Chekhov's alligator never goes off

One of my weekend of "favorites" last weekend -- which is getting further and further in the rearview mirror, as I have had time-sensitive posts taking precedence -- was Wes Craven's 1982 film Swamp Thing. To call this a "favorite" is a stretch. I saw parts of it on cable a lot in the mid-1980s, but before I pressed play, I actually had to consult my list of all the movies I've ever seen to be sure it was actually on there. Not that I couldn't watch it if it wasn't, just that I had, indeed, set aside this weekend to watch either old favorites or movies I wanted to see a second time for some other reason. (That explains all of the other three I had watched to that point, Throw Momma From the Train, Waterworld and Fantastic Planet.) It was, indeed, on the list.

Swamp Thing is certainly a B movie, made before Wes Craven become WES CRAVEN with A Nightmare on Elm Street two years later. (He'd already directed The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, but I think of those as a bit less mainstream.) Then again, the fact that it was designed as a B movie, an intentional callback to the creature features of the 1950s (specifically Creature From the Black Lagoon), excuses some of that, making it a feature not a bug. 

While generally enjoying the proceedings, I had one big nitpick in the script that I am writing about today.

The idea of alligators is present in Swamp Thing right from the very start. When a new crew is flying in by helicopter to the scientific laboratory in and around which this film is set, two of the men are talking and one of them asks what the primary feeding location is for the alligators in the swamp. The other responds, and I'm paraphrasing, "Right where we land, if they're hungry enough."

Not long later, we learn that the man that Adrienne Barbeau's character is replacing had to leave because he was bitten by an alligator. Although he did not die, he had to be immediately rushed to a hospital and of course was not keen on returning. 

Guess how many alligators we see in Swamp Thing?

Zero.

It seems a direct violation of the "Chekhov's gun" principle of dramaturgy. You're surely familiar with this, but in case you aren't, it's a theory put forth by playwright Anton Chekhov, which can be summarized as follows: generally, any narrative element introduced in a script (or a play, in his case) must pay dividends later on in the story, and specifically, if you introduce a gun at the start of the story, it must go off by the end.

Craven's script places unusual emphasis on the presence of alligators in this swamp, going so far as to mention them at least twice. Once would have been enough to require the appearance of an alligator later in the story.

And yet despite the numerous times we see characters thrashing around in these waters, either by themselves or fighting with an adversary, there is never once an alligator that pops its head above the surface. It easily could have dispatched one of the henchmen, to confirm the threat level discussed several times in the film's first ten minutes, or better yet, it could have presented a danger for Barbeau's character as she bathes nude in the swamp, another moment of mortal peril from which the title character can save her. 

And yet it does none of these things.

The thing I thought was especially curious was that characters walk in these swamps without even appearing worried that an alligator might swim up on them unnoticed and go into the death roll that they use to kill their prey. Even if no gator actually pops up, this means Craven also forgot that he'd even suggested the characters might have reason to fear them. 

I had an especially acute perspective on this from my time spent in and around the billabongs of the Northern Territory earlier last year, on our family trip. Crocodiles were a surefire danger and you didn't even go close to the edge of the water for fear of them. If you should happen to fall out of a boat, you might immediately be in such a panic as to draw extreme attention to yourself and inhibit your own ability to climb back in. And when I used the preposition "in" at the start of this paragraph to describe my relationship to the billabong, we were only "in" a watering hole where it was known safe to swim because it was disconnected from any access points for the crocodiles.

So to watch a whole movie where people blithely discount the threat of alligators -- even after the movie itself has warned us about them -- seemed like the height of falsity.

It made me wonder if it's so much of a B movie that they didn't even have the money for a few alligators and the specialists they'd have to pay to wrangle them. Judging from the rubber suit worn by the main character, that could be the case.

However, I did find charm in that rubber suit, as I did in the movie on the whole. It's not, like, a "good" movie, but it did pass easily enough, to say nothing of reminding me of days in the mid-1980s watching cable ... which is a good outcome for any movie. 

A misunderstanding of the Gold Class

For some reason recently I've been getting an ad for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 when I try to go from one game to the next on Lexulous on my phone.

Never mind that the movie came out on December 20th in the U.S., December 26th in Australia, meaning that it is definitively yesterday's news at this point.

The thing I find funniest is that this is advertising Gold Class at Village Cinemas, which is the high-end screening experience that every cinema chain has, where the tickets are like $36.50 rather than closer to $20, and you can order food from your chair. I don't know if you get anything extra with the $36.50, like a drink. Maybe the chair also massages you. I'm not sure what advancements they may have pioneered since I last attended one of these several years ago.

I know you can order food in many non-special viewing environments nowadays, but these sorts of boutique experiences led the charge ten or 15 years ago when ordering food was less of a widespread option. And they obviously still do well enough as the concept still exists.

However, I doubt anyone who is shelling out the money for a Gold Class experience is actually going to see Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ... regardless of how long it's been out.

I mean, you don't take kids to a Gold Class experience, do you? That kind of ruins the point of them trying to make it seem like an elevated, date night experience. I'm not sure if kids are specifically forbidden from this environment, but the chain would be well within their rights to do so, assuming they want to give their customers a prestige experience.

So I'm kind of surprised that they are even programming Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as a Gold Class option. I mean, each Village Cinemas only has one Gold Class screen, two at the most. At any given time, almost any other movie playing would be a better option for your finite space. 

Unless this ad is just marrying the Gold Class advertisement with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as two completely unrelated experiences, in which case, it's even dumber. 

Understanding Editing: Lost Horizon

This is the debut of my 2025 monthly viewing series Understanding Editing, in which I am watching winners of the best editing Oscar, both that I've seen and haven't seen, to better understand why fellow editors nominated and ultimately selected them as the winners -- and therefore better understand the discipline of editing itself.

Did I mention that the movies I'm watching this series are in chronological order?

I just looked back, and oh yes, I did.

That means starting with a film that is so old, some of its scenes are missing.

It's a phenomenon I first encountered when I was watching Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), a film that worked for me so much that it is now in my top 100 on Flickchart, but a film that had some portion of it lost to time. In order to fill this missing space in the narrative -- a narrative that was still four hours long, mind you -- production stills from those scenes were included. At first it's a bit weird, but once you're used to it, it adds an additional depth of historicity. 

It was funny to find the same thing in a film from 13 years later, and from director Frank Capra no less. I thought by 1937, the preservation of film had reached such a point that significant films were rarely, if ever, lost, in whole or in part.

It's only seven minutes worth of Lost Horizon, the Academy Award winner for best editing (as is every film in this series), that had to be recreated in this way, while the complete soundtrack played behind them. But I thought it was noteworthy that an Academy Award winner -- which won an award for its editing, no less -- would be chopped up in this fashion. 

Not as noteworthy, though, as it was to finally understand the origins of a term I have heard many times in culture but never fully understood.

That term is Shangri-La, and I know in the abstract that it refers to a remote paradise, a Brigadoon of sorts. (I haven't actually consumed any of the culture related to Brigadoon either.) I haven't ever known, though, where that term came from. As it turns out, it came from this movie, or from the book on which the movie is based. Which means I should be more familiar with Lost Horizon than its rather generic title has made me familiar with it to this point.

Shangri-La is the name given to a city hidden in a valley of the Himalayas, which is almost impossible to reach due to the nearly impassable mountains around it. And once you get there, you don't want to leave. Inexplicably, the city is teeming with all the resources its population needs to survive. And while some of those things are grown naturally, it seems hard to believe that the others can be explained exclusively because they were brought in by porters, including all the materials for the ornate buildings and other architecture in the city. Not only does everyone seem incredibly happy, but their aging has been slowed down almost to a halt, such that an average person can live hundreds of years without showing signs of getting significantly older until the very end.

Our crew of five main characters -- four men and a woman -- get here because they are British citizens piloted out of a Chinese city that is succumbing to rebellion. The plane is hijacked, something they don't realize until they've been flying all night and are in a different direction from where they thought they should be. The plane runs out of fuel and crashes, killing only the pilot, while the remainder are picked up by a group of envoys from the city. Many of them resist at first the strange change in their circumstances, but before long, all but one are fully under the spell of Shangri-La. Whether or not it is a benevolent spell is another matter.

My point today is to talk about editing, which is why I haven't bothered to name the actors or to go into any great detail about the ins and outs of the plot.

And right off the bat, I noticed some things that I thought might be qualifying for an Oscar, as well as those that might be disqualifying. 

The opening scene of the evacuation from the city that's being overthrown is just the type of sequence that would have gotten other editors talking back in 1937. As the crowds burst and flow toward the landing strip where the plane is trying to take off, there's a great momentum to their movements that benefits from the way editors Gene Havlick and Gene Milford (can't be a piece about editing without mentioning the names of the editors) have sown together the available footage. Not only do we get the sense of the movement, as a physical spectacle, but we feel the contagious stress of the people on the ground there. Good editing should likely have an emotional impact on you as you're watching, if it's this sort of scene.

