The un-fridging of Shelly

Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Crow (2024).

Alex Proyas' The Crow, now 30 years old, may be dated in some respects, a fact I discovered when I watched it earlier this year for the first time in about a decade. (Of course, I also managed to retain a good 80 percent of my original affection for it. That's how these things tend to work.)

But the single element that dates it the most is its status as a textbook example of the woman who gets "fridged," who therefore spurs her vengeful lover (or in some cases, father) to kill anyone he can get his hands on.

If you are somehow not familiar with this concept, here is what Google's AI has to say about it:

"Fridging is a literary trope in which a character exists for the sole purpose of being killed, assaulted, or otherwise harmed in order to serve as an inciting incident that motivates another character's journey. Fridging is most common with female characters, but male characters can be 'fridged' too."

This was clearly the sole purpose of Shelly, Eric Draven's girlfriend in the original The Crow, who is seen only in flashback after her death at the hands of murderous creeps (who also rape her). There may be a very brief scene of her death in real time -- I can't be sure, even though I've seen this movie at least five times, and as recently as five months ago -- but if there is, it's brief indeed. She does actually get a last name, Webster, which is more than I thought they gave her when I went to look it up on IMDB. However, I had never had occasion to look up the name of the actress before. That's how little Sofia Shinas is in the movie -- just long enough for us to appreciate that she and Eric had the sort of intimacy that was passionate and fun, which is screenwriter shorthand that allows us to feel the pain of her demise despite getting to know her not at all.

This was not a complaint of mine about The Crow when I saw it. We did not yet know, then, that fridging was bad. In fact, we did not yet know what fridging was. If I have a complaint about that now, it's primarily because I know I'm supposed to think it's bad. 

Look, it's not that I exactly love the idea of a female character whose only purpose is to drive our hero to revenge. It's not great agency and it's not great representation, and it's as one-dimensional a use of a female character as another trope we've learned about since The Crow, the manic pixie dream girl, who exists only to jolt the protagonist out of his spiritual malaise and awaken his passion for life and capacity for love. 

But I am also a romantic, and I do consider a person seeking revenge for the death of his beloved to be pretty romantic. 

Anyway, Rupert Sanders' remake of The Crow knows that this cannot be the only dimension of Shelly Webster in 2024, any more than Shelly can exist only to be saved, or only to put on a quirky hat and dance in the rain.

The 2024 Shelly -- who gets no last name on IMDB this time, but then again, neither does he -- is played by FKA Twigs. Or that might actually be FKA twigs. I can't tell you how close I once came to writing a post called "Who or what is an FKA twigs," but saved myself at the last moment from seeming as old as that would have made me seem. In trying to remember her name a few days ago, though, I said to myself "It was something like Twirl Forks." I got most of the relevant consonants in there, with a few extra.

Anyway, Twigs has been around long enough for me to probably know who she is, but I've just missed crossing paths with her. She's only been in one other movie that I've seen, Shia LaBeouf's Honey Boy, though she's only credited as "Shy girl" there, so probably not someone I would have taken note of.

I don't think it's relevant that Twigs is more famous than Sofia Shinas was when she appeared, oh so briefly, in the original Crow, in terms of determining how much more screen time she gets. I just think it's a different time. And though you can't escape that her character has a fridging aspect to it, it's as unfridgelike of a fridging as you will see, especially when we really get into spoilers.

For starters, we meet her before we meet Eric (Bill Skarsgard), which itself is a significant change from the original in terms of determining whose story this might be. I mean, it's still Eric's -- he's the Crow and he's the one who is going to be around for most of the movie. But we learn from the start that she knows something that's going to get her killed, based on a video that her friend sent to her, and she needs to go on the run. And while she's on the run, she literally runs into a cop, dumps a bunch of pills on the sidewalk from the sheer force of the collision, and is summarily sent off to jail.

She gets rehab instead of prison, and there she meets Eric. And she and Eric exchange moony eyes there. They also eventually escape rehab, a sort of spur-of-the-moment decision that occurs out of desperation, when Shelly spots some bad people coming to see her, people she knows are connected to the video and also had her friend killed. So then there is also a section of the film when they are hanging out in a crash pad, further establishing their budding soul connection as they do some drugs and smoke some cigarettes and develop a relationship we are invested in.

And so it is that I checked the clock, and she is not killed -- suffocated with a bag around her face, as is Eric -- until the 35-minute mark of the movie. That's significant improvement on the offenses usually associated with a fridging. 

I have to say, though, that the useful thing about a fridging from a screenwriting perspective is that it's efficient. The screenwriter has a whole raft of ideas of what to do with the hero and his adversaries that occur only after he's resorted to vigilantism. The fridging is the necessary evil that gets us there, that makes us believe -- nearly instantly -- that any righteous revenge he exacts will be fully justified.

I did like the way we see this relationship form between Shelly and Eric in the new movie, but I don't know that it actually made me believe more in the righteousness of Eric's revenge. In fact, it's possible it made me believe less, and maybe that's a good thing even though it is probably not what they intended. When we don't really know someone, it is easy to believe that they are perfect, and we don't need to have spent 15 or 20 minutes getting sick of how perfect they might be and starting to disbelieve it. We just have the same idealized memory of perfection that the protagonist has.

This Shelly is far from perfect. In fact, she's done something that she believes will be disqualifying of Eric's love, so she has not told him what it is. (When we find out, it's something sort of silly that's related to the movie's main antagonist, played by Danny Huston, which is a big deviation from the original Crow and is one of the film's more puzzling and unsuccessful attempts at forging its own distinct identity.) So though we do know her now more as a person, we are maybe less inclined to believe that the death of this particular person could be the sort of heightened tragedy of a typical fridging scenario. Probably the right thing, I suppose, but a bit less primal in terms of the feelings we're supposed to be feeling in a movie like this.

Twigs continues to appear in one choice I did like in this movie, where her body is seen sinking through water toward the murky depths from which there is no return, and his is still buoyant enough to be between worlds. He'll swim down to try to reach her, but knows he cannot go too far or he can never return to complete the unfinished business in front of him. 

But then we start to learn about the ultimate un-fridging, which is that there is a chance to save Shelly.

Now, male heroes are not supposed to save their female love interests in 2024, either. But I suppose if the character is technically dead, the movie might get a pass. You can't have very much agency when you are already dead. 

But once the notion is introduced that it might be possible to save Shelly, well of course that's going to happen, just as sure as Chekov's gun is going to go off. I didn't really believe it, possibly because there was no saving the original Shelly, but indeed, Eric pulls off some kind of soul switch -- a deal he made in the process of trying to kill all the other people who had been in some way responsible for their deaths -- and she awakens, gasping for breath in the apartment where she was plastic bagged, as paramedics attend to her and Eric lies dead next to her. 

(The most fun part about this The Crow, though, is the scene at an opera that involves all those deaths, of seemingly 20 men in tuxedos with guns, many of whom buy it in fashions that are gruesome enough that I never thought this movie was going to go there. Never mind that no one in the opera can hear about six dozen gun shots occurring just outside where they are sitting.)

I suppose it was inevitable that the only way to fully un-fridge a character is not to have her end up being dead at all. If this movie had had the courage of its convictions, Eric's revenge would have been enough, would have allowed Shelly's soul to rest in peace over the carnage of a million bad guys. (You can sense some ambivalence in the snideness of this remark.)

But it's 2024, and all refrigerators are now going to be slapped with tariffs. The tariff for remaking The Crow in 2024 is that in the end, there is no one to avenge at all. 

A swift change in the availability of The People's Joker

Last week, I wrote a post about my Letterboxd watchlist, and talked about how some titles carry over for one or maybe even two years, if the movies don't end up debuting in the year in which I added them. (Remember, I use this as a hitlist for current year movies to try to see before I finish my rankings.)

The People's Joker was one of those movies that might have carried over two years. Or maybe I removed it from when I probably would have first heard about it back in 2022, and then added it back when it materialized again -- in a limited manner of speaking -- earlier this year. In any case, it started on there a long time ago.

Knowing that Vera Drew's guerilla film, in which she views her own trans coming of age through the prism of trademark-protected Batman characters, would likely be sued out of existence, I always thought of it as a weird little curiosity that might never see the light of day. That might be why I removed it the first time, probably at the start of 2023 when I reloaded for that year.

But then earlier this year, the movie reared its head in a discussion on Filmspotting, where both hosts had high praise for it, I think both eventually including it in their top five movies of the year so far, which they released back in June.

