Sunday, March 31, 2019

The good, the bad and the really bad

I've decided my eight-year-old son is my animation polar opposite.

When we were trying to pick out a movie on Friday night for movie night, it was his younger brother's turn to pick. Of course, the older one never misses an opportunity to try to influence a situation with his words. (Shrewdly, if successful, this would get him two picks in a row, as this would technically be his brother's choice.)

"I'd watch anything Madagascar," he said to his brother. "Anything Madagascar is good."

This is a guy who, just moments earlier, turned his nose up, with prejudice, at The Lion King -- a movie with a lot of the same subject matter, only good. As I've told you before, he also claims to hate Toy Story and Finding Nemo, though I was at least encouraged that it was the younger one who vetoed Wall-E, which the older one would have been willing to watch.

Still, as a general principle, the eight-year-old seems to be Team Dreamworks while I am Team Disney/Pixar.

Sigh.

It's not that I don't like any Dreamworks films, because that's certainly not the case. However, my typical relationship with Dreamworks is to see the first in every series of films and leave their umpteen sequels unwatched. Even the good ones, like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. (Actually, I saw the second How to Train Your Dragon but not yet the third.) To be fair, I may be conflating multiple different non-Disney/Pixar animation studios here, as the prime example of this is Ice Age, which is Blue Sky, not Dreamworks.

The original Madagascar had been the poster boy for what I think Dreamworks does wrong with its movies. Too manic, too many characters getting hit in the head by falling objects. You don't need me to elaborate. You've seen these movies.

Anyway, I greatly disliked Madagascar and make a habit of commenting on my dislike for it whenever it comes up in conversation. I wear that dislike almost as a badge of honor.

Over the years, though, people I trust have diminished some of my bluster about Madagascar. Having liked the first movie well enough, they shouldn't have held any sway over me at all. But these are people whose tastes are otherwise trustworthy, and they seem to have an especial fondness for Madagascar 3, the one with the circus afros. Which, by the way, is not a good standout detail to know about a movie.

On Friday night, I felt like it was maybe time to give the Madagascar series another shot, so indeed, we queued up Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. (Wait, isn't Madagascar the country actually in Africa? Or off its coast anyway?)

Ugh.

Instead of rejuvenating the potential of the series, the second Madagascar killed it dead where it stood. I didn't figure it was possible to like it less than I liked Madagascar, but that sure was the case. The vocal performances are annoying (a big complaint I had with the first), the jokes are unfunny, the heartwarming storylines are utterly perfunctory, and the hitting on the head is plentiful, at least metaphorically if not actually.

Consulting Letterboxd, I see I gave the original two stars out of five, at least as a retroactive assessment of my feelings toward it when I started on Letterboxd in early 2012. The sequel? I gave it only half that, making it the rare animated movie to get only a single star from me. (Off the top of my head, I can think of only two others: All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Nut Job.)

I'm not going to further deconstruct my dislike for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, but I did want to give one more thing that I think is dumb about it: It has way too many silly side characters. Following in Despicable Me's footsteps -- or is it the other way around? -- these movies have their minions in the form of the penguins. However, then they also have King Julien and his sidekick. And there are also two posh monkeys who are like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppets. Predictably, it's way too much.

I also wanted to explain the meaning of my subject for this post, because there was a funny coincidence to this viewing.

As you will recall, I only just watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the first time on Wednesday night. I watched Moneyball in between, but Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa made for the second consecutive new-to-me movie featuring Ennio Morricone's iconic theme song from the Leone western.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" -- also the name of the song -- plays a couple times during the film, whenever this elderly New York tourist on safari shows up on screen. See, in typical Dreamworks fashion, she's a fightin' granny who tussles with Alex, the lion voiced by Ben Stiller. As the music reminds us of a much, much, much, much, much, much (catch your breath) much better movie, she delivers roundhouse kicks to Alex and says "Bad kitty."

Really bad indeed.

Saturday, March 30, 2019

The truest sign of my indifference to Captain Marvel

The further I’ve gotten away from Captain Marvel, the less I like it/think about it. Actually, I can’t say I don’t think about it, because I’ve been listening to it discussed at regular intervals on my podcasts as each of them gets to it, or as I get to listening to them. And in fact, one particular podcast finally gave me the balls to admit what I should have admitted straight away: I don’t really think it’s all that great. Genevieve Koski of The Next Picture Show, who I tend to think of as a champion of responsible depiction of women at the movies, gave a number of reasons she didn’t love it, all of which I agreed with. If it’s okay for Genevieve to say she didn’t love Captain Marvel, it’s okay for me to say it too.

One of the things Genevieve and I agree on is the piss poor usage of 90s music in the movie. It’s not that the songs they choose aren’t good, because they are. It’s that they are applied so indifferently, so haphazardly, that they exist only as broad signposts of 90s nostalgia, nothing that feels organic to the movie or the scenes in which they are deployed.

There’s a weird extension of this problem that I never thought would have been a problem for me, because it involves my favorite band of all time.

For a good portion of the movie, maybe 15 or 20 minutes, Carol Danvers wears a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt. It immediately put me in mind of the Public Enemy t-shirt the young John Connor wears throughout Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Whenever I thought of him wearing that t-shirt, I thought of it as a case of the two things mutually boosting each other up. The fact that he likes Public Enemy speaks well of John Connor, and the fact that the future leader of the human resistance against the machines wears a Public Enemy t-shirt speaks well of Public Enemy.

I should feel this – in fact, I should get a surge of pride – with Carol Danvers and Nine Inch Nails, as they are indeed my favorite band. But like many of the other signifiers in this movie, this one is pretty empty. Carol is, or at least thinks she is, an alien from another planet. Her choice of a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt is not based on an acquaintance with their music. It’s random and inspired by nothing other than its proximity to her at the time she was looking for clothing (they mentioned she grabbed it off a mannequin in the discussion on The Next Picture Show, though I don't remember that happening).

Whether Carol consciously adopted Nine Inch Nails as some kind of symbol or not should be irrelevant. If it’s not her endorsing the band, then it’s the movie endorsing it, and that should be good enough. But I treated Carol wearing a shirt emblazoned with the iconic NIN logo -- something that should have been aimed directly at me, appealed directly to me, and in all ways been an easy win for the movie to score with me -- with little more than a shrug. It doesn’t only represent her not making a conscious choice, but the choice feels just as arbitrary for the filmmakers as their choice of which music to drop in which scene that doesn’t go with that music.