I also thought the crash sequence was good in that regard, cutting back and forth between the plane on its descent and the faces of the people inside the plane, fearing the worst. I'm not saying that would be considered groundbreaking in 2025, but for 1937, I suspect it was a fairly clever way of showing their distress intercut with exactly the thing they had to be distressed about.

A later scene of a ceremonial gathering in Shangri-La, involving torches and processions, was also notable for how the two Genes have edited the footage into a rhythm with the music. Finally, there is an avalanche near the end that calls for a similar superlative use of the craft to achieve its impact.

Interestingly, though, I found that outside of these albeit four strong sequences, the editing was average to poor, at least by today's standards.

One thing that irked me, that I doubt was as much of an issue back then because it had not yet been acknowledged, was how many shots vary very little from the one before. Nowadays we know that if you are using two consecutive shots on the same scene, you have to gives us a different angle in each shot, preferably a very different angle, to give the scene a cohesiveness. (Without breaking the 180-degree rule, of course.) You barely ever seen two consecutive shots that are essentially the same angle, varied only very slightly, or with only a very slight difference in the depth of field. Or if you do, you immediately write the film off as poorly edited.

Again, this might not have been an acknowledged part of the craft back then. But looking at it with 2025 eyes, I noticed it every time -- all the more so for the fact that I was watching the film specifically to appreciate its editing choices. I think I expected either good or neutral/functional editing, not editing that I actually considered bad. And then when I saw it once, I immediately noticed it every other time it occurred, which was at least a half-dozen times.

Of course, I will grant Lost Horizon a pass here. And in fact, it's gratifying to see this as it will help me chart the evolution of the craft from these beginnings. I suspect I will not see this sort of faux pas, which likely was not even a faux pas back then, again in this series.

Which continues in February just a year later with Michael Curtiz' and William Keighley's The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I loved the one time I saw it. 

Murder on the dancefloor, stolen glory on the Hottest 100

The following rant is about rankings and countdowns, not about movies. It's also pretty long. However, I can, and have, given it a movie tie-in, if that's your thing.

In the years since I've moved to Melbourne, I've become invested in three beloved Australian institutions, the latter two of which came to a head this past weekend: the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Australian Open (also held in Melbourne) and the Hottest 100 countdown from radio station Triple J, which actually has no home city and is broadcast around the country. I didn't get to go to the Open this year -- have not been since 2021, in fact -- but Saturday night we watched the thrilling three-set victory of nice American Madison Keys over villainous Belarusian (and consecutive two-time winner) Aryna Sabalenka, who stomped around in a fit and trashed her racquet after losing. Stay classy, Aryna. We also watched the men on Sunday, though that was not as thrilling, and I turned it off after two sets won by Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokavic's successor in terms of never making mistakes. He ended up winning the third just as easily. Yawn. 

The Hottest 100 countdown, an event preceded by untold amounts of hype that is a true representation of how much people care about it, also is revealed on the long weekend associated with the January 26th Australian Day. Since they always do it on the Saturday, this year it occurred on the 25th, the same day Keys won her first-ever grand slam title at age 29. It's actually a big day around Australia, which I've had friends confirm for me. Though I've never attended one of these parties myself, people do throw listening parties that allow them to get "loose" (an Australian term for whatever form your insobriety may take) over the course of the afternoon. 

The way the Hottest 100 works is that starting in early January or possibly even late December, Triple J listeners are free to submit a ballot of ten qualifying songs from the previous year for placement in that year's countdown. The eventual ordering of these songs is determined entirely by fan voting. I can't remember the precise ways the voting works, although I did submit a ballot myself at least once. But if I'm not mistaken, you give preferential status to one of the ten songs, so your vote for that song counts more than the rest. This system may have also changed slightly over the years.

The system may make it similar to how Oscars voting works, though I know that has also changed. There are some songs that everyone likes a little bit, even though it may be no one's favorite, so if that song shows up on a plurality of the ballots, it has a chance to finish very high in the Hottest 100 -- even at #1. This actually happened a few years ago when, of all things, a cover by Australian kids band The Wiggles of the song "Elephant" by Australian band Tame Impala became the #1 song of the year. That's absurd and it leads into what I want to say about this year's Hottest 100.

The 2024 Hottest 100 was not won by this year's version of a cover song by The Wiggles. The 2024 champion was the much deserving Chappell Roan, who had only one song technically released in 2024, so only one song that fans could vote on. (In the voting, you are limited to songs entered into the system as eligible.) Her 2024 song was "Good Luck Babe," which I would have put on my 2025 mix (also finished this past weekend) if this past year I had not also discovered, and liked more, her song "My Kink is Karma." We've listened to a lot of Chappell Roan in my house, and she's the best thing to come along in some time. 

However, the #2 song was one of these songs.

Another Triple J institution is their series "Like a Version," in which bands -- usually Australian bands -- will come into the studio for the morning show and play a cover of a well-known song. Some of these covers -- like, I suppose, "Elephant" -- are quite good and have some reason to endure as their own distinct entities, beyond the confines of the morning show. 

That does not, however, mean I think they should have a chance to win the Hottest 100.

The #2 song of 2024, as voted by fans, was by Australian band Royel Otis with their cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor's 2001 single "Murder on the Dancefloor," which was having a moment about a year ago as a result of its prominent placement in the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. (Now you understand the poster above.) 

I listened to this song as I was listening to the Hottest 100. I listened live to about the last 35 songs of the countdown, having been up to other business for the first 65. (They start at noon and finish at 8.) It was fine. There is nothing particularly interesting about their cover. It is essentially a straight cover of the song.

Not, I would venture, worthy of nearly being enshrined as the greatest song of 2024.

As you can tell from Chappell Roan winning, the countdown is not limited to Australian artists. That would be a way to go about it, but it would likely make it less interesting. It would also justify someone like Royel Otis winning with a song that they did not write and that they did not even interpret in a way that was very challenging. 

I guess that never came very close to happening. The DJs -- or "presenters," as they call them here -- said something about "Good Luck Babe" getting more votes than any other Hottest 100 victor ever, which seems strange to me. I guess the song was a bigger part of the zeitgeist than I thought, having a life on TikTok and itself being covered by a number of prominent artists.

But let's just say there had not been such a strong contender for #1. You take "Good Luck Babe" out of 2024, and suddenly, for the second time in a couple years, the winner of Triple J's most august of traditions is a band who covered a song that was only having a moment because it was in a movie.

Talk about stolen glory. That's like two levels of stolen glory.

What put me off further was Royel Otis' reaction to getting the #2. In order to fill time between songs and continue to goose the hype, the presenters would regularly interview bands who had just earned a spot in the Hottest 100. I don't want to know how the interviews with the lower bands might have gone -- awkward -- especially if the interview with Royel Otis was any indication. Although they were certainly appreciative of the spot, they kept on making jokes about feeling "silver" -- as in the silver medal. Like they thought they really should have won it all with their arbitrarily conceived stolen glory. (I say "arbitrarily conceived" because they acknowledged they had initially been planning to cover a different song for their appearance on "Like a Version.")

That wasn't nearly the only "Like a Version" song in the Hottest 100. I didn't go back and parse the 65 songs I missed, though I did scan the list for titles I recognized, but in any given year there might be a dozen "Like a Version" versions of songs that don't otherwise have anything to do with the year in question -- just because the Triple J audience was allowed to vote on anything they wanted, as long as it did not exist before the year in question. Which I think is a flawed system indeed, and one wonders if they would even do it, if not for the narcissism of supporting their own series of morning show cover songs. Another spot in the top ten was also taken out by a "Like a Version" song, as Australian singer/band G Flip covered Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" this past year, landing her the #9 spot. 

Me saying these songs should not qualify for the Hottest 100 is not the same as saying they are unworthy to exist. I love a good cover, and there are certain songs I have learned through cover versions, meaning I vastly prefer the cover to the original. But that doesn't mean I think a countdown that analyzes the music of a particular year should have them anywhere near it. 

Let's take this out a step and see how we can translate this to movies. It would be like if a bunch of people made Sweded versions of movies -- to use the term coined by Be Kind Rewind -- and those movies ended up making the shortlist of best picture nominees. We'd all cry foul, wouldn't we?

This is not my only complaint about the Hottest 100.

Because this is a purely democratic system -- which in principle I support -- there tend to be other sorts of chart trends that I consider in violation of what a good countdown should look like.

Any song from an artist who released an album in 2024 is theoretically eligible, though I suspect there are some artists who are too far afield from Triple J's playlist to be worth entering them in the database. The artist had to get some sort of play on the station for them to think it's possible for enough of their own listeners to vote for them. There are some strange entries, though. I would not have thought a song I despise because I despise Morgan Wallen would have made it into the list, but there was "I Had Some Help" at #25. (The song is actually credited to Post Malone, who I like better, but it's got Wallen's stink all over it from his feature work.) I was gratified to see "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" by Shaboozey, another surprise for this station, beat it by a couple slots at #19.