While they were discussing it, though, I got a sense of its scarcity. They touched on the film's legal issues only slightly, but they mentioned they had to go to some obscure location to see it -- like not even the craziest arthouse cinema in their home city of Chicago, but rather, some out-of-the-way theater in some small town in Wisconsin you've never heard of. And even then it was only playing a few select dates as part of a very limited run, like maybe once on one weekend and then again two weekends later.

And again I thought to myself: "I'm never seeing this movie."

Lo and behold, I was checking out Cinema Nova's offerings for the post I wrote on Wednesday about The Substance, and wouldn't you know it? The People's Joker was playing once each day at 4:20. (A cheeky drug reference, that, though the movie only talks about the imaginary drug Smylex, and doesn't fit the traditional description of a stoner flick.) And it might have only just started this week, because the Wednesday night show was at 8:30, followed by those daily 4:20 screenings -- which gave that showing the sense of that single premiere session theaters sometimes show, usually on the night before the general release.

So immediately I started figuring out how on Thursday, a day I go into the office, I could end my day a bit early and hightail it over to Carlton to Cinema Nova in time for that 4:20 show. I'd be in the right part of town to pull it off, though I might need to catch an Uber.

It wouldn't necessarily be a great look with my family, since my various trips to the theater recently have sometimes caused trouble -- I got the start time wrong for Wicked on Sunday morning, for example, meaning I didn't make it home until nearly 2:30 in the afternoon, well into our traditional project time. But I thought "This might be my only chance to see The People's Joker, and if it's only playing at 4:20, then that's when I have to go."

But then I checked on U.S. iTunes and it's already available for rental for $4.99.

So in the space of about 24 hours, I went from thinking I might never see the movie to watching it in my own living room. 

And what a fortuitous turn of events it was.

For the third time in the past five days, I have seen a movie that becomes an immediate contender for my top ten of the year, after Wicked and The Coffee Table. I better slow down or all the movies that were previously in my top ten might find themselves on the outside looking in. 

I say pretty much what I want to say about The People's Joker in my review, so instead of rehashing myself, I'll just link to it here. 

I don't think I am in danger of a fourth tonight, though, as I finally sit down for the slightly thematically similar The Crow. I love the original of that film, of course, but I have not heard great things about this all-time box office flop ... except from one guy who thought it was decent, so who knows. 

Substantial

I haven't written very much about one of my favorite movies of the year, Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, but while riding home on the train today, I thought it was high time I should. 

At least extratextually, like in terms of the kind of phenomenon it is, if not so much about the movie itself.

(If you want to find my glowing review, go here.)

My train ride takes me past my favorite local cinema, The Sun in Yarraville, as the back wall of the building faces out directly on the train tracks, with only a parking lot in between. They use this back wall, smartly, to advertise to people on the train. 

But they don't just put up any old posters of any old movies that are playing there. For a long time, they had a large, horizontal advertisement up for The Hateful Eight -- like, years after its release -- because they would periodically still show it, due to retrofitting one of the auditoriums with a 70mm projector in order to play the film properly. In fact, they did such a good job that Quentin Tarantino, Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson all showed up there for a screening early on in the film's run, to take questions from the audience. I know some people who went to that, and in fact, some people who were going to go but didn't -- no one knew these three would be there until they got there -- and are still kicking themselves today for that choice. Heck, I think they might still show The Hateful Eight occasionally today. 

But when it's not something like that, usually it's something like the 72-hour James Bond marathon they had, at which I saw the final three Bond movies I needed to see to become a completist, just about exactly a year ago. 

Right now, the poster for The Substance is occupying its fair share of the available real estate, suggesting it is also a phenomenon in its own right, something they are proud to trumpet to the world.

This is significant because The Substance has been out for more than two months now. That's almost unheard of these days, even in Australia.

I say "even in Australia" because what I noticed when I first got here was that Cinema Nova in particular -- that was my local cinema where I used to live, and still a preferred cinema before they stopped accepting my critics' card -- would still be playing movies that came out four or even six months ago. But that was before the streaming revolution. That was before the shortened windows between theatrical and home release, which sometimes nowadays are as short as no time at all. As those two trends gathered steam, the release windows for all movies started to conform more to the standard thing you see in the U.S., where a movie is gone inside three weeks unless it's a real hit. And if it's a real hit, maybe it'll last five weeks.

The Substance shouldn't seem like it has any chance to be a real hit. It's an extreme body horror with a brand of satire that not everyone gets or appreciates. To stay in cinemas for two months, it should have to hit all the quadrants, as they say in Hollywood, and also be really acclaimed. 

The Substance has the acclaim part, despite some notable detractors. But that subject matter? Yeesh. It's a challenge. Could it be that Demi Moore is just that much of a draw? Do we miss her that much?

I don't think two months is the cap on this movie's run here, either. Yes the Sun only has a single 8:30 showing tomorrow night, which is Thursday -- which means it has survived another new release day and guaranteed itself at least one more week. But really, it's a hard R, so the afternoon showings are probably not super packed anyway. 

But the Sun is not the only place still showing it, not by a long stretch. Both Cinema Kino (the one downstairs from my old office) and the aforementioned Cinema Nova are still showing it. Kino has only one one additional show beyond the evening show, that at 3:50 in the afternoon, but Nova has it programmed five times a day -- impressive considering that the movie is two hours and 20 minutes long. Heck, the first show is at 10:25 a.m. just to get them all in.

As a reminder, this opened on September 19th. 

I can't explain its enduring popularity with what has to be a wide swath of the viewing public, but I'm glad for it. It means that when it ends the year very high on my chart, I won't be getting all the raised eyebrows people gave me when I elevated a horror movie they'd barely heard of, Skinamarink, all the way to my #1 spot last year.

Similarly, every time I hear a critic talk about how The Substance might actually be anti-feminist, given that it has these extended leering shots of Margaret Qualley in particular, and I start to feel the guilt of the male gaze, I am reminded a) that this is a female director, and b) that for crying out loud, this movie is still worth programming, in a business that is more reliant of its bottom line than it ever has been, an entire 69 days after its release. (Huh huh, huh huh.) It must be doing something right. 

Something about this wild and woolly shot of cinematic adrenaline, gross imagery and excoriating commentary about beauty standards and Hollywood has resonated with people. And I don't need to question it any more than that.

OMG (Oh my Grande)

There is a familiar process I go through in terms of accepting "frivolous" pop stars as people I can consider useful and extend my grudging respect. 

First comes the awareness. At first awareness, I am usually wary. Showing me as the old man that I am becoming -- though I'd say I've been doing this even since someone like Britney Spears came on the scene -- I immediately write them off as proof of the poor taste of young people. I tend to consider them as staking a claim to some percentage of our collective attention that they do not deserve, through spectacle that covers up poor craft -- even when this does not accurately describe their public persona. I brand these people as flashes in the pan, and think less of anyone who cannot see that.

Then I hear a song that I like a little bit. There's almost always at least one song by every pop artist that I like a little bit, even if I don't love their total output. The ice starts to thaw.

Then they've been on the scene for five years, and I decide they are not flashes in the pan, but potentially artists with genuine staying power. They are also five years older, so they may seem more mature to me, less reliant on showy displays designed to call attention to themselves.

After ten years, they are cultural mainstays who have done at least a couple things to ingratiate me to them, and I accept them. 

This has happened with people like Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Harry Styles, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Selena Gomez. (I haven't gotten there yet with Miley Cyrus, perhaps because I've found her to become more ridiculous as she's gotten older.) Usually their appearance in a movie or TV show helps get me over the hump, because now I am allowed to think of them as a "serious person."

Ariana Grande has been around long enough for her to have graduated through those steps, but she has not. My initial distrust of her validity stuck with me. Perhaps part of that problem is that I never found that bit of her music that broke through, possibly because I could not, as I sit here today, tell you a song I know for sure that she sings. Chances are she has made music that I like, but since I don't know that it belongs to her, it has not helped her join the ranks of those I respect. Then there's still the stain of her relationship with Mac Miller, that rapper who died of a drug overdose, since I understand their relationship was tumultuous. I don't know much about that just as I don't know what songs she sings, but it left a negative impression on me. 

Enter Wicked.

There are countless breathtaking adjectives I could use to describe Wicked, which I absolutely loved. But rarely does my breath escape me more -- in only 48 hours since I've seen it -- than when talking about how good Ariana Grande is in this movie. 

To establish a baseline, I had no previous experience with Wicked as a cultural institution. I knew what it was about and some of the ways it was about it, plus I am familiar with its big number "Defying Gravity." But the rest of the songs, and the individual plot moments on the path to where the story is obviously going, were unknown to me.

