Attainable movie dreams

When I use the word "attainable" on this blog, more likely than not I'm talking about some kind of goal in my quixotic, never-ending quest to see every movie ever made.

In this case, however, I'm using it in relation to something I saw in a movie once, that felt like a beautiful dream, which I have now attained, in a manner of speaking.

I don't love Before Midnight as much as I do because I appreciate the ways Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy beat each other up over the course of 109 minutes. I do respect that, and I do think they -- along with their primary collaborator, Richard Linklater -- have put their finger on something true about the way any relationship changes during its course, in ways you hope are not so bad that the relationship runs its course. I haven't seen the movie since 2019, but nearly six years deeper into my marriage, I'd probably appreciate those observations now even more than I did the first two times I saw it.

No, what put me into a state of love for the movie, which became more complicated as my relationship changed with the movie over the course of its running time, was the scene where Hawke, Delpy, and their friends talk and eat and philosophize over a beautiful outdoor table covered with food, the Agean Sea behind them.

In that moment, I wanted to have that dinner, with my friends, at some point. Preferably, hosting it.

I've had lovely outdoor dinners with a half-dozen people who care for and challenge and tease each other, growing ever more sweetly inebriated as the light fades from the sky. But never before have I had such a platonic example of that -- since we're already talking Greece and philosophy -- in my own back yard.  

It's summer here in Australia, don't forget -- the waning days of summer, but summer still. And so it was we had a group of my wife's friends from high school and their partners over for dinner this past Saturday night, in celebration of my wife's birthday, representing four couples across seven people, my wife and myself not included. (One partner was an apology.) 

It's not uncommon to see these people for dinner, as we do it a couple times a year. But only recently has it been possible to do it at our house. With my wife as project manager, this summer we have built a deck in our back yard. It took a long time and it was very hard in spots, but it looks really good now, and I don't even really notice the flaws, like the uneven ends of the boards in relationship to one another, or the few spots where the footing is a bit soft, giving way to a part of the frame that's less sturdy. 

Then just recently we dressed it up with a new outdoor L-shaped couch (we had no such furniture before) and a new BBQ (the old one was about eight years old and rusted through). We even repainted some old chairs so they matched the BBQ. In short, the place looks really good.

Add in some Peruvian chicken, rice, salad and a pavlova for dessert, with wine flowing freely around the table, and even what they call "fairy lights" (outdoor deck lighting) strung up just earlier that day, we sat around this table, chewing the fat and slinging the shit, until my wife got enough sense about her to drive us indoors at 10:30 so as not to disturb the neighbors. There our guests stayed until after 12. 

Perhaps because they've had children with them in the past, some of whom were coerced into coming even into their late teens, this group has never stayed out that late. Me, I'd like to think it was the outdoor eating environment at the perfect temperature that we'd created, by the sea -- a few blocks from the sea, but by it nonetheless. 

In my sweetly inebriated state, I said something about being glad they were all here and that it reminded me of a scene from a movie. I probably should have kept that part to myself -- nothing like curdling a moment by calling too much attention to it and seeming to care too much about it -- but I received nothing but warm good vibes in return, and we carried on as if I had not just said something embarrassing.

Ethan and Julie and Richard might have been proud. 

The wrong time to advertise a Christmas movie

If I seem to be harping on advertising mistakes recently, it's because people keep making them.

This time it's Amazon Prime, on IMDB.

Yes, the movie Red One might be an enticement to subscribe to Amazon Prime -- if it were mid-December, when the Christmas movie first became available on the service.

Late February? I'm sorry, no. 

We no longer have James Franco, so now we have Theo James

Theo James is the kind of guy who defines the phrase "a poor man's."

If you don't know what that means, I'll use it in a sentence: "Gerard Butler is a poor man's Harrison Ford." If you don't have the money for Harrison Ford but you want a similar element in your movie, you hire Butler, who will work for pennies on Ford's dollar. (I hope I remember to come up with a better example before posting, because that comparison is very unfair to Ford and they aren't even in the same generation.)

The point is, the star of the new movie The Monkey, in a dual role, is a poor man's James Franco. Or was, anyway. Now that same poor man could probably better afford Franco than Theo James.

See, Janes Franco was cancelled, and rightly so. But another James, Theo, was waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.

But it's not primarily that Theo James is bringing to movies what Janes Franco brought to movies -- or might still bring, if the poor man is desperate enough, or poor enough. I'm not sure that he does, as their personas are not very similar. 

It's that Theo looks almost exactly like Franco.

Here's Theo in The Monkey:

And here's Franco in Spider-Man:

Come on they're the same guy.

(Not so) crazy theory: Franco realized he could no longer get hired as "James Franco" so he came up with the alias "Theo James," so similar in structure but just with the order of the names switched. Why Theo? Well Theo was Vincent Van Gogh's more level-headed brother, and maybe JF needed a more level-headed alter ego to put his skeevy tendencies back in line. (Don't forget, Vincent Van Gogh was known for cutting his ear off for a woman. Different kind of skeevy.)

One problem with this theory: Theo is six years younger than Franco (if you believe Wikipedia), and Theo was making movies long before Franco got cancelled. In fact, his first credit is in 2010, the same year Franco was nominated for best actor for 127 Hours. (You might know him from the Divergent series, but I don't because I haven't seen any of those. I did enjoy his small bit in Dual, a top ten movie for me a couple years go.)

If the whole premise of this post seems founded on a certain dismissiveness of Theo James or The Monkey -- and you might expect me to be winding up for a thing like that, considering that I named the previous film by director Osgood Perkins, Longlegs, my worst movie of 2024  -- then it might surprise you to learn how tickled I was by this movie. It's great horror comedy, but maybe what makes it even greater is that it is balancing a couple tones at once, unafraid to consider some of the thornier issues of things like family relationships, particularly those between brothers.

