Driven away

Australia is, or at least once was, known for letting movies hang around in the cinema for ages. I frequently marveled at how a movie released in March was still available in August, and sometimes commented on it here. (That might be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.)

You know Drive-Away Dolls isn't great when it is already retreating to the smallest screening rooms and way fewer showtimes after only a week in theaters. 

I know Drive-Away Dolls isn't great because I saw it yesterday.

I know Drive-Away Dolls really isn't great because a beguiling performance by Geraldine Viswanathan was only enough to bring it up to two stars. (You can read my full review here.)

There were some lesbians in my audience who seemed to be enjoying it, so I know there is at least a possibility I would have liked it more if I had been giving it the pass you give movies that speak very specifically to something about you. Like as soon as they make the world's first movie about fantasy baseball, I'm sure I will give it five stars on Letterboxd, no matter how shit it might be.

But I'm not going to sit here and berate myself for not being queer enough to like Drive-Away Dolls. I think it's just a bad movie. 

And I guess most audiences do too, considering that my Wednesday showing (after last Thursday's debut) was in the smallest screening room at Cinema Kino, and when I checked the Sun in Yarraville to see if there was a more optimal showtime to catch on my way home from work, I noticed that the day's latest showing had been at 1:45.

It's now another Thursday release day -- Dune 2 comes out today, very exciting -- and Drive-Away Dolls has survived at both of these theaters. It's even got a nighttime screening at the Sun, though only the 6:50 slot, not the primetme slot. 

At Kino, it is playing only once, at 1:20.

So what drove me -- and presumably others -- away from Drive-Away Dolls?

If you followed the link to my review, you already know, but it's two words:

Margaret Qualley.

Like mother, like daughter I suppose -- or maybe, dislike mother, dislike daughter.

I'm not going to make a whole post out of this because I already regret the traction that my post "Anybody but Andie MacDowell" gets. I guess any traffic to your site is good traffic, but the internet seems to have glommed on to my posts that allow them to indulge in some sort of negative take on an actress. My post about Gaby Hoffman gets a lot of engagement, and the one about Andie MacDowell I wrote in 2010 has had 7,835 views and 21 comments.  

The premise of that post was that if anyone other than Andie MacDowell had appeared in two personal favorites -- Four Weddings and a Funeral and Groundhog Day -- then I might like those movies even better. (Though I also ended up saying that if changing a single thing about them made me like them any bit less, I wouldn't risk it.) I got into a few specific things I don't like about her as a performer. I won't rehash them here.

The same things I don't like about Andie MacDowell, I don't like about Margaret Qualley. But Qualley doesn't have a great movie propping her up a bit -- or not one where she plays a central role, anyway.

I saw Qualley in several movies (Palo Alto, The Nice Guys, Death Note) before I really made note of her or her connection to MacDowell. I really like The Nice Guys but I don't even remember what her role was in it. I don't think I had made the MacDowell connection yet either with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I do remember Qualley being one of Manson's crazies, which seemed appropriate since there is something in her eyes I don't like. Interestingly, Sydney Sweeney was also a Manson crazy and I have gone on to love her. Not so much Qualley.

By the time of Claire Denis' Stars at Noon, I knew she was MacDowell's daughter and I really, really didn't like this movie. As one of the two main characters (along with Taylor Swift's ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn), Qualley bore the brunt of my dislike. A similar two-hander -- a lot more of a two-hander than Stars at Noon -- was last year's Sanctuary, parts of which I liked. Overall, it was too much time with Margaret Qualley. She was in a top 12 movie for me last year, Poor Things, but see my previous comments about the amount of screen time she gets. Not much in Poor Things.

And now Drive-Away Dolls, where she's turned up to Nigel Tufnel's 11 with her exaggerated southern mannerisms and cartoonish love of pussy.

I already found a couple creative ways to rip her in that review so I will stop talking about Margaret Qualley now.

Because Ethan Coen also deserves a significant helping of my scorn.

Another observation I made in that review was that if we were to take the Coen brothers' two solo efforts as indications of the sorts of tone each brother prefers, we'd conclude that Joel was more responsible for the direction of a film like No Country for Old Men (which is not one of my Coen favorites) while Ethan would be more responsible for something like Raising Arizona (which is not only my favorite Coen movie of all time, it's my favorite movie of all time). 

The trouble is, there is a far greater range of outcomes for a movie in the Raising Arizona mold. There is worshipping it as I do, and there is hating it, which is how I feel about something like Burn After Reading. Zaniness is great unless it's terrible. 

The zaniness in Drive-Away Dolls is terrible, and Qualley has been asked to personify it from start to finish. (Sorry, I said I would stop banging on about her.)

The final reference I will make to my review is that I said that apparently Joel does not need Ethan but Ethan needs Joel. (I can't be accused of stealing good lines if I am stealing them from myself.) I may not prefer that the output of the Coens is all in the mold of The Tragedy of Macbeth, but that film did make my top ten in 2021. And if DAD is any indication, Ethan may no longer be able to hit the high end of the range of outcomes for this sort of movie.

I'm regretting, now, the decision to stack my chips on a viewing of Drive-Away Dolls yesterday when I might have been better served to use my wife's good graces to get to an opening night viewing of Dune 2 tonight.

Then again, lo and behold, it's February 29th again -- meaning the revival of my tradition, which dates back to 2008, to watch the worst movie I can find.

Tune in tomorrow to see what that ended up being. 

And I hope it's worse than Drive-Away Dolls. I really do. 

Jonathan Glazer's film-per-decade approach

I doubt it could be intentional or likely something he's ever considered -- he doesn't seem like the sort of person to dwell on superficial patterns -- but Jonathan Glazer appears determined to grace us with his talents only once per decade.

"But Vance," you say. "Glazer put out two films in the 2000s, Sexy Beast (2000) and Birth (2004)." (Yes, you include years in parentheses when you speak.)

Ah but did he?

If you believe all those smartypants who wanted to be pedantic when the year changed from 1999 to 2000, the 21st century didn't start until 2001 -- meaning that the year 2000 is technically the final year of the 1990s. No one actually really thinks of it that way, but if you are being as accurate as possible, it's true. (I didn't see and rank Sexy Beast until 2001, but it played festivals in 2000.)

In any case, the point is, Glazer does not make very many movies. And if he were to reveal after making his final film in 2042 that he had purposefully made only one film per decade, I wouldn't be surprised. If Quentin Tarantino can decide he's going to make exactly ten features, Glazer's hypothetical mission statement might not be much different in concept.

Which is why the fact that I didn't love The Zone of Interest is particularly disappointing.

Oh, I started out loving it. For about the first 30 minutes, I imagined the post I'm currently writing would be entitled "The movie that would have been my #1 of 2023." But Glazer made a couple choices in the direction the narrative went that just didn't really work for me. I don't oppose them on moral grounds -- I understand there is some outrage out there about how this subject matter is handled, but I haven't delved into it. I oppose them on storytelling grounds only.

If you want to read my full review now that the film has finally released in Australia, it's here.

Will I now have to wait until 2031 -- or, if we are considering the ten-year gap between Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest to be the new standard, as late as 2033 -- to get another of Glazer's incomparable conceptions of the world we live in?

It's hard to say. I'd hoped to be surprised and go to IMDB and see another project in pre-production. I mean, even Terrence Malick eventually started becoming more prolific, and then he became so with a vengeance. (On the music side, this can also be said for my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.)

Alas, no. And if we are to take his previous patterns as a prediction of future patterns, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with shorts and music videos and other bits of ephemera that occupy a creative person between major symphonies. 

Before I go, I should circle back on two bits of business:

1) You may recall that earlier in the month, I watched the aforementioned Sexy Beast as the inaugural film for my bi-monthly Audient Outliers series. At the time, I stated that I chose to watch that before Zone of Interest, even though I could have worked it out in the reverse order, because if I didn't like Zone of Interest, not liking Sexy Beast wouldn't be such an outlier. If you didn't follow the link to my review previously, you won't know that I ended up giving Zone of Interest an 8/10, only dropping from a 9/10 in the last 20 minutes of the film. (I actually may have dropped all the way from a 10/10, or five stars, in those last 20 minutes.) So at least you know Sexy Beast remains a valid first choice for that series. 

