The Audient

The stunted frustration known as anime

2012-02-17T08:21:00.000-08:00

I saw a poster for The Secret World of Arrietty the last time I went to the movies. And as I get when I see any poster for an animated movie whose story origins are unknown to me, I got excited by the possibility of it being our next great discovery in animated film.

And then I saw the trailer.

Oh anime, you've suckered me again.

I didn't immediately get it, looking at this poster, that the movie was anime. Some of the hallmarks are there, in the eyes of the larger character, and in the general milieu of sprites and other small creatures, possibly of the spirit world.

But the trailer cleared up any doubts for me. Here it is:

Here's my problem with anime:

It's the one form of animation that never seems interested in looking any better.

The action is still a bit jerky. The mouths still don't line up correctly with the words being spoken. And the eyes, the signature of the form, are still exactly the same as when the style was first hatched back in the 1960s.

I'll give you that some of these "deficiencies" can be mitigated by good storytelling. I've enjoyed the storytelling in a number of anime movies I've seen.

But except in very rare cases, the willful insistence on never advancing keeps me at arm's length.

And I find this an especially strange impulse (or lack of impulse), since the Japanese have long been technical innovators in nearly every other endeavor known to man.

Even animated styles that are purposefully rudimentary have grown over the years. Let's take South Park, for example. Originally, the characters and sets were all, literally, shapes cut out of construction paper. That was, you would agree, key to their charm. But I don't think that today, approaching two decades since South Park started as a five-minute short that made the rounds on video tape years before there was such a thing as viral video, we would still tolerate the construction paper approach. Which is why slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, South Park has grown into a very sophisticated animated entity. Next time you watch the show, check out the backgrounds. Check out the character designs. Just check out the detail. Computers have made the show full-blooded and actually beautiful to look at -- without sacrificing the aesthetic that first made it seem so original.

The same can be said for such long-running shows as The Simpsons and Family Guy. If you compare the first seasons to the most recent ones, the style has stayed essentially the same, but the detail has gotten so much richer. I'd say we're better for it.

I know what you're going to say -- the details are much richer in anime than they were at the start, and the characters' faces do conform more to the words they're speaking and the emotions they're expressing than back in the 1960s. I can't argue with you there.

But I can argue the degree to which they've improved. I can argue that in the year 2012, you should not still be animating human beings who speak just by randomly opening and closing their mouths.

The funny thing about anime is that it splits people into two basic camps. One camp agrees with me. They undertake anime mostly out of a sense of duty, giving their attention to the occasional film that scares up enough critical attention to demand a viewing from any serious film fan or fan of animation. And sometimes, they even develop a limited affection for those films. (For me, one of those films is Paprika, which we actually own.)

Then there's the other camp. For that camp, anime can do no wrong. And you might even say that the more rudimentary the art appears, the more it conforms to what they expect. It's a specific form with a specific series of expectations, which sometimes include loud and piercing line readings and melodramatic emotions.

Maybe I should just not judge. Maybe I should just accept what camp I'm in and agree to disagree with the other camp.

But my incompatibility with anime is brought home to me anew each time my hopes are briefly raise for a film like The Secret World of Arrietty. And of course, you should read this post with all the standard disclaimers that this particular movie might be good, that it certainly seems to contain the possibility for wonder. I hate to be a bully toward anime when the story has such potential to be sweet and magical. I mean, I did take one look at that poster and start to imagine myself away into that world.

But then I took one look at the trailer and imagined myself right back out of it again.

Lady's choice: Valentine's Day Edition

2012-02-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

For Valentine's Day, and for the second night in our bi-weekly Tuesday Lady's Choice Movie Night series, I had what may have been a first:

I started watching a movie without knowing what it was.

Okay, there was that time in that hotel when pressing a button repeatedly on a non-responsive remote control accidentally ordered us Balls With Fury. (Which we quite enjoyed.) But this was the first time someone had curated a movie-watching experience for me, without me knowing what it would be.

See, it was my wife's choice of movie again -- she chose two weeks ago, as you will recall from this post. Getting to choose again was to make up for the way I had dominated our viewing agenda in January, in my push to finish up my 2011 rankings. And she had a choice for Valentine's Day, but she wanted it to be a surprise. Which was quite possible, since the Netflix account is in her name, and she gets the emails notifying us which movies have been shipped. I did actually have a little Netflix business to transact on Monday -- I added The House of the Devil to our instant queue -- but I was sure to avoid the through-the-mail queue. And so moments before the movie started, I still didn't know what it was.

Really, I'd have liked her to carry through the idea one step further. When she saw that the title didn't appear on the DVD menu, she told me to open my eyes. I was familiar enough with the image in the poster above to immediately know what it was. Too bad, as I'd have loved the chance to see if I could guess which movie it was before the title actually appeared on screen. (Don't know if I would have -- I'd forgotten that Jane Campion directed this film until last night.)

Bright Star is beautifully shot and quite powerfully acted, I think. I've been a fan of Ben Whishaw since his admittedly minimalist performance in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and I sung the praises of Abbie Cornish back in this post. But the real surprise in terms of the actors was Paul Schneider, erstwhile of the first and second seasons of Parks and Recreation and the early movies of David Gordon Green. I had to look him up afterward to make sure he wasn't Scottish, because he did an incredible Scottish brogue. I also learned, to my surprise, that The National Society of Film Critics bestowed their 2009 best supporting actor award on Schneider for this performance. He had to share the award with Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds ... but damn, Waltz won everything that year, making the feat impressive indeed. (Of course, it also highlights the quirks of this critics' group -- Schneider didn't get an Oscar nomination.)

Despite its evident strengths, Bright Star was, however, too long and too slow. We'd had wine with our pasta dinner, and it was really dragging us down. We probably needed a 90-minute movie rather than a 120-minute one. But we also probably needed a movie that felt like it went somewhere a little faster than this one did, and brought us a bit closer to the characters than the proximity we achieved here.

But there was one moment that was absolute perfection, both in terms of the holiday and my personal cinematic interests. I've written before that I love what I call Wax Stamp Movies. These are movies that either actually feature letters that are sealed by wax (usually red wax), or have the kind of production design that would include such a wax-sealed letter. Set between 1818 and 1821, Bright Star is such a movie. In fact, there were a half dozen different instances of wax stamps appearing on screen.

One in particular stood out. Fanny Brawne, played by Cornish, receives a prank Valentine card from Mr. Brown (Schneider). It's given to her as a way of mocking her, as their mutual contempt is thinly veiled. But it has the effect of making the lovestruck John Keats (Whishaw) jealous. Anyway, this couldn't have been a more perfect moment for our Valentine's Day, making Bright Star an unexpectedly perfect choice for our second Lady's Choice Movie Night. So of course I had to take a picture of the paused image, which you'll see below.

Hope you had a great February 14th.

Four days late, many dollars short

2012-02-14T09:43:00.001-08:00

I thought it was a strange enough decision to release This Means War on Valentine's Day, a Tuesday, even before this past weekend at the box office came and went.

It's not your typical romantic comedy by any stretch of the imagination. Clearly, there are romantic comedy elements they are trying to emphasize, otherwise the Valentine's Day release date makes even less sense. But if you're going to release the movie on the actual holiday, the only way to capitalize on the general buzz created by the holiday is to get couples who are planning to see it that very night, on opening night. You'd be better off just releasing it the Friday before, like The Vow.

How much better off? Just ask The Vow.

The Vow led a jaw-dropping weekend at the box office with a staggering $41.2 million in domestic ticket sales. I don't know what the actual projections were for its performance, but I can only assume this shattered them. I mean, that's a blockbuster-sized opening. It's especially noteworthy given the fact that romance movies have become increasingly marginalized in terms of their mainstream box office potential.

But it wasn't just The Vow that performed mightily this past weekend.

I had checked the box office tallies on IMDB (something I do some Mondays, but not every Monday) to assess how The Phantom Menace performed in its opening weekend. As you remember from last week, I discussed that the Star Wars team has threatened to withhold the other 3D re-releases unless Episode I had a strong box office performance. When I saw it came in fourth, I figured that fans had indeed turned their noses up at it. But when I looked at the box office total next to it, I realized that wasn't really the case. Even in fourth place, Episode I hauled in $22.5 million. Not bad, really. Perhaps enough to give us Episode II.

So that means there were two other movies that made over $22.5 million this past weekend. Those being Safe House ($40.2 million) and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island ($27.3 million), which both probably qualify as very healthy returns on their projections. In fact, even the fifth and sixth place films cracked $10 million (Chronicle with $12.1 million, The Woman in Black with $10.1 million).

In essence -- maybe now that the football season is over -- audiences were just throwing their money at whatever was available on screen. You telling me This Means War wouldn't want in on that? One wonders if even its six-day total, tallied sometime this Sunday afternoon, will rival those totals.

Of course, one of the things I like to write about on this blog are release dates that seem over-crowded, especially when there are two movies that could speak to the same audience. Even without This Means War, February 10th was one of those release dates I almost wrote about. For about six weeks leading up to it, every billboard in town carried a release date of February 10th. Perhaps This Means War was the last to try to come out that day, and shifted forward to the 14th to avoid the bloodbath.

But a bloodbath implies that although there may be some winners, there will definitely be losers. In a very strange phenomenon, none of last week's new releases lost out. Even finishing fourth out of the new movies, The Phantom Menace can't be too disappointed because it's a movie most of its audience had probably already seen. Re-releases are known commodities that are already available on video, which makes them a tougher sell to begin with. Methinks this is probably one of the most successful openings ever for a re-release, which makes its fourth place finish quite easy to stomach.

But back to This Means War for a second. Is it possible that even the stars of this movie knew there might be something wrong with it? I'm thinking of one star in particular. Let's see which one it might be ...

Could it be ... this guy?

Nope, he's on board. He's got that sly smile. He's happy enough to be here.

Could it be ... her?

Nope. She took the same direction as the other guy. Sly smile, you're happy to be here.

What about ... this guy?

Yep. That's the one.

Is it just me, or does Tom Hardy look like a deer in the headlights here? Is Tom Hardy contemplating firing his agent? Is Tom Hardy pleading with us, asking us "What the hell am I doing here?"

Since making his first real mainstream appearance in Inception, Hardy has gotten very good notices in two films, both of which came out last year: Warrior, for which there was even some awards talk, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Those titles don't solidify him as some kind of indie darling, but they do seem like intelligent choices made by a selective person. (He's also in The Dark Knight Rises this summer.)

This Means War doesn't seem like the kind of movie he'd have chosen, if he had his druthers.

If you think you know that about him, it makes this poster even funnier. It really highlights the contrast between the expressions Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon are making, and the blank stare offered by Hardy. Of course it's possible the photographer didn't want all three of them to be making the same expression. But it's more fun to think that Hardy was so unenthusiastic about this movie that he couldn't even play ball for the poster.

So if you're spending your Valentine's Day at the movies tonight, at least Pine and Witherspoon hope you'll consider This Means War.

Hardy's hoping you'll go to The Vow, so his agent won't try to get him more roles where he plays a lovestruck spy in a McG movie.

Mistaking parody for incompetence

2012-02-13T07:21:00.000-08:00

For the first half of my life, I thought Big Trouble in Little China must be about the worst movie ever made.

It's taken the most recent half for me to see it, an event that finally transpired on Saturday night. And I gotta say: Wow, what a movie.

I didn't realize movies had their tongues this firmly planted in their cheeks, this many years ago.

Of course they did -- parodies have existed for almost as long as movies have existed. But because I never realized that, my only conclusion was that this movie must have been an epic disaster.

In 1986, when John Carpenter's movie first came out, I saw a commercial for it that left quite an impression on me. It had to have been a commercial, because I doubt I would have been seeing a movie where they were playing it as a theatrical trailer. I was 12 going on 13, and it's actually most likely I saw an ad for it appearing on cable a year or two later.

My conclusion? It looked like an awful, terrible movie of the poorest possible quality.

I didn't get that that was the point.

See, I didn't understand irony back then, and only thought I understood parody. I'm sure I'd already seen Airplane! -- even though I would have technically been too young to see that one shot of the topless woman jiggling through the aisle -- but I don't think I could have explained to you what Airplane! was doing, or setting out to do. In any case, the absurdity in Airplane! was straightforward -- you couldn't miss it that this movie was not on the level.

With Big Trouble in Little China, the scenes they showed in the commercial would have seemed far subtler to me. I didn't get that just turning up the ridiculous factor in an otherwise straightforward scene meant that you were making it incredibly funny to people in the know. I just figured it was a sign of poor craftsmanship. It seemed to me like a massive tonal failure, a colossal misunderstanding of how human beings really behave.

In fact, probably until sometime in my 20s when people told me otherwise, I assumed that Big Trouble was some misbegotten cousin of either The Golden Child or Howard the Duck. I considered them to be dark, murky misfires of the same ilk, at least two of those three featuring a large Asian cast. I haven't actually seen Howard the Duck, but I saw enough imagery of it at the time that this movie reminded me of that one. It must have been the shoddy puppet creatures in Big Trouble. In fact, I had the oddest sense of deja vu on Saturday, when I saw the scene I remembered from the commercial, where that hairy creature with the gruesome face shambles through a tunnel carrying Kim Cattrall over his shoulder. It might have been that single moment that made me consider Big Trouble a sad, alienating movie I wanted nothing to do with.

Thanks, young Vance, for finally developing a sense of humor.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Big Trouble in Little China is an absolute hoot. I'm not going to say it's a better movie than Airplane!, though I'm sure a lot of people would argue that. But I do think it gives its audience a ton of credit by not having to be quite so overt with its humor. Sure, the humor in Big Trouble is pretty over the top. But none of it involves total anachronisms and cutaways that immediately call attention to the fact that the whole thing is a joke. Big Trouble's humor is more a pastiche of absurd dialogue, toying with iconic character types and moments of gleeful special effects mayhem.

Shall I spoil a few moments to whet your appetite for a possible viewing? Okay, just a few.

- Playing Jack Burton, the incomparable Kurt Russell, in his third collaboration with Carpenter, has unwittingly driven his semi into a secluded alley in San Francisco's Chinatown, with his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) riding shotgun. About a dozen heavily armed Chinese gangs appear on the scene and begin an extremely elaborate shootout. After about five minutes of them shooting at each other, we cut to Russell sitting in the cab of his semi, freaked out, holding a Bowie knife. Yep, a Bowie knife.

- Burton later gets a hold of a machine gun, but when he fires it, it fires in single blasts, like a shotgun. No explanation is ever given.

- Burton and Chi pretend to be members of the telephone company in order to break into a building to find a secret passage. To pull off this charade, Burton walks in confidently holding a single rotatory telephone in his hand. You know, the kind that looks like this. How that would help an actual phone company employee fix a phone problem in a building is anyone's guess.

- At one point in the movie, Burton tells a group of people "If we're not back in two hours, call the president." It is completely unclear what he means by this.

I'll stop there. Besides, Big Trouble in Little China is one of those movies where you laugh so much, but everything is so random, that you can't even remember half the things you laughed at when the movie is over.

Unfortunately, I was not the only person who didn't get what Big Trouble in Little China was supposed to be when it first came out. The film failed in a major way -- so much so that it disillusioned Carpenter about Hollywood and prompted him to focus on smaller, more independent-minded movies.

But not before he gave us They Live, which operates on a similar level to Big Trouble, two years later. That's one I've been trying to push on my wife for more than a year. Now that she laughed so hard and loved Big Trouble so much, maybe she's ready.

As for me? Maybe it's finally time to watch Howard the Duck from my Netflix instant queue.

Could it be that George Lucas' famous flop is also a brilliant parody being mistaken as incompetent?

The Irish Nicolas Cage?

2012-02-11T22:54:00.001-08:00

Okay, who's excited for Liam Neeson's slate of upcoming movies in 2012?

That would be:

Wrath of the Titans
Battleship
Taken 2

Don't answer all at once.

Fortunately, I've already seen his first 2012 movie, The Grey, and I can tell you it's pretty good.

The rest of them ... well, if it were Nicolas Cage playing those same roles, don't you think he'd take some crap?

It should be obvious to anyone reading this why Liam Neeson is a cut above Nicolas Cage. But I think we need to take a look at it more closely.

Cage doesn't seem to turn down any roles. Lately, neither does Neeson.

Cage is a former Oscar winner who's acted in a bunch of big-budget crap. So is Neeson.

Cage often plays a character who was wronged and has come to kick some ass. So does our Teflon Liam.

Yet Neeson is teflon -- none of these decisions ever stick to him. No one ever says "What crap is Liam Neeson making now?"

This realization about Liam Neeson occurred to me when I was in the grocery store tonight. The DVD for The A-Team was at the checkout stand, begging someone to buy it for the bargain price of just $19.99.

Now, I actually liked The A-Team. But it doesn't mean seeing that movie there on that rack didn't make me say "Man, that Liam Neeson sure does make some schlock."

Shall we go on? Neeson's period of craptitude may go back to 2009, when the first Taken came out. That's when he developed the reputation of a guy appearing in vigilante thrillers who might want to kick someone's ass ... much like the reputation Cage has. Appearing in Unknown in 2011 surely helped Neeson further down that path, such that when the trailers for The Grey came out, people were joking "Hey, it's that movie where Liam Neeson punches a wolf in the face." Sure, such a moment was actually alluded to in the trailer -- but it doesn't mean people weren't thinking of the Neeson who delivered that "I will hunt you down, I will find you and I will kill you" speech in Taken. Except this time he's making that threat to a wolf.

Like Cage, Neeson has also gotten himself entrenched in a number of high-profile series. While Cage has been the face of such series as National Treasure and Ghost Rider, Neeson has been busy popping up everywhere from the Star Wars prequels (well, just one) to the Chronicles of Narnia movies. And oh yeah, he's also in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies -- he was in Batman Begins, and his fifth film on the 2012 calendar is The Dark Knight Rises.

One difference in Cage's favor is that he's actually mixed in some respectable work in the past couple years. While Cage was praised for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Kick-Ass, Neeson hasn't gotten a real whiff of critical acclaim since Kinsey back in 2004. In fact, Cage even has the more recent Oscar nomination, back in 2002 when he was up for Adaptation. Neeson's last Oscar nomination was in 1993 for Schindler's List -- and in fact it was his only nomination. (Even though he ought to have gotten one for Kinsey.)

But there's almost no doubt in our minds that Neeson is the better actor, right? Is it the gruff sense of gravitas he brings to his roles? Or is it just the fact that he doesn't expose himself to the same kind of ridicule Cage exposes himself to by not taking the risks Cage takes?

Don't get me wrong -- the point of this piece is not to prove that Cage is a better actor, or that he is in some way unworthy of the criticism he gets. I have laughed and shaken my head at Cage numerous times, and I believe he has deserved it each and every time. No one's saying Cage is portrayed unfairly. Most often the way he's characterized is pretty dead on.

But it's just interesting to me how Neeson gets a total free pass. I mean, Battleship? Have you seen how ridiculous that looks? If Nicolas Cage had taken that role, we'd be howling. But Neeson takes it and we don't blink. Is it possible that Neeson just fades into the background more easily? Do we kind of "look past" him?

You might also say that Cage has the courage of his convictions: At least he knows his movies are bad. The movies know they're bad, too. Most of the time. Neeson's bad movies seem more serious, like they're trying to be good. (And yes, I thought Taken was bad, even though it was a certified hit for him.)

It's funny, because this impression of Neeson as a fairly unselective actor just doesn't penetrate the first few layers of our brains. I guested on a film podcast last year and Battleship came up. I said something along the lines of "It's funny how we've gotten to the point where Liam Neeson, an Oscar winner, is in the Battleship movie." It's as though Neeson has cast a spell over us that makes us see him as so regal, so dignified. In fact, he's been making the Battleship movie for at least a couple years now, hasn't he?

The thing is, Neeson is not actually an Oscar winner. Even earlier in this piece I listed him as being one. It's only in my subsequent research that I'm realizing he did not actually win the Oscar for Schindler's List. But see, that's kind of the point. Admit it -- when I said Neeson was an Oscar winner, you didn't blink, did you? Neeson makes us think he's an Oscar winner with that smooth voice, that rugged sense of confidence, that idea that there's no piece of dialogue that might best him.

Hold on there. It sounds like I'm going negative on Neeson. I'm not, really. I very much like the man. But again, that's the point -- has he really earned it? Or is he just a really effective snake oil salesman, and what he's selling us is his persona?

Unfortunately, I'm inclined to think that there's a sad reason for Neeson throwing himself so wholeheartedly into his work for the past three years. When Neeson's wife, the darling actress Natasha Richardson, died during a skiing accident in March of 2009, I imagine it must have been incredibly sad for him. Theirs did not seem to be one of those Hollywood marriages built on a sham and bound for collapse. I felt that Neeson must have grieved deeply for her. Maybe he filled the hole by making a bunch of Clash of the Titans movies.

And because he seems like a nice man who would have been a loving husband and father, I don't mind so much that no one accuses Neeson of appearing in a bunch of stuff that's beneath him. If making a thinly-veiled Transformers rip-off that's a big-screen adaptation of a board game involving red and white pegs helps distract him from his loss, more power to him.

But I still don't think I'm going to be in line for Battleship.

You're more likely to see me at Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

(Hey, I'm curious to see what Neveldine/Taylor might bring to it.)

A multifunctional 2

2012-02-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

Menace II Society.

Jungle 2 Jungle.

2 Fast 2 Furious.

Journey 2 the Mysterious Island?

Not so fast. It's Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.

But don't tell me they're not trying to have it both ways.

For as many as two decades now -- Menace II Society was released in 1993 -- the number 2 (Roman numeral or otherwise) has been substituting for the words "to" or "too" in the titles of movies. It's become an almost normalized way to indicate to us that this movie has a loose, hip understanding of the ebb and flow of language. Either that or it's just pandering to people whose lives have been consumed by textspeak, or who use language in a way influenced by inner-city speech rhythms.

So I thought -- honest to God -- that that's what this movie was doing.

Only after I'd been seeing billboards for the latest family-friendly adventure from The Rock for several weeks did I realize that the 2 was actually being used as a sequel number. And that this was actually a sequel to 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

I probably never even considered that as being an option. To the extent that my brain thought of that option at all, it probably dismissed it on these grounds: "Jules Verne never wrote a sequel to A Journey to the Center of the Earth!" Ah, but silly me -- in Hollywood, such things are possible.

It's funny how quick I was to interpret the number 2 as a preposition, rather than the way it is far more commonly used in movie titles. Even in the posters, the number 2 gets the same prominence as the word "Journey," with "The Mysterious Island" appearing in conspicuously smaller print. I guess it's probably a representation of how my mind works, trying to link words together grammatically first and foremost. It was logical for me to read the whole thing as "Journey to the Mysterious Island," and just assume that the 2 was being repurposed for greater hipness. It also helped that there's no colon in the poster, but then again, there rarely is. I'm sure I would have gotten the connection to Journey to the Center of the Earth a lot sooner if it had been Brendan Fraser barreling forward out of this poster rather than Dwayne Johnson. (Because that's another thing that never happens in Hollywood -- actors being replaced by other actors in sequels.)

Still, I do think they're being a bit cheeky with the title. They know it has that second meaning. And this, of course, I applaud, if you read last Friday's post in which I sung my praises for the dual meaning of the title Dolphin Tale. I'm all about the cleverness.

But making sequels that never existed to classic novels from the 19th century? That doesn't sit so well with me.

Don't make me go back!

2012-02-09T07:54:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow night, my wife and I are taking advantage of having unpaid babysitters (my dad and his wife) and going out for dinner and a movie.

The movie we'd see was -- I thought -- already decided.

I remembered my wife and I seeing a trailer for Chronicle, and having a discussion about how it looked cool. So I thought it would be easy enough just to plant that seed in her head and run with it.

But when the topic came up a couple days ago, my wife flatly told me "Just so you know, I'm not that interested in Chronicle." At the time we were in the middle of other things, so no alternate choice was suggested. In my own mind, I shifted gears to thinking about the other options (The Woman in Black, The Innkeepers) that might catch her fancy instead.

So I broached the topic again when we were out for dinner last night, of what movie she might want to see instead.

"Albert Nobbs?" she suggested.

Uh oh.

I'm not the kind of monster who forces someone to see Chronicle if they don't want to. But can't I at least get a 2012 movie in its place?

See, if you know me, you know that I'm done (for awhile) with 2011 movies. The way my movie calendar breaks down is basically like this: I watch movies from the current/previous year from August to January, with a smaller percentage of other films from other years on DVD. February to July is when I really concentrate on the films from other years, and theatrical releases from the brand new year.

For some reason, to me, paying theater prices for Albert Nobbs in the middle of February seems like a waste, because it's not in the pursuit of any specific "goal."

When I go to a movie in the theater, I want it to "count" toward whatever movie list I'm currently assembling. My 2011 movie rankings closed over two weeks ago (see here for that list). My 2012 list is just in its infancy, containing only Joe Carnahan's The Grey. The Grey is lonely out there and needs a friend.

Albert Nobbs? Albert Nobbs is living in the past.

The thing is, this system only makes sense to me, or other movie fanatics like me. My wife is a movie fan -- I mean, she wants to see Albert Nobbs in the first place -- but she's not a fanatic. She doesn't make lists and she doesn't get why there are rules and why those rules must be followed. She doesn't get why Albert Nobbs, having missed the deadline to be ranked with other 2011 movies, now must eventually be seen on video if it's ever to be seen at all.

