Top 25 of the 2010s, statistically audited

As you would probably know, I posted my top 25 movies of the last decade (plus ten honorable
mentions) just a couple days after I posted my best of 2019. This was back in January.

Why, then, am I interested in revisiting that list less than a year later? When everything from last decade should be well and truly ancient history?

It has to do with what I used -- or rather, what I didn't use -- when I went about making my list.

As you would probably also know, when I make lists on this blog, I like to actually make them. In other words, I like to take the subset of films that relate to that list and shape them into a perfect order myself, without the help of outside sources.

I have a choice in methodology because I do have a source in my life that could just make the list for me. That's Flickchart, and it allows you to easily see your favorites in certain categories -- your favorite Disney movies, your favorite movies directed by Quentin Tarantino, your favorite movies from 1996, and yes, your favorite movies from an entire decade, like the 2010s. There's almost no limit to the way you can filter your chart to see your relative favorites in various subsections of it.

But as I've always said, for a list-maker, it's not fun to just copy over a list that gets made for you, even if that list is a reflection of your own tastes hashed out over thousands and thousands of previous indivdiual choices made by you -- as is the case on Flickchart, where your lists are the result of thousands of duels between two movies to create an ever-more-accurate list of your relative preferences.

So I was never going to use Flickchart to make my best of 2010s list. One reason was that I did not want to. The second reason was that I couldn't.

See, I've gotten way behind in adding my films to Flickchart, a consequence of once deciding I wanted to wait 30 days before adding a new movie to my chart, so it had the chance to "settle" in my mind, and not be placed artificially due to either a strong positive or strong negative reaction to it. I still think that's a useful approach, but it has the practical limitation that it's easy to fall behind. When you have no routine of adding a movie right after you've seen it, it means to add any movies at all, you have to purposefully sit down for a session of Flickcharting at a random time. And it became easy for those to drop from my list of daily priorities.

Over time, I got as much as two years behind on adding new films to my chart, and have forever been trying to work my way out of that hole.

With the pandemic, I've caught up more than I have been in ages. I am now only a little more than ten months behind, and that means I have just surpassed adding the last new film I watched before finalizing my list of the best films of the previous decade.

So for the first time, I do have a way to statistically produce my best of the decade list, now only as an interesting exercise rather the official record. And I do enjoy interesting exercises.

So today, after this typically long preamble, I'm going to see how the movies I chose for my list actually rank on Flickchart, now that they have all been added. 

I should say before I get started, there figure to be some big variances here. That's primarily the case in films where my opinions of them have either grown or shrank on subsequent viewings. If I loved it at the time I added it, but my thoughts on it have cooled a bit since then, it may take some time for that film to work its way down by losing casual duels. When a film loses a duel to a film below it, the most it can move down is one spot in the rankings. So its total loss of position, over time, comes from either losing individual duels itself, or from having other films leapfrog over it by beating films that are higher than it. At the highest ends of my chart, then, it might take a year or longer for a film to drop even 30 spots, on a chart of more than 5,000.

Because of the way Flickchart works, it's easier for a film to take big leaps in the standings rather than big drops. Any film that beats my #1 film in a duel, for example, immediately becomes my #1, even if it had previously been my #3487. (Of course, that would never actually happen, but just to illustrate how the site works.) Still, though, the lower film has to have the right duel at that right time if it wants to make one of those jumps. If my #500 movie really belongs somewhere in the 200-300 range, but it only gets random duels against my top 50 movies of all time or ones that are lower than it, it will not make that jump.

I suspect you've already expended today's allotted reading time on this post before we even get to any of the actual movies. So let's get to that now, on the off chance some of you are still here.

Here is what my top 25 of the decade looked like in January, including the honorable mentions:

25. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma)
24. BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee)
23. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen)
22. Red State (2011, Kevin Smith)
21. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
20. Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade)
19. What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)
18. Zootopia (2016, Byron Howard & Rich Moore)
17. 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle)
16. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins)
15. A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi)
14. Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)
13. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho)
12. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery)
11. Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu)
10. Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer)
9. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader)
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017, Osgood Perkins)
7. Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter)
6. Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
5. Tanna (2016, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean)
4. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher)
3. Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell)
2. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine)
1. Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard)

Honorable mentions (listed alphabetically): Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater), The Breadwinner (2017, Nora Twomey), Hell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie), The Last Five Years (2015, Richard LaGravenese), mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky), Other People (2016, Chris Kelly), Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris), The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson), Tangerine (2015, Sean Baker), Whiplash (2014, Damien Chazelle)

And here is what Flickchart says it would have been had I made all the same dueling decisions, but was actually entering the films into my Flickchart at the time I saw them, meaning the rankings would have been available mid-January. Included also is their overall ranking out of 5454 films on my Flickchart:

25. Your Sister's Sister (2012, Lynn Shelton) - 233
24. Wonder Woman (2017, Patty Jenkins) - 217
23. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) - 212
22. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader) - 211
21. Creed (2015, Ryan Coogler) - 200
20. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma) - 193
19. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, J.J. Abrams) - 189
18. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins) - 187
17. The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson) - 176
16. Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - 170
15. Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter) - 164
14. 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle) - 160
13. Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu) - 150
12. Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - 144
11. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery) - 143
10. Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell) - 130
9. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho) - 126
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017, Osgood Perkins) - 118 
7. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen) - 114
6. Tanna (2016, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean) - 113
5. A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) - 92
4. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) - 91
3. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) - 84
2. Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda) - 73
1. Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard) - 14

Honorable mentions (listed alphabetically): Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee), Coco (2017, Lee Unkrich), Hell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie), Ida (2013, Pawel Pawlikowski), Red State (2011, Kevin Smith), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman), Take Shelter (2011, Jeff Nichols), Winter's Bone (2010, Debra Granik) 

I was thinking of taking these film by film and analyzing the differences, but I've already taken enough of your time on an exercise that primarily interests me, so let's go for more of an overview.

The big similarities

My top ten has seven of the same films on both lists, with three (Tangled, The Social Network and The Blackcoat's Daughter) landing in the exact same spot. It mightn't have worked out this way except that the top two in my organic list, Tangled and Spring Breakers, made jumps into my top 100 in the past couple months through the course of adding the new films, and then dueling between each new add as a palette cleanser. Tangled then made the big jump into my top 20, where I've come to determine it truly belongs. (This is probably a good time to note I have a controlled methodology for adding new films. I will add a film, then engage in a session of random dueling until a lower film beats a higher one, and continue alternating between the two in perpetuity -- until I'm fully caught up, anyway. This ensured, for the purposes of this experiment, that I did not try to artificially inflate the amount of random dueling I was doing, to help whip the rest of my chart into better shape.)

In the rest of the top 25, A Ghost Story, Beyond the Hills, 127 Hours, If Beale Street Could Talk, Toni Erdmann and Portrait of a Lady on Fire all landed within five spots on Flickchart of where I placed them organically on January's list. In the case of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, its current ranking at #20 relfects the certainty I expressed at the time that it belonged higher than #25. Only two weeks after seeing it for my one and only time, I felt I could not place it any higher than #25 at the time. It's at #20 even though I liked it a little less on my second viewing. 

The big differences

There are four movies in my top 25 on Flickchart that did not even make my honorable mentions back in January: Your Sister's Sister, Wonder Woman, Creed and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Each of these are films I saw at least three times, and five in the case of Star Wars. The first three all came in at #2 of the year they were originally ranked, and when I added them on Flickchart, that glowing sense of them was still in place. Though I still love them, repeated viewings took a bit of the shine off them, such that they could not even crack the honorable mentions. In the case of Star Wars, it always ranked high but then beat a film that was on its way down (Chinatown), allowing it to jump from in the 300s on Flickchart to in the 100s. I hope that will even out a bit over time.

There were three movies that made my organic top 25 that could not crack the honorable mentions when looking only at Flickchart: Boyhood, What Maisie Knew and Zootopia. In fact, they are my 41st, 52nd and 53rd favorite movies of the decade if you go only by Flickchart, with Maisie and Zootopia actually appearing consecutively on my chart at #378 and #379. Boyhood is certainly a case of my appreciation of it increasing over time, now at three total viewings, which brought it to #14 on my organic list -- though it hasn't obviously had the right duels to really make a big jump on Flickchart. The other two I have always loved, but maybe ranked them conservatively to begin with, and they didn't get the right duels either. 

