A Hardcore obsession with Star Wars

As you recall, I've been reading through Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation since around the start of November. Tarantino's conversational book, a recollection of movies from the late 1960s to the early 1980s that he saw when he was too young, would not have taken me so long, except that I decided to watch all the movies I hadn't seen that he talks about in depth -- which has added eight viewings at a very busy time of year for viewings, with one still to go. I'll try to fit that last viewing in before the end of the year, and also finish the book before we roll over to January.

The penultimate film he discusses at length is Paul Schrader's 1979 movie Hardcore, which has that memed scene of George C. Scott looking increasingly distraught and anguished as the chracter watches images of his daughter in a porn movie, culminating in him screaming "TURN IT OFF!!!"

Instead of this salacious subject matter, today I'm going to discuss how many times the movie references Star Wars. 

It's three, by my count. Which seems like it must be intentional, though given the prevalance and popularity of the movie at the time this movie was made, it could have also just been that it was inescapable background material that was impossible to shoot around. 

Of course, we know that's never the truth with any filmmaker who puts an ounce of care into the movie they're making.

The first reference that I caught was when Scott's character is in his daughter's bedroom, back in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after she has already gone missing from her church trip to California. I believe this is after Scott has already contracted Peter Boyle's seedy private investigator but before that investigator has returned with the porn scene featuring his daughter. (Tarantino rightly wonders in the book how Boyle managed to find this movie, which I wondered at the time I was watching, but that's hardly his only criticism of the film. In fact he may be harder on this than any of the other films he's discussed.)

Anyway, in Kristen Van Dorn's bedroom there is a Star Wars calendar on the wall. The picture this particular month is near the start of the movie, the iconic image where Darth Vader has lifted one of the rebel soldiers off the ground and is on the verge of suffocating him. 

Then later, when her father Jake is out in Los Angeles trying to find her, the camera pans along a Los Angeles street from the building above, and catches a Star Wars billboard on its path.

But the one that really drove it home was when Jake finds himself in one of several dens of inequity searching for his daughter, and in this one, there are two half-naked women on stage, engaged in a lightsaber battle. Of course, it's not a realistic lightsaber battle, but more of a cheeky ballet in which lightsabers happen to factor in.

I decided to write this much about this post before seeing what the internet has to say about this, but I'm going to go check that right now. 

I found a video where Schrader talks about it on stage in a Q&A, and he says "I was having fun sort of tweaking George [Lucas]." And then "And years later George said to me 'I don't know why I ever agreed to that.'" Much laughter from the audience.

I guess it was nothing deeper than that.

I don't know if I will write one more Cinema Speculation post when I watch the last film, The Funhouse, but if I don't, I'll say that it has been a fun and instructive exercise to watch along with this book, but I don't think it's a standard I could maintain in any future similar scenario, while also hoping to get through the book at a decent clip. 

Just a touch of Christmas

I'm taking a cheeky few minutes to write a Christmas Day post before all the action starts. So I have to be quick here. 

(Merry Christmas, by the way!)

I mentioned yesterday that my problem with many if not most modern Christmas movies is that they absolutely strangle you with the Christmas. Every plot point is about some Christmas-related pageant, shopping excursion or decoration competition, and the movie is festooned with crass physical representations of Christmas -- or even tasteful ones that become crass through their sheer number.

Well, as I finished off my wrapping and cooking on Christmas Eve, this year I rewatched a film that has just a touch of Christmas by comparison.

Thomas Bezucha's The Family Stone is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. I'm sure that's not the reason most of those who are watching it this year are watching it. They are also honoring star Diane Keaton in the first Christmas after her passing, which is especially wrenching in a movie where she has cancer and is trying to wait until after Christmas to reveal it (best of luck there, no screenwriter would allow that).

The distributor didn't really know what to do with The Family Stone when they first released it in 2005. Although it had a Christmas release -- like, just before Christmas, on December 16th -- that angle was not particularly played up at the time. In fact, if you read this post that I wrote in 2012, you'll know just how little they played it up, including no mention of Christmas on the DVD copy, and releasing it on DVD the following April rather than waiting until November, as would be traditional for a Christmas movie. (You'll see from the poster above that they did ultimately conjure up some more traditional Christmas-related advertising for the movie.)

And maybe that was possible because of the aforementioned small quantity of Christmas.

If The Family Stone were made today, they would probably shove the Christmas of it down our throats. It's the same as they would never release Die Hard in July (or was it August?) if they made it today. Any Christmas aspect to it would have been amplified by studio notes, and the advertising would capitalize on it, 100%.

But though The Family Stone takes place almost exclusively on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, this is a movie about these characters, not specifically what errands they have to run related to Christmas. In fact, there is nary a Christmas errand in this whole movie, just a lot of conversations, some funny, more heavy.

In fact, on what I was suprised to discover is only my second viewing of the movie, I was even more surprised to learn what little percentage of this is actually geared toward laughs. Yeah there's that bit where Claire Danes' character takes a goofy header down the stairs getting off the bus, or where Stone brothers Dermot Mulroney and Luke Wilson engage in a comical wrestling match on their kitchen floor -- though it's anything but comical for the characters. And there are certainly plenty of jovial interactions. But there's also a melancholy hanging over this movie that only gets further explicated as the plot goes along. 

And thank goodness it's only a little bit about Christmas, because that allows all these tones to ultimately bring out the warmth, the combativeness, and the just plain seeming truthfulness of this extended clan, who just so happen to be gathered for the biggest Hallmark holiday there is. 

It's exactly the percentage of Christmas I needed this year -- enough to remind me that, in fact, it is that time of year, a time of year of great joy for some people and great pain for others. We're experiencing both this year, and that was better reflected in my Christmas Eve viewing by a movie that grapples with both, rather than shoving ugly Christmas sweaters down my throat for 90 minutes.

And as for Diane Keaton ... I was also surprised to find her to be less of the kooky Connecticut liberal mom than I thought she was, and than I eulogized her as when I mentioned this movie a few months ago when she died. She's a real person here, too, prone to her personal weaknesses, her judgments, her disappointments at how things are going in what she knows may be her last Christmas, when she should just let go and love as much as she can. 

That's to the credit of The Family Stone, and it's a reminder to us all to let go and love as much as we can, especially this time of year, especially since we are never sure how much time we may still have with the ones we love the most.