I did like the fact that the movie endorsing it, and by extension Brie Larson endorsing it, was proof positive of what I’ve thought for ages: that Trent Reznor is a feminist. Larson has spent a good portion of the press leading up to Captain Marvel talking about gender equality and #MeToo-related subject matter, after all. Reznor, the lead singer and in fact entirety of the band, has written some really angry lyrics and music over the years, the type that could make a fan defensive. But the people who know have never confused that anger with misogyny, even though some of the lyrics could broadly be interpreted through that type of filter.

The thing is, Reznor received a pretty high endorsement of his feminist credentials a full quarter century ago. None other than Tori Amos asked him to join her for a duet on the chorus of “Past the Mission” on her album Under the Pink, this after including the words “nine inch nails” in her song “Precious Things” from her solo debut album Little Earthquakes. Her follow-up to Under the Pink contains the song “Caught a Lite Sneeze,” which name-checks Reznor’s own debut album, Pretty Hate Machine.

In other words, I don’t need Captain Marvel or Captain Marvel to tell me I have good reason to like Nine Inch Nails.

If I felt the character of Carol Danvers and the music of Nine Inch Nails were in some way in conversation with each other -- as I do with John Connor and Public Enemy -- then it might mean something. But alas, the character herself is as poorly defined, as poorly delineated, as the character's connection to whatever symbolism Nine Inch Nails is supposed to have for her, or for the movie.

And I'm not going to include a bunch of language here reassuring you of my own feminist credentials. I hope you know I support the idea of Carol Danvers, just not so much her execution in this particular film.

Hey, Genevieve Koski said it was okay. 

Friday, March 29, 2019

This year's opening day psych-up movie

Happy baseball opening day, everyone.

Two teams played two counting games in Japan last week, but now it's time for the other 28 to join them. One of the best days of the year, if you ask me. And you're reading this, so I guess you're asking me.

I do like to tie in opening day to the movies, and I've usually done that in the form of watching Major League, a task made easier by having purchased the film on iTunes. But given that I did watch it each of the past two years, I figured maybe it was a good time to switch things up this year -- at least for one year.

So, Moneyball it was.

This may not be the movie you'd first tap for this honor, at least on the surface. It's about the love of the game, as most baseball movies are, but that love is buried deep within number crunching and philosophies about how to maximize wins from a small payroll.

There is, though, the dramatization of a 20-game winning streak by the 2002 Oakland Athletics, and that's about as sports movie as it gets.

And truth be told, much of my excitement about baseball nowadays is inseparable from my various fantasy baseball interests. So crunching numbers and evaluating players purely on the basis of what they can do for you is certainly on message for that type of thing. (Just so you don't think I'm some kind of soulless baseball fan, I'll tell you that my burning desire for my team, the Boston Red Sox, to win the World Series has been quenched by them having done that four times successfully since 2004, including last year most recently.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed sinking into my beanbag chair with a couple beers and a bag of grain twists for my third viewing of a film that made my top ten of 2011. It scratched the itch and then some.

And in just a few short hours ... play ball.

Thursday, March 28, 2019

Audient Audit: The Dollars Trilogy

This is the third in my monthly 2019 series devoted to revisiting, or possibly visiting for the first time, movies I think I've seen but may not have.

It's only the third month and already I'm breaking the rules of Audient Audit.

I'm supposed to be "auditing" one movie per month that has made its way on to my various movie lists, even though I'm not sure I've actually seen it. This month, though, I've done three. Clearly because I have just so much time on my hands. It's almost the start of the baseball season, which has a large amount to do with why I haven't posted here in nine days.

But Sergio Leone's Man With No Name Trilogy, which I've called by its other name in the title for this post for the sake of brevity, represents a special case. Both A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) have made it on to various of my lists over the years. In fact, the only one of these movies I'm sure I hadn't seen was For a Few Dollars More (1965), the middle movie.

At the moment, only Fistful is on my lists. I decided at some point in the past few years that I definitely had not seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and promptly scrubbed it from the lists on which it appeared. I can't remember what caused me to definitively decide I hadn't seen it, but I now think the three-hour running time had something to do with it. I would have remembered watching a three-hour western.

So that's why you're getting the poster for Fistful above. Why I watched all three movies was because a) there still existed some level of doubt about TGTBATU, b) I was gifted all three movies on BluRay for Christmas 2017, and c) my wife is out of town this week, leaving me the opportunity to watch them on consecutive nights. I actually ended up taking a one-night break between FAFDM and TGTBATU, in part because I was just too tired on Tuesday to watch a three-hour movie. And yes, I do like referring to these movies by their acronyms.

One other interesting note: I have already seen two other movies whose titles were inspired by movies in this series. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is one of my all-time favorite documentaries, and I enjoyed The Good the Bad the Weird a few years back when watching it as part of my series Asian Audient. (It's Korean.)

Starting to watch AFOD -- don't worry, I won't always use the acronyms -- made me realize another reason why I'd probably included it on my lists despite an absence of compelling evidence that I'd actually seen it. I've seen two other movies of this same material. Fistful was caught up in a lawsuit about its similarities to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, and is now considered a loose remake of that film. A more conscious remake was actually the first of the three I'd seen, the really terrible 1996 Bruce Willis vehicle Last Man Standing, directed by Walter Hill.

It didn't take long, though, for me to decide that I definitely had not seen this. Part of it on TV, years ago, when all I knew was that it was a Clint Eastwood western I was watching, and not which one? Maybe. But other than that, the details of Fistful were not familiar to me.

The Man With No Name -- that poncho, that stubby little cigar -- has become so prominent in American cinematic iconography that I've certainly seen snippets of all three movies in Oscar clips packages and the like. But the real tip-off that I hadn't seen this movie is something that happens very early on. A couple of no-good ruffians take some shots at Eastwood and his horse to scare him off, and the horse bolts. Eastwood ends up jumping off and swinging on a wooden contraption of some kind, almost like a 19th century gymnast. He then looks at a guy looking at him out the window of a nearby building, and says a single word: "Hello."

I snort-laughed. The delivery was perfect, and obviously intended for comedic effect. Which was my first sign that I really didn't know The Man With No Name.

For years and years now, I have harbored this idea that Eastwood's iconic character was some kind of badass who is such a magician with the gun, so quick on the draw yet so essentially unperturbed in his manner and line deliveries, that there isn't a single moment when he doesn't have the upper hand. In fact, certain other Eastwood movies I've seen -- like the really disagreeable High Plains Drifter -- do feature such a version of this character. A man who is so in command that he's never even in danger not only struck me as dramatically uninteresting, but also as endorsing certain macho stereotypes that I don't like endorsed. In fact, this ill-informed conclusion was possibly the basis for why it took me so long to start watching Eastwood westerns, even westerns in general.

