Monday, June 30, 2025

A very short amount of time vs. a very long amount of time

I had been stalking Christopher Landon's new movie Drop on iTunes, waiting for it to come down in rental price. When it finally hit $5.99 a few days ago, I pounced.

Why was I so interested in Drop?

1) I generally like the work of Landon, or at least hold Freaky in very high esteem. Freaky seems to give me a significant quantity of optimism for his future efforts.

2) I had heard enough about it to know it was some sort of high-concept movie, but I didn't know what the high concept was, and that's very unusual for me. 

Well, it turns out the high concept was a character trying to do a thing that would take a very long time to do, but having a very short amount of time to do it. That happens like a half-dozen times in this movie, and is one of my bugaboos. 

SPOILERS FOR DROP AHEAD.

I think you know the phenomenon I'm talking about, and it often features some sort of cross-cutting. A character needs to do something secretive, often right under the nose of another person without them knowing, but the thing is very complicated and that person's back is turned only for a very short time. 

Drop is, of course, not the only movie that is guilty of this. You're likely going to see it in some form in thrillers, in movies involving spies, or maybe in movies like this one, where a woman's son is being held captive and she must do exactly the things a mysterious person is messaging her, or the son will die.

Most movies that use this trope -- would we call it a trope? -- use it sparingly. Drop relies on it a half-dozen times. I'll give you the most egregious example, and leave the others to your imagination.

The main character, Violet (Meghann Fahy), is being sent around a fancy top-floor restaurant by her mysterious interlocutor, obligated to slip poison in the drink of her date, and she has to make attempts to get help and alert the authorities in ways this interlocutor can't detect. One is writing a message in lipstick on a $20 bill that she gives as a tip to the pianist. I don't want to get sidetracked on this one because it doesn't have to do with the thing I'm talking about, but it does contribute to the script's lack of credibility. Quickly: The possibility of the pianist actually seeing this message relies on a) him looking at the money in his tip jar, something he might not do until the end of the night; b) him deciding to get a drink from the bar (you'd think they might let him drink for free); c) him happening to choose that $20 bill to pay with after pulling a crumpled wad of about a dozen bills from the tip jar; d) him actually looking at the bill before using it to pay. Not bloody likely. 

Anyway, one of her attempts involves waiting for the maitre d', who is already suspicious of her, to be away from her station in order to seat some guests. This allows her first to try to call 911 from the phone that's at the maitre d' station, not once but twice, both of which cannot be completed, for reasons we aren't really clear on. You'd think a restaurant would indeed want to have this capability in case one of their guests had a heart attack or choked on some food. Often in movies like this the bad guy would have taken out the landlines, but there's no indication that's the case here.

When she's exhausted that idea, she moves to the unlocked computer terminal that's at the same station. Here she brings up a website for a domestic abuse hotline and starts a live chat. She's about to report what's happening to her, but somehow her mysterious interlocutor knows exactly what she's doing on this presumably unmonitored computer terminal and texts her something along the lines of "I wouldn't do that if I were you" right before she's about to hit send on the message she's typed. She hems and haws about this for about 15 seconds, then finally decides not to send the message, close the website, and hurry back to her table, where her befuddled blind date (Brandon Sklenar) is probably wondering why he hasn't peaced out of this unpromising evening. (Speaking of a lot of time vs. a little amount of time, all of Violet's strange behaviors and side quests have taken such a long amount of the time she'd normally be spending face to face with her date, that you can't believe he wouldn't have taken a lot shorter amount of time to decide the evening was not salvageable.)

So I suppose this means it took the maitre d' abandoning her station for, I don't know, three minutes? Four minutes? A long time. 

Anyway, there are at least three other things like this that take place in the restaurant.

But let's forward maybe a half-hour to the climax of the film, when we get a different example of a very short amount of time vs. a very long amount of time, also an annoying example of screenwriting sins but not quite the same as the one I've listed above.

Namely, it's the "you have way too little time to effect a meaningful outcome on something that will likely come to a head in the next 15 seconds."

So when Violet finally unmasks who's been sending her these drops, she pulls a fast one on that person and he ultimately ends up going out the window. But not before he issues an order to the person back at Violet's house, who has not only the son captive, but also Violet's unconscious sister: "Kill them."

The command "kill them" could have been been executed in one second. If the assailant had some hesitation -- you know, it's not easy to kill a four-year-old boy -- maybe that expands out to five to ten seconds. So let's consider what happens with Violet before the person back at the house has a chance to do this:

1) She gets the cracked glass behind the villain to break by throwing a hockey puck at it, which doesn't initially work and takes an extra hit from something else to finally break. (I can't remember what that second thing was.)

2) Both she and the villain get sucked out the window, him down to his death and her hanging on to a tablecloth that's also got a corner snagged on some sharp edge to prevent her from falling. 

3) Her date, who has already been shot in the side, crawls over to the edge and grabs the tablecloth before she can fall. 

4) Despite this debilitating wound, not to mention a date that has been bizarre at the very best, he finds the strength to pull her all the way up to safety.

5) Using the app on her phone that shows her home security cameras, Violet can see that the man in black with the balaclava is only just now walking upstairs to her son's bedroom with murderous determination. You would say at this point that at least a minute has passed since the man's partner issued his order to kill her family, but more like two minutes and probably three.

6) Violet then asks her date -- his name is Henry -- where his keys are. She wants to get his car, apparently. She also has to ask where the car is in the parking garage, and I guess identify the car as well since she's never seen it. Though I suppose we'll give her the benefit of the doubt that clicking the unlock button will make some car flash and beep and will allow her to find it. 

7) Henry, severely wounded, not only has to agree to this request, even though he only has a vague idea what's actually going on and what the stakes are of this request, and even though his date has been erratic at the very best all night long (though she did kiss him once, and maybe he was blinded by that), but he also has to have immediate perfect recall of where he parked his car.

8) Violet has to get down to the parking garage on the elevator, from however many floors up (it's the top floor of the building, remember), when you'd think the police might already be there, when the restaurant might have already been locked down, or at the very least, when the elevator was disabled due to needing to use the stairs during a building emergency. Remember, guns have been fired, several people have been shot, and a man has already fallen out the window to his death.

9) Violet then has to get the car and begin driving to her house at a breakneck speed, dodging and pushing through traffic. Even if her house happens to be close to the restaurant, the drive itself would take an additional five minutes at best, probably more like ten, and only if she doesn't crash the car in her panicked state, or get pulled over by the police who would surely be on scene by now, and would be very interested in a person leaving the scene of a crime that involved at least one death and danger to quite a lot of other people, driving at high speeds.

10) Now, I should tell you, Violet does have some help. Her unconscious sister has awoken from her conk on the head and is now doing whatever she can to slow the progress of her captor to the son's bedroom. But if we're adding up all the various time periods here, it has now been, what, 20 minutes since this man's partner ordered him to kill their hostages? And no, there's no apparent moral quandary from him in doing so. It takes an incompetence of the highest order to not be able to complete this task by now.

But of course, Violet gets there in time to stop the man and save both her son and her sister.

I get that she would try to do this. The alternative is that both her sister and her son are dead. However, that she would proceed with any likelihood that she would get there on time, and not just collapse in tears in a desperate heap, seems like she knew she would get there. 

Of course she did, she read the script.

I want to end on a last way that this script proves itself deficient. There's a moment in the climax where the henchman appears to have the drop on Violet, finally able to kill not only Violet, but the two others he has utter failed to kill so far. How she gets out of this is ridiculous, but that's not what I'm focusing on.

No, the part I thought was really dumb, from a screenwriting perspective, is that the sadistic henchman -- you have to make sure everyone is as sadistic as possible in order to ensure we don't haver our own moral qualms about their deaths -- decides he must remove his balaclava before finally killing Violet.

The movie considers this some sort of big reveal, focusing in on the man's face as he removes the mask. Who was it, we wonder, who was collaborating with the man in the restaurant? Which character we've already met is going to show up here unexpectedly?

Answer? He's nobody. We've never seen this character before.

Mic Drop.  

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Being single bites

When one of my movie podcasts mentioned Cameron Crowe's Singles in my past week of listening, in an episode about favorite movie quotes, it planted the seed that a Singles rewatch was nigh. (The quote: Cliff Poncier's "All this negative energy just makes me stronger.") 

When a second, unrelated podcast also name-checked Singles -- a music podcast this time -- in the context of 1990s alternative music, I knew this was the universe telling me to rewatch this movie now

Of course, when I think about Singles, I also think about Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, so I decided to make it a double feature.

Am I the only one from my generation who links these two movies? Definitely not, though I don't know whether it rises to the level of common knowledge that these movies go hand in hand. But let's consider what they have in common:

1) Both are about twentysomethings feeling jaded and unsure about their futures, though more so in Reality Bites than Singles.

2) Both heavily incorporate music, though more so in Singles than Reality Bites, and different types of music.

3) Both feature a rock band with a funny name where one of our main characters is the lead singer, the funny Citizen Dick in Singles and the funnier Hey That's My Bike in Reality Bites. (I especially like that the purported groupies of Hey That's My Bike are called Hey That's My Bikers.)

4) In both movies, that lead singer treated their love interest with contempt or indifference and came to regret this, crawling back for a second chance.

5) Both movies have one central plot and two subplots.

6) Both movies have sort of a Melrose Place thing going on. The apartment complex where most of the characters live in Singles is directly reminiscent of the one in Melrose Place, though obviously at a lower socioeconomic level, and Melrose Place is directly invoked in Reality Bites, where the character waiting for the results of her AIDS test, played by Jeanene Garofalo, says she's like the new character on Melrose Place with AIDS, and concludes by saying that Melrose Place is a really good show.

7) Both movies have a six degrees of Kevin Bacon connection with John Mahoney. Mahoney is actually in Reality Bites, and he was also in the movie Cameron Crowe directed before Singles, Say Anything

Because Reality Bites came out two years after Singles, 1994 to 1992, if you want to accuse anyone of theft, it would be Stiller of Crowe. But there's enough of a difference between the two that it would be a baseless accusation. They are more like kissing cousins than a movie that owes a debt to another movie.

Reality Bites is the far more serious movie, as evidenced by the specter of AIDS, not to mention the character played by Steve Zahn being thrown out of his house after coming out to his parents (and no further word on that topic before the conclusion of the movie). Singles is far lighter on its feet, and yes, this does correspond to a preference of one over the other, which I will expand on as this piece continues.

I will say, though, that coming in, I did not know which of these movies would play better for me in 2025. I watched them in chronological order, starting the first in my office in the early evening before finishing it on the couch after 10 o'clock, and starting the second far too late, but finishing it within the same night anyway. They're both less than 100 minutes long, which helps. It was the first time I had seen either movie since I started keeping a list of the movies I rewatched back in 2006. 