So I did not have Kristin Chenowith or Idina Menzel (Adelle Dazeem) to compare Grande or Cynthia Erivo to when I watched Wicked. (Both original Broadway stars make cameos in the movie.) Erivo is also great, but I've chosen to focus on Grande in this post because Erivo was first introduced to me as an actor (in Bad Times at the El Royale), so she never had to go through any part of my personal vetting process for pop stars. 

Therefore, Grande's portrayal of Glinda the Good/Galinda was, as far as I was concerned, wholly her creation, and what a creation it is.

There are certainly sympathetic elements of Grande's performance, especially as the movie goes on, but the thing that struck me was how perfectly she walks the line between a self-centered brat who fails to notice how she's projecting to other people -- possibly because they lap it up -- and a person capable of actually being good, rather than just "performing goodness." And for most of the movie, even after she has achieved some sort of redemption, she's still a frivolous rich girl batting her hair and eyelashes.

But this frivolity -- unlike the frivolity I initially loathe in a pop star who's newly introduced to me -- is absolutely chef's kiss.

A friend has told me Grande was a drama kid from way back, but this does not show in how she's spent her career so far. Opting for the undoubtedly greater financial rewards of music, she has become a pop megastar. In fact, if you go through her credits on IMDB, 90% of them are her own music videos. The only time I believe I have seen her on screen was when she played a pop star, if memory serves, in Don't Look Up, which I liked, but still found her contribution at least mildly annoying.

If she has chosen now to unleash herself on the rest of us who aren't teenagers or weren't when she made her debut, then it is to our great benefit. 

In my review of Wicked, which you can read here, I likened her to Lucille Ball. Am I getting carried away with myself? Possibly. But I just couldn't think of a better comparison for her combination of physical comedy, excellent line deliveries and just overall ability to make us laugh.

It's there in every look she gives, ever flipping of her hair -- a character trademark -- and every recomputation of her circumstances, which she uses her whole body to produce. She pulls off being absolutely vapid while also not making us hate her. They could have chosen to make her a Regina George, but she isn't that, and the story is all the better for it. She is literally learning empathy as she goes, having never previously in her life been confronted with a situation that actually called for it, and it was one moment where she displays her newfound skill this that actually made me tear up. Even within that context, though, she's still a self-centered brat, and that's a smart choice.

Words are escaping me to properly explain why Grande is so good here. She just executes every moment perfectly, which is a credit also to her director, Jon M. Chu.

And because I'm not doing such a good job saying what I want to say, I invite you instead to just go see Wicked, if you haven't already. Small spoiler alert: We'll have more of her Glinda/Galinda to look forward to with the release of Wicked: Part 2.

And so Ariana Grande has belatedly arrived to my respect, with a bullet. May she continue to flourish, though it's hard to know if she'll have regular opportunities for more roles like this, or if she'll even want/need them.

After all, pop music pays very well. 

A spoiler review of The Coffee Table

WARNING: You absolutely should not, must not, read the following post if you have any intention, at any point in your future, of watching a 2023 Spanish film called The Coffee Table, directed by Caye Casas. (Which qualifies for my 2024 rankings by being released in the U.S. in 2024.) Probably that means almost no one should be reading this post, but I will write it anyway, to be discovered by future generations.

This isn't actually a review I could write anywhere, because there is no publication that could tolerate this level of reveal about a movie that relies on the relatively early surprise of what it's about. But I can write it here. That's why we have blogs. However, it won't always conform to the way I usually write reviews, since I'm allowing myself additional latitude anyway. 

One more WARNING before I start the review proper.

Okay here we go:

Every new parent's worst fear is that their baby will have stopped breathing. You can't put your child down for a long nap, or especially the full night, without wondering about any little change on the baby monitor, any suspicious silence that might be confused for the cessation of his or her heartbeat. It's terrifying and you don't really get over it until they're at least a year old. 

And during that time, you have at least one night when you become 100% convinced the baby is dead. It might just be a sick feeling in your stomach. It's certainly just paranoia, because most likely any actual deaths caused by SIDS catch the parent by surprise. But if they sleep 30% longer than usual, or if there are no noises for a long period of time, or any other scenario your sleep-deprived brain can imagine, you have this conversation with yourself at least once: "Okay, my baby may be dead. But if I go in to check right now, it won't change that fact. All that means is that I will find out this horrible thing that much sooner. So I might as well enjoy these last fleeting hours before my life becomes a permanent waking nightmare." 

It's like Schrodinger's baby. The baby is simultaneously alive and dead. 

Caye Casas' The Coffee Table is about trying to preserve that innocence for just a little while longer -- when one of the parents knows the baby is dead, but the other does not. 

How did this baby die? Well it all came down to a coffee table.

Jesus (David Pareja) and Maria (Estefana de Los Santos) are out shopping for items for the decor of their new apartment, with their infant son Cayetano. Jesus didn't like that name, but Maria chose it, just like she's chosen almost all of their furniture. She promised Jesus he could select the coffee table, but now that he's gotten one in his sights, she wants to renege. It's a tacky glass tabletop propped up by the naked bodies of two gold female figures. They're relatively tastefully designed nudes within the context of nude table legs, but overall, still tacky. 

They argue about this, but he ultimately wins out, in part due to the irresponsibly aggressive sales tactics of the salesman (Eduardo Antuna). Among other things, the salesman tells them that he shares a name with their baby boy -- it's an unusual name, so that's doubtful -- that he himself cannot afford such a fine table (but that it's also a bargain), and that the glass top is absolutely, 100% unbreakable. This last seems to seal the deal. 

She's still a bit fuming about the turn of events when she gets home, so she goes out to clear her head and get some stuff at the store. Meanwhile, he's assembling the table, whose glass top must be screwed in. Because one of the screws is missing, he calls the store and asks them to deliver an extra. Meanwhile, he's looking after his son solo for the first time ever, and the baby is shrieking his head off. 

Um, hold that thought. 

We see Jesus and the baby disappear from view as father tries to calmly shush his son. We hear a loud crash. We see broken glass flood into view. And we see -- details thankfully spared -- a small corpse on the ground, which we soon learn has no head. 

At first we think papa has succumbed to a temporary moment of insanity, when he just could not handle the screaming and had to make it stop. After all, we know, because he told his wife earlier, that he thought the timing of having children was bad. (A perspective that was certainly disappointing to her, since she appears to be on the wrong side of 40.) 

But no, we learn it was just a terrible accident, involving a sheet of glass the salesman had told him, not an hour earlier, was unbreakable. 

After five to ten minutes of Jesus breathing heavily and staring in shock, the thrust of the narrative shifts to Jesus' attempts to -- well, not to cover up that this has happened, exactly. Not to find a plausible alternate explanation for how his baby became headless, though obviously the thought went through his mind. But maybe just to delay the inevitable discovery of this most apocalyptic of tragedies for parents, as he decides whether there is any way he can continue living. 

And let's just say that Maria -- not to mention his brother (Josep Maria Rivera) and his brother's new 18-year-old girlfriend (Claudia Riera) -- spend quite a lot of time in that apartment before they know anything is wrong other than the fact that Jesus cut his hand badly on the broken glass of the tabletop, therefore explain the large patches of blood on the carpet that he failed to successfully scrub away. In fact, the irony of this turn of events gives Maria the heartiest, most prolonged bout of laughter she has had in some time -- and very possibly the last one she will ever have.

It's absolute agony -- the most exquisite sort of agony -- to watch these characters and their separate understandings of what's actually going on. In the most excruciating twisting of the knife, all part of this film's extreme sense of black comedy, Casas continually adds triggering new turns of events for Jesus. Not only does his wife admit to their guests that their son is reason for life to be worth living, but his brother lets slip that his young girlfriend is pregnant, and they can't wait for the new little girl to play with her cousin Cayetano. 

Pareja is a revelation here -- pale, confused, and knowing that his need to delay the inevitable is powerful enough that he simply has to fake some version of normalcy while potentially the remaining moments of his entire life play out. Yes, he is steadily convincing himself that suicide is the only option. But he can't quite let go, wildly trying to imagine if there is any escape from the irrefutable realities staring him in the face. 

Although less is required of the other actors as a result of their less intense understanding of what's going on here, each performance is also a minor miracle of its own. In de los Santos we see a woman living through the last moments of normalcy of her life, aware only that her husband is acting a little strange and that it's surprising to see him so cautious about not waking the baby from his nap. The scenario is so shocking that it almost seems like the actress herself should be unable to play these scenes so blithely, knowing what the script has in store for her. Then there are the guests, who are just in the flush of young love -- well, she's young anyway -- and impending parenthood, and never thought this day would contain anything more than an afternoon of festive eating. 