But what it means for all the songs from an album to be eligible is that it seems like the sheep in the Triple J audience do vote for all the songs. Something happened this past weekend that shines a light on the shortcomings of this system. Not only did one artist break the record for the most singles appearing in the Hottest 100 in one year, but two broke the record -- in the same year. That's right, both Charli XCX and Billie Eilish scored eight entries into the countdown -- which in some cases was the same song since they worked together. That surpassed the record of seven held by the aforementioned G Flip. (The same names seems to appear year after year, which is another thing that makes my eyes roll a bit.) 

I can't get a movie equivalent to this phenomenon, but I can get a TV one. Let's say there was a countdown where fans were able to vote for their favorite TV shows. But instead of just voting for the show, they'd vote for individual episodes. So in one year, 13 of the top 20 might be episodes of Succession, just because it was a year where everybody watched and loved Succession. That's not only stupid, it's insular and boring.

So it sounds like I have a lot of complaints about the Hottest 100. Why, then, am I so invested in it?

Ah, but the complaints are the proof of my investment. 

It can be hard to pick up new things when you move to a new country. I have yet to really care about the biggest sport in the state of Victoria, Australian Rules Football, and only understand slightly more about cricket than when I first got here. 

But when you see something that you think is very close to being great -- close enough that you do pick it up and you do hold it close to your chest -- you want to make it a more perfect version of itself. For me that's the Hottest 100.

I suppose if it were just a countdown of the biggest hits on the Billboard chart, or whatever the American equivalent would be, that would also be boring. I like that it's a little quirky and that Australian bands are disproportionately represented. I like that it means that Australian radio listeners have a pride in the cultural output of their country, one that translates into genuine love that causes them to give Australian bands one of the cherished ten spots on their list, when an international artist might seem more "deserving" according to the actual quality or prominence of their work.

When you have a system like this, though, there are weird things that happen, weird things that seem to undermine the validity of the whole thing. Weird things like a cover song being enshrined as the best song of a given year. Weird things like two artists taking out nearly 20 percent of the countdown all by themselves. 

Maybe some year, this list will more closely resemble what I think it should look like, and that will make me happy.

The whole conversation, though, feels fairly academic. The truth of the matter is, though I do listen to Triple J, it's one of only a few different ways I spend my time driving, and almost never when anyone else is in the car because no one else seems to enjoy the station like I do. And though I do Shazam Triple J to get songs for my mix each year, the fact is, I am pretty out of sync with what's getting played most and, more to the point, what people younger than I am actually like the most. Out of this year's Hottest 100, I was probably only really familiar with about that same 20 percent of the songs. And the majority of the songs in the top 35 that I listened to were not songs I would have Shazamed if I came across them in the wild. In fact, I only jotted down one song as a candidate for next year's mix, and I did it belatedly, not one of those hurried Shazamings in the moment for fear of losing the song and never finding it again. Which maybe should not come as a surprise. I listen to enough Triple J that I had probably actually heard many of these songs before, I just didn't consider them worth Shazaming at the time, so would not now either. 

In the end, I am a 51-year-old trying to make sense of what teenagers and twentysomethings like and want to reward. That task is doomed to fail in any year. 

The tragedy of a Black fella

It was Australia Day again yesterday. Some folks call that Invasion Day. And some folks call those folks "black fellas."

I'm not really sure if I can use the term "black fella." I know indigenous people can, and do, use it towards one another. I just don't know if I can use it because I'm not schooled enough in the history of Australian racial relations to know if there are hurtful associations with someone like me using it, or if it is actually sort of a term of endearment, which it sounds like to me. After all, I am invader too, though the invading I did was far more recent and doesn't implicate anyone in my lineage. Things were already pretty much settled by the time I did my invading. 

I do know, of course, that "black fella" is a term of othering. Or at least, a term of distinguishing one thing from another thing.

The protagonist of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Fred Schepisi's 1978 film, is, in some respects, difficult to distinguish in this way. He's got one white parent and one indigenous parent. For the white Australians of the early 20th century, that was close enough to white to earn him some chances to "make good for himself" in their society. However, it was also close enough to black to make them wary that at any moment, he might conform to their lowest expectations of his other parent.

Which, I'm sad to say, he does. Which makes this a very complicated film. 

It's adapted from Thomas Keneally's novel, which itself was inspired by true events, and it makes for my fourth Australia Day/Invasion Day in a row where I've watched a film that examines the plight of indigenous Australians -- following Walkabout in 2022, High Ground in 2023 and Charlie's Country in 2024. As an invader trying to atone, I figure it's the least -- the very, very least -- I can do. 

Jimmie (Tommy Lewis) has been raised under the good graces of a reverend and his wife, who show the same mixture of optimism and wariness described above, only disguising their racism as charity. When Jimmie is of age, he tries to "make good" in the way they have trained him, proceeding through a succession of jobs that end through no fault of his own. Each employer takes advantage of him in some way or asks something of him that is against his core beliefs, and if he's even slightly reluctant to comply, they stiff him his pay or cast their favor elsewhere. 

It's a rough existence that eventually starts to see strides in the right direction -- er, that's debatable -- when he meets a white woman he wants to take up with, Gilda (Angela Punch), whom he believes he has impregnated. (Given that he first sees her canoodling with a married farmer, it's unlikely he should have trusted her in the first place.) When the baby is born, it's revealed not to be Jimmie's, as the boy's skin color shows no similarity to his own. At this point, unfortunately, they are already married. 

This, I thought, was a really interesting inversion on a scene we see in a lot of movies, where a white man is retroactively cuckolded when the newborn he thought was his has features readily identifiable as belonging to another man. That this is flipped against Jimmie in the other direction gives an idea of just what he is up against while trying to "make good" in this world ... and is just one of the factors that sets the stage for what is going to come next.

Spoilers for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

When one particular employer denies buying him groceries as part of the pay he is receiving for building a boundary around the employer's property -- on the grounds that Jimmie has lost focus with the arrival of some friends, which the employer worries has turned his property into a "blacks camp" -- Jimmie confronts him, explaining that not only is he owed this, but he has a wife and child to feed. (Despite not being the father, Jimmie has dutifully adopted the role.)

The man holds his ground, and in order to scare the man -- who isn't at home at the time, leaving only his wife and his grown daughters -- Jimmie and his "uncle" (Steve Dodd) appear at the farmhouse wielding axes. They don't plan to do anything with the axes, it would seem, but when the matriarch goes for her gun, a bloodbath ensues that leaves only the two Aboriginal men standing.

I was taken aback by the direction this films takes, though not mostly that The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith "goes there." My modern mind, trained on the moral logic of very careful Hollywood studio executives, finds it to be a disconnect that these "black fellas" could be guilty of anything so heinous as murder. We are not yet removed from a long period of mainstream movies where minority characters have been portrayed as saints, or given only very minor rough edges.

No, the thing that took me aback most was that having made this terrible error, Jimmie then leans into it and makes things far worse. We never lose our sympathy for Jimmie, not fully, but let's just say -- no need for further spoilers now that I've established my context -- that some of what Jimmie does after this is far less ambiguous and far more deserving of our scorn. In fact, one act is so heinous that it is almost disqualifying of our sympathy, even if Jimmie felt that the man it would hurt most was fully deserving of being so hurt.

Because Fred Schepisi is not an indigenous filmmaker, as he would need to be if he were to make a film like this today, it's hard to know just how we should view the narrative choices in this film. On the one hand, it's obvious that the film is on the side of its indigenous characters, even if Jimmie becomes problematic over the course of the narrative. On the other, it's possible for a white filmmaker to make a movie that has good intentions and still fails to depict things as sensitively as it should. I have not heard anything like that in the discourse about The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, but then again, I have not actually heard any discourse about The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. When I told my wife I was planning to watch it, her eyes widened and she said it was really good. If this movie were considered problematic by students of Australian film, I think she would have mentioned it.

What this film really does is reveal that war is ugly and that it takes down even the most well-intentioned people, on both sides. At one point in the film, Jimmie very pointedly says "Tell them I've started a war!" Rarely is having started a war considered a good thing, and certainly not here. 

The film clearly operates as a metaphor for political activism, and possibly a call to it as well. That's the same sort of political activism that expresses itself in things like renaming Australia Day as Invasion Day. Jimmie also has several lines of frustrated dialogue where he says that he specifically, or indigenous people generally, did not do anything to deserve this sort of treatment. But some of the lines are "I didn't do anything," without the clarification. If this is how they treat you when you didn't do anything, might as well do something, and at least hit your enemy where it hurts in the process. They're going to think of you the same way either way. 