Cramming in a Christmas movie, somehow

There's a lot going on right now at my house.

That is both literal and metaphorical. 

At the moment we have as many as a dozen people spending a significant portion of every day in our house, three of them under the age of 12. The reason for this gathering is sad, but we the people are doing our best to be happy. That's all I can really say out of a sense of privacy for my family. I'll just say that it does not involve the health of any of the immediate three members of my family, or me.

As a result of this thing and of the crazy year I've had at work, my movie viewings have taken an absolute nosedive. Just to give you some idea of that, I've seen only 13 new movies in 24 days of the month so far. That would be plenty for your average person, but for me, it's pretty low. We aren't to the end of the month yet, so a full comparison is not yet possible, but I saw 29 movies in December of 2024. I no longer have to worry about shattering my 2024 ranking record of 177 movies. 

I did, however, finally see my first Christmas movie -- and probably only new Christmas movie -- on December 23rd. 

It wasn't the greatest 2025 Christmas debut, but hey, I still have Christmas Eve to wash the taste out of my mouth. 

That's the thing I find most unpleasant about most new Christmas movies, of which Michael Showalter's Oh. What. Fun. is a particular exemplar: their chintzy taste and general sense of garishness. This poster gives you some idea. 

When you watch a movie set in and around Christmas these days -- the Eddie Murphy movie Candy Cane Lane is another example -- the production designers have left things so chockablock with Christmas paraphernalia that you literally don't have a shot in the movie without a gaudy lawn ornament or a bad Christmas sweater somewhere in it. 

And though this is, in most movies, supposed to be at least partly a commentary on the crass commercialization of Christmas, it's us who have to spend our time immersed in this space. And at a time of year when we are feeling frenzied because of our own responsibilities, it hardly feels like a relaxing way to spend our downtime, further assaulted by the colors red and green and just reminding ourselves of the present we haven't yet wrapped and the complicated toy we haven't yet constructed. 

Oh. What. Fun. is supposed to be a distiff Christmas movie in that it styles itself as focusing on the mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) rather than the dad (in this case, Denis Leary), as every other Christmas movie in the past does. In fact, as part of the extremely meta and self-aware setup of this film, Pfeiffer even narrates as much as she goes through a literal shelf of VHS tapes of all these other movies focused on the harried dad at Christmas. The most instructive example for the structure of this film is probably National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which I also don't care for.

But because it's Christmas Eve, and it's been a very hard year, I don't really want to leave you with a glass of curdled egg nog on my blog, especially if I don't get a chance to write about the movie I hope to watch tonight -- and with all these people around our house, I don't know if I will.

I will say that I missed the opportunity to watch Home Alone yesterday with this big group of people, as they did it during the last hour of my workday. That would have been nice, though it isn't a personal favorite of mine and I may have seen it only twice. 

So if you get the chance, treat yourself to a Christmas classic over the next few days -- even if it is about a harried dad -- and leave some of these newcomers unwrapped. 

Merry Christmas all. 

Understanding Editing: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This is the final in my 2025 monthly series in which I've been watching Oscar best editing winners, alternating between those I'd seen and those I hadn't seen, to get a better sense of superlative versions of the craft.

David Fincher is the man who famously said "There are two ways to shoot a scene, and the other one is wrong." 

What better way to conclude this series, than with a man for whom perfection is paramount, and whose 2011 film won an Oscar for one of the embodiments of that perfection -- its editing?

In fact, this was Fincher's fourth (and so far final) film to be nominated for best editing. Se7en and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button didn't win, but The Social Network won just the year before. I couldn't have watched that for this series, because the repeat viewings in this series were designed as movies I'd seen only once before. I've seen The Social Network four times. 

As you might suspect, you reach such levels of perfection by finding collaborators who help deliver your vision. Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won those consecutive Oscars in best film editing, and they were also the nominated pair for Benjamin Button. Even when Se7en was nominated he was seeking out the best of the best, as the editor on that film was Richard Francis-Bruce, who was nominated the year before for The Shawshank Redemption. 

But you know what? Baxter and Wall did design the famous titles for Se7en, so they have been with Fincher in some capacity the whole way. Baxter has continued to edit his increasingly lesser output of feature films, though Wall has not, and has no further feature editing credits to his name. I'm not going to dig into what happened there at this time, but don't worry, Wall has hung around as a producer. I also just noticed he graduated from my alma mater, Bowdoin College.

Well, all this build-up to the final film in the series really paid off. Although I had to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in three sittings -- a symptom of this time of year and some of the things that have been going on that are not directly related to it -- at every moment I appreciated its superior craftsmanship, especially in terms of the editing, though the cinematography is also first rate and was also Oscar nominated. 

This has been a series where I've meant to scribble down a lot of notes while watching, but in many cases found myself without the quantity of insights and observations in the moment that I thought I'd have. If you've been keeping up with my Understanding Editing writing this year, you've noticed that I've concluded on more than one occasion that I thought the film had won the Oscar because it was winning all the other Oscars already, and editing got swept up in the general furor. Which was never to say the editing was bad in those films, just that I rarely found the quantity of examples of why it was good that I thought I would find.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is basically nothing but examples of good editing. SPOILERS to follow. Here are some of the examples I jotted down:

1) I really appreciated the way this film conveys information just from people doing daily activities, like making a coffee or throwing a piece of food into the microwave. The film will convey this in basically three shots that are each cut off just a bit before the action seems to be fully completed, to convey momentum in an economy of storytelling, but also never to make you feel like you're being cuffed around by too many cuts. It's the sort of exact touch that you would expect other editors to notice and to nominate. 

2) The cross-cutting is excellent. The initial example I noticed, which was repeated throughout in other ways, was when Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) is arriving at Milton Security offices to report her background check on Mikail Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). As Goran Visnjic's Dragan Armansky is profiling her to Steven Berkoff's Dirch Frode, we go back and forth between what the two of them are saying in that board room and her steady approach through various parts of the building, of course beginning with her arrival on her signature motorcycle. It's a great character introduction, both showing and telling, giving us an idea of the way she's different in "every way," as Armansky says.