The Man With No Name is not that guy. He may have a mystique about him -- not having a name tends to do that -- but Eastwood's character is so repeatedly in trouble in these movies that he's almost more like a noir hero than the straw man I constructed in my mind. You know, the noir hero who's always getting beaten up and nursing his wounds while doggedly still pursuing his goals. In fact, in TGTBATU, he spends a significant amount of screen time being marched through a desert and nearly dying of thirst and heat stroke, his face looking like it had been held over an open fire for a couple minutes. He then spends a realistic amount of time convalescing from this near-death experience. He emerges seeming no worse for the wear, but still.

The other thing that surprised me about that "Hello" line delivery was that it meant he was a character with a sense of humor. I thought for sure he would be humorless, but the man knows how to crack a joke, how to self-deprecate, how to recognize the irony of a situation. He's no one-dimensional badass delivering gruff one-liners.

So watching the whole series was a refreshing deconstruction of my expectations. I'll give a little bit on each movie.

I found A Fistful of Dollars to be enjoyable, but quite straightforward. Although maybe that's not the right way to describe it, because I did have to consult the Wikipedia entry afterward to be sure I'd followed the plot. This is likely no fault of the movie, rather, the fault of the poor sleep I got the night before watching it. I did fall asleep repeatedly throughout the second half, always pausing it but probably losing a bit more of my orientation within the plot every time I awoke. I almost wonder if, 20 years from now, I will remember so little of it that I'll have to wonder again whether I've ever seen it. But I really enjoyed being in this town with Eastwood and the two warring factions that separated it. This is the kind of western that got made a lot at that time, with only a single set and relatively small ambitions.

That decidedly does not describe the next two movies Leone made. His artistic growth between Fistful and For a Few Dollars More is notable and measurable. I noticed a lot more risks being taken with camera setups and narrative, all of which paid off. My favorite part of the movie, though, was probably the introduction of Lee Van Cleef as a co-star for the next two movies. I'd heard Van Cleef's name before, and his appearance was certainly familiar, but I don't know that I remember extended exposure to him on screen. I fell in love instantly. What a presence! It was further undercutting the notion I had of the Man With No Name to give him a partner, and this movie almost feels like a buddy movie at times, their chemistry is so good. It's a bit more sprawling in its focus with a really dynamite villain (Gian Maria Volonte). I'm sure a part of the advances in this movie were budgetary. You can see that money was thrown at FAFDM once AFOD was successful, though I'm not looking it up to see if that's actually true or not. Spoiler alert, this was my favorite of the three movies. I can't imagine that's a particularly common viewpoint.

Van Cleef returns in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and this time is joined by Eli Wallach to make it a trio. Wallach is "the ugly" (introduced first), followed by Van Cleef as "the bad" and Eastwood as "the good" (though whether that means morally or with his gun is debatable). This movie, on the whole, was actually the least like what I was expecting it to be. I supposed I should have surmised that a three-hour running time would leave room for it to go all over the place … and it does. Having the movie set during the Civil War gives it a sense of specificity in an otherwise timeless genre, but then there’s actually a major battle that plays into the last hour, in addition to introducing some new characters. I’m not sure that all of the exceptionally sprawling nature of this film works, but it definitely does continue to point Leone toward what I consider to be his peak artistic achievement: Once Upon a Time in the West. I also really enjoyed the performances of the three leads, though I would have liked a bit more of Van Cleef. Wallach is great in this, and the three have really good chemistry. I suppose while I’m on the topic, it’s worth acknowledging that if this is the same character by Eastwood in all three films, then this is a prequel to those films, as he doesn’t don his signature poncho until the final scene. (I could look up all the discussions of this, but you likely already know what people say, or you don’t care.)

I can’t leave off in my discussion of these movies without making mention of their all-time-great music. Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most well-known in all of movie history – the mere sound of it conjures images of a tumbleweed rolling across a landscape as two frozen men stand, about to draw their guns. That was one of the reasons it surprised me that this movie is a bit less like the standard western than I thought it was, as I imagined everything about it would conform to some platonic ideal of a western. I really do like TGTBATU, but it’s not the movie I always assumed it was. I really liked all the variations on the signature theme Morricone used, and the theme from Fistful is also quite memorable. I’m not sure how much Morricone had to do with this, but the most memorable recurring music in For a Few Dollars More has got to be that tune that plays when El Indio opens his pocket watch, right before he’s about to blast someone.

One of the reasons I think I included as many as two of these movies on my previously seen list was the shame of not having seen them. That shame is now, thankfully, gone. 

I know for 100% certain that I could write another thousand words about these films, but baseball season calls.

In April I shall return to a single film for this series, but I don’t yet know what that film will be.

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

When the screen saver is better than the movie

I don't know if you have a version of Netflix that does this, but on our smart TV, when you leave
Netflix on without making a choice for a good ten minutes, it goes into screen saver mode. And what happens in this mode is that it cycles through maybe 20 different shows or other original properties Netflix is trying to push, though strangely, they're not usually the ones currently being buzzed about. In fact, some of the shows I've seen featured here, I only know about at all because I've seen them in this mode. (The Danish series The Rain, anyone?)

The way they do this screen saver is clever. It's a still promotional image from the show/movie/original property, not a moment that actually takes place on screen, but an artistic rendering that in some way amplifies the tone and/or themes. Then it does the thing that makes it distinctive: It takes different pictorial elements in the image and slowly moves them toward or away from one another, so the relative proximity begins to increase, decrease or indeed overlap.

It's a pretty entrancing effect. I could sit and watch it for quite some time, and have.

It's in this context that I finally want to bring up The Cloverfield Paradox.

As a prime example of just how random the properties on this screen saver mode really are, this is a promotion of a movie that hit Netflix over a year ago and was widely considered one of the worst movies of 2018. It narrowly avoided ranking in my bottom five of the year, and others' take on it was pretty similar to mine.

Simply put, it was a mistake Netflix should have made and quickly moved on from. Instead, they're still trying to drum up viewers.

But that's neither here nor there. What I want to talk about is how much better this image is than anything in the whole damn movie. So good, in fact, that I've chosen to devote an entire blog post to it.

Since I've included the image above, I don't need to describe it to you, but I will contextualize it for you if you're luckier than I am and haven't seen the movie.