And because Casas does have such a wicked black comedy streak, he complicates the situation with a 13-year-old neighbor who has a crush on Jesus. This girl -- who first sees them in the hallway with her mom while they are taking the coffee table up the stairs -- apparently thinks she has some sort of relationship with Jesus, as evidenced by the fact that he liked one of her Instagram photos and she made an attempt to kiss him on the elevator, which he dodged. He likely should have immediately told his wife that this happened, but he did not, and now she's insisting that he tell her about "them." If you don't think this is going to factor in to the finale of the film, you haven't been paying attention to basic screenwriting logic.

We know Maria and the guests are going to learn about what happens, we just don't know how. This is the only part of the movie I won't spoil, and it's the only part of the movie that takes it down from a perfect five out of five stars to only 4.5, since the actual reveal might have missed by just a little bit. Then again, perhaps just being what it's about, the horrible thing it's about, would prevent it from ever attaining a perfect score, because my God. 

I wanted to see it, I just don't remember why

Letterboxd has seemed to take a leap forward recently in terms of usage, or it could just be because two of my ReelGood writers have just started using it and have started to randomly tell me things like they were surprised about my 2.5 star rating for the original Dawn of the Dead. "Yeah, I don't like it that much," I told them. "But I love the remake and Night of the Living Dead."

One of the features I like most about Letterboxd came into focus for me last night when I watched the Australian film Birdeater.

Birdeater has been on my watchlist for some time, and only because I'd seen it on my watchlist regularly as I scrolled through the list did I know I wanted to watch it, when I saw it pop up on Amazon Prime, and that it would count for the current year's film rankings.

See, I use my watchlist as many people do, I assume, which is to add a movie they hear about somewhere so that they can remember later on that they wanted to watch it. My modification of that standard process is that I clear mine out each year after my list closes, in preparation for the new list year, leaving only those movies I had added but which had failed to get released that year. (One example that will carry over from 2024 to 2025: Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17, which was once thought to be coming out in 2024 but now will not debut until next year.)

The only trouble with this system is that I often forget why I added a film to my watchlist in the first place. 

I would not say I am particularly choosy about what I add, but I do have my standards. I'm not going and adding every film that shows up as a future release on Netflix, in part because there's less a chance I will forget about them, but in part because only a small percentage of them seem like must-haves, while many others are filler. My watchlist is no place to keep track of filler.

But even with those standards, the list can be quite long, full of quite a number of titles I don't expect to ever get to. Just to give you some idea, Birdeater was the 125th film I've seen this year that I will count for my year-end rankings, and there are still 81 titles remaining on my watchlist. (A movie leaves your watchlist once you've chosen a date you watched it and/or submitted a star rating for it.) If I were to rank 206 films this year, that would be more than 30 higher than my previous record, and of course there are films I'll see before the end of the year that I have not even heard of yet. 

This is perfectly expected. I'm adding movies throughout the year, when I see a trailer for them, when I hear them talked about on a podcast, when they're listed as part of a festival lineup, when they're personally recommended to me. 

But after the initial point of contact, I often forget why I added them in the first place. And as I later discover that movie in the wild and am watching it, I can only trust the earlier version of myself from that moment, and assume he knew what he was doing when he added it to the list.

This was the experience I had last night as I was watching Birdeater. I certainly did not remember that Jack Clark and Jim Weir's film was Australian. That eventually gave me the key to determining why I added it, but initially I was stumped. I don't hear a lot of Australian films being discussed on my movie podcasts. It's possible I could have gotten it as a rec from one of the writers discussed in the first paragraph of this piece, but it didn't seem familiar.

There are clues to be had from the placement of the film within your watchlist, though. Unless you purposefully re-order the watchlist, which I never do, it shows the oldest movies you added first. If you find that you added a certain movie right around the time that you added another movie -- and you remember why you added that other movie -- there can be useful context clues. Then again, since the movies do vanish as you see them, this can also be of limited value.

So I decided to review Birdeater's positioning on my watchlist to see if that helped solve the mystery.

Because I've never shied away from being a bit ridiculous on this blog -- and because it's something you can read fairly quickly -- I'm going to include my entire current watchlist below, listed in the order that I added them, so oldest first. (It actually appears on Letterboxd in the reverse order, newest first.) I'm just going to give the titles, not the directors or (obviously) poster art, because that most closely approximates the experience of actually scrolling through the list, where you have often forgotten who is directing a movie or why it was significant to you in the first place.

Also worth noting: At the time I added these films, I was also not checking to ensure their release dates qualify them for my current list, according to my own specific rules. I always check the release date before I actually watch the movie. As I'm going through now, I see some of them with a year 2022 after them. That could still represent a true journey between their first debut at a film festival and the time they were available for the general public to consider, or they could just be wrong. 

The End
Kraven: The Hunter
About Dry Grasses
La Chimera
The New Boy
Birdeater
Club Zero
Nosferatu
Presence
Wolfman
The People's Joker
Mufasa: The Lion King
Mickey 17
Out of Darkness
Back to Black
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Lisa Frankenstein
The Crow
One Love
The Great Escaper
Glitter & Doom
The American Society of Magical Negroes
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
The Antisocial Network
Janet Planet
The Grab
Evil Does Not Exist
Aggro Drift
Gasoline Rainbow
The Dead Don't Hurt
Horizon: An American Saga - Part 2
I Used to Be Funny
Good One
The Coffee Table
Am I OK?
Anora
The Apprentice
Mothers' Instinct
Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution
The Bricklayer
Problemista
A Real Pain
The Surfer
Kill
Cuckoo
Heretic
Ezra
The Beast
Teaches of Peaches
Afraid
Sing Sing
She Loved Blossoms More
Kneecap
Reagan
Survive
War Game
Conclave
Pavements
Close Your Eyes
Paddington in Peru
Slingshot
We Live in Time
The Outrun
The Front Room
Piece by Piece
Emilia Perez
Omni Loop
The Piano Lesson
Nickel Boys
Blitz
Apartment 7A
The Life of Chuck
Color Book
Greedy People
Carry-On
The Room Next Door
Dahomey
Red Rooms
Nightbitch
The Critic
A Complete Unknown
Joy

The last two of which were added just yesterday. Of course, I had heard of The Complete Unknown -- the Timothee Chalamet-starring biopic of Bob Dylan -- but had not previously added it to the watchlist.

The oldest film on the list, Joshua Oppeheimer's The End, is worth calling out here as a specifically funny example. This movie has been on my watchlist since at least 2022, and possibly before that. I hope it is not an indication of the film's quality, but I heard about it at least two years before it was ultimately released. IMDB does finally say its U.S. limited release will be in two weeks, so whether I see it or not, it's going off the list one way or another.

Just to give you a sense of how murky it can get, of the 82 titles above -- my earlier number of 81 was correct, but I have not yet logged Birdeater for the purposes of this experiment -- there are a full 26 titles whose origins on the list are completely unknown to me, which means I don't know who's directing them or why I added them in the first place. That's nearly a third, and it does include Birdeater, for the purposes of this analysis. 

However, the unique placement of Birdeater on the list was instructive in terms of figuring out the origins of the self-recommendation. 

There are only five titles ahead of it, which means there is at least some chance it carried over from 2023. My process in late January each year, especially with titles I don't remember, is to check IMDB to see if their release date disqualifies them from the upcoming year, which is usually if the movie has already gotten released in the U.S. If it has not, it stays on the list. So Birdeater was probably also unknown to me at the end of 2023, and it stayed on the list as not having yet gotten released in the U.S. In fact, it possibly still has not gotten released in the U.S., as the IMDB release date area is incomplete, not even showing the Australian release of the movie.

If I first heard about it in 2023, that means either someone was talking about it on an American-based podcast well in advance of its release -- not likely -- or an Australian friend had recommended it -- not likely because it did not get released outside of festivals until 2024. But that last qualifier is the clue to what it really was: It played at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2023, and though I obviously did not see it, I must have considered it strongly enough to add it to my watchlist.

This is somewhat unusual. There are certainly plenty of times I've added a movie based on seeing it was playing at MIFF, but that's usually because it's my first time hearing about a new movie from a celebrated director, which I know will factor in to the year-end conversation in terms of best of the year. It's not because two Australian directors I've never heard of have made a movie with a provocative title. But indeed it did play at MIFF, and clearly it intrigued me enough to make the cut.