2) This is a potential future entry in another series, Audient Bridesmaids, but as discussed a few days ago in the post about The Prince of Tides, we don't actually know for sure that The Zone of Interest will not win best picture this year. So to save myself the hassle, I'll limit the reference to that series to the two sentences you are currently reading. 

The end of a different Affair

With all my talk of Love Affair and An Affair to Remember two weeks ago on this blog, you'd think Sunday night's viewing of The End of the Affair might have something to do with that.

You'd be wrong, and it would be a different End of the Affair than you might think.

In December I read Graham Greene's celebrated 1951 novel The End of the Affair, which was recommended to me by a friend who called it his favorite book. Since I'd actually borrowed his copy, I moved it straight to the top of my reading list in order to avoid one of those "perpetual loan" situations we all dread. 

I really liked the book. Not a personal favorite maybe, but quite a quick read and quite an anguished look inside the head of a narrator full of jealousy and loathing, which I hadn't remembered being the default condition of Ralph Fiennes' character in the 1999 Neil Jordan film, where he was opposite Julianne Moore. Nor had I remembered the story was so much about spiritual yearning, involving a promise to God and then a desperate urge not to believe in that God in order to break that promise.

Usually when I finish reading a book that has a well-known film version, I watch the film version pretty soon afterward, whether I'd already seen it or not. Therefore, I expected to queue up the Jordan film, which I'd also quite liked, pretty soon after the start of January.

That being my busy time of year in terms of viewings, though, I hadn't gotten to it until Sunday night.

But when I couldn't find it on any of my streaming services, including the streaming service everyone has (Internet Archive), I turned to iTunes, where I noticed not one, but two filmed versions of Greene's novel to choose from. 

Instead of choosing the one I'd seen, I spontaneously decided to choose the one I hadn't seen.

That's the 1955 version directed by Edward Dmytryk whose poster you see above. It stars the always fascinating Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson (whom I've seen plenty of times, but whose films I could not identify without the assistance of IMDB) and perhaps most importantly in terms of clinching the decision for me, Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. 

And I think I liked it even more than Jordan's version.

I wasn't sure that would be the case at the start. Dmytryk's film, from a screenplay by Lenore Coffee, tells the story of Henry and Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix chronologically, which is a departure from a book published only four years earlier. In the book, we meet narrator Bendrix, appropriately, after his affair with Sarah has already ended. From my limited memory of Jordan's film, that's where that film starts as well -- and perhaps one of the reasons Jordan wanted to adapt the material was to correct the "mistake" made by Dmytryk and Coffee. It definitely seemed like it would be the less courageous choice, to feed this classic novel, which at the time was really only a contemporary novel, to audiences in the most common chronology available that they would be able to understand most easily.

By the end of the film, though, I was so wrapped up in the characters, in the performances, and in the choices made to adapt the book that I found myself giving the film 4.5 stars on Letterboxd, half a star higher than the admittedly flawed 4-star rating for Jordan's film -- flawed because I gave it out retroactively, some dozen years after I'd seen it.

Is this one of those recency bias things, or a case of me already trying to stack the deck for next year's "ten best movies I saw in 2024 that weren't from 2024?" Or another sort of bias, the "I just read this book and therefore would be more favorably inclined than average toward an adaptation of it" sort of bias?

Possibly. But Coffee and her director made all the right moves here, which I won't discuss in detail because it's likely you haven't recently read this book or seen either version of the movie, so it would fall on deaf ears.

One thing I am wondering, though, is whether this means there will be one more Affair in my near future. Now it feels like I must rewatch Jordan's version. If comparing a recently read book and its film adaptation is a good exercise on a blog -- or really, just a good cinephile exercise that helps expand your appreciation of the screenwriting process -- then comparing that book with two different adaptations, separated in time by 44 years, is even better. 

Vivarium is so getting that exemption

It's still early in the decade, but increasingly less so with every passing moment.

We've all just started watching movies from the fifth release year of the 2020s, which means there are only five more to go. The fact that most of us have seen only a handful of 2024 movies is what allows us to still think of this as the early part of the decade. A year from now, we will be officially midway. If the 20s were our age rather than an agreed upon convention for denoting the passage of time, first established more than 2,000 years ago based on the birth year of a person who claimed to be the son of God, we'd be calling ourselves in our mid-20s already.

And for an obsessive list maker like me, it causes me to ponder the paucity of serious contenders for my #1 movie of the 2020s. 

It makes for a very interesting contrast with the 2010s. At this same juncture last decade, four of my eventual top five movies of the decade had already been released, and all four of my top four. Only my #5, Tanna, still had its release on the horizon, in the year ending in 6 (2016). Three of the top four were all from the very first year of the decade (2010). 

I can't see the movies of the early 2020s dominating in this same fashion, unless it is going to be a really weak rest of the decade. I've named a #1 film in each of the first four years and I've loved those films, but each time I've anointed one of them, I've recognized that it was not a serious candidate to finish the decade at #1 -- and my secret hope was that none of these four titles would actually penetrate my top ten. They were the best of their year but of course that's all relative.

This is where Vivarium comes in.

I rewatched Vivarium on Friday night for the first time since 2020, having set myself the goal of scrolling until I found a heretofore undetermined title for my Friday night viewing. It didn't take long on Amazon Prime to see Lorcan Finnegan's film pop up and decide it was time for my third viewing. 

Vivarium was, technically speaking, my #3 movie of 2019. This was because I saw it at MIFF in 2019, well in advance of the rest of the viewing public, who saw it on its wide release in 2020 or sometime after that on video. But I gave it five stars without hesitation, and if I had just seen it in 2020 like everyone else, there would have been no doubt of its appropriateness to be ranked alongside all my other 2020 films. In fact, I feel pretty confident that it would have been my #1 movie of 2020, ahead of I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (Though how interesting would that have been as a 1-2 punch of noodle fryers.)

And as I thought about it, I thought Vivarium might actually have taken each of the next three #1s as well, if it had been released in those years. As I write this, I don't actually know whether Vivarium is ranked above or below those movies on my Flickchart, so let's find out right now in real time. I'll list each as a hypothetical duel based on the rankings they already have, rather than making this decision as though it were a live Flickchart duel, and you'll see which one is higher when I present the result: 

Vivarium vs. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Ending Things wins, 182 to 355
Vivarium vs. Our Friend - Our Friend wins, 209 to 355
Vivarium vs. The Whale - The Whale wins, 227 to 355
Vivarium vs. Skinamarink - Vivarium wins, 355 to 408

Not a very conclusive result in what I was hoping to prove, since Vivarium is only fourth ranked out of these five films. 

But I think this does indicate an interesting subconscious bias on my part. I believe the first three #1s of the decade were added to my Flickchart after I had already crowned them the best of their year, meaning I was inclined toward a confirmation bias and to elevate these films into comparatively august positions on my chart. Skinamarink was, if memory serves, the only of these movies to be ranked before it was officially named the best of its year.

In any case, if these movies came up against each other organically, I could see myself picking Vivarium in any of the four duels -- especially now that my third viewing reminded me how great it is. The film may have suffered a mild setback in my personal feelings during that second viewing, in which I think I forced my wife to watch it with me, as that was something I did in 2020 a lot more than I do now. When she inevitably didn't like it as much as I did, I think it made me a little more critical of it.

No such problem on this viewing. I was audibly laughing at twisted absurdities and saying things like "Oh my God," especially anything and everything related to that bizarre little kid. Not really a kid, as Jesse Eisenberg points out at one point, with a resigned sense of loathing: "That's not a boy." In fact, one of my big takeaways about Vivarium on this viewing -- and we might go into mild spoiler territory here -- is that the things that are observing our two protagonists may not be aliens, but rather, AI. That likely wouldn't have been what Finnegan was thinking in 2019, but today, it seems like an obvious conclusion to reach. The ways they get this "boy" wrong are very similar to the way an AI creates humans with extra fingers. This gives the film a whole creepy new interpretation that the director mightn't have even considered, which is one of the things good art is capable of doing. 

