Finish What You Started: Sisters

This is the first in my 2020 bi-monthly series, in which I finish watching movies I had to stop watching for whatever reason.

When I told my wife I was finally finishing Sisters, the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler vehicle we had started some three years earlier, she said “Didn’t we stop watching that because it was so terrible?”

I said, “No, I think it was just late on a Saturday night and we were tired. I don’t think it was terrible.”

As it turns out, she was right.

“Terrible” may be a strong word, but the movie does not showcase Fey and Poehler at their best, though it may showcase Fey at her sexiest, if you consider cleavage, acting wild and bits of bra poking into view to be “sexy.” I did, because I have always been attracted to Fey, but my fondness for her goes way beyond the mere physical. She is kind of the poster child for brainy women in comedy, so a role like this, in such inferior material, is unbecoming for her. But hey, even with her feminist bonafides, Fey is probably like any other human being in that she wants to remind people of her physical desirability as she hits her mid-40s. (Late 40s now, but this was five years ago.)

The bigger problem with the movie – well, there are many, but I’ll start with one. Fey and Poehler may be great friends in real life, but sisters, they do not seem to be. It’s not that they are so physically dissimilar, but just that they don’t seem like they had the same parents (James Brolin and Dianne Wiest, in this case). Fey plays a wild party girl and Poehler plays her goodie goodie sister. Obviously you can have “the good sibling” and “the bad sibling,” but a shrewd script and/or casting director would find things that the two had in common that made them read as siblings, even if their looks or behaviors are different. This reads as two real-life friends trying to have fun together. But not succeeding.

The premise is that the two grown daughters are facing the fact that their parents want to sell their childhood home. Both are stunted in their own way – Fey has a resentful teenage daughter and can’t hold a job, Poehler is successful but unlucky in love – so they see the selling of their home as a symbol of the ways they’ve failed. That sounds deeper than it really is, as the movie bumbles around in the doldrums of physical comedy and dirty language. What the two really want to do, apparently, is throw a final party in their old home, inviting all the other 40-somethings they went to school with, even though the new house has already been sold and the new owners are already hovering around, being obnoxiously wealthy (they paid in cash).

Can the two women throw a giant rager without destroying the home? Well, what do you think?

I have nothing but love for Fey and Poehler separately, or even together in the right context. Movies, though, are not the right context for them. I never much liked their first cinematic collaboration, Baby Mama, which again casts them against type in ways that don’t work (with Poehler the raunchy one in that context, and Fey the good one). I won’t even get into the icky ways that movie is insensitive, especially racially. Then their most recent collaboration, in which Fey plays more of a supporting role, was last year’s Wine Country, which Poehler also directed. That movie is more flat and disjointed than wrong-headed. It’s quite lethargic. (I remember from IMDB that they were both also in Mean Girls, but I don’t think their characters had any interaction.)

Sisters was written by actress/but-mostly-writer Paula Pell, who appeared in the Wine Country cast and has a small role here. (These women do like doing favors for each other, and you can throw Rachel Dratch and Maya Rudolph into this troupe of performers who appear together, as they also both appear in Wine Country and Sisters.) I kind of feel like Pell is someone with good comedic instincts. She wrote for SNL for ages and has punched up the Oscars a couple of times. But you really wouldn’t know it from here. Even a huge cast of likeable performers – including Ike Berenholtz, Bobby Moynihan, Chris Parnell, Greta Lee, John Cena and Samantha Bee – cannot scrounge up laughs from Pell’s material.

It’s not that there are zero laughs, though. I did chuckle in spite of myself on a couple occasions. Movies where parties spin out of control usually have at least a couple moments that work, that are sold simply by the talents of the performers in question. Sisters is no exception.

And so it was that I reported back to my wife that the film was “not irredeemable.” That’s not high praise though. The 1.5 stars on Letterboxd more concisely summarize this film’s value.

Okay, I’ll be back in April with another movie I started but didn’t finish.

The horror movie named after a classical composer

Johannes Brahms was a German composer who lived between 1833 and 1897. He spent much of his professional career in Vienna. Because of his talent and influence, he was often considered to be one of the "three B's" of classical music, along with Beethoven and Bach.

He was not, you would think, a likely inspiration for a horror movie.

Yet that's the impression created by the new movie Brahms: The Boy II, which has recklessly invited confusion among audiences who don't know what the hell this movie is on about.

Now I did not see The Boy, a 2016 horror movie that was apparently successful enough to spawn this sequel. I can tell, from a little cursory research, that the porcelain doll from the first movie (who reappears here) is called Brahms. So the mistakes started happening four years ago.

Though I myself would not have chosen to name the original doll after the composer, it's not such a problem in that first film, because any character can have any name within the context of a movie. It's when you start using that name in the title of the sequel that things get messy.

I'm sure I wasn't the only person who didn't know that the doll was called Brahms, so when I saw the title of this movie, I thought "What the hell does this horror movie have to do with classical music?" It's not really a thought process you want your audience to have.

This is not, though, a confusion that belongs exclusively to this movie. You could say a similar thing about the comedy Keanu that came out a couple years ago, which has nothing to do with Keanu Reeves. The cat is named Keanu there. And that cat is probably named after Keanu Reeves, because, you know, what other Keanu is there. But the movie's title then makes you stop and ask questions.

Is Brahms considered a bland enough name that it might not make someone immediately think of the composer? I don't believe it is. When I go to the Brahms disambiguation page on Wikipedia, there is not much ambiguity that needs to be disambiguated. The only other notable people with that surname are Albert, a German landowner who lived in the 18th century; Caryl, a writer; David, a Brigadier General of the U.S. Marine Corps; Helma Sanders-Brahms, a German film director; Julia, a voice artist; and William B., a New Jersey historian.

I think it would be a lot more obvious what I'm talking about if the porcelain doll had been called Beethoven. There would be no confusing that there was a relationship between the movie and the composer, a probably undesirable one at that. Then again, it could also be that there was a relationship between the movie and that other movie, Beethoven, about that dog.

So, I guess this has been going on for a while.

A streak that surely cannot continue

When it rains it pours, and when I write about a certain type of thing on this blog, it seems that’s all I can write about.

So yes, this is my third post this week about a streak, in a manner of speaking. This one is not a very long one, but I’m going to write about it now before it inevitably ends.

It’s not a very profound one, either, but my gut says to write about it, so why not?

And that is this:

I’ve seen five movies released in 2020, and each one I’ve liked more than the one before it.

So yeah, both not very profound and not very likely to continue very much longer.

You’d expect that kind of thing to happen early on in the year, as January is not the time of year you should expect really good movies to be released. But in each of the past few years, one of the earliest movies I saw was also one of my favorite. Fyre was the third movie I watched in 2019 and it ended up in my top 20 for the year.

This year, it’s going a bit more like you’d expect. I guess I thought five movies were statistically significant enough to write about.

I started out with a very low bar to clear, as Dolittle was the first movie I saw in 2020. I gave it one star on Letterboxd, but spared you a rant about it here. (Though if you’d like to check out my review, by all means.)

The current streak would have seemed unlikely when the second movie I watched, Tyler Perry’s A Fall From Grace, jumped all the way up to 3.5 stars. But I have an informal rule about those star ratings. If I think better of it, I can change the star rating, as long as I haven’t since logged another movie on Letterboxd. I thought better of it before the window elapsed, and downgraded it to only three stars. It probably really deserves 2.5, but what can I say, I have a soft spot for Perry movies.

The streak might’ve been dead right there because the next movie up was Birds of Prey (Long Title I Won’t Type Out Here). As a sequel/spinoff to the abysmal Suicide Squad, it stood a good chance of giving Dolittle company in the doldrums of my 2020 rankings. But I ended up liking Cathy Yan’s movie more than I expected to – the Cathy Yan part of it might have had something to do with that – and the movie nudged ahead of A Fall From Grace on my running list.