After the fact, I checked on Flickchart to see how I actually had them ranked. It's #648 for Singles and #957 for Reality Bites. That is definitely consistent with my preferences, but the gulf should be wider. Not necessarily because Singles should be higher, as I think it's ranked about right. But Reality Bites should not be in my top 1,000 movies. I wouldn't bust it down to 2,000+ or anything, but inside the top 1,000 is too high. 

Okay let's get to my takeaways from each movie, starting with Singles.

1) I was surprised at how flat-out charmed I was by this movie. It's sweet and, as I said a moment ago, very light on its feet. It's not that I didn't remember this being the case about Singles, but I was surprised by the extent of it being the case.

2) I love the fact that the characters randomly talk to the camera. It's not part of some artificial construct like a faux documentary, though I promise that's not intended as a dig at Reality Bites. It's just that sometimes, the characters need to chat with the audience.

3) My affection for Bridget Fonda was fully reignited with this movie. I won't get into the fact that I think she has the perfect mouth, not only great dental work, but those teeth are ideally framed by the shape of her mouth as she does what I call a "frown smile" -- a slightly downturned look that you can tell is a smile anyway. Sharon Horgan also has this. Anyway, I guess I did get into it, but I'm trying not to be too much of a creep here. 

No, the thing I really loved was how kind her reactions are to unrequited romantic intentions. Two different characters make overtures toward her in this movie, one her own doctor basically asking her out, another an ex-boyfriend going in for a kiss at a time of maximum vulnerability for him. She doesn't make either of these characters feel like they crossed a line, she just sweetly lets them down while also boosting them up. It's one of the more generous things I've seen in a movie in some time. That showcases an extraordinary amount of self-possession for this character, which is kind of a big deal given how little of it she has in her initial dealings with her boyfriend Cliff, whom she ultimately dumps. (Leading to him crawling back, as discussed earlier.)

4) While we're on the topic of the female leads, I was also very charmed by Kyra Sedgwick. It's not that I am anti-Sedgwick, but as her career went on, she did less and less for me. My wife and I have a joke where she yells "Confess! Con-FEY-OO-essss!", emphasizing her southern accent, from when she was on that show The Closer. (I think the bit actually came from a Saturday Night Live sketch.) Here, though, I was reminded how sympathetic she is in the right role, so sympathetic that I wanted to pat her on the head. You can see the vulnerability in her eyes, her awkwardness, her uncertainty that it will all work out.

5) As it has now been 30 years (!) since the height of grunge -- even more, I guess, as grunge was already starting to fade by 30 years ago -- I was surprised at how nostalgic I felt for the bands that play here, like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. The musicians don't themselves play an essential role in the story, I wouldn't say, though some acting is required of the members of Pearl Jam, who serve as Cliff's backup band in Citizen Dick. (Using their real names, which I thought was even more charming.) That's another similarity with Reality Bites, as the Lemonheads' Evan Dando has a very small role in that movie.

6) It's all about the Campbell Scott-Kyra Sedgwick love story, with the Matt Dillon-Bridget Fonda plot and the dating scene desperation of Sheila Kelley's character clearly serving as B plots. And though the B plots are more lightweight, they aren't inconsequential. They are lightweight in a warm and friendly way. 

The thing I like so much about the Scott-Sedgwick courtship -- Steve and Linda by their character names -- is how everyday it is, how grounded in the real world. They don't meet cute. They don't instantly realize the other person is for them. They are suspiciously lacking in grand romantic gestures, leaving anguished voicemails rather than running through airports, proposing marriage casually while one of them is eating a corn dog, which she does not want to become a "historic corn dog." I'm just thinking how a movie made today would not be allowed to languish so much in the apparently pedestrian, whose very relatability is key to its impact on us. 

7) Speaking of the way this movie is "friendly," I like the bit where Steve and Linda believe they are going their separate ways and they shake hands. "Let's be the first people to say they'll stay friends and truly mean it," says Steve. I don't know if it's an inconsistency in Crowe's writing, but I prefer to think of it as intentional, as Steve not realizing what's right under his nose: Each of these two have examples in their own lives of exes with whom they are "truly" friends. While it's clear that there is something unresolved, romantically, in Linda's relationship with her ex Andy (James Le Gros) and Steve's relationship with his ex Janet (Fonda), since she gets back together with Andy and he tries to kiss Janet (leading to one of her generous light rebuffings), until this point they are actually carrying on well enough as just that: friends. And while we don't see enough of the relationship between Linda and Andy to judge it, we know things seem quite comfortable between Steve and Janet, affection without longing. 

Overall, I like how this film does not feel like it has life or death stakes, even with a lost pregnancy, the losses of jobs, etc. Crowe manages to keep an upbeat tone throughout, which I suppose was a unique gift of his movies, one he didn't really step away from until Vanilla Sky in 2001. And then he went scrambling right back to it, but was never able to make another movie that felt as easy as Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous.

Okay, on to Reality Bites, which was not so charming.

1) I had forgotten about how many lines of dialogue there are from this movie that I either say or think of. For some reason Garofalo's line "Don't bogart that can ... man" is something I think of a lot, even though I am usually not bogarting anything myself or asking someone else not to bogart something, least of all a can. Then there's Garofalo's line where she calls out Ethan Hawke's and Winona Ryder's characters for the sexual tension of their bickering and squabbling, where she says "Oh why don't you guys just do it already and get it over with."

2) I had also forgotten how much of a prick everyone is in this movie. Even when/if they are ultimately good characters, and that's debatable, they are prone to treating each other monstrously. Having told a friend of mine about the double feature, as I was watching it, I wrote him the following message: "Everyone's really mean to everyone else in Reality Bites." And this is definitely true.

It's particularly difficult to like Hawke's Troy, whose intellectual narcissism -- which Stiller's character has such a hard time defining in one of his tongue-tied rants -- goes beyond the level of toxicity usually required of a character primed to reform himself and factor into a happy ending. Which is why I always found the ending of this movie disappointing. The thing is, I didn't really want Lelaina to end up with Stiller's Michael either, even though I must admit I am probably more of a Michael than I am a Troy. He's also not great. (My friend called him "insufferable.") Hawke has moments here where his philosophizing reminds one of the sort he would go on to do with Richard Linklater, as Before Sunset was set to come out the following year. 

3) Of the two films, Reality Bites appears to have aged significantly less well. Although I liked how much characters smoke cigarettes in this movie -- an accurate depiction of these people specifically and many people in general, even today -- that made it no less shocking to see how much smoking there is, since smoking has almost totally dropped out of the modern movie. (Yes, Hollywood has taken on the informal role of being a role model to young people.) Then there's the use of the "R" word, and I can put both of these things together into one scene, where Lelaina is sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, talking to her mother (Swoosie Kurtz) and her stepfather (Harry O'Reilly), who is also smoking. In this scene, both Lelaina and her mother use the word "retarded," and they don't mean it as "to slow the growth of."

4) A movie called Reality Bites is obviously in conversation with the concept of reality TV, but it feels a bit ahead of its time in that regard. One of the core conflicts is whether Lelaina is going to give up the documentary footage she's shooting of her friends to a TV network called In Your Face TV, where Michael works. (Would have been a stand-in for MTV at the time.) Now granted, it's not as ahead-of-its-time as you might initially guess, since MTV's The Real World had already been around for two years at that point, enough time for Stiller and company to poke fun at it. (Her footage is repurposed into a crass Real World clone, which includes, as one example, images of one rhinoceros mounting another, scored to the song "Let's Talk About Sex.") In introducing a test screening of the show -- called, appropriately, Reality Bites -- Michael refers to it has their foray into "real programming." The internet tells me the term "reality TV" was first used in the early 1990s, but can find no concrete examples of its actual origin. It's possible that it was not really used in 1994, since there were so few examples of reality TV that there would not yet need to be a name for it. I think of the debut of Survivor in 2000 as around the time the term really would have taken off. 

5) This movie was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki! Who would have guessed. Yes, he was just a regular working professional before he became the preferred director of photography for prestige directors making ambitious films. Movies from this period you might also not have guessed he shot: A Walk in the Clouds, The Birdcage and Meet Joe Black. (He was working with Alfonso Cuaron too, but those don't come as a surprise given the Cuaron works later associated with his name, such as Children of Men.)

6) Rodrigo Garcia was one of Lubezki's camera operators! And this I didn't even get in the opening credits, I had to wait and happened to catch it in the closing credits. If that name is not familiar to you, he would go on to direct films like Mother and Child, Albert Nobbs, Last Days in the Desert and Raymond & Ray. (I also see he directed episodes of a TV series I was not aware existed, a reimagining of Party of Five, but about the five children of parents who get deported to Mexico. That show was made in 2020 but it feels very relevant to 2025.)

7) It's interesting how these films reflect the persona of their director. I talked about how cool and easy Singles felt, in matching what we know to be Cameron Crowe's persona. Well, Reality Bites is tightly wound and anxious, matching the mode we most often see from Stiller on screen, as he's often whinging (to use the Australian term) or arguing with someone. Don't get me wrong, I love Ben Stiller -- he directed all-time favorite The Cable Guy as his very next film -- but I don't think he could have made a movie that was relaxed and slower paced like Singles, though it should be said he did not write Reality Bites, only directed and starred in it. 

But let's go with our original premise that Singles was in some way a text for Stiller when making Reality Bites. If so, it's easy to envision how there could be a parallel in the relationships between his character, Michael, and Hawke's character Troy, and Stiller and Crowe extra-textually. In a way, Crowe is like a Troy, only much nicer -- cool, with even the long hair, and with even looking a bit like Ethan Hawke. I can't honestly imagine that Crowe would have truly been a figure of frustration, resentment and of course aspiration for Stiller, since they might not even know each other unless they happened to meet sometime at an industry event. But you can easily see Stiller stammering out some sort of frustration at Crowe about how Stiller doesn't meet the cool threshold necessary to speak to him, just as his character does toward Troy.

Okay that's honestly a lot more than I imagined I would delve into these movies when I launched my double feature Friday on a lark. 

Saturday, June 28, 2025

The IMDB disconnect

So I think it's weird when you go to look up a violent, potentially haunting movie like 28 Years Later on
IMDB, and this is what you're greeted with:

The stars of the movie goofing around as part of some IMDB interview series that IMDB believes should be the first thing you see when you come to the page.

I'm sure these people had some amount of fun making the movie, and it bonded them such that they enjoy each other's company quite a bit. I'm sure they developed inside jokes and good chemistry, and doing press is the last time they'll be together in the same combination, intermingling a certain sentimentality with their fun.