I won't go into too many more details about the movie itself because the purpose of this post is not to synopsize Vivarium or specifically to try to get you to see it, if you have not already.

What is the purpose of this post, if I can finally get to it?

It's to remind myself that I did not initially consider Vivarium eligible for the best of the 2020s. Like Agora the decade before it -- a film with a 2009 release year in its native country, but that I didn't see and rank until 2010 -- Vivarium had slipped into that crack between decades, not quite a 2019 movie but not quite a 2020 movie, and because I compiled my best of the 2010s list after I saw it, I felt like it had missed out on its one and only shot.

Now, I think there's a plausible reason to reconsider it -- to call it a 2020 movie even though it is listed on my 2019 lists, and is definitively associated with that release year by my own rules for determining such things. 

You may recall, though it's more likely that you do not, that I considered the Vivarium question in my post for the best of the 2010s. Unlike the other three movies that narrowly missed consideration due to similar release year ambiguities -- Agora, Mother and Mr. Nobody -- Vivarium was the only film that missed because of a future release ambiguity (post 2019), not a past release ambiguity (pre 2010). Here is what I wrote about it:

"The last is a film that had only festival premieres in 2019, including MIFF where I saw it, but for most of the world will be a 2020 film, meaning I have decided to consider it for the next decade even though I have already ranked it in my 2019 year-end list. We'll see how I handle the release year in parenthesis dilemma ten years from now." 

Well there you go. Just as I didn't check my Flickchart rankings before starting this post, I obviously didn't read this previous post, or remember what I had concluded from it, before I started writing either. 

So I had already made the decision that Vivarium could not slip through the cracks between decades, that it would be considered as part of the 2020s, despite the aforementioned disconnect between putting a 2019 release year in parentheses whenever I mention the film, and then including it for a consideration in a decade whose other movies start with a 2 rather than a 1.

Well, maybe not whenever I mention it. As you will see if you are reading this post relatively soon after I've written it, I have decide to challenge my own sense of the rules by listing the release year of Vivarium as 2020 in my "most recently revisited" section in the right margin. It is an ephemeral choice, as it will be gone as soon as I rewatch three more films, but I do it symbolically, out of recognition that, indeed, I am making the decision -- or rather, reinforcing a previously made decision -- to grant an exemption to Vivarium for consideration as part of the best of the 2020s.

Because who wants to get to decade's end and have a top ten bereft of the sorts of movies that decorated that most elite tier last decade? Here is a reminder of those titles:

10. Under the Skin
9. First Reformed
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter
7. Inside Out
6. Like Father, Like Son
5. Tanna
4. The Social Network
3. Rabbit Hole
2. Spring Breakers
1. Tangled

As of right now, all of those movies are better than any of my 2020 contenders, Vivarium included. (And if Vivarium does make my top ten of the 2020s, that'll mean two straight top tens for Eisenberg, star of The Social Network.)

Here's hoping the 2020s will be a backloaded decade. 

A steady progression toward my demise

You know those movie characters who get injured a number of times during the course of the movie, so when they do finally get killed once and for all, you don't feel as great a sense of loss because they were already 85% of the way there anyway?

I kind of feel like this is me since I turned 50. 

First there was the loss of my big toenail on my left foot last November, followed five days later by the breaking of that same toe, which I discussed in this post. This was about three weeks after my birthday, mind you.

Then a few weeks ago, I fell while climbing up a ladder from the water at a pier near my house. I won't get into all the details, but let's just say that a kid behind me literally nipping at my toes caused me to hurry and lose my grip. Fortunately, he was alright. I was not. Even though I thought it was a clean fall, broken nicely by the water, the next day I noticed pains in my left hip, thigh and knee. Yes, that's the same leg as the repeatedly abused toe, whose nail is now a hideous sight that I cover with a bandaid anytime I'm at the beach or in mixed company who are going to have to stare at this monstrosity. Anyway, it took nearly three weeks to feel like I'm close to 100%, although I still have some numbness in my heel and some pain in my ankle that I think were side effects of the original injuries.

What prompted me to write this post, though, was that yesterday, I hurt my back just walking across the room in my house. 

I have no idea what caused this injury. I didn't step wrong. I didn't run into anything. All the sudden it just screamed out at me, and I ended up rubbing some Deep Heat on it.

Just put me out of my misery, already.

The amount of time it takes to fold laundry

In listening to a recent episode of Filmspotting, I became acquainted again with a type of movie co-host Adam Kempenaar has put forth into our taxonomy of movie types: the type of movie he likes to watch while folding laundry.

I totally get the concept, and the movie they were discussing, Rustin, totally fits that description. It's kind of like filler between movies you watch more intentionally. Pleasant, but not a needle mover in terms of movies you will one day consider personal favorites. (Unless, of course, the movie really surprises you, in which case you regret the way you underestimated it.)

I did wonder, though: Exactly how much laundry does Adam Kempenaar's family have?

More than most, to be sure. From having listened to Adam for more than a dozen years now, I've come to learn a fair amount about his family, including the fact that they have (I believe this is correct) four biological children and one adopted child. It could be five biological children. Anyway, it's a lot.

Still, is it enough to spend a whole movie folding laundry?

Even if every piece of clothing every family member had worn during a week's time were washed within a few days of each other and placed in a large pile for folding -- this large pile sits on one of the chairs in our living room in our house -- I still can't envision more than about 25 minutes of laundry folding. Meaning that even in the shortest of movies, you still have to find another mindless activity for the remaining hour.

Plus it's likely less than that, as I am pretty sure his oldest is off at college now. 

I've actually watched a movie while folding laundry before, but in my house, 15 minutes is the most amount of the movie this activity could occupy. Granted, I do have either three or four fewer children than he does.

If I'm really trying to pull off this sort of multi-tasking, the better activity for me is ironing. In my closet at any given time, I have at least ten and probably closer to 15 shirts I never wear because the fabrics that comprise them require ironing for them to be worn for anything more than the most informal occasions. Instead of doing that ironing, I usually just don't wear them.

However, maybe it's time for another good ironing session, which really could take that whole movie, and probably I'd still only have half of those shirts looking good by the end.

Thank goodness for polyester blends, I say. 

Audient Bridesmaids: The Prince of Tides

This is the latest in a periodic series in which I watch best picture nominees I haven't seen, in reverse chronological order.

What does a cinephile do when he's finished all his February viewing commitments by the 20th of the month?

Why, continue a recurring series that hasn't had its latest entry in nearly 14 months, of course.

I haven't progressed very far, in total, in Audient Bridesmaids, since announcing it at the end of March 2022 and watching the first entry (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) a week later. I did get in my second viewing (Ray) that December, but it's been a quiet spell since -- which is an appropriate measure of the distance in time between the 2004 release of Ray and the 1991 release of Barbra Streisand's The Prince of Tides.

(Quick interjection: My viewing of Women Talking last March technically qualified, since the recent Oscar nominations had added a new title to the list -- and in theory, I should watch both of this year's best picture nominees I haven't seen, American Fiction and The Zone of Interest, before I continue in my reverse chronological order. Zone finally releases today so I will get my chance soon. However, we don't actually know that these movies will not win best picture, so they are not technically bridesmaids just yet.)

Why such a long interval? Well of course it was because the 1990s were when I became a cinephile, and particularly obsessed with the Oscars. I might not have seen all the nominees in the year they came out, but you better bet I have gone through and cleaned up the ones I didn't see in the time since, with the two previously mentioned titles being the lone exceptions I had not yet gotten to by the time I started this series.

The Prince of Tides never felt like it required my attention so urgently. It seemed like the classic case of the melodrama that warranted Academy consideration only because of its "important" subject matter, and not because it excelled in any of the areas that a budding cinephile would respect.

What I found when actually watching the movie was that it really made me miss the sturdy, family-oriented drama that contained a blend of trauma, romance and humor -- so much so that I toyed with giving it 4.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Cooler heads prevailed and I ended up with four stars, which doesn't do much to distinguish The Prince of Tides from many of the better-than-average films I watch on a weekly basis. But I know in my head that when the year finishes and I'm posting next year's wrap-up post, this has a good chance to be one of my ten best I saw in 2024 that weren't released in 2024.