And in this movie, Theo James plays both brothers -- the good one, and the bad one, though probably they're both neither monolithically good nor bad in our world of relativity. This movie has the kind of complexity to explore that notion, and the performance by James, while not outstanding in any particular dimension, is capable enough for Perkins' ideas to be in good hands. 

And while we're on the topic of Perkins, thank goodness it looks like Longlegs was a misguided one-off. If you want to read my Monkey review, it's here. And Perkins returns to the form that made me love him so much in The Blackcoat's Daughter, though this is quite a different type of movie -- and not as good, though very few movies are. (Perkins has a great small role in this movie, too -- and what happens to his character is legendary.)

Stan claims a best picture nominee as its own

Stan was cleared of any wrongdoing in "the great Eat Pray Love streaming scandal" of earlier this month, but that doesn't necessarily mean all is well with the Australian streamer.

Except this time, I'm attacking them only for a silly marketing thing and perhaps a bit of excess and unwarranted pride.

You may recall, in the ultimately incorrect discussion of whether Stan streamed its movies at a sufficient quality (the fault with the poor stream lay elsewhere), that one of the things that gave me pause about unsubscribing from the service was that The Substance, my #1 of 2024, was about to start streaming there, and I really wanted to show it to my wife. It wasn't necessarily The Substance specifically that gave me pause, but the reminder that Stan has a definite benefit to me in that some movies become available there that aren't available on my other streamers, and may not be for some time. It being the #1 of my previous year just made for a quite prominent and well-timed example of that phenomenon.

My wife and I may watch it this coming weekend, but in the meantime, I came across the funny ad you see above.

You can read the surrounding content from one of my progressive news outlets, Daily Kos, if you want. But then come back to the ad.

Stan is calling The Substance a "brand new film." (More on my family's private joke about that particular phrasing later in the post.)

It's not the same as calling it a "Stan original film," which would definitely be a bridge too far. But the ad is attempting to deceive on some level, to take credit for a movie by implying a certain ownership or a certain exclusive right to make this film available to the world.

The Substance may be "new" in the broader, geological sense, and I would not harp on that phrasing if they just called it a "new film." But "brand" is a doubling down, a sense of underscoring its newness and pushing it out to the maximum end of that parameter. Something that's "brand" new, as opposed to just new, is something that you could not have accessed or experienced in any other way before now.

Not only is this patently wrong -- The Substance was released in Australia in September, having debuted at least a month before that at MIFF specifically and possibly at other festivals around the country, not to be mention becoming available for rental a couple months after that -- but even many casual readers of this ad would know it was wrong. 

If Stan has chosen to market The Substance heavily, as they should, it's because they know their viewers want to see it, as they should. But those viewers are inclined to see it because they have heard raves about it, and the more switched on of them -- they don't even need to be that switched on -- would know the movie has been nominated for multiple Oscars, including the top prize, and has already won a Golden Globe for Demi Moore's performance in addition to receiving several other nominations there. If you are even more switched on, you might be aware of the other awards it has won or where it has received nominations -- though by this point you'd probably be switched on enough to have already seen it.

So essentially, many of the people this ad is being pitched to would know it was trying to dupe them on some level, and that's not really a great place for any ad to be.

I said I'd get back to "brand new."

Stan has a lot of radio ads here for its offerings, and in that case they're more likely to be promotions of TV series, which likely still sell much better to customers than movies. The phrase "brand new" almost always makes its way into that ad copy, but a while back, at least a year ago, I noticed something about this ad copy that I pointed out to my kids, and especially the younger one brings it up regularly and thinks it's funny. 

While most people in the world contract those two words when they say them, so the D gets dropped and it sounds more like "brannew," the Stan ad copy reader went to broadcasting school, so of course he has to say the D. Which never doesn't sound awkward. He makes it sound less awkward because he's a professional, but try saying this out loud to yourself right there where your sit, only quietly, so the people around you don't think you're crazy. There's no way to pronounce the D in "brand new" without tripping up on the sound you are required to make in the middle and having the whole thing come out in sort of a sputter, when everyone knows what you're saying if you just say "brannew." In fact, I'd argue that if you say the D, it kind of doesn't actually sound like what you're trying to say, so rare is it. 

So when we call back to this, we always over-emphasize the sputtering D in the middle, like "bran-D-D-D-dnew." It never ceases to make us laugh. 

One final bit about The Substance while I have you, instead of creating a superfluous separate post on the topic. Actually two short bits:

1) I haven't read all the available writing on The Substance -- in fact, I haven't read 1% of it. But in the stuff I have read, I have never seen mentioned its similarity to a short film Coralie Fargeat made in 2014 called Reality+. A friend mentioned this similarity to me a couple days ago. Here is the plot synopsis for Reality+: 

"In a near future, the brain chip 'Reality+' acts on your sensory perceptions and allows you to see yourself with the perfect physique you've always dreamed of. All the people equipped with the chip can see your new appearance and you can see theirs. But the chip can only be activated for 12h a day..."

I almost snort-laughed to see how similar this is to The Substance, even down to the equal timeshare of the two modes. I can't necessarily use this as evidence of Fargeat's excessive fixation, since it's not uncommon for a director to build out an idea from one of their short films into feature length. I do think it's funny how little the concept has been modified. I don't watch a lot of short films but I may need to seek this one out.

2) Speaking of writing about The Substance, I just now noticed how much extra material there is in The Substance's Wikipedia entry, kind of like the written equivalent of all the DVD extras we used to get that expanded on how the film was made. I may have to set aside some time to read this at some point ... maybe either just before or just after the upcoming viewing with my wife. 

A Perfect Day-time movie

The last time I tried to watch Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, I thought I'd fit it into one of those late-night time lots I've been telling you about lately, pushed back to an inopportune starting time by my younger son's tendency to hang around the living room, where our big TV is, until nearly ten o'clock.