But this image in particular is out of sync with this movie, and I don't know that having it there is the best way of promoting the movie. (Acknowledging, of course, that this is a composite shot of a bunch of different moments, not a group photo.)

Not that IMDB is in the business of promotion, necessarily, though the cast, writer and director would not do these interviews if they didn't think the interviews would have a measurable impact on box office.

The counterargument is that IMDB users are, by their nature, at a level of cinematic sophistication a cut above your average moviegoer. There are many people who watch two dozen or more movies a year, who may not even know what IMDB is. They don't care who directed something and the names of the actors, and especially don't care about all the other cast and crew information available on IMDB. They just want a good story and a fun time at the movies.

So you aren't trying to make an everyday horror movie fan more excited about seeing 28 Years Later on IMDB. The horror fans coming to this page are probably coming because they've already seen the movie, and they want to know the name of that one actor who played that one guy.

Still, I think the far better use of this slot is for the movie's trailer -- which, after the movie's period of newness passes, will probably be the long-term content appearing in this space, to the right of the movie's main details on the movie's home page. Given that the trailer is designed to give you a feel for the sort of movie this is, it won't run the risk of making a zombie movie -- a zombie horror, not a zombie comedy -- seem like a constant yukfest involving the cast and crew pulling silly faces. 

Friday, June 27, 2025

The only one at M3GAN 2.0

When I arrived at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville last night at just before 9, the lobby was full and buzzing with people. And I thought "Shit, it's opening night for M3GAN 2.0. I should have gotten here earlier."

But when I got to the counter to get my ticket, the ticket clerk said "Oh, you're the only one in there."

Huh?

Turns out, the lobby was buzzing for other reasons. I noticed there were some people who were dressed up. The Sun has always got some special event going on, which is one of the reasons it's the best cinema in Melbourne.

But my "Huh?" was not the disconnect between the number of people in the lobby and the number of tickets purchased for M3GAN 2.0, it was that no one wanted to see M3GAN 2.0 on its opening night.

This I found baffling. The original M3GAN was a huge performer back in 2023. I don't know if everybody saw it in the theater -- I did not, as I wrote it off as just another lame horror movie when I saw it advertised -- but the appreciation quickly grew such that it became a definitive hit and a thing people talked about in the culture. That meme of M3GAN dancing took on a life of its own. 

And sure enough, that movie was a hoot and super fun.

Why, then, no love for the sequel?

I can't answer that. But I can tell you that the people who stayed away were wise. 

I have not yet written my review, which I'll write over the weekend and post on Monday. If you're reading this a few days from now, the link may already be up. 

But I'll just say that this starts out feeling like it understands everything we want about a M3GAN movie ... and then completely botches the execution in about the final two-thirds of the movie.

I won't go into details at this juncture. But let's just say that where the lunacy of the original was grounded by an essentially realistic setting and underpinned by the emotions of a girl who lost her parents and an aunt who was trying to cope with the new challenges of parenthood, this movie goes quickly into the unreal space of a sort of sci-fit tech thriller, one in which there are underground laboratories, laborious expository dialogue about various processes and covert operations, and more swiped screens than you can shake a stick at. 

I won't give away too much, but let me just say if you thought M3GAN 2.0 would be a movie where a maniacal villain has a self-destruct function for his laboratory that would count down from ten minutes, then you were expecting something entirely different from this movie than I was.

Yes, this is as much of a genre shift as from Alien to Aliens, which went from horror to action. This goes from horror comedy to tech thriller. The comparison to the Alien series definitively ends there.

How the people who didn't go to see it on Thursday night knew this is beyond me, unless the advanced word of mouth about this was so deafeningly bad that they all just stayed away. If it was, I didn't hear it. 

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Pride Month: The Danish Girl

Ten years is not much time in the real world, but in the case of our public conversations about the trans experience and its responsible portrayal on film, it feels like an eternity.

My memory of the exact timelines here is a bit fuzzy, probably because I was not personally affected by this discourse. But I don't think ten years ago, we had yet determined that there was something less than ideal about a trans character being played by a cisgender actor. In fact, ten years ago, most of us might not even have known what "cisgender" meant.

Ten years ago, in 2015, was when The Danish Girl came out. This was my final of four weekly viewings for Pride Month, the movie I had previously mentioned as a blind spot for me, especially considering my exhaustive coverage of films of a certain prominence from this period. I mean, The Danish Girl won an Oscar, for Alicia Vikander. I think a timing issue prevented me from seeing it in the year it came out -- yes, IMDB tells me it was released on January 21, 2016 in Australia, which would have been a week after that year's ranking deadline. And I didn't prioritize seeing it once it was no longer urgent to rank it. 

I'm going to get to telling you my thoughts on the film and some contemplations of what has changed in those ten years, but first I have to give you the baggage I brought into The Danish Girl, some of which I would have had at the time, some of which I've acquired since. As you may have detected, this is leading up to a somewhat sour finish to Pride Month, but hey -- you can't love every movie, even with subject matter as important as this.

Here's that baggage:

1) I have always had an issue with Eddie Redmayne. I don't know what it is, I just feel a bit unnerved by him. Those qualities may actually serve him to some degree in a movie about a person who feels uncomfortable in their own skin, but on practical terms, it keeps me at a distance. The only times I've really liked him on screen were in the Fantastic Beasts movies. That's not to say I don't think he's talented, just that his particular talents don't really work on me because of the way he unnerves me.

2) Tom Hooper, the director, has subsequently proven himself to be a bit of a hack. I think we all were on board with The King's Speech, the best picture winner, but I really disliked his Les Miserables (which also won an Oscar for supporting actress), and then his version of Cats was a cultural laughingstock. There's an excessive earnestness mixed with melodrama in these last two. After seeing The Danish Girl, I'm convinced this just characterizes him on the whole.

Both of these two contribute to why The Danish Girl did not work for me, but let's start with Redmayne.

Ten years ago, it was still okay for Redmayne to play this role. The way the conversation about representation has shifted has been both a positive development, and a potentially limiting one. Although it is now generally acknowledged that a trans performer should play a trans character, the reality is, there are not many trans performers who are also certified box office draws. Elliot Page can't play every trans role out there, especially since that would only cover trans men. While this does make for potentially greater representation among actors -- the most prominent three trans movies last year, Emilia Perez, The People's Joker and Will & Harper, all had trans actors playing trans characters, or playing themselves -- the flip side of that is that Hollywood may have just shied away from telling new trans stories, because they want the bankable stars but don't want to ruffle feathers.

The fact that Redmayne should no longer play this role is not fatal to the fortunes of The Danish Girl, because there's no question that he approaches the material sensitively (perhaps too sensitively, more on that in a minute). But it is hard to watch it in 2025 and not think about this. 

When I think about this issue of who can play whom, I think about the backlash against Scarlett Johansson when she agreed to play a trans character and then ultimately backed out of that role after the internet blew up. That was in 2018. So in 2015, we were still three years away from this being talked about popularly, if I am indeed right that this was a watershed moment in this discussion. It's interesting to think about how recent this whole discussion is, and how much we've grown up, collectively, in such a short amount of time.

So yeah, it was okay for Redmayne to play Lili Elbe, born Einer Wegener, in 2015. Do I think his performance is good? Not really. 

Once I started noticing Redmayne's go-to trick in the role, I couldn't top noticing it, since he kept on doing it. His big emotional transition over 15 to 30 seconds, which he does maybe a half-dozen times, is to start out looking scared or unsure, then get a faraway look in his eyes, then resolve his features into a bashful grin. The first time, it's interesting. Soon after, it's a crutch.

The fact that both he and Vikander spend most of this movie in a sort of foggy haze of tears, forever on the verge of crying or having just cried, is, in many ways, appropriate to the subject matter. This is emotional subject matter and it is serious subject matter. But as directed by Hooper, it feels constantly turned up to 11. I think Hooper's only mode is to shout at us.

I should probably tell you a little more what that subject matter is, if you don't know.

The real Einer Wegener was a citizen of Copenhagen in the year 1926, and married to his wife Gerda. (Every time they said her name, I thought they were saying Goethe, like the German writer.) They're both painters. He's a landscape artist, and she does portraits. (Until he becomes Lili, I'll use the pronoun "he" for the sake of clarity.) 

One day she asks him to stand in for a female model who couldn't be present, requiring him to wear a dress and fit into some dainty women's shoes. She couldn't have known he has a secret proclivity for this sort of thing, but that's the first place I thought this movie mis-stepped. Because we aren't given any clue about Einer's predilections -- is that a weighted word? -- at first we are left with the idea that he "became" trans as a result of seeing himself in women's clothing, rather than that this was, for him, a very weighted moment of flirtation with what he'd always wanted. We don't see that putting on these clothes is anything other than a lark for Einer, and then all the sudden -- at least that's how the movie makes it feel -- he has questions about his gender and his true self. 

Ten years ago, we may not even yet have been fully clear on the idea, as a society, that being trans is not a choice, not something that comes on suddenly, but a thing each person knows has been in them their entire lives. Surely, there's an innate effeminate quality to Redmayne that makes it easier to believe the character has always felt this way, and after the fact, he/she talks about it in those terms. But as first introduced, it seems like the character might have "caught" a "trans virus," and prior to modeling the women's clothing was just an ordinary husband with ordinary heterosexual hungers and images of self.

I also wondered at the responses of the medical community who meet with Einer, who rapidly is no longer appropriately referred to that way. In fact, let's switch over now to calling her Lili.

Although Lili does finally come across a sympathetic doctor, the ones she encounters before that are extreme caricatures. In fact, there's one that gets super annoyed at Gerda and says "Surely you must know that your husband is insane." Of course, a hundred years ago, "insane" was a very medically defensible term -- even 20 years ago it probably was. However, it does seem hard to imagine that a man of science has so little interest in possible schisms between the biological reality of one's body and the emotional reality of one's mind. Methinks The Danish Girl goes too far in the opposite direction of presenting these doctors as a bunch of quacks and idiots, almost to the point that it becomes slapstick -- which surely is not in keeping with the rest of the tone of the film. Oh and by the way, the doctor in question promptly terminates the interview with Gerda by walking away from her in disgust, another improbable response from a medical professional, even a medical professional from a century ago.

I will admit that as a person who has set aside a month to watch four trans films, I very much wanted each of the films I saw to be good. Only the first was very good, but that happens.

So it does pain me to deliver a negative verdict on The Danish Girl. But you are doing a far worse disservice to trans representation if you just rubber stamp everything as good because you want to lift up these themes and this representation. Certainly, the trans advocates who shat on Emilia Perez understand that. It's not just "any well-intentioned representation of trans people is good representation of trans people."