The Cloverfield Paradox doesn't have a lot to do with the other movies in this "series," but then again, neither did the very good 10 Cloverfield Lane. The series, if it is to continue, is developing into a bit of a Black Mirror, serial-style approach to exploring similar themes, and I'm totally behind that if the movies are good. This one isn't, but that doesn't mean that future Cloverfield movies might not be.

This one deals with a crew on a space station that suddenly "loses track" of Earth, and may have slipped into another dimension. Believe me, it's not nearly as cool as it sounds. The few good ideas the movie has are executed poorly, with a weird mashup of tones, resulting in the sub-par product you either did or did not see.

But this image is pretty damn great. It illustrates the fact that the movie ultimately features two versions of the scientist played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, dealing with a theoretically interesting quandary about whether to switch dimensions and go on living in the other one. Like I said, not nearly as cool as it sounds.

The way the image moves apart as described above, it's like the two Gugu Mbatha-Raws being pulled apart from each other, with the tendrils connecting each other being elongated like so much melted cheese. It's cool to watch, and just a little terrifying.

And though these images stay on the screen for no longer than 20 seconds apiece, I'd really love to see the logical outcome of this separating movement, so we ultimately got two distinct Gugus. Either that, or the sides of each of her faces starting to crumple inward and making it an even more compelling work of modern art.

If a screen saver could make The Cloverfield Paradox seem that much more compelling, I wonder what it could do for an even worse Netflix original sci fi film from 2018, Duncan Jones' Mute.

Probably nothing, but I'd like to see them try.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Real-world tragedy, on screen and off

I enjoyed -- not really the right word -- Hotel Mumbai when I saw it on Thursday night, but ultimately had a bit of a shrugging reaction to it. I was set to review it, and was planning to give it a 6/10, or three stars. In other words, a solid movie that doesn't really do anything new or particularly interesting, but is worth seeing anyway.

By the time I wrote my review on Saturday morning, real-world events had nudged that 6/3 up to a 7/3.5. Because by then, 49 Muslims had died in Christchurch, New Zealand -- only a three-hour flight from where I live -- at the hands of a white supremacist.

That news has cast a pall over this part of Australia, probably every part of Australia, although this is the only one I can comment on. I haven't read many of the details as kind of a method of insulating myself from their awfulness, but I know that either the prime suspect or one of the suspects is Australian-born. I think he was the guy who posted the manifesto and live-streamed his mass murder. Ugh.

But just the tragedy in and of itself has left us all with heavy hearts, as is the case any time innocent people are slaughtered by a monster. It feels a bit worse in this case because this part of the world has done a very good job at limiting gun-related violence, New Zealand probably even more so than Australia. There was a terrible shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996 that left 35 people dead. In the wake of that tragedy, they tightened the gun laws and there basically hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since.

Kiwis tend to be even more progressive than Australians, so while I don't know the exact nature of their gun laws, I suspect they are even more stringent than Australians'. What's more, though, New Zealand is just a place of sweet, loving people. Terrorist violence is anathema to a place like New Zealand, in the sense that there's no vocal minority stirring up racist fervor.

The stark reminder of the ways violence can tear us apart made it a bit more difficult for me to be dismissive of the parts of Hotel Mumbai that I didn't think worked as well. A critic's role is to assess both a movie's whole and its individual pieces, but focusing on the individual pieces that fall short feels more like nit-picking on some occasions than it does on others. When a movie is given such an unfortunate boost to its timeliness, it makes it all the more worth grappling with that whole than getting getting tripped up by its details.

Although the events in New Zealand will likely reduce the audience for Hotel Mumbai in this part of the world, as people will be seeking escapism at the movies if they're going to the movies at all, nudging the movie up to a 7 is my small way of suggesting to people that now is the time to engage with these issues. It may add nuance to the movie's depiction of terrorist violence that in the recent real-world event, the people of Muslim faith were the victims of terrorism rather than its practitioners. In the end, we are all sitting ducks when the insidious opportunism of hatred rears its head.

Monday, March 11, 2019

The A Dog's Cinematic Universe has a fan in my family

My son may not be old enough for the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- according to his parents, anyway -- but he's not too old for the A Dog's Cinematic Universe.

We're talking about my eight-year-old, not my five-year-old.

But before we get into that, you may be asking what the hell I'm talking about.

You may recognize a similarity in the poster art between A Dog's Way Home, a 2019 release, and the 2017 movie A Dog's Purpose that I wrote about here. That's because they're both based on material by writer W. Bruce Cameron, whose book A Dog's Purpose spent 19 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turned into that successful movie. However, the actual sequel to that book is called A Dog's Journey, and that is also becoming a movie, to be released later this year.

The interesting thing about the (so far) three films in this "cinematic universe" is that they are not even released by the same studio. The two actual adaptations of those books are being released by Universal (alongside a host of lesser production companies), while A Dog's Journey is a Sony release. I don't understand how it all works. Cameron is the common thread.

Never in a million years did I imagine I'd be sitting in an actual theater watching this movie, and that it if I were, it would be my older son initiating it, rather than my younger. But this is a good reminder of my personal creed as a critic, which is to see samples of every genre aimed at every demographic. That's the truly democratic way to review films, and modern versions of Lassie are not immune from this philosophy.

The potential interest in A Dog's Journey was first broached by my son a month or two ago, when he saw ads for it in a free magazine he got featuring pop culture options for children. I kind of laughed it off at the time. This is a kid who claims to hate Toy Story and Finding Nemo, among others. When push came to shove, he'd never actually want to watch a talking dog movie. (For the record, it's a thinking dog movie, not a talking dog movie, as we ever only hear the dog's thoughts. But that's a pretty unimportant distinction in the type of appeal it would have, and to whom.)

The issue likely wouldn't have been revisited, except that my younger son slept over at his aunt's Sunday night (we're in the midst of a three-day weekend), and the older son said he wanted to go to a movie at night as a way of recognizing the novelty of his little brother not being around.

I didn't think it would transpire because the options right now are pretty limited. We haven't given him the approval for movies like Captain Marvel yet, and besides, I saw that on Thursday night, as you know. The actual kids movies are held back for a week or two more, in anticipation of opening in time for the year's first school holidays, which begin on April 5th. The second Lego Movie kind of kicks off that season when it opens on March 21st.

But I did my due diligence and checked what was playing at The Sun in Yarraville, my theater of choice when all else is equal. And sure enough, the movie he'd said he wanted to see, about a talking/thinking dog, was playing at 6:40, pretty much the perfect time to get him home for a reasonable bedtime.