In terms of leaps or drops within the top 25, Inside Llewyn Davis is my #7 on Flickchart but only my #23 on my organic list. Again, it was the fourth viewing that kind of knocked it down a peg in my mind, though it obviously remained high enough to make my top 25. The reverse is true for another four-time viewing, Under the Skin, which is only my #23 on Flickchart but #10 on my organic list. It has not yet gotten the right duels to reflect my increase in appreciation for it over the seven years since I first saw it. Another notable title to discuss is Ruby Sparks, my #12 on Flickchart but only an honorable mention on January's list. I was passionately in love with this film, my #1 of 2012, when I first saw it, as it entered my chart around #90 overall. A steady cooling of those passions has only managed to knock it down to #144, good enough for 12th overall -- which gives you some sense of how long it takes for a film to drop unless you forcibly re-rank it.

Summary

Both lists please me in a way. They are both, in a manner of speaking, a reflection on my favorites in film from the years 2010 to 2019.

You'd think the outcome of this exercise would be to show me the difference between what I think I like and what I actually like. Instead, I think of it as the difference between a snapshot of what I liked in that moment, in January of 2020, and a history of what I liked over the whole decade. I was Flickcharting that whole decade, having started in 2009, so it's useful to see how my tastes progressed, and what evidence remains of my one-time passions. It's valuable to have a record of having loved films like Ruby Sparks, Creed and Wonder Woman, and I think it's good that Flickchart's core mechanisms make it difficult for their light to fade quickly. You should be reminded of the passion you once felt for something, because chances are you were only a little bit wrong about it, not a lot wrong. And if you were a lot wrong, then you can forcibly re-rank it downward, as I did after my viewing of Field of Dreams back in July. 

The other thing that interested me to see about my Flickchart list is that it's more diverse, both in terms of the filmmakers and in terms of the subject matter. Whereas my organic list has only two female directors on it -- Maren Ade and Celine Sciamma -- the Flickchart list has those two along with Patty Jenkins and (the dearly departed) Lynn Shelton, not to mention a half-directing credit for Valerie Faris. It has the same number of African-American directors, but with Ryan Coogler replacing Spike Lee in the main list but Lee still appearing in the honorable mentions, the whole list of 35 has one more Black director on Flickchart. Then there's things like the Flickchart list having a superhero movie (Wonder Woman) and two movies in franchises (Creed and Star Wars: The Force Awakens), while the organic list has none of those, unless you count honorable mention Before Midnight. 

Okay, exercise complete. I release you. 

I would have called it ... Palm Springs Eternal

A podcaster I listen to recently said that he doesn't like puns, except when they are used in headlines. I like puns -- or plays on words, which is the kinder way to refer to them -- more than he does, but I get the distinction he's making. If you smatter your speech with puns in your daily interactions, you are a goofy dad-joke maker at best, an annoying boob at worst. 

Headlines, though, provide the perfect opportunity for anyone to summon their latent pun-maker, as you are looking for something with a modicum of cleverness that draws the reader in. I do it all the time on ReelGood. 

The same logic applies, in theory, to titles. I don't know that you would call them puns, but you would definitely call them plays on words. Take the James Bond movie title The Spy Who Loved Me. It has already been parodied twice through plays on words, in the Austin Powers movie The Spy Who Shagged Me, and also in the forgettable spy comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me a few years ago. Neither of those movies might have been great (I have not seen the original), but in both cases I appreciate the title.

As I was finally watching Palm Springs last night -- more on the delay in a minute -- I couldn't help thinking that a better title would have been Palm Springs Eternal.

Palm Springs spoilers from here on out. Be warned.

The purpose of a good pun is not only to note a linguistic similarity between the part of the familiar phrasing you're replacing and the words you're using to replace it, most often a rhyme. It's also to underscore something about a theme you are exploring, one that's either inherent to the original phrase or illuminates a new scenario to which you are applying your newly created phase.

Both things are accomplished with the title Palm Springs Eternal.

Of course, the familiar phrase here is "hope springs eternal." There's an additional level of linguistic cleverness going on here, as "springs" is a verb in the original usage but a noun in Palm Springs Eternal. 

But you've also got thematic cleverness. And now we get to the spoilers, if you did not heed my original warning.

Palm Springs is about first one character -- actually, two, but the second one is off screen most of the time -- and then a second (third) who joins him, who are trapped in a time loop. They are repeating the wedding day of the first one's girlfriend's friend, and the second/third one's sister. (The characters are played by Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti and, the one who is only in it periodically, J.K. Simmons.)

Even at the start of the movie, Samberg has already been in this time loop for -- years, maybe? -- and we're really just joining him at the time that Milioti joins him. But it soon begins to be years for her too, with no prospect in sight of it ending.

Hence, "eternal."

Someone, somewhere, likely considered it. After all, naming a movie after its location is a bit like throwing your hands up in the air and giving up. It seems like a last resort.

Whoever that was rejected it, though, because maybe puns don't play that well in movie titles either. Examples are not immediately coming to mind, but I'm sure I've groaned at as many over the years as I've loved. Maybe puns need to stick to headlines.

As for finally getting to see Palm Springs, which had been trapped on inaccessible Hulu (here in Australia anyway), it looks like Amazon and Hulu may have some kind of partnership, at least internationally. It says "Hulu presents" but then it's playing on my Amazon Prime. This strikes me as unexpected, at least, as I would assume the two were mortal enemies, both kind of trying to be the #2 streamer after Netflix. 

Maybe it's a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing.

I did really like the movie. I'm kind of tired of these variations on Groundhog Day, which come along about once a year nowadays, but indeed, what others have said about it doing enough different with the concept turned out to be true.

We projected it on the sliding doors of our wardrobe in our Phillip Island hotel. It was the only suitable place to do it while still sitting comfortably in our bed. That meant there was a line down the middle of the picture demarcating the difference in depth between the two sliding doors, which distorted the image slightly in that one spot. But it was easy enough to adapt to -- and perhaps appropriate in a movie about a highly distorted version of reality. 

Black Christmas on Black Friday

Some Audient posts exist for little more reason than the fact that I thought of a good title for them. This is one of those.

However, since a two-sentence is post is not really good enough, allow me to pontificate for a few paragraphs longer.

Yes indeed, I did watch Black Christmas on Black Friday, on our first of two nights away down in Phillip Island, about a two-hour drive from our home in Melbourne. Just as Black Friday does itself, it was a way of informally kicking off the Christmas season, though in this case, it's the Christmas movie-watching season. And as a bonus, it had both the words "black" and "Christmas" in the title.

Actually, that viewing season technically got underway for me a week beforehand when I watched a Netflix release called A New York Christmas Wedding in order to review it. But I wouldn't have chosen to watch it, or at least not watch it then, had I not been hard up for a new release to review. I do adhere to the basic guidelines of not trying to get into a Christmas mood until Thanksgiving is over.

Of course, neither Thanksgiving nor Black Friday should really mean anything here in Australia. But since we now live in an economic marketplace that encompasses the entire world, the entire world freaks out when it's Black Friday (or really, within a week of Black Friday) in America. 

So when I went to the shopping centre (don't call it a mall) on Thursday night -- which I guess, technically, was Thanksgiving night, though I had a burrito for dinner -- I was confronted with Black Friday sales every which way I looked. And when I bought the one gift I ended up buying that night -- a photo printed on to a wood block -- the woman had to tell me both at the beginning and the end of my transaction that if I bought one more, the third would be free. I would have thought my first rejection of her offer would have been sufficient, but I suppose the psychology of the consumer mind suggests that you try again, especially after the consumer has already definitively committed to the first purchase, and may have gained in consumer confidence over the course of the transaction.

The movie? Let's just say Jason Blum has had his better moments for me. (Seriously, did you see this year's Nocturne?) I was surprised at just how much of an all-out assault it was on frat boy rape culture and mansplainers. Not that such people don't deserve to be eviscerated in popular culture whenever possible, but they also likely make up some decent percentage of Blum's audience, and I've known him in the past to play it a bit more conservatively. So, kudos to that I guess. 