3) The cutting on action is also excellent. Examples of this are Lisbeth closing the top of a laptop, which closes the scene and whips us to another, or her zooming motorcyle transitioning directly into Blomkvist, much later in the film, getting swept along the floor in the rig where he's held captive by the film's ultimate villain, Stellan Skarsgard's Martin Vanger, before Vanger intends to kill him. 

4) The scene where Christopher Plummer's Henrik Vanger describes the sequence where his sister Harriet went missing is also expertly conveyed, interweaving his story with the images of it, doling out a perfect amount of screen time each time it switches between the present and the past. 

5) There's a scene that is both funny from a narrative perspective and clever from a storytelling perspective that involves editing. Blomkvist is going through a written account of something that occurred four decades earlier, and he uses a highlighter to highlight each line of text. As he highlights the text, the images alternate to a dramatic interpretation of what's happening in the text. Although this was smooth and effective, I couldn't help but wonder: If you highlight each line of something, isn't that the same as highlighting none of it?

6) I noted how this film uses dissolves regularly. So even though it has examples of cutting on action that involve a sharp line of demarcation between two scenes in two different locations, it also has these languid transitions, which I think were more likely to be used to convey progression within the same scene. You wouldn't necessarily expect both of these things to be a feature of the same editing duo, but I suppose a good editor has all the tools at their disposal.

7) And yet this film also has examples of the sorts of editing that were prevalent in the last film I talked about in this series in November, The Bourne Ultimatum, which you will remember I didn't particularly care for. That film was a flurry of quick edits in fight scenes in a style that ultimately exhausted me pretty quickly, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo shows us how that sort of thing can work like gangbusters if it is used in moderation. The example of that is when Lisbeth tries to fight off a mugger on a train station escalator, ultimately dispatching him in a quick series of frantic shots before escaping back down and to safety. 

8) The final thing I'll mention is the way Baxter and Wall edit together the final car crash that claims the life of our villain. Lisbeth is chasing him on her motorcycle, and when he veers off the road and crashes, she also sort of spins out on the motorcycle, though is never in the sort of mortal danger he is. The editors combine shots of the two vehicles in their separate chase terminus spots, all within a quick two seconds of footage. 

If I didn't jot down more notes, it could be because my middle sitting was fairly late at night and I might have slept through some of it. 

When I went to Letterboxd to see what I'd given The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I was sort of surprised to see it was only three stars. I knew that this was not among my favorite Fincher films, probably for a couple of reasons: 1) it's very long and reaches its dramatic conclusion about 20 minutes before the movie ends; 2) the ending is a little unsatisfying as an explanation to the central mystery Blomkvist is investigating; 3) also making their second Fincher film in as many years, and also winning an Oscar for the first one, my beloved Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did not transport me with this score the way they did with their score for The Social Network. In fact, I'm wondering how much of my feelings about the movie are tied up in the fact that I bought the score before the movie was out, and I already knew the score was much longer than anyone needed to listen to (something like 80 minutes) and that none of it stood out for me as it had for The Social Network. 

Having watched this movie specifically with a focus on its construction, via its editing, gives me a new appreciation for its quality, and I just luxuriated in how nicely put together the whole thing is. There's a reason we consider Fincher one of the masters of this form we love so much. Even when the movies he makes don't fully engage us -- which also happened for me with The Killer most recently -- they look absolutely astonishing, and Fincher has excellent taste in the collaborators he chooses. 

So yes, I feel like I'm wrapping up with the experience I always hoped to have in this series, but rarely did. Even if I don't feel like the series unfolded exactly as I'd wanted it to, it may just be that the thing I've come to understand most about editing is that it remains an enigma. Sometimes, good editing is there for you to see and to grab hold of, with numerous examples like I've listed in this post. Sometimes, editing is the glue that holds everything together and delivers you a smooth viewing experience. It remains part of that enigma that other practictioners in the field are able to identify both forms and come to a consensus in rewarding them accordingly.

And one thing I'll say for sure is that Understanding Editing put a lot of great movies in front of my eyes, both those I hadn't seen and those with which I was already familiar. 

Spending time with different griefs and joys

I'm usually one to mention different sorts of tragedies on my blog when they rise to a certain level, whether or not there is a movie angle. 

The problem with the world today is that there are so many tragedies. How do I decide which ones to honor by talking about them here, and which ones to pretend aren't happening?

The shooting in Bondi Beach is such a tragedy. And yet, overwhelmed as I have been this holiday season, not writing my usual frivolous end-of-year pieces to the same extent that I usually do, I only felt it was urgent enough to spend time on a different, movie-related tragedy, the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. 

Yet I have certainly been spending time with Bondi Beach as well. I keep thinking about the chilling effect this has had on Hanukkah celebrations throughout the world -- obviously here in Australia, and especially in Sydney, our sister city. But everywhere. Everyone knows that hate can pop up at any moment, and hate is disproportionately being directed at Jews right now. In saying that, though, I should note that Muslims are equally at risk, as noted in the terrible mosque shooting in Christchurch a couple years ago.

And yet this is also a time of joy and melancholy in my family.

My younger son is leaving his primary school days behind him. In Australia, kids transition to high school when they enter year 7, which my son will be doing at the end of January. So this ends our four years of affiliation with the school that's just around the corner from my house, where we moved at the end of 2021. My older son spent one year there and the younger has now spent more years there than he did at his original primary school. 

There was a graduation ceremony on Monday night, which made me sentimental as hell. My son gave a speech, as did all his classmates in the staggered ceremony, which featured the three homeroom classes graduating in consecutive hour-long time slots. They finished with a dance, which was sort of in the style of that viral wedding dance that they then also performed on The Office, designed to trigger all of our brimming emotions.

During what is also the Christmas season -- a very strange Christmas season in our household indeed -- my emotions are brimming for all sorts of different reasons. People dying. People with health issues. People moving on to the next phase of their childhoods, reminding me of how I myself am aging, and how my youngest son will never be quite so young again. 

I feel a bit like I'm in a movie. Movies are good at capturing this tug-of-war between joy and grief in our lives. We know it isn't all just miserable, but we also know you can never have complete joy without it being tempered by pain. And then in among it all there are things like Christmas, arriving in eight days whether we want it to or not, creating certain obligations that must be ticked off, certain expected joys, and certain pain of remembering those we used to share the holiday with who are no longer with us.