Nick Nolte at the very top of his game gives this film a good head start. Known for being irascible, Nolte is often also unlikable. Here, though, he shows us a softer side that's still capable of occasional apoplexy (it wouldn't be Nolte without that), that overall keeps us interested in his every moment on screen.

The same can be said of Streisand herself, not in terms of the irascibility or apoplexy, but in terms of always being extremely watchable. Streisand has always had an uncomfortable relationship with her own beauty or lack thereof; I think of that line of dialogue in The Mirror Has Two Faces (where Nick Nolte is played by Jeff Bridges) where she says "Why put on makeup? It's still me, only in color." Streisand is certainly not a traditional beauty, but maybe a little bit like Lady Gaga, she is just so interesting to watch. Her elegance in this movie approaches beauty, if we are continuing in this superficial realm that doesn't have anything to do with her performance or her direction.

I remember one of the discussion points around The Prince of Tides was Streisand's failure to get a nomination for best director, just the latest indication that the Academy, especially in 1991, was unwilling to recognize the contributions of women behind the camera. This failure could have been one of the key factors in Jane Campion getting nominated for The Piano two years later. The direction here is not exceptional in terms of camera tricks or outside-the-box choices, but the movie is a good reminder that a director also, perhaps primarily, is tasked with getting good performances from her cast. And the performances here are quite good. 

The story is about Nolte's character, Tom Wingo, who is a South Carolina teacher and football coach who is having a bit of a midlife crisis that probably has its origins in the trauma of an unhappy childhood, whose details we will learn as the narrative plays out. Due to his inattentiveness, his wife (Blythe Danner) is having questions about their future together despite having three girls under the age of 13. The timing of her doubts is inconvenient, though, as he's called to New York after his sister Savannah (Melinda Dillon), a poet, makes her most recent suicide attempt. She's suffering under much the same childhood trauma as he is.

In New York he meets her psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein (Streisand), who is trying to learn more about this childhood trauma in order to prevent her patient from trying to take her own life again. They originally butt heads, as is the case in most love stories, and only very slowly does their relationship take on the components of a romance -- a detail the film makes plenty easy to stomach considering that both of their spouses are cheating on them. Because he is not technically her patient, there's nothing gross about this -- though he does benefit from the traditional services of a shrink in getting at his own issues that he shares with his sister. He also helps train her son, an accomplished violinist who wants to be a football player.

I guess movies like The Prince of Tides do still exist, though if you are looking for prominent examples that take the culture by storm, you are going to have a lot tougher time providing them. I wouldn't necessarily say The Prince of Tides was a cultural phenomenon in 1991 either, but being one of only five best picture nominees (at that time), it certainly was a bigger part of the monoculture than it would be today. Today's version of this movie does not get the accolades and does not get generally seen because indeed, we are looking for slightly different things in our movies today. We're looking for movies that are more obviously cinematic and perhaps don't lean quite so much on their score, though I will say that none of these defining elements felt like a limitation to me, and if it's dated, it's only in a good way that reminds me of more idealistic times for cinema.

In a way I myself have been gravitating toward movies like The Prince of Tides recently, finding my own versions, whether they generally receive praise or generally do not. Two of my last three #1 movies, Our Friend and The Whale, are sort of today's version of The Prince of Tides. In keeping with my theory about how times have changed, one of those movies was praised, but primarily for the performance of its lead actor rather than the movie itself, while the other was almost totally unseen, even with three known actors in the three central roles, one of them an Oscar winner.

I wasn't moved to tears in The Prince of Tides as I was in those movies, but the distance of 33 years could have something to do with that. I was, however, aware in every moment that I was watching a really good film that deserved one of those five best picture slots in 1991, and never deserved to be looked down on by me.

Excluding the two 2023 movies I mentioned earlier, my next movie in this series will be 1989's My Left Foot, probably something I should have seen before now just because it was one of Daniel Day-Lewis' three Oscars for best actor. 

Concert movie weekend concluded on Monday

I was ticking off all my remaining February viewing commitments this past weekend, perhaps overreacting to the short month, which is not quite as short this year as it usually is.

Having watched my Blaxploitaudient movie on Friday (and written about it yesterday), yesterday I finished watching David Byrne's American Utopia, which was my monthly assignment for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. I started it Sunday night, expecting to watch it by myself as a thematic rejoinder to having watched the Taylor Swift concert movie on Saturday night.

But then my wife walked into the room near the beginning, and my ideal condition for watching it -- with her -- suddenly came to fruition. She is more of a Talking Heads fan than I am (I really like them but never bought their albums), but usually when I approach my wife with an idea to watch a movie, she suddenly feels the pressure of needing to adhere to my schedule. She knows I don't usually ask her until I have a need to watch the movie in question one of the next few nights -- either to review it, or because I have to watch it during this particular month for commitments on my blog or in the aforementioned series whose acronym I will use on second reference (FFFF). Lately, I've just been avoiding the discussion altogether.

Now, Sunday night might not have been her ideal night to watch it. But since I'd already pressed play, the 48-hour rental clock had already started ticking. As a compromise for what worked best for both of us, we agreed to watch half of it on Sunday night and the other half on Monday -- which was her birthday. (We ended up watching slightly less than half on the first night, since Byrne and company's performance of "Once in a Lifetime," which concluded at the 45-minute mark, seemed about the perfect place to close the curtain after Act 1, if you will.)

I might have been slightly less engaged on Monday night than I was on Sunday night, and that was just enough to knock the whole experience down from a possible 4.5 stars on Letterboxd to 4 stars. I don't want to just hand out 4.5 stars like candy, something I've been guilty of in the past. This at least gave it an additional half-star over Taylor Swift, which felt important to me. I definitely feel like I liked American Utopia at least a star more than The Eras Tour, whose 3.5 rating was probably generous since I was already conscious of coming off as a Swift hater. What can I say, star ratings are fickle creatures.

(And I think the main reason I felt slightly less engaged was the two drinks we had at Mexican dinner, as well as a number of blunders committed by me at dinner, including ordering her the wrong item through the app, and miscalculating the dessert options that would work as a birthday cake. These left me feeling like I'd fumbled her birthday. I don't think she felt this but I can be hard on myself.)

Having emerged from an actual three days of celebrating her birthday in small ways, I'm a bit too burnt out this morning to go into the detail American Utopia deserves. I'll say generally that it was very cleverly conceived and executed and stood out in stark contrast to the performance histrionics of a typical rock concert like the one I'd seen the night before. Byrne always has been a lot more of a dada performance artist type, and both his sense of humor and social compassion came shining through in the Spike Lee-directed film. I did think it would have a slightly more definitive conceptual shape than it did, but I greatly appreciated all the little thematic tangents, which were either delightful or thought-provoking in isolation. 

Plus, it was clear the additional thought that went into staging this with someone like Lee at the helm. I've never been entirely clear the role a director plays in a concert movie, but it's a "final product" sort of thing. I know Jonathan Demme directed Byrne the first time, in Stop Making Sense, in a way that wouldn't have been what it was if more of a hack had been making the decisions. Again, I'm not sure how much of this is Lee's doing, but I was particularly impressed by the number of cameras and camera angles, and how I could never seen any of the cameras in any of the shots.

And now that I haven't watched a movie with a narrative since Friday night, I think I'll take a break from concert movies for a little bit. 

Blaxploitaudient: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

This is the second in my 2024 monthly series watching blaxploitation movies I haven't seen.

It being Black History Month in February, I tasked myself with finding just the right title to watch for this series, but it's possible that effort may have backfired.

It was a bit doomed from the start. Although I reckon there is something empowering about any blaxploitation film, when considered through the right lens, any blaxploitation film is also necessarily going to include disempowering elements that lean into hurtful stereotypes, even if the ultimate goal is to undermine those stereotypes.

My first port of call, among the movies I've already identified in a Blaxploitaudient Letterboxd list, was those that at least also empowered women. But the two different movies I will watch this year starring Pam Grier, Coffy and Foxy Brown, both mentioned drug dealers or pimps or some other unsavory element of society in their brief plot descriptions, so I steered clear of them -- at least for this month. March and beyond, these will be fair game again.