And the fact is, these praised performances -- Vikander's as well -- just aren't really award worthy, if you ask me. They and their director are giving us something so saturated in emotion that it becomes downright soggy with it. It's not an easy touch to underplay rather than overplay something, but the things that are underplayed almost always affect us the most, because their emotional potency sneaks up on us. The Danish Girl equates a constant dropping of shallow buzzwords about self-actualization, combined with a lot of tears and emotional intensity, with elevating a topic to its grandest form. But it shouldn't be easy to get this touch right, which is why some people are great filmmakers and some people are just mid.

If we are celebrating Pride Month on film, we should also be proud of the efforts of the filmmakers, and The Danish Girl just doesn't really get close enough. Lili Elbe's story was one that deserved to be told, it just should have been told better. 

That brings me to the end of another Pride Month celebration here on The Audient. I'm already thinking of the possible themes for 2026. 

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

The best (and worst) directors of the ranking era

Massive project alert!

This is my 30th year of ranking films. 

I started in 1996. It's 2025. That's 30 years. 

Of course, I have only 29 previous #1s because this year is not yet over. But soon it will be an even 30. 

So yes, I have some anniversary stuff on the brain this year. It isn't a sufficiently long amount of time since the last bit of ranking anniversary stuff I did, which was only at the end of 2022. That was a (sort of belated) year-long project to rewatch and then rank all my previous #1s, and it only happened three years ago because it celebrated the precise 25-year anniversary of when my first list was published in 1997 ... and not leading up to that anniversary, but after the fact. 

Anyway, this is not the same project.

At some point recently, and I really can't remember what triggered it, I got the idea to see which director has fared best in my rankings over those nearly three decades of ranking movies. We're only looking at 29 actually completed lists, but that's okay. Look, you get the idea at a certain time, and you maybe don't want to wait a whole year to put it into practice.

But the actual compiling of this information very much seemed like it might take the better part of a year. 

I'll try to explain what I did. (It's not that deep.)

So I took all my previous movie lists and loaded them into Excel, in order, though that didn't matter because I was going to re-sort them anyway. This was a total of 3,147 movies, if you want to know. Yes, that's a lot. 

Just loading them wouldn't have been that time consuming, but then what I also did was add the director for each movie in its own column, as well as a column that computed what percentage this movie's ranking was out of the movies ranked that year. That would allow me to do more of an apples to apples comparison, because a movie ranked 37th in a year where I ranked 37 movies is a movie I liked much less than a movie ranked 37th in a year where I ranked 177 movies. 

Anyway, this allowed each row of the spreadsheet to have a title, a director, a year, a flat ranking and then a percentage representing where that movie ranked out of all the movies ranked that year. And since each formula relied only on other information on the same row of the spreadsheet, it meant I could sort this information without messing up any of the formulas. 

The goal would be to sort the spreadsheet by director, and then take an average of the ranking percentiles for all their movies to find out who did the best for me during these 29 years of ranking movies. 

Of course there would have to be rules. The primary rule would be that a director had to have directed at least three movies during this 29-year period in order to qualify. 

Why three? Does a standard of only one movie every ten years really mean a person is working frequently enough to be considered in an exercise like this?

Ah but I wanted this exercise to be inclusive, not exclusive, and possibly reveal preferences I couldn't have guessed before I started. And I thought that with the generous allowances of a three-movie minimum, I could capture both seminal directors who happened to have stopped making movies early on in this period, or directors whose contributions are relatively recent. Plus identify random working professionals I didn't already know that I loved. 

Of course, allowing anyone in who had made three movies I saw fit to rank meant that the shortlist included ... carry the one ... 313 different directors or directing pairs. Which does not feel like exactly what I intended. 

But then I told myself that I didn't have to list all of them (it remains to be seen whether I will or not), and that I'll feel it's more complete if I don't penalize the old greats who had the rudeness to go and die on us, or the newcomers who had the rudeness to be millennials. 

After adding a director and copying the formula for all these 3,147 rows -- and I enjoyed a little game of seeing how many director names I could match to movies without having to look them up on IMDB -- I then sorted the whole list so all the directors' movies would appear together, and took an average that I then added in a separate worksheet in my spreadsheet, where I also included the titles. That took a while longer. 

I realized pretty quickly that directors with fewer titles had a significant advantage. The more movies you have, the more likely you are to make one or even several duds. Some directors with only three films really lucked out in that I happened to have only seen the good films they made during this period, possibly never seeing some of their other efforts, or seeing them only after the ranking period was over. Remember, this is not all the films the director directed during the past three decades, only those that I actually watched in time to rank in the year they came out.

But because of this advantage held by directors with fewer titles, I decided I would also shine a spotlight on each director who had the highest average among directors who directed the same number of films they directed. So the two guys who directed 18 films in those 29 years -- now is the time to guess who they might be, before I reveal in a few minutes -- should get some sort of special treatment, just for making so many movies I thought were worth seeing.

Before we get into the surprise results the statistics tell us, I wanted to highlight some significant directors from this period who I was surprised did not meet the three-film threshold. (And by the way, I sorted directors alphabetically by first name, which explains the sequencing you are about to see.)

I was surprised that the following directors could not make the cut: Aaron Sorkin, Andrew Haigh, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Armando Iannucci, Bennett Miller, Benny & Josh Safdie, Bill Condon, Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, David Lynch, Errol Morris, Frank Oz, Gaspar Noe, Greta Gerwig, Harmony Korine, Harold Ramis, Jacques Audiard, John Lasseter*, John Singleton, Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Glazer, Mike Figgis, Mike Leigh, Nancy Meyers, Paul Greengrass, Paul Verhoeven, Paul W.S. Anderson, Richard Kelly, Taylor Sheridan, Ted Demme, Todd Solondz, Tom Tywker and Tony Scott.

* - If you include movies where the director is listed as a co-director with somebody else, Lasseter makes the cut. But I decided, probably arbitrarily, not to count such collaborations toward the person's solo filmography. If they always directed as a pair, they'd get credit that way. 

Sure, the above group includes some directors who stopped early or started late within the period. The reason I find their exclusion significant is that many of these are directors I've done enough thinking about, in some cases even as the director of one of my #1 movies, that their relative absence in the movies I've ranked surprised me. (Plus, mentioning them here means you don't have to wonder about them.) In some cases, I saw their other movies, just not in time, perhaps due to them not releasing in Australia in time to meet my deadline. In others, perhaps I still haven't seen some of their films. But in each case, my eyebrows went up a little bit when I got to these names on the list and saw they did not have enough movies to qualify. 

Okay, without any more dithering, let's get to the top ten, the bottom ten, directors honored by quantity of films ... and whatever else we have time for. I'll list them in reverse order for dramatic effect, and the number in parentheses indicates their average ranking percentile across all their films I ranked.

The ten best directors of the ranking era, according to my statistics

10. Asghar Farhadi (83.7%)
Films: 3 - A Separation, The Salesman, Everybody Knows
Comment: The films that bookend the titles above were a #1 and a #3 film, so you can imagine I wasn't a huge fan of The Salesman or else he might be the runaway winner. As it is, he'll have to settle for top ten. Farhadi's niche in the film industry is one I could not do without: the domestic social whodunnit. 

9. Alfonso Cuaron (83.8%)
Films: 5 - Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, Gravity, Roma
Comment: Three top ten films, my favorite Harry Potter movie and one film I find overrated. I'll let you figure out which is which is which. Anyway, a new Cuaron film is, for me, an event -- an event that happens all too rarely. 

8. Jon M. Chu (84.3%)
Films: 3 - Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, Wicked
Comment: A real newcomer in this period, Chu has two top ten films and then one I respect but don't love. This is just the type of result I wouldn't have thought of that makes this exercise worth having done, and I'll be sure to anticipate each new Chu film with extra zeal. (And hey look, we have the Wicked sequel coming out later this year.) 

7. Ryan Coogler (84.9%)
Films: 4 - Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Comment: A #2 film and a #11 film, and then two Black Panther films, the second of which I actually like more than the first. Coogler would be even higher on this list if I did this exercise a year from now, as Sinners is currently my #2 of 2025. 

6. Jordan Peele (86.6%)
Films: 3 - Get Out, Us, Nope
Comment: Another relative newcomer. Strangely, I don't like Get Out as much as most people do, and I thought my Us ranking was not likely to be a boon to his fortunes. But Peele benefits from existing at a time when I was ranking over 150 movies per year, and I thought his films were among the cream of the crop of those years. 

5. Lynn Shelton (87.4%).
Films: 4 - Humpday, Your Sister's Sister, Outside In, Sword of Trust
Comment: Rest in peace. Shelton is the highest ranked director who is not still with us. I adore three of these films, and Shelton benefits from me not seeing in time two of her films from this period that I actively didn't like. 

4. Mark & Jay Duplass (88.3%)
Films: 3 - Cyrus, The Do-Deca Pentathlon, Jeff Who Lives at Home
Comment: Pity that these guys appear to be done directing movies, as they brought something special to the screen each time out. All three of these movies were in my top 20 of their respective years. They join Shelton to prove that when done well, I really, really like mumblecore.

3. Bong Joon-ho (89%)
Films: 5 - The Host, Mother, Snowpiercer, Okja, Parasite
Comment: Bong movies are an event akin to new Alfonso Cuaron movies. Four top 20s and one other movie I like a fair bit. And if I'd done this exercise one year later, Mickey 17 would have sunk him like a stone.

2. Ben Affleck (89.3%)
Films: 3 - The Town, Argo, Air
Comment: This was probably my biggest surprise, though maybe it shouldn't have been. Affleck is a really good director, and is helped by the fact that I missed (what I assume is) the mediocre Live by Night, though if I'd seen Gone Baby Gone that would have boosted him back up. He might be the walking epitome of the notion of what makes a good movie: Four great scenes and no bad ones. If there was a bad one, I missed it.

1. Spike Jonze (92.5%)
Films: 4 - Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, Her
Comment: If I'd really thought about it, I probably could have guessed Jonze would take this top spot. He has a #1, a #2, a #6 and a #21. Jonze likely also benefits from quitting while he was ahead, as he's had more than a decade to follow up my least favorite of these films and yet he has not, so I guess maybe he's just done. Shame. 

I'm quite proud of the diversity of this list, if I do say so myself. On this list we have three foreign language directors (from three different parts of the world), two Black directors, one Asian-American director and, yes, one woman, leaving only three regular white guys. (Or four, since you have to count the Duplass brothers as two guys.) If I had been coming up with this list with an eye toward political correctness, I could not have done better. The fact that these preferences were revealed through a scientific process is gratifying as it means I didn't have to cheat to look good. (Whether you agree with my tastes is, of course, another matter.)

This exercise did not only reveal the good. It also revealed the bad.