Anyway, it's Black Friday proper in the U.S. as I post this. If you are out there fighting for that last Furby or Cabbage Patch Kid or PS5, I hope you stay safe. 

Memories of Burning

Cinemas have been open here for the last 2+ weeks, letting loose a flood of movies with people I know in them whose existence I am suddenly aware of.

Instead of seeing one of those movies, last night I did something that I haven't done in a while, probably since watching Berberian Sound Studio as part of MIFF a few years ago: I watched an old movie in the theater.

I was actually supposed to watch this old movie a week and a half ago, but it was sold out, in what may be the most confounding commentary on the state we currently find ourselves in. Confounding in a good way. On the one hand, Cinema Nova can only seat 20 per screening room as part of its COVID precautions. On the other, it was still bizarre that a movie that was first released in 2003 reached that capacity of 20 two Sunday nights ago. Says very positive things about the moviegoing climate we have here in Melbourne.

When Memories of Murder was sold out on that trip, I shifted to the Australian remake of Rams, which I actually liked quite a bit. Murder seemed likely to get lost in the increasing torrent of these pretenders finally getting a release, but on Thursday night, I bought my ticket in advance and finally made good on the viewing.

Part of the reason I wanted to see Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho's second feature after 2000's Barking Dogs Don't Bite (which I also have not seen), is that it has heretofore been very difficult to get my hands on. I have of course known about it and its reputation for some time, but streaming or renting it had thus far been impossible. A friend of mine put an illegally obtained copy of it on his Dropbox for me to pick up a while back, and even though I myself don't sail in those pirate seas, I would have happily watched it. Except that getting access to it required upgrading my minimal Dropbox plan to greater storage space, and that has seemed like a bridge too far, even though there are probably plenty of reasons that would be a useful thing to do.

So having it appear at Cinema Nova -- it is also playing at the unaffiliated Cinema Lido, so this is some kind of coordinated re-release rather than a Nova one-off -- gave me the perfect excuse to finally see it. 

The viewing didn't remind me of Berberian Sound Studio or other repertory viewings I've attended over the years. But rather, it reminded me of another viewing of a Korean film at Cinema Nova from 18 months ago.

On April 28, 2019 I saw Lee Chang-dong's Burning, as it finally got its release in Australia, long after American critics had named it one of their best films of 2018. The two films have some obvious elements in common, such as their South Korean origins, being more than two hours long, and dealing eliptically with sociopaths.

But the real common element is that I was way too tired to watch both of them. 

I don't remember the circumstances that led to my exhaustion on Sunday, April 28, 2019, but on Thursday, November 26, 2020, they are plenty fresh in my memory. 

Yesterday started on a really bad, or at least foreboding, note when I started waking up around 5 a.m., for no reason I could determine, and never got back to sleep. By the time I had to walk the kids to school around 8:30, I was already feeling a bit loopy. I did get a nap during the day, but not nearly as long a one as I wanted. I even clocked myself out of work for an hour, with a whole quiet house to myself, but could not sleep more than a few minutes. 

Undeterred, I went for a run after work anyway. I didn't go the full 7.5 miles, which is my most recent peak capacity, but 5.4 miles, on top of a bad night's sleep, is still enough to make the prospects for the rest of your day quite dim.

Of course, I was not done. At 7 I had to go do an hour or so of shopping at the shopping center, which is only open at night two nights a week. As the places you need to go are invariably at opposite ends of the place from each other, this always tacks another couple thousand steps on to your day, plus an immeasurable amount of additional mental exhaustion. 

So it was with all this under my belt that I rocked up at Cinema Nova just before the 9:10 movie was about to start.

In fact, if not for the necessity of buying my ticket in advance, I might have just packed it in. (As it turned out, I could have waited, as the 20-seat capacity was only about half full. But I didn't want another Rams situation.) 

Memories of Murder has two things going for it over Burning, at least as far as my current circumstances were concerned: 1) It's 17 minutes shorter, 131 minutes vs. 148 minutes; 2) It's far more concrete in terms of its action and plotting. But in both cases I knew I had made a miscalculation in terms of my preparedness for the movie on this particular day.

I don't remember what snacks I had brought with me that time, but this time, perhaps subliminally fearing a Burning redux, I had a Coke, a bag of sourpatch kids and a sleeve of mint cookies. I should have had two Cokes. The liquid and the caffeine are what I crave most in this type of experience, especially as the two other things were drying my mouth out. I finished neither of the snacks, as I could literally not stand eating them anymore, but the Coke was finished with an hour left in the movie, even with forcing myself to delay starting to drink it as long as possible. (To give you some idea of what a bad idea the sourpatch kids ended up being, my teeth physically hurt when I had to brush them at home later on.)

The real problem is that when you are tired, it is especially difficult to watch movies that you know will not have a conventionally satisfying payoff. When you're fighting sleep, it helps to have a quick pace, plus challenges to your mind in terms of obviously clever twists and turns. When a movie has a more determined pace, as these movies do, and when the narrative reflects the messiness and lack of resolution of real life, its all the more challenging. 

The good news is, I recognized that both movies are really good, and ended up giving both four stars. The bad news is, I might have liked both of them better had I not been struggling to stay awake the whole time. I should have plenty of other opportunities to give Burning a second chance through a revisit, but as discussed earlier in this post, Murder has been particularly hard to get my hands on.

Maybe I'll have to spring for that deluxe Dropbox subscription after all. 

X-Ray vision

Have you ever invented something in your mind, and then lo and behold, some weeks or months or years later, it appears before you?

I'm in the middle of watching this just-released Amazon original movie, Uncle Frank, and as this phenomenon has just occurred to me, I had to stop mid-viewing to write this post.

For ages I've thought it would be great if movies had a feature that would tell you the name of an actor that's currently on the screen, so you didn't miss five minutes of the movie scratching your head and thinking "Now where the hell do I know that guy from?" I imagined it being something like Pop-Up Video, though it would have to be something you could turn on and off for viewers who don't care about such things.

As I was watching Uncle Frank, I paused for a moment, and realized that when I did so, pictures of two actors popped up in the upper left corner. I thought nothing of it the first time, but the second time I paused, I noticed two different actors and thought "Now what is this all about?"

Then I realized it was the two actors in the scene I was currently watching, and started to get an idea what this was all about.

The movie moved on to the next scene, a scene with four actors, and sure enough, when I paused, those four actors appeared, now taking up the whole left side of the screen rather than just its upper corner. And sure enough, they were the actors on screen. I could see their names easily, and could click into them if I really wanted to know more.

Now how about that.

It's just one of the elements in an Amazon exclusive featured called X-Ray, I have now learned. You can also easily jump to other scenes in the movie based on a short description, you can look at the entire cast with a bunch of head shots, you can learn trivia, and you can even learn the names of songs playing in the film -- this last being another feature I would use all the time.

Awesome.

When you're done looking up whatever you want to look up, you just click the X in the upper right-hand corner and you're back to where you paused.

I'm going to use this all the time. It's just so handy. 

Apparently the feature has been around since at least this past summer, as I found some stories online talking about it back in July.

I'd guessed it would only work for Amazon originals, since it would take a lot of work to implement this feature on all the thousands of titles they may be streaming at any given moment. But I can see that at least some non-originals have it, as they're advertising the availability of this feature on Avengers: Endgame (which you would have to pay to rent). 

Pretty damn cool.

(And yes, I did notice the little play on words in my subject, though I can assure you it was unintentional: Paul Bettany stars in Uncle Frank, and he played a character called Vision -- in the aforementioned Avengers: Endgame, at that. Or, I guess, only in Avengers: Infinity War. Close enough. And, spoiler alert.)

And since it's Thanksgiving on the calendar today -- here in Australia if not yet in America -- this makes a nice optimistic post for the day, a reason to give thanks.

Now let's see if the rest of this movie -- chock full of family themes and released just in time for Thanksgiving -- delivers more of the same. 

Audient Authentic: Stop Making Sense

This is the 11th in my 2020 series watching classic documentaries from prior to the last three decades that I haven't seen, chronologically. 

I've just watched my third music documentary for this series -- and last, I assume, though I haven't yet chosen the series' final film -- but it's the first one that can properly be described as a concert movie. There are snippets of performance in both Dont Look Back and Gimme Shelter, but Jonathan Demme's 1984 film Stop Making Sense is chock full of it. In fact, there's nothing else but the concert. (Actually, an assemblage for footage from four different concerts at L.A.'s Pantages Theatre.)