So how useful was it to have Birdeater sitting on my watchlist for something like 16 months?

In the end, not terribly. I try not to hold Australian films to the same standards as their Hollywood counterparts in the same genre, though of course in many cases they end up better, and it's their comparative authenticity that gets them there. However, there were a few problems that kept me from fully connecting with Birdeater and in fact from fully following what was going on. The largest of these was that the mix between the music and the dialogue was off, such that any time someone was talking over the music, the music was really talking over them, and I couldn't hear what they were saying. The movie does me no favors in that at least a couple of the characters have fairly heavy Australian accents, meaning that even after 11+ years in the country, even I could not understand everything they were saying. And then there's the fact that what I did follow about the story came up short of my expectations. From that title you might expect sort of a grotesque horror replete with animal guts, but this leans a bit more toward a heightened social drama than a genre exercise, to its detriment.

But the point is not the quality of Birdeater, which I gave a Dawn of the Dead-like 2.5 stars, because adding a movie to your watchlist is certainly no guarantee that you will love or even like it. It just makes a good case study of my use of my watchlist, the occasional shortcomings of that use, but the overall crucial role it plays in helping watch a wide array of potentially relevant films before I tell you what I think of all of them in mid-January.

Bridget Savage Cole is not Brigette Lundy-Paine

Warning: This post has little to no purpose, other than that I feel like giving my fingers about three minutes of exercise.

Last night I watched the new (not that new) Amazon film House of Spoils, from Blow the Man Down directors Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole.

But as I was waiting for their names to come up in the credits, all I could think about was that it was Brigette Lundy-Paine who had co-directed the movie.

Likely that was partly because I was conflating the Lundy part of her name with the Krudy part of Danielle's name. But the larger share is that both of those people have a first name of Bridget (with varying spellings) and a two-part last name (one hyphenated) where the first part has one syllable and the second part has two. (The "Savage" might be a middle name. But they both have a two-part "non first name" in their credit.)

Of course, Brigette Lundy-Payne is actually the star of I Saw the TV Glow and Bill and Ted Face the Music, and she looks like this:

Whereas Bridget Savage Cole is an increasingly prominent and accomplished writer-director, who looks like this:

And that's really all I have to say about it.

See? Told you reading this was not worth your time. 

Baboon shamed

One thing I'm envious of that other writers have, but that I don't think I really have, is their ability to talk about things in detail. Whereas I might say there was a dog walking down the street, they'd say there was an auburn cocker spaniel walking down the street. While I'll give the generic, they'll give the brand, and this goes to things such as fabrics, types of clothing, cars, types of metal or other solid material, etc. etc. The list goes on until I hang my head in shame.

I'm really hanging my head in shame today over my inability to name the sort of simian that appears in one of Gladiator II's fight scenes.

In my review -- which I am not willing to go back and change -- I described these creatures as "these sort of man-sized, hairless monkeys fed with a dose of the rage virus from 28 Days Later." And while I regain some little bit of pride from the apt cinematic reference, I can't shake the awkward way I described this animal while lacking the vocabulary, or at least the recognition, to explain what it actually is.

Which is a baboon. 

I discovered this while randomly reading another critic's review, and then I thought "Well duh, of course it's a baboon." (I also discovered from this review that I had spelled "Colosseum" wrong -- for some reason believing, without any inclination to even check it, that it was spelled "Coliseum." This I did change in the review.)

But it wasn't like I could just note my failure and move on. Oh no. The next day, while listening to a podcast, I heard a random ad that made mention of a baboon. Not only that, the ad specifically made mention of it in the context of the person, a child, not knowing what the "monkey with the funny butt" was called. That might give me comfort, or it might mean that I have a child's inability to parse the taxonomy of primates. (As you might guess, it had the latter effect.)

It could just be that I don't think about baboons very much. I must think about orangutans more. If Lucius Maximus Aurelius (I think that's his name) was fighting an orangutan in Gladiator II, I would have named it as such. Plus there's the whole thing where these digital baboons are such insane, artificially enraged creatures that any link to real creatures in the animal kingdom was severed.

The larger point, though, is not that I failed to identify a baboon as a baboon. It was that I lack one of the tools in the writer's toolbox.

I feel like I am observant, which I share with most writers. What I don't have is the ability to name things. Whereas I see a sweater, they see a cashmere sweater. Whereas I see something as metal, they see it as an aluminum-copper alloy. The rule of three dictates I give another example, but frankly, it's just too depressing.

If I were a fiction writer creating scenes from whole cloth -- though don't ask me what kind of cloth -- this might be a bigger problem than it is. The finer details are not always required in a review, and if you notice a moment where you think the writing would benefit from it, you can always google to find out what material it actually is, and look like you knew it all along.

Still, it makes me feel dumb that I can't do this better, though I also don't know how to improve it. As I collect items from the world in my head, like anybody does, do I need to make more of an effort to evaluate their core properties and store that away too? But how can I decide something is a cashmere sweater if I never knew what cashmere was in the first place?

I'll survive this. A baboon is just a baboon. But I would like to get better at it, somehow.

Editor's Note: I posted this on Wednesday morning, and Wednesday night I attended a talk by cultural commentator Jon Ronson, in which a baboon was also mentioned. I can't escape. 

Top ten sequels to best picture winners

It's been a minute on this blog since I've sat down to do some sort of top ten list. What was once the bread and butter of this blog has taken the back seat (to mix metaphors) as I have taken a more "catch as catch can" approach to blogging over the past, I don't know, decade. (My second son was born a little more than a decade ago. This could explain it.)

But the release of Gladiator II prompted me to decide to get back in the driver's seat, to return to the second part of my mixed metaphor. (Or to start slathering butter on the bread, to return to the first.)

So I decided to go through and look at all the sequels to best picture winners that I've seen, and decide which were the worthiest and least worthy. Or more correctly, to isolate the worthiest, meaning the least worthy will get shut out of discussion altogether.

Sorry Gladiator II. No spot on this list for you. 

(So if you want substantive discussion of Gladiator II, you can check out my review.) 

I ran into a tricky issue right away. While it would probably not surprise you to know that the vast majority of best picture winners have no sequel, there's one that has -- count 'em -- eight sequels, all of which I've seen. 

How to handle all the offspring of the 1976 best picture winner, Rocky?

Ultimately, I did include them all separately for consideration. If I only included one, I might not get to a top ten at all. 

First, though, just to give you a bit of an idea what we're up against.

I wouldn't say that I am familiar with all the possible sequels that may exist for the more obscure best picture winners. But as far as I can tell, no best picture winner had gotten a sequel until 1944's Going My Way had The Bells of St. Mary's come out the following year. I haven't seen The Bells of St. Mary's, so it won't be up for consideration on this list, and I didn't even know about it until I started research for this post.

It then takes all the way until 1967's In the Heat of the Night for there to be another BP winner to get a sequel, which is They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! -- making it the first BP sequel, chronologically, that I've seen, since I watched it only this year for my Blaxploitaudient series. The phenomenon becomes a little more common after this, but still not especially so. The French Connection in 1971 gets a 1975 sequel, which I also have not seen, and then of course The Godfather follows the next year, and we know what happened there.

One thing to clarify before we get started. I don't consider Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to function as a sequel to the 2003 best picture winner Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's a separate franchise and in any case, it wasn't solely the success of the best picture winner that prompted its existence.

So I have to say I started writing this post before I knew how many options there actually were to choose from. As I have now done that tally, I have seen 15 sequels to best picture winners, more than half of which are Rocky movies. 

So let's just make it a top 15.

15) Rocky V (1990) - The worst Rocky movie is easily the worst best picture sequel (that I've seen). No two ways about it.

14) The Godfather Part III (1990) - Nineteen ninety was a bad year for best picture sequels. It's likely Godfather III is not as bad as I remember, but I'm not eager for a second viewing to find out.

13) Gladiator II (2024) - I have to admit I came in a little biased against this film, because my former colleague at ReelGood told me beforehand that he hated it and would give it a 0/10. Having watched the film, I don't understand where that sort of vitriol comes from except this guy is given to extreme dislike (not so much to extreme like) and that he's younger than I am, so the original Gladiator was a foundational movie for him. But I don't think it's great. 

12) Hannibal (2001) - I remember the first sequel to Silence of the Lambs (I've only seen the two Hannibal Lecter sequels that feature Anthony Hopkins) having some unforgettable material -- like, the appearance of Gary Oldman's Mason Verger is permanently burned into my brain -- but that overall it's a bit all over all the place.