The ten worst directors of the ranking era, according to my statistics

10. Mark Steven Johnson (21.3%)
Films: 3 - Daredevil, Ghost Rider, When in Rome
Comment: Speaking of Ben Affleck, I don't think I actually hate any of these movies and I have some low level affection for Daredevil. But without any truly good films, Johnson approached rock bottom. I couldn't have matched this director's name to any of these movies or tell you anything about him at all.

9. Jeff Wadlow (21.1%)
Films: 4 - Kick-Ass 2, Fantasy Island, The Curse of Bridge Hollow, Imaginary
Comment: The Curse of Bridge Hollow was actually at the 46th percentile of its year, and made for a fun viewing experience with my family. That tells you just how negatively I feel about these others, including one that made my bottom five of last year. 

8. Gareth Edwards (20.6%)
Films: 3 - Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator
Comment: This one might really surprise Rogue One fans, and I do like that film better after a second viewing -- but only a little bit. The other two were way overrated for me, even though this is supposed to be "the good Godzilla." (If Roland Emmerich's was "the bad Godzilla.") 

7. Garry Marshall (19.9%)
Films: 4 - Runaway Bride, The Princess Diaries, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, Valentine's Day
Comment: Marshall made some really enjoyable films earlier in his career, but that's not the period covered by these three decades. I do like the original Princess Diaries pretty well. 

6. Chad Stahelski (17.9%) 
Films: 3 - John Wick Chapter 2, John Wick Chapter 3 - Parabellum, John Wick Chapter 4
Comment: So I am not a huge fan of the John Wick sequels, as you can probably tell, or the John Wick Universe in general. Stahelski would have been helped if I'd seen the original, which I do like, in time to rank it. 

5. D.J. Caruso (17.3%)
Films: 3 - Taking Lives, Disturbia, Mary
Comment: I think I liked Disturbia? A little? Not a lot. Mary was in my bottom five films last year. 

4. Terry Gilliam (15.8%)
Films: 3 - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Zero Theorem, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Comment: How the mighty have fallen. Gilliam directed some of my most cherished films of all time, and in fact, 12 Monkeys was one year before I started ranking. But this period? Blecch. There seems to be a moral justness to this as well, as Gilliam has revealed himself as a politically backwards jerk in recent years. 

3. Adam Shankman (14.8%)
Films: 4 - A Walk to Remember, The Pacifier, Rock of Ages, What Men Want
Comment: When I think of an example of a hack director, I think of Adam Shakman, though perhaps that has to do with his name. As a director, he shanks a lot of movies indeed. Rock of Ages should have, could have, been good, but it did not work for me. 

2. David Cronenberg (13.1%)
Films: 4 - A History of Violence, Cosmopolis, Maps to the Stars, Crimes of the Future
Comment: A possibly shocking result for cinephiles reading this. But I dodged ranking the good Cronenberg films from this period (Existenz, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method) and hit only the bad ones. I'm famously way lower than most people on A History of Violence, and Crimes of the Future is the only other of these that works even a little bit. Cosmopolis was my worst film of its year. 

1. Stephen Sommers (10.5%) 
Films: 4 - The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Odd Thomas
Comment: If you had given me 50 guesses about who would take this spot, I wouldn't have come up with the name Stephen Sommers. Especially since I feel like I sort of like the first Mummy and Odd Thomas, and definitely do not reserve special hatred for the other two. But statistics are statistics and I'm not going to argue with them.

What do you know. Ten white guys. I think that says more about the proliferation of white guys in the film industry than their innate talents as directors. However, this is another passive result that makes me sort of proud. 

Best directors at each number of films

18 films

Steven Soderbergh (67.5%)
Overall ranking: 72nd 
Beats out: Steven Spielberg (50.5%)
Comment: To be able to make an average of more than a film every two years during this period, and still be in the top 100 overall, is pretty good. With Soderbergh, there are only a few big highs (Traffic and Erin Brockovich, both top ten of 2000), and a few big lows (High Flying Bird, Haywire) while most of the rest are solid B+s. I'll mention Spielberg too. His greatest period of creative success is prior to 1996, in my opinion, and some movies I really did not like, such as War Horse, dragged him down to completely middle of the road. 

Big dropoff after their 18 films!

13 films

M. Night Shyamalan (31.9%)
Overall ranking: 275th
Beats out: N/A
Comment: Poor Night. We know it's been 30 years as a punching bag. However, this inescapable fact exists: Despite my low opinion of most of his films, I have only missed ranking one film he's released during this period, though having ranked Glass would not have helped him here. That is really saying something and worth acknowledging. Obviously my optimism for his potential remains undaunted. 

12 films

Richard Linklater (70.1%)
Overall ranking: 51st
Beats out: Woody Allen (51.2%), Ridley Scott (49.3%)
Comment: I avoided many of the "inessential" Linklater films from this period (eg. Bad News Bears, which is still one of my few Linklater blind spots) so the overall average of this great director is quite good, even for this many films. He's also had three top ten films during this period (Waking Life, Before Midnight, Boyhood). Always a must-see director. 

11 films

Christopher Nolan (69.1%)
Overall ranking: 57th
Beats out: Zack Snyder (31.7%), Michael Bay (26.5%)
Comment: Eleven films seems to be the magic number for giant spectacle movies, right? Snyder's and Bay's have been mostly bad, but Nolan's are (almost) always a huge success. Take out my negative reaction to Dunkirk and my middling response to Tenet and you'd have a top ten overall director, who may be the event moviest director we have working today. (Outside of Quentin Tarantino maybe.)

10 films

Wes Anderson (66.9%)
Overall ranking: 77th 
Beats out: Robert Zemeckis (64.6%), Joel & Ethan Coen (55%), Ron Howard (51.4%)
Comment: If I had seen probably my favorite Anderson film from this period, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, in time to rank it, he'd be even higher. Obviously I largely like Anderson, though some movies I dislike (The Darjeeling Limited, The French Dispatch) drag down an otherwise stellar record. Huge names he's beating out here, all of whom have a dud or two that cut into their average percentage.

9 films

Noah Baumbach (66%)
Overall ranking: 77th
Beats out: Danny Boyle (60.6%), Clint Eastwood (59.5%), James Mangold (49.5%), David O. Russell (48.5%)
Comment: At the start of this period, Russell was shooting for top ten overall status but his last, er, nearly 15 years have not been great. I always think of Baumbach as one of "my guys," though he too has let me down a bit with movies like Mistress America and The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). That tells you how strongly I feel about his other films.  

8 films

David Fincher (70.2%)
Overall ranking: 50th
Beats out (top five listed): Peter Jackson (69.7%), Adam McKay (69.1%), Martin Scorsese (67.2%), Jason Reitman (63.7%), Doug Liman (48.6%)
Comment: Like Nolan, a Fincher film is an event. I think of them as the two most interesting and challenging prestige directors of this period. Though Fincher does sometimes miss with me, as with The Killer. Otherwise, rock solid. 

7 films

Denis Villeneuve (78.8%)
Overall ranking: 19th
Beats out (top five listed): Taika Waititi (60.3%), Matthew Vaughn (57.8%), Bryan Singer (50%), Kevin Smith (47.5%), Francis Lawrence (47.2%)
Comment: Highest ranked director overall with as many films as he has made, though there are two directors with six films who are higher (as we will see in a moment). When Villeneuve misses, it's not by much, and he doesn't have any film lower than 55th percentile among that year's films (which was the first I ranked, Prisoners). Possibly the most exciting large-scale director to come on our radar in the last 15 years.

6 films 

Quentin Tarantino (83.4%)
Overall ranking: 11th
Beats out (top five listed): Darren Aronofsky (80.3%), Paul Thomas Anderson (73.8%), Alexander Payne (73%), Judd Apatow (72.3%), Sam Raimi (72.2%)
Comment: Of course. Tarantino just misses the top ten overall, and only because Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood managed only in the high 70s percentile those years. The list of runners up is like a murderer's row here. Aronofsky, the only director who has been my #1 twice, hasn't been as prolific during this period as I thought, due to a long layoff after Requiem for a Dream. If I had ranked The Fountain he would be lower. 

5 films 

Bong Joon-ho (89%
Overall ranking: 3rd
Beats out (top five listed): Alfonso Cuaron (83.8%), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (79%), Hirokazu Kore-eda (78.4%), Baz Luhrmann (71.2%), Todd Haynes (71%)
Comment: Already talked about Bong and Cuaron above, so no need to repeat myself, but I did want to comment on some of these others. Inarritu has gone missing lately but has made some excellent films that maybe have not all aged as well as they could have. Kore-eda is another "my guy" who I think of as an heir to Ozu. And I have a soft spot for the "jazz hands filmmaking" of Luhrmann.

4 films

Spike Jonze (92.5%)
Overall ranking: 1st
Beats out (top five listed): Lynn Shelton (87.4%), Ryan Coogler (84.9%), Alex Ross Perry (82.3%), Cristian Mungiu (78.9%), Pete Docter (78.6%)
Comment: I'll just mention Perry and Mungiu. Perry's films continue to challenge me and he has made my top ten twice. Mungiu has a #1 and a #2, a feat equalled by Jonze and beaten only by Aronofsky, but Graduation and R.M.N. did not work for me as well as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Beyond the Hills

3 films 

Ben Affleck (89.3%)
Overall ranking: 2nd
Beats out (top five listed): Mark & Jay Duplass (88.3%), Jordan Peele (86.6%), Jon M. Chu (84.3%), Asgar Farhadi (83.7%), James Cameron (82.1%)
Comment: Cameron is the only one I didn't mention previously. I guess he is the ultimate event movie director as he averages about a movie every ten years these days, meaning that a new James Cameron movie is a rare event indeed. A personal note that my friend and director Matthew Saville misses the five runners up by only three spots with his 77.1%, as only Curtis Hanson and Kevin Macdonald snuck in between him and Cameron. 

Okay, am I really going to list you the whole 313?

No I am not. It's too much. Even I can't delude myself that this is worthwhile reading for you.

However, I will finish by going down the list and mentioning a number of additional notable directors who have not been mentioned so far, their overall ranking, and possibly any films worth mentioning as to why they ended up higher or lower than you might expect.

I ended up going a little crazy, so you can just scan through and read the names you're interested in. 

#22 Jean-Pierre Jeunet - 4 films (77.9%) - Too few movies from this talent. Micmacs is his only miss. 

#29 Alex Garland - 4 films (74.8%) - Take out Men and you have a huge contender here.

#42 Sean Baker - 4 films (72.2%) - Red Rocket keeps this guy out of the top ten overall. 

#48 Guillermo del Toro - 6 films (70.5%) - Solid stuff from one of the icons of the period. 

#60 J.J. Abrams - 6 films (67.9%) - Directed movies in three franchises that have at least eight movies, and made good versions of all of them.