And for the Jewish friends among us, the "obligation" of Hanukkah can hardly be expected to carry as many of the offsetting joys this year as it has in the past. 

Mourning my favorite director

I debated about whether to hem and haw in the subject of this post about calling Rob Reiner my favorite director.

If you were measuring Reiner in terms of the yardsticks a cinephile would use to praise a director, you might not think of him as an obvious candidate for this honor. He wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks. He didn't have a signature style. His movies didn't make the Sight & Sound list. He wasn't a big mis-en-scene guy. 

But if measuring Reiner only on the pleasure his films brought me, it's no contest. 

I wouldn't maybe know I held Reiner in such high esteem except for Flickchart, which has revealed to me that I have three Rob Reiner movies in my top 30 of all time, and six in my top 200. Yes that's right, Reiner is responsible for 3% of my top 200 movies of all time. 

And today I learned he was stabbed to death, along with his wife, most likely by their son.

WTF?

I haven't even watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues yet. That is going to be one sorry viewing when it actually happens. 

There are lots of terrible things going on in the world. Two men fuelled by hatred just shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach. Another guy killed some Brown University students. And as it happens, I've got some pretty concerning health developments in my family right now. (Nothing in my immediate family of my wife and two sons. That's all I'll say.)

But because I'm a movie guy, the one I can't get out of my head is the image of Rob Reiner begging and pleading for his life when an assailant, most likely his son, was coming at him with a knife.

And losing that argument. 

Any death is bad. But when Rob Reiner's father, the great Carl Reiner, keeled over at age 98, you couldn't even really be sad. You knew it was his time. 

Rob Reiner was 78. He lived a good life. But it had such a terrible ending, and when I think of him, I will now always think of him in the same company as others who lost their lives in such devastating ways, like Phil Hartman. 

So while I want to give Reiner more of the typical, wistful send-off that I like to give our cinematic luminaries when they pass on to the great beyond, now I'm in such painful misery that I can't even type straight. 

But because I don't think I can write a series of pieces remembering Reiner, I'm going to give it a go now.

Rob Reiner became a target on shows like South Park for a sort of liberal piousness that Trey Parker and Matt Stone found grating. But for a liberal like me, that was part of why I liked Reiner. He believed in the causes I believed in. But that was just a happy bit of fortuitousness. I would have loved him even if he played on the other team. 

That's the thing about Reiner -- you could like the films he directed, but he also had a personality as a result of being an actor first and foremost. I can't say that I watched All in the Family -- in fact, it's possible I've never seen a single episode -- but Reiner's Meathead made millions into fans of his personality, a personality that earned him two Emmys. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing Reiner's persona. It was expansive. It was hilarious. In his comedy, it could be a bit naughty. On this weekend where we've lost some good and innocent Jewish Sydneysiders, Reiner embodied the lineage of great Jewish comedy, his kvetching always generous, his observations always shrewd. Simply put, he was funny as hell, and I also got a great sense of warmth from him. 

And the film that introduced him to the world as a director used that personality to good effect. My highest ranked Reiner film on Flickchart is his first, This Is Spinal Tap, my #9 film of all time. I said earlier that Reiner wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks, but how about new film genres? He and Tap star Christopher Guest might be the two men most responsible for the mockumentary, and we couldn't have gotten a better initial tour guide than Reiner's Marty DiBergi, who interviews David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. I can't believe I don't know what the first scene of this movie is, but if you told me it was DiBergi introducing himself to us, I'd say that's most likely right. Little did we know, Reiner was introducing us to his incorporable career, which gave him the best "imperial period" -- to borrow the music term -- of any director. What's more, it was his personality as the straight man playing off the Tap men that made it all work. Who else could have asked Nigel the innocent questions necessary for "This one goes to 11," and had it work so smashingly?

Reiner followed that up the very next year with The Sure Thing, which at #396 on my Flickchart is only my seventh favorite Reiner movie. I have friends for whom this might be top three. And it would be top three for me for many directors, but I have so many other films to talk about that I can't even linger on one of the films that really introduced us to John Cusack.

Stand by Me in 1986, #131 on my Flickchart, proved that we didn't know Reiner's only mode after two films. He could also make a Stephen King adaptation and a truly seminal coming-of-age story for Gen Xers -- though about their parents, so it worked for that generation too. Which also managed to be funny in spots. It had a huge impact on me. Heck, I was 12 when it came out. 

But then the very next year, again -- that's four movies in four years, if you're keeping track -- Reiner made my #11 favorite film of all time, The Princess Bride. Epic. Iconic. Also hilarious. You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions. I didn't even know how much I loved this until I rewatched it with my kids in the last decade, which is when it shot up from somewhere in my 20s or 30s on Flickchart all the way up to #11. If it weren't blocked by The Iron Giant, that would be two Reiner films in my top ten.

Rob Reiner didn't make a film in 1988. Everyone has to recharge sometimes.

But in 1989 he made what I consider to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time, and yes I know I am pissing off classic movie fans who'd rather Cary Grant star in their great romcoms than Billy Crystal. But what can I say, I was born in 1973, and When Harry Met Sally slayed me. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it makes me feel fonder about New York City than almost any film out there. For a long time this was ahead of The Princess Bride, fully in my top 20, but at the moment it's my #26 on Flickchart. 

And yet again Reiner made a movie in 1990, his second Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Which is also a stone-cold classic. Two-handers don't get more tense and exciting than this. He coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Kathy Bates that no one will soon forget, and brought James Caan back to relevance. Which is good enough for #150 on my Flickchart. 

Rob Reiner kept things going throughout the 1990s, with the exception of legendary flop North in 1994. (And even in a mode of excess generosity toward the man, no, I am not going to defend North.) I may not be as big a fan of A Few Good Men as some people (wow, I didn't realize it was all the way down at #3292), but I do respect it. The American President at #691 is more my style. Ghosts of Mississippi (#2125) is even pretty good.

But while many people are ready to write off Reiner's career at this point -- even with zeitgeisty movies like The Bucket List on his resume -- I am always left in a puddle of fresh tears over 1999's The Story of Us, which is all the way up to #167 on my Flickchart. This is possibly the only movie I can remember watching twice consecutively on the same day, just before my first son was born in 2010, for reasons I won't get into right now. I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember when or why. Then I went another 15 years without seeing it again, when I saw it this past February, my fourth time overall, and it inspired me to write this post. And then five days later, this post. 