11) Creed II (2018). I'm not sure if the first sequel to Creed (which of course is itself a sequel to Rocky) truly belongs outside my top ten, but I am putting it here in deference to two other films that have just one sequel and therefore likely would have made my top ten, for the sake of variety only, if I had been going for only ten movies. Given my affection for the first Creed, I really wanted to love this movie, but it just pales in comparison.

10) The Evening Star (1996) - One of only two sequels on this list that we would not consider to be part of a franchise. The sequel to Terms of Endearment was fine, as I recall. I think I may have seen it before I saw Terms of Endearment. 

9) They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! (1971) - The other non-franchise sequel. This really has nothing to do with In the Heat of the Night, as it only features the main character, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), spun out into a blaxploitation progenitor that takes place in San Francisco. It's pretty good, not great.

8) Red Dragon (2002) - I do not have significant memories of the second Silence of the Lambs sequel except that I remember I thought it was better than the first.

7) Creed III (2023) - Creed III may not be four slots better on this list than Creed II in terms of real-world quality, but there's an indistinct middle section here where the difference is negligible between the movies. A slight improvement on Creed II, it still convinced me that we don't need any more Creed movies.

6) Rocky IV (1985) - That this movie ranks as high as it does is an indication of a) how few good best picture sequels there actually are, and b) how this movie has gained in cultural cache over the years. I still think I've only seen it once, and I think about it more for its gloriously absurd extremes than for actually being a good movie.

5) Rocky II (1979) - I only saw this for the first time in the past few years, and in fact, it was the final Rocky movie I saw -- or close to it anyway. (I can't remember if I saw it just before or just after Creed III.) I think this movie gets sort of retrospective respect applied to it because it was the movie that likely allowed this series to continue as long as it has. If the first sequel had not worked, that might have been the end of it. And so it paved the way for three Rocky movies still ahead on this list.

4) Rocky Balboa (2006) - It seems unlikely that the sixth Rocky movie is quite as good as I remember it. After the disaster that was Rocky V, I didn't prioritize seeing this in the theater and eventually caught it on a plane. But I really enjoyed it on that plane, and it might be the Rocky movie I am most interested in revisiting just to interrogate that reaction.

3) The Godfather Part II (1974) - Blasphemy. Utter blasphemy that this would not be #1, you are probably thinking. But here we take a big jump upward to a truly beloved top three. Then again, maybe I can't quite call the second Godfather movie -- itself a best picture winner -- "beloved," which is why it does not beat out the two movies ahead of it. Infamously, the first time my wife and I watched this movie -- neither of us had seen it as recently as the late 2000s -- we watched it out of sequence, putting in the second DVD before the first. I eventually saw it correctly sequenced, but I think by then I had already missed the boat on loving this movie. What can you do. I can only ever give you my true perspective on the movies I see.

2) Creed (2015) - My #2 movie of 2015. I eventually watched this four times, including twice in the theater. It did lose a little bit on each viewing -- not a lot, but a little bit -- so it failed to scale the heights to the top of this list. 

1) Rocky III (1982) - If you put Rocky III and Creed up against each other in a duel on Flickchart, I might pick Creed. In fact, Creed is currently ranked #243 on my Flickchart while Rocky III is at #268, though I suspect they have never actually had a face-to-face duel. Creed is definitely the "better" movie in all the traditional ways you define the craft of cinema. But Rocky III is the movie I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid-1980s, and it has so many beats that I love. Creed will continue to diminish by small amounts if I go much beyond my current four viewings. At 10+ viewings -- though granted, only about one this century -- Rocky III has not yet lost any of its luster. The one this century was enough to confirm that. 

So was it worth writing a post tagged to the release of Gladiator II that just effectively became a ranking of Rocky movies?

Perhaps not, but at least it's done now.

Exactly halfway back through Sandra Bullock's 30

I hadn't fed myself any post-election comfort food until Sunday night.

Yes, before that I'd soldiered on through a good eight new releases, none of the viewing of which really suffered from my underlying distant foul mood the past two weeks. (Fortunately for me, here in Australia removed from it all, it has managed to be very distant, as my coping mechanisms for dealing with this disappointment have been working.)

But having given myself a little comfort food in the form of Friends episodes on the very night of the election, I finally gave myself a little of the cinematic kind on Sunday night.

The comfort came in the form of a romantic comedy in general, and The Proposal in particular. 

Anne Fletcher's romcom is not a great movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. (Which, arguably, might have made it more effective as comfort food.) But it's a far better one than you might think, and it benefits from starring the darling Sandra Bullock, always a personal favorite. More on her in a moment.

The last time I watched The Proposal was the second time I'd seen it within the space of a year, while in the hospital after my older son's birth in 2010. It was only just new the year before that, but I didn't see it until the calendar flipped to January in order to include it in year-end rankings. 

So I do think about it sentimentally for that reason. In the state of emotional fullness of becoming new parents, my wife and I watched The Proposal in her hospital bed -- her actually in the bed, me in the neighboring chair -- while we waited the comically long amount of time to be discharged. It helped pass the time quite well and we were both highly vulnerable to the charms of Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, to say nothing of the ways they lower their defenses and show each other their hidden fragility over the course of the narrative.

I did find myself mildly pushed in those same emotional directions while watching The Proposal on Sunday, but only mildly. I thought I remembered a few more moments of getting all the feels. 

One thing that did not disappoint was the comic charm and comedic timing of Bullock, and it caused me to ponder that it has now been 30 years of having Sandra Bullock in our lives.

I'm usually the sort of pedant who would point out that Bullock's acting career began in 1987 with a movie called Hangmen -- or would have been if I'd bothered to look it up on IMDB. (Just so you don't think I'm the kind of freak who can spontaneously produce the name of Bullock's first feature, made when she was only 23.) That's closer to 40 years ago than 30.

But we all know that Sandra Bullock really became SANDRA BULLOCK with the release of Speed in 1994. In fact, so striking was that movie as an introduction of "new" talent -- even if it was her 15th credit on IMDB -- that she is the person I think of any time I think about movies that introduced a future star to us.

By coming out in 2009, The Proposal now represents the halfway point between Speed and this moment in time. 

And because it took Bullock until she was 30 -- or about to turn 30 six weeks after Speed was released -- to get this sort of role, that means she was halfway to the age she is now at the time she made it. That's right, Bullock turned 60 years old in July.

Even though it would make sense that this is how old she is, seeing as how I just had my own 51st birthday, it made me a bit sad to consider it.

Sad not because I think a 60-year-old should be thrown in the bin. If you're a man, you might just be getting started at age 60.

Sad because as a woman, Bullock won't get that chance, and she has already begun her inevitable receding from the public spotlight. She doesn't have an acting credit since 2022's Bullet Train -- which I haven't seen, which reminds I still have plenty of unseen Sandy Bullock to look forward to -- and though I see that Practical Magic 2 is in the works, I don't have much hope of any more films where she gets to work her series of facial expressions and low-level physical pratfalls. (Just think of that great shot in Miss Congeniality where she takes a spill while walking in high heels, which combines both.)

I feel like a little Sandra Bullock retrospective might provide me any more comfort I might need, whenever I might need it.

But lest my 30-year crush on this actress comes too much to the forefront, I may need to keep it on the down low a bit. I already survived a couple entrances into the living room last night in my which wife surely wondered why I was watching an old Sandra Bullock film and could probably even identify which one it was. If I follow that in short succession with The Heat, The Lake House and While You Were Sleeping, I'll probably have some 'splaining to do.

How the hell do you punctuate this film?

I saw a film with the words "mother" and "couch" in the title last night, but almost everything else about the title seems to be up to the interpretation of wherever it's printed.

On iTunes this movie was called Mother, Couch when I purchased it for rental. It was renting at only $1.99, which was a minor miracle as I rarely pay less than $5.99 for a current year iTunes rental these days, $4.99 if I'm lucky, or $3.99 if it's a movie from the past. Mother, Couch seems to be the most common way to list the title around the internet. 

There are two possible semantic meanings to the title when listed this way. I prefer the one that suggests they are being introduced to each other, like "Mother, Couch. Couch, Mother." I include the second half of the introduction just to illustrate exactly what I mean. I like this one because indeed, the story revolves around an 82-year-old woman (Ellen Burstyn is actually turning 92 in three weeks) who sits down on a couch in a furniture store and then refuses to leave.

Or there is the simpler "This is a movie about two things, and the two things are listed with a comma so you know they are not part of the same thing. One is a mother. The other is a couch."