There's a really good thesis statement for the film in a line of dialogue I jotted down, which is related to the way wars lay everyone low -- and in particular this war that has raged between indigenous people and the white invaders who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788. A school teacher played by Peter Carroll, who becomes a hostage of Jimmie and one of his mates when they go on the run, hears the two indigenous bickering with each other about which of the two of them is guilty of which transgression. The teacher says "If you want to stand there comparing evils, you won't end until you've put a bullet through each other's heart."

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith does not put a fine point on many of its ideas, to its credit, but I was glad for this one. There's no real comparison between the evils done by the white men against the indigenous population who have lived here for 60,000 years, and whatever "evils" the indigenous may have done in response to those evils. However, this movie does bemoan the fact that we far too rarely see the productive response to evil, which would be good. Far more often we see the unproductive response, which is just more evil. 

Nothing's free in Waterworld

The long-awaited rewatch of Kevin Reynolds' Waterworld came on Friday night. So much for me saying in yesterday's post that it was a weekend of watching "old favorites." My rewatch of Throw Momma From the Train on Thursday night also gives lie to that premise, though I think the star ratings of these two movies may have swapped places. More on that in a minute.

When I say "long-awaited," I mean I got the idea about three-and-a-half weeks ago -- was it only that recently? a lot's happened since then -- when we went to Universal Studios in Los Angeles on January 1st, which was also my younger son's 11 birthday, and saw my beloved Waterworld stunt show, which I have now seen at least four times. I had only seen the movie once, and I decided it was time to rectify that. Maybe, I thought, it's better than I remembered. 

I was rewarded pretty quickly on my two "favorite" things about the movie, though one is an actual favorite and one is a moment that makes me laugh.

The actual favorite: the device where the Universal logo of the planet Earth steadily loses all its land masses before the movie proper starts, perfectly preparing us for what we're about to watch. I think that may be the first time I had ever seen a studio tie something about its logo into the themes of the film, and it enthralled me. 

As a side note, this is immediately followed by some voiceover setting the stage, the kind of thing that is far more often handled via on-screen text. The voiceover is in the familiar booming voice of Hal Douglas, who did the readings for about 732 trailers back at this time and was one of the most recognizable voices to those of us who watched them. There was a funny disconnect hearing his voice used within an actual movie, and I don't think it works. You just think you're watching a trailer.

The joke favorite thing: the line of dialogue mentioned in the title of this post, which comes during Kevin Costner's first exchange with another character.

(The second meaning of this title? Waterworld itself was not free. I can't believe I had to pay to rent it. I have about five streaming services and I thought it should have been available on at least three of them.)

Costner's "the Mariner" (I was surprised how rarely that name is actually spoken in the film, given its usage in the stunt show) is bartering with another loner like himself, who offers the Mariner something for free to sweeten the deal. "Nothing's free in Waterworld" says the Mariner, and I have to say, the intonation of this line is different than I remembered.

I always thought this was funny because the line should just be "Nothing's free." You don't need to say "in Waterworld." Waterworld is Earth. It would be like saying "Nothing's free on Earth," which no one would ever say. 

I understand the point of the line, which is to tell us, the audience, that this specifically -- not life generally -- is a place where there are no free lunches, where every free agent has their own agenda. But to the characters of this world, it's just the only world that exists. They would only call it "Waterworld" if they thought there were some sort of alternative.

Of course, there is an alternative, which is that some number of decades or centuries earlier (more on that in a minute), there were cities and countries and continents that were once above the waves. But the premise is also that no one alive has seen these cities and countries and continents -- except the Mariner, who can use his gills to swim down to them, but he isn't telling anybody about it -- and that the oral storytelling tradition is not sufficiently developed to have passed down any certainty that these things existed. In fact, most people believe dry land is a myth. If dry land is a myth, then certainly it's also a myth that there are any planets in the heavens, that the sun is a star, or that there is anything in the universe other than these people traveling around in steampunk boats and wearing Mad Max's hand-me-downs.

In other words, they have no reason even to believe in the concept of something called land, so to distinguish what they do believe in from it, there is no reason to call it Waterworld.

That's probably just about enough of that discussion.

But if there's no land, one wonders how they continue to get the things they need, that are in many cases used so plentifully that they are almost squandered. For example, there is a careless disregard for the quantity of cigarettes that are smoked, such that the lead Smoker, the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), throws them around to people in the teeming crowds like Donald Trump throwing paper towels to Puerto Ricans. Whether they get stomped on by those crowds seems immaterial, so obviously it is easy for them to make new cigarettes any time they want. 

But cigarettes rely on tobacco which grows as a plant. We obviously do see things growing here in some limited quantity of dirt, but then it's unclear where that dirt came from if no one has ever seen land and its very existence might only be a rumor. It's tempting to think they just came across a shipping container full of a zillion cigarettes, but then this would suggest that the time of land and regular tobacco plants was as recently as a decade or two earlier, in which case, many people alive would remember that land existed and it wouldn't be an idea involving any uncertainty. This happened more like generations ago. So this group of bestial, id-driven cretins, overseen by Deacon, somehow have the sophisticated means of producing, machine-rolling and then wrapping in paper boxes these perfect packs of cigarettes. Don't forget, they had to get the paper for that somewhere too.

This is to say nothing of all the other things they have, and how they got those things, like a seemingly unlimited supply of bullets.

It is not worth asking these questions about Waterworld. It is only worth asking if you had a good time.

And I did. I definitely liked the movie better than I remembered, and I'll go through some of these points here.

1) Costner's performance as Mariner is really enjoyable. His movements really suggest a person who is more animal instinct than refined human gesture. And he takes quite a long time to become fully sympathetic, though once that transformation occurs he is a pretty standard hero. Before then, he engages in such dubious behavior as suggesting that they throw the young girl Enola (Tina Majorino) over the side of the boat to optimize their supply of drinkable water, and then later actually throwing her overboard, in a fit of combustible annoyance rather than an actual attempt to kill her. I like that the movie gives us more than a superficial idea of his bestial qualities instead of immediately redeeming him as a traditional hero.

2) On the other side, Hopper's villain is not one-dimensional either. A film that cared less about nuance would just make Deacon do terrible things during his every moment on screen, because especially in 1995, we would have wanted our villains to be unproblematically loathsome, to make their eventual demises all the more gratifying. Deacon is an asshole, but you can't say he doesn't have his reasons; in his very first scene, he loses his left eye, an occurrence that the movie makes comedic hay out of the rest of its running time. In fact, the comedy in Hopper's performance is one of its best aspects, as he relates to people as more like a businessman frustrated with what he has to deal with than a cackling epitome of evil. I think of the contrast with his villain in Speed the year before, and though I like that work quite a lot too, I think this performance is less sadistic and more opportunistic. In a way he is also just a version of a guy trying to get by in this world, like the Mariner. (Incidentally, we already know Waterworld received some inspiration from the design of the Mad Max movies, but as I was watching this, I couldn't help but notice that the influence might go both ways. The way Deacon interacts with his subjects is very similar to how Immortan Joe would interact with his own subjects some 20 years later.)

3) Because the Universal Studios stunt show is more my frame of reference for this movie than the movie itself, watching Waterworld had the enjoyable element of feeling like I was watching that stunt show fleshed out to feature length. It was nice to be reminded where some of the design elements and specific stunts got their origins, and in turn made that stuff seem more vigorous and exciting in the movie. Any time a character swung around in a cage or traveled along a zipwire, I remembered the stunt show that has entertained me so much and it reflected well on the movie. These scenes are just plain exciting, and given some similarity in design elements, like big shipboard guns that can be trained on nearby targets, I sometimes felt like I was watching an elongated version of the scene in Return of the Jedi where Jabba the Hutt's floating barge is destroyed. 

4) The copy of the film I had looked really good. I'm not much one to determine how one copy potentially differs from another, but I was really noticing how crisp and clean everything looked here. 

5) I thought the plot had sufficient momentum for a movie than runs over two hours. Given that there is a general sameness to all the sets, I was surprised at how this thing moved.

6) I was also reminded of an actual favorite film, The Cable Guy, as I was watching. In the climactic scene of that film, Jim Carrey's character, while punching Matthew Broderick's character in a satellite dish full of rainwater, shouts "Dry land is not a myth! I've seen it!" And then paraphrasing his next line: "I don't know what the big deal is! I've seen that movie five times! It rules!" The funny thing is, Chip Douglas (no relation to Hal Douglas) saying he loves Waterworld is supposed to undermine his taste in movies. The Cable Guy came out only a year later, when Waterworld was definitively and seemingly irreversibly in the realm of complete and total flop. But I don't know. Maybe it does sort of rule, in some ways.

I could probably continue with some other observations, but that's enough.