Knowing what I knew about it -- mostly a single character, mostly little dialogue -- I thought it would clock in around 90 minutes. But when I saw that night it was 124, I quickly switched to something else.

This time it was much easier, as I had the whole living room to myself, and I was starting around 10 a.m. rather than around 10 p.m. 

The reason was that the aforementioned younger son was sleeping over at his aunt's house, and still there yesterday (Sunday) morning. Yes, he claims the living room on the weekend mornings, too. Taking advantage of the novelty of him not being there, I decided to watch the rare-these-days morning movie, which could be a little bit longer if necessary, since we were having a quiet day after having a group of people over the night before. (In fact, there's something about that gathering that may inspire its own post in a day or two.) 

I went into Kanopy not knowing what I would watch, but I didn't even need to start scrolling, because Perfect Days was on the landing screen, reminding me of my desire to watch it through sheer coincidence.

Perfect Days is, indeed, the perfect movie to watch during the day. I'll go into the reasons:

1) It's in Japanese. I'm not saying I can't watch subtitles at night, because that is exactly what I do most of the time. However, in the morning or afternoon, you're fresher than you would be even with an earlier evening start. It's always good to be fresh when you're doing a lot of reading and when your understanding of the film relies on that reading.

2) The actual amount of dialogue, though, is quite small, though there's more than I first thought there would be. This means I could watch it and still do the things that inevitably distract a person during the day, like people sending you messages on Facebook or having to play your turns in Lexulous. (Don't worry, Wenders lovers -- I did not do this very much, and always did it at a time when I reckoned I was likely not to miss something truly essential.)

3) Kind of expanding on point 2, this is a "hangout movie" in that it does not have stringent plotting. Some would argue -- in fact, I would be one of those -- that this only means you should pay closer attention to the small details, since it's all small details in this movie. But in a hangout movie, it's kind of nice if you can hang out, also -- you're watching and appreciating the movie perfectly well, even though you are also distracted and giving at least 17% of your attention to something else at least 17% of the time.

4) Because of the lack of dialogue, though, there isn't the immediacy of content to always hold your attention, which means if you watch it at night, you could be even more prone to the micro naps I've talked about recently.

I really liked the movie, almost loved. Maybe if I had watched it in the theater, uninterrupted, I would have actually loved it. Instead, I did succumb to a number of small breaks and the 124 minutes took more like 170 minutes to watch. Inevitably, some of the film's spell over me was broken in this situation, where others might walk through the room at any point, rather than just the beginning like my wife might do at night, before she settles in for her own evening's entertainment. Though they, too, were enjoying a quiet day.

Still, you can't see every movie you want to see in the cinema, in the cinema, and any viewing outside of that is going to be compromised in some way. I mean, I can't remember the last time I watched any movie at home and didn't pause it once. If the option is there, you take it. 

However, I do manage to love movies I don't see in the cinema each year, so pausing the movie itself is not fatal to your potential love for it. 

And for any number of reasons, the daytime viewing may be the perfect way to do that ... while also having its inevitable imperfections. 

The nod-off of indeterminate length

The later my younger son's bedtime gets, the later I start my movies these days. He likes being in the public space of our living room, and often does not vacate it until nearly 10 o'clock. That's how I get a lot of late-starting movies and a lot of instances of nodding off while watching them. I maintain my ability to pause the movie if I'm going to really fall asleep, but I tend to have a number of micro sleeps, where I feel like I might have been asleep for 30 seconds. 

In fact, I've discovered when I go back that I have usually only missed about one line of dialogue.

These experiences are quite bizarre in that sense. You know you have mentally disengaged from the movie, but you don't know how long. If you did know how long, though, you might not bother going back to see what you missed.

The example from Thursday night was the 1996 movie Freeway starring Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon. There's nothing special about this particular movie in terms of the phenomenon, it's just when I happened to think to write about it. In fact, this movie is so unspecial that I hate to even give it the spotlight of a poster on my blog. But I'm democratic that way. If someone reads this post looking for a recommendation of Freeway, they won't find it. In fact, I found this such an ugly movie -- from both a filmmaking perspective and a moral perspective -- that I decided to give it the rare half-star on Letterboxd. Yuck. (So much for the idea of seeing Witherspoon at her youngest and charmingest.) 

In retrospect, the idea that I would want to go back and watch anything in this movie again, to be sure I didn't miss it, is laughable, unless only to deepen my understanding of how wretched it is. (The movie has a 6.8 on IMDB. I will never understand the world.) But when this was happening most near the beginning of the movie -- a phenomenon I cannot entirely explain, because I should only get more tired as I go -- the verdict was still out on Freeway, so I did rewind 30 seconds to see what I'd missed. (I did ultimately get tired enough later to fall asleep for more than an hour, but I paused when I felt that coming on.)

And only at the very end of those 30 seconds would I finally get about one line of dialogue I had not heard. 

It's a strange phenomenon to be sure. You find yourself entering the fugue state of a waking dream, enough that you've already started populating your dream with characters and locations and a storyline. This occurs for long enough that you know you have not seen or comprehended whatever was playing on the screen in front of you. 

And then when you check back, you determine this period of time was no longer three or four seconds. 

The whole experience of watching a movie too late, elongated infinitesimally by needing to do these short rewinds four or five times in some films, may be starting to have an impact on my life. Because I try to avoid at all costs the whole "I'll just go to sleep and finish the movie tomorrow" thing -- tomorrow, I want to start fresh on something new, especially in the case of garbage like Freeway -- I find myself going to bed close to 2 a.m., and on the rare occasion, much later than that. I can't imagine this is not having some impact on me as I plow through my day during one of the busiest periods I have ever experienced at my job. (Don't get me started on this initiative we're supporting that was rolled out too quickly and replete with too many errors.)

In theory, I've already gotten that sleep, on the couch, during my pause. In reality, we know that chopped up sleep is lesser sleep, and any benefits I reap from sleeping from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. is mitigated by the act of awakening and re-slumbering, plus the inevitable difficulty in getting back to sleep when I do finally retire to my bed. 

