than you think, especially if you look at the business model of movies. 

The idea with any movie about any holiday is that you release it just before that holiday -- or, in the case of Christmas movies, maybe as long as two months before that holiday. For New Year's Eve, Christmas is already rudely grabbing most of that available release space. Sure you could release a New Year's Eve movie on, say, December 15th, but the audience does not want to skip over Christmas, which has not yet occurred, in order to land in the headspace necessary to celebrate New Year's. As the intensity of Christmas anticipation increases, that's right when you're trying to get your audience for your newly released New Year's movie. In short, New Year's does not have a "season" like other big holidays do. 

Sure, you could also release it a few days before New Year's. I like to say that Christmas is over at 2:30 in the afternoon on Christmas Day, and I'm only a little bit joking. But setting aside Christmas movies, late December is also the time when all the newly released Oscar hopefuls are upon us. Your little movie about New Year's Eve doesn't stand a chance.

Which is maybe why Nicholas Clifford's One More Shot -- which we watched last night here in Australia, finishing at about 10:45 -- was released on October 12th, having made its South by Southwest debut back in March. I mean, I suppose that's better than releasing it in June, but you can't really say that a tie-in with the holiday was really intended on that date. Not only was there still Christmas to get through, but there was still Halloween.

I started to watch One More Shot, on our Australian streaming service Stan, right around that time, before I paused around the ten-minute mark. I realized this would be a great thing for my wife and me to watch on New Year's Eve, when we usually want to watch something vaguely festive, but can never fit it directly into the theme of the holiday. (On one recent occasion, we watched Murder Mystery 2, and I knew we could do a lot better than that.)

Because the film is Australian, starring Australian acting exports Emily Browning and Ashley Zukerman, that also seemed to make it a bit more fun for our early Australian celebration of New Year's. 

Interestingly, due to the film's long gestation, my wife had already read the script, since she used to work at a body that gives funding to Australian films. But that didn't lessen her interest in watching it, and we both had a good time with it. 

In case it's something you might still consider getting in for your own New Year's Eve at home -- assuming you aren't young enough to go out and do something fun -- I'll give you a little bit of the premise. Browning plays Minnie, a woman in her mid-thirties whose life isn't in order, but she's hoping to pick up with an ex, Joe (Sean Keenan), at a party to celebrate rolling into the year 2000. She wasn't going to go after she saw a different ex earlier that day at the hospital where she works, whose wife was about to give birth to their first baby, but hearing that Joe has returned from New York, she throws on a red party dress at the last minute and joins her lesbian friends on whose couch she's surfing. It's a costume party, and asked who she's going as, she says "Friends," as in the TV show. Which friend? "All of them."

Of course, Joe is not as available as she might have hoped, and this evening is going to go through one crisis after another -- made possible by the fact that Emily has a magical body of tequila procured for her by some of these friends on a trip to Mexico ten years earlier. Each time she takes a swig, it resets her to that moment when she took her first swig outside the front door of the party. As Y2K looms and they are all concerned if it will be the end of the world, Minnie gets a chance to keep resetting and trying to get it right this time.

The premise works, the movie is funny, the 1990s needle drops are delightful, and the characters are developed enough to get a real sense of them as friends. It builds in depth and complexity from a gimmick that could be fairly superficial. It's also nice to see Browning, who once had a promising Hollywood career in front of her, resurface in something. I wouldn't have seen her in anything since Alex Ross Perry's Golden Exits in 2017.

It was interesting to watch a final movie of 2025 that deals in some way with deja vu, because 2025 ended up being quite the deja vu of 2024 -- in one way and one way only, which I am about to tell you about. 

You know I watch a lot of new-to-me movies each year, but that total falls within a range of 40 or more movies just due to the randomness of the way things work out. Some years I might see more movies I've already seen, like in 2022, when I rewatched all my previous #1 films. Some years I might get busy with other things and not get to as many movies. Some years -- though not in ten years now -- I might curate films for a film festival, and watch way more than I usually do. 

So I think you'll agree that it's unusual that after 365 days on the calendar in which to watch movies, I would end up with the exact same total of new-to-me movies in two years in a row.

But One More Shot was my 287th and final new-to-me movie of the calendar year 2025, just as The Brutalist was my 287th and final new-to-me movie of the calendar year 2024. 

(Yes, in 2024 I actually had 366 days to watch these movies, so I guess the per-day rate is not exactly equal.)

I was all set to come up short here, and that would have been my preference. But in the last few days, I had to watch three movies that related to finishing up my December viewing goals, before I even got to One Last Shot:

1) Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe on December 29th. I was supposed to be watching the 2000 version of Fail-Safe for a movie challenge, but I had never seen the original, so I wanted to watch that first. And glad I did, because I loved it, and also because it allowed me to listen to a podcast that discusses it in conjunction with Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite.

2) But then I couldn't find the 2000 version. So on the afternoon of December 30th I had to pivot to a different movie to complete the challenge, Josef Rusnak's 1999 film (there's that year again) The Thirteenth Floor. 

3) And then for reasons that are not very good -- I wanted to finish Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation before the calendar flipped to January -- I watched the 1981 Tobe Hooper The Funhouse, the last movie Tarantino discusses in detail in that book, on the evening of December 30th. 

And watching the exact same number of movies, two years in a row, was useful because it allowed me to tack on a second half of this post, if nothing else.

If you're reading this on December 31st in your time zone, happy new year. 