When adding this and Throw Momma From the Train to my list of rewatches on Letterboxd, I noticed the star ratings I'd given the two movies I hadn't seen since the 1990s (or possibly the 1980s for the other one). Obviously I gave those ratings not when I saw the movies but in, I think, 2012, when I filled in all the movies I'd seen on Letterboxd. I gave Throw Momma 3.5 stars and Waterworld 2.5 stars, but I think I would definitely reverse those two now, if not drop Throw Momma even a half-star lower than that. At the very least, my thoughts on that film don't warrant a full post, like I've just given this one. 

The year with the most best movies

Don't worry, friends. I haven't suddenly lost my grammatical abilities, or reverted to an excited teenager who talks about things being the "mostest bestest."

That subject line simply refers to the year that had the most movies that were the best movie I'd watched on the day that I watched them.

Um, I'm not sure if that helped.

So I need to tell you something -- remind you, actually, since I've discussed it before -- about one of my obsessive movie lists that I keep. This list, kept in Microsoft Word, has dates listed from January 1 to December 31, and then a list of movies I saw on each date and in what year I saw them. 

Probably better if I show you than tell you. So if we are going for today's date, for example, it looks like this:

January 25 = 8
Big Fan (2010), Oklahoma! (2013), Knights of Badassdom (2015), Cake (2016), Patriots Day (2019), Look Who's Back (2020), Big Time Adolescence (2022), Halloween III: Season of the Witch (2024)

That's actually quite a low number for January in particular, and a low number for any date really. My data of what day I saw something only goes back to 2002 (or 2003 in the case of January 25th, since I started keep track of the dates I watched things in March of 2002), but that means I had to not watch a movie on January 25th in any year from 2003 to 2009. Which is very strange especially by my current standards. 

There is, however, an explanation for that. January 25th is usually after my ranking deadline, so I may still be taking a few days off, or may be watching old favorites that I had been denying myself while cramming at the end of the previous year. This document only captures new viewings, not repeat viewings. (I keep track of the dates of repeat viewings as well, but not in this manner.) In fact, of those eight titles listed above, only Big Fan was watched in time to rank it that year. 

You may have noticed that one January 25th title is bolded, which is David Wnendt's Look Who's Back, a 2015 film that I didn't see until 2020. It's a comedy about a return of Hitler, the actual Hitler, in modern-day Germany, and it lacerates just as well as it makes us laugh, ultimately finishing on an extremely ominous note. I bet watching it today would feel especially relevant, though it felt relevant in 2020, when Trump had already been upon us for nearly four years. 

Look Who's Back is my favorite of those eight movies I've seen on January 25th, and that's why it's bolded. The bolding can change as soon as I see a better movie on January 25th, but that has not happened yet. (And probably won't happen tonight as I am taking this weekend to watch old favorites ... just as I earlier said I did on this date.)

I've been keeping this list for, I don't know, ten years? Longer? Not as long as I've been keeping track of the dates I watched movies. I had to backfill based on that list, which is the sort of project I love.

The point is, in that time it never occurred to me to do what I have now done: see which year has the most movies that were my favorite that I saw on that date.

The subject of this post make a little more sense now?

And I'll tell you I found the results of this little exercise very interesting.

But it's not "just" an exercise. In other words, it's not a project I'm doing just to see myself project. Or worse, just to make you see me project.

What it's actually doing, in a way I find compelling, is helping me identify the period of my life over the last 20+ years where I was watching the most movies that increased my love of the cinema. And that might help me answer the question of why that period was so fruitful. 

Now I should say, there is obviously quite a bit of luck involved with this. Some dates have a fairly pedestrian movie as the best movie from that date, just because I happen to have only seen other pedestrian movies on that date. And then there are the days where I have to choose the best from among three five-star movies. It's just how it goes. Still, I think that luck should even out over 366 days.

So what I will do here is list the years in decreasing order of which days had the most, and then just for fun, I'll go into detail about the titles that allowed the top ranked year to win. (I won't, however, include the other movies it beat out to win that title. Too tedious.) And then I'll close with some thoughts about what it all means. 

So here we go (newer years listed first in ties):

2014 - 23
2017 - 22
2013 - 22
2009 - 21
2018 - 20
2016 - 20
2019 - 19
2020 - 17
2011 - 17
2010 - 17
2023 - 16
2022 - 16
2012 - 15
2021 - 14
2008 - 14
2024 - 13
2005 - 10
2004 - 10
2003 - 10
2006 - 8
2002 - 8
2025 - 3

Yes, I've already seen enough good movies in three-plus weeks of 2025 to put it solidly on the board.

So 2014 wins. More on why that might be in a minute. But first, let's look how 2014 got there. Here are the list of dates where I saw my favorite movie on that date in 2014, and that movie:

January 29th: The Hunt (2012, Thomas Vinterberg)
March 1st: All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse)
April 8th: The Lego Movie (2014, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller)
April 17th: Mr. Nobody (2009, Jaco Van Dormael)
May 6th: Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford)
June 14th: TiMer (2009, Jac Schaeffer)
June 23rd: Edge of Tomorrow (2014, Doug Liman)
July 1st: Enemy (2014, Denis Villeneuve) 
July 3rd: The Orphanage (2007, J.A. Bayona)
July 7th: Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer)
July 15th: Cheap Thrills (2013, E.L. Katz)
August 16th: The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson)
August 27th: Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002, Phillip Noyce)
September 7th: Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)
September 17th: Unhung Hero (2013, Brian Spitz)
September 27th: Joe (2013, David Gordon Green)
October 18th: Gone Girl (2014, David Fincher)
October 26th: Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
October 27th: Whiplash (2014, Damien Chazelle)
November 8th: Life Itself (2014, Steve James)
November 17th: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
November 30th: What We Do in the Shadows (2014, Taika Waititi)
December 23rd: The Babadook (2014, Jennifer Kent)

Pretty solid year.

Note: A lot of those movies listed with 2013 release years were actually ranked in 2014 by me, because the IMDB release year in many cases indicates a festival debut. 

So first some general comments on the results, then specifically about 2014.

It's not surprising that the older years on the list were less represented. I've realized that although I don't think I've become a bigger movie fan over the years, at least not recently, my move to Australia did allow me to watch more movies, because I suddenly had way fewer conflicts at night. When I lived in the U.S., I spent many nights watching sports, as well as socializing with friends. In Australia, American sports are on during the day ... and I have fewer friends. (But also we're all older and would socialize less anyway, even if I were still living in Los Angeles.) Also the easier availability of "free" movies on streaming understandably increases my totals significantly. 

As an example of how much things have changed over the period we're looking at here, in the year 2003 -- the first complete year on my list keeping track of my viewings in order -- I saw only 114 new movies. The next year, it was only 105, which remains the lowest total since I started keeping track of this stuff. (I don't include 2002 because it was only a partial year, and understandably did not fare very well in this exercise.)

Those numbers are to be contrasted with the 287 new movies I saw in 2024. It's simple math: the more movies you see, the more chance any individual movie has of being better than other movies you saw on that same date in other years. 

Then of course the more years it has been since you've seen something, the more chances there are for you to use recency bias to get all hot and bothered about a new movie and elevate it above a movie that might be better. 

However, if the higher quantity were truly a hard and fast rule, you'd easily expect the year with the most movies seen to have the best shot at having the most best movies, if all else is equal. My results don't bear that out. 

In fact, in 2014, I saw only 211 new movies -- which is the fewest for any year since 2008, when I got married and when I saw only 193.

How the heck do you explain this?

I shall endeavor to try, but each explanation has evidence that counteracts it.

For starters, I was unemployed until mid-March that year, when I finally got the job that I still have today. That might suggest I had more time to watch good movies, but consider:

1) Only two of the 23 days were from before I got my job (January 29th and March 1st).

2) I had specifically decided to limit my watching to three movies per week while I did not have a job, so as not to distract any more than necessary from my job search. I guess that worked.

It's possible that with fewer movies on my schedule, I was more selective in what I watched. I also know I was first enjoying the benefits of the generous Melbourne library rental periods, which allowed you to take out movies for three weeks at a time -- as opposed to the two days (!) you could borrow movies when I lived in Los Angeles. Probably those movies were higher quality, classics I hadn't seen before ... but then again you don't really see those titles represented to a higher degree among the titles listed above. Only two of them are from the 20th century. 

But I think there is something interesting about the fact that there were only two favorite movies in the first three months of 2014 ... and then 21 after I started my job on St. Patrick's Day, the first one coming on April 8th. In fact, each month from June through November includes at least two dates where I still have yet to see a better movie. 

Could the massive relief of getting a job have injected an immediate sense of equanimity into me, which made it easier for me to relax and enjoy movies?

I think that's very possible.

I was quite stressed out when I was first looking for jobs. I couldn't even look for one for the first three months I was here at the end of 2013, because my visa didn't allow it. Then once it did, it was almost already Christmas and no one was hiring then anyway. Early in 2014, I got so frustrated at one point that I shouted out "Nobody in this fucking country wants to hire me!" My wife and I still laugh about that now and again.