I almost nixed it by laughing at him when he responded so quickly in the affirmative. I made a deft save, saying I laughed at the speed of his response and not his interest in the movie, though that wasn't really true. My laugh was a bit more complicated than that, though. My laugh was not about this movie in a vacuum, it was about it compared to some of the Pixar classics he scoffs at. "You have an actual disdain for some of the great animated features of all time, but you want to go see a talking dog movie?"

I'm glad I was able to convince him of the sincerity of my interest, because what parent wouldn't be delighted to have an eight-year-old who genuinely wants to see a talking dog movie? In an era where all we do is bemoan how quickly are children are growing up, it's heartening to see one who wants to watch what we might consider the epitome of wholesome entertainment. And who cares if it's corny? Corny I can live with.

I don't usually have to worry about leaving movies because he's scared anymore, but I thought I might have to worry about boredom prompting an early departure from this one. But he was really into it, obviously, and the only hesitation I caught in him declaring his affection for it was a sidelong glance to judge my own thoughts on it. I think he wants to embrace something like this, but maybe not if his dad doesn't also want to embrace it.

Well, I'm glad to report that I do embrace A Dog's Way Home. Sure, there's something hopelessly square and dated feeling about a movie like this. There's a part of me that feels like Babe should have put an end to movies that didn't realistically sync up the dialogue to the animals' mouths, and that was 24 years ago. Of course, these are only thinking animals, and you only hear the thoughts of the main one anyway, but the point is, the way Babe technologically eclipsed its forbears should have rendered them permanently obsolete.

But A Dog's Way Home has bits that make it feel current as well. For one, it relies on digital technology in a number of places, as when the dog has to interact with a baby cougar who grows up to become an adult cougar. You can't get a dog to chase a squirrel on camera unless the squirrel is digital, nor can you get a pack of wolves to close in on a dog. I could of course tell that these were digital, but I don't think my son could. I didn't ask him, anyway.

But what really heartened me about the movie is its social progressiveness. I kind of feel like a movie like this is designed to extract most of its dollars from middle America, but that doesn't mean that conservative politics factor in. Not only are there two interracial relationships in the movie -- one between a white man and a black woman and one between a black woman and a Mexican man -- but there's also a Native American police chief. I'm saving the best for last though. At one point the dog comes into the possession of a gay couple. The two men don't kiss or anything, but I think even a kid would probably guess they're gay. It probably wasn't necessary, which is all the more reason it was really nice to see.

I don't think I'm going to rush out and complete my A Dog's Cinematic Universe viewings, but if my son wants me to take him to A Dog's Journey later this year, I certain won't involuntarily scoff at the suggestion.

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Not just strength, but complexity

I didn't notice until after I'd written my Captain Marvel post yesterday that there was a reason the
movie was released (in the U.S. anyway) on Friday, March 8th -- it's International Women's Day. (Still is, I guess, though I'm writing this on Saturday morning in Australia.)

The movie features what we traditionally think of as a "strong female character." But then again, so does almost every other movie released nowadays.

But iTunes is doing something today that gets at what we really went from the representation of female characters in movies, and what my colleague at ReelGood, John Roebuck, is always saying we should be looking for: complexity, not strength.

Any boob (we're talking men here) can write a female character who can lift cars and roundhouse kick three minions at the same time, who shows unwavering resolve and never a hint of fear in any situation.

But that, in its way, is as simplistic a representation of female characters as the ones where they need a man to save them.

I like how iTunes has recognized the quest for true equality in on-screen representation by highlighting the complexity of the female characters in the recent releases it's trying to get you to rent or buy.

The banners running across the site today are not even touting these characters' status as female, which I think is pretty shrewd, especially since we will obviously get that from seeing who they've selected. The banner I'm interested in is just calling them "Complex Characters," and features the likes of:

Joan Castleman, played by Glenn Close in The Wife
Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade
Marlo, played by Charlize Theron in Tully
Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Janet Armstrong, played by Claire Foy in First Man
Lisa, played by Regina Hall in Support the Girls
Ellie Wagner and Lizzy Viara, played by Rose Byrne and Isabela Moner in Instant Family

Now I haven't seen The Wife and Instant Family, but I have to assume these were all curated because they were good, well-written characters, not just traditionally strong ones.

I don't think even your most extreme feminists, the types you'd lampoon if you were being cruel, want every female character to be punching out men left and right. They just want what has never been a problem when writing male characters: characters who may be flawed, but have strengths that balance their flaws, and an underlying competency and self-sufficiency that speaks well of their gender.

Now, before getting carried away with praising how nuanced iTunes is being in its progressiveness, I should note that this is not the only banner that appears on the site. There's also one called "Fearless Figures," which is a bit closer to the way Hollywood has reacted to its gender-related criticisms by creating one-dimensional superheroes. Then again, I cannot argue with the way some of these people approach actual superhero status. This list includes:

Elastigirl, played by Holly Hunter in Incredibles 2
Marie Colvin, played by Rosamund Pike in A Private War
Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg in The Hate U Give
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, played by herself in RBG
Colette, played by Kiera Knightley in Colette
Tish, played by Kiki Layne in If Beale Street Could Talk
Marina Vidal, played by Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman
Domino, played by Zazie Beetz in Deadpool 2

That's meant to underscore courage more than physical strength, though obviously there's plenty of physical strength to go around in these choices, considering that two of them come from actual superhero movies.

Then the final banner -- the one that's actually running along the very top -- is yet one step further toward typical reactionism. (Is that a word? You get what I mean.) It's called "Powerful Female Characters," and well, I guess the subtlety I gave them credit for is now kind of out the window. But this is an interesting list as well:

Atlanna & Mera, played by Nicole Kidman and Amber Heard in Aquaman
Queen Anne, Lady Sarah and Abigail, played by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone in The Favourite
Gwen Stacey, played by Hailee Steinfeld in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Ally, played by Lady Gaga in A Star is Born
Rachel Chu and Eleanor Young, played by Constance Wu and Michelle Yeoh in Crazy Rich Asians
Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth I, played by Saiorse Ronan and Margot Robbie in Mary Queen of Scots
Vanellope, played by Sarah Silverman in Ralph Breaks the Internet
Hatsue Shibata, played by Kirin Kiki in Shoplifters
Holly Burns, played by Julia Roberts in Ben is Back

And finishing with a link to pre-order Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in Captain Marvel.

I might argue that some of these belong under other banners, but okay.

My takeaway from all this?