Tiresome tropes: Facial recognition of a dead guy

I watched David Leitch's Bullet Train the other night, which I quite enjoyed. It plays on a long post-Tarantino tradition of playful violence and guys with nicknames. In fact, the movie even has a guy nicknamed The Wolf. But instead of seeming tired, it still works, when done right.

The thing that is tired, though?

The bit where someone holds a phone up to the face of a dead guy in order to access its contents. 

Bullet Train was at least the 137th time I've seen this in a movie, though to be fair, the "dead guy" in this movie was only unconscious at the time.

The thing I find funny about this trope is that each screenwriter seems to present it like it's a new and exquisitely clever idea, in conversation with our modern use of technology. When in fact, a dozen other movies that same year have the same moment.

(Note: It's actually not really a trope, but a device. But I have an occasional series on this blog -- there has been one other -- called Tiresome Tropes, and I like the alliteration.) 

An interesting thing is that even as tired as this feels, it's got to be relatively new. The internet tells me that facial recognition software in phones as a means of proving the owner's identity only started around 2011, and only became widespread in November of 2017 with the release of the iPhone X. That's less than eight years into which to pack 137 films references. So not only have these screenwriters been unoriginal, they've been busy.

By the way, this trope is a close cousin of the "cut the thumb off the dead guy to get his thumb print on the access panel to the high-security area" trope. 

Understanding Editing: The Adventures of Robin Hood

This is the second in my 2025 monthly series Understanding Editing, in which I'm watching both films I have and haven't seen that won the Oscar for best editing, to help me better appreciate the discipline.

This year happens to be the ten-year anniversary of when I first saw and immensely enjoyed the 1938 Technicolor glory The Adventures of Robin Hood, with a charming-as-all-hell Errol Flynn in the title role and Olivia de Haviland as Marion, in only the 22nd of her eventual 104 years on this planet. To say nothing of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone as mustache-twirling villains, though neither of them in the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham (who only has a minor role here). Since that day in May of 2015, I have been longing for a second viewing of a movie I gave an enthusiastic 4.5 stars. When it comes to 4.5 stars, is there any other kind?

Seeing that it won the Oscar for best editing in 1938, I dubbed it a logical candidate for the first movie in Understanding Editing that I'd already seen prior to the series. (I am alternating each month, and going in chronological order overall.) 

Its drawback as a candidate? Well, it's debatable how much the craft of editing would have changed in the year that elapsed since the first movie I watched in this series, 1937's Lost Horizon. Which is certainly something of a consideration, when I plan to watch 12 movies that span the entire time from then to now.

Beyond their editors both hoisting golden statues at the end of Oscar night, it may be that these two films could not have less in common. The older is black and white and has such a foot in the past that it's not even available in its complete original form, as there were seven minutes of footage missing, which had to be filled with production stills to accompany the audio. The newer is so bright and colorful that the first post I wrote about it, back in 2015, was called "1930's films that look like 1950's films."

How similar would my experience of their editing be? That remains to be seen.

At the start, I wondered if there would be more of the thing I noticed as a negative in Lost Horizon: the consecutive splicing of two shots where the angle on the action is not significantly different to flow naturally. I saw this a half-dozen times or more in that film, chalking it up to the infancy of the form and no one yet having realized that this is undesirable.

After I noticed one such shot in The Adventures of Robin Hood, though, there were none more to follow.

What did follow were a bunch of exciting action sequences, each of which benefitted in some measurable way from a talented editor. At this point, we should name him: Ralph Dawson. And it appears Dawson was essentially the king of his industry at that time, as Robin Hood marked his third Oscar win in four years, and ultimately his last despite one more nomination (a full 16 years later). No he was not the editor of Lost Horizon -- since I didn't check beforehand, I lucked into not picking the same editor for the first two movies in this series -- but he won the two years before that, for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Anthony Adverse, in that order. 

I noticed straight away how kinetic Dawson's action scenes are. I'm sure "kinetic" is an adjective I used in my first post, and unless I become overly conscious of it by talking about it here, it's probably not the last time in this series I will use it. But in Robin Hood it applies particularly. 

We get thrilling sword fights, both mano-a-mano, and in some cases, amid a scene full of numerous other close quarters fisticuffs. We get a marksman competition, which Robin can't resist entering despite the likelihood that it will expose him (it does), with its arrows hitting their targets in a rhythmic sequence of consecutive shots. We get a great scene of Robin's cohorts jumping from the trees on an unsuspecting group of travelers below, the similar shots of descending bodies all flowing in the same direction.

"Flow" is a sense you are supposed to get from good editing, and I got it here, numerous times. Perhaps my favorite example was a sequence where Dawson (and the directors, Michael Curtiz and William Keighely, who I would usually credit as the film's authors) want to show the direction galloped by a couple of fleeing horses and their riders, as well as the passage of time and distance their galloping would entail. We get the horses going from left to right in each shot, but then the background changing, to show a steady progression out of a castle, over a drawbridge and into the forest, as if in one fluid motion. Then as if to show off, Dawson repeats it with the men on horseback who are pursuing them. 

Another sequence I noted was the passing on of a message about a meeting being held in Sherwood Forest. The editing creates a sort of version of that old game of Telephone, as we see each point of contact between one new messenger and one new recipient of that message. Only in this case, the message doesn't get garbled in translation. 

These are not breathtaking instances of the craft, by any stretch of the imagination. However, they are things you notice if you are watching a movie specifically to assess how its shots are being sequenced. It's probably best that you only notice them if you are looking at the movie through this lens, because the purpose of good editing is to disguise itself. Or rather, just to put you into a time and place and not require you to think how you got there or notice any of the technical details in the experience of being swept away. This is what The Adventures of Robin Hood does.