I'm going to finish talking about this movie not because I don't think Reiner has made a good movie in the 21st century, but because it makes a good bookend with This is Spinal Tap. Why, you ask? What could these two movies possibly have in common? 

Answer: Rob Reiner the actor. Rob Reiner the personality.

In the film, Reiner plays the best friend of Bruce Willis' character, who is possibly separating from his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Reiner is married to Rita Wilson. Just likeable actors all around. 

Reiner doesn't have a huge number of scenes, but he has just enough to give us the flavor we like from his personality. And the part I love most is Reiner's disquisition about how the ass does not really exist. The ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. In reality, there is no ass. Believe me, it works in context, especially when it gets called back to later on.

Reiner was great in front of the camera, Reiner was great behind the camera, and Reiner was great in the sphere of progressive politics, even if Matt and Trey sometimes didn't like it. I can't believe I won't see him in front of or behind the camera again.

Is he my favorite director? God, now I have to use the past tense. Was he my favorite director?

It's something I've told people about before, this high success rate on my Flickchart, which corresponds to my real affection for the man and his movies. But I always feel a bit hesitant about it. If you go around telling everyone how much you love Rob Reiner, maybe they just focus on the fact that he didn't have a lot of hits in the last 25 years of his career, or maybe they think of Matt and Trey making fun of him. Maybe it's an embarrassment to say, especially in circles of serious cinephiles, how much you love the output of one of our great populist directors.

But if I can't proudly shout my love for Rob Reiner now, in the hours after his death, I don't know when I can. 

I might just shout until I cry. 

The perils of the long-delayed review

Welcome to my second straight post in which I express my anxieties about a film I appreciated less than most people, while also getting at a larger issue within film criticism.

Although I give away many of my advanced screenings to other writers for my site, I make sure to hoard the ones that will serve a purpose for me personally. In the past six weeks I've had a large quantity of those, three in total, which are movies whose Australian debuts are scheduled for much later in the film year and closer to my ranking deadline. That makes three films I don't have to worry about while catching other important end-of-year films, to say nothing of the blockbusters that also get released in late December.

Those three films are Sentimental Value, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice, and given how they've done in this week's Golden Globe nominations, they were good films on which to concentrate. Each of those films was nominated as best feature in one of the two best feature categories.

I've already written some about the last two, but it's the first one that I saw longest ago, all the way back on October 29th. And it's the first of these that has succumbed to some of the perils of not writing about it right away.

Normally when I see a film I'm planning to review, I write the review within 24 hours, and that's usually out of necessity. In many cases I'm planning to post the review the very next day, so writing it immediately is essential. In fact, in the review I wrote of Jay Kelly this week -- see here if you want to read it -- I finished the movie at about 1 a.m. on Tuesday night, and had a review up by 10 past 10 on Wednesday morning. That isn't maybe a typical turnaround, and in this case required some finishing touches during my first hour of work. It also helps that I am consistently waking up just after 6 a.m. when the sun rises. But it just gives you some idea of the sort of timeframe I'm usually working with.

In the case of Sentimental Value, which does not release in Australia for another two weeks, my timeframe for writing the review was almost two months. 

Before I get into the particulars of what's happened with it, I want to say I'm not sure I understand why it's a benefit to screen a movie so far in advance of its actual release. Surely the publicists don't want you to post your review until your readers have a chance to go purchase a ticket within the next few days, right? Yes you could write about it early, but that only contributes to the general buzz without having something concrete readers can convert into action. In our short attention span times, you don't want to let the iron cool down for two months. 

On the publicist's side, there are also logistical headaches because they have to remember who they invited to the screening, and check over the course of those two months to see if the critics have written their review -- because hey, they theoretically could post it at any time. 

Because I had a take on Sentimental Value and a clear way to open the review, I wrote my opening few paragraphs almost straight away. In fact, it was one of those reviews where I couldn't wait to get to a computer, because the words were already spilling out in my brain and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose the ideal phrasing I was concocting in my head.

But what then happens that is that in about the third paragraph, I start to give a couple paragraphs of plot synopsis, and this is where the urgency to continue writing dissipates. I usually know how I'm going to start my view, but I don't always know how the final four or five paragraphs of analysis are going to play out. With a movie not coming out for almost two months, I've got plenty of time to work that out.

So it was another ten days? two weeks? before I continued my Sentimental Value review, and then ultimately finished it in that same sitting. 

During that time, I became fuzzy on details. Points I thought I might have wanted to make at the time have gotten hazier. And more to the point, I'm hazier on my defenses for why this film didn't work like gangbusters on me, despite its win of the Grand Prix at Cannes (which is actually the festival's second most prestigious award, contrary to its name). 

So I did finish the review, and thought to myself it was okay I didn't love it, ultimately issuing it a 7/10 in our ReelGood rating system. Although Cannes is often totally in sync with the zeitgeist -- Oscar best picture winner Anora last year also won the festival's Palme d'Or -- there are times when Cannes' top prizes are awarded to very polarizing films, some of which people actually hate. Don't forget, this is the festival where people either give a film a ten-minute standing ovation or walk out. It's okay if I don't love one of the films honored here.

But over the last month in particular, I've learned just how much most people think of Sentimental Value. My first surprise was the realization that it was very likely to get a best picture nomination at the Oscars, which we won't actually find out until the 22nd of January, but which surprised me because foreign language films have historically had a steeper hill to climb on this front. (There's also some English in this movie, considering that Elle Fanning is one of its stars.) The Oscar bias against foreign language films is falling away a bit in recent years with the expansion of nominees from five to ten, and now each year we seem to get at least one foreign film nominated for best picture. I guess I just didn't know Sentimental Value would be this year's example of that. (And while we're at it, Nouvelle Vague and No Other Choice are also primarily in foreign languages, and they also have realistic Oscar ambitions.)

So now I'm looking at what I've written for Sentimental Value and trying to figure out ways of softening my criticisms. Clearly this film came together better for others than it did for me, but am I wrong or are they?