That there are 24 different movies hitting video at about the same time in which iTunes could isolate their female characters, with their various strengths and complexities, for praise, without serious concerns of someone scoffing at the way they've been hoodwinked into thinking a performance seems more progressive than it actually is.

It's heartening. Collectively, we are doing better at this.

And it should only keep getting better.

Friday, March 8, 2019

Looking for the Boden-ness and the Fleck-ness

Marvel Studios has hired directors with vision (Taika Waititi), hacks (Peyton Reed), and directors with vision that they tried to turn into hacks (Edgar Wright).

The decision to hire Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to direct Captain Marvel seems like a case of the former, but it may have ended up being a case of the latter.

In any case, after watching the movie, I’m not seeing the Boden-ness or the Fleck-ness in it.

That’s not to say I disliked Captain Marvel. In the end I had a fair bit of affection for it. I feel about toward it as I feel toward Black Panther, which is 3.5 stars out of 5.

But Black Panther was at least directed by a director with vision, who was allowed to keep that vision intact when he made the movie. Captain Marvel feels … well, just about like every other Marvel movie.

Which is kind of what they’re going for. It’s been much discussed, occasionally by me, that the real auteur behind the Marvel movies is not their individual directors, but Kevin Feige, the producer on … well, every single Marvel movie I think. He’s had credits on Marvel-related properties all the way back to 2000’s X-Men, where he served as associate producer. The guy is as steeped in the Marvel vision as Stan Lee was – more, probably.

But even within that, there is the leeway, even the desire, to step a bit afield from what’s considered to be the “standard” Marvel movie. That’s why Feige hired Edgar Wright for Ant-Man, though he wasn’t willing to go as far afield as Wright wanted. Maybe he wasn’t ready yet. Thor: Ragnarok’s Waititi and Panther’s Ryan Coogler got to inject some of themselves into the movies they made, which became massive hits.

So he was certainly ready for Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck to do their thing … but they didn’t.

Or maybe they just don’t have an identifiable “thing.”

Since the average MCU fan will likely not have seen any of their filmography – and I’m not going to blame you if you’re that person (sorry to refer to you as “average”) – I’ll give you some idea who they are and what they’ve been up to. Boden and Fleck have always worked together as far as I can see. They are not related and have never been in a relationship, which makes them a bit of an anomaly in terms of directing teams. [NOTE: I was wrong, they are/were in a relationship, but they are very private about the nature of it, though it looks like they have a child together. I'll leave this as is and just add this note.] In fact, they met on a student film and decided to collaborate. They do have a bit of a Coen brothers thing going on in the sense that both were always credited as writers but one was initially credited as the director, that being Fleck. (The man always gets the best title, right?) After about their second film they both started being listed as directors, which seems only fair.

They burst onto the scene, in a manner of speaking, with their 2006 film Half Nelson. You the “average MCU fan” still didn’t likely see it, but in indie film terms, it was definitely a bursting. It was one of the movies that helped break Ryan Gosling, who received an Oscar nomination for his role as a crack-addicted teacher. Neither crack addiction nor teaching makes an appearance in Captain Marvel.

They then moved on to something decidedly smaller scale, if only because it had no name actors in the cast. That was 2008’s Sugar, a realistic look at the attempts of a young Latin American pitcher to make it in American professional baseball, which makes it an anomaly in terms of baseball movies. The star of that movie is a young man name Algenis Perez Soto, who didn’t pick up another role for ten more years (though does have a small part in Captain Marvel, I now see). I’d say that Latin Americans and baseball do not make an appearance in Captain Marvel, but baseball does make a small appearance.

Next was another shifting of gears for the duo, who made the mental illness comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story in 2010. This was a bit more mainstream as it featured Emma Roberts, Zach Galifianakis and Viola Davis, not to mention another guy who seemed on the track to stardom but hasn’t been heard from much lately: Keir Gilchrist. (Oh yeah, he was in It Follows.) Mental illness doesn’t make an appearance in Captain Marvel, although I suppose comedy does.

Their fourth feature, and last before Captain Marvel, was the 2015 buddy dramedy Mississippi Grind, which features Ryan Reynolds and a man they would work with again in Captain Marvel, Ben Mendelsohn, who was actually my favorite part of the movie. It’s about two guys going on a gambling spree along the Mississippi, and also trying to discover themselves. There’s no gambling in Captain Marvel, but there's self-discovery out the wazoo.

I’ve liked all of Boden and Fleck’s movies, but trying to find a throughline is pretty difficult. The question is, should we try to find that? Do good filmmakers have to revisit similar themes to stake out an identity for themselves? And does appearing to be obsessed with the same themes over the course of a career actually make you a better artist, or just someone easier to discuss because it allows film school students to construct grand unifying theories of you?

And there’s no doubt they are good filmmakers. I’ve liked all of their films, particularly Half Nelson, which was my #10 of the year it came out.

What I don’t really see, and what it may not ever be possible to see, is a logical, identifiable reason why Feige would have considered them a good match for Captain Marvel. They’re not a bad match, certainly. Good filmmakers can, presumably, take any material and make it good, as long as they’re starting with a good script and a good cast. But what was the Boden-ness and Fleck-ness he was looking for?

If forced to give an answer, I’d surmise that he saw a streak of humanism in their films, a sense of how to bring three dimensions to a character. A “gooey women’s movie” needs someone like that. (That’s not me talking, of course, but what I imagine the thinking might have been.)

In fact, their hiring represents a kind of funny half measure toward accepting female directors, and primarily female-driven content, into the MCU. It’s only half-directed by a woman, though harder to believe even than that is that Marvel has yet to make a movie in which a woman was the protagonist. They do have a Black Widow movie lined up (directed by a woman, Cate Shortland – see my thoughts on her here), and presumably will have a Captain Marvel 2 if/when this is a success. But they’re a bit late in getting here, and when they do, it’s hard to know/see what this woman has brought to this project.

Again, nothing against Anna Boden, or against Ryan Fleck. But I just don’t see what they’ve done here other than shepherd the project through and make a pretty good movie.

In a way, this makes them like the biggest recent Marvel success stories, who are also a directing pair – the Russo brothers. If you are grading MCU directors on the admittedly flawed scale I introduced earlier, from hack on one side to directors with vision on the other, the Russos are probably closer to the “hack” end of the scale. I should probably describe what I mean by that. A “hack” is thought of as someone who just does the studio’s bidding and does not display any trademark techniques or styles. You know, maybe a Joel Schumacher. On the extreme opposite end you’ve got someone like Wes Anderson, who is so much like himself every time out that literally no one else could have made his movies.