In my notes, I also observed that Dawson uses the dissolve a couple times. I doubt he pioneered the dissolve or anything like that -- in fact, the internet tells me even George Melies used the dissolve -- but I thought it was worth jotting down, as it could be that this was considered one of the techniques Academy voters thought made Dawson a worthy winner.

The movie overall? Still really liked it, still found it a fine example of its form. I think it earns the 4.5 stars more on that basis than on competing on a equal playing field with other films I would give such a high rating.

Since I already laid out my upcoming agenda in the first post announcing this series, it's no spoiler to tell you that in March we'll move just another scant three years ahead in time to Sergeant York in 1941, which will be back to another first-time viewing. 

Reversing the normal order for a repeat viewing

I'm coming up on 7,000 movies watched later this year. So yes, any chance for a "movie first" is both unusual and appreciated. 

How about the first time I've seen a movie for the first time on video and the second time in the theater?

At least, on its original run?

There are times where I saw a movie first on video and later, much later, caught it in a repertory performance in the theater. Strange Days and Donnie Darko are both examples of that.

But in the same, original theatrical run? Well the circumstances for that would have to be pretty unusual.

As they were on Tuesday night.

It was my wife's birthday eve, and my younger son was also away at camp. She wanted to take advantage of the time the 11-year-old was away to do things that were not appropriate for an 11-year-old, but were at least marginally appropriate for a 14-year-old. (We'll test the limits of the term "marginally" as this piece goes on.)

So she asked me on Monday if I had already seen Presence. I responded in the affirmative, and I think in a totally neutral tone, though my mind was more like "Please. What do you take me for."

(My first viewing, I should remind you, was in a screener that we got from a publicist in order for one of my writers to review it. I of course snuck in a viewing myself. So when I describe the first viewing as "video," that's not entirely accurate, in the sense of it being available for rental. But these days I use the term "video" to describe any small-screen viewing experience.) 

"Damn you!" she responded, in a way that was both purposefully theatrical but also indicative of real annoyance. See, she doesn't like that I see every movie worth seeing as soon as it comes out. Of course, neither does she arrange to go with me to these movies in a timely enough manner for me to review them. 

So I told her I would go again, but again compromised my own position of compromise when she asked me if I had liked the movie. I told her I didn't love it. 

I wasn't sure all day Tuesday whether it was still on the table or off, and some of it would likely depend on the 14-year-old, who had acquiesced to the outing the night before, but then was nowhere to be found when I got home from work. I thought by just not mentioning it, and him continuing to not return home, I could slow-walk the idea out of existence. I mean, I didn't really want to see this movie again -- definitely not so soon (only 19 days after my first viewing), but possibly not ever.

But she did ask about it again, and he did come home in time, so I confirmed the plan. 

This wasn't an entirely disappointing outcome for me. As you would know if you read my two (!) other posts on Presence -- and I promise this will be the last one I write, at least during the month of February -- I have gone through stages of interpreting and reassessing the movie. Without that exercise, in and of itself, making me appreciate the movie significantly more. However, I did think it was possible that knowing how the movie ends would create an active watching experience in me on this second viewing, to see how well Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp laid clues and obeyed the rules they had put in place. 

Plus, I really enjoy the pizza they make at this movie theater, which you can eat at a little table that comes out of the armrest, while you're almost fully reclined. So what if they don't take my critics card and I have to actually pay for myself and two other family members?

I thought I was being a good guy, a "go-along guy." Little did I realize, I was supposed to use my knowledge of the film to exercise good parental judgement.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

First off, they didn't like the movie. My son said it may have been the worst he's ever seen, which is obviously not the sort of assessment that should send Steven Soderbergh weeping in a corner. Kids are prone to exaggeration, perhaps even more so in their teenage years than when they were younger. Still, point is, it did nothing for him.

I guess I was unable to really read my wife's body language, because she didn't like it either, though what she said most was that she "didn't hate the movie," which is kind of a way saying you sort of liked it. I had thought she might have been into it, at least judging by one involuntary audible reaction she made near the end of the movie. I did definitely see her squirming a bit when the movie gets into the specifics of the skeevy behavior of one character. And in order to go into more detail, I have to give a spoiler warning for Presence, for the second time this month. 

The crux of the issue -- the thing I could have avoided if I'd been sensible enough to give her a content warning -- was that the movie not only has a sex scene (a very short one that isn't graphic at all), but that the main antagonist ends up being a teenage boy who drugs and rapes girls.

It probably wasn't my finest moment when I split that hair. "He doesn't rape them," I said. "He only murders them."

I find this to be a bit of a no-win situation. I had already stepped wrong by a) seeing Presence before it came out because I had an advanced screener and b) showing evident hesitation in seeing it again because I hadn't loved it. Even had it occurred to me that the content might make him or her uncomfortable -- and it did not, since I consider my son pretty aspirational in his movie tastes -- if I had tried to use that as a reason not to go to the movie, it would have sounded like bullshit, and that I was using every piece of ammunition in my arsenal to get out of going. On the night before my wife's birthday, no less.

So instead I became a go-along guy ... and paid the price for it.

I didn't get it with both barrels or anything. I think my wife realized it wasn't a given I'd consider the content objectionable enough to be triggering, and she knows she had to twist my arm a bit to go in the first place. I know my son has seen the most recent Scream movie and Barbarian and perhaps the bloodiest of all of them, The Suicide Squad, so compared to those movies, Presence is nothing. But I guess those movies don't have a realistic teenage psychopath who uses what is normally consider a rape drug, even if he "only" uses it to kill other teenage girls, not to rape them.

Anyway, I've now had the experience of seeing a movie on a small screen first and for the second time on the big screen, in the same short period of time.

And, you know, might just as soon not had it. 

Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

Revisiting my first foreign film

Was Lasse Hallstrom's My Life as a Dog really the first time I saw a film with subtitles?