#71 David Lowery - 6 films (67.7%) - Have to mention my Ghost Story director here. Love A Ghost Story.

#83 Michael Moore - 4 films (65.3%) - A discussion of this period wouldn't be complete without a mention of its most confrontational documentary director.

#85 Robert Altman - 3 films (65.1%) - This is the kind of guy I was thinking of when I thought about directors who died during this period, and the three-film threshold would allow me to include them. Directed my #1 of 2001, Gosford Park

#96 George Lucas - 3 films (62.1%) - You had to want to know where the prequels ended up, average percentage wise, on my overall rankings, didn't you?

#99 Guy Ritchie - 4 films (61.8%) - The most notable thing about Ritchie is the number of his films I skipped during this period, at least in the year they came out -- far more than half the ones he made. I liked the ones I did rank, though. 

#113 Michael Mann - 5 films (59.8%) - I think of Mann as a good director but a few of his films have disappointed me. Would be lower if I'd ranked Miami Vice

#116 Yorgos Lanthimos - 6 films (59.3%) - Another iconic director from the second half of this period, Lanthimos was hurt by my comparative disappointment in Alps and Kinds of Kindness

#119 Kelly Reichardt - 6 films (58.9%) - There are actually eight female directors ranked higher than Reichardt, but each of them has only three films -- more of a comment on the film industry in general than anything else. Reichardt has been among the most prolific women in this period (we'll get to another later) with only one film I don't really like (Showing Up).

#121 Nicole Holofcener - 6 films (58.8%) - Ha, this is not even the one I was referring to in the discussion of Reichardt. Only two spots behind Reichardt overall, and one spot behind her for the title of preeminent female filmmaker who directed a half-dozen films that I ranked. 

#125 Sofia Coppola - 6 films (58.3%) - This is the one! Funny how these three are clustered all together. I adore Coppola and think of her as my favorite female director, but I can't deny that three of her films from this period have underwhelmed: Somewhere, On the Rocks and Priscilla

#126 Michel Gondry - 6 films (58%) - Started so strong with Eternal Sunshine, then offered steadily diminishing returns.

#129 Ari Aster - 3 films (57.3%) - If not for Beau is Afraid ... 

#134 Spike Lee - 6 films (56.8%) - There is always going to be some variability with the quality of films from a director like Lee. Some you're going to like, some aren't going to work for you. He probably wouldn't have it any other way.

#148 Robert Eggers - 4 films (54.6%) - Unforgettable filmmaking style, imperfect results. 

#152 Rian Johnson - 5 films (54.3%) - I don't like Brick, The Last Jedi or Knives Out as much as most people do.

#155 Oliver Stone - 6 films (53.1%) - There was a time when he was considered one of our greatest working directors, but that was largely before the last three decades. Now he is almost perfectly middle of the pack out of my 313.

#159 Cameron Crowe - 6 films (52.5%) - Crowe had two films in my top ten of the 2000s (Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky) but it was all downhill from there. Really it was just an excellent 2000 and 2001, though of course Crowe was excellent before then as well. 

#163 Ang Lee - 6 films (52%) - One of the most versatile directors we've ever seen has a couple misses that knock him down overall. What even was Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk?

#165 James Gunn - 5 films (51.6) - For all the grousing I've done about James Gunn over the years, I think favorably of him now, so I was a little surprised by this lowish ranking.

#173 Joe Wright - 6 films (50.7%) - Barely cracking the middle of my rankings in average among qualifiers, Wright is a study in extremes: the great Atonement and Darkest Hour, the terrible Pan and The Woman in the Window

#177 Tarsem Singh - 3 films (50.2%) - I will always think of this as sort of a "my guy" due to my love for The Cell. But the rest of his films are ... not The Cell

#185 Edgar Wright - 6 films (48.8%) - Wright was once flying high, but I really don't like his last two films. Like, at all. 

#199 Peter & Bobby Farrelly - 7 films (47%) - Really hot at the start, then really cold the rest of the way, with the exception of Hall Pass, which I unaccountably love. 

#205 Lars von Trier - 6 films (45.8%) - For all the ability he has to make unforgettably good films, more of his films are unforgettably bad, not to mention problematic. 

#209 Luca Guadagnino - 4 films (45.6%) - None of Guadagnino's four films I've ranked has worked for me as well as the general consensus, though I suppose there are a lot of people who don't think much of his Suspiria remake. 

#210 Paul Feig - 6 films (45.3%) - One of the more prominent comedy directors of this period started out very strong with Bridesmaids and Spy, but slipped considerably on his next four.

#211 Michael Winterbottom - 8 films (44.5%) - Winterbottom made more than just The Trip films during this period, but that did account for half of the eight films I ranked. The others were mostly disappointments. 

#213 Rob Marshall - 5 films (44.1%) - Our most prominent director of big-scale movie musicals did not make any nearly as good as Chicago, my #2 of 2002. 

#222 James Gray - 6 films (42.3%) - When Gray is good, he's really good (Two Lovers, The Lost City of Z), but when he's bad, he's more bad than the amount he is good (The Immigrant, Ad Astra). 

#226 Park Chan-wook - 3 films (41.9%) - Remember when Park was the best South Korean director? 

#230 Osgood Perkins - 3 films (40.7%) - The Blackcoat's Daughter? So good! Longlegs? So bad! Gretel & Hansel? Closer to Longlegs than Blackcoat's

#233 Nicolas Winding Refn - 3 films (40.2%) - Remember when this enfant terrible was on all our lips for a while? Unfortunately, the middle of the three I ranked is just terrible, that being Only God Forgives, which I ranked last that year. 

#237 Paul Weitz - 7 films (39.7%) - Busy working director who made a number of interesting films and some not so interesting, but in any case, it was not where I expected the director of American Pie to end up. 

#237 Sean Penn - 3 films (39.7%) - If not for Into the Wild, this would have been a disastrous period for Penn. 

#244 Terrence Malick - 5 films (38.9%) - Totally his own kind of director, and suddenly prolific during this period after a couple decades of inactivity, but he quickly became a parody of himself. 

#250 Wachowski Sisters - 7 films (38%) - My favorite film of theirs, Bound, was something I discovered later, so only The Matrix is a great film among these seven. And me ranking The Matrix Resurrections last that year really hurt them. 

#259 Tyler Perry - 6 films (36.9%) - There was a period when I made a semi-regular habit of watching Perry's movies and I semi-liked them. I've kind of lost track in the past five years. 

#265 Mel Gibson - 3 films (35.4%) - Remember how good Apocalypto was? 

#266 Jon Favreau - 6 films (35.1%) - My complicated relationship with Jon Favreau ranges from considering Elf an all-time top 50 movie for me to thinking Chef is one big portrait of a defensive asshole. 

#269 Roland Emmerich - 8 films (33.7%) - Emmerich's output is generally terrible, but I loved Anonymous (top ten that year) and I don't mind 2012

#271 Eli Roth - 4 films (33%) - Hostel was awesome. But maybe he should stick to acting. (Wait, he's not very good in Inglourious Basterds.)

#273 Duncan Jones - 4 films (32.4%) - Moon was my #1 of 2009. The other movies? Yeesh. 

#277 Robert Rodriguez - 5 films (31.5%) - I feel in my mind that Robert Rodriguez is better than this. He probably isn't. 

#279 John Woo - 4 films (29.7%) - Remember when John Woo was even good? We'll always have Face/Off

#285 Christopher Guest - 6 films (27.8%) - I remember when I thought the thing Christopher Guest brought to the movies was irreplaceable and hilarious. By the time of For Your Consideration and Mascots, that was long gone. 

#289 Ivan Reitman - 4 films (25.7%) - Clearly this was after Reitman's prime. My Super Ex-Girlfriend, anyone?

#293 Todd Phillips - 5 films (23.9%) - After tickling us with the first Hangover, Phillips curdled quickly.

#295 Ruben Fleischer - 5 films (23.8%) - I thought this guy might be bottom ten material because of how I loathe 30 Minutes or Less and Venom, but Zombieland props him up. 

#296 McG - 7 films (23.7%) - One of the most hilarious monikers of this period works a lot but doesn't make many good movies. My favorites of his are two films I didn't see in time to rank them: the original Charlie's Angels and We Are Marshall.

#297 Joel Schumacher - 5 films (23.4%) - And I even think of myself as a bit of Schumacher apologist, but the numbers obviously don't bear that out. (Still really like A Time to Kill though.)

Okay, exhale!

This exercise was long and fun (for me anyway), and it has indeed made me aware of some true feelings about the working filmmakers of the last three decades. And that's reason enough to do anything. 

Monday, June 23, 2025

Punching Nazis

After I got finished watching Shoah on Saturday night, I was really in the mood for punching some Nazis.

Not killing them. Just punching them.

Why not killing? Only punching?

1) I'm not a murderer.

2) Punching is more personal. 

When you kill someone, usually you're doing it with some kind of weapon as an intermediary. Some people can kill people with their bare hands, but it's not reliable if you want to be sure to get the job done.

Punching someone, though? That's flesh-to-flesh, bone-to-bone. That's your knuckles cracking them straight in the jaw, and hopefully not breaking your own hand in the process. That's visceral and that's where real frustration vents itself.

You can tell by the sound effect they use for it in the movies, that familiar short cracking whip, possibly accompanied by a body thudding to the ground.

Speaking of cracking whips, punching Nazis is one of Indiana Jones' favorite pastimes. Sure, he can pull out his pistol and shoot them, but that's such a remote way of showing someone your disdain. A good fist to the face, and they'll remember it and have to rub it something fierce to make the pain go away. 

So yes, it's no surprise I immediately started watching another movie -- yes, another movie, after more than nine hours of Shoah, and more than 14 hours in real time -- in which Nazis get punched, and then followed that with another the next night. 

The first was Blood & Gold, the vastly underseen 2023 Netflix movie that I've never heard another person talk about even though it's really good. The setup: It's the waning days of World War II -- literally, like the last two days -- and we open on German soldiers led by a sadistic commander hanging a deserter near a small village in the country. Instead of succumbing -- the sadistic commander told him it wouldn't snap his neck right away and would take time to kill him -- the alleged deserter is cut down by a war widow, who runs a farm with her mentally challenged brother. This puts them in the path of the commander and his superior officer, who are in the village looking gold in the home of a Jewish family who died in the gas chamber. 

Peter Thorwarth's movie is shot really well and has a Tarantino adjacent style. If it were done worse, you might even call it a ripoff, but the filmmaking is so good all around that a "loving homage" is the appropriate way to refer to it. It's fast-paced and mid-level violent, just fun enough without being gratuitous, and it gets you out of there in only 98 minutes. What more could I ask for after a nine-hour movie? It made my top ten of 2023 and is really worth seeing.