If I had just been writing about and posting my review of Sentimental Value in late October, this wouldn't have been a problem. If history proves me wrong on a movie, so be it -- it's happened plenty of times before. The problem comes when the review is in a state of unpublished limbo, meaning I can have second thoughts, I can tweak it, I could even change the entire thrust of my review if I wanted, contradicting my initial impression of the movie only on the basis of a fear of looking stupid and being wrong.

At least with Sentimental Value, the writing portion is out of the way. Correct or incorrect -- as if you can ever really say that when aesthetic judgments are involved -- at least I have something that is based confidently on things that actually happened in the movie. It's a little different with the other two.

I saw Nouvelle Vague on November 27th, so not nearly as long ago. It comes out on January 8th. As with Sentimental Value, I had a good couple opening paragraphs and I wrote them right away. And as with Sentimental Value, I lost the sense of urgency at the point of doing my plot synopsis. 

I've only just picked up the writing again this morning, and I did force myself to finish it. The last 600 words of my review are reasonable and I'm reasonably proud of them. But there was a delay of 16 days in there and I'm not sure what things I thought I wanted to say were lost in the interim. And though Nouvelle Vague is my favorite of these three, with an 8/10 score, I'm still wondering if my knowledge of its subsequent accolades are informing what I've written in some way.

Then you've got No Other Choice. This I saw only ten days ago, making it relatively fresh. But in this case, I have not even written the opening yet. I have an idea of how I'm going to open it, but maybe knowing that the review before it, Nouvelle Vague, was not even in the can yet prevented me from getting started. This comes out latest on the calendar, January 15th. By which point I will have endured another six weeks of accolades about it since the time that I saw it.

When I start to fret about this a bit, I have to remember that I once had a whole gig reviewing movies where I wrote the review years after both the movie had come out and after I had seen it. How does that even work, you ask?

Well when I was writing for AllMovie in the early part of the 2000s, I was actually trying to make a living at it for a short period of time. They were only paying me $20 for each 300-word review, so this endeavor was always doomed to failure. However, the thing that made it marginally possible was that I could write a review for any film that currently didn't have a review on the site, as long as I was approved to do so. I'd go hunting and I'd send them lists of 20 movies I wanted to review, of which they would usually approve all 20, or sometimes denying me on one or two token films. Oh those blessed times when there was a financial incentive for them to have me do this.

In any case, those reviews have to be considered highly compromised in that a) I had not seen the film in many years in most cases, meaning I was reviewing it based on a general impression and a plausible take, and b) I already knew what everyone else thought of the movie, so I was factoring that in to what I was writing, either leaning into the popular take or defining my thoughts in opposition to it.

So I do suspect there is some imperfection in the way these things go. Critics see movies all the time with huge advanced buzz, and they have to clear that noise out of their heads if they want to write about those movies purely and without bias. And because of the way life works, sometimes you can't write that review straight away, especially if you don't have that deadline.

I guess I'm just glad, at this point, that I am not likely to have any more of these, at least this year. I'm scheduled to see another movie with awards buzz, The Secret Agent, on January 15th, which will also help me get it in before my deadline. But at least in that case the movie comes out only one week later. 

My battle with One Battle

I think One Battle After Another is a very enjoyable movie.

It's funny, it's entertaining, it's full of spark, it's made incredibly well, it has good performances and it has a definite resonance within the cultural and political moment in which we currently find ourselves.

But ... 

... it's only barely in my top half of Paul Thomas Anderson's films. That's saying more about the man and his filmography than it's saying about the movie, but it's worth noting.

And ... 

... I can't help feeling that there was something about it that I didn't fully, all the way, 100% connect with.

And also ... 

... I did watch it jet-lagged, on the day I got back from Europe, though it's really saying something about the movie's excitement level that I never fell asleep.

And yet it seems to be the consensus best film of 2025, with a few other contenders potentially staking a claim, but most of those being movies that fewer people have seen or in some cases have not really fully been released yet. 

At the moment, it doesn't have a place in my top ten of the year, and if I'm not careful it will fall out of my top 20.

How concerned should I be about this?

When I got together last Friday night for a gathering with three other ReelGood writers for what we call the ReelGood Christmas Party -- usually just drinks out somewhere, though last year I did host it at my house -- I asked them to come up with top fives, hearkening back to our days when we used to podcast and when that would be part of our year-end show. No one else prepared a list, but I told them they didn't really have to, so I don't feel unsupported or anything.

But I told them my top five of 2025 nonetheless, a work very much in progress as you know, since I will not be finalizing it until January 22nd. And of course, One Battle After Another was not in that top five. It wouldn't have made the top ten, as I've said, and it's only just barely in my top 20.

When one of the other guys thought about his own answers to this question extemporaneously, he said One Battle would definitely be in it ... and had a hard time thinking of many/any others. 

This doesn't surprise me of course, and I mention it as just the most recent example of the overwhelming love directed at OBAA this year. Another example is the many Golden Globe nominations it just received, nine all told, with five acting nominations among those. (All deserved, I should say.)

Am I doing this wrong by not loving it more than I do?

And does OBAA still stand head and shoulders above the other contenders in a year with more genuinely beloved films? Or is this so good that it's just one of the best films of any year?

Suffice it to say that all the love is definitely rubbing off on me, in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, it's forcing me to reassess and remind myself of the many things I did love about the movie. On the negative side, it's getting my hackles up a bit.

I have nits to pick with the movie, but I do, for sure, find it entertaining, provocative, exciting and fun. It's all the things you want a movie to be.

Except for me that translates to a solid four stars, not the 4.5 or five stars usually attained by my best movies of the year.

Well, this battle will have one more skirmish before all is said and done. I've determined to watch it again before I finalize my list, which will be good because I know my wife wants to watch it too. It'll have one more day in the sun. 

And we'll have to see, then, if I do love it enough to promote it ... or whether I promote it just out of the insecurity of being so obviously wrong in not loving it as much as everyone else does.

Audient Zeitgeist: Jack

This is the final in my bi-monthly 2025 series watching movies I haven't seen that are in the zeitgeist.

How do you finish a six-movie series with a theoretically unlimited number of viable options, when you've got just one left and your last movie could be almost anything?

A legendary flop is one way to go, but even one better than that, how about a movie legendary for bearing no relationship to the rest of the director's filmography, which he made in order to keep financing his weirder and more personal projects?