Then I saw there was an obvious option staring me in the face: They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

(Incidentally, in the movie itself, the title is listed as They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! But it goes against my sense of correctness to capitalize only a single word in the title, even to provide the correct emphasis when spoken out loud. At least I include the exclamation point, which my iTunes rental did not.)

This being a sequel to In the Heat of the Night, I never would have thought it could qualify as a blaxploitation movie. But in my research leading up to this series, I saw the 1970 film listed as a "pre-Shaft blaxploitation movie," which implies that Shaft is considered the inception point of the genre. Clearly that assignation would have been given in hindsight, if people were not even talking about blaxploitation at the time it came out. In fact, given that the term was coined in 1972, that's obviously the case. 

Given Sidney Poitier's proximity to the civil rights movement and prominent role in the emergence of Black leading men in Hollywood, I could think of no better choice for Black History Month.

Here's why it may have backfired: 

Most of this cast is white. As is the director, Gordon Douglas.

It's true, Virgil Tibbs and his family are all Black, and there's a lot more time spent with his family, particularly his son, than you would expect in a movie that is largely the case of a murdered prostitute. (Even though I used this unsavory subject matter as a reason to exclude the Grier movies, you can't fully escape it, I suppose, because that's one of the things that makes it blaxploitation. At least Poitier's dignified presence takes the edge off it.)

And there are one or two more other Black characters, one another prostitute and one a mentally slow handyman who discovers the first prostitute after she's been killed. (An opening scene that actually has a bit of a giallo flavor to it.)

In general, though, you've got a bunch of white guys filling out the rest of the cast, including three very familiar faces: Martin Landau, Ed Asner, and Anthony Zerbe, whom I know from a lot of things but who I initially mistook for Tom Skerritt. (Which allowed me to look up Skerritt and remember that he is still alive and kicking at age 90.)

Given that this movie comes only three years after Poitier's watershed twin appearances in In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, it's not surprising that this would still be the sort of template in which he'd be fed to mainstream audiences. This is distinguished from other films considered blaxploitation by the fact that indeed, it would have been clear that the studio wanted the same audience from In the Heat of the Night to watch this. As it would develop, the blaxploitation movement would be a lot more clearly aimed at Black audiences than this movie is.

I said the choice of They Call Me Mister Tibbs! was sort of a backfire, but I don't have any objection to it being included in a blaxploitation series, and am very glad I've seen it. Let's talk about the parts that do resemble a blaxploitation movie.

One is clearly the groovy score by Quincy Jones. It's very seventies, even in only the first year of the seventies. I'm not musically literate enough to talk about the instruments that give away the score's placing within this landscape, but let's just say the score did definitely put me in mind of other blaxploitation movies I've seen, especially the way it gets ramped up and almost over-emphasized in action moments.

And those action moments are also noteworthy in terms of our genre expectations. There are only a few moments where Tibbs has to become a man of action and take out a potential assailant, but given that this was never Poitier's primary mode on screen, they are striking for using karate chops and other moves with heavy genre associations. So while I think the movie on the whole is not so different, tonally, from In the Heat of the Night, these individual moments do set it apart. 

Because I have, up to this point, failed to bring you up to speed about what this movie is about, I thought I should include a few thoughts on that quickly here. Virgil Tibbs and his family have relocated to San Francisco -- reason unknown -- and Tibbs is a lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department. He's called in to investigate the death by strangulation and bludgeoning of a prostitute being protected by her pimp (that's Zerbe), and the prime suspect is a minister involved in the passage of a local proposition for an upcoming vote (that's Landau). In fact, given that the project relates to urban renewal, and the precariousness of the vote is one of the factors why they are being delicate with the investigation, it does make this probably a good choice for Black History Month, at least in that respect.

As alluded to earlier, it's interesting how much of this story is related to Tibbs' family dynamics, specifically the way his son (played by George Spell, whose real-life sister plays his sister in the film) is reaching an age where he's talking back to his parents and even experimenting with smoking. There's a memorable scene where Tibbs makes the boy (Andy by name) smoke a cigar and drink what appears to be some whiskey, which he predictably reacts to by vomiting in short order (since he seems to be about 11). Today, that kid would be taught a lesson in a different way, just because the idea of showing children smoking is so taboo. (Also taboo: hitting children. Tibbs hits a defiant Andy a couple times in this movie, though each time it is a slap on the face that is a very small percentage of his capabilities, which we saw on full display in In the Heat of the Night.)

Overall I was quite impressed with the film. There are some subtle bits of technique on display, and Poitier is brilliant as always. If it does ultimately feel fair to include They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in the blaxploitation genre, only just barely, it is likely one of the finest example of the form in terms of the overall quality of its craftmanship, to say nothing of the caliber of its performances.

Unlike In the Heat of the Night, in which the topic of race is quite foregrounded, They Call Me Mister Tibbs! basically includes no discussion of race whatsoever. It isn't even really an elephant in the room, since Tibbs is generally treated with respect. And perhaps that explains the existence of this and one other Virgil Tibbs film, 1971's The Organization, which I may or may not watch in this series depending on how much it is viewed as blaxploitation: They want to show this character become post-racial, at least for a little while. Mission accomplished. 

Before I leave you, I did want to mention a funny random pickup I made during the film. There's a scene outside a church where you see a lot of extras, and in probably no more than three seconds of screen time, I picked up actor Al White in his first (uncredited) screen appearance.

Don't know the name Al White? Allow me to refresh your memory:

He's the one on the left.

Yep, with just a few seconds' exposure, I picked out "Second Jive Dude" from another movie with an exclamation point in its title, Airplane!

Come to think of it, there may be more blaxploitation in that one scene of Airplane! than there is in the entirety of They Call Me Mister Tibbs!

Supporting Taylor Swift

So what, exactly, does one of the most popular musical artists who has ever lived need with my support?

It's not that kind of support, exactly. I'll explain.

I must have been feeling a little annoyed by all the hype surrounding Taylor Swift's arrival in Australia, which occurred a few days ago, because on Thursday I made my third post on Facebook about it in the space of a couple weeks. Two were about advertised impacts on train travel within the city due to the concert, and one wondered whether she timed the trip to avoid the Super Bowl on the off chance she'd be dating someone who'd be playing in it. (Little did I know that the trip was not timed so fortuitously, as she had already been in Japan and had to fly back to be at the game.)

Here's the one I posted on Thursday, just to get a sense of the tone that was neither nasty toward Swift nor, you will agree, supportive:

"So today riding home there were actual announcements on the train about the big concerts (Taylor Swift) this weekend and about the resulting effects on train service. However, the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, where she is playing, are frequently at capacity for sporting events and other concerts, without such announcements. Just because she's TAYLOR SWIFT, does that mean that the logistics of getting to and from the venue are any different than for other capacity events at the MCG? Does it being TAYLOR SWIFT cause a single person to become more than one person? In actual fact, many of these people will be smaller than your average cricket fan."

First of all, the premise of the post was actually wrong. I later learned that in addition to all the ticket-holding fans -- a record 96,000 and change -- there was expected to be crowds congregating outside who didn't hold tickets but who just wanted to bask in the proximal glow. Hey, you never know when you might catch a glimpse of her. 

But the thing that gave me pause was a long response from one of my female Facebook friends, which I will not include in total but rather excerpts. It didn't call me out per se, like I was the root of the problem, but it wouldn't have run on for several hundred words if I were not meant to take something away from it. Which I did.

Anyway, here are some choice parts of the response:

"I feel like there’s this negativity towards how much girls and women are excited about and enjoying going to see her in concert and my take is that it comes from how - under patriarchy - we are told to not take up space or require men to make accommodations for us the way we accommodate and give space to men."

"To me, if a man really wants equality and for women to be able to take up space and express who they are then they should be flexible and not complain because it not so subtly sends a message to the women in their lives to be less and be smaller."

"How many women in the world don’t care at all about sports but every weekend get their homes ready, plan, shop, buy, cook food for “the game,” don the jersey, etc. all in service of their husband and his friends and their sons interest in a sports team?"

Amen to all that.

I immediately credited her with the excellence of her points and tried to explain that the post was intended as humor about infrastructure more than any judgment against Taylor Swift, which I do think is true, though I understand how it may have come off differently.