The year that sapped my movie energy

We have our pick of years that felt like the most awful year of the decade that Donald Trump has been president or a candidate for president. Some would take 2016, the year our innocence was lost and we realized Americans were willing to not only nominate but actually elect this monster. Some would take 2020, the first year of COVID and the year of the George Floyd protests, which at least had the brilliant capper, Trump-wise, of him losing the election. Some would take last year, when it was even more unfathomable that we would elect this monster a second time. 

But none of those years really drained me of my will to watch movies like 2025 did ... and most of the reason for that is not even related to Donald Trump.

Oh, statistically, the year will look like most others. I'm only coming up a few short of my total number of movies watched in 2024, which includes both movies released this year and movies I hadn't seen from other years, and the actual number of movies I rank in a few weeks will be in the same neighborhood as last year's record-setting year. 

But for the past few weeks in particular, I finally feel like I am going through the motions in this march to statistical normalcy. This year has just really taken it out of me. 

The biggest factor is likely my work. I don't talk about my work on this blog, and that's because I use my real name. I don't see any reason to trash a work that people could look up and figure out what I'm talking about, but also, I don't actually want to trash my work because this is the happiest I've ever been in a job ... even in a nightmare year like this one.

Let's just say that there was a big new program rolled out at the end of 2024 that has dominated my work like never before, due to the multiple issues in the way it was conceived and executed, then the natural issues involved in the customers I support learning a new system and inevitably making mistakes ... mistakes that tended to snowball because of the so many other issues involved, which prevented us from getting in touch with them in a timely manner.

Suffice it to say that my team and I have been burning the candle at both ends for the entire year, and more than 13 months out from the start of the program, it may actually be getting worse rather than better, even though the program is now finished and we should just be cleaning up all the loose ends. That may be what we're doing, but the loose ends continue to present themselves and in some cases multiply, meaning that I've been logging hours outside work just to try to stay on top of it all.

Then in the last month or so we've been dealing with an issue in the family about which I will also be vague. I will reveal the same level of detail that I've revealed previously, which is that it involves health but not the health of myself, my wife or my two children. That has left me particularly time and energy poor during the month of December.

And very lastly, we do get to Donald Trump, whose steady erosion of our belief in the possibility of good triumphing over evil has made 2025 an increasing nightmare with every further month that has passed. Sometimes you just feel like giving up. 

So while I am usually feeling especially activated at this time of year, as Golden Globe nominations and actual victories get revealed, as ten best lists reach us, as I start to realize my own ten best is really taking shape, this year I just feel tired. It's been a lot this year. 

I will be doing my usual end-of-year posts in a couple weeks like I always do, but the difference is, I have barely started on those time-consuming posts. I have only written half of a blurb for one of the movies I have reasonably calculated will be in my top ten. I have only come up with a few candidates for my top and bottom performers of the year. And I think I have come up with exactly one portmanteau, though I'm not really happy with it.

I can point to many external stimuli that have left me in my current state, including spending a full eight weeks of the year traveling, if you want to round up from the first few days of 2025 spent in Los Angeles, and then include our week in Georgia and six weeks in Europe. Those happy occasions have also, certainly, contributed to it being a "weird year." 

But whatever the case may be, I reach the end of 2025 just not really "feeling it." I'm low on energy. And I assume I'll get it back, but for now, I'm stumbling a bit. 

Then again, the new year is always about new beginnings. Maybe it'll be good to wipe the slate clean in 2026, and maybe that will also be a year of resounding mid-term election wins for Democrats. 

Though really, as I've said, my 2025 was not mostly about Trump. I'm not going to give him that credit. It was about work and family and just general exhaustion. And so when I find it time to recap the year, I'm not really focusing on some aspect of moviegoing that defined the year in one way or another. Heck I'm not even including a poster for this post.

But don't worry, I'll be back in 2026.

I always am. 

A Hardcore obsession with Star Wars

As you recall, I've been reading through Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation since around the start of November. Tarantino's conversational book, a recollection of movies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s that he saw when he was too young, would not have taken me so long, except that I decided to watch all the movies I hadn't seen that he talks about in depth -- which has added eight viewings at a very busy time of year for viewings, with one still to go. I'll try to fit that last viewing in before the end of the year, and also finish the book before we roll over to January.

The penultimate film he discusses at length is Paul Schrader's 1979 movie Hardcore, which has that memed scene of George C. Scott looking increasingly distraught and anguished as the chracter watches images of his daughter in a porn movie, culminating in him screaming "TURN IT OFF!!!"

Instead of this salacious subject matter, today I'm going to discuss how many times the movie references Star Wars. 

It's three, by my count. Which seems like it must be intentional, though given the prevalance and popularity of the movie at the time this movie was made, it could have also just been that it was inescapable background material that was impossible to shoot around. 

Of course, we know that's never the truth with any filmmaker who puts an ounce of care into the movie they're making.

The first reference that I caught was when Scott's character is in his daughter's bedroom, back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after she has already gone missing from her church trip to California. I believe this is after Scott has already contracted Peter Boyle's seedy private investigator but before that investigator has returned with the porn scene featuring his daughter. (Tarantino rightly wonders in the book how Boyle managed to find this movie, which I wondered at the time I was watching, but that's hardly his only criticism of the film. In fact he may be harder on this than any of the other films he's discussed.)

Anyway, in Kristen Van Dorn's bedroom there is a Star Wars calendar on the wall. The picture this particular month is near the start of the movie, the iconic image where Darth Vader has lifted one of the rebel soldiers off the ground and is on the verge of suffocating him. 