The funny thing is, when I read more about Francis Ford Coppola's 1996 film Jack on Wikipedia, there's no mention of the "one for them, one for me" mentality that we know drives someone like Steven Soderbergh. In fact, it looks like Jack may have been a "one for me" movie more than we ever thought, and not one of Coppola's "paycheck movies" (like The Rainmaker). 

And also, it wasn't a flop -- it made $78 million on a $45 million budget.

And also, I did not hate it.

Yes friends, I'm giving Jack 3 stars out of 5. 

When you come in negatively predisposed toward something, and you find it tolerable when you watch it, you feel even more positively toward it than if you'd had no expectations whatsoever. I suppose that's an obvious statement.

The problem with Jack is, it's a sentimental film, the sort that Robin Williams made one too many times. But it's nowhere near as mawkish as something like Patch Adams. And I found what it was trying to do touching enough, especially when I learned some of Coppola's motivations behind making it.

But first, some plot.

Williams plays the title character, who is born at a normal size and weight after only ten weeks of gestation in his mother's womb. This, we learn, is because Jack has a condition that makes him age at four times the rate of other people. I don't think this is a real condition. 

So by the time he's ten years old, he can be played by Williams, who was actually 45 at the time, though Jack is supposed to look 40. It's just the kind of role you know Williams would want to play. He gets to act like a ten-year-old, and if there's one complaint I have about the film -- there's probably more than one -- it's that I thought Williams was acting a bit more like he was six than like he was ten. I have an 11-year-old, and just a year ago he didn't act like Williams does in this movie. Then again, that's got an explanation in the plot -- Jack has not been attending school because it was thought a person in his condition could not properly blend into a school environment, and fair enough.

But it's eventually decided with some encouragement from his tutor, played by Bill Cosby (!), that it might be a good idea for Jack to try this environment, and his attempts at socialization with the rest of the children make up the bulk of the movie -- with of course the specter hanging over his head that his accelerated growth means he likely won't live until he's 25. 

There's a real warmth to Jack, in among the goofiness and the type of Williams performance that sometimes made us impatient with him. But really, it's not so much Williams' actual performance, but our wariness of what his performance might be, that puts us on guard. Although the performance is always on the verge of going the wrong direction, it never does, and it makes for an interesting exercise for an actor -- one Williams completes with charm and likeability. 

The ultimate message of the film, that we have to live our lives as long as we get the chance to live them, is not nearly as heavy handed as it could have been, either. The movie is schmaltzy in parts, but never as much as you fear it will be, and never even really enough to fully annoy you.

The reason for this warmth is that this story actually really resonated with Coppola. Wikipedia describes his interest in the script as stemming from two things, both related to his children:

1) The character of Jack reminded him of his own son, Gio, to whom the film is dedicated and who died in childhood;

2) He wanted to make a movie that his daughter, Gia, could actually watch -- unlike, say, Apocalypse Now. 

It was even a story with which he personally identified, since Coppola was sickened by polio in his youth. 

And speaking of youth, there's a good reminder that this film isn't as different from the other films in Coppola's filmography as you would expect. Okay, I just read the plot synopsis of Youth Without Youth to remind myself what it was about, and it doesn't appear it's as close of a thematic match to Jack as you would think from that title. But I'll leave this paragraph in anyway. 

Still, in his defense of Jack, Coppola said something that I found sort of interesting:

"It was considered that I had made Apocalypse Now and I'm like a Marty Scorsese type of director, and here I am making this dumb Disney film with Robin Williams. But I was always happy to do any type of film."

And I think the remainder of Coppola's career has really borne that out, often in ways that may have been true artistic failures, but represented this desire not to be pigeon-holed. I don't think Jack is a true artistic failure, it's just an example of the type of film that the right audience would find heartwarming, and the snob cinephile finds cloying. I guess that's why I don't think of myself as a snob cinephile, because hatred was not what I was feeling as I watched Jack.

Films involving the unusual growth of children have a bit of a tough row to hoe. For every The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, there's three Simon Birches. Jack is more Birch than Button, but it's a lot closer to the middle of those two poles than you might think. 

There are some other noteworthy things about the film. One of which is that it's one of Jennifer Lopez' first film roles. It was interesting to see her up there at all of age 27, playing Jack's teacher. She was about to really blow up with Out of Sight, but what is probably her actual breakthrough, Selena, was not until the following year. 

Look I'm not going to go out recommending Jack to everyone I see. I do think, though, that if it had been directed by someone like Tom Shadyac or Chris Columbus, both of whom made sentimental films with Williams in the 1990s, it would have gotten less flak. It's just that no one could believe that this was the movie Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make as a follow-up to The Godfather Part III and Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

And while I adore BSD, which is in my top 100 on Flickchart, I have to say that Jack is waaaay better than Godfather Part III. 

A violation of animation's sacred rivalry

I don't know a lot of things these days about the behind-the-scenes movements in the film industry -- in part because I don't try to keep up with/understand all the various takeovers and new conglomerates -- but I thought I knew this:

Disney is Disney and Dreamworks is Dreamworks and never the twain shall meet.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I logged into Disney+ yesterday, and one of the first things greeting me was an image of Shrek in the eponymous film.

Shrek, the movie, is in many ways the flagship product of Dreamworks Animation. It was only the sixth of an eventual 53 feature features (and counting), but it's got the most direct sequels of any Dreamworks series (three, with one more on the way) and it represents the moment the studio really announced itself as a player, not having quite gotten there with films like Antz, The Road to El Dorado and The Prince of Egypt. 

Since then, Dreamworks has positioned itself as the primary alternative to Disney in the animation realm. If for some reason you didn't like Disney -- and yes, I suppose there are people out there who do prefer Dreamworks, including, so he says, my younger son -- then Dreamworks would be giving you movies that looked almost as good with almost as good voice talent and, well, far worse writing if you ask me. 

As you will see in any good rivalry, Dreamworks heavily borrows from Disney when it can, and the reverse is sometimes true. I'm sorry to say that Disney has begun more often using the sickly pinks and purples I railed about in this post, which I considered a Dreamworks staple. 

So why the hell is the Dreamworks flagship product now available on the streaming service of its chief rival? What gives?