It's hard to say for sure. I suspect not. We had French teachers who would put on French movies in class, though not the French New Wave or anything like that. (Not usually. I have some memory of watching Godard's Breathless in school, though I would have been older.) Specifically, I remember a movie called La Boum (The Party) being shown in school, enough that it's in my big movie list.

My Life as a Dog, though, was certainly the first time I chose to see a movie made in another country in the theater, with my own money, or at least with my parents' money.

Hallstrom's film has a 1985 release date in Sweden, but IMDB shows me it didn't come out in the U.S. until May of 1987, which makes sense with the timeline I remember. That summer was when I transitioned from middle school to high school, so I would have been 13 about to turn 14. We had a friend who led the way in transitioning from childish things to not so childish things -- I may have still been playing with G.I. Joes at that age -- and that summer he convinced a bunch of us that this movie was great and we needed to see it. So we did.

And thought it was great. 

I was not, until then, even aware of a desire to become more sophisticated in my tastes, so something like My Life as a Dog was a good gateway to foreign language films. It features a lead character who would have been a couple years younger than we were, but close enough in age for his coming of age to seem relevant to us. Anton Glanzelius, who plays Ingemar, is a year younger than us, but the actress playing his rival-slash-love interest, the tomboy Saga, Melinda Kinnaman, is two years older, I now see. Because she's dressed as a boy for most of the movie, I don't feel like I felt any independent romantic stirrings for the actress, though my sophisticated friend clearly did, as I remember him going on about it. Which, in retrospect, was a bit strange, because she looked a bit like his sister.

However, the whole experience -- watching a foreign film, ingratiating myself to our cool friend, taking a further step toward adulthood, knowing there was supposed to be something intoxicating and romantic about Melinda Kinnaman (she shows her mosquito bite breasts on two occasions, which now seems strange for an actress who as only 14 during filming) -- left me feeling that this was a masterpiece. It helped that the film had a highly contemplative nature I remember most, specifically, Ingemar's pondering of the plight of Laika the dog, sent into space by the Russians where she was left to die when she ran out of food. These thoughts were set against a backdrop of the stars, just adding further dimension to this experience I was having. Then there's the underlying narrative element that Ingemar is sent to the country to live with his aunt and uncle because his mother is dying, which must have had added poignancy for us. 

My lingering impression of My Life as a Dog has stood untested until now. Over the years, I have considered a rewatch, and especially within the past ten, have multiple times looked for it on a service like iTunes, never with any success. As I was reviewing my highly ranked films for a post that will probably go up tomorrow, I had occasion to look it up again -- and there it was, finally, on iTunes, available for a $3.99 rental. So on Sunday night, I watched it.

Just to give you an idea how elevated this has been in my mind, I should tell you how elevated it is in my Flickchart. It's currently my 150th ranked movie, and I don't have to tell you the type of masterpieces that puts it ahead of. But for context, my next five are Boyhood, Zootopia, Rain Man, Trainspotting and Coco. #150 means it's higher than all but a half-dozen movies I've named #1 for a year since I started doing that in 1996. (Parasite is only one ahead, and then the others that outrank Dog are A Separation, Moon, Titanic, There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, Adaptation and Children of Men.) In other words, I love it -- or think I do.

Well, My Life as a Dog does not deserve to round out my top 150. It still deserves a place in my top 500, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

It was interesting to watch the film unfold and like what it was doing at every step of the way, but generally fail to find what it was doing distinctive -- at least in comparison to my considerably better established film knowledge 40 years later. I'm wondering, in retrospect, if this was also among the first coming-of-age movies I saw. I would of course have seen movies featuring kids and high schoolers before -- two of my favorites at that age would have been The Goonies and Back to the Future -- but it's hard to call those first and foremost coming-of-age films. Stand by Me was before this, but there were no girls. My Life as a Dog is like the prototypical coming-of-age story, as its main character is bridging that period of his life where we still see him wet the bed, and where he sneaks a peak at a Britt Ekland/Anita Ekberg type in the village, posing nude for a sculpture. There's also, of course, the moment when Saga shows him her mosquito bites, and wants him to show her his "thing." 

I don't remember feeling particularly titillated by any of it, maybe not even the Ekland/Ekberg type (actually actress Anki Liden) posing nude. However, I do remember feeling that there was supposed to be something special about the Ingemar-Saga relationship, but I'm wondering if that's just because my friend was such a big fan of her, and it created in me a sense of anticipation toward the girls my age that were actually in my own life. I was definitely already into them by that age, as I remember the drama of who and whether I was going to ask them to dance at the middle school dance. 

There's some good quirk in the Swedish countryside village where Ingemar plays a little soccer, does a little boxing (almost exclusively against Saga), works on a summerhouse with his eccentric uncle, and gets stranded in a zipwire lunar module that only makes it halfway across its intended length. There's a repeated bit about how his uncle insists on playing the same goofy song over and over again on his record player, which drives his wife, Ingemar's aunt, to the brink of barking mad.

Speaking of barking ... yes that's a thing, and why the movie is called what it is. On a couple occasions, Ingemar pretends he's a dog, which ties into the canine themes of Laika the space dog and Ingemar's own dog, who was taken to a kennel "temporarily" (but has actually been put down). It threads the themes through well enough, but I did not find it astonishing in its own right.

So yeah ... maybe we shouldn't revisit these formative films if we want to still think of them in the same light. However, I've also always said that any film you love should be able to stand up to the scrutiny of a rewatch, and I feel it's appropriate to know that My Life as a Dog should steadily lose duels on Flickchart to films I like better.

Even though the film didn't have the profound impact that it had on me when I was 13, one thing I will never lose is that feeling of graduating from movies intended only for children to those that seemed more adult in their goals ... even though they also starred children. I remember very clearly the sense of feeling proud of myself for loving My Life as a Dog as much as I did, for not feeling it was homework, something I had to read, something that would be shown to us in school. Choosing something like My Life as a Dog for myself, even if I never would have seen it or even heard of it without the urgings of a friend, was part of my own coming-of-age story.