Then later, when her father Jake is out in Los Angeles trying to find her, the camera pans along a Los Angeles street from the building above, and catches a Star Wars billboard on its path.

But the one that really drove it home was when Jake finds himself in one of several dens of inequity searching for his daughter, and in this one, there are two half-naked women on stage, engaged in a lightsaber battle. Of course, it's not a realistic lightsaber battle, but more of a cheeky ballet in which lightsabers happen to factor in.

I decided to write this much about this post before seeing what the internet has to say about this, but I'm going to go check that right now. 

I found a video where Schrader talks about it on stage in a Q&A, and he says "I was having fun sort of tweaking George [Lucas]." And then "And years later George said to me 'I don't know why I ever agreed to that.'" Much laughter from the audience.

I guess it was nothing deeper than that.

I don't know if I will write one more Cinema Speculation post when I watch the last film, The Funhouse, but if I don't, I'll say that it has been a fun and instructive exercise to watch along with this book, but I don't think it's a standard I could maintain in any future similar scenario, while also hoping to get through the book at a decent clip. 

Just a touch of Christmas

I'm taking a cheeky few minutes to write a Christmas Day post before all the action starts. So I have to be quick here. 

(Merry Christmas, by the way!)

I mentioned yesterday that my problem with many if not most modern Christmas movies is that they absolutely strangle you with the Christmas. Every plot point is about some Christmas-related pageant, shopping excursion or decoration competition, and the movie is festooned with crass physical representations of Christmas -- or even tasteful ones that become crass through their sheer number.

Well, as I finished off my wrapping and cooking on Christmas Eve, this year I rewatched a film that has just a touch of Christmas by comparison.

Thomas Bezucha's The Family Stone is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. I'm sure that's not the reason most of those who are watching it this year are watching it. They are also honoring star Diane Keaton in the first Christmas after her passing, which is especially wrenching in a movie where she has cancer and is trying to wait until after Christmas to reveal it (best of luck there, no screenwriter would allow that).

The distributor didn't really know what to do with The Family Stone when they first released it in 2005. Although it had a Christmas release -- like, just before Christmas, on December 16th -- that angle was not particularly played up at the time. In fact, if you read this post that I wrote in 2012, you'll know just how little they played it up, including no mention of Christmas on the DVD copy, and releasing it on DVD the following April rather than waiting until November, as would be traditional for a Christmas movie. (You'll see from the poster above that they did ultimately conjure up some more traditional Christmas-related advertising for the movie.)

And maybe that was possible because of the aforementioned small quantity of Christmas.

If The Family Stone were made today, they would probably shove the Christmas of it down our throats. It's the same as they would never release Die Hard in July (or was it August?) if they made it today. Any Christmas aspect to it would have been amplified by studio notes, and the advertising would capitalize on it, 100%.

But though The Family Stone takes place almost exclusively on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, this is a movie about these characters, not specifically what errands they have to run related to Christmas. In fact, there is nary a Christmas errand in this whole movie, just a lot of conversations, some funny, more heavy.

In fact, on what I was suprised to discover is only my second viewing of the movie, I was even more surprised to learn what little percentage of this is actually geared toward laughs. Yeah there's that bit where Claire Danes' character takes a goofy header down the stairs getting off the bus, or where Stone brothers Dermot Mulroney and Luke Wilson engage in a comical wrestling match on their kitchen floor -- though it's anything but comical for the characters. And there are certainly plenty of jovial interactions. But there's also a melancholy hanging over this movie that only gets further explicated as the plot goes along. 

And thank goodness it's only a little bit about Christmas, because that allows all these tones to ultimately bring out the warmth, the combativeness, and the just plain seeming truthfulness of this extended clan, who just so happen to be gathered for the biggest Hallmark holiday there is. 

It's exactly the percentage of Christmas I needed this year -- enough to remind me that, in fact, it is that time of year, a time of year of great joy for some people and great pain for others. We're experiencing both this year, and that was better reflected in my Christmas Eve viewing by a movie that grapples with both, rather than shoving ugly Christmas sweaters down my throat for 90 minutes.

And as for Diane Keaton ... I was also surprised to find her to be less of the kooky Connecticut liberal mom than I thought she was, and than I eulogized her as when I mentioned this movie a few months ago when she died. She's a real person here, too, prone to her personal weaknesses, her judgments, her disappointments at how things are going in what she knows may be her last Christmas, when she should just let go and love as much as she can. 

That's to the credit of The Family Stone, and it's a reminder to us all to let go and love as much as we can, especially this time of year, especially since we are never sure how much time we may still have with the ones we love the most.

Cramming in a Christmas movie, somehow

There's a lot going on right now at my house.

That is both literal and metaphorical. 

At the moment we have as many as a dozen people spending a significant portion of every day in our house, three of them under the age of 12. The reason for this gathering is sad, but we the people are doing our best to be happy. That's all I can really say out of a sense of privacy for my family. I'll just say that it does not involve the health of any of the immediate three members of my family, or me.

As a result of this thing and of the crazy year I've had at work, my movie viewings have taken an absolute nosedive. Just to give you some idea of that, I've seen only 13 new movies in 24 days of the month so far. That would be plenty for your average person, but for me, it's pretty low. We aren't to the end of the month yet, so a full comparison is not yet possible, but I saw 29 movies in December of 2024. I no longer have to worry about shattering my 2024 ranking record of 177 movies. 