In the movie itself, though, the title appears as Mother, Couch! in the opening credits. I thought it might have been Mother Couch!, but I went back this morning and saw that indeed the comma was present. Which I was glad to see, because otherwise that would mean someone made up a comma out of whole cloth. 

The possible semantic meaning of this is less clear. It could be the same as meaning 1 above, only it indicates the excitement of this introduction, particular on behalf of the mother. (We have to assume that the couch, as an inanimate object, is indifferent to the introduction.) Or it could be that the mother is ordinary, but the couch is extraordinary, which is certainly her impression of it. Though that is not spoken in so many words, nor is it clear this particular couch has any particular value to her other than as a symbol of arriving at a moment in time where she is not going to budge anymore, and this happens to be where he was physically located at the time she passed this point of no return in her head.

But then on IMDB it is just listed as Mother Couch, with an acknowledgement of the original title Mother, Couch -- which is still not accurate from the film itself. Mother Couch offers a new possible interpretation in terms of meaning, which is similar to "mother country." Like, this is the couch from which all the characters -- who include three grown children -- originate. Or more literally -- but then I suppose more figuratively -- she is the mother in a family of couches, and they are all baby couches, albeit grown baby couches.

So then I started to think about other possible punctuations that would give us other meanings.

The one I like best here is mother! Couch. And the reason for starting it in lower case is that it evokes Darren Aronofsky's mother!, another film with an exclamation point that befuddled people. It's appropriate because as this film goes along, it leaves behind some of the shackles of realism to provide us with material that is more chaotic and symbolic, or just projections of what the characters may be seeing in their minds, which is akin to the most common mode of mother! Then there's the connection that the last time I saw Burstyn as anguished as this on screen was when she was in Aronofsky's classic Requiem for a Dream.

Not that mother! Couch makes much sense considering our ordinary grammatical rules, but even less sense would be Mother Couch,. Yes, that would be ending the title with a comma. There I suppose the comma would serve sort of the same function as an ellipses, which suggest there is more to say on this topic -- and in watching the film, you would know for sure that there is. 

So how about going outside the punctuation marks already provided?

Mother? Couch. - This would be asking the question if this character is a mother, and then returning the answer that no, this character is a couch.

Mother Couch? - This would be questioning whether this is indeed the couch from which all the younger couches emerged, or do we have a case of mistaken identity.

Mother? Couch? - This would be where both the mother and the couch got lost in the woods, and as the kids are searching for them, they are calling out their names to see if they will answer.

(Side note: I always think it's funny when people are searching for other people in the movies and they have to individually call the names of each person they are searching for. Let's say there are four lost children. You have to rotate through calling each of the names, as though a lost child hearing this call would not respond unless their own name had been called. Maybe the parents just don't want to have to explain, after the fact, why one of the kids did not have their name called. Do the parents love that kid less than the other kids?)

Mother; Couch - The couch gives us additional understanding of the mother, but the two concepts don't have a close enough literal connection to be separated by something so simple as a comma.

Mother > Couch - It is better to have a mother than it is to have a couch.

Mother "Couch" - It is only a symbolic couch, and this is its mother.

¿Mother Couch? - The same movie, but dubbed into Spanish.

On my blog and in all my lists, I have decided I will refer to this movie as Mother, Couch!, with the last comma only for the structure of this sentence, and only the first comma and exclamation point as part of the title. That's how it appears in the movie.

However, when I put the label in on my blog, I will have to go with mother couch! -- which I do not see as the actual listed title anywhere -- because Blogger interprets the comma as a separation of two different labels, not part of a single label that happens to contain ambiguous punctuation. 

When space is at a premium

I was looking through my work notebook today and I saw some notes I scribbled while on the plane to Singapore last month, reminding me that I never actually wrote the post I intended to write from those notes.

So let's pretend it's still three weeks ago -- a much more innocent, simpler time -- and we'll go from there. 

When I was scrolling through the movies available on the plane, I noticed something funny. They didn't allocate enough space to fit in the full movie title for titles that were more than about four words long, which I get. It's some of the abbreviations themselves that I didn't get, since many of them were lacking the most important word, the word that really orients you and provides you the most relevant information about whether this is something you really want to watch -- namely, the franchise title.

And so it is that the following options appeared on the plane for my viewing pleasure:

The Chamber of Secrets
Let There Be Carnage
Here We Go Again!
The Meaning of Life
Order of the Phoenix
Prisoner of Azkaban
Return of the King
The Two Towers
The Half-Blood Prince

Of course, you know what franchises these movies are a part of, because you're a cinephile. But your average punter (to use the Australian term), who only watches movies when they're on a plane? Imagine their surprise when they click into the movie with the incredibly cool title Let There Be Carnage and find out that it's just another dumb superhero movie. 

If I'm this airline -- and it was nearly a month ago so I'm not even sure I remember which airline it was -- oh yeah it was JetStar -- I feel like I'm better off, on a limited word count, going with something like Harry Potter: The Chamber or Mamma Mia: Here We. The name of the franchise is actually what you really care about, not which of the many sequels it is. And if you then do care about which sequel it is, at least you have a couple unique words in the subtitle to help distinguish it from other sequels.

The funny thing about this was that they did not do this for the Spider-Man movies.

Each of the three Spider-Man movies available contained their full title, likely because each subtitle (No Way Home, Far From Home, Homecoming) contained just few enough additional characters to meet the space limitations. It seemed like an exception for this franchise, but it was more like a coincidence driven by the shorter and snappier Spider-Man titles. By contrast, titular brevity has not been the strong suit for the Harry Potter series. 

Blaxploitaudient: Coffy

This is the penultimate entry in my 2024 monthly series Blaxploitaudient, in which I watch a blaxploitation film I haven't seen each month.

It has not been a great last week for Black women.

They are just about the only voting demographic who did not show significant support for Donald Trump. The others all had their reasons, I suppose. I hope we don't have to examine those reasons through the ashes of a destroyed country. (Really, I'm still fine. In fact, I'm only regularly mentally engaging with the election whenever I sit down to write a new blog post.)

Black women? They supported Kamala Harris, perhaps because she was one of their number. But perhaps also because they can see things clearly in a way others cannot. 

So it felt good to watch a movie in which a Black woman was empowered to seek vengeance against those who would keep her down, of multiple races. She comes up against just about every other demographic -- the demographics that were acknowledged in 1973, I should say -- in Jack Hill's Coffy. 

In the big brawl/food fight that is the "funniest" part of this movie, she may even come up against another Black woman, though I think that's more collateral damage than the target of her righteous fury.

In her third movie in this series, Pam Grier stars as the title character, an emergency room nurse who pulls out a metaphorical spray gun of revenge after her younger sister is hospitalized with her heroin addiction. When riding in a car with the only good man we meet in this movie -- her honest police officer friend Carter, played by William Elliott -- she tells Carter that she wants to get everyone involved with delivering drugs into her poor sister's hands. He counters with the fact that it all leads back to "a farmer in Thailand," and when asked whether she was going to get them too, she responds "Well why not?"

And so she decides to go undercover as a prostitute, which will give her access to the various bad men she's picked out as the first recipients of her punishment. Only, it doesn't take very long for someone to get wise to her plans, putting her in harm's way herself.

Harm's way is a familiar place specifically for Pam Grier in blaxploitation movies. Thinking back to the first time I saw her in this series, Foxy Brown, I remembered being taken aback by the extent of the violence and debasement against her before she finally rises up as the victor at the end. In that movie she is actually drugged and raped. In this movie there is an attempting drugging and raping, intended to be followed by her murder, only Coffy had earlier switched out the dope with sugar, as part of the plan to point dealer King George (Robert DoQui) toward the grave even before she might have a chance to do it herself. Without actually being laid low by heroin, she is able to escape, and take out a couple henchmen with her.

But some of what befalls Coffy before that is even more vile, in a sense, and separates this from some of the other blaxploitation movies I've watched that have one foot clearly on the side of trying to be fun. When the gangster Vitroni (Allan Arbus) first has her in his room one night, having been impressed by her fight when taking on the other jealous prostitutes and covering them in salad and other edible artillery, he is rough with her and uses every combination of expletive and N-word to degrade her. She's supposed to be a prostitute, so she realizes this might be part of his kink -- or at least has to be pretend she thinks this as a form of deference to "her client." When he spits in her face, she's not so sure. And I might have audibly gasped. 