And are there punched Nazis? 

Oh there are punched Nazis indeed.

There are a number of scenes of close physical gouging and mauling and plenty of punch-like activity, but Thorwarth has enough respect for realism that these read more like "subdue your enemy at any cost" fights than they read like "photogenically punch a Nazi square on the jaw" fights. 

But you can bet those Nazis are punched all right. Clawed at and cut and spat on and gouged at. Plenty roughed up. Will feel it in the morning. 

Sunday night brought chapter 2 in this little informal Nazi-punching double feature, with one of the Nazi punchiest movies out there: Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Speaking of Tarantino. 

I had only seen Inglourious Basterds twice, both of which were in the first year of its existence. But that's certainly no knock on it, as it made my top that year and I think of it as being among my top four Tarantino films, joined by Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and The Hateful Eight

I don't really need to tell you anything about Inglourious Basterds because surely you have seen it. However, I'll tell you about a funny takeaway I had from the film on this viewing, which I wouldn't have been in the position to have when I last saw it in 2010.

Namely, this is by far the closest Quentin Tarantino has to a Wes Anderson movie. However, I'd say if anything, Wes might have been stealing from Quentin.

Although Tarantino's movies have never been without a sense of humor, I think there are moments of absurdity in Inglourious Basterds that feel almost Andersonian in their presentation. Of course, Anderson's movie that is most like this is The Grand Budapest Hotel, which he would not release for another five years. However, Anderson was doing that sort of quirk before Tarantino was, so maybe there is a little bit of mutual respect showing here.

But what we're really here to talk about is the Nazi punching. 

How does Inglourious Basterds fare on that front?

Quite poor, actually.

Oh, plenty of Nazis get theirs -- it's history as revenge fantasy, where essentially the entire top brass of the Third Reich gets taken down in a burning theater, including Hitler riddled with bullets, and then his corpse riddle with some more bullets. 

But actual punching is in short supply. Non-existent, really.

The closest we get is that two of the Basterds, who have gotten into the film premiere, strap on wrist guns that fire through a punching action. Two Nazi guards meet their demise from these wrist guns, and I believe the one played by Eli Roth actually engages in a punch of sorts when he fires it.

Oh, and Aldo Raine does head butt Hans Landa. That's pretty personal -- and something you really have to know how to do without hurting yourself unless you want to walk away with a severe headache.

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Audient Zeitgeist and 7,000th movie: Shoah

This is the third in my 2025 bi-monthly series Audient Zeitgeist, in which I'm watching previously unseen movies that have an ongoing role in our zeitgeist.

With my 7,000th movie on the horizon -- that's 7,000 distinct titles, not 7,000 total viewings -- I had been scouting movies with the number 7,000 in their title, but I wasn't liking the choices too much. 

Red Line 7000? 7000 Miles? Paris 7000? Tallahassee 7000?

I hadn't heard of any of them, and this was starting to feel like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T all over again. (Which was not a good way to celebrate the milestone of 5,000 films watched. Especially not that particular milestone.)

So a couple months ago I started to take a different tack, and I came up with a title that would also work with my Audient Zeitgeist series.

Which is how I came to watch the longest movie I've ever seen on the longest day of the year, though of course June 21st is actually the shortest day of the year in the southern hemisphere, making the task all the more challenging.

(It's the same number of hours, of course. And less daylight is probably more rather than less conducive to watching a movie all day.)

Did I say all day? I meant it. 

The reasons Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah makes for a good 7,000th movie, and why 2025 is a particularly good time to watch it:

1) The movie is listed on IMDB as 9 hours and 26 minutes long. I say "listed," because the four-disc DVD set I picked up off Amazon contained what appeared to be "only" 9 hours and 4 minutes of movie. At that point, what's another 22 minutes? But I'm sure I did not need it.

2) When this movie came out in 1985, it had been 40 years since the end of World War II, a period of time the film remembers as it interviews survivors and witnesses of the Third Reich's attempt to exterminate the Jewish people through their concentration camps in Poland. It has now been 40 years since the movie came out, and 80 years since the end of World War II. So that makes for an interesting perspective, both on how far we had come (or not come) by then, and how far we have come (or not come) now.

The reasons Shoah is a good Audient Zeitgeist movie:

1) The word "zeitgeist" is German.

2) Number two takes a little more explanation and introduces you to my personal history with the movie, such as it is.

I first became aware of Shoah sometime in the late 1980s, and if memory serves me correctly, I discovered it while poring over one of Roger Ebert's books of great movies. Actually I think it was a book of his capsule reviews, but I'm not finding the exact thing listed in his bibliography. In any case, it was some Ebert-related book, and I must have been going through it with a fine-toothed comb in order to learn that this movie called Shoah was 9 hours and 26 minutes long (or maybe just 9:04). 

I immediately told my friends about this. Or they discovered it and they told me. This was nearly 40 years ago so forgive me if my memory is hazy. 

In any case, we were intensely fascinated by a movie that utterly exploded our notion of the viable length for a feature film. I mean, how would you even watch a nine-hour movie? Would there be bathroom breaks? 

Shoah became a go-to example I would use in scenarios where a long movie was required. Today I am more likely to talk about Lord of the Rings: Return of the King -- like, "It's only 1 a.m., it's not too late to start watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" -- but back at that time, Shoah would have been my example. Maybe over the years, I prefer my jokes to be a little less exaggerated.

Because solemn subject matter aside, which we will discuss in detail later in this piece, there had to be something exaggerated, something avant garde, something intentionally button-pushing about a movie that so blithely disregarded existing cinematic conventions for length?

I guess I don't know the extent to which Shoah holds this role for people in the population at large, which is what makes me unsure if this truly qualifies as a zeitgeist movie. Maybe for other people, Bela Tarr's 7 hour and 19 minute Satantango is their Shoah. But my friends and I seemed to talk about Shoah a lot, and therefore, I'm happy enough to extrapolate this fascination to other people as well.

I always distantly imagined I might see Shoah, but I never knew what circumstances those would be. A little internet research tells me that the first people to see Shoah saw it in October of 1985, when it debuted at New York's Cinema Studio, but that most people saw it two years later across four nights on PBS. 

I knew I didn't want to watch it across four nights. That felt like cheating. 

If they made Shoah today, it would not be considered a single feature, but a limited documentary series, like O.J.: Made in America. What fascinates me so much about it is that it existed outside of such streaming era conventions, making it an absolute anomaly for its time, and giving it a different feeling than the long-form documentaries we would get today. 

Getting my hands on it at all was the first problem I had to tackle.

I couldn't find it streaming anywhere, for possibly obvious reasons, though they might slice it up if they didn't want to load one giant file lasting over nine hours. But I did find it available on DVD through Amazon.

If I wanted to get it in Australia, it would cost me something like $150, and that was not an amount I was willing to spend, even for a landmark 7,000th movie. In the U.S., though, there was a copy available for only $30. I would solve the DVD region incompatibility issue with the fact that I still have a computer set to the correct DVD region and it still works, for just such occasions. I just needed to send it to my friend Don in Chicago, who would send it to me and I would pay him back for the shipping. Turns out, he shipped it from work so I didn't need to pay him back at all.

When I received the DVD, more than a month ago, the writing on the DVD case was in German. This momentarily made me wonder if a) it was actual Region 1, which is how I have my old laptop set, or b) if the option to watch with English subtitles would even be available. And though I had to navigate a DVD title menu in German, indeed the "Sprach" menu allowed me to pick English for the subtitles, and indeed I was off and rolling.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I have to tell you how I got to picking this past Saturday.

When I made the decision to do this as part of Audient Zeitgeist, which had a bi-monthly post due in June, it was mid-May and I still had something like 35 movies to watch before 7,000. That would be faster than my usual pace at this time of year, but I knew that if I put my mind to it and I didn't schedule any rewatches, I could time it out to hit 7,000 by the last weekend in June.

As it turns out, I really put my mind to it, and also spent a weekend being sick, so I got there with time to spare, and on track to watch it even a weekend earlier than that final weekend. In fact, I had to slow down my usual pace this week, scheduling rewatches for Tuesday and Friday nights and not watching anything on Wednesday, so that 28 Years Later on Thursday night would be #6,999, and I'd be ready to start Shoah on Saturday morning. 

Because one thing I was sure of: It would be cheating if I did not watch this all within the same day. Yes, I've watched movies over multiple days before -- in fact I think I intentionally took four nights to watch Ben-Hur -- but it was a point of pride, for this landmark movie, to have something close to a real-time, consecutive viewing of those nine hours, all in one day, like the first audiences in October of 1985 presumably had. I arranged Saturday June 21st with my wife, and she gave me one of her bemused "you're crazy" looks and said "Sure."

Because the interesting thing to note about Shoah is, it's not naturally divisible into four parts, which is what they had to do to show it on PBS. The movie really does run like one long feature, and the divisions they've put in to change discs seem largely just that: instructions to change discs. Technically the film is divided into two parts, but each is more than four hours, and again, I could not tell if this was in the film at the time or put in later for our easier consumption. Either way, each part is way longer than most movies you've ever seen. 

I don't want to keep you here reading this for as long as it took me to watch Shoah, but the rest of this post will be divided into two parts: 1) A timeline of my viewing of Shoah. Come on, you're dying to know how a person watches a nine-hour movie in one day, and who am I to deny you this? 2) My thoughts on the movie based on the notes I took. 

Let's start the first part with a general strategy. 

Obviously I can't just sit there for nine hours in a row and watch a movie. Even if I could handle it from a stamina perspective, which I could not, there were a few things required of me during the day. So I decided I would try to follow a system of taking a break every hour, as well as another break any time I had to change discs. Breaking the viewing up into manageable bites would make the whole thing more manageable, hopefully. 

I should also fess up to something: I didn't only watch the movie. I did check baseball scores and that sort of thing. When you have something as long as this to watch, you have to use whatever strategy gets you through it without unduly compromising the experience of watching the movie. 

Okay let's get to that timeline. 

Timeline

7:29 a.m. Started movie. I had hoped to start closer to 7 a.m., but after checking the morning's baseball news and sleeping a few minutes later than I intended, this is when I actually started. My first viewing spot was in my office, on the old computer I mentioned previously, with a coffee and a mini chocolate chip muffin, the kind my younger son loves. 

8:30 a.m. First break. Washed dishes from the night before, and took my son to his soccer practice, which was set to start at 9 a.m.

9:13 a.m. Started second hour in my car outside the soccer practice. I was going to take this hour off to take a walk during practice, which is my custom, but after only an hour of watching Shoah and getting a little later start than I intended, I knew I couldn't afford to fool around. You'll see later on that this was a good decision. 