I did, however, finally see my first Christmas movie -- and probably only new Christmas movie -- on December 23rd. 

It wasn't the greatest 2025 Christmas debut, but hey, I still have Christmas Eve to wash the taste out of my mouth. 

That's the thing I find most unpleasant about most new Christmas movies, of which Michael Showalter's Oh. What. Fun. is a particular exemplar: their chintzy taste and general sense of garishness. This poster gives you some idea. 

When you watch a movie set in and around Christmas these days -- the Eddie Murphy movie Candy Cane Lane is another example -- the production designers have left things so chockablock with Christmas paraphernalia that you literally don't have a shot in the movie without a gaudy lawn ornament or a bad Christmas sweater somewhere in it. 

And though this is, in most movies, supposed to be at least partly a commentary on the crass commercialization of Christmas, it's us who have to spend our time immersed in this space. And at a time of year when we are feeling frenzied because of our own responsibilities, it hardly feels like a relaxing way to spend our downtime, further assaulted by the colors red and green and just reminding ourselves of the present we haven't yet wrapped and the complicated toy we haven't yet constructed. 

Oh. What. Fun. is supposed to be a distiff Christmas movie in that it styles itself as focusing on the mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) rather than the dad (in this case, Denis Leary), as every other Christmas movie in the past does. In fact, as part of the extremely meta and self-aware setup of this film, Pfeiffer even narrates as much as she goes through a literal shelf of VHS tapes of all these other movies focused on the harried dad at Christmas. The most instructive example for the structure of this film is probably National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which I also don't care for.

But because it's Christmas Eve, and it's been a very hard year, I don't really want to leave you with a glass of curdled egg nog on my blog, especially if I don't get a chance to write about the movie I hope to watch tonight -- and with all these people around our house, I don't know if I will.

I will say that I missed the opportunity to watch Home Alone yesterday with this big group of people, as they did it during the last hour of my workday. That would have been nice, though it isn't a personal favorite of mine and I may have seen it only twice. 

So if you get the chance, treat yourself to a Christmas classic over the next few days -- even if it is about a harried dad -- and leave some of these newcomers unwrapped. 

Merry Christmas all. 

Understanding Editing: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This is the final in my 2025 monthly series in which I've been watching Oscar best editing winners, alternating between those I'd seen and those I hadn't seen, to get a better sense of superlative versions of the craft.

David Fincher is the man who famously said "There are two ways to shoot a scene, and the other one is wrong." 

What better way to conclude this series, than with a man for whom perfection is paramount, and whose 2011 film won an Oscar for one of the embodiments of that perfection -- its editing?

In fact, this was Fincher's fourth (and so far final) film to be nominated for best editing. Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button didn't win, but The Social Network won just the year before. I couldn't have watched that for this series, because the repeat viewings in this series were designed as movies I'd seen only once before. I've seen The Social Network four times. 

As you might suspect, you reach such levels of perfection by finding collaborators who help deliver your vision. Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won those consecutive Oscars in best film editing, and they were also the nominated pair for Benjamin Button. Even when Se7en was nominated he was seeking out the best of the best, as the editor on that film was Richard Francis-Bruce, who was nominated the year before for The Shawshank Redemption. 

But you know what? Baxter and Wall did design the famous titles for Se7en, so they have been with Fincher in some capacity the whole way. Baxter has continued to edit his increasingly lesser output of feature films, though Wall has not, and has no further feature editing credits to his name. I'm not going to dig into what happened there at this time, but don't worry, Wall has hung around as a producer. I also just noticed he graduated from my alma mater, Bowdoin College.

Well, all this build-up to the final film in the series really paid off. Although I had to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in three sittings -- a symptom of this time of year and some of the things that have been going on that are not directly related to it -- at every moment I appreciated its superior craftsmanship, especially in terms of the editing, though the cinematography is also first rate and was also Oscar nominated. 

This has been a series where I've meant to scribble down a lot of notes while watching, but in many cases found myself without the quantity of insights and observations in the moment that I thought I'd have. If you've been keeping up with my Understanding Editing writing this year, you've noticed that I've concluded on more than one occasion that I thought the film had won the Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars already, and editing got swept up in the general furor. Which was never to say the editing was bad in those films, just that I rarely found the quantity of examples of why it was good that I thought I would find.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is basically nothing but examples of good editing. SPOILERS to follow. Here are some of the examples I jotted down:

1) I really appreciated the way this film conveys information just from people doing daily activities, like making a coffee or throwing a piece of food into the microwave. The film will convey this in basically three shots that are each cut off just a bit before the action seems to be fully completed, to convey momentum in an economy of storytelling, but also never to make you feel like you're being cuffed around by too many cuts. It's the sort of exact touch that you would expect other editors to notice and to nominate. 

2) The cross-cutting is excellent. The initial example I noticed, which was repeated throughout in other ways, was when Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is arriving at Milton Security offices to report her background check on Mikail Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). As Goran Visnjic's Dragan Armansky is profiling her to Steven Berkoff's Dirch Frode, we go back and forth between what the two of them are saying in that board room and her steady approach through various parts of the building, of course beginning with her arrival on her signature motorcycle. It's a great character introduction, both showing and telling, giving us an idea of the way she's different in "every way," as Armansky says.