But the bar was not so high that my next movie, Color Out of Space, had a hard time clearing it. That’s a flawed movie too, but its three stars were slightly more favorable than the three stars of either Birds of Prey or Fall From Grace. I mean, it’s a new adaptation of a Lovecraft story I read only last year, so it had that going for it even if Crazy Nic Cage and some good body horror didn’t prop it up.

Now is a good time to write this post, though, because Emma has made things a lot trickier for its successor. At first I gave Emma only 3.5 stars, but upon further reflection – there’s that informal rule again – I decided that my enjoyment of this confection was a lot more appropriately described at the four-star level. I go on more about it in this review, just posted within the last couple hours.

Now, it’s possible that the next movie I see could surpass Emma without being a four-star movie. I have trouble explaining it, but my rankings are not simply a matter of mathematically ordering all the films I see in a given year according to their star rating. But it’s more likely to need to hit four stars than it would be later in the year, as enough time won’t likely have passed for me to realize I was too generous toward Emma.

I don’t actually know what that next movie will be at this moment, but there’s a pretty good chance it will either be The Call of the Wild or Sonic the Hedgehog, either of which could involve my kids.

And while there’s some chance one of those movies will be better than Emma, better write this now and just tick off another Thursday on this blog.

Going for the Nova endurance record

I saw Parasite at Cinema Nova in Carlton on June 27^th, 2019, on the first night of its release.

That was 237 days ago. It’s still playing.

On two screens.

This isn’t 1977, when Star Wars played in cinemas for a full year (actually, 44 weeks) because there was no other way to see it. No, it’s 2020, when some movies debut on streaming services the same day as their theatrical release, and even when they don’t, they sometimes have less than two months between their theatrical release date and video premiere.

Parasite was an exception to that rule in Australia. Because the movie was not released in the U.S. until September, its Australian debut on physical media was delayed until just two weeks ago – a week later than it debuted on physical media in the U.S., in fact. I watched it on the plane (for second time) back in November, but unless you were taking a flight somewhere, you were out of luck.

Fortunately, Cinema Nova has been there to oblige.

I’m pretty sure it dropped at some point down to 1-2 screenings a day, but after the Academy Awards, Parasite has come back in full force, finally prompting the few people who haven’t seen it to go ahead and do so. Even though it is now available for purchase, and presumably, for rental. And even though there is now also a black and white version to watch in some cinemas.

I can’t say whether this is actually a modern-day record for Nova, because there’s no easy way to research how long they’ve held certain films playing. I can say that having something like 16 screens (which is gigantic for an arthouse theater) has allowed them to continue allocating one screen to Parasite long after other cinemas had stopped doing so. It’s not unprecedented for a popular film to still be playing at Nova four or five months after its initial release, but eight months is a different story. If the ticket sales support it, I suppose Nova will do it.

Even if it's not a record, you’ve got a unique case with Parasite that would create the conditions for possibly setting one. First, it a word-of-mouth hit that slowly built support and viewers over the duration of its initial several months at Nova. Just at the moment that you’d expect that phenomenon to start petering out, Parasite was released in the U.S., leading to a renewed round of critical attention that of course makes its way over here, generating more interest and more viewers. At the time you might expect that bump to peter out, critics released their best-of-the-year lists, many of which were topped by Parasite. Cue more viewers. Finally you have its Oscar nominations and Oscar wins. Who knows how much longer the film will float along on the current wave.

It’s one of the things I love about Nova, and what it says about independent movie fans and cinephiles in this area, possibly even in Australia in general. It says, or certainly implies, that such people recognize the value of seeing movies on the big screen, even when they have small screen alternatives. It suggests that while they might not get to a movie on its first or second weekend, they certainly have the intention of doing so eventually. It also suggests a fair number of repeat viewers.

And as for the theater itself, it shows that there is a certain patience to their approach, a hesitation to jettison something for the next shiny new thing, just because some model might forecast an expected downturn in the movie’s profitability. There were probably times in, say, late November, when its ticket sales were flagging, when somebody thought about removing it. But ultimately no one did, and lo and behold, here it still is the following February – going stronger than ever, if we are to believe that the people allocating the screening spaces are doing it based on actual ticket sales and not just expected demand. I’m not sure if Parasite was ever playing on two screens at Nova before now.

As a sign of how they're doubling down, I noticed last night that the Parasite poster had again assumed a place of prominence among those you see as you take the escalator up to the lobby. Usually these are reserved for brand spanking new releases or movies that have not even come out yet. 

Maybe it would have been smarter to hold this post until I can tell how long Parasite will ultimately last. But I likely would have forgotten to pay attention to that. If I remember, I’ll update you with the final tally once I notice Parasite falling off the slate on an upcoming Thursday.

Until then, it continues to set records -- both officially, at the Oscars, and unofficially, at the arthouse theaters who adore it.

The words of a ghost

It took until the very final moments of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky for me to sit bolt upright in my seat and get some real resonance from the film. It was not a resonance I could immediately place, though, making it all the more ethereal.

It’s some words spoken by the writer of the book on which the movie was based, who functions as the narrator in the film, though he only has about three short sections of “narration,” two of which are right near the start. That’s Paul Bowles. His last lines of the film, the last lines of the film, are:

“Because we don't know when we’re going to die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

For Bowles, they were particularly limited due to his already advanced age, as he was 80 when the movie was released. He did live nine more years, dying 50 years after the release of his book, and in that time I hope he watched the full moon rise as much as he could.

But the basic profundity of his words were not what struck me. Immediately I knew I had heard them before.

I raced to the internet to google them, thinking they must be from a movie. I mean, many of my references are from movies. Sure, I could have read the words somewhere, but I specifically remember them spoken, in a context I found very poignant. I doubt that happened in a TV show; even less likely, on stage.

So I googled them and got references to The Sheltering Sky, of course, and then references to some random interview with Brandon Lee –

Wait, that’s it. Brandon Lee.

I watched the little 24-second clip, which was from the last interview of Bruce’s son, the star of The Crow and a few (a depressingly few) other films. Lee had committed Bowles’ words to memory, and for some reason saw fit to produce them in this interview, almost as though he had a premonition of his own death.

This is where I’d seen Bowles’ memorable quotation. I’d watched Brandon Lee’s last interview on my Crow DVD. Or actually, at that time, it would have been my Crow VHS. I never got it on DVD.

They’d certainly seemed poignant to me at the time, which is why I remembered them. But it was likely more than 20 years since I last heard them, and of course did not remember their source, which was a movie that had only just come out three years previous at the time Lee invoked them. He might have gotten them from the book, but he references the movie in the clip. And it was a movie I’d picked up at the library for no other reason than that I was familiar with the title and remember it getting some awards buzz 30 years ago. I didn’t even know what it was about, and in fact, I tried to watch two other films on my DVD player first, landing on this one due to technical difficulties with the others that are too boring to get into now.

The thing is, The Sheltering Sky does not really seem to be about that quotation, per se – it doesn’t seem like a final encapsulation of the themes we’ve just been absorbing. The movie is about travellers seeking transcendent experiences, which was what Bowles was doing, which caused him to settle in Tangier for the remainder of his days. But it is not specifically sentimental about the finite quantity of life’s experiences, even as it deals with death and danger and great transformation. In fact, though I did like the movie, I think Bowles’ words would have fallen on deaf ears for me at that point, had I not drawn them up from the distant recesses of my own memory.

And so on a random night in February of 2020 I had occasion to again mourn Brandon Lee, who died on a random night in March of 1993. The point is, it’s all random, and we don’t know what things we should be appreciating because they may be the last times we do them.