As it turns out, concert movies make me drift off a bit. 

That's not to say that they make me sleepy, just that they don't fully hold my attention, even with bands I really like. Which might be why I don't watch all that many of them.

I think back to the experience of going to see a concert movie of a band that I consider one of my favorites of all time, Phish. I actually wrote about the experience here, when I went to see Phish 3D. (It's probably not worth going to the link, as I just noticed that several updates to blogspot have really thrown off the formatting on that particular post.)

The gist of what I wrote was that it was really hard to stay focused on the movie when it was literally just them playing their songs. Even though they were songs I loved, I needed a bit more of a narrative spine to remain fully engaged. I did notice that without that narrative spine, nor breaking away for interviews, there was no reason for me not to treat it like a regular concert -- in other words, to talk to the guy I was watching it with, if the mood struck us, and to go the bathroom if I needed. Which is something I would never ordinarily do outside of the most desperate of circumstances.

I didn't have anyone to talk to while watching Stop Making Sense in the hotel last Friday afternoon ... but that didn't stop me. In fact, I found myself carrying on several different chats on Facebook while the movie was playing, and I'm pretty sure I went to the bathroom at least once. 

You'd think this might have diminished my enjoyment of the film. It did not. 

Just because I wasn't watching every second of the movie didn't mean I didn't totally appreciate the experience that Demme and Talking Heads frontman David Byrne were bringing me. I credit Byrne specifically because the staging of the show was his concept, according to the credits. But really, the whole band was bringing the experience to me, enthusiastically, with incredible musicianship, great set design, and great costumes. (Byrne's "big suit" has become kind of a famous image.)

I don't like Talking Heads anywhere near as much as I like Phish, but I like Stop Making Sense a lot more than I liked Phish 3D. Talking Heads are one of those bands where I never bought one of their albums, but I'd be a great candidate for a greatest hits album (presumably one exists out there). There are probably a dozen Talking Heads songs I know and can sing along with, about half of which get played here. But I liked the sound of even the songs I didn't know.

At first I thought there was maybe nothing groundbreaking about this film, but then I realized, what qualified as groundbreaking was a lot different in 1984 than it would be today. This whole series, in fact, is about pioneering new forms of non-fiction storytelling, and Stop Making Sense certainly does that -- to the extent that you can call what it's doing "storytelling." 

The most groundbreaking aspect of it is something I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not read about it afterward. According to Wikipedia, it is the first film made using entirely digital audio techniques. That's probably more a convenience on the filmmaking side than an observable difference by the audience, but it was a significant enough part of the process to make it into the opening paragraph on Wikipedia. 

What I was more likely to notice was the techniques Demme and company used to get the cameras right up in the faces of the band members, something that was probably also fairly unusual at the time (though I think the Maysles brothers may have actually done a bit of that 14 years earlier in Gimme Shelter, if memory serves). I did actually wonder how they went from long shots to close-ups in the same song, yet you don't see the camera operators all over the stage, ruining the long shot. (I also thought it was probably something of an annoying price to pay for those who watched the show live, that there would always be a crew filming all over the stage.) 

Of course realizing that it was shot over four nights helps explain that. The close-ups were likely from one performance while the long shots were from another, but it's all blended so seamlessly that you really would have no idea. That does, however, probably mean that the band had to wear the same outfits each night, to create the illusion of one single performance. Fortunately, they'd have the days in between to launder them and remove the sweat stench.

Although all the Talking Heads stuff was, of course, great, I may have most enjoyed the mid-movie song "Genius of Love" performed by the Tom Tom Club, which has some Heads band members in it. In terms of sheer practicalities, the song exists to give Byrne time to do a costume change, but the musicianship in this particular song is just off the charts, and I found myself grooving along to this even a bit more than to the Heads songs.

Really, there's just great showmanship all over this thing. It may be hard to isolate Demme's role exactly here, and it's something I think I might appreciate better if I watched his other prominent concert movie, Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids from 2016. He also made a Neil Young concert movie in 2006. Though of course neither of those fit in the current series. Anyway, to the extent that this is a really captivating movie and someone had to oversee all the various choices that got made just as they needed to be, Demme deserves praise.

Captivating? In a movie I spent talking to friends online and playing my turns in Lexulous?

Yes indeed. All versions of captivation are not equal. This one captivated me visually and sonically, perhaps not in equal measure, but one more than made up for the other, alternating throughout.

Okay! We're on to the last month of Audient Authentic. I don't know what the grand finale will be, but I can tell you it will fall during the years 1985 to 1989, to put a capper on the faithful chronological sequencing I've kept going all year. 

A record-setting hotel projector weekend

By virtue of having checked in to my hotel (motel) two hours earlier than usual -- and then not watching any movie longer than 123 minutes, most between 90 and 100 -- I set a personal record in total movies watched over the span of time from Friday at noon to Sunday morning at 10 a.m.

That would be 14 movies in 46 hours. 

That's in fact two more than the most I'd managed before. 

Factor in maybe 12 hours of fitful, heartburn-affected sleep -- remember that I bring a whole bag of junk food with me -- and those 14 movies were really occurring in something like 34 waking hours. If you give each movie a two-hour time block, which factors in 15 minutes of enforced downtime between movies (and sometimes to let the projector cool), that leaves only about six hours that I did anything other than watch movies. 

Actually, I can't account for more than an hour or so outside the hotel, other than quick trips to the shops. That was my Saturday morning brunch, which was scrumptious. So maybe 2:15 would be a better block of time to allocate to each.

Now, 14 movies is a lot to write about in a recap post, if I'm intending to provide deep thoughts on what was my most recent (not my first) viewing of most of the films. Ten of the movies I watched were repeats, with only four new ones, and the last new one over by 11 a.m. on Saturday morning. 

So instead of really writing about the movies individually, I thought I'd give you a flat list, with a line break in between the day changes, and then make some general observations about the experience. The movies in bold were the first-time viewings.

Rock Star 
The Girl Next Door
Stop Making Sense
Loving Vincent
Frozen II
-----------
Possession
My Octopus Teacher
Married to the Mob
Music and Lyrics
The Virgin Suicides
Labyrinth
Tangled
------------
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Four Weddings and a Funeral

If I could I'd draw a line through both Possession and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because they both straddled midnight, though at least Rocky Horror was finished before I went to bed on Saturday night. I was really fighting the confounding first half of Possession on Friday night, and ended up being overwhelmed by a desire to sleep just before the first really icky supernatural element was introduced to the movie, at which point it really took off for me. Unfortunately, that last hour was watched between 7:45 and 8:45 Saturday morning, when the film's terrific horror elements were blunted by the morning sun trying to peek through the curtains. This movie deserves an entire post to itself ... let's see how the week goes whether I give it one.

Without really meaning to, I divided the movies pretty equally between time periods. Six total decades were represented among the 14 movies, including one from 1970s, four from the 1980s, two from the 1990s, three from the 2000s, three from the 2010s and one from the 2020s. 

The distribution among streaming services also appeared premeditated, but I assure it was not. In fact, the six films I watched on the first day, if you count Possession as a Friday viewing, happened to be from six different individual sources: Rock Star (Netflix), The Girl Next Door (Amazon), Stop Making Sense (Kanopy), Loving Vincent (Stan), Frozen II (Disney+) and Possession (an mp4 given to me by a friend). Saturday's viewings proceeded along similar lines, though Kanopy sat this one out -- just as well as I'm down to my final two viewing credits this month. Those viewings went Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Stan, Netflix, Disney+ and a DVD from my own collection. 

Oh, and funnily enough, only 11 of the movies I watched were from the 142 I told you in Thursday's post that I'd curated. As I mentioned yesterday, Tangled was not planned, and came up organically during the weekend. For some reason, Stop Making Sense didn't get added to the list when I was going through my Kanopy choices, but it was on my mind anyway because I'm watching it for Audient Authentic this month. And then I didn't list any of the DVDs I brought on that list, of which Rocky Horror was one. 

Most of the films also had something in common with at least one other film. You notice these things when you watch 14 movies essentially back to back. Some of the common elements were intentional, inspirations from previous viewings, but most were not. 