But that's a pretty hard stance to rationally justify. It basically made it almost impossible for me to see Albert Nobbs in the theater, because it didn't even open "wide" (in limited release) until January 27th -- three days after my deadline for ranking 2011 films.

Nobbs is an interesting case because I actually did toy with seeing it in time for my deadline, when it played a one-week run at one theater in L.A. between Christmas and New Year's. On the final night of that one-week run, it was either that or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I decided to get tattooed instead. If I'd really been shrewd about it, I would have seen Nobbs and saved Tattoo for the following week. But I was feeling stressed about all the movies I "needed" to see before my deadline, and I didn't feel I ultimately "needed" to see Albert Nobbs at all.

Now I'm contemplating watching it tomorrow night, when all it will really do is give me a greater appreciation of whether two of its actors deserve Oscars.

For most film fans, that would be enough of a goal. And for me it probably should be. But for me, the exciting thing about the Oscars is really the day of the nominations, because that's also the day I release my rankings to the world. I like to think I've been conscious enough of the buzz to see as many of the performances likely to be nominated as I can before the nominations are announced. See, the idea is to rank these movies in a vacuum, without being influenced by the fact that they may have been nominated for Oscars. That's informally why I chose that date, long ago, as the date to finish ranking movies from the previous year.

But does that mean I must arbitrarily no longer see any more 2011 performances after that date? Most people would say I was crazy. Most people would use the nominations as a jumping off point, to tell them what movies they still needed to see before Oscar night. The build toward Oscar night would be the exciting period of their movie-watching existence, not the build toward the morning Oscar nominations are announced.

The real point may just be this: If you are interested in seeing a movie on the big screen for whatever reason, you should, regardless of whether or not it "counts" for anything in your "arbitrary" (the word my wife used) system. And my wife's reasons for wanting to see Albert Nobbs are good ones: 1) She knows the producer of Albert Nobbs; 2) She points out that we like the films of Rodrigo Garcia; 3) She wants to support independent film.

Well damn. She's got me there.

So maybe I should put my aspirations toward building my 2012 list on hold. I've got all year to do it, and in reality, the movies that are playing in theaters now will all be available to watch on video by the summer. I don't need to see them in the theater any more than I need to stop seeing 2011 movies after my ranking deadline. And the ones I want to see in the theater now, either because I think the visuals will be cool or because I just need current movies to talk about at parties, will be ones I'll prioritize seeing on my own, anyway. In fact, maybe I'll go out and see Chronicle on Monday night after my dad and his wife leave town.

Maybe this Albert Nobbs viewing could be good for my soul, could shake me out of my comfort zone. Not to mention earning some points with my wife by validating her suggestion.

I'm only 38 years old. I'm too young to be set in my ways, right?

Held hostage by this menace

2012-02-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Do you think it might be cool to see the original Star Wars trilogy on the big screen in 3D?

Regardless of your skepticism about 3D transfers, are you tantalized enough by the prospect of the Millennium Falcon warping out of the screen directly into your lap that you'd think it was a shame if it didn't happen?

Then you better get out there this weekend and see The Phantom Menace in 3D.

Until now I'd thought it was a foregone conclusion that all six Star Wars films were returning to the big screen in three dimensions. Just yesterday in a Facebook thread, however, I learned that the fate of the remaining five films hinges on the success of this first one.

That's right, producer Rick McCallum let it slip that if Star Wars Episode I does not do enough box office on its 3D re-release, the remaining five movies will be not be re-released in 3D on the big screen. (This news is not new -- he said this mid-way through last year -- but I didn't learn about it until yesterday.)

Just an idle threat, to force us to go out and see a 3D Jar Jar Binks and a 3D baby Annakin Skywalker? Or a legitimate concern?

I'd be very surprised if George Lucas et al would pass up any chance to make a buck on any part of the Star Wars saga. Of course, the ordinary Hollywood business approach is not to greenlight sequels unless the first movie does well, and some of the same logic applies here. But would Lucas really want to take the PR hit that would come from shelving his remaining 3D transfers, simply because many fans didn't want to shell out $14.75 to see the Star Wars movie many of them considered the biggest disappointment?

And if that's the case, shouldn't we be even more disappointed that he chose to re-release them in this order, rather than the order of their theatrical release as many fans would have preferred? Surely many of us would be treating these 3D releases with more excitement if it were the 1977 Star Wars hitting theaters this weekend, right?

Then again, there's a good chance that The Phantom Menace will in fact make decent money this weekend, and for one or two weekends after that, which would make the whole thing moot. See, Lucas is not catering these 3D releases to the fans of the original movies -- he's catering them to the audience that grew up knowing The Phantom Menace as their first exposure to Star Wars. These are also the same fans who have to some degree grown up with 3D. Sure, 3D has only really taken off in the last couple years. But it stands to reason that the people who love The Phantom Menace are also younger and less jaded about 3D in general, meaning they are less likely to poo-poo these plans than us crotchety old thirtysomethings, who take every opportunity we can to shit on both Lucas and 3D.

But what if that group doesn't turn out either? It doesn't help that The Phantom Menace is hitting theaters on the most crowded release date of the new year. Movies like The Vow and Safe House don't figure to siphon off much of the core Star Wars demographic, but you can't say the same for the family adventure Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Which is also in 3D.

I'm sure some of you reading this are rooting for the box office failure of The Phantom Menace, and don't give a shit what effect it has on other potential Star Wars re-releases. In fact, seeing Lucas eat crow might satisfy you more than anything else that has happened in the movie business for years.

Me? Well, I'm just tantalized enough by that Millennium Falcon jumping out of the screen at me that I have very mixed emotions.

But will I be supporting The Phantom Menace with a $14.75 ticket this weekend?

Nah.

At least the decision has been taken out of my hands. My father and stepmother are in town until next Monday, so I can't exactly sneak off to the movies by myself. Their presence does give my wife and me the opportunity to see a movie together while they babysit our son, but she's having none of The Phantom Menace, and rightly so. Really, I'm having none of it either ... but that doesn't mean I don't feel some ambiguity about it. So I guess I'm having "almost none" of it.

We'll probably be giving Chronicle our money instead, and that will feel right for my soul.

Besides, if we give The Phantom Menace a big box office, it won't create the necessary conditions for us to call McCallum's bluff.

Let's see how committed they really are to scrapping the other 3D transfers, or if they really were just trying to hold us hostage.

The miracle? That they went with this title

2012-02-03T07:35:00.000-08:00

It certainly isn't the goal of most family movies to come up with the most original or clever title you've ever heard. In fact, you could argue that the blander it is, the better.

But Big Miracle?

That's particularly uninspired.

Okay, I get it. It's about whales, who are big, and it's about a miraculous saving of the lives of a bunch of whales, which is a miracle. In fact, if the Catholic church could attribute their survival to a single human being, that human being might need only two more miracles to qualify for sainthood.

But Big Miracle is just so ... clumsy.

It would be one thing if "big miracle" were a common phrase people used. Like, "I need a miracle here ... a big miracle."

But it's not. A miracle is not something that be measured in degrees. It's either a miracle or it's not a miracle. The word "miracle" runs the gamut of all possible miraculous things, from arriving back at your car the exact moment before the meter maid pulls up to give you a ticket, all the way to the planet Earth being saved from an approaching asteroid by suddenly moving 10,000 miles to the left. Either of these would be a miracle, or at least, someone could interpret them that way. The word "big" is just excessive. It's like saying "He got beheaded, big time." Nope. There's either having a head or not having a head. (For the record, though, I'm not sure I'd want to see what moving 10,000 miles to the left would do to our planet's agriculture.)

Like I said at the beginning, a family movie does not need to have a particularly clever title. But there are ways of doing it so it's clever enough.

Let's take last year's Dolphin Tale. That's a nice title, while still remaining very simple. It gives you everything you need to know. It tells you the movie is about dolphins, it tells you it's a family movie, but it also throws in a little something for the linguists. It's a "tale" as in a story, but it's about a dolphin who loses her "tail" -- and goes on living. Dolphins aren't supposed to be able to do that, and only with the help of a prosthetic tail was she able to. I'd say that's actually a pretty big miracle, if we're measuring miracles in degrees.

They might have been tempted to make the title Dolphin Tail instead, assuming correctly that if you heard the title spoken aloud, you'd hear the first meaning of the homophone ("tale"), giving them reason to emphasize the second meaning ("tail") in the written text of the title. However, they were probably wise not to -- people might have just thought it was an error.

So how to fix the title Big Miracle?

I don't think you're going to be able to get the word "whale" into the title. There are ways to do it with common phrases -- A Whale of a Time, or something -- but they are too whimsical for the subject matter, and frankly, would probably invite greater derision from a person like me than the current title. (Besides, I doubt those trapped whales really were having a whale of a time.) It's worth noting that the word "whale" does appear in the title of the book on which the movie was based, which is called Freeing the Whales. However, I can understand why they thought they needed something more catchy and less literal than that. (Even if they struck out with Big Miracle, you can tell they were at least trying.)

So, maybe something along the lines of Big Miracle, but not so clunky?

Large Blessing?

Great Fortune?

Humongous Phenomenon?

Not Very Small Really Good Thing?

(I'm liking Big Miracle more and more all the time.)

Coming up with titles is hard, but I also find it a really interesting challenge. In fact, sometimes, when I absently daydream about my own ideas for movies, I come up with the title first and work the plot backward. (An excellent approach to screenwriting, I'll have you know.) I believe that for every movie there should be a perfect title lurking out there. And it's a wonderful feeling when you think they got it just right. I mean, it's a wonderful feeling as a fan -- imagine the feeling if you're the person who came up with the title yourself.

Who knows how long they sat there with Big Miracle, trying to crack it. Cold Ocean, Warm Hearts? Other Fish in the Sea? Whale Tale? Baleen for Boris? I Came to the Arctic Circle and All I Got Was Stuck in the Ice, and This Lousy T-Shirt?

I guess I'm just glad it wasn't my job.

I'll stick to the easier task of coming up with titles for stories that don't exist.

Lady's choice

2012-02-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

After closing out my 2011 rankings last week, I was determined not to see another 2011 film for at least a couple weeks.

But last night I couldn't help myself. See, it was "lady's choice."

You may think I'm referring to my wife and her gender when I say "lady's choice," and in this case, I am. But "lady's choice" could also refer to something I'm choosing.

Before you think I spend my nighttime hours in drag, let me explain. "Lady's choice" has become a phrase that gets thrown around our household all the time. On one particular evening in the last couple years, my wife asked me what I wanted to watch on the DVR. Because she'd had a bad day -- but maybe also because I wanted to win points -- I deferred to her and said "lady's choice." I always think of this as a phrase that might be used by a dealer or pit boss in a fancy casino. So I used it kind of whimsically, but it caught on.

Now, "lady's choice" basically translates as "I'll defer to you." And my wife uses it (almost) as much as I do.

A couple weeks back, we decided to start a "Lady's Choice Movie Night." Every second Tuesday, one or the other of us will get to choose a movie to watch, and it will be 100% our choice. She or I will get to be a total dictator, and the other person just has to sit there and take it. (Oops, that just got dark.) We'll be benevolent dictators -- there'll be no attempts to screw the other person with a genre we know the other person hates. But neither will there really be the chance for the off-week person to opt out. She'll just have to trust me, and I'll just have to trust her.

Why didn't we think of this years ago?

For me, it's win-win. Even in weeks I'm not choosing, I win. Because for me, watching a movie at all is a victory, and I'll watch literally anything that's out there. Watching a movie is a victory over the demanding grind of keeping up with our TV shows.

So my wife kicked off the series last night with the 2011 film Megan is Missing, which was in our Netflix instant queue. Because I so dominantly set the watching agenda in the month leading up to the closure of my 2011 rankings, she's actually going to get the first two picks in Lady's Choice Movie Night. She'll be picking again on Valentine's Day, as it happens.

As for the specific movie that got us started, well, I'm not sure how much I want to say about it. It's in the found footage genre, I'll tell you that.

I don't know if I want to recommend it to you, and I don't know if I even want to tell you the reasons why I don't know if I want to recommend it. I vastly preferred not knowing anything about it going in. However, you need to know enough about it to know that you might not want to see it. Let me just say that it is very confronting. I hope that could mean a couple different things to you. If you don't think you want to be confronted, don't see it. However, if me talking around it in this way has only whetted your appetite, then see it. Just don't blame me if you decide you wish you hadn't. (I'll say one other thing: Since you can tell from the title it involves a missing girl, it was a rather ironic first screening for a series centering around "lady's choice.")

So I must say I'm looking forward to what she chooses on Valentine's Day. My wife is not what you would call a huge romantic -- I'm much more likely to fill that role -- so it will be interesting to see what she chooses on a night when we want to watch something related to love and romance. She may not be a huge romantic, but on Valentine's Day, she buys in.

My first choice, on the penultimate day of February? Well, I'll tell you now that I plan to use this series mostly to watch movies I've already seen but she hasn't. That seems to me like the most logical interpretation of me choosing the movie, and there are plenty of movies I want her to see if we could only find the time. Well, we've found it now. And I plan to start with Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, which you may remember as the movie where River Phoenix got an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. (It also stars Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti and Martha Plimpton.) I'm curious to see if it holds up. She loves Lumet, though, so I'm throwing her a softball to start, something she should definitely like. (If it holds up, that is.)

And if she wants to interpret the series as continuing to clear out random titles, like Megan is Missing, from our instant queue, then more power to her.

After all, it's lady's choice.

Snoozing through Sundance

2012-01-31T07:58:00.000-08:00

If the question is "How long does it take to get over going to the Sundance Film Festival?", my answer might just be "Five years."

See, I went to Sundance in 2007. It was just the first weekend, Friday night to Sunday night. I saw only two movies (Noise and Miss Navajo) and waited in line fruitlessly for a third (Waitress). I also skied for about an hour-and-a-half.

Yet I was so seduced by the experience that for the next four Januarys, every time I heard, read or saw some piece about the annual Park City pilgrimage getting underway, I became overwhelmed by regret that I could not partake in that pilgrimage myself.

Not this year.

Maybe I just didn't hear, read or see those pieces, or maybe I've got other things on my mind (house hunting, for one). But I was definitely aware of when the festival was starting, and I was definitely not sickened by longing for the closest major film festival to where I live.

I'm trying to analyze this change in me. Maybe it's just growing older.

Back then, I'd say I was still thrilled enough by rubbing elbows with celebrities that it was that phenomenon itself that so captivated me. In fact, I kept a running list of every celebrity I'd seen on my blackberry. I still have the list -- it's my same work email account as I had then -- if you'd like to see it:

John C. Reilly
Scott Speedman
Billy Baldwin
Jamie Kennedy
Tom Arnold
Eddie Kaye Thomas
Alan Alda
Harvey Weinstein
Richard Rucculo
Richard Roeper
Jude Ciccolella
Nathan Fillion
Cheryl Hines
Keri Russell
Dick Gephardt

Yes, that last one is the former presidential candidate. (Apparently, I'm much better able to identify men than women. Either that or they were more free about coming out of the woodwork.)

I kept this list partly out of a general obsessiveness, but also because I was planning to write a feature story on my experience for the website where I used to freelance. That was a damn fun piece. It basically ticked off times of the day throughout the weekend, then followed each with a brief and witty comment about what I was doing. It was a little self-indulgent, but not excessively so.

You'd think that rubbing elbows with celebrities would not be such a big deal, living in LA. But in truth, you don't run into Jack Nicholson in Starbucks every three weeks just by living in Los Angeles. In fact, I'll go six months to a year at a time without seeing any celebrities that I recognize. Much more likely is to see someone you know you saw in a commercial, as I did a few weeks ago at the playground.

When I first moved to LA in 1996, before moving back full time five years later, I also kept a journal of my "encounters" with celebrities. They seemed more frequent then. Yes, I would actually describe the circumstances of my seeing the person, and back then, I might actually talk to him or her. Just so you know, this is considered to be undignified rookie behavior, and I've long since gotten over it. But what can I say, the 22-year-old me was just starstruck.

Some vestiges of that still remained when I was at Sundance in 2007. I didn't talk to any of those people, but you better bet I noted them and pointed them out (quietly, subtly) to anyone who was with me. Which was usually just my wife (then girlfriend).

I think part of the maturation of any person, and specifically, any film fan, is a realization that it's more about the work, the product, than the celebrity behind that product. Perhaps those five years since I went to Sundance have been my own personal period of maturation. Sure, under the right circumstances and with the right insider connections, I could probably still be that guy who would have to check himself to avoid dropping names like the thousands of Hollywood wannabes in this city who seem so vulgar and shallow. But I like to think that if I went to Sundance today, I'd derive far more pleasure from getting an early look at the movies we'll all be talking about six months to a year from now.

That's what it really means to be a film fan, and not just a devotee of the E! network.

(But would I still want to get early exposure to those movies primarily so I could lord it over other film fans?)

(Yeah, probably. I'm only human. Humans love lording things over other humans.)

A traveling travelogue

2012-01-30T09:14:00.001-08:00

If you looked over at the right column on my blog and saw which movie I've most recently revisited, you might have said to yourself:

"Octopussy? Really?"

Yes, Octopussy. The James Bond movie. The 13th James Bond movie, to be precise. The sixth to star Roger Moore.

"Why the hell are you rewatching Octopussy, Vance?"

Well, I'll tell you.

On the Flickchart blog, a friend of mine is hosting a year-long series in honor of the 50th anniversary of James Bond in the movies. Dr. No, the first Bond movie, came out in 1962. It's 2012. I've checked the math -- it's correct. As such, there will be one post per month about something related to the Bond franchise. I'm writing the February one.

"But why are you rewatching Octopussy in particular, Vance?"

Ah, yeah. That.

The thesis of my piece is that because there are so many Bond movies, it's hard to have a consensus opinion about a) who the best Bond is, and b) what the best Bond movie is. Sure, the "right" answer about who the best Bond is is Sean Connery. But a large percentage of today's Bond fans don't even know Sean Connery from his later work, so why should they know him as Bond?

So the essential idea behind my piece will be: "Why not Octopussy?"

"But Vance, why not The Man With the Golden gun instead of Octopussy? For example?"

Well, because I watched Octopussy about ten times when I was a kid. In fact, I believe it's the only Bond movie I've seen more than once. I must love really love it if I've seen it ten more times than any other Bond movie.

That, or it was the one Bond movie I had on VHS. When I was a kid, I had a rotation of about a dozen movies we'd recorded off cable that I watched repeatedly. They included such titles as Superman II, Star Trek II, The Secret of NIMH, Time Bandits, Rocky III and The Goonies.

And, oh yeah, Octopussy.

But I like to think it wasn't just its availability that made me watch Octopussy repeatedly. It wasn't just that Octopussy was the only Bond movie that played during that finite period (2-3 years) when we had The Movie Channel, when my mom recorded almost everything that played.

I like to think that Octopussy was really better than other Bond movies -- other Roger Moore Bond movies in particular, but Connery Bond movies too. (I've still seen only two Connery Bond movies -- Dr. No, and the pretender Never Say Never Again, in which Connery returned to the role in an unauthorized version of the character, which was released the same year as Octopussy. Yes, I should be heavily berated for this gap in my filmography.)

I know it's better than Moonraker, which always struck me as very weird -- James Bond in outer space? I'm pretty sure it's better than For Your Eyes Only, the only part of which I really remember is that there's an extended skiing sequence. And I know it's better than A View to a Kill, despite the presence of Christopher Walken and Grace Jones. And I'm ashamed to admit I haven't even seen Moore's first three outings as Bond, all in the 1970s.

Anyway, enough about why I watched the movie. Watching it was a highly enjoyable trip down memory lane. So glad I did.

I won't write too much more about it now, because I'm going to save that for the other blog post. However, I did notice one thing about the experience that I wanted to talk about (now that we're nearly 20 paragraphs in):

I don't know if I've ever previously watched a movie in so many different locales. Appropriate for a movie that's essentially a travelogue, and takes place in many different locales.

I started watching it at the gym on Friday after work. I'd had a rough couple nights in a row of sleep (my son is teething), so I didn't have the energy to go my full 45 minutes on the stairmaster. I paid attention to what my body was telling me and cut out after 25 minutes. But then I watched another ten or so downstairs in a comfy chair in the lobby before leaving.

That night at home, after my wife went to sleep, I watched another 20 minutes or so. But remember what I said about having a couple bad nights' sleep in a row? (I hope so -- it was only one paragraph ago.) So yeah, I didn't last too long on that viewing before the couch got me.

Then I watched the last hour Sunday morning at my office. I've found my office conference room to be a good place to take my son on Sundays, when the office is empty. (Except for the security guy, who is used to seeing me by now.) There's a TV and DVD player all set up. And he can run around the room and play with his toys for awhile before he gets bored. There are very few things that he can break, or that can break him.

That's not only three locations, but three different players: my portable DVD player, my home BluRay player and the DVD player at work. (You can also say this movie has traveled, because I received it through the mail from Netflix.)

It matches the movie's three locales: the "cold open" that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, which is set somewhere in Latin America; the bulk of the action in India; and Germany, where slightly less of the action takes place.

However, I guess Bond really has me beat. The movie also contains a short couple scenes at Secret Service HQ and an auction house in London, as well as a Russian war room scene that, presumably, takes place in the Soviet Union.

Then again, the British Secret Service has a bigger budget than I do.

Go back to 2003, Phone Booth

2012-01-27T07:35:00.000-08:00

I didn't like you then, either.

Will we be raunchy old people?

2012-01-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

Random thought that occurred to me the other day:

"If elderly movie fans still cherish the movies they loved when they were kids, does that mean we're going to still have a raunchy sense of humor when we're elderly?"

Think about it. If you came of age loving American Pie or the Farrelly Brothers, or worship at the altar of Judd Apatow, how do you think you'll feel about these movies when you're in your seventies or eighties?

I'd be tempted to say that I'll still laugh at Ben Stiller getting his balls stuck in his zipper when I'm decrepit and using a walker. But part of that is pie-in-the-sky, a willful denial of the fact that I'll ever be anything less than the jaunty picture of youth I am today. "I'll never be square, will I? Of course not."

But I wonder.

There's something untoward about the idea of an old person who thinks that dick jokes and poop jokes are funny. I mean, we'll still be us -- we'll still have the essential personalities we've always had. But doesn't some kind of sophistication have to overtake us eventually? Or will we just have to pretend to be sophisticated in polite company?

People who are old now have not really had to confront this. They came of age in a cinematic era when things were simpler. Sure, there was that era's version of raunchiness in some of the movies released before the Hays Code made everything prim, proper and innocent, a period that lasted from the mid 30s to the late 60s. But nothing like the raunch we see today. And those who came of age after the MPAA ratings began in 1968 are too young to be considered elderly yet.

When we sit a grandchild on our knee for a great lecture on the cinema of yesteryear, which will inevitably begin with the words "In my day ...", we'll definitely have plenty of appropriate movies to talk about. Star Wars will be an ancient relic, but it'll be just the perfect kind of thing to bring up here. The animation of Toy Story will look positively primitive, but the story itself will still be a classic. There will even be some great comedies that'll be pretty safe to talk about. Ghostbusters is pretty tame, all told, isn't it?

But maybe, just maybe, we won't bring up the fact that we all loved a movie where a guy has sex with an apple pie.

Out of propriety, maybe we'll just keep that one all to ourselves.

This Critic Was Wrong: Mistakes from 15 Years of Ranking Movies

2012-01-25T07:33:00.000-08:00

This January marks 15 years since I started ranking all the movies I've seen in the previous year, from first to worst. I started the practice in January of 1997, and here it is, January of 2012. (Technically, that's 16 lists, because there are two lists bookending that 15-year period. But it's still 15 years. If you are for some reason coming to my blog for the first time during this very post, my 16th list went up yesterday.)

So to celebrate this milestone -- because you know how I love burdening you with my milestones -- I thought I would take a look back at where I've been and how far I've come.

But I'm not going to do something boring like give you a list of my favorite movies from those 15 years. Especially since there were plenty of great movies I saw during that period that I didn't see within their release year, meaning they never appeared on any year-end list, meaning talking about them here would be a strange way to mark the occasion. (No movie I see after the morning of the Oscar nominations is eligible for ranking.)

Instead, I'm going to look at what I got wrong. Those rankings are and will always be part of the "official record," but clearly my feelings about the movies I ranked have changed over the years. Some, I like a lot more than I did when I first saw them; others, a lot less. And so I thought I'd give you a list of the top ten movies I misranked when they came out, at least, relative to how I feel about them today. And in some cases, as you'll see, I even wonder what the hell I could have been thinking at the time.

But before we get into that, I want to lay the groundwork, to give you some idea about my tastes over the years. For each year from 1996 to 2010 (see yesterday's post for 2011), I want to tell you three things: 1) how many movies I ranked by my deadline, 2) the movie I ranked #1, and 3) the movie I ranked last.