3) The cutting on action is also excellent. Examples of this are Lisbeth closing the top of a laptop, which closes the scene and whips us to another, or her zooming motorcyle transitioning directly into Blomkvist, much later in the film, getting swept along the floor in the rig where he's held captive by the film's ultimate villain, Stellan Skarsgard's Martin Vanger, before Vanger intends to kill him. 

4) The scene where Christopher Plummer's Henrik Vanger describes the sequence where his sister Harriet went missing is also expertly conveyed, interweaving his story with the images of it, doling out a perfect amount of screen time each time it switches between the present and the past. 

5) There's a scene that is both funny from a narrative perspective and clever from a storytelling perspective that involves editing. Blomkvist is going through a written account of something that occurred four decades earlier, and he uses a highlighter to highlight each line of text. As he highlights the text, the images alternate to a dramatic interpretation of what's happening in the text. Although this was smooth and effective, I couldn't help but wonder: If you highlight each line of something, isn't that the same as highlighting none of it?

6) I noted how this film uses dissolves regularly. So even though it has examples of cutting on action that involve a sharp line of demarcation between two scenes in two different locations, it also has these languid transitions, which I think were more likely to be used to convey progression within the same scene. You wouldn't necessarily expect both of these things to be a feature of the same editing duo, but I suppose a good editor has all the tools at their disposal.

7) And yet this film also has examples of the sorts of editing that were prevalent in the last film I talked about in this series in November, The Bourne Ultimatum, which you will remember I didn't particularly care for. That film was a flurry of quick edits in fight scenes in a style that ultimately exhausted me pretty quickly, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo shows us how that sort of thing can work like gangbusters if it is used in moderation. The example of that is when Lisbeth tries to fight off a mugger on a train station escalator, ultimately dispatching him in a quick series of frantic shots before escaping back down and to safety. 

8) The final thing I'll mention is the way Baxter and Wall edit together the final car crash that claims the life of our villain. Lisbeth is chasing him on her motorcycle, and when he veers off the road and crashes, she also sort of spins out on the motorcycle, though is never in the sort of mortal danger he is. The editors combine shots of the two vehicles in their separate chase terminus spots, all within a quick two seconds of footage. 

If I didn't jot down more notes, it could be because my middle sitting was fairly late at night and I might have slept through some of it. 

When I went to Letterboxd to see what I'd given The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was sort of surprised to see it was only three stars. I knew that this was not among my favorite Fincher films, probably for a couple of reasons: 1) it's very long and reaches its dramatic conclusion about 20 minutes before the movie ends; 2) the ending is a little unsatisfying as an explanation to the central mystery Blomkvist is investigating; 3) also making their second Fincher film in as many years, and also winning an Oscar for the first one, my beloved Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did not transport me with this score the way they did with their score for The Social Network. In fact, I'm wondering how much of my feelings about the movie are tied up in the fact that I bought the score before the movie was out, and I already knew the score was much longer than anyone needed to listen to (something like 80 minutes) and that none of it stood out for me as it had for The Social Network. 

Having watched this movie specifically with a focus on its construction, via its editing, gives me a new appreciation for its quality, and I just luxuriated in how nicely put together the whole thing is. There's a reason we consider Fincher one of the masters of this form we love so much. Even when the movies he makes don't fully engage us -- which also happened for me with The Killer most recently -- they look absolutely astonishing, and Fincher has excellent taste in the collaborators he chooses. 

So yes, I feel like I'm wrapping up with the experience I always hoped to have in this series, but rarely did. Even if I don't feel like the series unfolded exactly as I'd wanted it to, it may just be that the thing I've come to understand most about editing is that it remains an enigma. Sometimes, good editing is there for you to see and to grab hold of, with numerous examples like I've listed in this post. Sometimes, editing is the glue that holds everything together and delivers you a smooth viewing experience. It remains part of that enigma that other practictioners in the field are able to identify both forms and come to a consensus in rewarding them accordingly.

And one thing I'll say for sure is that Understanding Editing put a lot of great movies in front of my eyes, both those I hadn't seen and those with which I was already familiar. 

Spending time with different griefs and joys

I'm usually one to mention different sorts of tragedies on my blog when they rise to a certain level, whether or not there is a movie angle. 

The problem with the world today is that there are so many tragedies. How do I decide which ones to honor by talking about them here, and which ones to pretend aren't happening?

The shooting in Bondi Beach is such a tragedy. And yet, overwhelmed as I have been this holiday season, not writing my usual frivolous end-of-year pieces to the same extent that I usually do, I only felt it was urgent enough to spend time on a different, movie-related tragedy, the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. 

Yet I have certainly been spending time with Bondi Beach as well. I keep thinking about the chilling effect this has had on Hanukkah celebrations throughout the world -- obviously here in Australia, and especially in Sydney, our sister city. But everywhere. Everyone knows that hate can pop up at any moment, and hate is disproportionately being directed at Jews right now. In saying that, though, I should note that Muslims are equally at risk, as noted in the terrible mosque shooting in Christchurch a couple years ago.

And yet this is also a time of joy and melancholy in my family.

My younger son is leaving his primary school days behind him. In Australia, kids transition to high school when they enter year 7, which my son will be doing at the end of January. So this ends our four years of affiliation with the school that's just around the corner from my house, where we moved at the end of 2021. My older son spent one year there and the younger has now spent more years there than he did at his original primary school. 

There was a graduation ceremony on Monday night, which made me sentimental as hell. My son gave a speech, as did all his classmates in the staggered ceremony, which featured the three homeroom classes graduating in consecutive hour-long time slots. They finished with a dance, which was sort of in the style of that viral wedding dance that they then also performed on The Office, designed to trigger all of our brimming emotions.