For example:

- Timothy Olyphant appeared in both of the first two movies, Rock Star and The Girl Next Door. I was so glad to see Olyphant's face in the first of those, having forgotten he was in it, that I specifically chose to follow up with The Girl Next Door to keep the Olyphant vibe going. (That also helps clarify which movie called The Girl Next Door this was. No, I wouldn't already be rewatching the violent 2007 version I only just watched for the first time a few weeks ago.)

- David Byrne appeared in three movies, in a manner of speaking. "Once in a Lifetime" gets played in Rock Star. Two movies later I followed up with Stop Making Sense, already sort of planned out as a Friday late afternoon movie, and as this is a Talking Heads concert movie, obviously Byrne is all over it. The real surprise was seeing that he did the music for Married to the Mob, which brought up the other surprise ...

- ... I ended up actually watching two Jonathan Demme movies. Demme directed Stop Making Sense, but I didn't remember he had also directed Married to the Mob until I actually started watching it.

- I watched two Disney digitally animated films, though the watching of Frozen II sort of directly inspired the watching of Tangled, in that I told my friend I'd watched it and he asked if I'd seen the ten-year anniversary article on the AV Club, which I wrote about yesterday.

- Possession and My Octopus Teacher both have an octopus-like creature in them -- in Possession, a spawning human who has tentacle arms while he's still in his pupa stage, and in My Octopus Teacher, an actual octopus. (And yes, the first appearance of this creature in Possession was what I missed by falling asleep about three minutes too early.)

- Stop Making Sense and My Octopus Teacher are both documentaries. Interestingly, looking back across my Microsoft Word document that keeps track of my history of all these hotel marathons lo these past ten years, I had never watched a single other documentary. 

- Married to the Mob and Music and Lyrics (watched consecutively) both feature a water bed. (Hey, I didn't say these connections were all amazing.)

- Possession and Rocky Horror both feature the use of an electric kitchen saw, the type used to carve meet, both of which are used to carve human flesh. (Now that's a bit more interesting.)

- Hugh Grant appeared in both Music and Lyrics and Four Weddings and a Funeral. The first one was the accident here, as I had already been strongly considering FWAAF for my traditional Sunday morning spot of "Movie You Know So Well, You Can Pack Up the Room While Watching It."

- Rock Star and Music and Lyrics are both about the inner workings of the music industry.

- Frozen II, Labyrinth and Tangled are all stories set in a fantasy world featuring a castle.

- The Girl Next Door and The Virgin Suicides are both coming-of-age stories told from the nostalgic perspective of an older version of the characters looking back.

I think there may have been some some others in there, but I wasn't taking notes. 

The only movie that I didn't find to have some direct connection to another movie was Loving Vincent, but if you want you can say that it's an animated movie, like Tangled and Frozen II -- though the means of animation is infinitely harder and not very similar in appearance, so I didn't think it warranted its own bullet point. (Don't forget, this is the movie where every single frame of the film was hand-painted by one of a total of about 100 different artists.)

I haven't even mentioned that something threatened to derail my visit from the very start.

When I got the key from the woman at the desk and asked for the WiFi password, she told me the WiFi did not work very well in that room. No sooner had I started doing calculations in my head about how quickly I'd run through this month's allotment of data on my phone, than I discovered that the signal was nothing of the sort. It worked just fine, thank you, only once or twice buffering during the whole weekend. In fact, it seemed to be worse on my other devices, like the one laptop I was using to surf the web while the other was pretty much permanently attached to the projector. During The Virgin Suicides I did momentarily switch to my phone's data to work my way through some pixelated sections of the film, but by the next movie I watched I was back to the hotel WiFi, and never looked back after that.

As with any of these trips, you have your moments of crisis. The first few movies on Friday are always the best, because you still have the whole weekend ahead of you and -- if you've consistently followed my rule of thumb -- you have a couple good "afternoon movies" with a guilty pleasure vibe to welcome you into the experience. But over the course of the weekend, you do question your choices, and that happened to me on Saturday during the consecutive viewings of Music and Lyrics and The Virgin Suicides. I didn't like either movie as much as I remembered liking them, though to be honest, I've always been lukewarm on Sofia Coppola's first film. And there was a mild sense of panic about the time slipping away, and how I had essentially just wasted four hours on two movies that might have yielded their time to a handful of the 131 others that didn't get watched. At times like this you realize that even with watching 14 movies, you can't afford -- or, you don't feel like you can afford -- to make too many mistakes.

All told, though, it was as good an experience as it always is, one that fully cures me of that itch for at least another year, by the end of it. As much as the time starts "slipping away," I don't know that I could really watch another 14 movies in another 46 hours on top of those I'd already watched, so it's just as well when it all comes to an end. Ranking my three two-night trips to this hotel, dating back to 2017, I'd say this one wasn't as good as the first, but it was better than the second.

Oh, and my new projector? Just as much of a champion as I'd hoped it would be ... and as I paid for it to be. 

Speaking of those other 131 movies, I'll end with a short list of the movies that didn't quite make the cut -- the ones I most seriously considered watching in one of my available time slots, before opting for something different and then moving on from there. 

Beavis and Butt-head Do America
The Break-Up
Hot Rod
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Minority Report
Punch-Drunk Love
Road Trip
Rogue One
Sleepy Hollow
Speed Racer
A Time to Kill
Wayne's World

Which I guess just means I've got my starter list for next time.

Ten years of Tangled

I hadn't planned to watch my favorite movie of the last decade so soon after my last viewing, last December 30th, which was designed to confirm that it was, indeed, my favorite. I certainly hadn't planned to watch it at the hotel this weekend, even though I knew it would look amazing on my new projector.

What changed my mind is that on Friday afternoon, as I was multi-tasking between my third movie (a concert movie, so it was okay) and my personal correspondence, a friend sent me this article from the Onion's AV Club -- the "serious" side of the humor website. (Parody reviews only have a limited usefulness, I suspect.) 

The title of that piece had me at hello: "Years before Anna and Elsa, Tangled reinvigorated the Disney princess tradition." 

Celebrating the glory of Tangled on its ten-year anniversary and taking a swipe at Frozen? I was putty in the article's hands.

I couldn't line up the dates exactly for ten years, but I got close. I first saw the film on the half-day before Thanksgiving in 2010, which was Wednesday, November 24th. This viewing on Saturday night, in my primetime slot, was on Saturday, November 21st. It hardly seemed worth waiting until Tuesday to make it exactly ten.

In those ten years I've seen Tangled in a variety of different formats. The BluRay I bought soon after it was available had both 2D and 3D versions, and I've watched both -- the 3D version only once, since we had a 3D TV for only less than a year before moving to Australia in 2013. Saturday's viewing was my first on Disney+.

And my love for it just keeps growing. 

And yes, I am still discovering things for the first time on this, my seventh viewing. For example, I never before realized the double entendre in Mother Gothel's line to Rapunzel: "Rapunzel, let down your hair! I'm not getting any younger down here." That's just a cliched way of telling someone to hurry up, but in Mother Gothel's case it's literal -- she will be getting younger up there. 

Tangled is just chock full of that kind of thing. 

But because I've written about that love now a staggering 14 times on this blog -- including just yesterday -- I won't try to produce another Tangled essay today. I guess that's 13 times, actually, since the first post was before I saw it, when I was still skeptical about its possible merits. And that's just the times I actually tagged the movie's title in the post.

Still, I can't go without acknowledging the film's birthday on my blog. I wouldn't miss acknowledging a family member's birthday, and Tangled has, in a weird way, become a bit like family for me. It's maybe my older son's little brother, as he was born almost exactly three months before I first saw the movie.

Here's to another ten years, and another seven viewings in that time ... probably not that many this time, but I mightn't have though I'd watch the movie this many times in my life, let alone in its first decade, so all bets are off. 

Frozen (not even) 2 (stars)

Taking a quick break from my hotel (really, motel) weekend movie marathon. I'm getting so many idea of things to write about in the movies I've seen, I thought I'd get some of them down, especially as I wait for my brunch to arrive.

I thought Frozen II would be a good movie to show what my new projector can really do. I always find that animation looks especially good when projected on a wall, so even if the movie were not good, it'd be a treat for my eyeballs at the very least.

Well, the movie was not good.

