I told you Thursday that I had narrowed down my choices of what to watch in my limited time before my list closes on Monday.An unexpected curveball threw all that out of whack.
I'm actually finishing my viewing season out of town, in a moderately sized "country town" called Ballarat, where it's conceivable we could be moving when my job moves there a year from now. I won't get into that now.
What you do need to know is that we're renting an Air B&B for four nights in order to get a taste of the local area, to decide if it would be a fit for us.
I brought with me the movies I needed to watch while here, either already rented on iTunes or just a click away from doing so. But that was before I saw the local supply.
This house has literally one thousand movies to choose from.
In fact, it has so many that most of them are not in cases, but rather, sleeves, just so they can all fit in a relatively confined storage space.
To give you some idea of how this differs from your typical "holiday house," in our experience, usually a place like this has maybe ten to 12 DVDs. That includes a couple movies you genuinely want to see, a couple movies you've already seen because they are ten to 20 years old, a couple movies for kids, and a couple movies you've never heard of, that you assume must have been acquired opportunistically from a bargain bin.
This house? This house has more of a seek and destroy mentality.
And it's not just the result of some splurge or some estate sale from the distant past. There are new movies here. There are copies of John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum and Angel Has Fallen in DVD cases. I haven't seen Angel Has Fallen and I could still watch it in time for 2019, but I also haven't seen its two predecessors, having made a conscious decision not to spend my time with Gerard Butler at his presumed worst. I'm not going to reverse that decision now, when every viewing counts.
Going through a random assortment of these movies is kind of an uncanny experience. They look like real movies as they feature real stars, sometimes big stars. But it's kind of like being in an alternate universe, as the owners of this place seem to have curated these stars' weirdest straight-to-video titles, movies I've never heard of, movies that seem like fake movies inside the fictional narratives of other movies.
But then there are plenty, the majority, that are legitimate, and not just the mainstream blockbusters you would put in a holiday house to cater to the widest possible audience. A Ghost Story, my #1 movie of 2017, was a movie that came up in one random grab at a pile of discs, not to mention a couple other independent movies I wanted to see that eluded me in recent years, like White Boy Rick and In a Valley of Violence.
I should stop to say that the origin of many of these movies is sketchy at best. They have a very "purchased on the street" look to their covers. I suppose that's partly because they had to reprint the cover art so that it fits a sleeve rather than a DVD case. Chances are, rather than being purchased on the street, these movies were purchased/ripped/pirated online and then copied to a DVD. The labels on the discs themselves are blank, which would never be the case with a street copy. (And makes for very difficult differentiation if you have a bunch of them out lying around.) I did put one into the DVD player in my computer, and it looked like a normal movie. (Why they have any movies at all in proper DVD cases, as a result of proper store purchases, is anyone's guess.)
Aside from being just a ridiculous level of customer service, I suspect part of the explanation for all these movies is that the owners themselves sometimes live here. It's too perfectly appointed for it to be their regular residence, but in our first hour here on Thursday, a woman did come by on behalf of the owners to unlock two closets in our bedroom that had been inadvertently locked, leaving locked two other closets that contained the owners' personal stuff.
Normally my instinct would be to go through all the movies in a holiday house on general principle. That's easy to do when you only have ten to 12 titles. But the sheer volume, plus the fact that I already had targeted viewings planned out for this trip, caused me to go against my every cinephile instinct and just leave the unexplored.
There was one title that changed my mind: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in one of those generic sleeves.
Now, I've already seen Quentin Tarantino's latest twice. I don't need to see it a third time, at least not yet. But my wife hasn't seen it, and we have a really big TV here. As a communal viewing experience, I would watch it a third time, perhaps for the novelty factor alone.
More than the movie itself, though, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood suggested to me that there is gold to be found among all the rocks, dirt and silt of this movie collection. An appropriate metaphor, as the city of Ballarat came on the map in the 19th century because gold was found here. There are all kinds of touristy gold-related things to do here.
So I reversed the reversal of my cinematic instincts, deciding that I would indeed dig, and that I would indeed find something that I would add to my viewing schedule before I left, regardless of whether it helped me with my viewing goals for 2019 or not. It was just too good of an opportunity to pass up.
So on Friday morning I did that dig. In the end, it took only 15 minutes. In addition to finding, somewhat hilariously, a couple movies duplicated -- A Quiet Place and Hickok (?) were the two I noticed -- here were the contenders I came up with, along with a little blurb on why each intrigued me:
White Boy Rick - McConaughey curiosity.
In a Valley of Violence - An interesting choice for horror director Ti West in that it's a western. Want to see how it comes off.
A Prayer Before Dawn - Thai prison boxing movie that got some hype at MIFF a couple years ago.
Last Flag Flying - Only recent Linklater I haven't seen.
The Mountain Between Us - Idris Elba and Kate Winslet.
War on Everyone - Movie I think of in the same breath with In a Valley of Violence. Both eluded me in the same recent ranking season.
Avengers: Endgame - No way I'm seeing a three-hour movie for a second time on this trip, but I had to include it on this list just because I do really want to see this again. (But, what's the distinction between seeing a three-hour movie a second time and seeing QT's latest 161-minute opus a third time?)
Cell - Not to be confused with The Cell. I read the Stephen King book but still haven't seen the film adaptation.
Future World - James Franco is the star. Probably not a serious contender.
Anna - Gets me another 2019 viewing. However, I did just snub this when it was available as a 99 cent rental on iTunes just last week. Shut up, universe, I'm not going to watch Anna. However ...
... and here's the one that really gave me pause ...
Fast & Furious: Hobbes & Shaw.
Goddammit.
Didn't I just write a whole post about how I was going to leave this one on the sidelines?
I can ignore the universe when it comes to watching Anna, but I may have to give in on this one, now that it's free.
I did for a minute consider the fact that with so many movies in this collection, there would be no way they could know if one went missing, or if they did, associate the theft to any particular person who had stayed at this Air B&B. Of course, I only considered it for a minute because I'm not that type of guy. They may have stolen these movies online, but that doesn't mean I'm going to steal them from them. Besides, that's just an academic side observation, as I need to watch Hobbes & Shaw now if I'm going to include it on my list.
And that's what I ended up doing.
The first half of this post was written yesterday morning, and in the interim, as you can see from my log of recently seen movies on the right, I did watch Hobbes & Shaw. When the other choice was the Chinese language Ash is Purest White, it seemed like a better way to finish a day in which I did more than 12,000 steps (according to my phone) while walking around Ballarat and the recreated medieval castle that's just outside of town, Kryal Castle (about which I'd write a full post if I could think of a decent cinematic tie-in).
Unfortunately, the other thing I did that day was have a big glass of pinot noir at dinner, meaning that I sunk hard into the leather couch and paused this movie about four times for short naps. So although I've seen Hobbes & Shaw, I'd say it's closer to having half-seen it. So I might have missed some of its subtle details, ha ha.
I will say the thing looked great on this big TV. Interestingly, though, I did not find it outlandish enough. I expected the chemistry to be a bit better between Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.
Oh well. Better luck in Hobbes & Shaw 2.
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