Another reminder that we should live our lives to the fullest – I’d say a timely reminder, but we never have any idea how timely it may be.

Winona, me, and Keanu makes three

There’s something simple to the successful formula of Victor Levin’s Destination Wedding:

Take two Generation X stars who are identifiable from just their iconic first names, pair them for the third time and first since A Scanner Darkly in 2006, and have nobody else in the whole movie speak a single line of dialogue.

Simple, eh?

You, the audience, become kind of the third character in this intimate, quirky affair.

At first blush, it seem like Destination Wedding will be a pointed critique of the type of wedding thrown by people who are just below society’s upper crust, who can’t afford some decadent affair in a palace, but who can afford to make their guests take a short plane ride from where most of them live to attend their destination wedding. Or, more to the point, think their guests can afford it, and reward them with little gift bags full of gourmet biscuits and expensive skin lotion.

Destination Wedding is that, sort of, but more than anything, it captures what it’s like being an outsider at a wedding that you maybe shouldn’t be attending, where you don’t know the other guests and where the only people you do know, the bride and/or groom, don’t have the bandwidth to give you any face time. Keanu Reeves’ Frank should be attending the San Luis Obispo wedding, in the strictest sense, as he is the groom’s brother. Outside of occasions like this, though, he avoids his sibling. Winona Ryder’s Lindsay most definitely should NOT be attending, as she was once the groom’s fiancée, until he broke off their engagement only five weeks before the wedding. This was six years ago, but she’s still not over it, and the groom only appears to have invited her as a gesture toward being the bigger person. She hasn’t even seen him since then.

Frank and Lindsay meet cute when they are both waiting to board the eight-seat puddle hopper that is taking them to San Luis Obispo, and by “cute” of course it means that they initially loathe each other. She thinks he’s trying to cut her in line. He explains that he’s only moving ahead so as to avoid the banal interaction she forged out of his polite attempt at conversation. Clearly, the wedding is not their only destination. Their other destination is each other.

Maybe. They’ve both got sardonic views on the world and appear to have contempt for the idea of a long-term relationship, especially with each other. But these types of things have a way of being smoke screens that are trying to hide their deeper yearnings.

It’s a two-hander that owes a lot to someone like Woody Allen, as the characters bicker and eventually bond while unspooling verbose versions of their life philosophies. The movie is a tad overwritten to be sure. But Reeves and Ryder are both game participants, and they have a couple scenes of physical comedy that remind us how well they both can do that kind of thing. Other recent examples are Reeves’ cameo in (spoiler alert) the movie I saw to start this weekend and Ryder’s work as Joyce Byers in Stranger Things, particularly its most recent season.

But one of the things I liked most about it was that the other characters in the movie are kept at such a distance. We do indeed see the bride and groom, mostly from at least 100 feet away, once from closer on the dance floor, but really, never well enough to pick them out from a lineup later on. Various other characters reappear from a similar distance, and Frank actually tells us about some of them, particularly the ones who are his own estranged relatives. Presumably, he does share actual words with them at some point, but no point we ever see. These two misfits stuck together, both by fate and by table assignment, never get close to anything that’s actually going on at the wedding in any scene portrayed on screen.

A lesser film would have certainly given Lindsay an awkward scene with her ex-fiancee, to show us he’s a douche (as Frank proclaims) and to help give her the closure she says she’s seeking. Or Frank could have had an awkward scene with his father, who left his mother for an older woman. According to Wikipedia, he’s only the groom’s half brother, so I may be misconstruing Frank’s parentage.

The point is, they are both estranged from this whole scene, and though they participate in some of the activities – like a pedicure, and an event where people crash into each other while encased in inflated bubble wrap – they are really just ghosts.

I think it’s something we’ve all experienced at one point or another. And you never know who you might find in that scenario.

I don’t want to overstate the quality of the film. It’s more of a pleasant little diversion than anything. It’s the second feature from a man who has spent much of his life as a TV writer and producer, most notably on Mad About You. In fact, it’s so slight, in a way, that the credits start to roll even before the 80-minute mark, ultimately petering out before the 83-minute mark. (Even though the DVD box lies and says it’s 87 minutes, while Wikipedia lies and says it’s 85.)

But the star wattage of Keanu and Winona is the type of thing that gives the project additional visibility. Ryder is no longer in the phase of her career where she can pick and choose, but her last ten years have been a lot better than her previous ten. Reeves, on the other hand, is possibly at the hottest he’s ever been, after himself having a bit of an aimless decade following the end of the Matrix movies. They both likely did this as a favor to Victor Levin, though it doesn’t show from their commitment to the material.

Anyway, it’s worth a watch, especially if you want to feel like you’re the third in an 80-minute conversation between two 1990s stars who burned brightly, and are burning still.

The end of a record Audient streak

Only 13 months ago, this blog celebrated its tenth birthday with a whimper. I wrote about how I didn't know if I was still producing any useful material, and hinted at an uncertainty about continuing in an age in which blogs are mostly ignored in favor of video (YouTube) or shorter form (Twitter) content.

Well, screw that noise, I guess.

Just yesterday I finished the most prolific period of writing in this blog's now 11-year history. Actually, I should say, the period is not finished, but a break in the action has given me a chance to reflect on it.

The first break in the action in 41 days.

If you've been reading this blog for some time, you may know I have a practice of never posting more than once in a single day. In prolific times, when a lot of different movie thoughts are leaping from my brain into my fingers, this sometimes means I hold back several written pieces at once, until a day without something else planned opens up on my calendar.

Never before, though, have I written something on this blog for 40 consecutive days without a single missed day.

That record streak ended just yesterday, when no new piece traveled from my brain into my fingers on the day after Valentine's Day, even though it was a Saturday, meaning I had more time than usual to write something.

Actually, truth be told, I wrote the post you're reading now yesterday, in anticipation of the fact that I wouldn't write anything yesterday. That's not a Catch-22. As I sensed how long this streak was going, I knew I would write a piece like this whenever it finished. But I could only post it once a day had elapsed without me publishing something. Knowing that would finally happen on Saturday, I got writing.

I don't know that posts on 40 consecutive days is any great feat in the grand scheme of things, as there are likely blogs that dutifully post new content every single day of the year. But me, I've never forced it. Oh, I could have written something yesterday and the streak could have kept going, but I didn't have anything I really wanted to talk about. And only rarely, to break long streaks of inactivity, have I ever forced writing something just for the sake of publishing something new.

The news here is really that for nearly a month-and-a-half, I never had to force it. Each day -- and sometimes for many days in advance -- I had plenty to write about, movie-related thoughts scampering around in my brain and demanding to be committed to permanence, or whatever kind of permanence the internet provides. Thirteen months ago, I never would have imagined that my most fruitful sustained period of writing on this blog still lay ahead of me.

A perfect storm of cinema-related happenings surely assisted with this. From the point when the streak began on January 6th, I had the end of my viewing year to discuss, followed quickly by my posting of my best of 2019 and the two posts that traditionally follow that one. That was immediately followed by three best-of-the-decade posts. Since it was the start of a new year, I also had two separate posts announcing my new monthly and bi-monthly viewing series, plus two actual installments of the former. The Oscars were earlier than usual this year, meaning I then turned my thoughts to them, plus there were also three prominent people who died during this period who I wanted to memorialize. Finally, the period ended with Valentine's Day, a day I always try to recommend some romantic movie to my readers.

At my busiest and most backed up, I had as many as six posts waiting to be published. Now granted, some of those were long-term works in progress, best of the year and best of the decade posts that can't be written in one day. But there were times when I didn't know if I'd ever post certain things I'd written, which were delayed as long as two weeks after I originally wrote them, while other, more urgent material surfaced. At times I felt like a newspaper editor trying to figure out which needed to post now and which could wait for a slower period, without anything losing its sense of timeliness.