I tried to see if this was a general availability of Dreamworks stuff on Disney, but as I searched for a number of the other high-profile Dreamworks properties -- such as Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar -- I found nary a trace of them. I tried a handful of other titles just for good measure before stopping. I'm not going to try 53 titles.

There is clearly some kind of licensing exception going on here, and that's another thing I don't pretend to understand, nor do I really want to understand any better. Because it's not actually all the Shrek movies that are available on Disney+, just the first three. Shrek Forever After (2010) is not there.

AI slop to the rescue!

Here's what AI tells me about this, in an unusual brief answer to the question:

Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third are now streaming on Disney+. To all who are confused, this is because of a licensing deal between Hulu and DreamWorks. But Shrek is from Dreamworks? David Frantsen licensing deal.

I love that this answer just loses all pretenses to grammar at the end.

So that was actually my thought, that it had something to do with Hulu, which is part of Disney+ at least here in Australia, and maybe only here in Australia. Like I said, I don't try to understand these things.

I do still find it very weird, and it also seems like we're one step closer to everything just being owned by one company. I'm finding this whole Netflix/Warner Brothers situation fairly ominous in that regard, again without really digging into it. I just know it was very expensive and there's a lot of hand wringing about it.

For now, at least I have easy access to finally watch the second and third Shrek movie if I want. That's right! I've only seen the original! 

At the time Shrek came out, I thought I liked it quite a bit. It was very early on in the new age of animation and I had a basic awe of what it accomplished. But by the time I saw part of it again later on that year on the plane, I had turned against it. The whole five-minute argument about whether onions had layers or not -- really, listen to that scene, it goes on forever -- may have been the thing that did it, but it was really just emblemetic of larger issues. I never thought it was necessary to watch another one, which tells you something about what I think of Dreamworks in general: I never even wanted to watch any of the sequels to their flagship product.

I just checked back in my rankings for 2001 and I had it ranked 53rd out of 73. Not great. 

However, now that Disney has brought it into the fold, maybe I need to reconsider! 

Asian racquet sports double feature

I was going to possibly choose Lurker as the second half of my double feature at the cinema on Wednesday, since I've heard great things about it and I don't know that I'll have access to it through rental or steaming before my ranking deadline next month. 

But then I thought, why pass up an opportunity for an Asian-themed double feature, especially since my rankings are light on foreign language films? And because it might spur me to write a post on this blog, which I have been neglecting lately?

See the first movie was Park Chan-wook's latest, No Other Choice, which is one of a couple movies I've seen at advanced screenings that won't be coming out in Australia until January, when I will be quite busy trying to cram in all my other "must haves" before my list closes. It's a bit of a black comic riff on Parasite, and I think I'd be saying that even if the directors of both films weren't Korean. 

And besides, Elizabeth Lo's Chinese documentary Mistress Dispeller was starting 20 minutes earlier.

I knew both movies were from Asia, but I didn't realize they would both feature racquet sports -- and that they would both spell the word "racquet" differently in their English translations.

Tennis is a very small part of No Other Choice. It's a pastime enjoyed by the wife of the main character, one she decides to give up when he loses his job and their family falls on hard times. It isn't integral to the plot, but it comes up enough in conversation that her hopeful husband talks about buying her a new "racket" when he gets back up on his feet.

In Mistress Dispeller, a documentary about a woman who helps break up extramarital affairs, the couple she's trying to save are badminton aficionados. We see them playing this multiple times, and at one point someone talks about the correct way to hold the "racquet."

I'd say "racquet" is correct, yet I'm sure for many years in my life I thought it was "racket." 

Though looking at it just now, I'm not so sure. AI tells me that "racket" is the "older spelling, preferred in American English." Which would have been why I wrote it that way for so long. "Racquet," AI explains, is preferred in other countries. 

But I'm pretty sure I would have stopped writing "racquet" long before I moved to Australia. See, "racket" already means something else. It wouldn't be the first word to be spelled the same way and have two different meanings, but "racquet" clearly tells you what it's talking about without any ambiguity. I mean, a "tennis racket" could technically be a corrupt enterprise around the sport of tennis -- you know, point shaving or something. 

Both movies in this double feature also got 3.5 stars from me, which qualifies as a mild disappointment. (It's funny how I've come to think of this is a "disappointing" rating, when some people would use it as a signifier of great affection.)

This is actually a step up for Park, since his last film, Decision to Leave, was such a disappointment to me that I could not even give it a positive star rating (2.5). I've never seen another Elizabeth Lo movie, but I guess I hoped this one would blow my mind. I did really like it, but I spent entirely too much time questioning how someone makes a documentary about a cheating husband and his mistress, with tons of footage of them, without them understanding that this documentary is about someone trying to break them up. 

So I guess I won't be raising a racket for either of them when I review them (har har). 

A change of projector locale

I didn't originally think I would "take advantage" of my wife being out of town in any way, except maybe leaving some dishes unwashed for longer than I ordinarily would, or never making the bed.

Then I realized that our bedroom would make a perfect location for the new portable projector screen she got me for my birthday, and that shelf that runs along the length of our bed, above the pillows but under the windows, would be the perfect height to hold the projector.

And so it is that I set up the screen in front of our bureau, which she accesses more than I do, and that's where it's been since Friday evening, with a few more days expected since she's had to extend her trip. 

This is a picture from the first film I watched, After the Hunt, which I didn't particularly care for. I've subsequently watched Until Dawn, Yi Yi, First Blood, Rolling Thunder and Freakier Friday. Quite the mix of films there. 

It's fun, and unusual, for me to watch movies from bed. I usually take the living room, and my wife winds down her night in bed with her device, on nights we aren't watching something together. 

However, I have to admit it is not as comfortable as I might have thought. I need one of those pillows with the arms that used to be all over the place when I was growing up, so instead I'm kind of slumped over, scrunching up as many normal pillows as I can to try to recreate the same effect. Suffice it to say, I won't miss it when I have to take it down when my wife gets back on Wednesday, but it's been a fun novelty. Change is as good as a holiday, or so they say. 

Not a lot more to say today, just wanted to let you know I'm still here, and already feeling a bit snowed under -- though not in Australia, where today is the first day of summer -- by end-of-year obligations at work and with Christmas coming up.