When your life is not settled, when you are depressed about something, when you are anxious about something, when you are mourning ... these are not good times to consume movies. You just can't give them your full heart and mind like you would at other times. It's a key reason why I try not to watch anything I think I might like immediately after Donald Trump wins an election. 

But as soon as that negative condition is relieved ... well it may just be that you are even more inclined to give your full heart and mind than in an ordinary time where nothing particularly interesting is happening one way or another. The relief itself creates a high, maybe a heightened sense of engagement. 

That first year in Australia still remained hard for me, even after I started work, as I was still feeling unsettled, still missing my friends back in LA, still staring off into the distance, a thousand yards at a time. However, getting this job -- which I still have and which I still love -- clearly started to pave the way to greater calm. And I think the continued introspection of a big move like this, and all the changes it entails, blended with that increased sense of calm to allow me to really interface effectively with the movies I saw, both intellectually and emotionally.

Or, maybe it was just a really good year for new releases. 

Yes, the fact that some of these films happen not to have been eclipsed by better films in the intervening years is partly due to luck. Not all of the titles listed above are movies I would consider personal favorites. The Lego Movie, The Orphanage, Cheap Thrills and Joe, in particular, figure to have a pretty flimsy hold on their titles.

But as I said earlier, this sort of luck tends to equal out, the larger the sample size gets. I may have a fixed sample size, as it will always and forever be 366, but it's large enough for these purposes. Plus the individual movies themselves create that larger sample. 

And whatever the reality, this exercise has shown me something interesting about myself and how I may react to particular periods of unusual activity in my life ... and how my experience of movies improves or suffers as a result. 

Finally, a proper Oscar nominations post

I never get to write a post exclusively about the Oscar nominations.

As you know, the day they are revealed is, in most years, the day I post my rankings of movies from the previous year. Two more wrap-up posts follow on consecutive days, plus an informal ode to my #1 on day 4. By that time, the nominations are no longer a new enough phenomenon for me to devote a whole post to them and still feel current. 

This year, due to the tragic circumstances of the LA fires, my rankings release and the nominations date became disentangled. (I could have continued watching 2024 movies until yesterday, but I think that might have killed me.) So here I am, able to create a full reaction post and still be within the first 12 hours of the world's knowledge of them.

First let me start by saying I have to officially learn how to pronounce Emilia Perez. Like many lazy Americans, I still put the emPHAsis on the wrong syllABle. (That old joke.) I still say "Perez" as "Puh-REZ," when of course we know it is much closer to "PAIR-ez." I'll get it one of these days.

Emilia Perez did lead all nominees with 13 Oscar nods, a ridiculous number that is higher than I can remember any film getting in quite some time. That number is of course boosted by three nominations in the music categories, for the score and two songs, but hey, 13 nominations is 13 nominations. No reason to undercut it. 

Especially since Emilia Perez was my #4 movie of 2024. Which is gratifying as hell to see. 

I have yet to see Emilia Perez on another critic's top ten list, though granted, I've only closely observed about eight of them. (Lost in this year's busy and travel-filled December and January was my usual perusal of top ten lists from prominent critics. I'm talking about seven top ten lists on two of my movie podcasts and one created by my friend Don.) 

There was a temptation to think of Emilia Perez as one of those movies the Golden Globes embraces but the Oscars do not embrace. (And yes, I do realize I'm following different pluralization rules for those two bodies, which strikes me as strange but which feels right.) And that means if you like that movie, there is something unsophisticated about you.

But no, Emilia Perez has gotten the full-throated support of the Academy, perhaps even more so than the Globes, It's been officially endorsed. It's okay for me to love it as much as I do.

But hold on there, Emilia Perez is not my highest ranked best picture nominee. Not nearly. 

I figured my #2 Wicked would get a nomination, and it did. But only lately did I start thinking, to my general surprise, that my #1 The Substance would get a nomination. I started to get the idea it might be possible not from the Golden Globes nominating it for best musical or comedy, since that category has some allowances the drama category does not, but from Coralie Fargeat being nominated by the Globes as best director. And indeed, The Substance got that BP nomination, as well as another directing nod for Fargeat, a screenplay nod for Fargeat, and the richly deserved and much expected best actress nomination for Demi Moore. (And hair and makeup.)

Suddenly, a top ten list that I felt put me out of step with other cinephiles -- I was often counting no more than one title in common with their lists, though finally one of my podcasters named The Substance his #8 -- is a fully defensible, even mainstream, list. Three best picture nominees in my top five. 

In fact, too mainstream? Am I now a company man or something? Because actually there are three other movies in my top ten that got best picture nominations. Expectedly, The Brutalist (#9) got one, and I think may be the favorite to win. Unexpectedly, Nickel Boys (#10) got one, which I thought would be unlikely since I'd only heard its name called once or twice before that, though one was for RaMell Ross' screenplay, which always gives a movie a chance at the big prize. And even though its predecessor got a nomination, I thought it was no sure thing that Dune: Part Two (#8) would follow suit, because it sounds like some people are cooler on this than the first, and sequels generally are considered damaged goods. 

So, fully 60% of my top ten was nominated for best picture. I'm not sure I've ever had that sort of alignment with the Oscars. There was one recent year, in fact, where my highest ranked movie to get a best picture nomination was my #11, meaning I had zero in my top ten. And this is the first time my #1 has been nominated since Parasite won the big prize in 2019. 

That leaves four other movies, only three of which I've seen. I thought there would be one nominee I hadn't seen, but I was led by early prognosticators to think that might be Sing Sing. Instead it was I'm Still Here, a surprise nominee from Brazil -- a surprise not because I hadn't heard of it, as I did start getting the buzz about it later in the year, but because foreign language films struggle to find a spot here, though perhaps less so in recent years. (In fact, Emilia Perez is primarily a foreign language film, as it has some English despite mostly Spanish. Both films got nominated as best international feature, Perez representing director Jacques Audiard's home country of France.) 

My #14, Conclave, keeps my alignment with the Academy going. That makes seven nominees in my top 15. Astonishing, though with Conclave it was certainly expected. Even my eighth ranked best picture nominee, Anora, almost made my top 25, settling in at #26.

That's where it drops off.

Every time I heard A Complete Unknown's name called throughout the morning, having watched the nominations live at 12:30 a.m. my time as I always do, I shook my head. The movie was my #128 of the year, and I wanted to put it lower except I liked some of the recreation of the period and Timothee Chalamet's performance. Everything else about that film was, I thought, a dud. We'll get into some of my specific reservations as we go through the categories.

Which I think it is time to do now, limiting ourselves to "the big eight" for the purposes of close analysis, followed by some other scattered thoughts. In some cases I will award the highest ranked film on my list but in some cases I will not. I'm mercurial like that.

Best picture

Most deserving nominee: The Substance
Least deserving nominee: A Complete Unknown

Comments: As discussed. 

Best director

Nominees: Sean Baker, Anora; Brady Corbet, The Brutalist; Coralie Fargeat, The Substance; Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez; James Mangold, A Complete Unknown

Most deserving nominee: Corbet
Least deserving nominee: Mangold

Comments: I'm going to give this one to Corbet despite two other films appearing higher on my list. The Brutalist is the grandest vision in terms of old-fashioned auteurist directing, and I wouldn't mind seeing that rewarded. Of course I would also love to see one of the French take home the statue. And I think Mangold's direction may have actually been one of the worst aspects of ACU. 

Best actor

Nominees: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist; Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown; Colman Domingo, Sing Sing; Ralph Fiennes, Conclave; Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice

Most deserving nominee: Brody
Least deserving nominee: Chalamet

Comments: Although I said I liked Chalamet's performance, I don't like the movie and so I want its nomination count to go down, not up. Besides, this category contains two movies I haven't seen, and though I also want the nomination count to go down for a movie about Donald Trump -- he'll consider it some kind of ego boost that someone was nominated for an Oscar for playing him -- I can't call a nominee I haven't seen undeserving. Brody edges out Fiennes by having the more demanding role. 

Best actress

Nominees: Cynthia Erivo, Wicked; Karla Sofia Gascon, Emilia Perez; Mikey Madison, Anora; Demi Moore, The Substance; Fernanda Torres, I'm Still Here

Most deserving nominee: Moore
Least deserving nominee: Madison

Comments: It's absolutely wonderful to see a trans performer nominated in the gender with which they associate. It seemed likely the Oscars would get this right, but we couldn't be sure until it happened. And though Gascon is utterly deserving (as is Erivo), I have to give it to my girl Demi, don't I? I haven't seen Torres' film so that leaves only Madison, who was great in and as Anora. What can I say, some categories are just jam-packed. 