It's hard to say what my previous record was, because I broke regularly enough in my updating of this blog that it was never something I had any reason to keep track of. But just scanning the history of this blog, something that is easy enough to do because the total number of posts in each month appear next to it in parenthesis, there were only a few months where I wrote even within three posts of the total number of days in that month, and that never occurred in consecutive months. That pretty much rules out anything over 30 in a row, and my longest streak was surely closer to 20.

Well, it's over now.

That's a joke of sorts -- clearly I am still in this period, effectively. And I could easily start a new streak today and be backed up by three posts only a day or two from now.

But I think it's nice to pause and recognize that this blog is not as dead as I passively proclaimed it last January. Movies have continued to stimulate my writing brain, sometimes more than I can handle, sometimes so urgently that I need to sit down right then and there and write what I'm thinking.

It may still not produce your favorite content to read, but it's keeping me plenty busy and satisfied.

Hallelujah.

Watch Maybe with your certainty

Or even if you’re not certain about the person. This won’t push them any closer to “maybe” status, and in fact, could push them toward that certainty. Or, I should say, push you toward that certainty, since you’re the one making the suggestion.

Okay, maybe watching a movie is not the way to go on Valentine’s Day, if you are truly trying to woo someone and convince them of your capacity for grand romantic gestures. But maybe they don’t like grand romantic gestures. Maybe this small one is just the ticket.

Always Be My Maybe was one of the true delights of 2019, the kind of movie I would have loved to get higher on my chart just because it’s the kind of old-fashioned romantic escapism we once loved, in an up-to-the-moment package. It landed at #29, which is still pretty high praise on a list that contained 146 titles.

My wife and I never do much more than watch a movie to celebrate Valentine’s Day, in part because she’s never really fancied grand romantic demonstrations, at least those that conform to the Hallmark parameters of this holiday, and in part because it’s only five days before her birthday. So we will, indeed, be watching Always Be My Maybe tonight, her for the first time.

I hope you don’t need a sell job on the movie, since you have Netflix and probably had the movie’s trailer start playing for you automatically when you lingered on it once in the selection list. Netflix needs to increase the time it takes to start playing the trailer when you linger, but that’s a subject for another day.

For today, Valentine’s Day, I invite you simply to turn on this very funny, very sweet story of two young(ish) Americans of different Asian ancestry (he’s Korean, she’s Vietnamese, though actress Ali Wong is actually of Chinese-Vietnamese descent) as they try to figure out if they are more than just friends. There’s also an incredible cameo, as discussed in a roundabout fashion (though you probably are already aware of it) several times on this blog.

Oh, and if you are just allergic to romance entirely, you could still watch it for the humorous songs of the in-movie band, Hello Peril, fronted by Wong’s co-lead, Randall Park. One of them relates to the cameo, but the others are funny too.

It’s easy because it’s on Netflix, and if you haven’t seen it already, you’re behind the times. So get on that, and have yourself a very happy Valentine’s Day.

Audient Authentic: Man With a Movie Camera

This is the second in my 2020 monthly series watching “classic” documentaries, i.e., significant documentaries from before 1990.

Man With a Movie Camera should have hit my viewing schedule long before now, if only because it was 2012 when I marvelled over it making the top ten of the Sight & Sound poll, making it the highest rated movie I had never seen. It’s closer to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll than the 2012, but I’ve finally now seen it.

I probably didn’t see it before now because I viewed it as a chore. I don’t remember who made a snide comment over how insufferable it was, but that comment lodged in my head and stuck there.

Well, whoever made that comment was wrong.

Really impressive stuff here.

If you are somehow not familiar with Man With a Movie Camera, it is Dziga Vertov’s 1929 experimental film whose title is kind of a literal explanation of what it is. There do not seem to be any guiding principles to this film beyond Vertov and his camera operator, Mikhail Kaufman, traveling around the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa, filming the daily lives of average Soviets.

This sounds boring. It decidedly is not.

The filmmakers experiment with all sorts of different camera setups, the crazier the better, and they also film themselves in the act of filming, to shine a light on the process of filmmaking and its inherent challenges and acts of derring-do. There’s a third collaborator who plays an equal role in what we see here, and that’s editor Elizaveta Svilova, who is also shown on camera in the midst of plying her trade. She was Vertov’s wife. I’ve always known that editing was a business that seemed to attract women disproportionately to other behind-the-scenes film roles, but I had no idea that was the case as long ago as the 1920s.

And Svilova’s editing is, in a way, the star of the show. I was pretty astonished by the small number of frames – sometimes only one or two I would guess – Svilova would splice into longer scenes, or sometimes alternate small numbers of frames from the same two scenes in such quick succession that it created a strobe effect. It’s especially astonishing given the prevailing wisdom about filmmaking at that time, when an uninterrupted sequence that’s way too long was far more common than one that was too short. Not only that, she seems aware of the eerie effect this editing can have, as when a face is ominously edited into a longer sequence for only a couple frames, then vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived.

This is not the only way they’re playing with the capabilities of the moving image. There are a number of scenes here where images are superimposed over one another, which may have been accomplished by double exposure or some other technique. There’s a great stop motion technique in which a camera and its tripod appear to come to life, unpacking themselves from their box, beeping at an appreciative audience like R2-D2 (in the version of the score I heard, anyway) and then slinking off the side of the frame. There are also split screens, with several scenes appearing side by side, and even an effect that I most closely identified with Inception, where a building appears to be folding in upon itself. Whether Vertov influenced Christopher Nolan or the other way around, I’m not sure.

The actual content goes from mundane to enthralling. There are many people at work, in factories and such, but there’s also plenty of play, as people lounge on the beach or compete in sports. One sequence in which a woman is repeatedly making some kind of hand-folded object at high speeds was particularly memorable. There are people in transit, and people in stasis – in fact, a funeral is filmed. But so is a birth (and yes, you see the immediate aftermath in close biological detail). And then there’s a sequence of people signing marriage licenses in an office.

I wouldn’t say that I was in this film’s thrall at first. In fact, as I was developing what I would say in my head, I thought my perspective would be that the lack of a narrative meant that it was only necessary to see some of Man With a Movie Camera, to get the gist of what it was about. Getting up to get something from the fridge was not a cause for needing to pause the film.

But as it continued on, I found each sequence to be more essential, and often profound. The film is not structured narratively, but at least, for the most part, it keeps like parts together. If the whole thing was interspersed seemingly at random, it might start to feel tedious the way a Terrence Malick film can feel. But it moves from work to play to vehicles to machinery to sport, sometimes doubling back to revisit a previous topic, but never losing a sense of forward momentum in its structure.

The only thing that somewhat marred my experience was the fact that YouTube was playing up on me. I watched it through the YouTube app on my TV. It being periodically broken up by ads was annoying enough – it was quite a jolt out of the moment to suddenly be seeing an ad for Picard – but the real frustration came when the video would quit and say “Something went wrong.” This happened about five times. I’m not sure if it was a YouTube issue or my shitty internet, which was also lagging significantly, but the end result was that I needed to go back in and fast-forward back to where I had been. And since I couldn’t see what the timecode was when it crapped out, I mostly had to guess at this, sometimes repeating sequences. I was also jumping around between about five different versions of the video, as the one that had stopped working could not resume, or at least, could not resume straight away. These videos varied in quality and also, I believe, had different scores.

Then again, I think Vertov might appreciate the disjointed and disrupted way I watched his film. Man With a Movie Camera uses disjointedness as its central ethos, and it sure was a disruptor in early cinema.