I proceeded to tell this woman that I regularly try to convince my wife that Swift has good songs and her music is valuable. I know, I know, it's like being called a racist and then naming all the Black friends you have. But it is true that in our house, it's the man who feels a bit sheepish about this inclination to give Taylor Swift space and the woman who dislikes her and other "divas" who came before her (such as Madonna) on principle. (Hey, she was raised on punk rock, what do you want from her.)

I also told this respondent that I had considered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour this weekend but was worried my wife would frown on it.

Well, Saturday night I made good on my word, so that any little bean counter who happened to see my $19.89 rental fee would know that I, too, want to give Taylor and her fans space.

In truth, I had considered watching this in time for my 2023 rankings, but I couldn't quite stomach the premium rental fee, adjusted cleverly to mirror the year of Swift's birth as well as the name of one of her albums. As you can see from the previous paragraph, that price has not yet come down. However, I also thought, "If not now, when Taylor Swift is actually in Melbourne, and actually physically in the process of giving this performance within 15 kilometers of my house, then when?" 

And, as I said, it's a mea culpa for contributing some small amount to marginalizing this nearly unprecedented worldwide phenomenon. (The precedents my friend listed were Elvis and the Beatles. That tells you something. But in those cases, heterosexual hormones were a big factor as well. Here, not so much, making this display of undying affection potentially unprecedented, full stop.)

I'll tell you something, though: It's sort of hard to watch a concert when you are only familiar with about a third of the songs, and two-thirds of those don't come until hour three of the movie. (I think it was about 2:40 when released to theaters, but there were four extra song performances added here at the end, kicking it up to an even three hours in total.)

While finding myself extremely impressed with the feats of staging and costume changing that The Eras Tour required, I think you need the ability to sing along with and love the songs to really be transported by a concert experience -- and perhaps that is even more true on film. In the arena, the absolute intensity of the vibe can take you places you won't go at home, but on your couch, you are inevitably distracted by your phone and by the fact that there isn't a plot to sink you teeth into. 

On this particular Saturday night, when I'd been out for most of the day on a day trip, I viewed the lack of a plot to be a bonus, especially with the three-hour running time. But I also wasn't in a position to fully disengage, because then I'd fall asleep and miss five songs and not really know if there was something in one of those songs that would unlock the experience for me on the whole.

It's kind of hard to rate this sort of experience. I ended up going with 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, a recognition mostly of the difficulty of the feat they were trying to pull off, Swift's inexhaustible energy and devotion to her fans, and the fact that I do, indeed, quite like about eight songs I ended up hearing. Incidentally, this usually prominent rating for any movie represents a comically small percentage of the star ratings on Letterboxd for The Eras Tour. Just four percent of us (5,621) gave it 3.5 stars. You might not be surprised to learn that 68% (108,018) gave it five stars, with the next two healthiest percentages being 4.5 and 4 stars. I guess Swifties use Letterboxd too. 

As a movie itself, of course there isn't usually anything all that special to an experience structured as just filming songs that occurred consecutively on one night (or a small number of nights). I'd say something like Stop Making Sense is the exception to this rule, but most concert movies exist in service of just giving the songs their best showcase. (I remember people also had good things to say about that other Jonathan Demme concert movie involving Justin Timberlake, so maybe I should watch that at some point.)

The movie was filmed over a number of nights on the final stop of the tour, at LA's Sofi Stadium, and it does have a bit more structure than some concert movies might, as the songs she performed were grouped according to albums. Those album titles would flash up on the screen, so fans got a sense of the era of Swift music they were about to hear before they began hearing it. At first I thought these were actual song names, because both of the first two albums also feature a song by the same name as the album -- or at least a song that says the album name among the lyrics. As it went I got what they were doing, though.

Look, I've always found Swift's songs catchy, but few of the ones I'd never heard did anything for me. This is not something unique to Taylor Swift, of course. For one, big radio hits are big radio hits precisely because they have something propulsive and toe-tapping about them that distinguishes them from the album's filler tracks. But big radio hits have also been played to us so many times that we know them back to front, and that is one of the things you are looking for in a concert. Do I enjoy tapping my toe to "Shake It Off" because it is an inherently good song or because I've probably heard it a hundred times? I reckon a little of both.

I couldn't help, though, thinking that there isn't anything so uniquely charismatic about Swift as a personality or exceptional about her as a songwriter that would elevate her above others in her position who have topped out at a half or less of the fan support that Swift enjoys. It seems to me that reaching her height in a period of maximum social media saturation has something to do with it, as does the fact that she seems more accessible to your average fan than forbears who have been more intentionally confrontational with their choices, such as Madonna and Lady Gaga. I'm not sure there is ever a perfect formula for determining why two artists who offer about the same thing can have wildly different career trajectories.

Oh, and as for my wife's feelings on all this? She just teased me a bit. My younger son brought his device back into the room to put it on charge while I was watching, and my wife joked to him "Don't worry, he's still Daddy, even if he is watching Taylor Swift."

I wouldn't have given Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour 3.5 stars if I weren't glad I watched it. And a lot of the songs were in my head last night as I slept, as the concert definitely infiltrated my dreams in a way that feels scrambled and difficult to remember in the morning.

More than my experience of the film itself, though, I'm glad I contributed some small amount to proving I'm not an obstacle to the amount of space women and girls deserve to take up in the world. 

Ryan Gosling loves Emma Stone a lot

On Friday I was playing a game of CineNerdle (discussed here if you don't know it), and one of the pivot answers -- in other words, an answer that helps you get the name of two different movies -- was "Ryan Gosling loves Emma Stone."

And I suppose if you do play CineNerdle but you haven't yet played Puzzle #469, this is your SPOILER WARNING.

The spoiler is: Neither of the movies was La La Land.

With an average worldwide score of 4.1 out of 5 for this particular puzzle, that told me that on average, players were getting better than four of the five movies. But I could only conclude one of the two movies that this clue ended up applying to, that being Crazy Stupid Love.

I ultimately did the desperation move that you do when you don't know the answer, where you start randomly moving around tiles until you get the yellow indicator that you have three in a row and only need the fourth. As it turned out, I got the three in the row on the first try so easily ended up solving the puzzle, even though I had not seen the movie in question.

That movie was Gangster Squad, which I still haven't seen even though I have actually written about it before on The Audient.

Anyway, the takeaway was that not only have these two actors already appeared together three times in their careers, but that in each of those three movies they were in a relationship.

Should we begin thinking of them as the modern-day Hepburn and Tracy?

Probably not, but I did find it interesting that they have this sort of professional relationship, because we don't really talk about them as actors who are known for appearing together more than once on screen. I guess people don't really talk about Gangster Squad much in general. (I only talked about it when anticipating its release, wondering whether we'd get the good version of director Ruben Fleischer that we saw in Zombieland, or the bad version that we saw in 30 Minutes or Less. I obviously never bothered to find out.)

I did a quick run through the rest of Gosling's filmography on IMDB and concluded that Stone wasn't in any of his other movies, and since I did Gosling I didn't need to do Stone.

I did wonder, though, who they could have played in each other's movies over the years, while still meeting the requirement of being in a relationship.

Stone could have been:

1) A Barbie, though after Margot Robbie there wasn't really any room for other A-list actresses, and Stone would never have been cast as Stereotypical Barbie;

2) A blow-up doll that Lars falls in love with, though that would have required even better acting skills than even Emma Stone has;

3) Micelle Williams in Blue Valentine (best fit, probably);

4) The Ana de Armas hologram in Blade Runner 2049, or

5) Neil Armstrong's wife.

Honorable mentions: Carey Mulligan in Drive, Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond the Pines

Gosling could have been:

1) Duncan Wedderburn, indulging in his fondness for comedy by playing a foppish rake;

2) Jonah Hill in Superbad;

3) Bradley Cooper in Aloha (best fit, probably);

4) Spider-Man, or

5) Joaquin Phoenix as a stand-in for Woody Allen? (Irrational Man)

Honorable mentions: Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight, Andrea Riseborough in Battle of the Sexes?? A cartoon caveman in The Croods or its sequel??