Here they are:

1996 - 43 movies. #1 - Looking for Richard (Al Pacino), #43 - Before and After (Barbet Schroeder)
1997 - 39 movies. #1 - Titanic (James Cameron), #39 - Speed 2: Cruise Control (Jan de Bont)
1998 - 58 movies. #1 - Happiness (Todd Solondz), #58 - Almost Heroes (Christopher Guest)
1999 - 57 movies. #1 - Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer), #57 - Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld)
2000 - 58 movies. #1 - Hamlet (Michael Almereyda), #58 - The 6th Day (Roger Spotiswoode)
2001 - 73 movies. #1 - Gosford Park (Robert Altman), #73 - The Musketeer (Peter Hyams)
2002 - 80 movies. #1 - Adaptation (Spike Jonze), #80 - Bad Company (Joel Schumacher)
2003 - 58 movies. #1 - Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola), #58 - Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan)
2004 - 59 movies. #1 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), #59 - Troy (Wolfgang Petersen)
2005 - 73 movies. #1 - Hustle & Flow (Craig Brewer), #73 - Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman)
2006 - 77 movies. #1 - Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron), #77 - Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan)
2007 - 82 movies. #1 - There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), #82 - Captivity (Roland Joffe)
2008 - 87 movies. #1 - The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky), #87 - An American Carol (David Zucker)
2009 - 113 movies. #1 - Moon (Duncan Jones), #113 - The Final Destination (David R. Ellis)
2010 - 109 movies. #1 - 127 Hours (Danny Boyle), #109 - Furry Vengeance (Roger Kumble)

Come to think of it, I don't know what this actually tells you. One thing of interest to me, though, is that never have I awarded the same director top honors twice, nor have I hung the dunce cap on any director more than once. (Though I think M. Night Shyamalan came close, and Joel Schumacher came very close yesterday when I ranked Trepass second lowest of 2011.) However, Charlie Kaufman did write two of my #1s, those being Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Okay, enough preamble. I found 25 contenders for my biggest mistakes and pared them down to ten. I've also given you their ranking, and some better films they finished ahead of or worse films they finished behind. In reverse order of their severity ...

10. Napoleon Dynamite (2004, Jared Hess)
Ranked: Too low, 27th out of 59
Below such films as: Fahrenheit 9/11, The Forgotten
Explanation: This must be a case of the film not having achieved its eventual beloved status until well after it was released. (In fact, the movie is apparently so beloved that Fox decided to revive it this year as an animated show.) One of the other contenders for this list was Office Space, which I had ranked fairly low at the time it came out, but has since become a common reference point for numerous film fans by playing regularly on cable. The same could be said for Napoleon. Still, I knew that I liked it at the time and I also knew that Michael Moore's 9/11 polemic annoyed me, so how did I get this wrong?

9. High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears)
Ranked: Too low, 37th out of 58
Below such films as: Red Planet, Mission to Mars, The Perfect Storm
Explanation: I wouldn't say I was a huge fan of Frears' movie, prefering Nick Hornby's book (as people who have read the book first are wont to do). But I must have really thought it trod wrong if I ranked both of the Mars movies, neither of which was very good, ahead of it, not to mention The Perfect Storm, which I found even more problematic than the Mars movies. Or perhaps it's just that over the years I have conflated the film with the book, and just see them as a single entity that I love.

8. Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002, George Lucas)
Ranked: Too high, 14th out of 80
Above such films as: About a Boy (speaking of Nick Horby), Blue Crush, Signs
Explanation: Yes, I loved seeing Yoda bust out that lightsaber. And yes, I saw it twice in the theater. (An honor the inferior Phantom Menace can also claim.) But I think I must have had a case of serious Star Wars blindness, or perhaps just relief to move on from the narrative inertness of Episode I, in order to rank it ahead of the movies listed above. I know Signs has its detractors and Blue Crush may just be a guilty pleasure, but Crush is a guilty pleasure I felt fervently about at the time. Then again, none of us could know the extent to which the prequels would backlash on George Lucas until they had all been released and they were all sub-par.

7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004, Alfonso Cuaron)
Ranked: Too low, 24th out of 59
Below such films as: The Manchurian Candidate, Before Sunset, Million Dollar Baby
Explanation: Although I was enchanted enough by the Harry Potter movies at the time -- I'd legitimately liked two of the three -- it wouldn't yet have been possible to know that this movie would become the crown jewel of the series, looking better and better as each new movie disappointed me (until the final one, that is). It certainly helps my current appreciation of Azkaban that Children of Men would elevate Cuaron to the status of a god in my mind two years later. Still, I knew I really enjoyed this at the time, so I don't know how I would have ranked it behind a serviceable if unspectacular remake, a somewhat frustrating sequel (that's beloved by some) and a best picture winner I didn't find worthy of that honor, even if I couldn't have known it would win best picture at the time.

6. Wag the Dog (1997, Barry Levinson)
Ranked: Too high, 18th out of 39
Above such films as: Air Force One, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Explanation: Even at the time, I'm pretty sure I found this an overly smug satire that didn't make me laugh the way it considered itself so clever for doing. I actually remember resenting the critical praise directed at this movie. Yet as I looked back at my lists, I found it in the top half of the films I saw that year. I blame that decision on the fact that I had not yet honed my current sense of independence from what others think. I must have thought I "should" like this more than I did, and elevated it accordingly. Granted, the original Austin Powers is also a movie that's become significantly more beloved (by me, and in general) as the years have passed.

5. The Matrix (1999, Larry and Andy Wachowski)
Ranked: Too low, 22nd out of 57
Below such films as: Magnolia, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Dogma, Sleepy Hollow
Explanation: Oh, the perils of being a movie made in 1999. As I looked back on these lists, I found that 1999 had far and away the greatest concentration of excellent movies. In fact, all the movies I've listed above are movies I either like a little or like a lot. So the inclusion of The Matrix on this list, in this spot on the list, says more about just how much of a cultural institution that film has become in the intervening years -- even though it got plenty of attention as the surprise hit of the year it was released. And the funny thing is, I remember how much of a good time my friend and I had when we first saw it, coming in with no expectations. So it shouldn't have even needed that second viewing to help elevate it toward how I currently think of it, as probably one of my favorite 200 films of all time.

4. Disney's The Kid (2000, Jon Turteltaub)
Ranked: Too high, 12th out of 58
Above such films as: The Cell, American Psycho, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Explanation: Rule of thumb when it comes to movies: Always watch the ending. I watched The Kid on a plane ride to Los Angeles (I lived in New York at the time), and it charmed the damn pants off me. But it was the second film they showed on the flight, and the pilot had to shut it off before the actual ending in order to land. I thought we were close, so I counted it and ranked it and moved on. I mean, how much can really go wrong in the last 10 or 15 minutes of a movie? (Ha.) Well, I finally watched the end in 2010, and, well ... you can read about it here. (And for the record, it was more like 25 minutes that I missed back in 2000.)

3. War of the Worlds (2005, Steven Spielberg)
Ranked: Too low, 30th out of 73
Below such films as: Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Cache, Aeon Flux
Explanation: Sometimes you just never know which films will take hold and become favorites. I own War of the Worlds and have seen it probably four times now. No other film from that year have I seen more than twice, yet I ranked 29 films ahead of it. I don't know what I saw in my second viewing of War of the Worlds that catapulted it so far forward, but that's where it is, and it certainly should have been ranked higher. Darn, now I kind of want to see it a fifth time. (I know, I know, you don't like the ending. Get over it.) For the record, that doesn't mean it's now my favorite film from 2005 -- just that you never know why you'll want to repeatedly watch certain movies, even if they are not "better" than other movies that you don't care to watch repeatedly.

2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nicholas Stoller)
Ranked: Too low, 18th out of 87
Below such films as: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Taxi to the Dark Side
Explanation: Okay now, you might be saying "What?" It's safely in the top 25% of a year in which I saw 87 movies, and besides, both of the movies I listed above are pretty good. No, this one is again to show you how much this movie jumped up after two more viewings. When I ranked my top movies of the decade a mere year after publishing these rankings, I'd become so smitten with this film that I ranked it 18th again -- out of the whole decade. Granted, I may have been under the undue influence of an extremely heightened sense of appreciation for this film, one that probably doesn't translate to reality. (On a movie podcast last year, I actually said I preferred this movie to Jaws. Why those two movies were being compared, I won't get into right now.) But the fact remains that there's no movie I've seen more than this since I first saw it in November of 2008, having just watched it for the fourth time on New Year's Day.

1. Scary Movie 2 (2001, Keenen Ivory Wayans)
Ranked: Too high, 39th out of 73
Above such films as: The Princess Diaries, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Blow, The Fast and the Furious
Explanation: Did I have a brain embolism when I was making out my 2001 rankings? Or have I just completely forgotten the things about this movie I might have once found funny? The reason this movie is my #1 ranking mistake is because I currently think of it as so loathsome, so puerile, and so inept, that I have it ranked #3289 on my Flickchart -- out of only 3329 films total. That means that according to my current understanding of Scary Movie 2, there are only 40 movies that I've ever seen that I hate more. Yet in the year 2001, I thought it was better than nearly half of the movies I saw -- 34 movies in that year alone. What's the real truth? And could I possibly be so intrigued by this odd disconnect that I would actually watch it again? Eh, probably not.

Was this exercise interesting to anyone but me?

Eh, probably not.

Separating from 2011

2012-01-24T06:07:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year again ... the time to leave the year behind and release my rankings for the best -- and all the way to the worst -- films of the previous year.

I do it every year on the morning the Oscar nominations are announced, and this year, I set a record for movies seen in the previous year: 121. That beats my previous record (set in 2009) by eight. Funny, I don't necessarily feel like I put my mind to it much harder than before -- maybe I got in more movies "casually." (Define that as you will.)

I'll continue to see movies from 2011 -- not for a couple weeks, but I will. However, I will not continue to rank them. These are the rankings that will go down in the annals of my personal record book.

Let me just start by saying that 2011 was a weird year. A friend and fellow film critic characterized it as a year where there were many very good but few great films, and I kind of agree with that. Only my top three films are films I would not change a single thing about. However, it would not be a stretch to say that I love my top 30 films, and that I agonized each time a film I loved inevitably inched downward on the list. (In case you are puzzling over the semantics of this paragraph, apparently you can "love" a film without it qualifying as "great.")

On mornings like this, I usually like to let the list itself do the talking. So, here it is:

1. A Separation
2. Red State
3. Take Shelter
4. Another Earth
5. The Arbor
6. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
7. Anonymous
8. Moneyball
9. Melancholia
10. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
11. Shame
12. Hall Pass
13. The Artist
14. Crazy, Stupid, Love
15. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
16. Paul
17. Rubber
18. Water for Elephants
19. Meek's Cutoff
20. Cedar Rapids
21. Win Win
22. A Better Life
23. Captain America: The First Avenger
24. The Guard
25. Certified Copy
26. X-Men: First Class
27. Hugo
28. The Ides of March
29. The Future
30. Margin Call
31. Warrior
32. Bill Cunningham New York
33. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
34. Buck
35. Senna
36. Young Adult
37. J. Edgar
38. Everything Must Go
39. Surrogate Valentine
40. Bridesmaids
41. Martha Marcy May Marlene
42. Contagion
43. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
44. The Tree of Life
45. Terri
46. Beginners
47. The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence
48. Weekend
49. Rango
50. Higher Ground
51. Our Idiot Brother
52. Jane Eyre
53. Tabloid
54. Like Crazy
55. Super 8
56. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
57. Midnight in Paris
58. The Help
59. The Adventures of Tintin
60. Take Me Home Tonight
61. Jumping the Broom
62. The Lincoln Lawyer
63. Hanna
64. Limitless
65. The Trip
66. The Descendants
67. I Saw the Devil
68. Insidious
69. Super
70. Attack the Block
71. Madea's Big Happy Family
72. The Devil's Double
73. Gnomeo & Juliet
74. Pearl Jam Twenty
75. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
76. The Sitter
77. Bellflower
78. Your Highness
79. Horrible Bosses
80. The Beaver
81. Drive
82. Hobo With a Shotgun
83. Green Lantern
84. Mars Needs Moms
85. Skateland
86. In Time
87. Circumstance
88. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
89. Submarine
90. The Adjustment Bureau
91. Sucker Punch
92. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
93. Carnage
94. Battle: Los Angeles
95. Friends With Benefits
96. Mr. Popper's Penguins
97. War Horse
98. The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman
99. Apollo 18
100. Trollhunter
101. Red Riding Hood
102. 50/50
103. Thor
104. Source Code
105. The Perfect Host
106. Miral
107. We Bought a Zoo
108. The Thing
109. From Prada to Nada
110. Fright Night
111. Just Go With It
112. The Green Hornet
113. Beastly
114. No Strings Attached
115. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
116. Cowboys & Aliens
117. Drive Angry
118. The Hangover Part II
119. The Change-Up
120. Trespass
121. 30 Minutes or Less

Movies I most regret not getting to see before the deadline: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Margaret, Project Nim, Rampart, The Skin I Live In, We Need to Talk About Kevin

And I've never done this before, but here are a few "notables" to give my list a little context:

Film that kept getting better the more I thought about it: Melancholia
Film that kept getting worse the more I thought about it: The Ides of March
Film I was really too tired to be watching: Martha Marcy May Marlene
Film I will probably like the most better on second viewing: Martha Marcy May Marlene
Film I wish I could have ranked higher, but it felt wrong: A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
Film I wish I could have ranked lower, but it felt wrong: Drive
Similar sins, (almost) the same ranking: Apollo 18/Trollhunter
Biggest surprise, director: Kevin Smith, Red State
Biggest letdown, director: Alexander Payne, The Descendants

I could probably write up a few more, but let's just get this out on the interwebs, shall we?

This is the only time of the year that I really beg for you to comment. On the day I finish my rankings, I'm giddy to discuss what I've done and compare and contrast it with your own impressions of the previous year. So please, stop in for a comment or two, won't you?

They made BluRays of these movies why, exactly?

2012-01-22T07:07:00.000-08:00

We all know that prices for movies on physical media are seriously in the tank. Generally speaking, the only movies that can be priced at top dollar have been released within the past six months, maybe a year. (And special collections like Criterion, of course.)

Everything else -- even the good movies -- can be had for under $15, and usually under $10. That's both DVDs and BluRays. In fact, one of the most interesting parts about this phenomenon is that stores are observing less and less of a distinction between these two formats when pricing them.

Sure, there are the exceptions, like the clueless grocery stores that are still selling DVDs of four-year-old movies for $20. My guess is, they're not selling many of them.

So it's very common to walk into a store that sells movies and find a discount shelf with tons of decent titles on it. Just recently I walked out of Target with a $5 BluRay of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Never mind that I had an unopened DVD at home I had obviously never watched -- the $5 BluRay was attractive enough that I now have two T2s. In fact, I've decided I need to stop looking at BluRays at Target, period. I could walk away with several each time if I'm not careful.

But this piece is not about an idiotic chain that violates these BluRay pricing guidelines. It's about the idiotic companies that release the dregs of their back catalogue on BluRay in the first place, when their only possible destination is the bargain bin.

When I went shopping at Fry's on Wednesday to pick up a hard drive for work, I came across such a $5 BluRay wall, and because I can't help myself, I scanned it to see what BluRay I would buy if I were buying one. (For me, this is like the problem gambler who makes gentleman's bets to feed his addiction without letting it destroy him.)

I couldn't find a single BluRay on this wall that I would actually buy, regardless of price. And it's not just because they were bad movies from the past couple years that I wouldn't want to own. It's because they were bad movies from the 1980s and 1990s that I wouldn't want to own.

Which got me thinking: Why the hell would they have brought these movies to BluRay in the first place?

As a sometimes-anal guy and a self-described completist, I understand and philosophically agree with the idea of making all movies, however obscure, available on the physical media platform that's the current standard bearer. (That's in part because I'm old-fashioned and still love physical media.) But from a business perspective, I don't get it at all. When someone said "Yeah, let's do a BluRay press of The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag," did they really expect to make money on it? What buying public out there was frothing at the mouth for a forgotten 1992 comedy starring Peneleope Ann Miller? (I guess I shouldn't diss on Miller -- she does appear in The Artist.)

I haven't actually seen The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, but I just noticed a hilarious indicator that it might not be a very good movie. The lead "critigasm" on the poster above is "A screwball comedy!" See, the word "screwball" is not just an adjective modifying the word "comedy." "Screwball comedy" is an actual film genre. So this is the equivalent of a poster for Die Hard proudly proclaiming: "An action movie!" Which tells me there weren't many other options for critics praising Betty Lou. (In fact, it's very possible that this critic was not praising the movie, either. He might have been merely listing the film's genre in his review. But it's common practice for a studio's marketing department to excise any piece of any review for any reason, twist it to sound like praise, and add exclamation points at their discretion. Careful what you write, film critics out there.)

But this was just one of a bunch of hilarious titles, a sampling of which I emailed myself in order to refer to them later. A number of them were terrible straight-to-video movies (Sharktopus) or mockbusters (The Day the Earth Stopped) from recent years, but I get those, because at least BluRay existed at the time those movies were released. It's the ones that are genuine relics that made me laugh the most.

Instead of listing them and telling you why each one is a poor fit for BluRay from a profit perspective, I thought it would be more fun to just show you their posters and leave the conclusions up to you. Forthwith:

For the record, I've seen Consenting Adults, The Marrying Man and V.I. Warshawski. If forced to choose between these, The Marrying Man has a funny moment or two, if I remember correctly.

Of course, if forced to choose from the entire wall, I'd have chosen Betsy's Wedding, a 1990 comedy starring Alan Alda and Molly Ringwald. I remember it primarily as the other movie I saw in an illegal double feature the first time I saw Total Recall. But I also remember finding it pretty enjoyable.

So why didn't I include the Betsy's Wedding poster in my list of humorous posters?

Well, like the marketing departments of movie studios, I like to pick and choose only the evidence that actually supports my case.

The battle for the biggest output

2012-01-21T07:10:00.001-08:00

When a director releases two movies in quick succession, you tend to take notice. It usually says something about how prolific he or she is.

Not every director, mind you. Steven Spielberg had two movies come out a week apart in December, but they were his first two movies as director since the disaster known as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, so in that case it really was just an accident of timing.

With Steven Soderbergh, it's pure volume of cinematic output.

Soderbergh had a movie in September (Contagion, which I just watched last night) and now one in January (Haywire). He's clearly making them as fast as his body will allow. (Without the content itself suffering, apparently.) It's not the first such period of intense activity of his career, either. Remember, this was the guy who got nominated for best director for two different films in the year 2000 (Erin Brockovich and Traffic, the latter of which netted him the Oscar).

Soderbergh's frenzied moviemaking rate made me think of other directors who are constantly going behind the camera, and three other names immediately jumped to mind: Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Michael Winterbottom. Allen's and Eastwood's movies usually make headlines; Winterbottom's don't necessarily, because they're a bit more out of the mainstream. But these are three guys who are constantly delivering new features, presumably on or ahead of schedule, since that would be the only way for them to keep pace with themselves. True to form, each had a film in 2011 (Midnight in Paris, J. Edgar and The Trip).

So I thought it would be interesting to see who's truly the most prolific of the foursome, and I'd love to hear your suggestions for which others might belong in the conversation. (Current directors only, please -- that eliminates all the hacks who made four or five movies a year back in the studio system days.) I have my suspicions, but as I write this, I really don't know who will take the prize.

In order to do this, we'll need to examine each director's career, starting with the year that the least experienced director in the group released his first feature. We'll look at their filmographies from that moment onward, and may have to make some judgment calls if there are films whose status as a feature is borderline. For our purposes, documentaries are considered features because they run at feature length. Before we even start I know there's an asterisk with Winterbottom's The Trip, which was a TV series edited into a feature. However, you could argue that a TV series might take even longer to film than a feature, so Winterbottom should get credit for it and then some.

It turns out that the newest to the game is in fact Winterbottom, whose first theatrical feature was 1995's Butterfly Kiss. (Or 1995's Go Now -- I'm having a hard time telling which one was released first.) He'd made TV movies before then, but his first feature wasn't until 1995.

So starting with the release year 1995 and onward, here's how it looks for each of our contenders:

Michael Winterbottom

Butterfly Kiss (1995)
Go Now (1995)
Jude (1996)
Welcome to Sarajevo (1997)
I Want You (1998)
Wonderland (1999)
With or Without You (1999)
The Claim (2000)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
In This World (2003)
Code 46 (2003)
9 Songs (2004)
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006)
The Road to Guantanamo (2006)
A Mighty Heart (2007)
Genova (2007)
The Shock Doctrine (2009)
The Killer Inside Me (2010)
The Trip (2011)

That's 19 titles in 17 years, nine of which I've seen. It appears he has two movies due out in 2012, one of which premiered at last year's Toronto International Film Festival (Trishna), one of which is about scheduled to shoot (Bailout), I guess with the intention of getting released this year. But he loses out due to the timing of this post. (Sorry, I'm not counting the film festival premiere.)

Steven Soderbergh

The Underneath (1995)
Gray's Anatomy (1996)
Schizopolis (1996)
Out of Sight (1998)
The Limey (1999)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Traffic (2000)
Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Full Frontal (2002)
Solaris (2002)
Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Bubble (2005)
The Good German (2006)
Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Che Part 1 (2008)
Che Part 2 (2008)
The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
The Informant! (2009)
And Everything is Going Fine (2010)
Contagian (2011)
Haywire (2012)

And Soderbergh takes the lead with 21 films since 1995, 15 of which I've seen. I'm glad he didn't pull ahead of Winterbottom by only one, because I had to make the judgment call to split Che into two films. They were released that way, with separate admissions in most cases, and they contain over four hours of content in radically different styles. If that's not two movies, I don't know what is. (Though since they were filmed at the same time with the same crew, you could just as compellingly make the argument that they should be one film, if in this context you are quantifying a "film" as a distinct project in a distinct location that requires a certain amount of the director's undivided attention. So many ways to interpret the same information.) Incidentally, Soderbergh's Magic Mike is also expected later in 2012, with something called The Side Effects due in 2013.

Clint Eastwood
The Bridges of Madison County (1995)
Absolute Power (1997)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)
True Crime (1999)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Blood Work (2002)
Mystic River (2003)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Flags of Our Fathers (2006)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
Changeling (2008)
Gran Torino (2008)
Invictus (2009)
Hereafter (2010)
J. Edgar (2011)

Well, Eastwood has let me down. I guess he has only been hugely prolific since 2008, releasing five films since the fall of that year. His 15 movies in 17 years -- 11 of which I've seen -- leave him at a pace of less than one a year. Still, not bad for an 81-year-old, especially when many of his films are painted on a huge canvas and seem to require a great deal of logistics. IMDB doesn't list a 2012 movie for him, so either someone charged with updating his page is slacking, or the man is finally giving his weary bones a short rest.

Woody Allen

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Celebrity (1998)
Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
Small Time Crooks (2000)
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)
Hollywood Ending (2002)
Anything Else (2003)
Melinda and Melinda (2004)
Match Point (2005)
Scoop (2006)
Cassandra's Dream (2007)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Whatever Works (2009)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
Midnight in Paris (2011)

My suspicion was that Woody would be the most prolific. That's why exercises like this are great. Turns out he's only third most prolific, with 17 movies in the 17 years, 13 of which I've seen. But Woody does get a special commendation for being the only one on this list to make at least one movie (exactly one) in every year since 1995. If I were going only by U.S. theatrical release dates, Cassandra's Dream was released in January of 2008, leaving him with two movies in 2008 and none in 2007. But it played a number of places around Europe in 2007 and is generally credited with that release year. And sure enough, Allen's 18th film in the last 18 years (Nero Fiddled) is due out later this year. If you want to know how far back this streak goes, you have to go all the way back to 1981 to find a year in which Allen did not direct a film.

So our champion is: Steven Soderbergh! The guy who inspired the topic in the first place.

Take a vacation, will you, Steven? You're making everyone else look bad.

Wake up! Quiz time.

2012-01-20T07:23:00.000-08:00

The part of the title that comes after the colon is something I've written about numerous times on this blog. It's an increasingly common crutch, which we seem to think of as dumbing down the movie title, or at least the studio hedging its bets to include the name of the franchise for easier recognition.

Funny, though -- couldn't you say that the post-colon part of the title actually has a proud tradition in academic journals and books of great intellect? The title of almost every non-fiction book these days is constructed in the following way:

[Short clever phrase that hints at what the book is about]:[Longer detailed explanation of what the book is about]

Example:

Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater than the People in Power, by Wael Ghonim.

(This just happens to be a title I heard discussed earlier this week on NPR. The author is an Egyptian Google executive who created an anonymous Facebook page that helped lead to the protests in Tahrir Square. His book is not actually a perfect example of the phenomenon I'm discussing because a) the part after the colon is still somewhat abstract, and b) the full title, as listed on Amazon, actually has yet another colon and the words A Memoir at the end. But you get the idea.)

Wow, I'm already off track.

And the book example doesn't actually make much sense anyway, because especially in the case of non-fiction writing, the pre-colon part of the title is rarely the name of a familiar franchise.

Jeez, I am about to lose you. Please continue reading.

Anyway, that post-colon part of the title is now prevalent in Hollywood movies, with the latest example -- Underworld: Awakening -- coming out today.