I’m undecided on a movie for March. I had a candidate in mind but found out that it’s only 25 minutes long, and I’m trying to decide how married I am to the idea of a documentary being (approximately) feature length. My first two movies were over an hour long, but the most significant documentaries of the 1930s seem to be a fair bit shorter than that. Since you aren’t likely following along with your own viewing anyway, maybe I’ll just surprise you.

Utkarsh Ambudkar is not Siddharth Dhananjay

Is it racist if I say I confused the two American actors of Indian descent who can both rap?

The incredible performance by Utkarsh Ambudkar at the Oscars – he not only wrote his rap as the show was running, but also memorized it – reminded me of the other times I have enjoyed Ambudkar on screen, including Brittany Runs a Marathon and Patti Cake$. (Not so much Game Over, Man!, which was my least favorite movie of 2018.)

Only Ambudkar is not in Patti Cake$. That’s Siddharth Dhananjay.

My confusion came when I watched Brittany, actually. I was trying to place Ambudkar and I thought “Ah yes, that’s the guy in Patti Cake$.” When in fact I was probably remembering him from Game Over, Man!, if from anything at all.

Plus, they both rap, so there’s that. I didn’t know that when I saw Brittany, as rapping is not part of the character Ambudkar plays in that film. It is, however, the central part of Dhananjay’s character in Patti Cake$, so when I saw Ambudkar rapping at the Oscars, it only increased my certainty that they were the same person.

Before you go saying “What, all people of Indian descent look the same?”, let me show you a picture of them side by side. You have to admit the physical similarity. That’s Ambudkar on the left and Dhananjay on the right.

Okay, they’re not identical twins or anything. But they have a similar build and I do think there are similarities in their faces.

The scarcity of American actors of Indian descent also helps with the confusion. You’ve got Aziz Ansari, Kal Penn and (no, not Kumail Nanjiani, he’s of Pakistani descent). Internationally, you’ve got Dev Patel. In other words, there are few enough guys out there that if two of them look similar and they both have the ability to rap, it’s easy enough to assume they are probably the same guy, without committing a hate crime or anything. (Plus, Dhananjay wears a durag for most of Cake$) 

I really enjoyed Dhananjay in Patti Cake$ so I’m kind of disappointed his career hasn’t really taken off. Then again, I guess that’s not fair to say – he’s continued working, it’s just I haven’t seen anything else he’s done.

Maybe after the Oscars, Ambudkar’s career will take off.

In either case, now that I’ve done this little exercise, I won’t confuse them again.

By the end of the night, I could speak Korean

Surprises really can come true.

I wrote an entire post yesterday about the obstacles Parasite had to overcome to win best picture, but sometimes, Hollywood does the right thing.

Instead of celebrating itself, sometimes Hollywood just chooses the best damn movie that got made. And this may be the first ever that had zero to do with Hollywood.

Yeah, Bong Joon-ho has made films that were primarily in English with big Hollywood stars, and he also had a deal with Netflix, though I guess that was just for one movie. But the movie that won him not one golden statue, but four, was the one exclusively in his native tongue, starring exclusively actors with his own skin color.

And it became the first ever best picture winner in a language other than English.

It's really astonishing.

For me, it marks only the third time my #1 movie of the year has been named best picture, as Parasite follows on the heels of Titanic (1997) and Birdman (2014).

As Bong kept getting up again, and again, and again, and kept finding ever more charming ways to express himself, I wondered if his translator was ever going to get stressed out about him going on too long for her to be able to reproduce all the words he'd said. And who knows if she did or not. The subject of this post notwithstanding, I don't actually speak Korean.

But for one night, Hollywood did. Hollywood said "Screw all these try-hards who are producing the type of movie they think we want to recognize. What we want to recognize is quality."

And for one night, they did.

As I like to do every year after I finish the Oscars, watched on delay here in Australia, I'm going to throw in some general thoughts and bullet points about the show, having not read any recap stories and having no idea if these thoughts are original to me or if I'm just the 403rd person in your Twitter feed to release them into the world. Of course, I'm not in your Twitter feed, but you get what I'm saying.

So, here goes ...

- At first I didn't think I knew who either of the singers were in the opening number, which made me feel old. But after a few moments I said to my wife (who was still watching at this point, and continued to do so for exactly two awards), "I think that's Janelle Monae." Whew! Less old. But I still didn't know who the other guy was. (His name is Billy Porter, which I might have known if I watched the TV show Pose.)

- Why did Brad Pitt and Al Pacino both decide to wear their hair like lion manes? There were other options.

- I thought it was kind of a weird decision to present the Oscar for best animated feature before best animated short. But they did the same thing with the documentaries so at least they were consistent.

- I thought the Frozen II song with all the foreign language singers was a good choice, especially with how the evening ended up winding down. And that all the jokes about Idina Menzel landed.

- Parasite wins best original screenplay! There's something happening here ... what it is ain't exactly clear.

- What the hell was Timothee Chalamet wearing? If it was a non-binary outfit, then I rescind my befuddlement.

- Taika Waititi wins best adapted screenplay? That could actually be the biggest surprise of the night.

- The show was pretty flat, I thought, before Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig came out. I thought they loosened things up.

- I thought the best documentary winners might thank the Obamas. They did not.

- For some reason I thought that Laura Dern had already won an Oscar. When I realized she hadn't, it made me even less worried that my girl Florence Pugh did not take home the statue. She will take home at least three in the future.

- I don't really get the reason for the Eminem song but at least it was well performed. I imagine it took a lot of good directing to get people on camera who had the right reaction to it. Unfortunately, at one point they also got Martin Scorsese.

- I figured Eminem might be the one to drop an f-bomb, but instead, it was Ray Romano. Ray Romano??

- Randy Newman looks old. But he can still perform.

- The recap rap by Utkarsh Ambudkar was tight, and probably my favorite segment in the whole show.

- Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus were the best comedy duo. Everything they did worked, including the confusion over whether they were wearing earpieces or not.

- Was Cynthia Erivo dressed as an Oscar? I knew she could sing from Bad Times at the El Royale, but I didn't know she was also a songwriter. Talent.

- I groaned when James Corden and Rebel Wilson came out dressed as cats, but it was appropriately self-deprecating, and the bit with them playing with microphone was great, though I suspect unrehearsed -- it looked like Wilson was planning to get on with reading the winner and had even started speaking when Corden had a moment of inspiration.

- Bong said he was ready to get drinking, which was great, but he still had two more awards to accept.

- Kellie Marie Tran wins good sport of the evening by showing up to introduce a presenter and seeming like she was genuinely having a great time and not burdened by great psychological baggage over the way she's been treated. The producers returned the favor by including her multiple times in the clips that played over John Williams' nominated score. I hope she has a terrific life, whether in front of the cameras or not.

- I thought it was very strange that Joker was scored by a woman. Maybe Todd Phillips doesn't hate them after all?

- As the show neared the end, it became more and more clear: The Irishman is the only best picture nominee that is not going to win anything.

- Bong honoring the other directors was touching and lovely, and I didn't envy him that he had to figure out how to say something nice about Todd Phillips.

- Wait, Joaquin Phoenix didn't win an Oscar for Gladiator? How have I thought he did for the past 20 years? (Benicio del Toro did for Traffic that year.) Okay, not so upset about that one either. Especially after he gave one of the most interesting and impassioned Oscar speeches I've ever heard, even though I was prepared to cringe at any moment if he went off the rails into insanity.

- The only thing that tainted the win by Parasite, and only ever so slightly, was the fact that the final set of speeches was pretty discombobulated in comparison to what Bong had given us before then. Jane Fonda seemed unsure what she was supposed to do. And by the way, how the hell is Jane Fonda 82 years old? She looks 62.