During what is also the Christmas season -- a very strange Christmas season in our household indeed -- my emotions are brimming for all sorts of different reasons. People dying. People with health issues. People moving on to the next phase of their childhoods, reminding me of how I myself am aging, and how my youngest son will never be quite so young again. 

I feel a bit like I'm in a movie. Movies are good at capturing this tug-of-war between joy and grief in our lives. We know it isn't all just miserable, but we also know you can never have complete joy without it being tempered by pain. And then in among it all there are things like Christmas, arriving in eight days whether we want it to or not, creating certain obligations that must be ticked off, certain expected joys, and certain pain of remembering those we used to share the holiday with who are no longer with us.

And for the Jewish friends among us, the "obligation" of Hanukkah can hardly be expected to carry as many of the offsetting joys this year as it has in the past. 

Mourning my favorite director

I debated about whether to hem and haw in the subject of this post about calling Rob Reiner my favorite director.

If you were measuring Reiner in terms of the yardsticks a cinephile would use to praise a director, you might not think of him as an obvious candidate for this honor. He wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks. He didn't have a signature style. His movies didn't make the Sight & Sound list. He wasn't a big mis-en-scene guy. 

But if measuring Reiner only on the pleasure his films brought me, it's no contest. 

I wouldn't maybe know I held Reiner in such high esteem except for Flickchart, which has revealed to me that I have three Rob Reiner movies in my top 30 of all time, and six in my top 200. Yes that's right, Reiner is responsible for 3% of my top 200 movies of all time. 

And today I learned he was stabbed to death, along with his wife, most likely by their son.

WTF?

I haven't even watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues yet. That is going to be one sorry viewing when it actually happens. 

There are lots of terrible things going on in the world. Two men fuelled by hatred just shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach. Another guy killed some Brown University students. And as it happens, I've got some pretty concerning health developments in my family right now. (Nothing in my immediate family of my wife and two sons. That's all I'll say.)

But because I'm a movie guy, the one I can't get out of my head is the image of Rob Reiner begging and pleading for his life when an assailant, most likely his son, was coming at him with a knife.

And losing that argument. 

Any death is bad. But when Rob Reiner's father, the great Carl Reiner, keeled over at age 98, you couldn't even really be sad. You knew it was his time. 

Rob Reiner was 78. He lived a good life. But it had such a terrible ending, and when I think of him, I will now always think of him in the same company as others who lost their lives in such devastating ways, like Phil Hartman. 

So while I want to give Reiner more of the typical, wistful send-off that I like to give our cinematic luminaries when they pass on to the great beyond, now I'm in such painful misery that I can't even type straight. 

But because I don't think I can write a series of pieces remembering Reiner, I'm going to give it a go now.

Rob Reiner became a target on shows like South Park for a sort of liberal piousness that Trey Parker and Matt Stone found grating. But for a liberal like me, that was part of why I liked Reiner. He believed in the causes I believed in. But that was just a happy bit of fortuitousness. I would have loved him even if he played on the other team. 

That's the thing about Reiner -- you could like the films he directed, but he also had a personality as a result of being an actor first and foremost. I can't say that I watched All in the Family -- in fact, it's possible I've never seen a single episode -- but Reiner's Meathead made millions into fans of his personality, a personality that earned him two Emmys. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing Reiner's persona. It was expansive. It was hilarious. In his comedy, it could be a bit naughty. On this weekend where we've lost some good and innocent Jewish Sydneysiders, Reiner embodied the lineage of great Jewish comedy, his kvetching always generous, his observations always shrewd. Simply put, he was funny as hell, and I also got a great sense of warmth from him. 

And the film that introduced him to the world as a director used that personality to good effect. My highest ranked Reiner film on Flickchart is his first, This Is Spinal Tap, my #9 film of all time. I said earlier that Reiner wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks, but how about new film genres? He and Tap star Christopher Guest might be the two men most responsible for the mockumentary, and we couldn't have gotten a better initial tour guide than Reiner's Marty DiBergi, who interviews David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. I can't believe I don't know what the first scene of this movie is, but if you told me it was DiBergi introducing himself to us, I'd say that's most likely right. Little did we know, Reiner was introducing us to his incorporable career, which gave him the best "imperial period" -- to borrow the music term -- of any director. What's more, it was his personality as the straight man playing off the Tap men that made it all work. Who else could have asked Nigel the innocent questions necessary for "This one goes to 11," and had it work so smashingly?

Reiner followed that up the very next year with The Sure Thing, which at #396 on my Flickchart is only my seventh favorite Reiner movie. I have friends for whom this might be top three. And it would be top three for me for many directors, but I have so many other films to talk about that I can't even linger on one of the films that really introduced us to John Cusack.

Stand by Me in 1986, #131 on my Flickchart, proved that we didn't know Reiner's only mode after two films. He could also make a Stephen King adaptation and a truly seminal coming-of-age story for Gen Xers -- though about their parents, so it worked for that generation too. Which also managed to be funny in spots. It had a huge impact on me. Heck, I was 12 when it came out. 

But then the very next year, again -- that's four movies in four years, if you're keeping track -- Reiner made my #11 favorite film of all time, The Princess Bride. Epic. Iconic. Also hilarious. You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions. I didn't even know how much I loved this until I rewatched it with my kids in the last decade, which is when it shot up from somewhere in my 20s or 30s on Flickchart all the way up to #11. If it weren't blocked by The Iron Giant, that would be two Reiner films in my top ten.