So I thought, to mark the occasion of the release of the fourth (yes, fourth) Underworld movie, I would quiz you to see if you can match the post-colon part of the title with the appropriate franchise. (Fair warning: Just about every synonym for "revenge" has been used at least once, leaving many of these things feeling completely interchangeable.)

You can easily cheat, but there are no prizes, so it's hardly even worth it. To make it a little harder, some of these movies may not have actually come out yet.

(For those of you who live and die by the latest developments in the Underworld mythology -- all two of you -- please forgive me for making light of your obsession. I'm sure this movie will be, like, really important and good.)

Shall we begin? We'll start easy ...

1. Rise of the Silver Surfer

a) The Fantastic Four
b) X-Men
c) Blue Crush
d) Watchmen

2. Apocalypse

a) Underworld
b) Dawn of the Dead
c) Ultraviolet
d) Resident Evil

3. Book of Shadows

a) Sherlock Holmes
b) The Blair Witch Project
c) National Treasure
d) The Spiderwick Chronicles

4. The Lightning Thief

a) Percy Jackson & The Olympians
b) Thor
c) The Chronicles of Narnia
d) Clash of the Titans

5. Europe's Most Wanted

a) The Pink Panther
b) Deuce Bigalow
c) Agent Cody Banks
d) Madagascar

6. Retaliation

a) Resident Evil
b) G.I. Joe
c) Taken
d) The Punisher

7. Monsters Unleashed

a) Monsters Inc.
b) Monsters vs. Aliens
c) Scooby Doo
d) Pokemon

8. Armed and Fabulous

a) Miss Congeniality
b) Legally Blonde
c) Rupaul
d) Zoolander

9. Cruise Control

a) The Fast and the Furious
b) Speed
c) Speed Racer
d) Crank

10. Retribution

a) Ghost Rider
b) Resident Evil
c) Max Payne
d) The Crow

11. Texas Blood Money

a) Texas Chainsaw Massacre
b) From Dusk Till Dawn
c) Natural Born Killers
d) Deliverance

12. Marauder

a) Lara Croft
b) Starship Troopers
c) G.I. Joe
d) The Punisher

13. When Nature Calls

a) Over the Hedge
b) Open Season
c) Ace Ventura
d) Ernest

14. Back in Business

a) Barbershop
b) Daddy Day Care
c) The Santa Clause
d) Wall Street

15. Fully Loaded

a) Crank
b) Inspector Gadget
c) Herbie
d) Ghost Rider

16. The Far Side of the World

a) Pirates of the Caribbean
b) The Hobbit
c) Master and Commander
d) Prince of Persia

17. Bloodline

a) The Omen
b) Bloodrayne
c) Children of the Corn
d) Hellraiser

18. The Movie

a) Star Trek
b) The Brady Bunch
c) Garfield
d) All of the above

19. Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

a) Bruno
b) Borat
c) Ali G
d) Corky Romano

20. Chipwrecked

a) Alvin and the Chipmunks
b) Alvin and the Chipmunks
c) Alvin and the Chipmunks
d) None of the above

Okay, how many did you honestly -- honestly -- get?

I don't have the ability to write these upside down, so don't cheat:

Answers: 1 - a, 2 - d, 3 - b, 4 - a, 5 - d, 6 - b, 7 - c, 8 - a, 9 - b, 10 - b, 11 - b, 12 - b, 13 - c, 14 - a, 15 - c, 16 - c, 17 - d, 18 - c, 19 - b, 20 - a, b or c

Bonus poll question:

1) Which of these post-colon titles is the most ridiculous?

a) Port of Call New Orleans
b) Voyage of the Dawn Treader
c) The Owls of Ga'Hoole
d) Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

$2 popcorn? It must be the end of days!

2012-01-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

I sure picked the right day to see Take Shelter.

Because of Martin Luther King Day, my son's first of two trips to daycare this week was on Tuesday instead of Monday. The days he goes to daycare are the days I have some freedom with how to spend my time after work, because my wife doesn't need me to relieve her after a day of parenting duty. I usually use that time to go to the gym, but in the final week before I finalize my 2011 movie rankings, the call to the movie theater was much stronger.

A few days earlier I'd learned that Take Shelter, a movie I'd given up as not being able to see before I finalize my rankings (because it doesn't come to DVD until Valentine's Day), was still playing at exactly one theater in Los Angeles, at exactly one time of the day (5 p.m.). That worked well with my 3:30 release from work, even if I had to drive up to Beverly Hills to see it at the Laemmle Music Hall. So I hatched a plan to go, and my wife endorsed it. She probably would have anyway, but she was especially inclined to do so because I'd had a miserable night's sleep on the couch with a cranky child who could never get into a comfortable sleeping position.

I expected to pay $11 for the ticket and not buy any popcorn, but those plans soon changed when I reached the theater.

I did a double-take when the woman at the ticket window told me how much I owed for the ticket. I thought I'd only heard the last two syllables of the word "eleven," but in fact she'd said "seven." I can't remember the last time I paid only $7 for a movie ticket, even if this probably does qualify as a second run theater. (Take Shelter came out on September 30th, while The Skin I Live In, which is also playing there, came out two weeks later. Midnight in Paris is still playing there even though it's already out on DVD.) I soon learned that this is part of a special Tuesday deal, where tickets are $7 all day, and entered the theater with a spring in my step.

No sooner had I seated myself for the trailers than I felt a hunger in my belly. I hadn't planned to get popcorn, but the $7 ticket made that option seem more palatable. The lobby had been deserted when I walked in, but when I got back out there, there was one person ahead of me in the snack bar line. I worried that his presence would make me miss the start of the movie, but the trailers had only just started, so I stayed.

Thank goodness I did and thank goodness he was there, because I heard the words "special Tuesday deal" pass his lips. I'd been planning on spending $3.50 for a small popcorn, but his words caused me to examine a little placard that sat on the counter, mentioning their Tuesday specials. Even the largest tub of popcorn was a mere two bucks on Tuesday. I think that much popcorn might cost two bucks even if you bought it from the grocery store.

So I got to watch a damn good movie in the theater, with a large popcorn, for less than $10.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did have to shovel six quarters into the parking meter outside to cover the remaining hour before you could park for free. So that did bring the total experience to $10.50, plus the intangible cost of gas.

Still, when was the last time you went to the theater and felt you'd gotten a bargain?

Next thing I know, birds will start flying through the sky in strange formations.

PROTEST

2012-01-18T07:43:00.000-08:00

Today's normal Audient post has been preempted in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA). These bills would give the government new powers to block Americans' access to websites that corporations don't like, censor entire websites, and cut sites off from advertising, payments, and donations. This legislation would stifle free speech and innovation, and threaten popular web services like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Learn more about how you can help at
AmericanCensorship.org

Still a sucker for Titanic

2012-01-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

Hello, and welcome to my second straight post about trailers I saw while at the movies last week.

Looks like I still have the potential to weep like a baby at Titanic.

I saw my first theatrical trailer for the 3D re-release of Titanic before my 3D screening of The Adventures of Tintin. I have to say, the way it was cut to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" made me ready to well up with tears all over again. (Whether you can be "ready" to well up with tears or not is open to debate. I'd say, you either well up or you don't. I guess I'm being vague in an attempt to maintain my credibility as a high-minded film fan.)

I was genuinely surprised by my own reaction. Now, I have never thrown Titanic under the bus, and remain a person who argues ardently for its importance as a film and the uniqueness of its achievement. But did I expect that it would still be able to tug at my heartstrings, a full 14 years after I first saw it?

No, I did not.

I believe I've seen Titanic three times -- twice in the theater, then once on video. They would have all been within the first year after it was out. During the intervening 14 years, my affection for it has been only slightly muted, since I still consider it to be one of the most overwhelming and involving theatrical viewing experiences I've ever had. The unique combination of awe-inspiring visuals and human drama left me babbling incoherently when I left the theater.

I'd expect the visuals to still inspire awe in me, but shouldn't the human drama have lost some of its potency over the years? Especially as Titanic has been repeatedly parodied, as its iconic scenes have become so familiar to us, and as it has been the recipient of some of the greatest backlash of any film in history? As it's become downright shameful to admit that the justifiably reviled Celine Deon could have sung a song you even liked, let alone one that moved you to tears?

Yet despite all the factors that should work against Titanic still having an emotional impact on me, the way that trailer is cut brought me right back to December of 1997, to that theater in Massachusetts where I first saw James Cameron's film. (For the record, it's the old couple lying on their bed as the water rushes under them that devastates me the most.)

I'm going to blame it on the big screen. And the 3D. Yeah. Definitely the 3D. The 3D got me all verklempt. That's it.

But am I ready to pay $15 to see it again in 3D?

I don't know, maybe I am.

Now to figure out the alibi I'll use with my wife, a strident Titanic hater ...

John Carter had me at "hello," lost me at "how are you?"

2012-01-16T08:19:00.000-08:00

When I hunger for new cinematic visions that seem to represent a clear departure from things I've seen previously, John Carter is the kind of movie I think of.

Or so I thought from the first trailer, anyway.

Here's that first trailer:

Of course, everything that was minimalist, ominous and visionary about this first trailer felt pedestrian in the trailer I saw last week, before either Tintin or War Horse.

Here's that trailer:

Now I think it just seems like any other gladiator movie, any other ripoff of Star Wars, with one shot that seems like a ripoff of Avatar (which itself was a ripoff of oh-so-many things).

So I don't know where I stand with respect to John Carter. Am I excited to see it? Watching that first trailer again just now, I felt so. Watching the second trailer again reminded me that I might not be.

I think it gets at the difference between a teaser (which, even at 1:45, the first trailer essentially is) and a trailer (which tells you more of what the movie is essentially about). And so that explains the title of this post, which you thought was just a clever riff on the oh-so-current cultural reference, Jerry Maguire.

See, the teaser is kind of a "hello." It says "Hi, I'm a thing. You may or may not have known I was a thing, but this footage is designed to give you that knowledge and get you a little excited." A teaser is great, because it leaves open the possibility that the movie could go in so many different directions from what you're seeing. How skillful, for example, to give us the detail that this man started in 19th century England before ending up on Mars. That bit of information is meant to give you the Keanu "Whoa" reaction.

However, once the full trailer is revealed, it can no longer hide what it's about. That's the "how are you" -- literally, how is the movie. How do those images we've seen coalesce into a story.

And that's where John Carter appears to trip. Clearly, Disney thought its best bet to get a big audience on the first weekend (still almost two months off) would be to highlight the movie's action. You'll notice that 19th century London makes no appearance whatsoever in the second trailer -- that only confuses people who came for an action movie.

But what we're left with is a bunch of lame Star Wars prequel stuff, including gladiator footage that seems to be right out of Attack of the Clones (that was the movie where they fought in an arena while chained up, right?). Then there's a bit of warmed-over Braveheart ("He will fight for us!") or any of the countless movies that involve a rallying speech to an underdog army.

I guess I'm giving away the change in my excitement level by the poster I chose to accompany this post. If I'd still been in giddy-teaser-phase, I might have led with this poster, which is even listed as the "teaser poster" in the file name (I hadn't consciously realized there was such a thing, but it makes as much marketing sense as a teaser trailer):

Oh, how I long for those days when John Carter could still have been about anything.

John Carter seemed to have the cross-genre potential of a movie like Cowboys & Aliens, where elements of our past and elements of a science fiction future fit together naturally in a way that both expands and blows our mind.

Oops, except Cowboys & Aliens didn't pull that off, either.

Here's hoping John Carter pulls it off better than Cowboys & Aliens. If it doesn't, not only will it fail to be the first awesome movie of 2012, but it may not even be worth watching on video.

The King is Staying Alive

2012-01-14T00:25:00.001-08:00

There's a video store near my house called Movies & More. Maybe the "more" is what's keeping it afloat, since most walk-in video stores are having a really hard time these days.

I've never been inside, but I walk by it when I go grocery shopping at the supermarket nearest my house.

In the front window there are six posters. Four flank the door, two on each side, and two are above door level, one each above the two pairs of lower posters.

Four of those posters you would expect. Two have no business being there whatsoever.

The four lower posters, right now, are Abuction, Conan the Barbarian, Final Destination 5 and Dolpin Tale. All movies that hit theaters in August or September, all movies that must have hit video in the past week or two. All movies you would expect to see there.

The two upper posters?

The King and Stay Alive.

The King was released in U.S. theaters on May 5, 2005. Stay Alive was released in U.S. theaters on March 24, 2006.

Huh?

They say that the video store is a relic of yesteryear, but this is ridiculous.

The King is a title I vaguely remember. It probably caught my attention because it stars Gael Garcia Bernal. I now discover it was also directed by James Marsh, who has since gained a reputation as a successful documentarian (Man on Wire, Project Nim).

Stay Alive I remember as an anonymous slasher movie.

What in God's name either of these posters is still doing in the window of a video store is beyond me.

Why is Stay Alive still stayin' alive? Why is The King still king?

The only possible explanations I can imagine are:

1) The creative teams involved in these films have a personal relationship with the store's owners.

2) Being the two upper posters, they are somehow too difficult to reach.

The really funny thing to me is, it could be a case of false advertising. One of the knocks against brick-and-mortar video stores is that they have a finite amount of shelf space. As such, they must make decisions about what to stock and what not to stock based on potential profit. I remember one of my complaints about Blockbuster in the dwindling days of its dominance is that it stopped stocking even some titles that I thought would be slam dunks -- the specific example I wrote about at the time was The Full Monty. The explanation I got? "If it doesn't rent once in a year's time, we stop stocking it."

This may not be such an issue for the mom-and-pops, who don't have to devote an entire wall to copies of Transformers 3 when it comes out on video. But let's say they do follow the same guidelines. How many times could The King and Stay Alive possibly get rented in a year? Well, maybe more than otherwise since the damn posters are still up. But even then, it can't be much. What if I walked into that store and couldn't actually get either of those movies?

But as I said, I've never walked into that store. I probably should support the neighborhood video store, just because video stores are an institution I would not like to see vanish from the face of the earth. And by sticking with the giants (Netflix, Redbox), I am surely contributing to their demise.

What a shame that the most compelling reason for me to go inside that store is to scream:

"WHY THE HELL DO YOU HAVE POSTERS FOR TWO RANDOM MOVIES THAT ARE FIVE YEARS OLD IN YOUR WINDOW?"

It's Friday the 13th ...

2012-01-13T10:32:00.000-08:00

... so where's my crappy horror movie?

The Devil Inside couldn't have waited one more week to come out?

Steven Spielberg Today: A Portrait in One Evening

2012-01-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

Which is a fancy way of saying: I did actually manage to complete the Steven Spielberg double feature last night.

It's my second straight year with a themed double feature at the end of the year. (Yes, I know it's January -- we're talking about "end of the year" in terms of the previous year's films.) While last year I attended a Jeff Bridges double feature -- Tron: Legacy and True Grit -- in the week between Christmas and New Year's, this year I managed two Spielberg films -- The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse, though I should hardly need to name them -- a couple weeks later. (Both at the same theater, Pacific Theaters in downtown Culver City, where the staff is so skeletal that you buy your ticket at the snack bar and no one even rips it as you walk back to the screening rooms. After that, you're free to sneak in to a second movie without any fears of discovery.)

And naturally, I thought of a lot of different things to talk about. In fact, I've got four subheadings: One about the general experience, one about Tintin, one about War Horse, and one about both.

So let's get right to them:

Candy stimulation

If I were going to watch the 146-minute War Horse starting at 9:30 p.m., I knew I needed to come stocked with candy to stimulate me back into consciousness. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I get up a little after 6 every morning.

Last night's haul: A big resealable bag of Reese's Pieces, a box of Hot Tamales candy, a bag of sour gummy worms, a Cadbury Peanut Butter Egg and two small Redbulls. (Don't worry, I didn't finish it all.)

But last night's foods were chosen not for any preference I have toward them -- they were chosen merely for their potential efficacy. And in some cases they were testing a philosophy of what foods had a better chance to keep me awake when everything in my body said "sleep."

Let's start with the Red Bulls. This is actually my third time bringing Red Bulls with me to the theater in the last couple weeks. I started two weeks ago with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and continued last week when I took in the double feature of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Carnage.

To be clear, I'm not a Red Bull guy. I definitely had a period in my life when I thought Red Bulls were sort of cool, and I sort of liked drinking them. But they were never a natural fit for me, and it's debatable how much they actually do to keep me awake. I've been bringing them to the movies because the theory is solid, but after three trips to the theater with Red Bulls in jacket pockets (and jacket bunched up in my arms as I enter the theater), the jury is still out. I will say that I haven't more than nodded off in any of those movies, but I can't be sure the Red Bulls were responsible. However, when I brought two cans the last two times, each time I drank only one -- which means either that it worked so well that I didn't need a second, or that I didn't think a second would accomplish anything that the first hadn't been able to accomplish.

Now, the candy. The Reese's Pieces are a good energy crutch because there are a lot of them, and you can eat them regularly like you'd eat popcorn. (Plus, I really like them, and plus, they make an appropriate accompaniment to a Steven Spielberg movie.) Chocolate is supposed to stimulate you plenty. The problem is that I opened them too soon in the grand scheme of the evening. I didn't want to save all my food until the second movie, so I chose the Reese's Pieces to eat during Tintin. I hadn't intended to eat them all, but I have a hard time saving my concessions once they're open. A popcorn never lasts longer than the first 15 minutes. And I apparently hadn't learned my lesson from eating my Reese's too fast in a 9:50 showing of We Bought a Zoo just before Christmas, then fighting sleep for most of the movie.

So that left me with only non-chocolate candy stimulants for War Horse. Except, of course, that peanut butter egg, as my emergency "nuclear option."

The Hot Tamales and the sour gummy worms were both tests, as neither of them were things I'd normally pick out from a concession stand. (Gummy worms, maybe; Hot Tamales, no.) I figured the bursts of sour and cinnamon would be just what I needed to get my endorphins pumping a little bit, send some energy out to my extremities. I had to hope they would work at least as well as the chocolate, because I knew there was a chance the Reese's Pieces would be gone by the end of Tintin. (The philosophy was that they'd operate in a similar fashion to my Altoids, which I always have with me, and which serve as an emergency final option if all else fails and if I need some repetitive eating just to keep me awake. They're marketed as "curiously strong," so each has the ability to give me a little kick in the head.)

The cinnamon bursts did the trick. In fact, I didn't even finish the box and never opened the gummy worms, in part because a whole bag of Reese's Pieces and 2/3 of a big box of Hot Tamales leaves you feeling pretty oogey. But I did indeed feel like each one lit a little flame in my palate, temporarily warming my skull and keeping my eyes wide open.

The nuclear egg option was not needed.

Andy Serkis as a ... human?

It's been a good ten years for Andy Serkis. An actor capable of getting only bit parts in live action, Serkis has turned himself into the very face of motion capture technology, starting in 2002 as Gollum in two Lord of the Rings movies, then continuing on to King Kong in 2005 before again garnering awards buzz as another primate, Cesar, in last year's Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

And so it's funny to see him just playing ... human.

That's what he does in Tintin, playing Captain Haddock, who functions as the title character's boozy sidekick. He gives a good performance as usual, but it was his first motion capture role that made me ask ... why Serkis?

The captain doesn't look at all like Serkis really looks, but that's hardly an issue -- of his previous "mocap" roles, only Gollum is actually based on his own physical traits. Serkis is lauded for both his exceptional vocal work and his uncanny understanding of how to move his body. However, neither of these seem to be put to maximum use in Tintin, either. His Scottish brogue could have just as easily been done by Gerard Butler; in fact, I even checked the credits afterward to see if it was Butler, before remembering that duh, of course it was Serkis. And I don't necessarily see what special body movements he's bringing to Haddock, since all the other actors (most prominently Jamie Bell and Daniel Craig) are playing humans as well and doing the body movements just fine.

Good job, Vance -- the first time you write about the great Andy Serkis on your blog, you're dumping on him.

That's not it, actually -- I do think he's great. I guess my point is, not every motion capture role can be a role that needs an Andy Serkis.

Then again, even if you don't need an Andy Serkis, why not hire Andy Serkis? At least you know he doesn't command the same salary as some of the bigger stars, and there's got to be some benefit to the fact that he's used to having those little ping pong balls attached to his body.

And oh yeah, you know he'll give a great performance every time out.

I don't understand movie bidders

There are any number of scenes in War Horse that are supposed to remind you of scenes you've seen in other movies -- in fact, War Horse is as much an exercise in homage as it is its own entity.

The ones I found most frustrating, however, were the two different scenes devoted to people trying to outbid each other at auction for an item that holds great value to them -- in this case, the titular horse.

How many movies do I have to see where the two bidders are wincing over each higher bid as the crowd gasps behind them, unable to be sure if they can afford the price they're paying -- and then one of them submits a bid that is, like, three times the amount of the previous bid?

I guess it's the only surefire way to make a movie bidding war dramatically interesting. I mean, otherwise you're left with the winner having been the guy who outlasted the other, who kept submitting higher bids in the smallest possible increments until the other guy decided he'd reached his limit. After all, this is how every single bidding process in the real world goes down.

But in a movie, nothing could be less interesting. Which is why the first bidding war goes in increments like this:

"One guinea!"
"Two!"
"Three!"
"Five!"
"Six!"
"Eight!"
"Ten!"
"Eleven!"
"Twenty-five!"
(Crowd gasp.)
"Thirty guineas!"
(Another crowd gasp.)

Sold.

Couldn't these two men have worn each other out in the late teens? Maybe. But I guess it would have been boring.

So then (spoiler alert) the horse is for sale again later in the movie. This time, the ridiculous topper bid is 100 guineas. (The previous bid had been 25). Major crowd gasp there. Not only that, but the winning bidder tells everyone that he'd sell the jacket off his back to bid higher, then sell his entire farm to go to 1,000 if need be.

Ah, movies. So much suspension of disbelief required.

Two different Spielbergs have much in common

On the one hand, people are saying that The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse showcase two different versions of Steven Spielberg -- the old-fashioned director unashamed to make an homage to old-fashioned filmmaking (War Horse), and the technologically innovate director ready and eager to embrace the latest techniques (Tintin). (Funny, I feel like we were just having this discussion about Marty Scorsese.)

But seeing these movies back to back made me realize how much they have in common, in really funny ways. Forthwith:

1) Both movies prominently feature a drunkard who's trying to quit drinking. (Or at least theoretically wants to.)

2) Both movies include references to unicorns.

3) Both movies feature an incredibly heroic animal capable of incredibly improbable feats. (Not sure how they got the horse to do some of the things he did in War Horse.)

4) Both movies clearly hearken back to earlier points in Spielberg's career. (Numerous scenes in Tintin seem right out of an Indiana Jones movie, while I suspect Jeremy Irvine was cast as the lead in War Horse because he is a dead ringer for E.T.'s Henry Thomas.)

5) Both movies include a bidding war for a desired object (a model ship in Tintin) that eventually comes down to a "name your price" scenario.

6) Both movies feature a large amount of gun violence with little actual blood, keeping them family friendly. (Hilariously, in Tin Tin, a man gets machine-gunned down at a door, but doesn't have a single entry or exit wound when he falls through the doorway.)

7) The animals in the movies are named Joey and Snowy.

8) Both movies are largely unable to develop their human characters beyond the level of archetype.

9) Both movies were released in December of 2011. (Okay, I'm running out of legitimate comparisons so I guess I'll stop there.)

So?

Tintin = Innovative storytelling and visuals, no soul
War Horse = Plenty of soul, even more cheesiness

Released at the discretion of Netflix?

2012-01-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I received the movie Higher Ground in the mail from Netflix.

The funny thing is, that was the first day of its official availability.

Which means the movie actually got shipped out on January 9th, a day before it was officially available.

Now, I know that Netflix doesn't rip open a box of new movies every Tuesday. I'm sure they've had them in stock for plenty of time, and Tuesday is the day they are allowed to unleash them on the world -- Tuesday being the traditional release date for new DVDs and BluRays.

But I found it kind of funny that they were allowed to/inclined to jump the official release date by one day on shipping, meaning I'd theoretically be able to enjoy it on the actual first day of its release. I guess that makes a certain sense -- if I had been picking it up from Blockbuster or another movie rental business with physical locations, I'd have been able to see it yesterday. But it still struck me as getting some kind of extra benefit from Netflix, which was nice to see.

That's all.

The dumbing down of Arclight Cinemas

2012-01-10T07:39:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow night I'm scheduled to catch one of my final true theatrical priorities among 2011 movies: The Adventures of Tintin. In fact, I'm even thinking of making it an (illegal) Steven Spielberg double feature, following up the 7:30 Tintin with a 9:30 War Horse -- even though it's asking for trouble to start a 146-minute movie at 9:30 p.m.

A friend gave me a $20 gift card to Arclight Cinemas for Christmas, so I was originally going to use this to visit the nearby Arclight location known as "Arclight Beach Cities" in Manhattan Beach. In fact, I may still, but I think the times work out better at the theater mentioned above (in downtown Culver City).

Scanning the movie options at Arclight Beach Cities, however, I came to a rather disappointing realization:

Arclight isn't arthouse anymore.

And in fact, the "arthouse multiplex" -- a concept that only a big city like Los Angeles can support -- may no longer be supportable after all.

Before we go any further, I should tell you all a little bit about Arclight Cinemas.