Best supporting actor

Nominees: Yura Borisov, Anora; Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain; Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown; Guy Pearce, The Brutalist; Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Most deserving nominee: Pearce
Least deserving nominee: Norton

Comments: Another Complete Unknown nomination, another whiff. Norton is fine in this movie, but there isn't a lot of acting involved. This is what I said about the Seeger character in my review: "The portrayal of Seeger in this film is a discussion for another time ... he's largely ineffectual and eventually becomes something of a buffoon, despite seeming like a very nice guy." That is not Oscar material. Pearce edges out Borisov, but Culkin was quite good in a movie I didn't particularly care for. 

Best supporting actress

Nominees: Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown; Ariana Grande, Wicked; Felicity Jones, The Brutalist; Isabella Rosselini, Conclave; Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez

Most deserving nominee: Grande
Least deserving nominee: Barbaro

Comments: Even though I was a bit captivated by Barbaro, who I'd never seen before, come on, Joan Baez is a nothing role in that movie. Though it should be said, much as I love Conclave, Rosselini's role is a "barely anything" role. It's hard to compare the work of Saldana and Grande because it's so different, but I have to give the edge to Grande just because of how much she surprised me and how much her work contributed to why I loved Wicked.

Best original screenplay

Nominees: Anora, The Brutalist, A Real Pain, September 5, The Substance

Most deserving nominee: The Substance
Least deserving nominee: A Real Pain

Comments: I think this is the only nomination for September 5, which I guess is what you get if you decide to release your movie so deep into awards season, with so little ability for people to see it except in screeners at their own houses. Since that leaves me only four choices for least deserving and three of them are in my top 26, the default choice is A Real Pain, which did, I think, have a pretty good script. The Substance wins, natch. 

Best adapted screenplay

Nominees: A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Emilia Perez, Nickel Boys, Sing Sing

Most deserving nominee: Emilia Perez
Least deserving nominee: A Complete Unknown

Comments: I have to say I did not even know Perez was adapted from something else, though maybe it makes sense that Audiard did not just whip up such a crazy idea for a movie out of thin air. The script here is incredibly ambitious and somehow manages to land everything it's doing, including songs. And you won't be surprised to hear yet another jeer for ACU, whose script, I think, is among its worst elements. 

Other assorted thoughts:

1) I have not heard of a single of the documentary feature nominees. How far that category has fallen out of the mainstream. I blame the lines blurring so much with all these quickie, exploitative documentaries on Netflix. 

2) I would have liked to see Kirsten Dunst get a nomination for Civil War, which I thought seemed like a lock. I don't know who you'd kick out, though, since I haven't seen I'm Still Here.

3) There was a movie called Elton John: Never Too Late?

4) I only saw two of the best animated feature nominees. I was on the cusp of seeing the Wallace & Gromit movie while I was in America but was thrown by its 2025 release date on Netflix. I chose not to see Memoir of a Snail (incredibly depressing filmmaker) and Flow (I didn't think I could handle a whole movie without dialogue that late in the viewing season). My preference between Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot is clearly Inside Out 2, but it was only #60 on my list in what I thought was a bad year for animation. My highest ranked animated movie was one that never had a prayer of a nomination, Ultraman: Rising at #28.

5) Speaking of The Wild Robot, is it weird for an animated movie to get a sound nomination? I'm not sure if I've ever seen that. I feel like the thrust of this award is for sound that accompanies and complements a moving image, and animation is not a moving image in the same way. Or could it be that an animated movie has just never had as good sound as The Wild Robot? I doubt that. 

6) As Bowen Yang noted during the announcements, three of the visual effects nominees created monkeys as one of their primary effects. 

And even though six is a fairly random number of additional comments, I think I can/should release you now. 

Back in action with Back in Action

In the style of Chandler Bing ... could there be any better title to start a new ranking year than Back in Action?

My week could have shaken out in such a way that the first 2025 film I saw was Wolf Man, though at this point, it remains to be seen whether that will actually happen. It might happen later today, but it might not happen at all -- the movie is already gone from one theater where I might have seen it, after only a week, and some of the other convenient theaters only have it at inconvenient times. Which is especially strange given that director Leigh Whannell is Australian. 

But come on. I couldn't let it go down like that. It had to be Back in Action, because I am, indeed, back in action.

My actual return to film watching, after two nights off, was The Retirement Plan, which could have had its own symbolic value if I were sick of ranking films. But again I say: Come on. 

The third film, and first released in 2025, was Back in Action, and it was actually really fun.

I'm not here to give you an in-depth discussion of this movie that is not very deep. But it is really light on its feet, and I laughed out loud more than a half-dozen times. If you want my review you can read it here. 

And no need to really go on at length about this either ... I just liked the obvious title for this post and I couldn't resist. 

Remembering the man whose name became an adjective

I haven't had a chance to reflect on David Lynch before now. When I learned of his passing on Thursday due to complications from emphysema and having to be relocated from his home during the fires, at age 78, it was right at the beginning of a cavalcade of year-end posts that were ready to go up and were going to consume the next four days on this blog. And while some cinephiles might consider Lynch's loss to be reason enough to interrupt that freight train, I am not one of them, which I will explore more in a minute.

I thought of not doing a Lynch in memoriam post at all. I don't consider myself to be the "blog of record" in the sense that I need to note the passing of any influential member of the film community. I don't consider it, or at least don't want to consider it, a sign that I don't care enough about that person if I fail to write a remembrance post. Sometimes the timing and my schedule just don't work out.

But even if Lynch was not always my favorite filmmaker, he was the favorite filmmaker of the most cherished other cinephile in my life, who does the year-end rankings with me and has known me for nearly 50 years. (I've only been alive for 51. In reality, it's more like 48.) Plus, there's absolutely no denying the singular impact David Lynch had on the movies we've watched for the last 40 years, even if he made comparatively few of them himself. 

After all, this was a man whose last name was an adjective.

If you were to call a movie "Lynchian," people would instantly know what you were talking about, if they themselves were the right level of cinephile. And I'd argue that the people who knew what that meant might extend even to people who weren't cinephiles. Twin Peaks had such a cultural moment that even people who had only seen snippets of it knew that it represented a new sort of perspective on storytelling, or at least the first time this perspective had reached a wider audience.

Defining what it means for a film to be Lynchian is an imperfect exercise. It's a "you know it when you see it" thing. Any film that is "weird" might invite the Lynch comparison, but there are a lot of "weird" films out there that are not Lynchian. To be Lynchian, a film must also have sort of gothic noir overtones, and preferably a haunting score. If a character speaks in tongues, all the better. If a beautiful woman dies, all the better, though that probably only applies to Twin Peaks and its various movie versions and rebooted TV versions among Lynch's variegated output.

I do love certain Lynch films. Oddly, I often called his least Lynchian film, The Straight Story, my favorite, though this has since been eclipsed by Eraserhead. I also have a strong fondness for Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man, and have come around on Mulholland Drive after being more befuddled than entranced on my first viewing.

There are also, of course, Lynch films that I struggle with. My one viewing of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me left me perplexed, and I couldn't crack The Lost Highway either, even though I owned its soundtrack for years before I saw it due to Trent Reznor's involvement. And of course his Dune is a trainwreck. Then again, I suppose I am not alone in having these opinions about these films.

Even the two features I haven't mentioned I am more than mildly positive on. Those would be Wild at Heart, one of the last ones I saw, and Inland Empire. Having not yet taken to Mulholland Drive at this point, I was all prepared to hate Inland Empire considering it is also three hours long. Yet I felt myself bewitched by it largely in the way the director would have intended.

The fact that Lynch has not made a proper feature since then, which is nearly 20 years ago, indicates how little he was interested in being any one sort of thing. In the meantime he directed the Twin Peaks reboot series -- which some people love but which I gave up on, even before Nine Inch Nails played -- and numerous shorts. Heck, he was even a weatherman for an LA radio station for a while, mostly as a joke but played straight by him, albeit in his strange, inimitable style. And of course he was also an actor. Despite all these other hats he wore, I know my friend was hoping for at least one more feature, because that was the essential Lynch as we all first came to know and love him.

Because I didn't know and love him quite as much as some other people did, I will leave a better analysis of his art to other people. In fact, since I'm late to the game on this remembrance, they've all already done it, I'm sure some of them quite beautifully.

I will say, however, that Lynch represents somewhat of an unusual case for me: A director with nearly ten feature films (he fell just one short), all of which I've seen. Yes, I am a David Lynch completist, if you are counting only feature films and not all the other stuff from his prolific output of a career that started in the 1960s. 

And you can't be a completist on a director with that many films unless you are acknowledging there is something great and worth reckoning with in those films. I'll say that every time I started watching a David Lynch film, I knew there was a chance that he would reframe my entire understanding of cinema, even the world. 

If Lynch had that impact even on me, one of his lesser disciples, then just imagine how he blew the minds of those who truly love him ... and how hard the past week of knowing he would no longer be with us has been. 