Anyway, this has been fun. 

Movie milk

I was walking back to my office from getting my bagel on Wednesday -- the bagel place that had been closed for a year! -- and I noticed this excessively large quantity of milk outside the movie theater downstairs from my office.

And I thought:

"What the hell does a movie theater need with that much milk?"

Now, this is a fancy movie theater and they do make coffee. But as far as I know, they do not offer milkshakes, bowls of cereal, chowder made on site, macaroni and cheese, any of the other things you can imagine requiring an excessive quantity of milk, or even milk by the glass.

Even if you do suppose they are getting in this much milk just to steam it for lattes, it begs the questions:

1) How many people are taking a coffee into the movie theater? If there's one time when you want not to let your bowels take command of you, it's entering into a darkened theater for two hours, one that you can't afford to leave without losing at least five minutes of plot.

2) Even if they do make a lot of coffees at this theater, wouldn't it be better to get a dozen or so bottles and then order a dozen more, rather than getting 30 and risk dumping half of them because you don't use them by the expiration date?

However, I'm going to give the good people who run Cinema Kino the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not stupid. They wouldn't make this sort of order if their usage patterns didn't justify it. Especially nowadays, you can't expect to be profligate and still succeed in the movie theater business.

I guess it just surprises me that this is, indeed, the sort of order they would require on a regular basis.

Maybe they need so much because whoever is delivering it is just leaving it outside the front door, hours before they open, so passersby are only too happy to help themselves to a crate or two.

My favorite title of 2024

I know it's only six weeks into 2024 and I know I will be presented with a lot more titles before the end of the year.

But can anything beat this one for its combination of humor and a probable description of what the film is about?

Without looking at a plot synopsis, I can imagine that Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person features a main character, a vampire, who doesn't want to murder to drink the blood she needs to survive, so is looking to hook up with potential candidates for an assisted suicide.

Given that the film is French, it may not be that straightforward, but it will surely use this at least as a jumping off point.

I'm imagining that the main character ends up developing a relationship, romantic or otherwise, with the person who responds to the ad, actual or otherwise. Which of course makes the suicidal person want to live, maybe, creating problems in the relationship.

Or, perhaps the idea is explored that if a vampire drinks your blood, you don't actually die but become a vampire -- a vampire who is just as depressed as when they were still a person. Which also complicates the whole situation. 

In any case, I want to see it. Great titles are a rarer breed than you would think. 

Watching my Valentine's movie before Valentine's Day this year

There's being committed to watching movies at thematically appropriate times and then there is just being stupid.

Last year on Valentine's Day, I tried to convince my wife to watch Roman Holiday, the second movie in my monthly Audient Classics series, with me. She wasn't interested, so I watched it by myself.

Stupid, I told you.

As it turns out, my wife would have been interested in something else -- if you follow me -- only I didn't read the room correctly. We had not had a special dinner and though we did have a cocktail while starting our latest puzzle, it seemed to me that Valentine's Day was effectively being treated like any other night.

I won't make that mistake again, and to prove it, I watched the overtly romantic classic film on February 13th this year.

That film was Love Affair, a title I had heard before, but only got on my radar as something to watch because I saw it pop up on Kanopy the other day. One of my unofficial benchmarks for it being the new movie year -- yes, I'm still talking about "new and old movie years" -- is that I need to watch something truly classic, and a film released in 1939 seemed to fit the bill. 

Only as I started watching, and not until around the midway mark, did I realize Leo McCarey's movie has the same plot as An Affair to Remember -- which is in fact a remake of Love Affair, released 18 years later. Interestingly, both films are directed by McCarey. It's like when Alfred Hitchcock remade his own The Man Who Knew Too Much.

An Affair to Remember is the one that gets referenced in Sleepless in Seattle and arguably has the bigger stars (Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, as opposed to Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, the former of whom I'm not sure I knew). But I think I ultimately preferred Love Affair. There's just something so sympathetic about Dunne, and Boyer is very sympathetic for a Frenchman. (Sorry, any French readers who may be reading this, but your people are often portrayed as snooty or as unrepentant playboys.)

This is sort of a funny analysis because I think Kerr is great and Grant is probably my favorite classic actor among men. I just looked it up on Letterboxd and I also gave An Affair to Remember four stars, so whatever difference there may be between them, it's small.

And now that this is out of the way, I can enjoy Valentine's Day tonight totally unencumbered by my love of the cinema. The love of my life deserves my attention tonight.

Audient Outliers: Sexy Beast

This is the first in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I'm revisiting a single film I didn't like by a director whose work is otherwise a hit with me.

When I went to look up to see whether Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast was available on any of my streaming services, I came up with a funny result on Netflix.

(I'll waste some space here so when I paste the picture in, it will steer clear of the proper Sexy Beast poster and will not create a layout headache for me. You can't post a second picture too close to the first picture or else the text doesn't look right. Just trust me as I continue to type nonsense here that you can either read or not read, as you see fit. Discuss amongst yourselves. Here, I'll give you a topic: the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman.)

When you put that search term in Netflix, you get this amusing result:

What looks like an alien saying "Oh behave!" left me curious, for sure. But when I saw it was a TV show rather than a movie, I passed on the longer commitment and just satisfied myself with posting the picture here.

However, I did think there was about as much chance of me liking a TV show about naughty aliens as there was of me liking Glazer's 2001 feature debut, which stands out in stark contrast to Birth and Under the Skin, both of which I adore. I suspect I will also at least greatly respect, if not love (can you really love a film about the Holocaust?), The Zone of Interest, which doesn't release here until the 22nd of this month. In fact, I had considered holding this viewing back until after I'd seen it, but I decided to watch Sexy Beast first for two reasons: 1) February was ticking along and I needed to start watching movies for this, for Blaxploitaudient and for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, and 2) If I watched Zone of Interest and didn't like it, well then, Sexy Beast isn't really an outlier anymore because then I don't like half of the man's feature films.

(By the way, I looked up Sexy Beasts and it's a reality dating show where people don elaborate makeup to prevent appearances from being a major factor in determining their chemistry when they are on a first date. Interesting idea. Maybe I'll watch it after all. Rob Delaney is involved, which helps.)

Well, if the intention of this series is hopefully to find something in these films that I didn't find the first time, we're 0-1 so far.

The problem with Sexy Beast is what it was back in 2001: Don Logan.

It's a name that's supposed to strike fear into the hearts of men, and their women. In fact, that's what happens when Jackie (Julianne White) and Aitch (Cavan Kendall) show up at dinner with Gal (Ray Winstone) and Deedee (Amanda Redman), looking ashen, like presumably they've just had an argument about one of the many things couples argue about. Instead, it's that they got a call from London just before leaving their house, from someone wanting Gal to come back for "one last job."

So what? Gal seems to say. "I'm retired." Yep, we've already seen what Gal spends his time doing: baking in the Spanish sun as he lies, oiled up, by his pool. 

"It was Don Logan."

Record scratch.

Now Gal looks like he's about to throw up.

The problem, then, is that when Don Logan shows up to make the offer in person -- an offer Gal can't refuse, I suppose -- he's Ben Kingsley playing a petulant baby given to stomping his feet and throwing temper tantrums.

Now, I should pause here to say that there are lots of different ways a character who's supposed to be frightening can be frightening. The only truly menacing character in this film, Ian McShane as Teddy, comes by this by never blinking, and by letting the silences turning his conversational opponent into a quaking puddle of nerves. In fact, I'd like to have seen this movie with McShane as Don Logan.

Kingsley? He stomps his feet and throws temper tantrums like a petulant baby.

Not menacing. Never was.

And because of the odd structure of Glazer's film, we have to watch this behavior for about 50 minutes of an 88-minute movie. Or at least, up until the 50-minute mark, starting maybe at the 20-minute mark.

A menacing character should barely need to lift a finger to accomplish his goals. If there is a threat about what a character will do to you, you shouldn't be able to turn him down a dozen times, and actually force him to head to the airport without knowing whether you're actually going to do the job he wants you to do. And the fact that you look extremely scared while repeatedly rejecting him just makes it all the more of a disconnect. If you are scared of someone, you don't reject their request even once.