The original Arclight is in Hollywood, where it is and has been the crown jewel of Hollywood moviegoing. It's got something like 14 screens on two floors -- well, three floors really, as the main floor has only the ticket windows and a restaurant, and you can take escalators either up or down to catch your movie. The lobby is simply breathtaking:

In its heyday, not only did the Arclight offer the latest in independent cinema and limited releases, but it also pioneered a concept about seating that I think is rather brilliant. (It was the first I was aware of to do this, anyway.) If you are late for the show, you simply won't be seated. So below each movie on the screen you see here, it says things like "Now available for seating" and "NOT available for seating." It's all part of Arclight's mission to give you a luxurious moviegoing experience, uninterrupted by jackasses picking their way to their seats five minutes after the movie has started. It's also one of the first places I remember seeing gourmet food at a movie theater -- you can get a chicken-apple sausage sandwich with watermelon salsa. Believe me, it's good.

You do pay extra for all these frills, but they're worth it. More worth it than anything was that Arclight carried movies I couldn't find elsewhere, because they had not yet reached the regular multiplexes, and probably never would. It was even worth the 30- to 45-minute trip to Hollywood.

But as is the case with any successful concept, it expanded. The Arclight concept is now in three other locations -- Sherman Oaks, which is in the San Fernando Valley; Pasadena; and the aforementioned Beach Cities in Manhattan Beach. Each of these locations has steadily watered down the concept a little bit, leaving that grandiose clock and the color of the wood paneling as the signature Arclight detail, not the movies they show.

But I didn't think it had gotten this pedestrian. Here's what's currently playing in Arclight Beach Cities:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
Hugo
New Year's Eve
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The Adventures of Tintin
The Artist
The Descendants
The Devil Inside
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
War Horse
We Bought a Zoo
Young Adult

Perhaps this list of movies does not leaving you gasping with incredulity. I mean, there are some movies in there that were not widely carried at other theaters, such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But TTSS is not what I'm talking about when I think of Arclight's unique, rare offerings of yore. The Descendants and The Artist may not have made it into every backwater multiplex in the country, but they are also two of the frontrunners for best picture, meaning Arclight can't claim it as a novelty to carry them. (Especially since I saw The Descendants in the theater before Thanksgiving.)

The movie that really concerns me on this list, however, is The Devil Inside.

When the movie that claimed the honor of "first wide release of 2012" came out last Friday, the only thing I could think to write about it, in my normal Friday spot, was to make an INXS joke. So I didn't.

Since then, I've thought of two other things:

1) So, are we going to get movies about demons possessing religious people every January from now on? (See The Rite in 2011).

2) So, does the first movie of the calendar year really need to be shown by Arclight?

This, more than any of the other titles on that list, is what worries me that Arclight is slowly but surely morphing into Just Another Theater Chain. If that happens, I'll be really sad to see it.

I think it's indicative of two dispiriting trends, one of which is probably more important than the other in terms of guiding Arclight in its choices about what to screen. The most important trend is, of course, the economy, or more broadly, the times we live in. A large theater trying to stay afloat in a tough economy, and competing with a myriad of sophisticated home video options, simply must take on its share of crowd pleasers in order to turn a profit. The Twilights (which probably played at all the Arclights) prop up the theater and give it the opportunity to play the Take Shelters.

The second trend that worries me, however, is that I suspect the audiences are really getting increasingly less sophisticated, and increasingly in need of popcorn movies as opposed to the acquired taste of the nourishment provided by independent cinema. I have no evidence of this, at least none that is concrete. But I think it's a legitimate worry.

However, before you lose all hope that a multiplex devoted to arthouse movies can survive in this economic climate, I should let you know that the original Arclight still gives us hope.

The Arclight in Hollywood is currently playing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Iron Lady, two movies that have not yet had their wide release, and is the only theater I'm aware of playing Pariah, which I'd really like to see in the theater but probably won't. It's also in the midst of a one-week return engagement for Drive, for people who like that movie.

However, even the Arclight in Hollywood is playing The Devil Inside.

I'll just try to think of The Devil Inside as the devil that must exist inside the Arclight, allowing it to shine the rest of its light of angelic, cinematic goodness.

How not to write a synopsis

2012-01-08T07:08:00.001-08:00

As a guy who's done a lot of film writing in my day, I've also synopsized a lot of movies.

And by this I don't mean I've summarized the plot of a lot of movies -- that's not the point of a synopsis. If you want that -- and I sometimes do, if I've been falling to sleep during the second half of a movie -- wikipedia usually has excellently detailed outlines of movie plots from beginning to end (even if they are not always excellently written). The spoiler alert is assumed.

The synopsis is really to give readers a taste of what the movie is about -- to give them about what the trailer gives them, assuming it's a trailer with the standard level of exposition. Roughly approximated, it's about as much information as you would learn in the first ten or fifteen minutes of the movie -- who the characters are, and what their (overt) goals seem to be.

And so it's very important not to write a synopsis based on information you could have only gleaned by watching the whole movie. If you're going to synopsize a movie for public consumption after you've seen it, you have to be oh-so-careful to remember what information you learned, when.

This is why I'm pulling out an example from one of my own former colleagues for this post. It's not because he's a bad guy (in fact I don't know him personally), and I actually think he can be quite a strong writer. It's because he pretty much blew some of the key surprises about Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol by failing to adhere to this simple synopsizing protocol (if you will). (But because I don't want to throw him under the bus, I'm not going to name him or the site name in this post.)

And because this plot synopsis will constitute a spoiler for those of you who haven't seen the movie, I'm going to invite anyone in that category to stop reading right now.

Okay, we good?

Actually, there's really only one sentence in his synopsis that's relevant to today's discussion, so I'll include only that. (Which will also make it less likely that you'll track down who I'm talking about.) Here's what he wrote:

"As the movie opens, Ethan Hunt (played once again by Tom Cruise) is busted out of a Russian jail, where he was imprisoned for taking revenge for the apparent death of his wife (Michelle Monaghan)."

If you've seen the movie (and I'm assuming everyone who's still reading has, or doesn't care if they haven't), you know that there are actually three violations of synopsizing etiquette in this sentence. In possible order of their magnitude:

1) At the beginning of the movie, we know only that Hunt was in a Russian prison. We have no idea why he was there until much later, when it is part of a key reveal in the plot.

2) That key reveal is that his wife was killed, and he took revenge on those who killed her. However, this reveal probably does not come until an hour in, at which point, we are supposed to take it at face value. Plot synopses are all about the parts of the plot we are supposed to take at face value. So even if her death was revealed in the first 15 minutes, and therefore appropriate as part of a synopsis, you wouldn't want to call it an "apparent" death -- that only signals to the reader that things are not as they seem. (Imagine synopsizing The Sixth Sense and referring to Bruce Willis' character as "a psychiatrist who may or may not be alive.")

3) By giving Michelle Monaghan's name in parentheses, you are essentially telling the reader she appears in this movie -- something that doesn't occur until its final five minutes. Sure, you could just be reminding the reader of what he/she knows from Mission: Impossible III, but unless an actor or actress appears in the cast of the current movie, parenthetically mentioning them in connection with a character name is misleading at best. (Of course, she could have been killed in the opening of this movie, but once they start watching, viewers will quickly realize that's not the case -- and have the rest of the movie tarnished for them at that point.)

People who write about film for a public audience have such a sacred responsibility to respect the intentions of the filmmakers, not to mention create the best possible circumstances for a viewer to receive and benefit from those intentions, that I can't help but write about this. I know that my appreciation of this incredibly fun action movie would have been severely compromised if I'd read this synopsis before I saw the movie.

So I hate to single you out, So-and-So from Such-and-Such website. But my own intentions are only good ones. And if you do happen to read this, maybe it'll help make you a better synopsizer -- and help save some of your readers from having future movies casually spoiled through careless writing.

A pretty backhanded award

2012-01-07T07:25:00.000-08:00

Organizations will do year-end awards for almost anything.

Sometimes, this will make them look silly.

Exhibit A: Redbox's 2011 Movie Awards.

As a regular Redbox customer, I received a link to this five-minute "awards show" (made with flash animation) in my inbox on January 1st. A number of smaller awards were handed out first, followed by the grand prize: the movie most rented from Redbox kiosks in 2011.

If you want to know who won, well, my poster art has already ruined that surprise for you. (As well as possibly giving you a special feeling in your special area.)

That's right: Just Go With It, the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston vehicle that most critics (including this one) did not like, was rented more than any other movie in 2011.

If you're being generous, there's a temptation to take that honor at face value. It's got to say something about the movie's popularity if it was rented more times than any other movie, right?

Right -- it says something. But maybe not what a casual observer would think it says.

If we unpack this a little bit, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Okay, for starters, in order for a movie to be a popular rental, that likely means it was not a popular movie to see in the theater. Unless you think there were a legion of Just Go With It fans who loved it so much on the big screen that they re-watched it as a rental, you're talking about rentals by people who wanted to see it, sort of, but not enough to pay theater prices.

Then you've got to consider how long a movie was eligible to be rented. A movie that came out early in the year, like Just Go With It (February 11th theater, June 7th DVD), had much longer to possibly be rented within the calendar year than a movie that came out in the summer. It stands to reason that there are a number of summer movies that might have overtaken Just Go With It if they'd been released a month or two earlier, or if the window were extended past the end of December.

And then you've also got to consider Redbox's internal considerations about how long to actually carry the movie in kiosks. While this calculation is likely a function of whether it's still earning them money, we can't really be sure what factors were involved in how long they made it available. It's possible that other popular movies were pulled sooner for reasons we wouldn't even know about.

Not to mention, finally, that Just Go With It was only competing with other movies that Redbox chose to carry in the first place -- though I'm sure that anything obscure enough not to be carried by Redbox would never be a serious competitor for this award, if it had been carried.

Those are only the empirical factors. I'd say there are things you can assume that detract further from this supposed "honor." Me, I'd guess that Just Go With It was primarily being rented because of the woman above, Brooklyn Decker, whose jiggling boobs were a focal point of the advertising campaign. Perhaps the jiggling boobs were not enough of a factor to get people out to the theater, but they definitely held enough sway (pun intended) to get people to plunk down the cash money for a dollar rental. (Plus, some people who rented it might have wanted to "be alone" when they watched it, if you know what I mean.) Who knows how much the rentals of Just Go With It would drop without those two double Ds.

At least the most rented movie was actually from the year 2011, giving the award a slightly greater sense of legitimacy. I suppose if you want to submit an argument on behalf of Just Go With It, you could say it beat out all the holiday movies from 2010, which should have made plenty of hay in the first half of 2011, when Just Go With It was still in limbo between theater and video.

The real problem with any "awards show" in which the big winner is Just Go With It is that it has pretty much zero prestige. (Not that "prestige" is what they were going for, of course -- any time an award is given out simply for popularity, you have no control over the results.) A lack of prestige is pretty consistent with an unmanned kiosk where you rent videos -- it's as "common" as things get.

The rest of the award winners bear out that idea. Here, take a gander at them:

Most rented action movie: The Green Hornet. See previous discussion of movies with early release dates (January 14th) having a distinct advantage.

Most rented action star: Angelina Jolie, Salt. Really? Does anyone even remember that movie? And who decided to rank a star independently of the movie in which she appeared, unless they were going to mention other movies in which she also appeared?

Most rented family movie: Rango. Which came out in March.

Most rented horror movie: Insidious. Which came out in April.

Most rented comedy and funniest couple: Just Go With It, Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston. I am starting to wonder how they even chose which awards to give out. The funniest couple award came from survey responses, as did the random tidbit (included in connection with the most rented family movie) that Redbox customers had the most fun with the minions of Despicable Me. Damn, I'm starting to like Redbox customers less and less all the time.

Most rented drama: The Tourist. Okay, so Redbox customers really like Angelina Jolie.

Most rented actress: Natalie Portman. Sheer quantity of movies is obviously a factor, as they mentioned Black Swan, No Strings Attached, The Other Woman, Your Highness and Thor -- all of which were in theaters by May. But at least you've got the reigning best actress here, which adds a little prestige.

Most rented actor: Owen Wilson. Again, quantity is a factor, with How Do You Know, Little Fockers, Hall Pass and Cars 2, though I think it's cheating a bit to include Little Fockers, since it's a supporting role.

The most puzzling award, however, was the Lifetime Achievement Award. I guess they're speaking only of Redbox's lifetime, because it didn't go to some big name who's been in the movies for decades. It went to Kevin James, who has been starring in movies for about five years. And the reason it went to him was because Paul Blart: Mall Cop was the fastest movie to reach one million rentals.

Again I say: People can only rent a movie if you are stocking it in the kiosk.

And if Redbox customers held Paul Blart: Mall Cop in such high esteem that it was stocked long enough to be rented one million times, well ... I want to distance myself from them even further.

But I'm the one who has just spent the better part of an hour writing about this.

So I ask you:

Who's the fool? Who looks silly?

Tyler Perry is bad at math

2012-01-06T07:12:00.000-08:00

Nope, this is not just an opportunity to take an easy potshot at a sometimes easy target.

In fact, I'm going to start today's post by praising Madea's Big Happy Family, the latest entry in Tyler Perry's series of Madea movies. A movie I pilloried in this space based on my perception of self-loathing in its catchphrase "Good afternoont" (see post here) was actually one of the most purely entertaining Perry movies I've seen. In fact, the Madea character herself, who has frequently caused me fits, may have been my favorite thing about it. Best use of the character yet, I say.

I wasn't planning to fit this movie in before my year-end rankings close (January 24th), but I happened across it at the library and needed something to watch at the gym. I'm glad to say that it did one better than helping me get through my exercise -- I was actually laughing, regularly, and when not laughing, I was enjoying the drama surrounding social issues. (Perry is known for alternating wildly between tones in his movies, and this one was no exception.) The cast was uniformly strong, but the character that made me laugh the most was the spiteful "baby mama" of Bow Wow's character, played by Teyana Taylor. Whenever Taylor says his name -- Byron -- she draws out the last syllable for the next ten seconds:

"By-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(breath)

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(breath)

eeeeeeeeeeeeeen."

I don't know, it just made me laugh.

(For the record, Bow Wow is now crediting himself as Shad "Bow Wow" Moss.)

However, I do have some nits to pick about Perry's ability with numbers, especially when he's casting actors to fill out the seemingly limitless branches of Madea's family tree. Specifically the ages of the actors, and the likelihood that they could be parents and children to each other.

I'm looking at two relationships in the movie in particular, and before I go on, I'll give you a spoiler alert, since not everything about the nature of these relationships is known at the beginning of the movie.

There. Have all the Tyler Perry fans who haven't yet seen this movie left the room?

The biggest surprise reveal in the movie is that Byron and what he thought was his sister Kimberley (Shannon Kane) are actually mother and son. She got pregnant when she was 13, so her mother (the great Loretta Devine) raised the baby as her own baby.

The thing is, The Artist Formerly Known as Bow Wow (and Lil Bow Wow before that) is 24, while Kane is only 25.

It's one thing to say that baby-faced Shad Moss can play younger than his age, which is nothing new for actors. Hell, Michael J. Fox was still playing teenagers when he was 40. But this movie doesn't present Byron as a teenager -- he's definitely in the workforce, or at least trying to be (he loses his job at one point during the movie). And so it's quite another thing to tell a beautiful actress like Kane that she can play ten years older than she really is. That kind of thing doesn't usually go over well with actresses -- or anyone in the movie business, come to think of it.

But that's probably not the strangest parent-child age relationship in the movie. The movie also features a mostly separate plot about a character who just goes by the name Brown (David Mann) and the character who is allegedly his daughter, Cora (played by gospel singer Tamela Mann). ("Allegedly" because this parentage is not straightforward either.)

There are three very strange things about having these characters play father and daughter:

1) Both actors are exactly 45 years old.

2) For reasons known only to Perry, Cora's age is actually given in the movie, and she is supposed to be 58 years old. So not only is she also playing at least ten years older than she actually is, but that means that David Mann is playing 30 years older than he actually is, if you average out the potential ages he was when he fathered her, erring on the side of making him younger, and call him 20.

3) David Mann and Tamela Mann are actually married in real life, which is probably part of the reason Perry did it, as an inside joke.

Of course, Perry himself is only 42, and his Madea character is supposed to be in at least her mid-70s, seeing as how she's Cora's mother.

Now, if we are going to proceed from the assumption that Perry was trying to be at least somewhat realistic, there are two things we can conclude:

1) There is a somewhat crude if ultimately complimentary saying about black people, which is "Black don't crack." Which, unpacked, is supposed to indicate that African Americans don't show signs of aging as quickly as those from other races -- their skin does not "crack." If you are to believe this notion, you could say that Perry is either using this notion to his advantage to cast by skill set rather than age appropriateness, or simply making fun of the notion.

2) Perry's movies are all about uncovering the pernicious underbelly of the African American experience in the United States -- when they're not all about broad physical humor, that is -- so the young age at which many African American girls become mothers could be one of the notions he's trying to wrestle with. Actors really can be close in age to each other, and play parent and child, if that parent him or herself was only a child when he or she became a parent.

But really, this level of analysis is probably not necessary at all. Cinema is all about illusion, and these days, actors can play a lot older than they are (through makeup) or younger than they are (through digital enhancement) in a way they couldn't in the past. Why be limited by age considerations if you know you have an actor who is right for the part? As long as the viewer isn't distracted, you're in the clear.

I guess I was distracted -- enough to write this post, anyway. But I still liked the movie plenty well. I went in with my arms crossed, and I came out with them open.

Before I leave you for this Friday, I do have one final question:

What the hell am I supposed to call this movie?

I am currently listing it as Madea's Big Happy Family in my Most Recently Seen section to the right. However, there's ample evidence that the official title is Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, and that's how I first listed it when I updated my blog last night after seeing it.

What a tongue twister. It's terrible to have those two words with apostrophes right next to each other, but it is in keeping with the naming convention for the last however-many Perry movies. The last two I saw before this I refer to as Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys and Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns. But that apostrophe situation gave me pause this time around, and I chose to use an earlier naming convention for this one. Namely, when Madea's Family Reunion came out back in 2006, Perry's name was not part of the title, either officially or unofficially. At some point along the way, however, he took a lesson from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and got on board with full authorship as part of the title.

Since I really don't want to include his name in the title this time around (because of the grammatical awkwardness), I'm seeking any excuse not to. However, most sources do seem to list it as Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, while Madea's Big Happy Family is the name of the stage play that inspired the movie. To confuse matters, the wikipedia entry for the movie is listed under Madea's Big Happy Family, but the first sentence of the entry calls it Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family.

Don't be surprised if I've changed my mind again by the time you read this.

Getting acquainted with ... Doris Day

2012-01-05T09:33:00.000-08:00

This is the 11th in my Getting Acquainted series. If you don't know what it is by now, screw you. Kidding! I watch three movies a month that feature a cinematic talent who is generally unfamiliar to me. After that month, we're fast friends.

If we played a game of word association with the name Doris Day, I might have said things like "the 1950s" or "wholesome" or "movie star." Those were the general ideas I had swirling around in my head about this actress, whose iconic status did not necessarily make me any more certain who she really was. (Is -- she's still alive. But she hasn't been acting for the past 40 years.)

It was a little interview with her on NPR -- I think it might have been Weekend Edition -- that got me interested in putting her on my list for this series. I didn't necessarily know that Doris Day was equally famous (if not more so) as a singer, so it was with a little surprise that I heard her introduced in the context of the song "Que Sera Sera." What surprised me more was that the song appeared in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. Suddenly I wondered if I were unacquainted with Hitchcock. I hadn't seen The Man Who Knew Too Much, but "Que Sera Sera" didn't sound like a song that would appear in a thriller, let alone a Hitchcock thriller.

Suddenly I became very intrigued, and decided I needed to get to know Doris Day. It made sense to start with the film above, since any opportunity to add another Hitchcock to my list is always appreciated.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, Alfred Hitchcock). Watched: Saturday, December 10th

But before I watched The Man Who Knew Too Much, I decided to watch The Man Who Knew Too Much.

In case you weren't aware, Hitchcock first directed a version of The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934. (Yep, this guy had a long career.) It featured Peter Lorre in the villain role. In fact, I would have watched my first Doris Day movie ten days earlier, except that it was this version, not the version I wanted, that was available on Netflix streaming. I didn't realize that until I'd sat down to watch it on Thursday, December 2nd. So I watched something else that night, but decided I might as well squeeze in Hitchcock's original version before I got to his remake -- might make an interesting exercise. Besides, his original was only 75 minutes long, meaning I could watch it over a cup of coffee, right?

Wrong. It actually took me about three sittings to get through the original, in part because I always tried to watch it when I really should have been going to bed for the night. But also because it was damn near incomprehensible. That's a pretty stiff criticism to deliver about a movie made less than a decade into the talkie era, but I found it to be incredibly choppy, and it had terrible sound. I could see why Hitchcock wanted to give the story a second shot.

And really liked the remake, starring Day and the great Jimmy Stewart. The story revolves around a trip by the MacKenna family to Marrakesh, in which the family meets a strange Frenchman who ends up getting killed under mysterious circumstances a couple days later. As he's dying he whispers a secret in the ear of Stewart's Ben MacKenna, leading to Ben's unwitting possession of too much knowledge. The secret relates to an assassination plot in London several days hence, and in order to find out what Ben knows about it, those behind the plot kidnap his son. Ben and his wife Jo (Day) are under strict orders not to go to the police, so they begin a risky mission to use the clues they have to find their son and foil the assassination plot.

It's classic Hitchcock in a lot of ways, including the virtuoso sequence in London's Albert Hall in the third act, which goes wordless for ten or so minutes as only the key orchestral piece plays on the soundtrack. The parts that didn't seem to logically fit into Hitchcock's ouevre were the parts that interested me most, however. Such as this uplifting Day song, used twice as a showpiece -- both at the beginning and at the end. Which likened those moments more to the typical Day fare I'll explore later than to Hitchcock. It's such a good song that I won't go so far as to say it stands out like a sore thumb -- if it stands out, it's a neutral to positive standout. I just thought it seemed like a strange addition in a Hitchcock movie, which only goes to demonstrate that Hitchcock was first and foremost an entertainer, with populist sensibilities.

Day's performance was also quite good. Stewart's character initially keeps her in the dark about what has transpired involving their son, and in a moment laden with a certain darkness that shouldn't be pondered too closely, he actually drugs her before telling her that their son has been kidnapped. This is surely meant as an act of benevolence, to keep her from become paralyzed with shock and panic. She still has those reactions, since she becomes aware of the kidnapping before the drug has entirely taken its effect, and she plays them quite convincingly.

You don't really need to know my detailed analysis of the whole movie -- these Getting Acquainted pieces are long enough without me having to delve into the particulars of technique in a Hitchcock film. So let's move on to the next movie.

The Pajama Game (1957, George Abbott & Stanley Donen). Watched: Friday, December 16th

When I saw this title in Day's filmography, I must admit I did not immediately recognize it as the name of a beloved Broadway musical. Instead I thought it would be something light and fluffy along the lines of Gidget, which is the kind of prototypical Day movie I thought I wanted to see. (To be clear, Day does not appear in Gidget -- but I thought she made movies like Gidget.) Maybe I thought the character would actually spend the majority of the movie in her pajamas, talking about boys.

What I got instead was a story about a labor disagreement in a pajama factory.

Who knew?

Although I am a lover of Broadway, I did not love The Pajama Game. I thought it was okay. My biggest issue was its appearance. Save one outdoor sequence at a company picnic, which brings the film temporarily to life, The Pajama Game takes place almost entirely in grimy interiors that are shot poorly. You'd think that a musical would take pains to be colorful and effervescent, but this one didn't. Not only are the set design and costumes drab, but the camera never seems to be at the right depth. All the musical numbers are shot from what seems to be a distance of about 15 feet away, which gives neither a sense of grand scope nor a sense of intimacy -- both of which are key to the charm of a musical. I did find a number of the songs catchy, though.

What surprised me is the different perspective this gave me of Day. It still wasn't what I was expecting, but it wasn't what I was expecting in a different way. As a union type who stands up for employee rights in the factory, Day was a bit gruff -- more of a Laverne than a Shirley. (Yeah, the pajama factory made me think of the bottling plant where Laverne and Shirley worked.) I had the sense that Day wasn't anybody's idea of a pinup model, and this confirmed it. However, it also made me realized I had miscalculated again on my assumption that she was involved with wholesome fluff. The Pajama Game is wholesome enough, I guess, but it definitely has its ribald moments, as well as drunkenness in several key scenes and a homicidally jealous knife thrower. Also, it's no fluff. The story is about workers fighting the big bosses for a minimal raise, almost like a precursor to Norma Rae or something.

Day's character is involved in a romance, with the new superintendent, played by John Raitt (Bonnie's father). However, it develops in fits and starts and has a pretty unsatisfying arc. What's more, I didn't find Raitt charming at all. The characters' positions on opposite sides of the labor dispute give their relationship some inevitable edge, but the problem was that I didn't see much reason why they fell for each other in the first place. And even some nice songs didn't do much to bridge the gap in my understanding. I just found them incompatible and without chemistry.

I should say, for the record, that this film was enormously popular.

With Six You Get Eggroll (1968, Howard Morris). Watched: Saturday, December 31st

After The Pajama Game, my December was quickly swallowed up by the holidays and having family in town for the next ten days. However, I did finally squeeze in my final Day movie on the final day of the year. (See what I did there?)