Rob Reiner didn't make a film in 1988. Everyone has to recharge sometimes.

But in 1989 he made what I consider to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time, and yes I know I am pissing off classic movie fans who'd rather Cary Grant star in their great romcoms than Billy Crystal. But what can I say, I was born in 1973, and When Harry Met Sally slayed me. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it makes me feel fonder about New York City than almost any film out there. For a long time this was ahead of The Princess Bride, fully in my top 20, but at the moment it's my #26 on Flickchart. 

And yet again Reiner made a movie in 1990, his second Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Which is also a stone-cold classic. Two-handers don't get more tense and exciting than this. He coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Kathy Bates that no one will soon forget, and brought James Caan back to relevance. Which is good enough for #150 on my Flickchart. 

Rob Reiner kept things going throughout the 1990s, with the exception of legendary flop North in 1994. (And even in a mode of excess generosity toward the man, no, I am not going to defend North.) I may not be as big a fan of A Few Good Men as some people (wow, I didn't realize it was all the way down at #3292), but I do respect it. The American President at #691 is more my style. Ghosts of Mississippi (#2125) is even pretty good.

But while many people are ready to write off Reiner's career at this point -- even with zeitgeisty movies like The Bucket List on his resume -- I am always left in a puddle of fresh tears over 1999's The Story of Us, which is all the way up to #167 on my Flickchart. This is possibly the only movie I can remember watching twice consecutively on the same day, just before my first son was born in 2010, for reasons I won't get into right now. I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember when or why. Then I went another 15 years without seeing it again, when I saw it this past February, my fourth time overall, and it inspired me to write this post. And then five days later, this post. 

I'm going to finish talking about this movie not because I don't think Reiner has made a good movie in the 21st century, but because it makes a good bookend with This is Spinal Tap. Why, you ask? What could these two movies possibly have in common? 

Answer: Rob Reiner the actor. Rob Reiner the personality.

In the film, Reiner plays the best friend of Bruce Willis' character, who is possibly separating from his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Reiner is married to Rita Wilson. Just likeable actors all around. 

Reiner doesn't have a huge number of scenes, but he has just enough to give us the flavor we like from his personality. And the part I love most is Reiner's disquisition about how the ass does not really exist. The ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. In reality, there is no ass. Believe me, it works in context, especially when it gets called back to later on.

Reiner was great in front of the camera, Reiner was great behind the camera, and Reiner was great in the sphere of progressive politics, even if Matt and Trey sometimes didn't like it. I can't believe I won't see him in front of or behind the camera again.

Is he my favorite director? God, now I have to use the past tense. Was he my favorite director?

It's something I've told people about before, this high success rate on my Flickchart, which corresponds to my real affection for the man and his movies. But I always feel a bit hesitant about it. If you go around telling everyone how much you love Rob Reiner, maybe they just focus on the fact that he didn't have a lot of hits in the last 25 years of his career, or maybe they think of Matt and Trey making fun of him. Maybe it's an embarrassment to say, especially in circles of serious cinephiles, how much you love the output of one of our great populist directors.

But if I can't proudly shout my love for Rob Reiner now, in the hours after his death, I don't know when I can. 

I might just shout until I cry. 

The perils of the long-delayed review

Welcome to my second straight post in which I express my anxieties about a film I appreciated less than most people, while also getting at a larger issue within film criticism.

Although I give away many of my advanced screenings to other writers for my site, I make sure to hoard the ones that will serve a purpose for me personally. In the past six weeks I've had a large quantity of those, three in total, which are movies whose Australian debuts are scheduled for much later in the film year and closer to my ranking deadline. That makes three films I don't have to worry about while catching other important end-of-year films, to say nothing of the blockbusters that also get released in late December.

Those three films are Sentimental Value, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice, and given how they've done in this week's Golden Globe nominations, they were good films on which to concentrate. Each of those films was nominated as best feature in one of the two best feature categories.

I've already written some about the last two, but it's the first one that I saw longest ago, all the way back on October 29th. And it's the first of these that has succumbed to some of the perils of not writing about it right away.

Normally when I see a film I'm planning to review, I write the review within 24 hours, and that's usually out of necessity. In many cases I'm planning to post the review the very next day, so writing it immediately is essential. In fact, in the review I wrote of Jay Kelly this week -- see here if you want to read it -- I finished the movie at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday night, and had a review up by 10 past 10 on Wednesday morning. That isn't maybe a typical turnaround, and in this case required some finishing touches during my first hour of work. It also helps that I am consistently waking up just after 6 a.m. when the sun rises. But it just gives you some idea of the sort of timeframe I'm usually working with.

In the case of Sentimental Value, which does not release in Australia for another two weeks, my timeframe for writing the review was almost two months. 

Before I get into the particulars of what's happened with it, I want to say I'm not sure I understand why it's a benefit to screen a movie so far in advance of its actual release. Surely the publicists don't want you to post your review until your readers have a chance to go purchase a ticket within the next few days, right? Yes you could write about it early, but that only contributes to the general buzz without having something concrete readers can convert into action. In our short attention span times, you don't want to let the iron cool down for two months. 

On the publicist's side, there are also logistical headaches because they have to remember who they invited to the screening, and check over the course of those two months to see if the critics have written their review -- because hey, they theoretically could post it at any time. 