Now I should say, I was not a huge fan of the first Frozen. I gave it 3.5 stars out of five, but I now think my feelings toward it are a little closer to a three. And since I often find myself defending the vastly superior Tangled against it, it tends to drive those feelings of comparative dislike, maybe even down to something like 2.5 stars.

Still, I had planned to see the sequel in the theater when it opened last year. I had a good opportunity on the morning I arrived in Tasmania after a ferry ride overnight, when we were going down there for Christmas. I didn't have any other family members with me (my kids were not interested in the movie anyway) and I didn't have anywhere to be until the next day. But I succumbed to the desire to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a second time, rather than Frozen II a first.

Good decision.

This film is a mess. At any given time I did not understand the point of the plot or what its real thrust was supposed to be. The plot, such as it is, screamed of resulting from a bunch of writers sitting in a writing room, knowing they needed to cobble together something credible in this enchanted and ice-encrusted world, because the eight-year-old girls would demand it, but really, having no driving force to tell any particular story themselves.

This narrative slackness is borne out in the songs in particular. Not a single song in this movie is derived from the action. People start singing because they are, mathematically, at a segment of the plot where a song is required. Perhaps the worst example of this, in a character I find incredibly annoying, is when Josh Gad's Olaf sings a song called "When I Am Older." The whole point is that the situation he's in right now -- not that strange in terms of this world, but strange enough for him I guess -- will make more sense to him when he's older. The thing is, he's like the fifth most important character in this film, and he has no agency at all -- everything just happens to him. Why do we care what does or doesn't make sense to him? Oh that's right -- Olaf has to have a song, that's why. Every other song is either an "I'm looking ahead to the great unknown" (that's almost exactly the title of the song) song or a "I'm at my lowest moment" song. How many "lowest moments" can one film have?

Not that these things really matter that much, but I noticed that Elsa's powers can basically be summarized as "whatever the plot requires at the moment." The big climax doesn't even really register because of course she could do what she does -- why not?

I did notice an interesting thing, speaking of Tangled. There were at least two moments that I thought were direct references to that film. There's a little chameleon-like creature in the "enchanted forest" that is basically supposed to serve the same function as Pascal in Tangled, and even looks a lot like him. Then Rider is the name of one of the new characters we meet -- as in Flynn Rider from Tangled. It's almost like this movie's writers themselves realized that Tangled is the better movie, and a better source from which to steal than the original Frozen.

I could certainly go on about my dislike for this movie but I suspect my brunch will be arriving shortly, at which point typing will become much more difficult.

So I'll just close out by saying yes, Frozen II could not even get two stars from me. That's where I thought I would go with it, but by the end I was so annoyed that I busted it down a half-star further to 1.5.

It did look good on the projector though.

I might watch 142 movies this weekend

Vance, you say. A weekend is somewhere between 48 and 80 hours, depending how much you are stretching it in either direction while staying within the parameters of Friday to Monday morning. That means the most number of movies you could watch in a weekend would be 40, maybe 55 if they were shorter, but in order to do that you would also have to stay awake the whole time.

Oh, I'm not going to watch 142 movies this weekend. I mean that there are 142 different movies I might watch. Important difference.

If you haven't already guessed from this setup, I'm making a solo trip to the hotel again.

It's a thing I do about every year. My wife does it too -- a different weekend, obviously -- but her trips do not involve a movie marathon projected on the hotel wall like mine do.

We each used to go just one night, but lately we have expanded that to two. So much nicer on your first day knowing you don't have to pack up and leave tomorrow. And on the first morning you wake up, you still have more than 24 hours left of your visit.

Mine have involved movie marathons ever since I first envisioned this when we lived back in Los Angeles. It's a product of our years as parents, when it was really useful to get a night away rather than waking up at all hours of the night when your baby was crying. Now, we continue to do it for fun. And, I suppose in COVID times, to get the type of isolation from your family that you might need more than usual. 

Most years I've done this, I've focused on DVDs, or occasionally iTunes rentals, as my primary source for getting my movies. I'd bring a dozen from my own collection and maybe another 20 gathered up from the library, knowing I'd get through half of them at most. It's nice having choice, and letting mood dictate what you watch next.

But COVID-19 has inevitably shifted how I think about such things. Not only are the libraries not yet open -- they are the last stragglers as we hit our 20th day without any new cases here in Victoria -- but my streaming subscriptions have exploded this year. 

I might still bring some DVDs from my collection -- one of the two computers I'm bringing still has a DVD player -- but the vast majority of what I will watch will come from Netflix, Amazon, Stan, AppleTV+, Disney+ or Kanopy. 

Hence, 142 movies.

That's right, I went through each of these services, as meticulously as I could handle before burning out, and dutifully recorded the names of all the movies I might consider watching this weekend. The majority of them are rewatches, as is consistent with how I've envisioned these hotel movie marathons in the past. In fact, 97 of them are movies I've already seen, though most of them not more than once or twice. I then whacked all the titles in a spreadsheet, including a second column that noted which streaming service on which to find them. I even printed it out for good measure.

The poster I've included here is one of the only ones I know I will definitely watch, and also one of the only ones that's not on a streaming service. Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film Possession is extremely hard to find, so a friend actually gave me a digital copy of it. And I know there's something fucked up about it, though I don't know (or remember) what. So isolating myself in a hotel to watch it, rather than at home on a weeknight as my wife is regularly walking through, is the way to go.

The rest ... well, I'll have my list to consult, won't I?

I do worry that my current plan entails an excessive reliance on the hotel's WiFi. I do not recall that its availability or its speed has ever been an issue in the past, but if it is, I could be out of luck. That said, I do have 40 GBs of data per month on my phone, 36.8 of which is still available between now and the 10th of December. I can probably lean on that if I need to.

I may have buried the lede in my eagerness to tell you about all the movies I've curated. And that is: I also have a new projector.

The one I'd been using in the past, whose possible lack of reliability I wrote about in this post, had cost only $80 to procure, slightly used. For $80 it was an amazing deal, and did the trick. But the image was not really good enough to watch foreign language films -- the subtitles were too difficult to read -- and it came with the additional headache of requiring an adapter to an American plug. Yes, I bought it in Australia from a guy on Gumtree (the local equivalent of Craigslist), but the guy had acquired it in America. The adapter did the trick, but it was always just one more thing to worry about.

My new projector cost ... more. I'll just leave it at that. And I tested it out for the first time last night. It's fabulous.

So this could well be my best movie marathon yet. One further exciting detail is that they said I could check in "around lunchtime." In the past it was always a strict 2 p.m. check-in, at least as I recall. I suppose industry-wide desperation could play a role in their increased flexibility. I'm off work at 11:30, and my wife is dropping me off soon after that. 

In the meantime, I will not watch a movie tonight. My eyes need to rest up. 

One hundred forty-two movies don't watch themselves you know. 

Lars von Trier's 20-year descent from humanism to misanthropy

I guess the past few days have been about picking off movies that have been sitting on my Kanopy queue for a while. Thursday night it was The Girl Next Door, and then Saturday night, Dancer in the Dark.

Now of course, this was not my first viewing of Dancer. I saw it in the theater just about exactly 20 years ago. I was living in New York at the time, and I saw it with an ex-girlfriend while she was visiting me in the city. I'd hoped we might get back together, but that wasn't her intention with the visit. So Dancer had the function of feeling additionally sad to me. 

IMDB says the movie was released on October 6th of that year, but I'm pretty sure my ex's visit was not until November. I wasn't so fixated on seeing movies immediately after their release back then, so it's perfectly plausible we were only just catching up with it a month after its release, which would make this pretty much the 20th anniversary of my first and only viewing of the movie.

Although I loved Dancer in the Dark -- it was my #6 movie of 2000 -- I have since come to see it as a "one-timer." In other words, a movie so hard to watch that you can't bring yourself to endure it again. At least, I thought that explained why I had never sat down for that second viewing.

Really, though, the notion of the "one-timer" is something that makes a lot more sense for other people, not me. I've watched movies like Irreversible and Requiem for a Dream multiple times, so apparently the experience of marinating in human misery is not something I really object to recreating.

As I was watching the movie, though, it occurred to me that part of my feelings of despair about its world are retroactive, and a function of how I have come to see the movie's director, Lars von Trier, in the ensuing years. I was surprised to realize that this was not, in a lot of ways, the von Trier I have come to know and steadily detest. 