With Six You Get Eggroll came on my radar entirely because of its title. I'd seen it on the shelves at the library, and had pondered renting it as long as a year or two ago, simply because of that title. (And for some reason, was under the mistaken impression that Walter Matthau appeared in it.) I couldn't fathom what the title meant, but it seemed vaguely racist. Its grammatical incorrectness (there should either be an article before "Eggroll," or the word should be pluralized) made it sound like something a Chinese restaurant owner would say in broken English.

In fact, the line of dialogue is actually spoken by a young American child while at a Chinese restaurant, and his comment refers to the restaurant's apparent policy of giving out free eggrolls if your party exceeds a certain size. Since his widowed mother (Day) married a widower (Brian Keith) with a daughter, the four of them make six when combined with his two older brothers. So it's like The Brady Bunch, minus two.

I actually adored this film, and I adored Day's performance in it. (So I "adored Doris," you might say.) In one sense, this is the light, fluffy Day I was looking for, if only because it's really funny and she is one of the main reasons it's so funny. It does indeed have a sitcom setup, with Day's Abby falling for Keith's Jake, then trying to negotiate all the pitfalls of cohabitation with four bickering children, two of them teenagers. However, it wouldn't be entirely accurate to call it "fluff." There are some serious moments of apparent irreconcilable differences and the possibility of infidelity, though they all have warm, comic resolutions. (With one weird exception of a particular night when Jake cancels on Abby to go dancing with another woman -- she sees him out with this other woman, but the subject never actually gets addressed between them, oddly enough. He actually stands her up twice and gets let off the hook. Go figure.)

But back to Day's performance. At the very start I got worried, since her character runs a lumber yard, and I was already getting flashbacks to the blue collar milieu of The Pajama Game. But her job basically disappears from the narrative, which becomes more about the difficulties of single motherhood and finding a new life partner with three kids in tow. Day is pitch perfect as the the mother who has seen it all, whose innate instincts on refereeing her children kick in without a second thought -- which doesn't mean they aren't accompanied by a perfectly timed roll of her eyeballs. In fact, what's so great about Day's performance comes down to her impeccable comic timing. This really could be one of my favorite comedic performances I've seen from an actress. At first I wasn't sure what I thought of Keith, but I really came around on him as the movie moved along.

What's odd is that I found her adorable physically as well. While I found her appearance attractively bland in The Man Who Knew Too Much and really quite scruffy in The Pajama Game, a decade later I found her as cute as a button. I suppose that could have to do with the genre shift to straight comedy, which clearly suits her talents, as well as the fact that she dresses up well in the attire of the late 1960s.

One noteworthy aspect of this movie: It was interesting to see how much a G rating would let you get away with back then. Today, this movie would be rated at least PG, possibly PG-13, just from "adult subject matter" alone. There's all sorts of ribald material in this movie, from the neighborhood seductress who tries to bed Jake, to some rather bold sexual innuendos, to the revealing short skits in a nightclub during a surprisingly protracted musical number that screams "This movie takes place in the 1960s!" I also found it interesting that two of Abby's kids stand up in the bath, and you not only see their butts, but you get a very brief view of their frontal nudity. So what wouldn't even appear in a movie today was rated G back then.

One of my favorite things about With Six You Get Eggroll is the cast. All sorts of actors we would know better later on appeared here, including Barbara Hershey as Keith's teenage daughter, George Carlin as a wise-cracking waiter at a drive-in, Alice Ghostley as a zany housekeeper and Jamie Farr as a zany hippie. (The firecracker climax involves several police cars, several arrests, a mobile home, a man using a teddy bear to cover his privates, and a whole slew of hippies. If that doesn't make you want to see it, I don't know what will.)

Sadly, With Six You Get Eggroll was not a success, and it was actually the last movie Day appeared in. That's too bad -- as far as I'm concerned, she had just tapped into her potential.

Okay, thus ends the final Getting Acquainted of 2011. I do intend to resume the series after a one-month break in January. I use each January to gorge on films from the previous year before I finalize my rankings at the end of the month. January of 2012 will be no different.

But when I resume in February, I think I'm going to make some format changes. I love Getting Acquainted because it keeps me from getting complacent in my desire to continue watching older movies and becoming more familiar with cinematic greats. Without a structured way of doing that, I could easily become slack in my resolve.

However, I'd be lying if I didn't say that these monthly write-ups have become something of a burden for me. I've created this artificial pressure to say something long and profound about each movie I watch, and when I'm doing it with three movies each month, the urge to procrastinate is powerful indeed. That's why I'm only getting to these write-ups by the 5th or later of the following month -- it just seems like a big effort to compile my detailed thoughts on three films, especially when the first one is something I saw as long as a month ago, whose details may be escaping me by now.

So in 2012, I vow to keep the Getting Acquainted project going, but to write about it here in only abbreviated form -- just an acknowledgment that I watched the movies, then a few quick hits about each. Hey, we all only have a finite amount of available time, and if given the choice, I'd rather spend that time watching the movies than writing about them.

See you back here at the end of February ...

"Please don't let me die!"

2012-01-04T07:54:00.001-08:00

Some movies are so good that you don't need to rewatch them very often.

That seems like a strange thing to say, but it's true. I think I've talked about that on this blog before. When these movies come up for discussion, you just nod, and you don't even need to say anything. It's understood that they're great, and even if you haven't seen them in ten years, that doesn't mean that they are any less so, or that you appreciate their greatness any less or any differently.

Die Hard is one such movie. It might be 15 years since I've seen it all the way through, though I've certainly seen little pieces here and there since then. Monday night, we decided to watch the whole thing, as a final bit of our Christmas season on my last paid holiday until Memorial Day. (Don't forget, Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve.)

I didn't feel as viscerally enthralled watching it as I expected to feel. Some visceral thrills are possible only on a first-time viewing, and never repeat themselves. But I did appreciate the hell out of it, especially the minor details.

I frequently refer to Die Hard as the greatest action movie of all time, but I think that's a pretty commonly held sentiment. It definitely ushered in a new golden era of action movies -- or more accurately, like any trendsetter, it spawned a sting of inferior imitators. (Everything for about the next decade was pitched as "Die Hard on a ______.")

The thing that made it so different from many of the action movies in the Schwarzenegger mode that had preceded it, as well as many of the action movies that have followed it, is the simple understanding of what would make us love John McClane so much:

He's human.

The feats McClane pulls off in this movie are, for the most part, in human scale. Sure, it's questionable whether anyone could truly survive the gauntlet of physical abuse he endures. Sure, it's helpful that he picks the exact right moment to jump off the roof before the bomb is detonated. And sure, it's really helpful that he can defy physics while falling down that shaft, first falling out toward the center of the open space, then falling back in the opposite direction toward the outer walls, allowing him to improbably grab the lip of an opening on the way down.

But no individual feat is presented as something there's no way a human could pull off. And even when the movie starts to veer toward that territory, McClane's reaction to the feat in question brings it back to human scale.

Take that moment on the roof. McClane is muttering to himself about what he's doing and why he's doing it, and the fact that he must be crazy. It's a trademark Bruce Willis character trait, showing up prominently in Pulp Fiction and other films as well. A lot of it is conventional comic relief, and therefore not all that noteworthy.

But this moment stands out:

"Oh God, please don't let me die!"

He's about to plunge himself over the edge of a skyscraper, relying only on the fire hose tied to his waist to stop his fall and prevent him from pancaking on the sidewalk below. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Charles Bronson (when I first saw the poster for Die Hard, I thought it was in the vein of Charles Bronson's ouevre -- that tells you where action stood at the time of its release) would never say such a thing -- they would be stoical in the face of such steep odds. Which might make them extra macho, but wouldn't do much for their believability as characters.

A great action hero, pleading with his lord and savior not to die? Before Die Hard, we assumed it would rob him of all his authority. On the contrary -- it made us relate to him, and consider his feats all the more impressive because they were performed by a real person, just as scared as you and I would be in that situation.

(And speaking of his "lord and savior," I couldn't help but notice on this viewing that McClane does make a couple references to a higher power. At one point he talks about whether or not he'll get out of this situation alive, and says "That's up to the man upstairs." The funny thing is, you could say things like this back in the late 1980s without it being a political statement, because there was not a religious divide dominating the country the way there is now. Oh sure, there was still that debate -- the fundamentalists were called The Christian Coalition back then -- but it didn't seep into our sociopolitical fabric to the extent that it does now. I'm sure none of us thought John McClane's several invocations of God's name meant that he was a Christian or that Die Hard functioned as some kind of right-wing propaganda. Ah, to return to those simpler times.)

Oh, and having just seen Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, don't think I didn't notice how much the Burj Khalifa sequence owes to this scene. I won't go into any more details for those of you who have yet to see it.

Another scene that has always stood out to me for its realism is the scene in the bathroom, when McClane has to pick all the glass out of the soles of his feet. That more than anything serves as his second act crisis, the moment when he loses confidence and is not sure he can go on. Just think about that -- after being shot at, punched, kicked and dropped down air shafts (some of his more perverse tortures still lay ahead), the thing that could finally stop him would be scampering over a floor covered with glass. A screenwriter for a standard action movie wouldn't have even considered that as a stumbling block for its hero, because the presumption is that Arnold Schwarzenegger's feet are made out of iron that's impervious to a million little cuts.

As he's picking the chunks of glass out of his feet, he's nearly crying. Yes, this kind of thing would be extraordinarily painful, and he's not just going to bounce back from it. It's going to take every ounce of his remaining stamina just to be able to keep on walking.

And regarding his running commentary to himself ... how great that instead of stoically beating up Alexander Godunov's character, he's screaming at him that he's going to fucking kill him while he's doing it? The rage and adrenaline are building up in this man, possibly the only thing that allows him to continue surviving. It's what a normal human would do. A conventional action hero, on the other hand, would consider it a solemn responsibility to beat up this man, not the act of fury and vengeance indicated by the stream of profanity Willis lays on Godunov.

I don't suppose these observations are new to the discussion of Die Hard -- I mean, of course they're not. But just as we take great films for granted, we sometimes take for granted why they're great, and writing a few paragraphs on it on a January morning can be a nice reminder.

Drive out the old year, drive-in the new

2012-01-02T08:55:00.001-08:00

Parents going out on New Year's Eve without needing a sitter?

Mission: Possible.

On Saturday night, we rang in the new year with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and The Sitter at the Mission Tiki Drive-in in Montclair -- the site of both successes and failures in our moviegoing past. And we got to be (semi)-responsible parents by having our son right there in the back seat with us. (Better than leaving him at home with Jonah Hill, right?)

It had been a rather late-developing plan. The initial idea was to do more or less what we did for his first New Year's, which was go out for an early dinner at somewhere that was fancy enough to serve us a celebratory cocktail, then return home for a movie (last year, it was the thematically appropriate countdown movie Run Lola Run).

But this past Wednesday Mission Tiki sent me its weekly email advertising its offerings for the upcoming weekend, and it was clear they would be open on New Year's Eve. In fact, we were being told to "ring in the New Year under the stars." Since we'd failed to decide on a movie (Roland Emmerich's 2012 had been batted around, but did we really plan to see this behemoth a second time?) or a place to eat, going to the drive-in would take care of both, as we'd buy sandwiches to picnic at the theater. In fact, the sandwiches and the $7 entry fee per head might make the whole evening about as expensive as just our two celebratory cocktails.

We'd learned our lesson about trying to switch screens between the first and second movie (see the "failures" hyperlink above), so we needed to be convinced that both the movies were ones we a) at least sort of wanted to see, and b) had not already seen. The only one of the four pairings that met our criteria was M:I - GP and The Sitter. (With The Adventures of Tintin and Hugo, we'd both seen Hugo; with Sherlock Holmes and The Darkest Hour, she'd seen Sherlock Holmes; and with Chipwrecked and We Bought a Zoo, I'd seen Zoo. And besides, not even at a drive-in would I see a chipmunks movie.) And since they repeat the first feature after the second one finishes, we could risk switching screens at that point and might even catch The Adventures of Tintin. (Though it would be weird watching the clock strike midnight in the middle of a movie.)

Ah, but there was one more criterion we haven't mentioned: They both needed to be movies we'd be willing to see in the compromised environment of the drive-in. Here was where I almost tripped us up.

See, everyone's been talking about how great Mission: Impossible is -- and specifically how great it is in IMAX. If there were ever a movie to see in IMAX, this was apparently it. I knew that most of the action set pieces had been shot with an IMAX camera, but I didn't know what most of those set pieces were, meaning I might be able to claim bliss by virtue of ignorance. However, the film's most famous set piece -- Tom Cruise climbing the outside of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building -- would always haunt me if I didn't see it in IMAX. This is what I wrestled with once my wife had decided she was on board for the drive-in, lured particularly by Mission: Impossible.

I wrestled for less than a day. Ultimately, I felt pretty fortunate in the first place that my wife wanted to wade back into the unknown dangers of going to the drive-in with a toddler, and if I got hung up on whiny technicalities ("But I wanna see Mission Impossible in IIIII-MAAAAX!"), I'd run the risk of throwing a wet blanket over the whole affair. You can't see every movie you want to see in the ideal setting to see it. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good.

So we got all our ducks in a row and left around 5:25 for a 7 o'clock show -- in other words, at least ten minutes later than we'd wanted to leave. It's funny, because after last time, we swore we'd never be running late to the drive-in again. Last time, we were fumbling with our walkmen (that's how you don't bother the sleeping baby with the sound) as the opening credits were rolling, desperately trying to find the correct FM station on cheap equipment we'd bought for $10. When we got a late start Saturday night for the hour-long drive, I felt the same nerve-jangling scenario arising again.

Never happened. In fact, we were parked and ready to go at about 6:40 -- early enough even for me to sneak off to the bathroom for, ahem, something more than a trip to the urinal. (Since I don't want that innuendo to be misunderstood, I'll remove its usefulness as an innuendo by explaining: I had to go #2, and was already worried that I wouldn't have the time for it, leaving me in a potentially desperate situation during the movie.)

The place was dead. We thought there was a decent chance parents would see this as a way to get out with their kids for New Year's Eve, especially with two family-friendly double features playing. But we were one of only about a half-dozen cars facing our screen when we got there, and that number only doubled by the time the show started.

It went mostly smoothly. Our son slept all the way through to the Burj Khalifa sequence. At this point, my wife got into the back seat and fed him the bottle we'd warmed up at home before we left -- and I started to panic. See, my wife had left her walkman in the front seat -- I think she didn't want to get tangled up in the headphone cable. I thought she'd planned to just hand him the bottle -- he can drink it without our assistance -- but she stayed back there until he was done, and even comforted him when he wouldn't return to sleep. So I was filled with that sinking certainty that she was missing ten minutes of the plot (the scene where they set up the fake exchange at the Burj Khalifa), and it started distracting me terribly. Eventually I went diving for her walkman on the passenger side floor, and handed it back to her. It was only later that I learned that she was hearing the scene fine, albeit at a quieter volume -- there was a car less than ten feet to our right, and they were playing it at full volume.

Whew. Had the chance to ruin the whole movie for her.

Our son was up for a good 90 minutes at this point, but surprisingly, it was not that much of a distraction. We each took turns rocking him in place in the carriage, and even though he didn't go back to sleep, he was pretty docile. And all you really have to be doing is facing the screen with your headphones in. Who cares if you're standing up or sitting in the car? Seeing the movie is the important part.

And so it was that we didn't care that we both watched the first half (the weaker half) of The Sitter outside the car, as a sign of solidarity to the other person who wasn't doing the rocking/pushing. He finally went back to sleep, and we both watched the more heartfelt second half of the movie back inside the car.

We had decided beforehand not to stay for The Adventures of Tintin when it played again at 11. We knew that things would time out perfectly for us to get home just before the ball dropped if we were lucky, and that was a goal worth striving for. Being on the roads before midnight, rather than after, would also cut down on the knucklehead factor in terms of other drivers. But the people at the Mission Tiki made it easy for us anyway, taking the microphone during the closing credits for The Sitter and thanking us for coming -- "We are now CLOSED." So much for ringing in the new year. My guess is that they looked at the paltry attendance and figured that they could at least salvage something from the evening by sending their staff to a local party in time for midnight.

Sure, it wasn't like the old days at the drive-in. We didn't get to eat as much of the wide variety of food we'd brought as we'd planned, because it's much harder to locate where you put things when you're trying not to rustle and crinkle too much around a sleeping baby. (And that was even with my wife taking precautions to organize everything better than last time.) We lost a small bit of each movie to baby logistics. And listening to the movies through our headphones rather than the car's radio was a definite step down in the auditory experience.

But hey, as a New Year's Eve activity with a 16-month-old? First rate.

And we did get home before the ball dropped. In fact, it was 11:49 when we pulled up outside our house, and though our son woke up and started wailing, I appeared to have him down by about 11:58.

As soon as I exited his room, he started wailing again. But by now, it was a mere 80 seconds to midnight. We decided he could endure 80 seconds of wailing and watched the ball drop in Times Square -- three-hour tape delay, of course -- then finished the countdown with the customary kiss at midnight. In that moment, we really didn't notice the screaming baby soundtrack.

Just two parents finding that compromise between the way things used to be, and the way we're so glad they are now.

Seeing the future

2011-12-31T00:04:00.001-08:00

We all know that wikipedia is good for almost everything. Well, you can take the "almost" off of "almost everything."

One of my favorite areas of wikipedia is the "year in film" pages. Like, if you want to know the (North American) release dates of all the films that came out in 2011, go to "2011 in film" and it's all there for you. And, since I frequently do want to know the release dates of all the films that came out in 2011, organized neatly in a chronological chart, I do frequently go to this page. It's really useful for tasks like figuring out which movies I still want to see before I close my year-end rankings (on January 24th -- I know, I know, I mention it in every post).

But wikipedia doesn't stop at 2011. The film page for 2012 is almost entirely filled out. And there are significant entries for 2013 and 2014 as well.

It makes sense that these future release dates would be known. Everyone's talking about the May 2013 release date of the next Star Trek movie, for example. But it kind of amazed me that the good people at wikipedia have dutifully entered all known release dates for all movies in post-production, production, pre-production or even still in the typewriter of some malnourished screenwriter. Consolidated in a couple of exhaustive pages.

So I thought I'd take you through the trip I recently took down this rabbit hole into the future, to discuss some notable release dates of movies that are all just glints in our collective eye right now. So we don't have to dutifully blow through the John Carters and Loraxes due out in the spring and all the Batmen and Spidermen due out next summer, let's skip ahead and start next fall.

September 14, 2012: Resident Evil: Retribution. I guess this answers my question from this post. Hey, if there are going to be four Underworlds, why not five Resident Evils?

September 28, 2012: Looper. A sort of Inception-like thriller from Brick director Rian Johnson. Another blogger I read mentioned this movie in something like the summer of 2010, so it blows my mind that it's still this far from coming out.

October 5, 2012: Taken 2. Liam Neeson's daughter gets kidnapped again -- I guess. Maybe this time it's by the Taliban. Go America!

October 5, 2012 and October 26, 2012: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D and Halloween 3D. My my. More unnaturally fast reboots of horror series that had already been recently rebooted. But this time -- 3D!

November 2, 2012: Red Dawn. Another much-discussed remake. Another miniscule box office haul.

November 9, 2012: Skyfall. Doesn't it feel very recent that the James Bond franchise was in serious jeopardy of not continuing?

November 16, 2012: Twilight - Breaking Dawn: Part 2. It will be over. Finally.

November 21, 2012: Gravity. Alfonso Cuaran directs his follow-up to the masterpiece Children of Men. Finally.

December 14, 2012: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I have to say, we sort of expected it. (But I'm looking forward to it.)

December 21, 2012: Life of Pi. I read this book. I remember like five years ago when they were talking about M. Night Shyamalan directing this. Now it's Ang Lee.

December 21, 2012: World War Z. I did not read this book. I tried. I really tried. I just found it too boring to read interviews with people talking about a zombie war that had already happened. Where's the immediate danger?

December 25, 2012: Django Unchained. Quentin.

December 25, 2012: The Great Gatsby. The prestige picture of next holiday season. Directed by Baz Luhrmann! In 3D!

Okay, 2012 release dates are not that impressive. But when we hit the year 2013, it starts to feel spooky. Who knows what the world could be like two years from now? (Okay, just over a year, but go with me -- it sounds futuristic.)

March 8, 2013: Oz: The Great and Powerful. Did you know Sam Raimi was directing this?

March 15, 2013: Ender's Game. Read this too. The kid from Hugo is starring. Let's hope he's not too old by then. (Well, they're filming now, so, I guess it should be okay.)

March 27, 2013: Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters. Really.

March 29, 2013: The Host. American remake.

April 12, 2013: Evil Dead. Not directed by Raimi -- he's busy on some Wizard of Oz sequel/prequel -- but at least he's producing.

May 3, 2013: Iron Man 3. So I guess he doesn't die in The Avengers.

May 10, 2013: Pacific Rim. Guillermo del Toro's horror movie that I actually think might be sort of like The Host. Have been hearing about this since 2009, it seems like.

May 17, 2013: Untitled Star Trek Sequel. And we get to the untitleds. (Actually, there were already some that I skipped over.)

May 24, 2013: Fast Six. Of course there is.

May 31, 2013: The Lone Ranger. Johnny Depp as Tonto.

June 14, 2013: Man of Steel. Superman reboot. I originally thought it was coming out next summer. But maybe one summer couldn't handle one movie each for the holy triumvirate of superheroes: Superman, Batman and Spiderman. (Or, more realistically, they aren't on that shooting schedule and never were.)

July 3, 2013: Despicable Me 2. Does there? Have to be?

July 3, 2013: Robopocalypse. Spielberg.

July 26, 2013: Dirty Dancing. And why is it taking them this long to churn out this film?

August 2, 2013: The Smurfs 2 and Red 2. Red will fight blue in an epic battle to the death.

November 15, 2013: Thor 2. I guess he doesn't die in The Avengers, either. Aren't these interweaving plot lines going to get messy?

December 13, 2013: The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Keeping with the previous Tolkien release schedule of coming out in consecutive Decembers.

2014? Could there be?

April 4, 2014: Untitled Marvel Studios Film. They don't know what it will be about, but they know there will be one and they know it will come out on this date.

May 2, 2014: The Amazing Spider-Man 2: First sequel to a movie that has not come out yet. Bold.

May 16, 2014: Untitled Marvel Studios Film. They also don't know what this will be about, but they also know that this will be the date it's unleashed on the world. Aren't they supposed to eventually make Ant-Man?

June 20, 2014: How to Train Your Dragon 2. Not, apparently, "How to quickly follow up a successful movie with a sequel."

December 2014 TBA: Avatar 2. At last, a release date that is not apparently set in stone. My contention: No one really cares about seeing what happens next with these characters.

What? 2015? Is that even the name of a year?

December 2015 TBA: Avatar 3. See previous comment.

And that's where the projections end, at least. However, I should say that wikipedia offers visible, functional hyperlinks to the years all the way out to 2023. (They all redirect to the page called "2013 and beyond in film." Which itself is probably a short-timer, since 2014 will soon have enough entries to stand on its own.)

I just find it interesting that there are established release dates for movies that are coming out two-and-a-half years from now. Of course they aren't set in stone, but I do think it's funny. I suppose you want to get in early, stake your claim, not lose the release date to another movie intended for the same target audience.

If it isn't obvious, seeing the future like this gives me a bit of a thrill (even as I tease). So as we say goodbye to 2011, I'm already ready to say hello to ... 2016.

I mean, it can't be long before "2016 in film" is up and running.

A thousand trips to the movies

2011-12-30T07:58:00.001-08:00

I keep track of a lot of personal movie-related statistics, many of which I've discussed here before.

One of these is the number of movies I've seen for the first time in the theater.

Last night, that number hit 1,000.

The movie that took the title was David Fincher's Hollywood remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It narrowly edged out Albert Nobbs, which has garnered buzz for Glenn Close's portrayal of a 19th century woman passing as a man. Of the two of these movies, Tattoo was the one that interested me more. But Nobbs was finishing a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles last night, and I thought it would be fun to take my opportunity to see it in time to rank it with this year's films. (It doesn't open wide until January 27th.)

I have actually been to a movie theater more than 1,000 times in my life. There are 20-25 movies I've seen in the theater more than once. But as of last night, it's 1,000 different movies seen in the theater.

What's interesting to note is how that number compares to the number of movies I've seen total, which is 3,422. Movies seen on video outnumber those seen in the theater by nearly a 2.5 to 1 margin. I guess for the average person, it might be much higher, since I prioritize getting out to the theater more than most people do. (Then again, I also watch more movies at home than most people do, so maybe the ratio would be about the same.)

But my 1,000th theatrically screened movie was only one of several blog topics that came to mind about seeing The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last night. Here, I've created subheadings to discuss the others.

Setting the mood

I picked a perfect night to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I suppose it might have also been a thematically appropriate night for Albert Nobbs, if Nobbs were set on the Scottish moors rather than in Ireland.

See, we had perhaps our foggiest night of the year last night. When I walked out of the house to leave for the movie, the landscape was suffused by fog. Not just a mist, but thick, mashed potato fog. Something that seemed to be a perfect complement to the wintry Swedish atmosphere I'd seen in the trailers for Tattoo.