Not tempted enough by Babygirl

Yesterday I had almost the perfect scenario for grabbing a movie on the fly without it impacting anyone in my family, and I did something I almost never do:

I passed.

I was taking my 11-year-old to an 11 a.m. birthday party for his friend, more likely turning 12 but possibly also turning 11. It was at a place called TimeZone which has bowling, video games and laser tag. It's a fairly standard location for the birthday party of an 11-year-old, or even a 12-year-old. 

The location was the Pacific Shopping Centre in Werribee, about 20 minutes from my house, and the precise physical location of Time Zone within that shopping center (I'll use the American spelling when referring to it casually) was directly next to the Hoyts theater. Before I left the house, I'd done the reconnaissance work to figure out what movie was starting right around that time, and on a Sunday morning, there were a number of options, but only one where I hadn't seen it, I remotely wanted to see it, and it would end by the time I needed to collect my son.

Although I had decided against going to that one movie that perfectly fit my needs, I still walked up to the Kiosk at 10:57, when at least ten more minutes of trailers could still be expected for the 10:50 start, and flirted with the idea once more. I went so far as to see how much it would cost, and I guess the $23 was enough to turn me away.

Yes, I'm just not that interested in Babygirl.

I haven't heard anything really negative about it. In fact, one podcaster I listened to recently -- a woman in her 20s, so take the age (not the gender) with a grain of salt -- raved inarticulately about how much she loved it. And "love" is not too strong of a word for how I felt about Halina Reijn's last film, Bodies Bodies Bodies.

But I couldn't pull the trigger, and it wasn't only because I was interested in having a breakfast sandwich and a coffee, and writing this post. (In fact, that it is the exact thing I am currently doing.) No, there were plenty of other factors that made this particular movie a non-starter for me.

1) The $23. It's much less than I paid per ticket when I took my kids to see Captain America: Brave New World on Thursday night, as Hoyts charges an outrageous $33 per adult for what they call their X-treme Screen, which is barely any bigger than a normal screen. (Fortunately, I got them both tickets at reduced kids prices.) But it's much more than the $0 I usually pay at participating cinema chains that take my critics card. Besides, Captain America was a unique set of circumstances where I could really kill multiple birds with one stone, as it was also an excursion to buy birthday presents for my wife, and I could review that movie and rank it for the current year. Perhaps still smarting from the nearly $200 I spent on dinner, the movie tickets and movie snacks, I wasn't so eager to shell out another $23 for a movie I didn't really want to see, and one that I couldn't rank for the current year -- or really review, since it's already been out a couple weeks now in Australia, having debuted in the U.S. in 2024.

2) I'm a little over Nicole Kidman in these roles. Babygirl is Kidman's second 2024 movie (along with A Family Affair) in which she has an affair with a much younger man, a definite way of flattering the 57-year-old who has done everything within her power to create the illusion that she is still in her 40s or even her 30s. I didn't particularly care for the other one, so I didn't think this one would be much better ... and even though I have never considered myself a plastic surgery shamer, I must admit I am finding it harder and harder to look at this treasure of an actress and not be distracted by the mistakes she's made in her quest for the fountain of youth. 

3) I'm a little over this recent trend of trying to reinvigorate the erotic thriller. I haven't really cared for any of the more prominent examples that immediately jump to mind (Deep Water, Fair Play), and I kind of feel like these movies should have stayed in the 1990s. 

4) I have been inundated with ads for Babygirl when I'm playing Lexulous on my phone. They tend to show about a ten-second montage of images and dialogue from the movie and then play it over and over again until you are finally allowed to click out of the ad and get back to the game. So even if I were game for the subject matter, the repetition of the same footage and dialogue might have already irked me terminally.

5) Then there's the fact that I am not a big Harris Dickinson fan. I think he might have a bit of a bully look to him. So it makes it more problematic that one of the ads focuses on him dancing shirtless to George Michael's "Father Figure," a focal scene that has already come up multiple times in the limited discussions I've heard of this movie, and makes me roll my eyes because of the way it's talked about as some moment of great inspiration, when it really seems more like the stuff of basic bitch thirst traps.  

Well, sometimes it's nice not to indulge every movie-related life hack that comes your way. It's what separates us from the animals.

And now that I've almost finished my coffee and have finished this post -- which I won't publish until tomorrow because I've already published today -- I have more than 90 minutes of window shopping, reading, and other aimless meandering to look forward to.

Giving it away to just anybody

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have officially become score sluts.

The Gorge, which debuted on AppleTV+ Friday and which I watched last night, marks their third score for a major motion picture in the past calendar year. 

I haven't landed yet on how much I like The Gorge, but let's just say the star ratings I'm deciding between are 2.5 and 3. And I'm starting to question how "major" the major potion pictures to which they're giving away their talents really are these days.

Of course they are not actually "giving them away." Writing a score for a movie is a gig that pays you money. Like anyone else, Trent and Atticus like to get paid for doing the thing they are good at doing. 

But it may just be my love for Nine Inch Nails, whom I have considered my favorite band for more than 30 years, that makes me think it's also nice if the movies they score have a certain artistic validity to them beyond that paycheck. The same way you would call out Christopher Nolan if he directed, I don't know, Sonic the Hedgehog 4. 

This hasn't been a problem for Ross and Reznor before now. In fact, let's use this moment in time to give a quick overview of this period when the two have been working regularly on movie scores, given that it is almost the 15th anniversary of their first and what remains their best score: The Social Network. 

Next came two more collaborations with David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, both of which continued the "event movie" status of their work. Two of their next three are documentaries I haven't seen, Before the Flood and The Vietnam War, which, if not "event movies," certainly carry with them a seriousness of purpose. Sandwiched in between those was maybe our first sign of them branching out into less significant subject matter, though I suppose a movie about a bomb set off at the Boston Marathon (Patriots Day) still meets the description of a "serious" movie.