The stories of how hard von Trier is on his female actors, in an effort to get the kind of gut-wrenching performance that Bjork gives here, are legendary. Misogyny has come to seem like a feature of von Trier's films, not a bug, as he subjects his female characters to all sorts of brutality and sacrifice. It's a bit complicated as he wouldn't make women the main characters in his movies if he didn't also have some kind of empathy for them or intuitive sense of their interiority. It certainly warrants an in-depth discussion, but not here or now. 

In my memory, Dancer in the Dark was a story of how a good woman is destroyed by a terrible world. I was surprised to find that this is anything but the truth.

Spoilers for Dancer in the Dark to follow. 

Bjork's Selma is a self-described day dreamer, drifting away into flights of fancy in her head that von Trier depicts as glorious musical numbers. The settings of these musical numbers -- a factory, a prison cell block -- make them very von Trierian, but they also reflect Selma's real world. Selma is also going blind, so working in a factory with heavy machinery is precisely the wrong place for a person with her already distractible nature.

That Selma is headed for a crash is inevitable, but it's not for lack of others trying to ward it off. I was amazed at having to jump to a second hand when counting the people who try to help Selma, well beyond what is required of them. 

First there is her friend and fellow factory worker, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve), who knows Selma needs the job as she is saving money for her son to have a surgery that will prevent the same degenerative eye disorder from which Selma suffers. So Kathy helps Selma continue to work in the factory, both assisting with a doctor's appointment where she has to pass an eye test, and working a night shift (without getting paid) to make sure Selma does not hurt herself or destroy the equipment. (Alas, Selma does destroy the equipment.) Kathy also helps during Selma's rehearsal of the local production of The Sound of Music, making an "accidental" entrance on stage in order to determine how many steps Selma must take to reach her mark. It's not the only time in the movie Kathy takes the blame for something so Selma can continue upholding her charade. Kathy gets frustrated with Selma sometimes, but she never gives up on her, even after Selma is imprisoned for murder. In fact, I found Kathy's emotional journey -- which is all a selfless act of helping a woman live her life on her own terms -- to be the thing that moved me most on this viewing.

Then there is Jeff (Peter Stormare), a lonely misfit who lives in town and always shows up at the factory at the end of Selma's shift to offer her a ride home. He knows Selma has vision problems and that riding her bike home is no longer really a viable option for her. But Selma is proud and she does not want to lead Jeff on, so she tells him she doesn't want a boyfriend right now. This does not deter Jeff, but not because he wants to break down her hesitancy. He's in love with her, and has a bottomless well of kindness to offer her, even with no hope of the reciprocity he wants. In fact, having no hope only seems to make him kinder toward her.

When Selma is in prison, she is doted on by Brenda (Siobhan Fallon), a kindly prison guard who may also (sort of) be in love with her, but more than anything is just under the spell of Selma's core goodness. Interestingly, von Trier does not show us the seeds of Brenda's endearment toward Selma. The first time we meet her, she is already fully besotted, eager to do anything within her means to make Selma's stay on death row slightly less horrible.

Even two characters who ultimately do Selma wrong have an empathy toward her at their core. Her foreman at the factory fires her only with an extremely heavy heart, after a number of warnings and after a whole day of productivity at the factory is lost when Selma breaks the equipment. Before that we see him being kind and jovial with Selma, even though he knows she is a "problem worker" and he's in a results-driven business. And then her director on The Sound of Music, who ultimately calls the police to let them know where she is after the film's central act of violence, shows excessive deference to her as well. When she makes the difficult decision of telling him she can no longer play Maria -- again, not referencing her eyesight -- he understands what's happening with her and finds a different, less-demanding role for her in the show. He tells her she will always be his Maria.

Okay, so I didn't get to that second hand. But no fewer than five characters in this film do all they can to help a woman whom life has dealt a harsh hand. And they do it gladly.

Even the film's two real sources of evil -- Selma's landlord Bill (David Morse), a policeman, and his wife Linda (Cara Seymour) -- only do what they do because of their human frailty. Bill believes his wife will leave him if he does not have enough money to support her expensive shopping habits, and he's really desperately afraid of this outcome. So he makes the unforgivable decision to steal Selma's life savings, saved for her son's operation. When he's caught later on, he's so miserable that he asks Selma to kill him. We only get third-hand accounts of Linda, and never know for sure whether she really would leave Bill, or if this is just his paranoia. But she is actually kind to Selma before beginning to suspect her husband is having an affair with their tenant, and her own actions start to spiral from there. She chooses to believe her husband's version of his interactions with Selma, and she also sees Selma apparently having shot Bill in cold blood upon trying to steal his money.

Instead of the exercise in misanthropy I thought I remembered this film as being, it is, paradoxically, one of the more humanistic films I have ever seen.

Suffice it to say that von Trier has never made a film like this again.

This November also marks 20 years of Lars von Trier in my life, as I believe I did not see his earlier breakout Breaking the Waves until after this. Although I have liked other films von Trier has made -- Dogville and Melancholia chief among them -- no film he has made since then has had anything like Dancer in the Dark's optimism about the capacity for good of human beings.

What happened, Lars?

Dogville, the film with the minimalist set design and Nicole Kidman as the tortured heroine, is kind of like the misanthropic version of Dancer in the Dark, where a town collectively destroys a woman instead of mostly trying to save her. Antichrist is about the horrors a husband and wife visit upon each other as they grieve the loss of their infant child. Melancholia represents a slight uptick toward humanism, as the behaviors of these characters are largely a function of trying to cope with depression, but there is at least one character (the one played by Charlotte Rampling) who is a source of concentrated malevolence. And then both of the Nymphomaniac films are basically four hours of something like malignant narcissism, and everyone is pretty much awful to each other. 

Von Trier completed his descent into total abject faithlessness in humanity with The House That Jack Built, in which Matt Dillon plays a sociopath who kills for sport. This film has victims, but if I remember correctly, it doesn't really have any characters who are good. I may not remember correctly, though, because I have mostly blocked it out.

No wonder I had not scheduled another viewing of Dancer in the Dark before now.

But I'm so glad I did. It reminds me of everything of which von Trier was capable when he was at his best. And since I myself am an optimist, I believe he can get there again. We're still within ten years of a von Trier movie I really loved (Melancholia). 

Unfortunately, I think it's much more likely that he will remain in the dark. 

Okay then ... never I guess?

Now that cinemas are open again and we are on our 15th (!) straight day of no new COVID cases in Victoria -- have we actually eradicated this thing? -- I just now mapped out my potential trips to the cinema this week.

As these are crazy times, I think I may not be seeing something from 2020, but rather, something from 2003. Bong Joon-ho's second feature, Memories of Murder, has been very hard to get your hands on, but it's showing at Cinema Nova right now. I may write an actual post about this, so I won't steal any further thunder from that potential post.

But in scanning the options playing at Nova, I noticed they were showing a movie that had played a starring role in the early part of the pandemic.

You may remember this post from back in April, which I wrote on the occasion of my first time noticing a movie with a rental price point of $19.99. That has since become commonplace. In fact, Mulan reached a high of $30, and only if you were already a Disney+ subscriber.

I didn't rent Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a drama about a girl considering an abortion, at the time, even though in that post I said I might. No, instead I made my first $19.99 rental Trolls World Tour of all things, and have since repeated that rental price twice: The King of Staten Island and Bill & Ted Face the Music.

I'm not seriously considering seeing the movie at Nova this week, mostly because its latest showtime on any of the days is 5:55, and that just doesn't work with my schedule. (Unless I'm seeing a 10 a.m. showing of Tenet, that is -- oh the exceptions to my rules.)

But seeing the movie playing did prompt me to go back to iTunes, figuring its rental price would now have come down, and at least I can finally throw some money its way, not to mention see an acclaimed 2020 independent film.

Well, its price has indeed come down. It's now $14.99. But that is for purchase, not for rental. 

Just buy the damn thing and get it over, Vance.

You might say that. But buying a movie I don't know if I'll even like goes against my principles. I don't have unlimited storage space, and I also just don't believe in it as an approach to watching movies. If I'm going to own something, I want it to be an intentional decision, not a choice I have to make because I can't rent it. This may be a fairly academic objection, especially if buying something costs less than renting it would have. But its for these same academic reasons that I won't just buy it and then delete it after I've watched it, which is the same thing that would happen if I rented it.