The Russo brothers came to the MCU with two random features – Welcome to Collingwood and You, Me and Dupree – as well as a handful of episodes of Community (which appear to have won them the gig) under their belt. Not much. But they ended up being the perfect choices to execute Feige’s vision, first in two Captain America movies and now in two Avengers movies, assuming they continue their run of success with next month’s Avengers: Endgame.

Boden and Fleck would certainly be happy with accomplishing something like that, but I guess I feel more is expected of them, given that they made four genuinely interesting films, one of which garnered an Oscar nomination. Their role in relation to those films was decidedly not the role of a hack, as these are smaller movies that they wrote. But neither did they develop a signature style. So when they’re tapped to direct a Marvel movie, I do expect more from them than just turning in a good Marvel movie … even if I can’t quantify what that is.

If you’ve seen the movie and can identify either its Boden-ness or its Fleck-ness, I’d love you to let me know in the comments below.

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Cary Grant and his ubiquitous suits

I've long considered Gary Grant to be one of my favorite classical movie stars, but I sometimes wonder if he was born wearing a suit.

In every movie I can ever remember seeing that starred Grant, he wears a suit in almost every single scene. In fact, he wears so many suits that any time he's not wearing a suit it seems odd.

The most recent such viewing was Houseboat, a frivolous 1958 film directed by the excellently named Melville Shavelson and co-starring the incomparable Sophia Loren. I didn't like the film all that much, as it feels very much steeped in retrograde gender ideas and general corniness. But Loren? Magnificent.

Grant? He wears a lot of suits.

I guess the suit was a more typical everyday wardrobe choice for the professional man in 1958, and Grant's character has the type of job that would require him to wear one (though I already forget what that job was, even having finished the movie only 15 minutes ago). I think it's more of a window into a different area than anything particular about Grant, though I can't think of another actor with such a near total percentage of his wardrobe consisting of suits.

There's one time in the movie when Grant is wearing only a shirt and pants, no jacket, and I thought he looked like a bit of a namby pamby. (This is not a word I would ordinarily use, but old-fashioned movies put me in mind of old-fashioned vocabulary.) Perhaps even sillier than that no jacket look was his pajamas, which were white from head to toe and buttoned all the way up to the neck.

Better put back on that suit, stat, Cary.

I don't see a lot of movies from this era, I guess; I was somewhat shocked to learn that Houseboat was only the ninth film I've ever seen released in the year 1958. The fifties were not a great decade for cinema, per se, but I should have seen more than that.

If I do try to increase that total -- and I'm trying to increase my total for all other years at the same time, mind you -- I'll try to make note of what the other actors are wearing and whether it is almost always a suit. It probably is. Though I do think it's also a Grant thing. He was in North by Northwest the next year, and damn if it he doesn't wear a suit in every single scene in that movie as well.

At the end of the movie, he's getting married, and so I don't have to spoil a 61-year-old movie I'll avoid revealing who the bride-to-be is, since there are two contenders. I will say that I wasn't at first sure if he was the groom, as the suit he was wearing to his own wedding looked pretty much exactly like every other suit he had worn in the movie. That's the problem with wearing suits all the time. When it's time to actually look special, what do you have to do to distinguish yourself?

He actually does wear a tuxedo at one point in this movie, but not for the wedding. Funny.

Loren's wardrobes were a lot more fantastic, including a gold dress she wears to a ball. As I haven't seen a lot of classic period Loren, I think it's fair to say my jaw pretty much hit the floor.

However, it's hard to drool too much over Loren without acknowledging those retrograde gender politics. I won't get into specifics, but I will say Hollywood's tendency to cast a very young woman as the love interest of a much older man has been alive and well for some time. I knew Grant was older than Loren, obviously, but until I checked their respective dates of birth I had no idea how much older. He was in fact 30 years older than she is, to the year, meaning that when Houseboat was released he was 54 to her 24. At least they had the decency to cast an actor to play her father who was 15 years older than Grant, reducing some of the ick factor, sort of.

If these were the old days, I might research and list 20 other examples of Grant's ubiquitous suit wearing and even possibly provide you with a rash of photographic evidence.

But it's 2019, it's a Wednesday night, and I need to go to bed.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

A strange calling card

The following post contains spoilers about Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

I tried really hard to find out online whether Alex Ross Perry has a sister. Ultimately, I failed.

But I sure hope he doesn't, because The Color Wheel is a really weird way to introduce yourself to the world.

Since I can't be sure you've heeded my spoiler warning, I'll prattle on a bit further before getting to my point.

This was not technically the first introduction of the former Kim's Video clerk to the world, as The Color Wheel is actually his second feature, the first being something I'd never even heard of called Impolex. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that movie I'd never heard of doesn't exist.

Pretty bold, then, to make your first movie about brother-sister incest.

To say The Color Wheel is about that is not really accurate, as it doesn't happen until the final ten minutes. Of course, once you've seen it all the way through, you can't help thinking that this is the movie's theme, and the last ten minutes just bring to a culmination something that had been building the whole time, only you didn't notice it.

Speaking of building up to things, you'd figured you'd build to the movie about brother-sister incest, not go to it right out of the gate.

For those of you who haven't seen this movie but didn't care about having it spoiled, I'll tell you a little bit about it. Although it was made in 2011, it's got the grainy, DIY quality of an early 1990s indie movie, complete with the black and white and the use of supporting actors who were actors in name only. I won't say the filmmaking itself is amateurish, as there are some nice long takes and details in the writing that I thought were quite good. I will say that Perry has refined his craft over the years in films like Listen Up Phillip, Queen of Earth and Golden Exits. (In fact, that's the entire Perry filmography to date, though Her Smell is set to debut next month.)

The story concerns a mid-20s brother who has agreed to go on a road trip to help his black sheep sister (also mid-20s) move her stuff out of the house of her most recent ex, a university professor she was sleeping with. There's not much more to the story than that, though they do attend a party thrown by his sister's frenemy from childhood. Carlen Altman plays the sister and Perry himself plays the brother.

Oh, and in the last ten minutes, while lying on the couch together in increasingly suggestive proximity, they start making out, and it's implied that they have sex.

Huh?

I knew something oddball was going to occur in the last ten minutes because the film's reputation preceded it, and I was fairly sure this was what it would be, though my second bet was on a random murder occurring if it wasn't incest. Well, it was incest. And I was surprised even though I guessed it, just because that type of thing usually takes you by surprise. It's just so taboo that you only include it in a movie as a sign that the characters are really damaged and this is what they've been reduced to.