This was the scene as I drove to the theater, listening to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo score on my ipod, hooked up through my car stereo. (I don't have the Albert Nobbs score -- strike two, Albert.)

I'm a huge Nine Inch Nails fan (as I've discussed ad infinitum, it feels like), so Trent Reznor's scores (composed with Atticus Ross) for The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have been right up my alley. Except I was having an extremely difficult time getting into the Tattoo score, seeing as how it is a whopping 39 tracks in length, and actually exceeds the movie's 158-minute running time. In fact, I'd been trudging through a bunch of atmospheric ambient noise for 26 tracks in the week before Christmas, before I stopped listening and failed to continue. Last night I finally picked back up, and it was just the right time to do so -- the last ten tracks or so of the score are phenomenal.

The car ride to the theater was only long enough for one or two of those tracks, but then I switched from car speakers to headphones as I listened to the rest, walking up Sepulveda Blvd. to the Howard Hughes Center, where my 8:15 show of Tattoo was scheduled to start. The fog enveloped everything in a surreal quality that was matched by the ethereal music pouring into my ears.

How to shave $3 off the price of your ticket

And why was I walking up Sepulveda to get to Rave Motion Pictures, the theater in the Howard Hughes Center? Because I've decided that the $2 surcharge to see movies at this theater is no longer something I want to pay.

Rave Motion Pictures -- nee The Bridge, or Cinema du Lux at The Bridge -- used to be the crown jewel of the Los Angeles theater scene. When it opened in I wanna say 2003, it was state-of-the-art in modern adult theatergoing, with fancy screening rooms and a fully stocked upscale bar. However, since then, it has been eclipsed by other new crown jewels, making it sort of the Skydome of new theaters. (That's a baseball reference, referring to the state-of-the-art stadium in Toronto that was initially heavily praised for being new and modern -- before a slew of cozy postmodern stadiums made it seem archaic.) But even though it is no longer a destination that would bring in moviegoers outside of the local area, it still has great screens, and is still one of our top few choices for where to see new movies projected in grand scale.

The only nuisance is that the ticket prices are bumped up by $2 for the flat parking fee you have to pay to park in the Howard Hughes Center lot.

And you pretty much have to pay it, because there's no free lot within what most people would consider easy walking distance.

However, I am not most people.

Last night I parked down the hill on a side street, leaving me a 10-12 minute walk to get to the theater. Honestly, I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me earlier. I guess it's not possible to do this when you're rushing to get to the movie on time, but the 8:15 showtime of Tattoo was timed perfectly to allow me the luxury of a gradual arrival. It allowed me to put our son to bed just before 7 and eat a quick dinner, and still have time to get to the theater early enough not to pay for parking. In fact, I hate that more movies don't start between 8 and 9 o'clock. In this case, Tattoo was playing on two screens, meaning there was a much greater likelihood of a starting time in this range. That's really the way to go -- see a movie at a theater where it's playing on multiple screens, and you can find that elusive start time.

However, it was a calculated risk. Although Rave Motion Pictures does have some theaters with assigned seating, the lion's share of them are old-fashioned free-for-alls. You have to get there early if you want to avoid sitting in the front row. And because I couldn't select my seats online -- a great way to tell what percentage of the seats have been sold -- I had no way of knowing, when leaving the house, whether I'd be walking into a near sold-out situation. (That's where I shaved off the other buck -- not buying the ticket in advance, and therefore saving the $1 handling fee. If you aren't buying an assigned seat, what's the point of purchasing in advance?) And since this was a screening of a much-buzzed-about movie that had only been out for eight days, during the prime evening hours in the week between Christmas and New Year's, there was a good chance I was setting myself up to fail.

Fortunately, when I arrived at 7:45, there were not large numbers of people teeming outside the ticket window. Shortly afterward, I discovered that the movie was only 6% sold at the time. Score. It might have been a bit sad to see the movie with less than 10% of the seats filled, so I'm glad to say that they were at least a third occupied by the time the movie started.

What's more, I really enjoyed that walk. Not only did I continue to listen to the score on my ipod, but I approached the Howard Hughes Center from a different angle than I ever approach it. It was cool to see the building's various neon features glowing behind a haze of fog, and I even got to take it all in while riding an external escalator. (It's the simple pleasures, you know.) If I'd parked in the lot, I would have been pretty much inside the building the whole time.

So, did I like it?

Yes indeed. It was by far some of my favorite cinematography of the year, and Fincher created exactly the mood I was hoping for. And as you've heard, Rooney Mara is a revelation.

Still, I have some complaints that may be inextricably linked to the source material. Both in the original Swedish version and in this version, there are story aspects that I think don't have the affect Stieg Larsson intended them to have. (A strange comment to make about one of the most popular books of the last decade.) I'll leave that comment vague for those who haven't seen it, but I guess I will never be a truly devoted fan of the story that's there, meaning that the potential impact of any film adaptation is going to be somewhat limited from the start.

For what it was, though -- quite impressive.

Now, bring on the next 1,000 trips to the movies. I just hope that 1,000 theatrical visits from now, people will still be going to a thing called a movie theater.

Um, Blockbuster? This is why you're bankrupt.

2011-12-29T08:29:00.000-08:00

If you've read any of my posts on Blockbuster (check out the corresponding label if you're interested), you know that I broke with the company in September of 2010 and have been exclusively a Netflix customer since then. (Bad timing, Vance, as this was about Netflix's worst year on record.)

Okay, not exclusively. I also frequent Redbox, the library and OnDemand. But also not exclusively Netflix because I've had two additional Blockbuster experiences. One when I rented the BluRay of Disney's A Christmas Carol from a store last Christmas, because I couldn't find the BluRay available elsewhere, and one when I rented Everything Must Go from a kiosk back in October, on a lark.

The Blockbuster kiosk had me kind of intrigued. Yeah, it was Blockbuster coming late to the party once again, this time competing with the Redbox business model the way it tried to compete with the Netflix model with DVDs through the mail. But as with the through-the-mail option, there's at least one advantage over its competition that Blockbuster brings to the table. Unlike Netflix and Redbox, Blockbuster does not have a deal with the studios to delay availability of most new releases by 28 days. This means that if I'm absolutely jonesing to watch a movie that just became available on DVD for the first time, I can visit a Blockbuster kiosk and scratch that itch 28 days earlier than I could scratch it at a Redbox kiosk. A particularly valuable advantage at this time of year, when I'm trying to cram in 2011 movies before I finalize my year-end rankings on January 24th (the morning the Oscar nominations are announced).

So I used that logic to make my second trip to a Blockbuster kiosk last night. Unlike with Redbox kiosks, which seem to be everywhere, I know of only one Blockbuster kiosk near my house. (Another sure sign of the company's ailing fortunes.) Fortunately, it's pretty near -- only a longer drive than the closest Redbox kiosk by a minute or two.

The goal was to see The Hangover Part II. My wife and I have had a downer couple of days since Tuesday, when we discovered that we had lost out on an amazing house we bid on last week. (I don't think I've mentioned it before, but we're house hunting.) We wanted to laugh last night, and she thought the best way to do that would be to see the second Hangover. Even though my own personal understanding of the film's quality is that we will cringe more than we will laugh, I also wanted nothing more than to deliver her the movie of her choice. Especially since at this time of the year, I don't discriminate -- I just want to consume 2011 movies where I can, when I can.

Pretty soon after getting to the kiosk, I determined that The Hangover Part II was not one of the movies resting inside its belly. I scrolled back through the screens chronologically, then searched by name just to be sure. I found it with a Coming Soon banner painted across its poster.

So this was my first warning that Blockbuster wasn't offering the advantages I thought it offered. I knew for a fact that The Hangover Part II would be available from Netflix (and presumably Redbox, which seems to be on the exact same schedule) on Tuesday. Well, this was also its Blockbuster availability date. What happened to that 28-day window, where Blockbuster finds most of its competitive advantage? Nowhere to be found.

Nor was that window to be found for our second choice: Cowboys & Aliens. My wife knows the film's screenwriters, and we had originally intended to see it in the theater. As with The Hangover, Cowboys & Aliens becomes available on Netflix and Redbox on Tuesday January 3rd. Which is also the day it will magically appear in this Blockbuster kiosk.

Strike two.

So I texted my wife some other options -- options which, on the whole, were things I could have just as easily scored in a Redbox kiosk. But I was here now, so it was easiest just to continue down the road with Blockbuster. She didn't like most of the options, but we did decide on one movie that we both (at least sort of) wanted to see: Mr. Popper's Penguins. And here I felt a momentary surge of renewed confidence in the Blockbuster kiosk, because I also knew for a fact that I'd have to wait until next week to get Mr. Popper's Penguins from the aforementioned two competitors.

That surge of renewed confidence lasted all of 30 seconds.

When I went to check Mr. Popper out, I saw that the rental fee was not $1 or $1.50, the going Redbox fee. (And the fee I'd paid for Everything Must Go at this very kiosk two months ago.) In fact, Blockbuster wanted a whole three bucks for me to take home Jim Carrey and a bunch of waterfowl.

Okay, now Blockbuster has sacrificed its entire advantage. Blockbuster does carry certain titles its competitors don't carry until later. But it charges a premium for that service -- two to three times the price of a regular rental. And now I understood what it meant when I'd been going through the screens of available movies on this kiosk, and certain titles, which have been available on DVD for three or more months, were advertised as being $1 rentals. My brain saw that, but if it made anything of it, my brain assumed that the $1 rental was being advertised as an alternative to a $1.50 rental, or something like that. My brain never assumed that the regularly priced rental was a whopping three bucks -- and that was even for a number of movies currently available from Redbox.

Look, I get it -- Blockbuster has its financial realities it has to deal with. If the past couple years have made anything clear to Blockbuster, it's that financial realities dictate almost everything about how you do, or don't do, business.

But if it can't even position itself as a viable alternative to Redbox with a few distinct and meaningful advantages, what hope does it have? The battle against Netflix has already been lost. The battle against Redbox could be over before it even begins.

I grumbled and paid the $3 and rented Mr. Popper's Penguins. I see everything Jim Carrey makes, but this movie had only a few scattered cute moments amid a sea of Hollywood conventionality. In fact, as my wife pointed out, it's basically the same story as Carrey's own Liar Liar, where the career-oriented jerk has to learn to be a better father and husband. (In this case, ex-husband -- he's trying to win back his ex-wife. Does he succeed? Um, yeah. Of course he does.)

As one final note about Blockbuster's cluelessness, even the packaging for the DVDs is deficient. Whereas Redbox delivers its DVDs and BluRays in these nice plastic containers that snap tightly shut, keeping the disc nestled safely inside, Blockbuster uses these odd black sheaths made out of some kind of military grade plastic, which are open on one end. You'd think that the discs should snap in to some inner part of the sheath, so that they don't fall out. But they only seem to stay in by the pressure exerted on the disc by the walls of the sheath.

And they don't really stay in at all. Soon after I'd brought Mr. Popper home, he fell out onto our living room floor. Who knows what kind of trauma that might have caused the disc, if it fell on a different surface, or even if it landed wrong on our hardwood floors. I can only imagine what kind of impact this packaging has on the life of the disc, and when Mr. Popper started to go haywire halfway through -- pixelating and skipping -- I feared that either its previous rentals had scuffed it, or it had suffered damage from the fall in our house. Fortunately, stopping and restarting the disc cleared up the problem, and there was no recurrence.

So I'll have to think long and hard about whether I'll be using the Blockbuster kiosk in my neighborhood this January. Cramming in movies before the deadline is a goal about which I care deeply, whether rightly or wrongly. And cramming in movies that are unavailable elsewhere is an even more rarified feat.

But at what cost? The difference between $1 and $3 for a rental may be that imaginary dividing line in my mind -- or it may simply be the arbitrary detail that justifies my declining to support a company I once loved, which has lost its way.

Stealing storylines from future movies

2011-12-28T08:13:00.001-08:00

Star Wars long ago ceased to be a universe whose timeline begins and ends with what we see in the movies.

Even when I was a kid growing up, I had a piece of Star Wars-related fiction called Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, which had to do with the adventures of Han Solo and Chewbacca either before or after the events of the original trilogy. (I'm gonna say before, since it didn't feature any of the other characters -- though maybe it would need to be after, to preserve the possibility of life-threatening danger to our heroes. I could look it up, but since it's one of those half-remembered things from childhood, it's more fun to speculate.) Anyway, that was the 1980s, and divergences from what we knew about the official Star Wars timeline were already in full swing by then.

Since then, there have been more adventures tangentially related to the Star Wars universe, both "officially licensed" and not, than probably even the most devoted geeks can keep up with. It only worried me enough to write about when I saw the poster for what seems to be the most recent of the dozens of Star Wars-related video games that have been produced in the last couple decades.

Quite arrestingly, the poster for Star Wars: The Old Republic is done in the style of the famous Star Wars posters by Drew Struzan -- you know, the ones with the head shots of various characters and action shots of various others, all combined together into a single iconic image. (Struzan also did the posters for Raiders of the Lost Ark and other films.) As far as I can tell, this poster is a theft of/homage to Struzan's work and not done by him personally. But it's still pretty impressive at getting the Star Wars juices flowing in an excited fan.

And because this poster reminds me so much of an actual movie poster, it made me wonder how much unfamiliar material there will/could still be remaining for future Star Wars movies.

Thought we were done? Thought George Lucas was content to continue riding the coattails of currently existing films, as he is doing by releasing the existing six movies in 3D, starting this February with The Phantom Menace?

As the movie industry has, in recent years, become even more reliant on existing brands than it has ever been, it stands to reason that episodes seven, eight and nine of the original nine-part series would still come to the big screen at some point in the future. At one point it seemed certain that George Lucas himself would have to be involved, but maybe that's not the case. It now seems unlikely that Star Wars will have faded into obscurity even a hundred years from now, and only rebooting/remaking the original movies -- something that seems certain to happen within 15 years -- is not enough for a century's worth of new Star Wars-related adventures.

What I'm really wondering is more broad, and it certainly doesn't relate specifically to The Old Republic, since that clearly seems to take place before any of the events we're aware of -- meaning it would have no bearing on episodes seven, eight and nine. What I'm wondering, in general, is how much of what we officially know about Star Wars has to jibe with the other things we officially know about Star Wars, or whether what happens in the movies is the only stuff that's really "on the record."

Again I'm not inclined to look this up, but mustn't there already be people out there who know how Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Leia (shit, does she have a last name? Organa? Skywalker?) meet their demise? Hasn't this already been written in some semi-licensed graphic novel that tried to fill the Star Wars void between Return of the Jedi in 1983 and The Phantom Menace in 1999?

I guess it's best not to think about it. I might drive myself crazy. Well, probably not. Since being a hugely devoted fan of Star Wars growing up, I've allowed myself to find a comfortable home in the middle ground of Star Wars fans. You know, the kind of fan who is not sure whether he's going to see the movies rereleased in 3D. See, the most passionate fans already know for sure whether they're seeing it (of course, it's Star Wars!) or not seeing it (blasphemy of the highest order!). It's the less intense fans, of which I am now one, who haven't made up our minds yet.

I do know that thanks to this poster, I'd now like to play Star Wars: The Old Republic -- or at least watch someone else play it. (I've never been very good with a game controller.)

Whether the events, characters or timeline of The Old Republic, or any of the other countless Star Wars branches, ever become "legitimized" by appearing in a movie? That's a concern for another day.

Wonderful

2011-12-24T21:48:00.001-08:00

I'm in the midst of watching It's a Wonderful Life on NBC.

Pretty cliche Christmas Eve activity, I know.

But it's only my second time seeing it. And it doesn't count, since we started watching at 9 p.m., even though it started airing at 8. (We were watching Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol before that.)

I'm usually against coming in halfway through a movie, even if I've seen it before. Movies I've seen lots of times can function as sort of an exception to that rule. With movies I'm seeing only for the second time, however, I need that first half to orient myself again.

I'm making the exception with It's a Wonderful Life, which I only saw once during the 2002 Christmas season, because I'm looking for a good dose of "normal Christmas" tonight. I'm currently in a hotel room in Palm Springs, which is not very "normal," Christmas-wise.

It's actually a pretty special Christmas, because members of both my wife's family and mine are here with us, having traveled from cities in three different countries to be here. My mom and her boyfriend flew here from Boston. My wife's aunt and uncle, cousin, and cousin's family flew here from Toronto. And my wife's sister and mother both came from Australia -- Melbourne and Hobart (Tasmania), respectively.

But the things we've done haven't been very Christmas-oriented. We did see snow today, having ridden the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway to its peak. (Which is considerably frostier than the temperatures at the base, which allowed us to actually go swimming in a heated outdoor pool this afternoon.) But as soon as the 14 of us returned to the hotel, having had a great time, we dispersed at about 6 p.m., and didn't see each other again.

See, I'm accustomed to Christmas Eves where people share food and laughs, and probably get a bit tipsy on wine, and you have a warm feeling inside you as you return home to bed, maybe wrapping one last present or two before you close your eyes for the night. Not where you run out to the grocery store at 7:30 to get a pasta dish and garlic bread to make in your hotel room's kitchenette.

But as I was starting to feel a bit down, pondering what was missing from this December 24th, my wife convinced me that this would be one of those Christmases we'd remember and talk about -- where both sides of our families got together and met us in the same hotel where we'd all stayed when my wife and I got married three years ago, just a stone's throw from here. So what if we didn't get the room decorated, or pick up a two-foot-tall tree like we'd talked about. It's a special Christmas where an extended family spread across the globe is now just separated by a couple rooms at an inn.

And so what if I've now typed through most of the second half of It's a Wonderful Life. It has served it's function, which is: to remind me that life is wonderful, when you're surrounded by family who have all traveled great distances to be together. Improbable distances, really. If it doesn't resemble some prototypical past Christmas experience in my mind, that -- precisely -- is the wonderful part.

Merry Christmas, and to all a good night.

Why can't Nicole Kidman always be awesome?

2011-12-22T01:42:00.000-08:00

Tom Cruise got his post yesterday, and among the settlements from their divorce many years ago is that Nicole must be given equivalent coverage whenever Tom is mentioned in the public domain.*

(*not really)

Well, I don't know if Nicole will be too happy with this one.

But let me start by buttering her up. Nicole Kidman is, for my money, quite possibly the most talented actress working today. Oh sure, you could offer plenty of other compelling choices and you'd probably be right. But when Nicole is on, she's on. And in those times (Rabbit Hole, Birth, etc.), no one does it better.

Unfortunately, Kidman is showing about as much selectivity when it comes to scripts as her famously undiscriminating Trespass co-star, Nicolas Cage.

I watched Trespass Tuesday night, knowing full well that it was a generally reviled film. It barely had a theatrical release and was on DVD almost immediately, even with the names Kidman, Cage and Schumacher all attached. (Say what you want about Joel Schumacher, but his films at least get theatrical releases.) I didn't see much promise in the names Cage and Schumacher, but Kidman had me interested.

So I watched.

Ugh.

Trespass is one of the most poorly conceived, poorly written, indifferently acted and just plain cliched home invasion movies you will ever see. It doesn't contain the slightest bit of nuance, and for large periods of time it doesn't make any sense, either.

What's worst is that Kidman is bad. She doesn't elevate the material, not even a little bit. She acts down to it, almost like she's got an on-off switch and it's currently switched off. She's still the same actress -- she still does those little facial twitches and other expressions that remind me who she is. But the movie is still absolutely terrible.

Part of what should make an actress good is her willingness to hold out for the roles she wants. Clearly, Kidman isn't doing that. You could list a number of her famous duds (Bewitched, The Stepford Wives, etc.), but you really don't need to go outside the year 2011 to wonder what the hell she's doing. Her most mysterious appearance this year -- which originally gave me the idea to write a post about her choices -- was the awful Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston comedy Just Go With It. Didn't think she was in that? Yeah, neither did anybody. She's some kind of rival to Aniston's character, and it's a thankless role that involves embarrassing dance sequences and other pratfalls. What were you thinking, Nicole? (I'm guessing she's friends with Sandler or something.)

We have to pause now to regrettably acknowledge the reality that Hollywood is not brimming with satisfying roles for actresses. For every grieving mother of a deceased child (Rabbit Hole), there are ten roles for bad romantic rivals (Just Go With It).

Still, this is Nicole Kidman. She's been nominated for three Oscars and won one. And should have been nominated for an Oscar for Birth. Here's a quick scene from Birth that summarizes everything of which she is capable. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled on youtube, so you'll just have to follow the hyperlink above. The blow-your-mind acting begins at about 1:20, but the first 1:20 is useful for establishing Kidman's emotional state during the ensuing scene.

But the problem is, if you want to work -- and it appears that Kidman does -- there's pretty much no way to keep your record totally unblemished. There are very few actors or actresses who don't have at least a couple duds to their credit.

Here's hoping that Kidman has gotten her couple duds out of her system in 2011, and her 2012 will be more like her 2010.

Tom Cruise can run

2011-12-21T00:06:00.000-08:00

You know what a lot of actors can't do very well?

Run.

Lately I've been noticing it a lot. Scenes in movies or TV shows that are supposed to be tense, that feature the main characters running. Except most of the time, they look like they're more worried about tripping on a loose object and stumbling face first -- the kind of fall that would risk scratching up their money-makers. I can't believe the number of directors who let actors get away with these slack-faced, controlled trots, which are all the more ridiculous because you can't look intense while running cautiously.

But not Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise can run.

In fact, Tom Cruise running is one of the main reasons I look forward to a Tom Cruise movie. That guy runs like a bat out of hell. He runs like he's being chased by a pack of wolves that haven't eaten in two weeks. He runs like there's a finish line and he needs to blow past a hundred other runners before he can get there. He runs like he's running away from a bomb. (Which in movies, he usually is.)

If you don't believe me, just check it out. I'd hoped to find a single still that perfectly encapsulated the Tom Cruise Run. Fortunately, Youtube has got me covered. (Which also means that "Tom Cruise can run" is not a particularly original observation).

Here:

Even still this does not capture the quintessential Tom Cruise Run in my mind's eye.

Where other actors hesitate, Cruise commits. Where other actors demonstrate a me-first attitude, he puts the drama first. And you know it's not a double, because they usually shoot him head on. How else to capture that slightly crazed, slightly desperate, slightly shocked look in his eyes?

Anyway, it's one of the reasons I'm now looking forward to Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. (Damn, that's too much punctuation for one title). Which opens wide today after raking in the dough while opening on just a couple hundred screens last Friday.

I mean, I knew Cruise could run and I knew he would run in Ghost Protocol. The difference is that I have seen a lot of bad running recently in movies and TV, so it has whetted my appetite for an actor who can actually do it effectively.

I'm also looking forward to it because the critical raves are in. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, one of the critics I read most, even put it in his top ten of the year. (At #10, but still.) And unlike such series as The Fast and the Furious, where Fast Five has gotten a lot of positive word of mouth, I'm actually caught up with the M:Is. So I can watch this one without wondering if I'm missing some of the story (he says while stifling a bit of laughter at his own ridiculous rules).

The problem is, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Adventures of Tintin also release today, and the list of movies I'd like to see before January 24th, when I close my 2011 list, is currently 40 titles long. (Exactly 40 -- I just checked on my blackberry.)

If I want to see all these movies, I'd better run.

Fun fact

2011-12-19T00:06:00.003-08:00

Did you know?

Sixty-six percent of the documentaries I've seen this year feature Eddie Vedder covering The Who's "Baba O'Riley."

Get with the program, Bill Cunningham New York.

(It's been a terrible documentary year for me so far, something I intend to remedy in the next month before I close my list of 2011 rankings.)

Great pauses in movie history

2011-12-17T06:28:00.000-08:00

The exact moment we pause a movie -- to go to the bathroom, to answer the phone, to get a drink -- is usually somewhat random.

Unless you're trying to wait until the end of the scene, you usually just choose a moment and press pause. There's little to no premeditation.

And so I think it's kind of funny when you happen to get a really good one.

In fact, I've taken pictures of funny pauses before. After the one I got last night during Gnomeo & Juliet, I think it's time to start an unofficial, sort-of series on my blog.

I'll show it to you first, then I'll explain why I think it's so great.

Juliet (left, voice of Emily Blunt) has just told her faithful frog sidekick Nanette (Ashley Jensen) that she has just met a boy, and he's "a blue." Believing that she's kidding, Nanette, whose real life function is a plastic, water-squirting toy, bursts out in laughter, spraying water everywhere.

However, at the moment I picked up the remote, Nanette had not yet had her reaction. Right as I hovered my thumb over the pause button and pressed, she exploded into laughter, leaving water droplets floating in the air, and Juliet closing her eyes to avoid the spray.

Just struck me as funny. Nothing more profound than that.

To give you a little more of the background behind Great Pauses in Movie History, I took a picture of a paused Angela Bassett a couple months ago during Jumping the Broom. I can't actually remember what's going on in the scene, but this pause just struck me as very funny:

I am pretty sure she had not just taken a bite out of an onion, but beyond that, I don't remember.

Silent means silent. That means you, old lady.