And then there's the uncomfortable stuff that does not have anything to do with her. Coffy is caught trying to kill Vitroni with a gun she smuggled into the room in a teddy bear, but he was wise to her and had his henchmen lurking. She frames King George for the setup -- which might be a bit of a dick thing to do, if King George weren't a monster -- so the same two henchmen pick up George the next day. He thinks it's a friendly visit, until one of the henchmen pulls a gun and they drive out to a remote location. I could not totally believe what I was about to see unfold: George with a noose around his neck, dragged behind their car, first on foot, then struggling on the ground, then just a lifeless corpse crashing into nearby obstructions as the car fishtails around corners. You get one final shot of what's left, though Hill mercifully does not hold it for more than a second.

Films like Coffy remind us that there was a fierce political agenda behind these movies, in addition to trying to give us entertainment. It's hard to imagine someone putting such imagery up on screen without an understanding of the moral responsibility that accompanies it. An image of a Black drug dealer being steadily murdered through a high-speed lynching, or a Black prostitute being spat on and called the N-word, could never be part of any but the most vile people's definition of fun. 

But it must have been a really tough balancing act, because there would be no point to make a blaxploitation film if it couldn't be profitable. You can say that about any film, really. Even in cases where they've wildly miscalculated a film's potential profitability, the desire was there to make money. The genre aspects that fall short of this level of confrontation are there to do that, but these others were not deemed to be deal breakers, and indeed they were not, since Coffy became one of the more iconic blaxploitation films. For Blacks living in America in 1973, there was no such thing as pure escapism, no such thing as joy without nearby pain swooping in to remind them of its presence. These films understand that, and they give audiences an outlet through the ultimate victory of the protagonist over the male forces that try to hold her down and kill her. (May we be so lucky with our outcome over the next four years.)

Coffy does lean into another dominant aspect of the genre, rarely so dominant as it is here. Even with a number of the other movies I've watched involving the sex industry, I've rarely seen such a parade of bare breasts in any movie. Let's go back to that "funniest" scene. When Coffy and a jealous prostitute played Lisa Ferringer, who is King George's girlfriend, have their "catfight" that involves a whole food setup at a party, and eventually involves about five other women, each other woman has her breasts exposed as she's dispatched. It's almost as though it's some sort of finishing move by Coffy, that the ripping of their dress to reveal their ladies is going to render them combat deficient. But we get lots of other topless shots throughout this movie, including Grier several times. Which maybe still surprises me, since once we got into the 1980s, it was always the supporting characters who did nudity in movies, rarely the lead.

Before I get to my summation, there's one other person I'd like to mention here, and that's Sid Haig. He's of course the horror icon who I first met in Rob Zombie's movies (and in Spider Baby: The Maddest Story Ever Told), but this is now also the third blaxploitation movie in which I've watched him this year. In fact, he's appeared in both of Grier's other movies, those being Foxy Brown and Black Mama, White Mama. He's part of a package deal with Jack Hill, it seems, as Hill also directed him in Spider Baby and Foxy Brown. Grier and Haig now become the two most regular participants in this series, appearing in a quarter of the films each -- or what will be a quarter once I've watched my 12th film next month. His comeuppance here is pretty great.

Although this series does not wrap up until next month, I'm going to be ending it on what I think will be a lighter note, so this seems like a good time to be reflective about what I've watched. Especially in light of the fact that a man was just put into power who abuses, disrespects and degrades women and people of color.

Coffy does not distinguish itself from the other movies I've watched this year in terms of the greater story arc and where the film ends up. In fact, it is sort of the prototypical blaxploitation movie, if what I've watched this year gives me any additional expertise to make that sort of assessment. There are prostitutes (real and fake). There are pimps. There are drug dealers. There are corrupt cops. There are mob bosses. And there's a woman -- yes, more of these than not involve a female avenging angel rather than a male -- who is going to rise above it all to set things right, narrowly escaping with her own life, and unable to escape without severe damage. (The image of Coffy at the end, with deep lacerations above her cleavage, is memorable.)

It does, however, distinguish itself in the details. Moments that are a bit more disquieting than they needed to be. A deliberate choice to direct our gaze toward something we can't unsee. A purposeful question about what it means to be watching something like this, even as it points toward a "happy" ending in which the female protagonist has achieved some measure of her ultimate goals. As we see from the image of an exhausted and quite injured Coffy walking down the beach, toward what I hope is a metaphorical sunrise, we know that she wishes she never had to be here in the first place. She'd much rather be saving lives in a hospital room than in the streets. 

I'm going to hope that the Black woman in America can rise up today, as she did 50 years ago -- even though we know much of that was fantasy. It's just a shame that Kamala Harris could not quite make it there. It reminds us again of all the malevolence we're up against. It is perhaps too strong to call today's male Trump voters a series of pimps, drug dealers, corrupt cops and mob bosses -- but I wish it were further off the mark than it may be.

I'll wrap up this series in December on what I hope is a lighter note: Shaft in Africa. Which somehow also came out in 1973. (Were there a hundred blaxploitation movies in cinemas in 1973?)

Watching Tuesday to mourn Tuesday

Every loss is like a little death.

The most despair I've felt recently, outside of Tuesday's loss, was when the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, the ultimate proof that the experience of loss is utterly subjective. It was a luxury to feel sad over that outcome, as it really had no bearing on, was no commentary on, the world we live in. It was just a guy bummed out that the team he loved could not get over that last hump. (A hump they did make it over two years later.) Nevertheless, I remember telling my family, even a few days later, that I knew it would be okay eventually.

Ha.

The results of the presidential election should have thrown me into much deeper despair than that, and my intellectual mind knows that it's in there, somewhere. It may come out in some strange way later that I'm not expecting. I think of 2016, when I broke down sobbing while watching the very thematically appropriate The Purge: Election Year, an outpouring of emotion so profound that I ended up ranking the film in my top ten for the year just for touching me so deeply, something it likely never would have done in more even times. 

But I've continued to do well with the "putting one foot in front of the other" pragmatic approach that I espoused in my last post. Mind over matter. Mind over matter. It's working, and my mind has been plagued by nothing worse than a distant sense of disappointment as I have been able to get joy out of the small things in life.

As you recall, I returned on Friday night to watching movies, and selected something that I thought didn't have much chance to be a great love or a great disappointment. On Saturday, I dared to go for a choice that had the potential to reach the same rarefied air as The Purge: Election Year, my year-end top ten.

But it couldn't be just any acclaimed 2024 film. I wanted it to be on-the-nose in terms of dealing with despair, for better or worse.

So I went with Daina O. Pusic's Tuesday, a film that deals exclusively with actual death. It also deals with Death with a capital D, as a character in the film in the form of a talking macaw parrot. 

I'd wanted to see this for many months now, as at least one of the Filmspotting hosts listed in his top five films of the year as of the midpoint of the year, in a tradition they've been doing for several years. Actually it was their guest who for sure listed it, but at least one of the hosts may have as well as they all admired it greatly. It was also one of my potential viewings at MIFF this year, only the timing didn't work out.

But choosing this movie had other reasoning. For one, it seemed like an intentional echo to the movie I watched a few days after the 2016 election, Arrival, which also deals with the death of a child. And though that movie has never quite impacted me the way it has impacted other people, I recognized that watching it during a time of mourning was probably the best way of getting something out of it, not the worst way, as it might be with other films. 

Then there was the fact that Tuesday stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a huge champion of progressive causes. I got a number of emails from Louis-Dreyfus during campaign season -- maybe even before campaign season -- and I know she's hurting right now, just like the rest of us.

Well, my reaction to Tuesday was similar to my reaction to Arrival. I was very impressed by its craft. I understood it to be touching without actually feeling my own emotions well up to the same degree. And I ended up on a mere 3.5 star rating on Letterboxd.

Movies that take big swings like Tuesday can impress you with their big swings even while failing to penetrate through in that way you are hoping. I find that a person's feelings about a movie can be boiled down most succinctly to "when you know, you know." In other words, you shouldn't have to convince yourself that a movie worked like gangbusters for you. Gangbusters is a state of affairs that cannot be faked.

And so although I toyed with the four-star rating for Tuesday, I decided this was a conflict between "should" and "did." I thought I should love Tuesday, but in actual reality, I did not. 

Some of you would, and therefore, now is probably a good time to watch it. There's some really big ideas in here, and they are all in concert with how progressives are feeling right now. There's very direct textual material about coming to grips with an impending loss, and then when the loss actually occurs, figuring out how to soldier on rather than letting it consume you. In fact, the film's very final shot is probably the kick in the pants all liberals need right now. 

The period of immediate mourning is not over for most of us. We probably need that kick in the pants a week from now, rather than right now.

But when you're ready for it, Tuesday is ready to give it to you.