10:13 a.m. Finished second hour just about a minute before my son returned to the car at the end of practice. 

10:32 a.m. Started remainder of Disc 1 back in my office at home.

10:59 a.m. Finished the 2:26 Disc 1. A quarter of the way there.

11:05 a.m. Started Disc 2. 

11:15 a.m. Man came to the door to deliver four heavy boxes of rabbit food. (We have rabbits.) Had to pause for a few minutes.

12:08 p.m. Broke for lunch.

12:18 p.m. Resumed in my office, with my leftover meatloaf, broccoli and mashed potatoes all warmed up.

1:13 p.m. Disc 2 finished. Message says "Fin de le premiere epoque." I think this may refer to the fact that the movie was made over 11 years. (I couldn't really tell if things were being shown chronologically or not because there are no dates on screen.) 

I also took this break to shower and restart my computer, which went into a mode where I couldn't call the screen back up. I worried that this foreshadowed technical problems that could prevent me from finishing the viewing, but it was the last thing for the day that was any sort of technical issue. 

However, since I'd restarted my computer, I wasn't able to get my external DVD drive, which is attached by USB, to be recognized at first. While I was clicking through the various choices in My Computer, I remembered/realized that I actually have an internal DVD player on this computer, which is what I used for Discs 3 and 4.

1:48 p.m. Started Disc 3 and the "second period (epoque)" of the movie. Now I'm relocated to the couch in our garage, to give my back a bit of a rest.

2:53 p.m. Next scheduled hourly break. 

3:04 p.m. Resumed on the living room couch. Both of my sons were now out of the house -- my younger one for a sleepover at his auntie's, the older one on a bike ride with his friends -- so my wife invited me out of the dungeon-like gloom of our garage and into the sunny living room. Note: This is the fourth and final viewing venue for the movie. 

4:08 p.m. Next hourly stoppage for the longest break of the day. My older son had a 5 p.m. basketball game that's like a 20-minute drive from our house. They had a big comeback and won the game.

6:22 p.m. Resumed on the living room couch for the final 20 minutes of Disc 3.

6:42 p.m. Finished Disc 3.

6:54 p.m. Start of Disc 4.

7:37 p.m. Our Chinese delivery arrived. Ate dinner with my wife and watched an episode of The Studio.

8:18 p.m. Resumed.

8:44 p.m. Hourly break. With 1:20 left on Disc 4, decided I would skip my final break, which would come with only 20 minutes remaining, and just get it done.

8:50 p.m. Resumed. 

10:10 p.m. FINISHED.

So in all, it took me 14 hours and 41 minutes to watch 9 hours and 4 minutes. That would have been a lot shorter, of course, if not for the 2 hour and 14 minute break to go to my son's basketball game. Which did probably help me with the necessary stamina to finish the viewing.

My thoughts

Well this is pretty much a masterpiece. Let me get that out of the way at the start before I present some reservations.

I think it makes sense to look at this in a chronological overview and then go into general thoughts.

I was a bit worried at the start. The very first thing that happens in Shoah is some expository text about one of the characters the film will follow -- pages and pages of it, in fact. I thought "What, nine hours is not long enough to actually tell this person's story on screen?"

Of course, that's not the sort of movie Shoah is. It has no voiceover, only interviews with the interview subjects, and of course questions from Lanzmann as their interviewer. (More on him in a moment.) 

But at the very start I thought I was in for a long haul, and not just because the movie is about the length of three baseball games. The material in the very first portion of this film is mostly survivors visiting these areas where they came so close to death, four decades earlier. That's poignant, but not particularly distinctive, especially in terms of the way the Holocaust has subsequently been covered in our culture. I have seen quite a lot of films that have Holocaust subject matter, and though that's not Shoah's fault, because it undoubtedly got there first, it does mean that this material specifically was less likely to blow my mind and wrench my heart than it would have been if I'd seen it in 1985. (I think we also have to acknowledge that the very first part of this movie, like its first 15 minutes, were always going to be the hardest, since the enormity of how much remains is foremost in your thoughts.)

I have to say, though, that by Discs 2 and 3, I was fully in the thrall of this movie. The interviews started to give me material I hadn't gotten before in movies about the Holocaust, and make me consider things I hadn't considered before. By some point during Disc 3, I decided I was going to give Shoah five stars on Letterboxd as an absolutely vital document, the likes of which do not exist anywhere else out there in the cinematic landscape in general, and in Holocaust filmmaking in particular.

After Disc 4, I'm not so sure about that five stars. (I have not yet logged this on Letterboxd.) I may still go five stars, but I thought the momentum of the movie lost some steam in its final two hours, as it shifted to discussions of possible uprisings at the camps and in the Warsaw ghetto. This is not something I find as engaging, intellectually, as the descriptions of camp life and logistics that took up much of the middle 50 percent of this movie, and I did not find the interview subjects as compelling. For whatever reason -- and I really don't think it was exhaustion because I never felt too tired or like taking a nap -- Shoah diminished a little in its last quarter.

Who am I kidding, I will probably still give it five stars.

If you want to get an idea how the movie feels on the whole, it's a bit like 25 different interviews with survivors, participants or other related people, some of which run for a generous 20 to 25 minutes. Sometimes we see their talking heads, sometimes you are just getting the camera running over the landscape as it is in 1985 -- or, I suppose, anywhere from 1974 to when the film was finally finished in either 1984 or 1985.

Although most of what we see feels like it's taking place in the same period, we do also see some earlier interviews, particularly with a former SS soldier, that are black and white videos involving a clearly younger Lanzmann. To draw attention to the fact that these occurred at a different time, Lanzmann introduces a bit of artifice by having himself and some of his crew watch these on a video in the back of a van that functions as a mobile production studio for them, rather than just showing the video itself. 

Though they would have every reason to be, very few of these people are an emotional mess. They speak about the events with some degree of matter-of-factness, and due to an interesting choice by the filmmaker, sometimes we don't know who we're hearing from and what this person's role was until the interview has been going on for ten minutes or even reached its conclusion. It's certainly a profound way of contextualizing what they've been saying.

I also want to talk a bit about Lanzmann and how impressive he clearly was. (He only just died in 2018.) Because many of the earlier presented interviews are with Poles, and he doesn't speak Polish, it takes a little while to get a sense of how many languages he truly does speak. In fact, the translations by his translator are something that contribute to some of the early pacing issues, because we'll hear a whole story in Polish without seeing any translation, then get subtitles only when the translator is explaining it to Lanzmann. (The right choice, I think, but it means these interviews take a lot more screen time.) And how impressive, by the way, is she, for having to remember and present as much as a minute of consecutive storytelling in Polish? (I'd be curious how close her translations are to what was actually said.)

But Lanzmann proves his linguistic prowess with interviews in both English and German, only using his native French with his own translator, and we see how important it is for him to have the ability to go back and forth with an interview subject in real time, given how he can coax things out of them or hold their feet to the fire. In the former case, it's getting truly wrenching testimony from victims or survivors. In the latter case, it's forcing people involved to admit some amount of culpability, pressing that "We have to do this," or refusing to let them dodge questions. This was obviously a consuming passion for the director, requiring nearly a dozen years of his life.

Because the length of this post is already well past ungainly, I wanted to finish with a few isolated takeaways from the subject matter, things that struck me as profound or otherwise noteworthy.

1) I was really absorbed by one particular interview in English with a man talking about how the Nazis' evil deeds where almost never spelled out literally and always referred to with euphemisms, such as "the final solution." He talks about how it was a sort of "nod and wink" scenario that led to "creativity" in how to implement "the final solution." 

2) I read after the fact that Shoah was not received well in Poland, and I can see why. One interview subject, a Christian Pole, gives a pretty bad answer when asked about a distinction she makes in her comments between the word "Pole" and the word "Jew." We then get Lanzmann asking Christian Poles who observed what was happening in the ghettos if they miss the Jews or if they think their lives are better now than they were then, and the answers are disturbing. I found it fascinating to note how these people in the late 1970s/early 1980s had not yet developed today's sense of shrewdness about political correctness. Perhaps their understanding of the Holocaust and questions of complicity were just very unsophisticated at that time, but you get the sense they answer honestly without being able to hear how anything they're saying is actually sounding. They all talk about how many of the "Jewesses" were beautiful but that generally the people are "dishonest." Yikes.

During this whole section, the survivor we open on -- who was forced to sing for the Nazis along the river when he was a teenager -- has returned to the ghetto and is welcomed back enthusiastically by the locals who remember him. These same locals are saying these same ignorant things, directly in his presence, while he just continues to give an unbroken smile with only a hint of sadness, and only if you really look for it. 

3) Something I had not yet learned, in my exposure to the history from this period, was how the Nazis would kill people in so-called "extermination vans," but piling them into the back of enclosed trucks and pumping exhaust from the vehicle into the enclosed space. The description of this was horrifying. They couldn't drive too quickly from one destination to the other or else the Jews in the back of the van would not be dead yet by the time they got there. 

4) Speaking of horrifying, one interviewee talks about the "death panic" involved in the last few moments of life in the gas chamber. He talks about bodies spilling out of an opened chamber door like wood, and that they always have a pattern -- the stronger, bigger people on top, where they were climbing to get more air in the dark chamber, and the weaker, smaller, younger people on the bottom, their skulls smashed in the panic that ensued. I'm not sure if this person actually witnessed this or was just listing it as a "for example," but he makes mention of a father crushing the body of his own son -- because none of them could see anything and were fighting for their own lives.

5) Particularly interesting is one interview with a man who was forced to work as a barber in the gas chamber, cutting the hair that the Nazis would then reuse -- whose role was also designed to reduce panic amount the impending victims. I mean, why would they give you a haircut if you're about to die? Surely it'll all be alright? Although this man falls into the category of people who had no ideological role in anything related to Nazism and were essentially forced to do the things they did, and the things they did had no direct relationship with murder, he's clearly complicit in something, and it's this man who has a hard time continuing without Lanzmann pressing him and requiring him to continue. Interestingly, he's actually involved with cutting someone's hair during this interview.

There are plenty of other moments I could pluck out from over nine hours of movie an absorbing footage, but let's just say you and I have both been here long enough today. 

I'll conclude with this thought:

The impulse to watch Shoah as my 7,000th movie may have had something of the gimmick behind it. A movie about the Holocaust should never be a gimmick in any way, shape or form. 

But I'm so glad that the "stunt" of watching a nine-hour movie in one day -- 9:26, 9:04, what have you -- resulted in me finally becoming acquainted with this absolutely vital document of world history, full of first-person source information, about a topic we can never revisit too many times, because we are always learning more about its horrors -- and we should always be reminded never to forget them or let them happen again.