2011-12-16T09:26:00.000-08:00

After seeing The Artist Tuesday night, I posted on Facebook that an audience talking during the movie was even worse when it was a silent movie. Some people tried to offer me the glass-is-half-full perspective: At least the noise pollution wouldn't be preventing me from hearing the dialogue.

That's a good idea in theory, but not in practice. Sure, it's possible you would miss some key information if some jerk were talking over the dialogue, but the worse problem created by audience chatter is that it functions as a distraction. If it happens enough, it takes you out of the movie. And with only music playing -- no dialogue, and not even any sound effects -- you can't help but focus on the content of the surrounding chatter. You could look at it this way: In a Michael Bay movie, the talking of other people is not such a distraction, because the explosions tend to drown it out.

Fortunately, I was not taken out of The Artist. But there were a couple of yammering old ladies behind me whose occasional failures of impulse control were downright comical. The thing is, they weren't really that old, even -- mid-50s maybe. I'm calling them "old" because a) they were older than me, and b) their tendency to blurt out whatever thoughts were in their head is trademark old-person audience behavior.

I knew we were in trouble when they came in late, during the trailers, and carried in whatever hilarious conversation they were having outside. Something quite funny had just happened to them, or so they believed, and they had to laugh about it for another two to three minutes after they sat down. Sure, I didn't care that much about the War Horse trailer, but I knew this would be a preview of things to come.

Here were the highlights, all spoken in a regular speaking voice rather than a whisper. They'll make sense to you if you saw the movie, and will not ruin it if you didn't. (Though I'll try to keep it abstract.)

During the dream sequence: "I don't get it."

Later on: "That's all his furniture!"

A little after that: "He shot his dog?"

Then the most mysterious verbal expulsion: What sounded like halfway between a groan and scoff during the film's indisputably effective emotional climax.

At least my wife and I got a good laugh out of it later on.

And speaking of that ... Tuesday night was our first real experience with how expensive a good old-fashioned dinner and a movie can get when you are also using a babysitter. Even a reasonably priced babysitter ($10/hour) like the one we've just started using.

Here's a breakdown of our costs:

Two tickets to see The Artist, including the $1 surcharge for purchasing online: $27
Two Cokes and two bags of Smart Fries: $15
Dinner afterward of gourmet sandwiches and one cocktail each (including tip): $66
3.5 hours of babysitting (including tip): $40

So yeah, we spent $148 on our evening.

Ouch.

We could have saved a couple bucks if they ever started a movie at a convenient time to get dinner first. We went to a 7:50 show, but even an 8:30 or 8:40 show would have allowed us to eat beforehand and prevented our desperate need for some pre-movie sustenance in the form of the theater concession stand.

Dinner also would have been cheaper if we hadn't gone to a place that charges $14 for sandwiches (but oh, they're so good) or if we hadn't gotten cocktails. But what's a rare dinner date with your wife if you don't have a cocktail?

At least we didn't have two. I'd have had to take out a loan or something.

A curious literacy strategy

2011-12-15T08:12:00.000-08:00

You can imagine I was surprised to see this familiar image on information kiosks this holiday season, since Disney's A Christmas Carol came out a full two years ago.

Turns out, they're just using the image of Jim Carrey's Ebenezer Scrooge to convince people to read books.

On the one hand, I get it. But on the other, isn't it kind of a contradictory impulse, to tell people to "Explore New Worlds," but then to spoon-feed them the images upon which to base that exploration?

The supposedly wonderful thing about reading is that you get to create the world in your head. You can imagine what every character looks like, and you get to conjure your own appearance for the houses and towns in which they live. Your brain gets a special boost if it's a fantasy world, something for which you may have no previous frame of reference.

And so, presenting someone with a fixed image of what a character, such as Ebenezer Scrooge, looks like, is kind of counterproductive. Not only that, but it's a fixed image from a movie. Aren't movies supposed to be the enemy of books, at least for hardcore bibliophiles?

Never mind the nit-picky detail that the setting of one of the world's most famous and celebrated Christmas stories is hardly a "new world" to explore.

I guess the bibliophiles responsible for this campaign, at least, must acknowledge that they need celebrity to sell the idea of reading. Only by using the likeness of Jim Carrey on a poster about reading will they get our attention enough to bring home the message. Advertising is a visual medium, so you need something to catch our eye. Might as well be something familiar, something that makes us look twice -- as I looked twice, enough that I stopped to take a picture and am now writing about it here.

Well, it's for a good cause in the case of A Christmas Carol. Not only should everyone see Robert Zemeckis' movie, which is truly creative and visually arresting, but they really ought to read Charles Dickens' novel, which brings the Christmas spirit like no other.

Literally. Three spirits, actually.

This screener will self destruct in 10 seconds

2011-12-13T07:29:00.001-08:00

We got to watch Young Adult last night, but it was a close call. For a moment there I thought the screener had destroyed itself.

As I've written about several times in the past, I have a friend who's in the Writer's Guild, who tries to either loan me one of his screeners, or watch one with me, every Christmas season. I was over at his house the other night, and I thought it would happen then, but the topic never came up. Then a couple days later he texted me and asked me if I'd seen Young Adult yet. A strange question, because it was the very day the movie was opening, and not even all that late in the evening. He said that he'd loan it to me when he saw me at one of two parties we were both planning to attend this past weekend.

Since my wife and I were both eager to see it, the DVD made its way into our BluRay player the very next night.

And was quickly ejected. Forcibly ejected.

The BluRay player attempted to read it, then spat it out. The screen flashed "Disc Error."

Uh oh.

Now, this has never been a problem in the past with his screeners. In fact, I know for a fact that his screeners have the potential for multiple viewings, because I've watched several of his movies that he'd already watched. In fact, I've even come into possession of one from about five years ago, and have watched that particular copy twice myself.

But there are warnings all over the disc that talk about prosecuting the person if the disc is found to have been uploaded to the internet and traced to this copy, and there are explicit instructions given for returning the disc to the studio if the recipient cannot agree to the viewing terms. (So let's hope no one is reading this who would have the motivation to trace things back to my friend. And if you are, hey, I'm a film critic, which means I might see an advanced free screening of this movie anyway.)

Plus there's an actual request for the recipient to physically destroy the movie by February 26, 2012. Yeah, like anyone actually does that.

Since I can't ever remember our BluRay player rejecting a disc, we thought there was a pretty good chance the disc had been designed to compromise itself once the film had already been screened once. But we tried to play it in my laptop anyway.

At which point it played through without a problem. Whew.

Well, there was one problem: I couldn't seem to get the DVD control menu -- which includes the volume, pause button, etc. -- to exit the bottom of the screen. I even took the disc out and reinserted it. That menu came on after I paused to adjust the volume, then it just wouldn't leave. For a second there we thought we'd have to pay this smaller price -- a distraction at the bottom of the screen for the duration of the running time -- for the right to watch this movie.

Turns out I just needed to move the cursor to anywhere on the top 80% of the screen.

Shows you how many movies I watch on my laptop.

As for the movie itself? Well, I know some of my readers are excited about this movie and would not want me to either confirm their excitement with a positive appraisal or curdle it with a negative one. Besides, as I learned from watching Charlize Theron on Jay Leno last night, the movie is only in limited release right now -- it doesn't even open nationwide until Friday.

So if I'm not going to give Paramount the money to see Young Adult in the theater, at least I'll help them out by maintaining a self-imposed reviewing embargo. You've probably heard about reviewing embargoes recently with regards to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where Columbia Pictures was furious with David Denby of The New Yorker for posting his (positive) review in the magazine too many days before the movie was set to release.

Where that ranks as an offense next to unauthorized viewings of awards screeners, I'm not so sure.

Mainstream, but not too mainstream

2011-12-10T11:38:00.001-08:00

I often beat myself up over the fact that I don't always get as far outside the mainstream as I like in terms of the movies I watch. Oh, I'm aware of and see my share of foreign, independent and just plain weird titles. But a film snob would probably scoff at the overall commonness of what I watch.

So it was pleasing the other day when I was looking at the "2011 in film" entry on wikipedia, and noticed that I had seen only one of the top ten grossing films so far this year.

(I saw a second -- Transformers: Dark of the Moon -- last night, so I figured I better write this post before I get any further down that inevitable road.)

That's right, only the highest grossing film of the year -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 -- had crossed my eyeballs before last night.

And that's out of nearly 80 films from 2011 that I've already seen.

Here's how the whole list stands, with the worldwide grosses listed afterward. (I usually have a local bias and consider grosses domestically, but wikipedia is more fair and lists the grosses worldwide, so I will go with that system for today.)

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 - $1,328,111,219
2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon - $1,123,196,189
3. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - $1,043,871,802
4. Kung Fu Panda 2 - $663,024,542
5. Fast Five - $626,137,675
6. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 - $596,383,267
7. The Hangover Part II - $581,464,305
8. The Smurfs - $562,044,359
9. Cars 2 - $551,846,625
10. Rio - $484,635,760

I assume I'll end up watching maybe half of these before I close my 2011 rankings in late January, and most of the rest over the next couple years. (Not sure if I'll ever get that far in the Twilight series -- we'll have to see.) But those I do watch between now and January, I'll be watching more to be completist than anything else -- more to be sure I've seen a truly representative sample of the films that came out in 2011, for ranking purposes. The others will make good candidates to watch with my son when he gets old enough. (I'm stockpiling animated movies I haven't seen now, so I'll have plenty later.)

And I take some pride in the fact that only one of these is a movie I went to see in the theater. I'm not such a sheep after all, am I?

However, the reverse conclusion is also somewhat discouraging. It means that a lot of other people saw a lot of movies in the theater that I, as a general film fan and critic, did not deem worthy of my theatrical dollars. Which, if you trust my judgment at all and extend this line of thinking outward, means that popular films are getting worse and worse in quality. Or simply that people are demanding less and less of them.

Well, for today I'll just dwell on the positive. I'm selective in what I expose my eyes to.

At least until I inevitably see the fourth Pirates and the fifth Fast and the Furious.

December movies I can safely avoid

2011-12-09T09:28:00.000-08:00

This time of year, it feels like we're being assaulted with new releases that demand our attention in the form of a theatrical screening. (Last week notwithstanding.) That is, they demand our attention if we want to be up on what may be getting Oscar nominations a month from now.

So it can be a real relief to make a determination about certain films that you just aren't going to prioritize -- whether they are Oscar contenders or no.

Two such movies are coming out next week -- Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. Neither of which are Oscar contenders, really. I might have been a candidate to see Holmes in the theater, except I still haven't seen the first one. (Call me old-fashioned, but I do my best to see these things in order.) And with Alvin and the Chipmunks, well, I think my disinterest in that goes without saying.

But next week's low-priority December releases are not, well, the priority for this post, because there are three coming out today as well.

Entertainment Weekly stole my idea!

You could look at it one of two ways:

1) Entertainment Weekly took a really good (if somewhat obvious) joke out of my hands, or

2) Entertainment Weekly saved me a heckuva lot of work.

See, the sheer quantity of celebrities on the posters for Garry Marshall's last two films -- Valentine's Day, and now New Year's Eve, which releases today -- gave me an idea a couple weeks back. Like I said, it wasn't a particularly original idea. But I wanted to mock up a poster for an imaginary movie called St. Patrick's Day, which would feature a grid of pictures of so many movie stars, the pictures would be too small to even identify them.

Then EW gets out ahead of me by making a parody poster in last week's issue for a fictitious movie called Arbor Day -- and for suggesting a half-dozen other holidays that Garry Marshall could make into movies, including plot outlines for these theoretical movies, a couple of the many stars who would appear in them, and a role in each movie for longtime Marshall collaborator Hector Elizondo.

There was some disappointment that I couldn't go ahead with my idea once I saw theirs, but the more dominant feeling was one of relief. I mean, if you saw this fledgling first attempt at manipulating images on Microsoft Paint, you'd know that I'd have to spend a really long time on this to make it look good. And come on, it's the holidays -- who has a really long time to spend on anything?

Regarding New Year's Eve, the jokes make themselves. I will say that I think it looks like a slightly better movie than Valentine's Day, if only because New Year's Eve is a slightly more exciting, cinematic holiday. (Even if Hollywood has failed to realize that by making more movies about Valentine's Day than New Year's Eve -- which has entirely to do with box office viability, since there's less competition in February than December.) When you come right down to it, though, all of the numerous plots in both films are probably about love, which limits their potential to really surprise us.

The interesting thing about these movies is that the casts are so large, every film fan should be able to find at least one cast member whose participation in this movie is disappointing. For me it's not Robert DeNiro, who jumped that shark a long time ago. Oddly, I'd have to say that Seth Meyers disappoints me the most. Not because he's got some stellar film career going -- in fact, he rarely appears anywhere outside the Weekend Update desk on Saturday Night Live. It's because as a funny guy who both writes and delivers funny lines, he should know better.

Stinker, Failure, Moldier - Why?

You can disregard any meaning in that subheading. I just thought it was a funny play on words. I'm sure Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a good movie, especially since it's directed by Tomas Alfredson, who brought us Let the Right One In.

But I'm down on the movie nonetheless because I've decided in the past couple years that I don't like spy movies. And I'm using the release of this film to tell you about that.

I didn't necessarily know I had a problem with spy movies, until I recognized a pattern of feeling dissatisfied upon finishing a spy movie. I won't go through a list of examples, but I will tell you about one in particular that helped bring home the realization: The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert DeNiro (making his second appearance in this post, in two totally different contexts). The movie is a semi-fictionalized take on the origins of the CIA, and it just left me cold.

What I realized during The Good Shepherd is that narratives involving double or triple crosses and people who speak 14 different languages just don't interest me. I don't find anything relatable in them.

You might think that's ridiculous -- how do I relate to a mob movie, a superhero movie or a political thriller? Well, I have actual answers for those questions. Mob movies interest me because they are all about the bottom line -- achieving an end by whatever means necessary. There's something primal about that. Superhero movies usually involve regular people who are suddenly bestowed with irregular powers. I'm a regular person, so that could happen to me. And a political thriller is interesting because I find the machinations of politics interesting, if often frustrating.

But I don't really care about characters in spy movies, because frankly, spies don't seem like real people to me. Especially movie spies, who are almost incapable of making mistakes -- they are preternaturally talented at what they do. While this should fascinate me, it sort of doesn't. They seem more like narrative constructs than real people.

Another thing is that spy movies often seem to revolve around periods in history from which we have already emerged unscathed. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is supposed to give us a sense of tension and urgency in its drama, but it takes place during the Cold War -- a conflict we have already satisfactorily resolved. We are supposed to gasp the way Gary Oldman gasps in the trailer, when he says "Tinker ... tailor ... soldier ... (gasp!) ... spy!" As if a spy is the most unholy abomination you could imagine, and should fill you with dread. The violins that kick in at that point of the trailer are meant to underscore that feeling. But I don't feel unsettled by a spy. I just feel frustrated.

In case you were wondering, James Bond gets a pass. He's a different story. He's more like an action hero than a spy. But I wouldn't be surprised if he does speak 14 languages.

The latest rehash of After Hours

They keep remaking Martin Scorsese's After Hours, don't they?

This time it's with Jonah Hill as a babysitter who takes his charges out on an ill-advised booty call that ends up involving all sorts of criminal enterprises and other shenanigans.

Meh.

Then again, I did end up really liking the most recent remake of After Hours, which was last year's Date Night, starring Tina Fey and Steve Carell. Against all odds and all prejudices I brought into it, I laughed a lot and really liked it.

Note -- The Sitter may be your last opportunity to see the Jonah Hill you've come to know and love. From here on out, he may be waaay too skinny for his body, and continue to look as weird as he looks in anything filmed in the last couple months.

How did that work out for Seth Rogen, Jonah?

However ...

I definitely do have one of this week's new releases on my priority list.

You can't look at this picture of Charlize Theron in Young Adult and not get your hopes up for a gonzo comedic performance, equal parts bitchy and pathetic. The trailers seem to promise as much.

Also looking forward to Young Adult as the fourth feature from Jason Reitman, who seemed like he might veer off toward serious material with Up in the Air. Even Juno and Thank You For Smoking dealt with hot-button issues (teen pregnancy and the tobacco industry). I like that this movie seems content to be just a comedy -- a smart comedy, but not necessarily an important one.

And come on, Diablo Cody doesn't deserve the crap everybody gives her. You liked Juno when you first saw it, admit it. Only in retrospect has her dialogue taken on the reputation of being too cutesy.

But I probably won't actually be getting to the theater at all this weekend. It's a busy one for me. Next scheduled theater trip will probably be Tuesday, when my wife and I plan to make use of a newly discovered babysitter (not Jonah Hill) by going to dinner and then The Artist.

However, don't be surprised if Young Adult sneaks in and steals The Artist's spot.

Harry's Return of the King?

2011-12-08T08:05:00.000-08:00

For most people, the word "consider" means ... well, exactly what you think it means.

For Hollywood types, it connotes something very specific: an Oscar campaign in full swing.

Which is why Los Angeles is the only town where there could be billboards all over the city, featuring grandiose stills from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and the word CONSIDER in big letters, and there would be no explanation necessary about what was going on.

Simply put, the push is on by Warner Brothers to get the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize the final installment in the Harry Potter saga, the same way they recognized the final installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy eight years ago.

And I guess they might have a shot.

On the surface, it would seem like an uphill battle. There are a number of important differences between Potter and Rings. For starters, Rings featured three films released in consecutive years from the same director, which were filmed concurrently, so they benefited from the same look. What's more, each of the previous two films was nominated for best picture before Return of the King finally took home the statue.

With Potter, there had been seven previous films over the course of a decade, none of which have been nominated for best picture. (Neither have there been any acting nominations, and overall, not as many technical nominations as you might think.) What's more, these movies represented the creative vision of four different directors, whose approaches sometimes differ sharply from one another. (And whose backgrounds in film are quite different as well.) It's not so easy to re-frame the Potter movies as one holistic viewing experience that maintained a consistent tone and quality from start to finish.

But Deathly Hallows Part 2 does have certain things going for it. For one, 2011 has yet to produce an obvious front-runner for best picture. I'd say The Descendants probably has the best shot right now, but it doesn't have nearly the heat other front-runners have enjoyed at this point in the campaign. (Of course, being the front-runner in early December doesn't usually work out well. Just ask The Social Network.)

Before it would have the chance to vie for top honors, the film would have to first get nominated -- a feat none of its predecessors has accomplished. Here too there is some hope. Most of those predecessors didn't have the advantage of a field of possibly as many as ten nominated pictures. Given the love Part 2 has gotten, it shouldn't seem like a stretch that it would finally score the series' first nomination. However, cancel some of this advantage because of the change in rules this year, which will allow as few as five films to get nominated if only that many films get a certain minimum percentage of first-place votes from Academy voters.

The thing that's noteworthy about this push by Warner Brothers is that a typical CONSIDER campaign is found in the pages of trade magazines, not on billboards around the city. If you were not previously familiar with the indelicate machinations involved in getting an Oscar nomination, you may remember that Melissa Leo was widely chastised last year for funding her own crass yet ultimately successful CONSIDER campaign for best supporting actress, which was a full-page glamor shot of her wearing some kind of animal fur. (Her awful acceptance speech at the Oscars only compounded the sense of tackiness that started in that campaign.)

So taking the campaign beyond the insiderish world of industry types and bringing it to the masses could indicate two things: 1) A skepticism that people are reading the trades as much as they used to, and B) A sense that this year's best picture statue really is there for the taking.

It could also represent a growing acknowledgment of the power to create buzz that's now in the hands of everyday citizens. With the ways people can reach each other through Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, maybe your average citizen really does have the ability to influence the way industry people fill out their Oscar ballots. It's all one powerful interwoven force known as "hype."

Well, we'll know if all the money Warner Brothers is spending was a success on January 24th, when the nominees are announced, and then again on February 26th, when some movie will take home that coveted statue.

Only with a victory on that second night will Warner Brothers "consider" its mission accomplished.

Adding value

2011-12-07T07:45:00.001-08:00

Next June, I will have been in IT for ten years.

It wasn't a career I planned. In the spring of 2002, when I decided I couldn't make a living as merely a freelance film critic, I reluctantly signed on with a temp agency. About my third job for the agency ended up being in an IT department. The rest, as they say, is history.

And though I've thrived at times, there have also been times when I've skated by, and never have I felt I was giving my all to IT. In the back of my mind I have always wanted to make inroads at having a full career as a film critic. Unfortunately, I've also known that this kind of career, even if possible, would result in a pay cut for me. And as my family responsibilities have increased, that kind of dream work has seemed less and less likely to ever transpire. I can't afford to make significantly less money than I'm making, especially on a permanent basis. Which basically puts me in the same boat as everyone else who's had to permanently defer their dreams.

Little did I know that my love of films would actually help keep me in my current job, even when I'm not giving it my all.

You see, my boss -- the same boss from my first IT job, who recruited me to my current job -- loves movies. He might not have the sophisticated, well-rounded love of movies you and I have, but he's gaga for new movies from his wheelhouse genres (mafia movies, crime dramas, thrillers, suspense). Yet he also doesn't really have a way for discovering movies other than what the Hollywood mainstream feeds him.

That's where I come in.

Particularly over the past six months, I've been recommending movies that my boss would never otherwise have known about. (At his request, of course.) My recommendations aren't always a success, but they hit with him more than they miss. And just recently he's begun to characterize this as a "value" I bring.

"I just wanted to let you know how much value you have to me," he told me on Monday. "Last night, I was flipping through the channels and I saw that Animal Kingdom was on. If it hadn't been for you, I would have thought it was some kind of Animal Planet show."

As luck would have it, he'd just rented Animal Kingdom from Netflix a few days before, on my recommendation. The channel surfing example was merely given as an indication of how he feels more in the know, now, thanks to me. (The example would have been slightly cooler if he'd been planning to see Animal Kingdom, but hadn't yet, and was able to get in a random viewing as a result of me making him a better-informed channel surfer.)

It turns out he really liked Animal Kingdom. I've had luck with him with the recent Australian crime dramas, as he also liked the Edgerton brothers' The Square. In Bruges was another recent favorite. These three hits really make up for a recent miss. Just before Thanksgiving he texted me, "Winter's Bone was winter's boring."

And so I've started to think of my ability to keep my job as a function of my ability to recommend good movies.

Before you worry about my actual employment status, I should tell you that I'm exaggerating here. My boss feels very endeared to me, having known me significantly longer than anyone else we work with, and having actually recruited me away from my old job.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't take advantage of that. Not only do I not worry so much about occasional bouts of semi-indifferent work performance, or occasionally being a bit "mean" to one of the users (I've been accused of this, much to my chagrin), but I also take advantage in terms of goofing off more than I probably should. (Like, I am currently writing this blog post on company time.)

So sometimes I get paranoid that I've been abusing his good will, and that one day he'll learn I'm not half as valuable an employee as I am a cineaste. And whenever that paranoia sets in, I want to come through with an especially great recommendation -- to keep him confused about my actual value for as long as possible.

For awhile there, I could do no wrong. First I turned him on to Lebanon, Samuel Maoz' 2009 film that takes place entirely inside a tank, after we had been talking about Das Boot. (Which I haven't actually seen, so the conversation must have been pretty generic.) He really liked it. Then it was the Wachowski brothers' directorial debut, the masterful film Bound. He was in love with that one, as am I. "Five stars," he told me. I also loaned him my copy of the New Zealand post-apocalyptic film The Quiet Earth, which seemed to give him a charge.

But my footing started to slip after that. He liked Timecrimes, but I could tell he had some concerns about it, that it might have thrown him a bit. He thought Donnie Brasco was okay, but it caused him to comment that I might have mis-identified him as "the mafia movie guy." The Wages of Fear, a classic, left him non-plussed. And in a text he described the Coen brothers' great Miller's Crossing as "so-so."

As luck would have it, this coincided with a period in which my boss seemed distant and unreachable. It was a general thing and it was likely the result of job turmoil that wasn't related to me, but when you're already concerned you might not be performing up to your capabilities, you tend to take these things personally. Besides, we'd had a bit of a difference of opinion on a work-related issue, and I felt like we'd never satisfactorily buried the hatchet on that particular disagreement.

So suddenly I was panicking: "My boss is pissed at me, and I'm not winning him over with my recommendations? What if he decides I no longer have any value?"

Fortunately, this "dark period" was over in a matter of weeks, and the recommendations seemed to get back on track as well. He quite liked Unknown (the one from 2006, not the one from this year), and the successful triumvirate of In Bruges, The Square and Animal Kingdom soon followed (with the one inconsequential Winter's Bone blemish thrown in for good measure).

Now that he's twice referred to my services as a "value" (the first time with In Bruges), and doesn't seem to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, I feel like I'm probably pretty secure. Not that I ever really wasn't.

Unfortunately, now I've got a new challenge ahead of me: How to keep them coming? I already scoured my highest ranked films on Flickchart to find movies that a) I thought he would like, and b) I thought he probably hadn't seen or heard of. I still have a few titles I'm saving for a rainy day, but pretty soon I'll have to start going out on more limbs. And keep in mind that I've already strayed from his wheelhouse with such recommendations as The Wages of Fear and Winter's Bone.

So when you see me start watching movies specifically so I can curate a list of recommendations for my boss, that's when you know I must be really in trouble.

Until then, please assume that I'm maintaining at least a minimum level of actual job performance.