- This BP winner gets us back to rhyming following two years in which the streak was broken. You had Spotlight, then Moonlight, now Parasite.

- Was there not a single winner played off the stage by the orchestra this year?

After this triumph, the Oscars can give top honors to five Green Books in a row and they'll still have this to fall back on.

Well done, Academy. Pat yourself on the back.

For your consideration: Parasite

Tonight the Oscars will televise -- about halfway through my workday, so around lunchtime I will stop paying attention to the interwebs and then watch them when I get home.

I don't expect a lot of surprises, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

A surprise I think could happen is that Parasite could win best picture. I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

Maybe it won't have been such a surprise if it does happen. It feels like the consensus among critics, and even maybe among audiences, as the best and most interesting film of the year. I've written that this is the closest my tastes have aligned to the larger critical community since There Will Be Blood in 2007, though even that year, many critics felt that No Country for Old Men was the worthier selection. I don't know that Parasite has a direct competitor in the best picture nominees as far as the critics are concerned.

This, however, does not mean it has that good of a shot at winning. The critical favorite is usually the bridesmaid, not the bride, with countless examples dating as far back as Citizen Kane. More recently, films like L.A. Confidential, The Social Network and Roma are prominent instances of this, and Parasite certainly seems poised to become just the latest.

But Parasite shares something in common with Roma, and now that it has happened two years in a row, maybe the necessary critical mass is building to push it over the top.

For the second straight year, a film entirely in a foreign language has been nominated for best picture. If Academy voters were testing the waters last year with how they felt about the proposition, with Roma presumably falling just short of Green Book, maybe this year they are ready to take the plunge.

It would be an extraordinary feat if it happened. A film entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture, and looking at the list of past winners, only The Last Emperor has any significant portion of the film that's not in English. That also marks one of the few best picture nominees, and certainly winners, that has significantly Asian subject matter, a trait it also has in common with Parasite.

To get a sense of how rare both of these things are, I went back and reviewed the entire history of nominees in the best picture category. As far as I could tell, these were the only best picture nominees that did either of these things, if you don't include films that had some English, and films about Americans in Asia:

Foreign language:
The Emigrants (1972) - Swedish
Cries and Whispers (1973) - Swedish
Il Postino (1995) - Italian
Life is Beautiful (1998) - Italian
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) - Mandarin
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - Japanese
Amour (2012) - French
Roma (2018) - Spanish

Asian subject matter:
The Last Emperor (1987)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2005)

I'm not familiar at a glance with all the movies nominated for best picture over the years -- like, really not familiar with some of them -- but I think it's a safe assumption that there were few, if any, foreign language nominees or nominees about Asia in the vast wasteland of mediocre studio pictures that were nominated prior to 1944, when the Oscars moved to only five nominees per year. But even if I did miss one or two, you get the idea about the relative scarcity of such nominees.

And even in the nominees above, some should get asterisks, such as Letters from Iwo Jima. I love that film, and I continue to think of it as having an incredibly high degree of difficulty for director Clint Eastwood, as it was not in his native language. Still, it had an American imprint on it, which certainly made it easier for Oscar voters to recognize.

Given what Parasite is up against, historically, it does make it a tall order to think of it walking away with the evening's top statue tonight. But maybe that just means it's time. Maybe these other films have reached the brink of winning top honors in order to pave the way for Parasite.

You'll notice this post has spent no time on Parasite's actual qualities as a film, the things it does that earns its status as the best film of the year. That's because I've done that elsewhere on this blog. You know I consider it worthy as I named it my #1 movie of 2019. And you've probably seen it for yourself, so you are familiar with its many strengths.

No, today I am talking directly to the Academy -- very belatedly, of course, and entirely in a rhetorical way. That best picture winner is already in that envelope ready to hand to whoever is going to read it (um, let's say that's ... Barbra Streisand. Sure, why not?). Not that my wee little blog would ever play much of a role in changing any of the minds of these people, many of whom are set in their ways, leading to predictable winners year in and year out.

But as I've said in the past few days, there are surprises, like when Moonlight upset presumed favorite La La Land to win, just a few short years ago, with many of these same voters voting.

I don't expect it to happen, but then again, can you actually expect a surprise?

How a technical innovator became the boring establishment pick

If you had told me that a movie that seems to take place all in one shot and is set in World War I was going to be the frontrunner for best picture, I'd say "Wow, what an outside-the-box choice!"

But if you told me 1917 was going to be the frontrunner for best picture, I'd say "Boring, typical Hollywood."

How on the earth did the former become the latter? And how on earth did I become convinced of that along with everyone else?

I should start by saying I know a number of people who think 1917 is the best movie of the year, including my esteemed ReelGood colleague John Roebuck. (Until he saw The Lighthouse and amended his choice, that is.) It's not some Green Book, which a decent number of people thought was reasonably good, enough to vault it above the other favorites that burned brightly and passionately for a more select few. No one thought Green Book was the best movie of 2018, but there are some who think that way about 1917 in 2019.

But the right people, the people who dominate the cultural conversation about the Oscars, seem to think it's just the latest example of Hollywood's well-documented myopia.

Who are the "right" people? I'll engage in some argument shorthand by referring to them only as "snooty critics." I'm not always a man of the people, but I do embrace my low culture, and when I want to see "snooty critics" as them, it's easy enough for me to do so.

"Snooty critics" have a number of problems with 1917, though I haven't heard them explained all that convincingly. The phrase "video game" gets thrown around, as in, it is one. But I'm not all that sold on that take. Yes, it's a series of obstacles to overcome that have a first person quality to them by the very nature of the single-take aesthetic. But how else are you meant to make a movie like this and not have a number of challenging set pieces break up the story at approximately eight-minute intervals? If you're attacking 1917 as a video game then you are also attacking the core conventions of screenwriting.

Then there are those who say it glamorizes war, but Francois Truffaut said that he's never seen an anti-war movie, as every war movie, by the very dramatization of what it depicts, glamorizes war to some degree. You can't make a movie with trenches and mortars and people being shot through the helmet without making a movie that "glamorizes" war in somebody's opinion. It would be fair to say that on the spectrum of glamorizing war that goes from "not very much" to "Michael Bay," 1917 is much closer to the "not very much" side.

An argument that would probably convince me a bit is that it's a very male movie, as the only female character -- at all? -- is a woman hiding in the shadows, nursing a baby. But I haven't even heard this argument much. While true, I gotta say, that's World War I for you. Maybe in this day and age, that movie shouldn't win best picture, but Sam Mendes probably couldn't have made it all that differently.

I can poke holes in both the good and bad arguments against 1917, so why is it that these criticisms have gotten under my skin and made me a convert? Why are there at least three other movies I'd rather see take home the trophy?

That last question is easy -- there were three or four, actually exactly three, best picture nominees ahead of it on my year-end list. So yeah, it's not my first choice. But it's also not my last choice, the choice I dread. It's not Joker, for Christ's sake, and its frontrunner status will help deny Joker any shred of a possibility it has of winning.

I did turn on 1917 somewhat quickly, though, from ranking it #15 for the year with a near-perfect 4.5 star rating, to only a few days later, openly contrasting it with a movie I ranked #24 for the year (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) in a conversation with a friend, and saying the latter was the better film. Its status as the second-to-last film I saw before closing my list meant that I didn't really have the time to chew it over before I was sure it belonged as high as I placed it.