So my eye wandered down the page to see when it would, again, be available for rental, presumably at a lower price:

June 1, 2021.

Um, what?

That is a date so far in the future that it is just plain absurd. In COVID times, I don't know if anyone can plan even to February, let alone next June.

Before I had sympathy for this movie, which had its (albeit modest) box office ambitions kneecapped by the pandemic, and was just trying to make a buck with an elevated streaming rental price. Now, though, this feels like shenanigans. 

Every movie has its window of maximum profitability, which is either a theatrical run or an increased initial rental price. For some movies that rental price is something like $6.99, though in COVID times it got up to $19.99. Fair enough.

But then those movies are supposed to settle in at a rental price of $4.99 or thereabouts, and stay there for the rest of their lives as streamers, excepting the times they go on sale for a short period of time.

Withholding a reasonable rental price for Never Rarely Sometimes Always for the first 14 months of its existence is just absurd. I can't begin to understand the strategy.

I really want to watch this movie to include it in my 2020 year-end rankings, but if this is how they're going to be, well then they can just forget it. If you can play chicken, then so can I.

It seems a harsh stance to take toward a little underdog indie about a girl considering an abortion. And maybe I'll lose that game of chicken after I've thought about it for a bit.

But I think part of the current cinematic landscape is acknowledging when something is just a loss. Tenet had to be the guinea pig and eventually stumble out into theaters at a mere fraction of the box office it could have made in normal times. Greyhound, which I just watched on Friday night, had to movie to AppleTV+. Bill and Ted's latest excellent adventure was on the small screen for most of us. 

But let's look at Bill & Ted Face the Music as an example of how these things are usually done. Only two months after it debuted at that $19.99 rental price, you can now rent this movie for $5.99 and buy it for a little less than twice that. 

That's what we should be seeing with Never Rarely Sometimes Always. That's the last vestige of some kind of normal we might expect from 2020, and though 2020 has been anything but normal, that last vestige is attainable in this case.

And since I started this post talking about Memories of Murder, let's look at that. I'll pay a lot more than $14.99 to see that movie, and it came out in 2003. The difference is that I won't own it afterward, which in this case I consider to be a good thing. 

By running away and hiding, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is not helping anyone. "Always" is the amount I want to see this movie, but "never" is the amount I may actually see it. 

An exploitation film in childhood nostalgia's clothing

I wanted to watch something edgy last night. After a lot of scrolling on Kanopy, I was reminded of this poster that had caught my attention a while back, prompting me to add it to my Kanopy queue. 

Imagine my surprise when the movie starts a lot like a mild mid-century nostalgia movie. You know, something kind of in the mold of The Wonder Years, where an adult narrator looks back on formative childhood experiences that overwhelmed his blossoming mind but were really quite tame all told. 

That girl blindfolded on the poster? It could be explained by a harmless game the kids play at the beginning, when one of them is blindfolded and she tries to find the others and throw apples at them. It doesn't totally make sense but it seemed innocent enough, and seemed to enforce the sort of dopey innocence of this movie. 

I didn't know how I, or this poster, could have gotten this movie so wrong.

As it turns out, nope.

Spoilers for The Girl Next Door to follow.

The story, inspired by a true story, is based on two sisters who lose their parents in a tragic accident (in the real story the parents were alive, but indisposed). They go to live with their aunt (the real foster family had no reltaion to them), a single chain-smoking mother who already has a gaggle of her own children, mostly boys. This story takes place in 1958, but the actual events were in 1965. The mother keeps up appearances in the idyllic little town where they all live, but behind closes doors, things get ugly.

It was fascinating, and terrifying, to watch as this movie -- constructed a bit like The Wonder Years, you will recall -- starts to morph into something truly disturbing. Stephen King is a bit of a specialist in the abuses heaped on children in small towns, as evidenced by such works as It and The Body (made into the movie Stand by Me). But King's horrors are telegraphed well in advance, and he never made anything like this. In fact, on the film's Wikipedia page, he's quoted as follows:

"The first authentically shocking American film I've seen since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer over 20 years ago. If you are easily disturbed, you should not watch this movie. If, on the other hand, you are prepared for a long look into hell, suburban style, The Girl Next Door will not disappoint. This is the dark-side-of-the-moon version of Stand by Me."

Wait wait ... how do we get from The Wonder Years to this?

This foster mother Ruth -- played memorably by Blanche Barker -- appears to be jealous of the older child, 16-year-old Meg (Blythe Auffarth), who is attractive and who triggers the sexual curiosity of Ruth's children. She starts to give lectures about promiscuity, and to punish Meg and her younger sister Susan (whose movements are restricted by polio) for her perceptions of their promiscuity, or for any small act of rebellion, like Meg hitting one of her cousins who touches her inappropriately. Spankings with paddles and other household implements become commonplace, as does starvation. When Meg tries to get the police involved, it gets a LOT worse.

I don't think I'll tell you about everything that goes on in that dungeon of a basement in Ruth's house. But let's just say it's awful. Pain, humiliation, torture ... it's all there. A blowtorch gets involved at one point. 

I think what makes this as shocking as it is, though, is the way the film starts out following the rhythms of an entirely different and far more tame film. Through the first 15 minutes of this movie, I asked myself how the poster had so utterly failed to capture what this film was about. It wouldn't be the first case of false advertising I'd ever seen, but it might be the most egregious.

And then ... 

Since I've already given you a spoiler warning, I might as well say it: Meg eventually dies of her injuries. It isn't one ungodly thing but the collection of all of them that causes her body to ultimately shut down. 

I was so horrified that of course I went to Wikipedia and read every last bit of the page on the murder of Sylvia Likens, the real-life person on whom this was movie was based. That's not usually something I do. With Wikipedia, they tend to go into so much depth that I usually just get what I need and get out. But in this case, I sat there scrolling on my phone for 15 minutes after the movie ended, gaping in horror.

The real case might actually have been worse. Because a movie just has to give us something to hang on to, we get the satisfaction of our narrator, David, trying to help Meg escape, and acting as a real (though ultimately ineffectual) advocate for her interests. He didn't do enough, obviously, probably because he didn't understand the way these events were escalating and spiraling. I mean, grown-ups know what's right, right? We also get the satisfaction, as it were, of watching David bludgeon Ruth to death with one Susan's crutches.

In the real incident, it's not clear Sylvia Likens had any advocates -- she just had children (including neighbors) who tortured her with greater and lesser relish. Actually, it was girls in the real family who did more torturing than the boys, though I can certainly understand why they would change that for the movie. And the real Ruth, Gertrude Baniszewski, was not bludgeoned with a crutch. In fact, she served only 14 years in prison for this, and was ultimately paroled as a born-again Christian. It's way too good of a fate for her, though she did die (of lung cancer, well deserved) only five years after leaving prison. (And as the death penalty was sought for a number of those involved in the case, she could have easily had worse.)

I don't know exactly how I feel about The Girl Next Door as a movie. On the one hand, being shocked the way I was in this movie is a rare thing. I echo Stephen King there. I'm sure I've been shocked by plenty of other things since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and in fact, I can think of a few right off the top of my head. But the way this movie shocks you is so profound because of the way it creeps up on you. It puts you in David's shoes. He couldn't have imagined things escalating the way they did, and neither can we, given how the movie starts with the catching of crawdads by the river, the playing of innocent childhood games and the riding of ferris wheels.

On the other hand, there's something that beggars belief about the whole thing. Although David makes gestures of trying to help Meg throughout, it seems impossible that he couldn't have told his own parents (his one attempt is incredibly lame) or brought it to the police. Sure the Ruth character threatens all sorts of awful retribution, both to him and to her captives, but how can characters we are supposed to support let such obvious evil go so far?

But perhaps that's why this case was so horrible, frequently referred to as the most heinous that's ever been tried in a court of law in the state of Indiana. You can't believe this happened because even movie characters would never act this way. But movie characters have to be better than real people, I suppose, because above all, director Gregory Wilson wants to preserve our faith in humanity. He tells the story the way he does because he wants it to be possible for us to still see good in the world ... even when certain cases make us doubt it to our core.