Because I had a take on Sentimental Value and a clear way to open the review, I wrote my opening few paragraphs almost straight away. In fact, it was one of those reviews where I couldn't wait to get to a computer, because the words were already spilling out in my brain and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the ideal phrasing I was concocting in my head.

But what then happens that is that in about the third paragraph, I start to give a couple paragraphs of plot synopsis, and this is where the urgency to continue writing dissipates. I usually know how I'm going to start my view, but I don't always know how the final four or five paragraphs of analysis are going to play out. With a movie not coming out for almost two months, I've got plenty of time to work that out.

So it was another ten days? two weeks? before I continued my Sentimental Value review, and then ultimately finished it in that same sitting. 

During that time, I became fuzzy on details. Points I thought I might have wanted to make at the time have gotten hazier. And more to the point, I'm hazier on my defenses for why this film didn't work like gangbusters on me, despite its win of the Grand Prix at Cannes (which is actually the festival's second most prestigious award, contrary to its name). 

So I did finish the review, and thought to myself it was okay I didn't love it, ultimately issuing it a 7/10 in our ReelGood rating system. Although Cannes is often totally in sync with the zeitgeist -- Oscar best picture winner Anora last year also won the festival's Palme d'Or -- there are times when Cannes' top prizes are awarded to very polarizing films, some of which people actually hate. Don't forget, this is the festival where people either give a film a ten-minute standing ovation or walk out. It's okay if I don't love one of the films honored here.

But over the last month in particular, I've learned just how much most people think of Sentimental Value. My first surprise was the realization that it was very likely to get a best picture nomination at the Oscars, which we won't actually find out until the 22nd of January, but which surprised me because foreign language films have historically had a steeper hill to climb on this front. (There's also some English in this movie, considering that Elle Fanning is one of its stars.) The Oscar bias against foreign language films is falling away a bit in recent years with the expansion of nominees from five to ten, and now each year we seem to get at least one foreign film nominated for best picture. I guess I just didn't know Sentimental Value would be this year's example of that. (And while we're at it, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice are also primarily in foreign languages, and they also have realistic Oscar ambitions.)

So now I'm looking at what I've written for Sentimental Value and trying to figure out ways of softening my criticisms. Clearly this film came together better for others than it did for me, but am I wrong or are they?

If I had just been writing about and posting my review of Sentimental Value in late October, this wouldn't have been a problem. If history proves me wrong on a movie, so be it -- it's happened plenty of times before. The problem comes when the review is in a state of unpublished limbo, meaning I can have second thoughts, I can tweak it, I could even change the entire thrust of my review if I wanted, contradicting my initial impression of the movie only on the basis of a fear of looking stupid and being wrong.

At least with Sentimental Value, the writing portion is out of the way. Correct or incorrect -- as if you can ever really say that when aesthetic judgments are involved -- at least I have something that is based confidently on things that actually happened in the movie. It's a little different with the other two.

I saw Nouvelle Vague on November 27th, so not nearly as long ago. It comes out on January 8th. As with Sentimental Value, I had a good couple opening paragraphs and I wrote them right away. And as with Sentimental Value, I lost the sense of urgency at the point of doing my plot synopsis. 

I've only just picked up the writing again this morning, and I did force myself to finish it. The last 600 words of my review are reasonable and I'm reasonably proud of them. But there was a delay of 16 days in there and I'm not sure what things I thought I wanted to say were lost in the interim. And though Nouvelle Vague is my favorite of these three, with an 8/10 score, I'm still wondering if my knowledge of its subsequent accolades are informing what I've written in some way.

Then you've got No Other Choice. This I saw only ten days ago, making it relatively fresh. But in this case, I have not even written the opening yet. I have an idea of how I'm going to open it, but maybe knowing that the review before it, Nouvelle Vague, was not even in the can yet prevented me from getting started. This comes out latest on the calendar, January 15th. By which point I will have endured another six weeks of accolades about it since the time that I saw it.

When I start to fret about this a bit, I have to remember that I once had a whole gig reviewing movies where I wrote the review years after both the movie had come out and after I had seen it. How does that even work, you ask?

Well when I was writing for AllMovie in the early part of the 2000s, I was actually trying to make a living at it for a short period of time. They were only paying me $20 for each 300-word review, so this endeavor was always doomed to failure. However, the thing that made it marginally possible was that I could write a review for any film that currently didn't have a review on the site, as long as I was approved to do so. I'd go hunting and I'd send them lists of 20 movies I wanted to review, of which they would usually approve all 20, or sometimes denying me on one or two token films. Oh those blessed times when there was a financial incentive for them to have me do this.

In any case, those reviews have to be considered highly compromised in that a) I had not seen the film in many years in most cases, meaning I was reviewing it based on a general impression and a plausible take, and b) I already knew what everyone else thought of the movie, so I was factoring that in to what I was writing, either leaning into the popular take or defining my thoughts in opposition to it.

So I do suspect there is some imperfection in the way these things go. Critics see movies all the time with huge advanced buzz, and they have to clear that noise out of their heads if they want to write about those movies purely and without bias. And because of the way life works, sometimes you can't write that review straight away, especially if you don't have that deadline.

I guess I'm just glad, at this point, that I am not likely to have any more of these, at least this year. I'm scheduled to see another movie with awards buzz, The Secret Agent, on January 15th, which will also help me get it in before my deadline. But at least in that case the movie comes out only one week later.