But I think there's another recent best picture winner, which I adored, that played as much of a role in my souring on it ever so slightly.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) did two things that sort of do this film a disservice, and make it seem more conventional and "establishment-like" than it might initially seem. Not only did Birdman do the one-shot concept already, five years ago, in ways that may have been more technically challenging than 1917 in certain ways, but it also broke the glass ceiling for high-concept films such as itself. When I saw Birdman and immediately boosted it into my top spot for the year, a spot it never relinquished, I didn't for a minute think of it as an Oscar film. When it became not only a nominee but a frontrunner, the same eye-rolling by "snooty critics" that is now attending 1917 made it seem significantly less ground-breaking than I had every reason to think it was. Because of Birdman, Mendes' film can't say the same thing about breaking ground, even as technically accomplished as it is.

And yet it is accomplished enough that one might rightly call it a wonder. Can you figure out where those edits are? I sure can't. CGI is getting pretty damn amazing, but even within that, Mendes and company are using it virtuosically. They're doing Birdman without some of the crutches, daring you to point out the cracks that you could probably point out fairly easily in Birdman -- though I don't think Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu would care because he's not pretending it's one two-hour block of time like Mendes is (sort of).

But maybe this is the thing that makes it the most establishment. There's nothing Hollywood loves more than celebrating itself, and in a way, 1917 represents the "magic of the movies" more than any other nominee. Parasite and Little Women may be better, but neither is literally tricking your eyes the way 1917 is.

I think the most establishment thing about 1917, actually, is that we've seen it before. We've seen war movies before. We've seen World War I movies before. We've seen World War I movies win best picture before. We've seen movies that pretend to be one continuous take win best picture before. We've seen movies directed by Sam Mendes win best picture before. We may not have seen this exact movie before, but a lot of its ingredients are familiar, and there are a lot of best picture nominees with far more unfamiliar ingredients.

And maybe one of those will win. I've got my fingers crossed for Parasite, the one movie I think is capable of pulling off a shock upset, which would be even more shocking because a movie that's entirely in a foreign language has never won best picture.

But the Oscars really only shock you rarely, like when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had the wrong envelope, or, in the same moment, when Moonlight beat presumed favorite La La Land.

I hope Parasite is this year's Moonlight, because 1917 is definitely this year's La La Land.

Those darn ellipses

It's the day before the Oscars (two days, but I live in Australia) and I still haven't written much, or maybe anything, related to the upcoming telecast. Today is not going to change that. What can I say, I'll try to crap out some thoughts on them tomorrow.

I can, however, at least talk about one of the nominated films, however superficially. And it's something I've been meaning to get off my chest for some time.

It's this: I hate the stupid ellipses.

I usually try to honor a movie's chosen way of presenting its own title, even finally coming around on Se7en as the preferred way to spell the David Fincher film (as discussed in this post). But for some reason I just haven't been able to adopt the way Quentin Tarantino wants me to write the name of his latest, which also stars Brad Pitt.

I think he wants us to write Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, because that's how it appears in the movie, but I just can't. The ellipses have got to go.

I say "I think" because the jury is out on the matter, as embodied in the contradictory image above.

Look closely, and you'll see two distinct ways of writing this title, smashed right up next to each other. It's from the iTunes rental page, if you can't tell.

The text has the "right" way, the way I've written above. The poster, though, puts the ellipses one word later: Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood.

Now, I don't know if that's an authorized poster or just some mock-up the guys at Apple threw together without running it by the copy editor. But you'd think that if anything, the poster would get it "right" and the accompanying text would contain the error.

I don't like either of those titles, but the former is definitely preferable. The ellipses have the effect of preparing you for a surprise, something ironic, something unexpected. They also separate the familiar phrase ("Once Upon a Time") from the "punchline" ("in Hollywood.") The latter works well enough in the surprise department, but no better than the former, and the former is the only one that meets the standard of separating the familiar phrase from the punchline. The familiar phrase is not "Once Upon a Time in." So yeah, it's probably just a fuckup by the guys at Apple.

But wouldn't Once Upon a Time in Hollywood just be a lot easier?

IMDB thinks so. I'm glad I can rely on it to be a successful arbiter in this case. It lists Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as the title and Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood only as an "original tile."

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does a third thing that I think this film is definitely trying to do: It reminds you of a couple of cinematic greats directed by Sergio Leone. That's no coincidence, as the very text of the film grapples with one man's decision to start doing spaghetti westerns. The title should then be faithful to Leone's best spaghetti western (Once Upon a Time in the West) and also to his gangster masterpiece (Once Upon a Time in America). A couple other films have already paid homage to these films, those being Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and certainly others that I haven't seen or aren't thinking of right now.

And none of those films has a damn ellipses.

Now, I am not opposed to ellipses in titles as a general rule. I somewhat reluctantly will include the ellipses in Say Anything ... or When Harry Met Sally ..., both films that are in my top 50 of all time. I'm not even necessarily opposed to ellipses in the middle of the title, and there's even one film I've seen whose title starts with "Once Upon a Time" and has ellipses in the middle. That's Once Upon a Time ... When We Were Colored. Something tells me, though, that Tarantino is not paying homage to that particular film.

Trying to dissect what I don't like about Tarantino's usage, I'm landing on the fact that it's patting itself on the back for being clever. "Get it? It's a story about a place where they make stories! What could be more meta?" Look man, I don't care. I don't get to the end of that title and feel like congratulating you on how brilliant you are. Just can the ellipses and get on with the show.

And it's a good show, I've decided after my second viewing back in November. It's only the seventh best nominee for best picture in an unusually good year for the Academy with regards to honoring the year's best films, but it's a lot better than the two stars I gave it on first viewing. Pitt should pick up an Oscar for his efforts and there's an outside chance Tarantino will too for his writing, though Parasite oughtta win that category.

But it would be every so slightly better without those superfluous three dots.

Stroke kills Kirk Douglas - 24 years later

If that seems like a pretty flippant title for a post about someone who has just passed, I actually mean it as the ultimate sign of respect. I'll explain more a minute.

But first ...

I've had occasion to write about a number of senior citizens lately on this blog, and on the same night that Kirk Douglas died, I happened to watch a 95-year-old Cicely Tyson in Tyler Perry's A Fall From Grace, still going strong in a small role. I've also, unfortunately, had the occasion to memorialize some people who were taken before their time.

But hanging in the background of the elder statesmen and women I've talked about, there was always the eldest statesman: Kirk Douglas. He was the last remnant of a golden age of Hollywood that has mostly passed into history. (The last male remnant, perhaps -- this is the second straight day I've had occasion to mention 103-year-old Olivia de Haviland.)

Every time I thought of how old someone was, and how surprised I was that they were still alive, I thought of Douglas, now well past his 100th birthday, not acting anymore of course, but still around. Still able to walk and wave and smile and exist.

There was a time when it seemed all but certain that he would outlive his son, Michael Douglas, who was thought to be a goner when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer some years back. Somehow, the younger Douglas (now 75 years old) fought his way back from that prognosis and seems poised to make the type of run at 100 that his dad made. Those Danielovitch genes are pretty darn good. (Kirk was born Issur Danielovitch, way back in December of 1916. Michael never got a Danielovitch name, but he did get his father's stage name as a middle name.)

However, there was an earlier time when it seemed like Kirk Douglas could die before he even hit his 80s.

In late January of 1996, Douglas had a stroke, and it was a doozy. He was expected never to regain his ability to speak, but he bucked those odds. Still, he looked incredibly frail from that time onward, like it was just a matter of time before he would succumb.

It was, in the end, a matter of time ... a matter of 24 years.

In 2016, for the celebration of his 100th birthday, he was jovial and jaunty and able to walk into his birthday party under his own power. He had three more birthday parties after that, the last one just two months ago.

It's impressive to see a person in Douglas' shoes just keep going and going after there was every reason for him no longer to be around. And keep going he did, until Wednesday.