Rest in peace, you weird and wonderful iconoclast. 

Horror goes back-to-back -- or does it?

If there is anything stranger than a horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2023, it's a second horror movie taking my #1 spot in 2024 -- when no movie with that genre tag had ever accomplished that feat before.

But is The Substance really a horror movie?

Skinamarink was/is, there's no doubt about that. But is it possible for a movie that's discussed by almost everyone as body horror, to not actually be part of the larger genre assignment in which body horror is presumably a subset? 

I think it's not only possible, but probable. 

Now, we know that at least for the purposes of Golden Globes consideration, The Substance was considered a comedy. I've always thought it was useful that the Globes breaks down its nominees between drama and musical/comedy, since it broadens the number of types of film on which they can shine the light of praise, beyond the five films that might fit into a single category. The Substance almost certainly would not have been recognised if there were only one category.

We can be snooty and cast serious doubt on whether we should grant the Globes any legitimacy whatsoever, but they do provide a useful role in helping us understand how we should think about a movie like The Substance. Although it is not "ha ha" funny in more than a few individual moments -- I think of that great moment where the already gnarled version of Elizabeth Sparkle storms out of her apartment and tells her neighbor to fuck off -- there is no doubt Coralie Fargeat's film is wicked in its intentions, and is a full-on satire even if it not a full-on comedy.

That does leave space for horror, and believe me, IMDB does assign that category to it. In fact, The Substance has a ridiculous number of categories assigned to it, four of which include the word "horror." In order of how they're listed, these are:

Body Horror
Dark Comedy
Monster Horror
Psychological Horror
Drama
Horror 
Sci-Fi

We can't necessarily trust whoever assigns the categories in IMDB, but the number of genre assignments alone -- more than I have seen for any other film -- probably indicates why this movie was such a fabulous success for me. After all, I've gone on the record saying I wanted my #1 movie to push the limits of an easy genre association, and The Substance passes that test with flying colors.

And despite the mention of horror four times in those categories, I still wonder if it is actually a horror movie.

Let's consider what makes a movie a horror movie. I'll start with the most obvious two:

1) It attempts to scare you by establishing a sense of dread, a sense of not knowing what might happen but knowing it will be bad.

2) It attempts to then spring that scary thing on you with a suddenness that makes you jump, which is why we call it a jump scare. 

These primary two building blocks of a horror more are, I would argue, not even present in The Substance.

Although Fargeat's film establishes a sense of eeriness, supported primarily through the facelessness of the company that provides Elizabeth the drug, nothing about what happens to Elizabeth Sparkle is supposed to be establishing a sense of dread. We might be discomfited by the grossness of it, but there are no things we can't see, hiding in the shadows, that might make the scenario more frightening. In fact, we are directly confronted with the things that happen to Elizabeth in so open a way that it is almost a case of over-sharing, while horror fundamentally relies on under-sharing.

Since there is nothing hiding in the shadows, there is nothing to jump out of those shadows. Therefore, no jump scares either.

Of course, to limit horror to those two basic components is to be rather reductive. I also, however, find it fairly useful in terms of deciding whether something is a horror movie or not. If you can think of any true horror movie that does not contain one or the other of these elements, I'd like to know what it is.

"Body horror," though, is absolutely an appropriate genre classification for The Substance, given how much body horror there is in this movie. Interestingly, this leads us to a distinction between the genre called "body horror" and the use of that phrase to describe something you specifically see within any movie. You can say that a movie contains body horror without actually being part of that genre. As a good example, there is body horror of a sort in the Deadpool movies in that the main character is always having awful things happen to his person. Yet you would not for a moment consider putting that as a genre tag on Deadpool & Wolverine. 

And yet if you were to say that The Substance contained body horror and yet was not part of the body horror genre, well that would be incorrect, now wouldn't it? I think it might have to do with the quantity of body horror. The Substance exceeds that standard by a country mile.

Then the question is, can a movie be in the body horror genre without being in the larger horror genre that surrounds it? 

I don't know if I have an answer to that, but then I can look back on the evidence of The Substance and how little effort it makes to "scare" us in the conventional ways that a standard horror movie scares us. Being a cautionary tale is not the same thing as being scary.

When it comes to the subject of body horror, you should always come back to David Cronenberg. The grandfather of body horror, the genre, includes body horror, the cinematic component, in almost every one of his films. Even A History of Violence has a knack for body horror -- remember seeing the close-up of that guy's face after Viggo Mortensen stomps it? 

Cronenberg's movie Existenz seems like a good example. Although I don't remember a lot of this movie, it is one of the first movies I think of when I think of the concept of body horror in the abstract. My memory of this film, though, is that it uses body horror more for the purposes of science fiction -- like The Matrix did -- than for anything that would truly be categorized as horror. And that provides a good template for what The Substance is, though in this case that primary genre might be satire.

Or it might be science fiction. Or it might be drama. Or it might be dark comedy. These are all possible genre associations for The Substance.

All these questions are to the good of Fargeat's movie. When trying to pick apart why a movie is my #1, our very inability to pigeonhole it is a strong asset in its favor. 

The only thing I know for sure -- and the only thing that really matters -- is that a really awesome movie has gone back-to-back with another really awesome movie.

I can't wait to see what awesome movie succeeds it in 2025. 

2024 in portmanteaus

Twenty twenty-four was a year, just like any other year since 2014. 

Which means it's time for the 11th annual installment of the year in portmanteaus, in which I take two movies from the year just completed, mash them together by title, and see what laughs might arise from the smoldering ruins.

Without any further ado, here's 30 of them:

It's What's Inside Out 2 - Riley's teenage brain gets even more scrambled when all her emotions switch places with each other.

The Deadpool Don't Hurt - Actually, that's a common misconception about the wisecracking superhero. It's quite painful when he gets sliced and diced up by an enemy, it just doesn't have any long-term impact. 

I Saw the TV Crow - Two confused teenagers become vigilantes after they believe they've turned into the characters on a popular TV show. 

Rebel Ridge: The Scargiver - A former marine unfairly detained by the police leads an uprising of local townspeople, giving scars to many corrupt cops.

Red One Rooms - Santa is arrested and put on trial after filling the dark web with reindeer snuff films. 

Ghostbusters: Unfrosted Empire - The origin story of the giant walking Pop Tart that destroyed New York City. 

Bratiator II - Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy team up to fight a digital rhinoceros. 

Better Monkey Man - A simian Robbie Williams cuts a path of mayhem through Delhi while singing and dancing.

Fly Me to the Moana - The latest trick by a mischievous demigod is that he fakes the moon landing. 

The People's Joker: Folie a Deux - Wait, which one has Lady Gaga again? 

Furiosa: A Mad MaXXXine Saga - An 80s porn star hunts down the man sending her cryptic messages, who is always prattling on about guzzoline. 

Sasquatch Suncoast - A family of missing links finds their primitive brains tested when they must decide whether to disconnect Terry Schiavo's feeding tubes. 

Nosferatuesday - Count Orlok meets his match in the form of a giant talking macaw. 

The Substanicky - An Atlantic City lounge act injects himself with a fluid to make him younger so his audiences will still want to listen to his porn-themed song parodies. 

Transformers: One Love - The origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron as Rastafarians who wanted to transform the world through song, and marijuana. 

The Greatest Night in Cop: Axel F - LA police officers gather for a recording where they all go "Doo do doo do do do do" to the tune of that Harold Faltermeyer song. 

Wolfserines - Two different Hugh Jackmans from two different timelines show up at the same crime scene to dispose of a body. 

Mufasa: The Lion Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - Talking apes? Talking lions? Who can keep up. 

Janet of the Apes - Watching Janet Planet bores millions to death, resulting in the extinction of humanity. 

Saturday Nightbitch - The first ever sketch on Saturday Night Live was actually about a mother turning into a werewolf. 

Brutalista - A Hungarian architect tries to gain his work visa by doing strange favors for Tilda Swinton. 

Harold and the Purple Christopher Reeve - A storybook character restores Superman's ability to walk by drawing him a new pair of legs.  

Megalopolisters - Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel chase tornadoes that threaten to destroy their new utopian city.

Under MegaloParis - Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel chase sharks that threaten to destroy their new utopian city. 

Longlegalopolis - Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel try to chew more scenery than Nicolas Cage. 

Twicked - Storm chasers follow Dorothy into the tornado, enroll at an academy for students potentially gifted in witchcraft. 

Imagimary - The mother of Jesus tells her husband she was impregnated by an imaginary friend only she can see but we all should worship.

Will & Harperez - Will Ferrell gets an additional surprise when he learns his dear friend was also once the head of a powerful drug cartel. 

Trapprentice - Authorities corner a dangerous criminal inside an arena to hold him accountable for his crimes, but the American people vote for him anyway. 

Hundreds of Beetlejuices - Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Bee