Because of the way Kingsley plays Don Logan and the way Glazer asks him to play Don Logan, I immediately lose all my bearings of what Glazer wants to convey about this world. It would seem Glazer is showing us that a gangster can never really be retired, because there is always someone trying to pull you back in -- someone who holds something over you that compels you to be pulled back in. Glazer presents two different metaphors for this in the film, one a massive boulder that rolls down the side of the hill and lands in Gal's pool, nearly hitting him (which would have killed him), and one a six-foot rabbit-like creature that looks like it has been chewed up and spat out, who shows up in Gal's dreams as sort of a grim reaper figure with a gun. (In fact, I was thinking about how when this came out in 2001, it was the same year as the six-foot rabbit in Donnie Darko.)

His non-metaphorical version of the idea that you can never really retire? It's a petulant baby yelling "No no no no no no!," whose big transgressive act is to pee on Gal's carpeted bathroom floor.

There is what I would call a fairly useful 25-minute stretch at the end of Sexy Beast that features the job in question -- in which Gal does participate, but not under the conditions Logan would have wanted. It's got a lot of McShane, who is great, and it's an interesting set piece for a robbery, as it involves safety deposit boxes and men in scuba gear. There are also some techniques in here that preview some of the camera movements and editing we'd see later from Glazer, specifically in Under the Skin.

But even this portion of the film feels like a weird footnote, after Glazer had already chosen to spend way too much time on Don Logan, including an odd tangent where Logan refuses to put out his cigarette on a plane, is taken to be questioned, then accuses a male flight attendant of groping him. It's only because of this episode that he remains in Spain at all.

And even this portion contains some narrative bits that don't make any sense or are unexplained, like how they pull off a heist involving scuba gear while remaining essentially unnoticed, and like why Teddy does a certain thing he does to a certain character who hasn't come into the story before now. (Don't need to go into spoiler territory as such.)

One thing I appreciate about Birth and Under the Skin is how Glazer does not feel as though he needs to explain everything that's happening. But in the genres those films are in, that's much easier. In a film that is effectively a descendent of the Tarantino style -- a milieu in which Glazer probably doesn't naturally see himself -- plot and narrative connectivity are far more important. You might say a heist film, which this is for its last third, demands that sort of logistical clarity even more, just so we understand the stakes of the heist and have an idea what failure would look like.

I started this piece with a funny picture of a TV series with a similar title. As I was looking up Sexy Beast on IMDB to get some of the names of the actors, I found another TV series with the same titles -- and based on the same characters. That's right, only two weeks ago, what would appear to be a prequel to the movie Sexy Beast began airing as a TV show, with the same characters as younger men.

I just don't understand this. Whatever any individual viewer may get out of this movie, I can hardly see how it can be viewed as a cohesive whole. Mileage may vary on the individual components -- I happen to not really like any of them -- but as a complete unit, Sexy Beast is a first film showing some promise in its very kindest interpretation. 

I just don't think Glazer thinks of himself as this kind of filmmaker. There's a reason he didn't try to become England's next Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn. He had bigger things on his mind, and I think he would consider this a career outlier too.

And now that I have seen Sexy Beast twice, I'm glad I don't ever have to see it again.

This time I knew about the four years

I knew my next viewing of my favorite movie of all time, Raising Arizona, couldn't be completely organic after I wrote this post back in 2020.

At that time I discovered that quite by coincidence, my previous viewing had been almost exactly four years earlier, and the one before that had been four years before that. These three viewings were all within a two-week span from the end of February. The one before them was closer to five years, but it was less than five years so it was still within that every-four-years pattern, for the most part.

Having written that post, I knew that when it came time for the next viewing, I would be too conscious by half of either continuing the streak or purposefully deviating from it.

However, the fact remains that when I started to get a Raising Arizona itch about a week ago, I did not specifically remember when I'd written the post linked to above. About four years ago seemed right, as I said that was the sweet spot for how often you should watch your #1 movie -- enough to maintain your high level of familiarity with it, but not enough to burn out on it. But I could only confirm the last date by looking it up, which I did only after I'd chosen Saturday night as the latest viewing of my highest ranked film on Flickchart.

Sure enough, this adds Saturday night into a viewing chain that now looks like this:

2/10/2024
2/29/2020
3/13/2016
3/3/2012
6/2007

(As I said in the previous post, I only started recording the dates of rewatches in 2006, and for the first 18 months I only recorded the month, not the actual day.)

I went a little early this time, according to the pattern -- but I guess that just contributes to whatever organic part of this there is. 

Probably next time I'll be one step more aware of all this, and I'll recall that I happen to watch this movie in leap (and presidential election, and Olympic) years. But maybe I'll forget that too and have another sort of organic desire to watch Raising Arizona in 2028.

About a third of the way in, I did wonder if I'd gone too early in a different way. I have recently thought about how it might be time to show my kids Raising Arizona, as the subject matter is mostly inoffensive and they might enjoy some of the wildness and physical humor. I'd be breaking my viewing schedule of Raising Arizona in a big way if I end up just sitting down to watch it within them again later this year.

But on this viewing, I noticed a funny thing -- which continues the notion that you have new takeaways from favorite films on each new viewing.

Namely, Raising Arizona uses the word "fuck" -- but only once.

Nowadays, unless you are doing it for effect -- as they did in the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie -- being in for a penny of "fucks" means you should be in for a pound. If you decide to introduce the F-word into your movie, thereby introducing the rating restrictions that will likely accompany it, you might as well make it one of the colors you come back to regularly on your painter's palette.

Nope, Raising Arizona uses it just once: "So he's got his sandwich in one hand, and the fucking HEAD in the other." Thank you, M. Emmet Walsh.

This didn't offend my delicate sensibilities, but it did remind me that we try to prevent at least the younger of my sons from a knowing exposure to f-bombs. Which in turn reminded me that Raising Arizona is not, at its core, designed for kids who are only ten and 13. (Though interestingly, 13 was the exact age I was when Raising Arizona came out, and I know I did see it in the theater. That said, it was certainly not my favorite movie when I first saw it, and I was probably a little perplexed by it.)

When you've got something good, it makes sense not to go too early on it. When you've got a wine that will reach its peak taste in 2028, don't drink it in 2024. Wait until 2028.

So maybe that will be the best time to show Raising Arizona to kids who will then be 17 and 14. Or maybe I need to wait further still, to see if they consciously embrace cinema as an art form, which will mean they have a specific hunger for all the wonderful examples they haven't yet stumbled over in their array of age-appropriate fare. The stakes are too high to get this wrong. If I show it to them at just the right time, maybe they'll get exactly what it's doing and it will become a personal favorite for them too.

Hey, I know I'll be watching it every four years, and one of those chances will probably line up just perfectly with their specific stage of maturity as young viewers.

It occurs to me also what an interesting stretch of time it has been since I last watched Raising Arizona.

During my last viewing, COVID fears were just starting to dominate the news and nothing had been shut down yet. March 2020 was when everyone started locking themselves into their homes, so the last day of February was right on the eve of that. This was followed by all the racial strife in the U.S. as well as the blessed defeat of Donald Trump in the presidential election. Another year of significant COVID restrictions followed, and we have spent the last two years finally working our way back to normal. I guess I'm hoping the next four years will be a bit less fraught -- and will also not feature Donald Trump in any significant way.

Before I leave you, I did want to touch briefly on the artwork I've chosen for this post. 

As this is now the eighth time I've specifically tagged Raising Arizona on my blog -- only eight? -- I've previously used variations on its poster enough times to run out of good options. (In addition to never repeating a subject for any of my posts, I also never repeat artwork.) So I wanted to choose a picture of H.I. McDunnough in that awesome shirt.

If anyone knows where I can get this exact shirt, please let me know, because I would wear it often enough that everyone would whisper about whether it was the only piece of clothing I owned, like what happened to Marge Simpson that one time. 

By the way, if you go only on mentions of my favorite film and not on official tags, the number jumps up from eight to 47. That's more like it, and represents an average of three times a year in the 15-year history of this blog -- a frequency far more befitting of a #1 movie.

So I may only watch Raising Arizona once every four years, but it's always in my thoughts.