Except I don't really think that JR and Colin are all that damaged. They've got tendencies toward narcissism, sure, and are a bit insufferable. A couple reviews quoted on Wikipedia characterize them as "unpleasant." Weirdly, Colin is also a bit racist (another randomly provocative thing for Perry to include in his "first" (not really his first) film). But damaged? No more than any of us.

Yet there they are, making out, having the type of sex that could result in severely deformed offspring, like it was nothing.

I'm not even actually being critical of it, because I did find it interesting. It's about a five-minute take of mostly her talking that ends in this, which would be impressive in terms of the staging if nothing else. I just find it a very strange thing to include in the film you hope will get you noticed, because it could get you noticed for all the wrong reasons.

And really skeeve out your sister if you have one.

Then again, this kind of thing is not actually unprecedented. Ever heard of a guy named David O. Russell? His first feature was called Spanking the Monkey, and it ends with an act of incest between a mother and a son. And I know David O. Russell has, or at least had, a mother.

I suppose the argument could be made that it's better to start with the brother-sister incest movie than to make it only once you've gotten a certain measure of creative control. (Many indie directors do have creative control of their minuscule-budgeted films, but you know what I mean.) If you build up to it, I suppose that could be interpreted as you finally getting to make your passion project after cutting your teeth on things that only paid the bills. Better maybe to toss off your incest movie randomly. Perry hasn't returned to that topic in his films, anyway.

I guess it did get Perry the right kind of attention, because like Russell, he has been regularly releasing films every couple years since The Color Wheel. Though maybe the disastrous 2015 pairing of Accidental Love, which was directed under a pseudonym, and Joy finally knocked Russell off that pace, because I don't see anything for him in the pipeline.

Posts like this, I suppose, demonstrate how much bravery it takes for an artist to make something truly provocative. I and at least half the people who saw The Color Wheel wondered if Alex Ross Perry was a sister fucker. He's probably not, but to his credit, he's not really worried about people thinking he is. If he were an actual sister fucker, he'd probably keep that a secret, just as if he were an actual racist he probably wouldn't make a movie in which a character played by him is a racist.

You do write what you know, though, so on some level, this is something Perry "knows" -- even if it's being transmogrified in order to appear in this form.

I've thought about writing stories about provocative topics, but shied away from them because I thought they revealed something about me that I didn't want revealed -- something shameful. A true artist does not feel the shame that would prevent them from sharing their art with the world, and so I guess, at least in that sense if not others, Perry is a true artist.

Saturday, March 2, 2019

Disney's unnatural clustering

Have you ever noticed there are periods of time when you feel like you are seeing certain actors in everything? It could of course be that they are blowing up, but sometimes, they're appearing in so many roles that you wonder how it was possible they even did all this work at the same time.

The answer is: They didn't. Because films have different periods of gestation, it's possible you did the work two years ago and it's only just now coming to the big screen. That's how an actor like John C. Reilly appears in The Sisters Brothers, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Holmes & Watson and Stan & Ollie, all released within a period of about four months in 2018. I'm not looking it up to confirm, but I'd bet he shot those over 18 months or more, rather than the intense four-month period their release dates would imply. Reilly himself had no control over when those movies would be released. He just showed up to work.

But a studio has a lot more control over the release of its movies, at least in theory. Often times they establish release dates in advance, then pull whatever strings are necessary to meet those release dates. Sometimes they miss and have to push it back, but for the most part, they don't.

Which is why I think it's so weird that Disney is giving us Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King all within 2019, at two-month intervals, starting at the end of this month.

I'm tempted to say it's like releasing three Star Wars movies within the space of five months, but that's not an exact parallel. These movies have nothing to do with each other in terms of story.

However, they are all part of Disney's most clearly delineated new initiative, which is to make live action remakes of most if not all of its classic films. I mean, it probably won't be all -- I doubt we're going to see the Treasure Planet or Home on the Range live action remake any time soon. But isn't that all the more reason to space them out? It's like they want to drain the whole well in 2019, and then move on. Who knows, maybe they do.

It seems hard to imagine that these films won't cannibalize one another in some way, either in terms of providing actual competition for one another or in terms of reducing our overall appetite for watered down CG versions of Disney classics. In North America, competition is not as much of a problem as it may be here in Australia, where movies tend to play longer in theaters.

I imagine these movies are messing with the Australian release strategy for children's movies, which often involves delaying releases to times that coincide with school holidays, which is why we are still waiting another month for the Lego Movie sequel. Dumbo's late March release works perfectly with the upcoming school holidays, which begin on April 5th, but Aladdin's May release can't rightly be pushed back to the end of June for the next school holidays, because The Lion King is hot on its heels.

Whether these movies cause logistical problems for one another, they just don't make sense from a strategy standpoint. You don't want to saturate the market with a particular type of film because the audience will stop considering it special and will kind of implicitly ask you for less of it. If they learned anything from the failure of Solo, maybe it should be that.

Or maybe they just think the appetite is inexhaustible for these live action remakes, as they are serving a different audience. Star Wars geeks rebelled (no pun intended) against the annual release of Star Wars movies, if not actually then implicitly, by not throwing their money at Solo. However, the money has been good for movies like Beauty and the Beast, so maybe either that Solo-type reckoning is still ahead, or will simply never happen.

Or maybe they recognize that the appetite is about to be exhausted, so better churn these out now before the audience definitively turns away from them.

Before I leave you I should probably explain that subject.

"Unnatural clustering" is a useful (if I do say so myself) term I coined in discussion of a phenomenon that occurs when ranking movies on Flickchart. (I can say I "coined it" because it's still used by people on my Flickcharters Facebook group). It refers to what happens when you are ranking movies in filters, as in, all Star Wars movies against each other. It's problematic to do it this way, because if one movie beats the other, it moves one spot ahead of it on the whole chart. In reality, those two films probably do not belong consecutively on your chart, but by forcing similar movies to duel each other, it's created the impression that they have landed naturally next to one another. That may occur in the course of random dueling, but filters force specific duels, and the problem is only worsened if Film C beats Film B, which had beaten Film A, leaving three consecutive Star Wars movies on your chart of potentially thousands of films.

Disney has created its own kind of unnatural clustering by taking three movies that would logically be their own types of tentpoles for the initiative they represent in their own calendar years. Instead, it's just 112 days from the release of the first to the release of the third.

For Disney, it could end up being a clusterfuck.