On a blog like mine, this should almost certainly be a remembrance of Douglas' contributions to cinema, but in that regard, he did not hold a special place in my heart. Oh, I always thought he was a very charismatic presence, but if we're doing the math, I only actually saw five films he ever made, if you can believe it, and one of those (It Runs in the Family) was after he had already had his stroke. Of the four others, Ace in the Hole was far and away my favorite.

No, Douglas was most interesting to me as a survivor, a determined bastard whose body failed him nearly a quarter century ago and yet he kept going. He kept living, because maybe life is all there is, and he didn't want to miss any of it.

Rest in peace, old lion.

Sixty years of old age

Some people were just never young I guess.

Angela Lansbury is still alive – she’s ticking along at 94. In fact, she appeared in a movie as recently as two years ago, with a short cameo (that included singing!) in Mary Poppins Returns. IMDB also lists her as involved with a project that’s only just now in pre-production. She’s not done, and soon she will start to rival Betty White (98) in terms of longevity. (Though they both still have a ways to go if they want to catch Olivia de Haviland, who is 103.)

But Angela Lansbury has been an “old woman” for nearly 60 years.

You’d know from some of my recent writing on this blog that I’m fascinated by actors who play significantly older than their actual age, the examples I cited being Ian McDiarmid in Return of the Jedi and Max von Sydow in The Exorcist. Lansbury may have them both beat, though.

Tuesday night I rewatched The Manchurian Candidate, only my second-ever viewing of the classic. (I’ve also seen the remake, which I think is pretty good.) It crackled for me just as much as the first time, even though I was feeling under the weather and watched it in bed on my iPad.

I was struck by the fact that Lansbury plays the mother of the brainwashed soldier played by Lawrence Harvey, even though she was only 37 at the time it was released on October 24, 1962, and had only just turned 37 a week beforehand. That means she was 36 or even 35 during filming – probably 36 as production schedules tended to be shorter back then.

That means – are you ready for this? – she was less than three years older than Harvey. He was born on October 1, 1928, meaning that Lansbury was only just about to turn three when he was born. That could be the lowest age differential I’ve ever seen between actors who are supposed to be playing parent and child. (Harvey, I think, is supposed to be playing significantly younger than he actually was.)

The thing is, this was standard practice for Lansbury. I remembered having this observation about her once before, and went back to check my blog for when that might have been. It turns out it was while watching Elvis movies for my Getting Acquainted series back in the day. Just a year before The Manchurian Candidate she played Elvis’ mother in Blue Hawaii, though at least there, he had the decency to be almost a full decade younger than she was. (She’s also a bit of an antagonist in that film, if memory serves.)

I’m not sure why Lansbury struck casting directors as prematurely old back then, except that her face always had a certain maturity to it, and she was certainly talented enough to play those ages. Also, she’d already been around for nearly 20 years in the early 1960s, as she debuted at age 18 in 1944’s Gaslight.

Now, just because she plays the mother of a grown adult who has returned from fighting in a war does not necessarily make her character “old.” A 37-year-old could indeed be the parent of a war veteran. But Harvey himself looks nothing like some fresh-faced 18-year-old, and is not supposed to be, either. He’s supposed to be a contemporary of Frank Sinatra, who was actually nearly a decade older than Lansbury. Plus, Lansbury is the wife of a powerful senator played by James Gregory, 14 years her senior, but not supposed to be, I don’t think. Wives of powerful senators should be at least in their 40s, and more likely in their 50s.

I’d like to be more familiar with the other movies Lansbury made around this time, to see how commonplace this was for her, but somehow, I haven’t seen a single Lansbury performance for nearly 20 years on either side of these two. Blind spots everywhere, I’m ashamed to say.

Well, cinema needs its menacing matrons, and Lansbury did it very well, whether she was old enough to do so or not.

The best and worst annoyingly long movie titles

You’d think that there would not be any good “annoyingly long movie titles.” The very name discounts the possibility of them being good.

But I think it’s possible for something to be annoyingly long and still good, or at least, still funny.

Today I hope to throw some words at the topic of annoyingly long movie titles, inspired by the upcoming release of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which is decidedly an example of the latter. As in, the worst.

Come on, it’s just Birds of Prey, screw all that other noise. And most movie marquees around the country and the world will, indeed, be screwing all that other noise. You will not see the full title of this movie on any movie marquee in the world. But you will see it on every poster for the movie, albeit in significantly smaller type, which means some idiot in the marketing department at the studio is still trying to make And the Fantabulous Emancipation (breath) of One Harley Quinn happen.

But not every annoyingly long title is And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Maybe it’s only because I really liked the movie, naming it my #1 movie of 2014 and one of the top 25 of the last decade, but this new title reminds me most of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a title for which I developed a limited fondness. As they are both, broadly, superhero movies, I even feel like Harley Quinn (I’m not writing that damn thing out again) is borrowing inspiration from Birdman. Both also seem to have pretentious ambitions, which again, I accept because the movie really worked for me in Birdman’s case.

Of course, probably the best example of the annoyingly long movie title is the one that does so specifically for the purposes of humor. Well, you might argue that most annoyingly long movie titles are done for humor, as otherwise you’d just switch to something more palatable. But there are certainly degrees to which the humor does or does not work.

Take, for example, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat’s broken, some might say strangled, English was one of the biggest jokes about the character, so a title that is grammatically awkward, unduly worshipful of the man’s home country, and also gets at an obsession with America and its pop culture, is like killing three birds with one stone. I’ve made it a point of pride that I can roll off this title without any errors, when asked. (Because that particular scenario arrives just about every day.)

But long character-based titles don’t work just because it’s a somewhat beloved character. Sometimes they just try our patience. A couple years ago, the movie with the longest title on my whole movie list came out. It was called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. So Tony Clifton may not be beloved, but Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman may both be, to varying degrees. But this title pretty much just made me smack my forehead. Suffice it to say that I definitely had to look up the correct wording just now.

The movie whose title is long just to make fun of the idea of long titles is also usually a bust. The first movie I’m discussing today that I haven’t seen is a prime example of that. That would be Don’t be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Now that I’ve written it out, I think the title is not trying to make fun of the idea of long titles so much as it is being silly by trying to literally string together about four different titles. At least it’s better than Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th. There’s one more of these titles that is like twice this length but I’m having trouble tracking it down.

My favorite purely innocent long title is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. I suppose there is something cheeky about this – they could have figured out a simpler title if they’d wanted to – but the title does do an admirable job of describing what the movie is about, as it is about a provincial debate in the Welsh countryside about whether a local elevated surface is better described as a hill or a mountain. For a while, this was my favorite movie title to bring up in joke circumstances, when I was looking for something awkward to encapsulate a small, idiosyncratic non-blockbuster.

Supplanting The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as my go-to random long title was Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is not an easy choice as I always have to look up the exact wording, but is fun anyway. As this is an arthouse film with a very serious demeanor, this title exists to capture the everyday humdrum quality of a person’s life by naming the movie after her street address, not to be whimsical in any way, shape or form.

It’s probably worth including a subsection in this post about earnest documentaries with long subtitles, like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief or If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front or Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, but I don’t know that their length is “annoying.” Or if it is, it’s only annoying because it sounds more like the name of a graduate thesis than a movie.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of movies whose titles test our patience and don’t always reward us, but I can’t end this discussion without mentioning probably the actual best movie to be guilty of a thing like this, which is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. If Stanley Kubrick did it, there has to be some merit there, right?

As for this new movie coming out, I think the main things that annoy me about the title are that it a) makes up a word, b) uses the word “one” as though pretending we don’t know who Harley Quinn is, and c) suggests that the movie is entirely about the fact that she has been “emancipated” from her relationship with the Joker, or at least so it would appear.

I think I’ve had enough references to the Joker for a couple years, thank you very much.