In 2018 we see them starting to shift down into a bit more of a minor key, scoring Jonah Hill's Mid-90s and their first Netflix collaboration, Bird Box. So as long as seven years ago, you could say they're already making movies just for money, though I loved the novel on which Bird Box was based and I probably liked the movie just a smidge better than some people. I'd argue that at this point, we don't yet feel inundated by their work.

Their first TV work came in 2019 for Watchmen, which I have not seen (no HBO), before scoring an excellent movie for director Trey Edward Shults, Waves. This is a prelude to what I might call their breakout years as household names among casual cinephiles, when in 2020 they scored the best picture nominee Mank and the best animated feature nominee Soul, their first work in a movie designed to be viewed by people of all ages. If we are indeed saying they became household names that year, it could be because they were nominated for Oscars for both scores, the first time since they won for The Social Network, and won for Soul.

Perhaps exhausted by all the accolades, they did not produce a movie score in 2021. However, their foot has been on the pedal ever since. Strangely 2022 brought two more movies I have yet to see, Bones and All and Empire of Light, the latter of which seems particularly out of step with what I would have once thought of as a prototypical Ross/Reznor score. And while no artist wants to be thought of as making prototypical versions of themselves, I'd argue you could also say it's an indication that they're willing to work for anyone who approaches them.

In 2023 it was back to working with Fincher for The Killer, and their second animated movie, Teenage Mutant Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which I loved. Then last year it was Challengers and Queer, the latter of which I also have yet to see, both of which are collaborations with Luca Guadagnino, with whom they worked on Bones and All. Which also describes the next project Wikipedia has listed for them, Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is due in theaters in October. (Incidentally, Wikipedia failed to list The Gorge, so it's possible there is another project in there that I didn't get.)

So why this moment in time to slut shame them?

I don't know. I suppose on some level it's not warranted. Even though Challengers, Queer and The Gorge have all been released in one 12-month period, if you go back to looking at the release years only, they're averaging two per year. They had two in 2024 and now it looks like they will have two in 2025, just as they had two in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 -- every year except 2021, when they had zero. (I'd have liked to think that meant they made a new Nine Inch Nails album that year, but they didn't, and haven't made one since 2018. Maybe now we're getting at the source of my frustration, since I don't want them to pack away Nine Inch Nails for good, especially as Reznor turns 60 this year.)

Perhaps two scores per year is what they've determined is the maximum they can make while still giving their full attention to each score. And I have no doubt that's exactly what they're doing. As I had the stirrings in my mind about the idea for this post even from hearing they were associated with the movie, I gave a special ear to the Gorge score as I was watching, and found it to contain thought and purpose -- maybe more so than some of the past efforts I've listened to. (I bought every score up to Gone Girl, but then stopped buying them, in part because I stopped buying much music in general.)

So I'm not saying Reznor and Ross have started phoning it in. I think they put as much into their scores as they ever have. Although I did not always love how Guadagnino employed their score in Challengers -- one of my complaints was how he would bring it up and down in the same scene without any apparent motivation for this, when it would have seemed to make more sense just to let it play through -- I did think it was a good score, and maybe was as surprised as anyone else when they didn't get their fourth Oscar nomination for it. (That's right, even making as many scores as they do, they have only been nominated those three times.)

Really I think it's that I would hope they would look at the script of each movie they're scoring, when they're approached to score it, and make some qualitative analysis before they accept the gig. I'm not saying The Gorge looks like a failure on paper, or that it even was a failure, though I might think it's a mild failure. I'm saying that the basic narrative components don't seem quite Reznor-Ross-worthy. That no matter how good Scott Derrickson made it -- and it's at least fine in that regard -- it might never have been Reznor-Ross-worthy.

And that's another thing about their standards seeming to lower imperceptibly. They don't even have the argument of working with a visionary director here. Although Derrickson has made some pretty good films (The Black Phone, Doctor Strange, Sinister), for some reason I always think of him as the man behind the Day the Earth Stood Still remake, which I thought was pretty terrible.

Maybe again I just wonder: Are we going to get any more Nine Inch Nails? Probably not at this pace of making movie scores, especially as they continue to hike up their skirts for unworthy suitors. (The slut shaming metaphor lost a little of its usefulness just now.)

Then again, the last period of NIN fertility saw the guys release Not the Actual Events, Add Violence and Bad Witch in consecutive years from 2016 to 2018. And though I don't love any of those albums (some of them are EPs), they were legitimate, vocals-based Nine Inch Nails albums, unlike the two instrumental Ghosts albums released in 2020. During those same years, they also scored five films.

So it is possible for Trent and Atticus to have it all, even if they accept gigs to write music for films that might be beneath them. They just have to decide they want it all. And though I think they will never get too old to score movies, the days of them composing new angst-ridden industrial-edged popular music, and simulating the related emotions as they play it on stage, are limited. Give me a little more Nine Inch Nails now, because you can always score Sonic the Hedgehog 4 later. 

Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch Eat Pray Love. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.

(*read on, there's more to this story)

Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).

I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.

In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."

My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference. 

So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.

Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked. 

Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier. 

There was no comparison.

Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face. 

So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:

I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.

Oh no.

Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens. 

On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.

If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.

Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.

There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.

Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.

I am now asking myself:

Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?

There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.

But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?

Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.

As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it. 

Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors. 

Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad. 

This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.

But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon. 

But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew. 

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.

And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show. 

Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that. 

But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan. 

I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.

But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection. 

The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.

So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.

Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.

They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.

My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.

Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied. 

A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.

Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this. 

So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed. 

Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV. 

We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.

Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams. 

Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.

And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.

I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch. 

And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too. 

So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.

The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.

The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet. 

You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew. 

However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here. 

And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ...