How would Donald Trump interpret me watching Melania?

Melania is just the type of movie I would watch just to shit on it. 

Now, I don't want to sacrifice my cherished objectivity as a film critic. So officially, I would come in to Melania ready to give it a fair shake. And unofficially, I think that if I somehow actually liked the film, I would be willing to tell you that, and give it a corresponding star rating on Letterboxd and position in my in-progress 2026 film rankings. 

But come on. There are certain films that we can't really hold to the same standard as other films. Films made entirely for grift-related reasons, shining the light on people we can all agree are vapid and vacuous -- and yes, I believe that opinion probably extends to actual Trump supporters -- disqualify themselves from the benefit of the doubt you ordinarily give to filmmakers, whose intentions you assume to be earnest, and whose output you believe to be the result of a true belief in the thing they are trying to make.

It would be reasonable to potentially be afraid of watching Melania, for fear that I might actually like it and might not be capable of shitting on it. But I don't fear that. I can't really envision a world where I could give Melania any more than 2.5 stars out of five on Letterboxd, and even that is highly unlikely. 

But the movie is now available on Amazon Prime. It probably was about two weeks after it was in theaters. But I only just noticed it this week, which is why I am writing this post now. So I can watch it any time I want.

No, the only reason I'm worried about watching Melania is that I don't want Donald Trump to take a victory lap over the fact that I watched it. 

Realistically, Trump will never know that I, an American film critic transplanted to Australia, a blogger who calls himself Vance based on his former blog handle and a nickname his friend gave him from a Monty Python skit, watched Melania, unless he reads this blog post. And while I don't put it past Trump to read anything that is in any way about him, there's just too much content out there. He doesn't have the time. 

But if he did read it, that would be a good thing, because he'd know I watched the movie just to take the piss out of him and his vacuous, vapid wife. 

If he doesn't read it, he'll just see one more viewing added to the view count, and he'll pump his fist in the victory of having contributed something people want to watch to the world of cinema, about his inherently fascinating wife. 

Don't think Trump doesn't know the view count. Streamers don't like to share their streaming data, but that doesn't apply to someone like Trump and a streamer like Amazon, which is purposefully kissing up to the sitting president. Even if Jeff Bezos weren't politically aligned with Trump, he's the kind of shitstain who would work every angle to his advantage with a venal U.S. president, milk whatever favors he could out of him -- especially an even bigger shitstain like Trump, who practically has an "open for business" sign staked into the White House lawn.

So yeah, Bezos is sending Trump the view counts of Melania. Bet on it. 

I don't want that count to tick up by even one just because I deigned to watch this movie.

The thing is, I've heard it's not even a good howler. Probably at most it is boring and silly. I doubt it commits any major gaffes. Brett Ratner is a reasonably competent filmmaker and I'm sure he -- also politically aligned with Trump -- did whatever he could to make sure Melania was beyond reproach, at least in people's ability to pick it apart on the fundamental level of its presentability. 

The other thing is, though, I like to see movies that are in the zeitgeist, and there may be fewer movies in early 2026 more zeitgeisty than this. Hey, movies aren't in the zeitgeist only for positive reasons. 

So I will probably watch it. Probably sooner rather than later. 

And I'll just have to hope Trump, in his heart of hearts, knows that my +1 on the view count is because I despise him and his inner circle and I am eager to subsequently dump steaming piles of shit on him through the platform of my own particular professional expertise. 

Unfortunately, now that I've written this post, I'm probably less likely to do that, lest I commit a different sort of Trump-related sin -- giving him too much attention. 

When no attention is bad attention, you really can't win. 

A significant release year miss

When I started watching the movie F on Thursday night, the "latest" from 47 Meters Down director Johannes Roberts, I thought it had quite a strange look to it. 

There was an out-of-time quality to it that I couldn't place, that I attributed to it looking like TV rather than looking like a movie. This was streaming on Amazon, but it's the same feeling I remember having about a Netflix straight-to-streaming movie I saw a couple years ago, Blood Red Sky. I didn't think either movie was bad -- not by this point of F, anyway -- but I do think there's something uniquely unsavory about a film that looks like a TV show. We all know that we love TV shows that look like movies, but the reverse is not true.

It was only when I got to the very end of the credits, which I watched despite not liking the movie by its very strange ending, that I realized why this 2026 film looked so odd:

It was made in 2010.

Of course, if I'd already seen the poster above -- a poster from the movie's DVD release -- then of course I would have known its vintage. But I had only this to go on:

Huh? In what way, shape or form is this a 2026 film?

Even if Amazon had newly acquired this film, which it seems like they must have, that is not the same as a release year. 

I checked the Wikipedia page to see if it mentioned anything about some new release agreement, some kind of streaming debut, that would, in any conceivable way, qualify this as a movie released in the current year. But I found mention of nothing like that.

You may recall that Amazon has biffed this sort of thing before. I wrote here about watching the movie Corner Office, thinking it was being released in 2024 but then finding out that the actual release year was 2022.

I get that. Release years are slippery things. A festival debut here, a theatrical release there, and then a streaming release, and you could conceivably have a three-year range of ambiguous possible release dates.

There is no way to miss a release year by 16 years. 

So now Amazon is requiring me to do all my homework before watching one of their "new" releases, which takes away some of the spontaneity of just finding it on the streamer and pressing play. 

I guess a movie that looks like a TV show, supposedly released today, is the kind of thing that should give you pause. 

Watch Bluff because you watched The Bluff

So I guess you should judge movies by their titles?

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but come on Amazon. I'm not going to watch a movie just because it has (almost) the same title as another movie I watched.

The Bluff is a 2026 pirate movie, and a pretty bloody one at that.

Bluff is a 2022 movie about an undercover cop trying to bust up a heroin ring.

There is no intrinsic reason why watching one should make me want to watch the other. (Or maybe they just know that my goal is to eventually see every movie ever made. Then again, if that were the case, they could have recommended me The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants or A Serbian Film and it would have been no less arbitrary.

The Three Musketeers rec? That's spot on. Both the movie I saw and the movie they're pushing on me involve swashbuckling.

Miami Vice? The TV show, not the movie? We're getting a little strained there, but at least The Bluff was set in the Cayman Islands, and I'm sure Crockett and Tubbs went there at some point?

Bull? Okay now we are seeing some of the same algorithm shortcomings. Bull could have been a mispelling of The Bluff if someone was really drunk. The movie is also set in London (like The Bluff) and also involves dalliances in the criminal underworld.

I just hope that Amazon is not recommending that anyone who watched Disney's Frozen should also watch Frozen, the movie about trapped skiers on the lift threatened by bloodthirsty wolves, because those are two very different movies. 

Amazon Prime, doing a service to drunk movie searchers since 2011.

A Statham exception

Jason Statham has made about 37 copies of the same movie, and I have seen almost none of them.

Not totally true. I have likely seen at least a dozen Statham movies and I like him as a screen presence. But fully half of those would be collaborations with Guy Ritchie or Fast and Furious movies. The movies where he is the lone wolf traditional action hero, I traditionally give a miss.

A Working Man was an exception, and I'll tell you why:

1) It's available for free on Amazon Prime.

2) Amazon Prime is spruiking it heavily so there's no way I can miss that it's on Amazon Prime.

3) It counts toward the current year. 

4) Not only does it count toward the current year, but it's come along early enough that it feels like a good get, to have access to it at a time of the year when current year movies usually either have to be rented for a steeper price tag or are the typical Netflix swill. This one actually played in theaters. Later in the year, there would nothing novel about it and I definitely would not prioritize it.

So no, I don't usually see Statham movies, and it felt mildly disorienting to be sitting down to one. Pretty quickly I realized that prejudging them in the past has probably not been a short-sighted perspective on my part. I thought this was pretty bad. David Ayer, a director of action movies who momentarily flirted with prestige in the 2010s, is pretty much a hack.

But I'm not here today to analyze the finer points of David Ayer's career or this particular movie. Really, I want to see how many of these cookie cutter Jason Statham movies I have not seen.

In looking at this, I will skip movies that are what I would have once thought of as "straight to video" -- in other words, movies I never heard of. This needs to be a list of movies that I knew about but chose not to watch.

First, the Statham movies I had seen prior to A Working Man, in order:

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Snatch
The One
Collateral
Cellular
London
Revolver
Crank
The Bank Job
Crank High Voltage
The Expendables
Gomeo & Juliet
Parker
Fast & Furious 6
Spy
Furious 7
The Fate of the Furious
The Meg
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes and Shaw
F9: The Fast Saga (I don't think that's how I used to write this title)

Okay so when I said more than a dozen, I meant 20. A Working Man makes 21.

But I bet the list of those I've heard of but haven't seen is even longer. Let's see:

Mean Machine
The Transporter
The Italian Job (and yes, I had to check my records that it was The Bank Job, and not The Italian Job, that I'd seen)
Transporter 2
The Pink Panther
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
War
Death Race
Transporter 3
The Mechanic
The Expendables 2
Homefront
Mechanic: Resurrection
Wrath of Man
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
Meg 2: The Trench
The Expendables 4
The Beekeeper

That's 18. Just a few less.

"Big deal, Vance," you say. "You saw some of the guy's movies and not others."

I think the point I'm trying to make is that for an actor of Statham's prominence, who is as bankable a star as he is, a person like me, who sees so much, should have seen more than 54% of his movies I was aware of. I don't usually punish actors for appearing in what seems to me like it will be inferior material. Heck, sometimes I want to see inferior material just to help fill out the lower end of my rankings or my Flickchart.

I suppose it's not Statham per se, as much as it is his absolute fealty to making a certain type of movie, that's caused me to skip so many of his movies. When thinking about other actors about whom the same post might be written, the names that came immediately to mind were people like Gerard Butler and Liam Neeson. This exercise would work particularly well for Neeson. It could even work for a guy like Nicolas Cage, given how much of his career he's devoted to paying the bills via schlock, or especially for someone like poor Bruce Willis.

Statham might actually be better off than any of those mentioned in the previous paragraph. A big chunk of my Statham misses were due to being out on two of his series -- Transporter and The Mechanic -- such that not seeing the first also means I have not seen the sequels. And I bailed after the first Expendables so I also didn't see the two others he was in. 

Now that I've written almost all this post, I have another observation about myself as a blogger: After a total quantity of posts closing in on 3,500, I'm bound to repeat myself. 

I just went to add the "jason statham" tag to this post, and found it already existed. So naturally I wanted to see when I tagged him previously and what I wrote about him. And found this. 

If you don't want to follow that link, I'll tell you what you'd find if you did: basically a shorter version of this very post, timed to the release of Parker, when I talked about Statham movies basically going in one of my ears and out the other.

I won't scrap this post, like I did when I recently started to write a second post talking about the surprising feminism of Starship Troopers, a topic I'd already covered. There may be some nuanced differences to the way I'm writing about Statham now from how I wrote about him a dozen years ago. A third post in another dozen years, though, can be avoided I think.

And I have little doubt that Statham will still be making, and still be capable of making, movies like A Working Man in another 12 years, when he's 69 instead of 57. (I guessed he was 58, so not far off.)

And because I like this guy's screen persona, I did hope the Statham exception I'm writing about today would be that A Working Man would actually be good. Alas, it was not, and for that I blame David Ayer rather than his star. 

The wrong time to advertise a Christmas movie

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

This time it's Amazon Prime, on IMDB.

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

Late February? I'm sorry, no. 

Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no comparison.

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

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

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

Oh no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am now asking myself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not recommending me a movie I've already seen

I did not like You're Cordially Invited. "Hate" is not too strong a word.

This despite the fact that Will Ferrell is one of my comedy heroes, Nicholas Stollar directed my beloved Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I've liked Reese Witherspoon pretty much every time I've seen her on screen. If you want more of my thoughts on why I did not like hated this movie, see my review here. 

In fact, so low was my opinion of You're Cordially Invited that I did something I almost never do: I rated it with a thumbs up or a thumbs down, as the streamers are always asking me to do. In this case, that was obviously a thumbs down. 

I found the result funny, and counterintuitive -- only worsening the experience, if that were possible.

Here is what came up on screen after I gave the thumbs down:

I'm caught up on the wording "We won't recommend this."

Because Amazon doesn't say to whom it won't recommend it, I'm left with the following two guesses:

"We won't recommend this to you." Well, of course you won't recommend it to me. Why would you recommend me any movie you know I've already seen? That's just dumb. If I've seen it, I can judge for myself whether I want to see it again. 

"We won't recommend this to any of our customers." If that's the case, it's a little extreme based on one person's opinion. Some people may like You're Cordially Invited, though I wouldn't want to be friends with them.

What I think they mean to say here is "We won't recommend you similar movies," but if that's what it is, that's wrong too for how I would practically use their service. I do want to watch many if not most romantic comedies, which is one of the reasons I watched this within the first 12 hours of its availability. If the result of me rating this movie is that I no longer know about other romantic comedies streaming on Amazon that might interest me, then I really do regret rating it, and this is why I don't do these ratings in the first place.

What they maybe should be saying, though it would be very wordy, is "We will take your rating into consideration when deciding the extent to which we will recommend this to other Amazon subscribers whom we have deemed to be somewhat similar to you." Then again, I haven't given them many/any ratings before, so they only know I watched certain movies, not whether I liked them. So my one rating may not be of much use to them anyway.

A paucity of available space forces unhelpful semantic shortcuts in the text. We can say that one thing for sure.

I didn't miss Red One after all

One of the greatest Christmas movie calamities I can remember was the release of a 2004 film called Surviving Christmas, starring Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini and Christina Applegate. I've written about it on this blog before and recounted its salient talking points before, but that was back in 2010, and repeating a story every 15 years is, I think, quite alright.

Famously, the movie was released so early in the "Christmas season" (October 22nd) and performed so poorly at the box office ($15 million worldwide gross) that they released it on video in time for that very Christmas, to recoup any little bit of their $45 million investment. And that was in an era when the window between theatrical release and home viewing release was as wide as it has ever been. Releasing a movie on video a mere two months after the theater -- when theaters would, ideally, still be playing it -- was unheard of.

But times have changed, and in retrospect, there seems to be a certain brilliance to the move, even if it was born out of desperation. The drawback Christmas movies have always had is that they may do big business in the theater, but the home video market is likely to have significantly depleted profitability due to the fact that there is no point to release it there a mere three to four months after it was in cinemas. Because no one wants to watch a Christmas movie in February, you wait until the following year, at which point it's old hat -- or at least, no different than any other old movie a person chooses to rent or buy.

I have to think Surviving Christmas did make a little extra money on video just by virtue of being a "new" movie -- people always love the new -- and by being easily available at home when they still wanted to watch Christmas movie.

Nowadays, it was likely always the plan to release Red One on Amazon Prime in time for this Christmas, which they did last week -- even though they released it only a month before that in cinemas. That's in spite of how well it did in theaters, which was reasonably well: $175 million globally. That's nothing compared to a budget of -- am I reading this right? -- $250 million, so yes, it's not a hit, though it's more of a hit (percentage-wise) than Surviving Christmas was. Obviously not what they were hoping for, but it's not going to tank the studio or anything. 

I had resigned myself to missing Red One. Not with a huge amount of regret, but I do like to watch a new Christmas movie or two each year, and not just limit myself to the pap and dreck that's released on streaming. (That's an oversimplification, as some of the Christmas movies I've enjoyed most in the past ten years -- Klaus, Spirited and Jingle Jangle -- all went straight to streaming.) It was easy to see that Red One would lose out in a crowded field of awards contenders when vying for my limited viewing time.

But then the other weekend, I took my younger son to the theater to see Moana 2 as part of a birthday party for one of his friends. He was looking at one of the trailers playing in the lobby for Red One, with a certain knowledge of its existence and essential details that could have only come from interest (or watching something about it on YouTube). That was when I experienced a small amount of regret, as it could have been a way for us to usher in a Christmas season that has been slow to get started, in part because we are going overseas tomorrow, and therefore have not gotten our own tree or done much in the way of decorating. 

Then all the sudden, there it was, available for streaming. 

And I felt just like the Surviving Christmas viewers of 2004 must have felt, only with significantly more optimism. 

I had hoped to watch it with my ten-year-old on Saturday, but we are also building a deck -- don't ask -- and my wife was concerned about a preplanned engagement to watch the movie cutting short our deck time. However, it was clear we were ahead of our pace, so she happily approved the potential viewing. Only when I put it to my son, offering him either Saturday or Monday as possible dates, he opted for the Monday -- a small, but ultimately unimportant, setback.

I did watch it with him on Monday, on the hottest day of the year so far, when we were cocooned inside our air conditioned living room, feeling almost as cold as the polar climates depicted in the movie. 

I think he might have slightly preferred not to watch it, since kids have short attention spans these days, and the video games he would have otherwise been playing are more natural fits for that. The evidence of this was that at one point during the movie, he had to get up and "twirl around" behind our couch for a few minutes. Yes, he's prone to being antsy, but it doesn't mean he's not enjoying or doesn't have the patience for the activity in question. He might even do it during the brevity of a Simpsons episode.

But he hasn't yet turned 11 -- that's just a few weeks off -- so I still have him as a captive audience for another year or two, as a kid who would rather make his dad happy if all it takes is spending a little bit of his unlimited fungible free time. This time next year, it might already be that much harder to watch Red One.

And in the end, the movie was not a huge hit with him. He called it "alright," then tried to hastily upgrade his assessment when he saw my surprise at his middling level of approbation. (It turns out, his reaction to the movie was more in line with the general outlook than my own.) Probably two hours and three minutes is too long for this movie, but not when you consider how absolutely bursting with ideas it is -- both good and not so good.

Me? I had cause for my optimism. I ended up giving it a 7/10 in my just-posted review on ReelGood, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when I flirted with an 8. Clearer heads prevailed, and by the time I actually wrote the review, I realized the things I had to say were more in line with a 7. 

But a 7 can be a pretty positive review, and it's way better than the half-star (out of five) I would have given Surviving Christmas if I'd been in charge of the star rating on the old site where I reviewed it. (In a now strange-seeming procedural move, some editor at the site gave a film a star rating based on available consensus, and it didn't matter if what you wrote was relatively out of sync with it.) (I just went to my old review site, AllMovie, to check to see what the star rating was, and this is how I discovered the fairly momentous news that the writing we all did back then appears to have been largely scrubbed from the site, replaced by a Wikipedia plot synopsis and a place for people to add their own reviews. This would be an even bigger deal if I hadn't printed out all my reviews at the time, though I must admit that this is a thought-provoking turn of events for me as a critic that may require its own separate post at some point. For what it's worth, the current star rating for Surviving Christmas is a quite-laughable three stars out of five.)

In any case, since this is a time of year for Christmas movie recommendations, I can give you one for Red One. It doesn't have any chance of entering the canon of classic Christmas movies, but it's a lot better than the average pap and dreck released directly to streaming -- and not only because it has that desirable imprimatur of having gotten released on the big screen just a month ago. 

Always double check your Amazon release years

I was supposed to watch the Survivor finale last night, but I couldn't get that part of the TV to work. By the time I'd rebooted the Fetch box a couple times, it was already about 10:20, so I had to pivot to something quickly. 

My preference would have been to consult my list of 2024 movies I still have to watch in the next month-plus, but that often involves doing an iTunes rental (something I initiate from my computer) and I could not be bothered at this point to go into the other room and do it. So instead I hopped on Amazon Prime, noting that there would likely be a new movie I'd never heard of that immediately struck me as something rank-worthy to watch.

True enough, there was: Joachim Back's Corner Office, an office satire staring John Hamm. It had the 2024 release year and everything to prove it.

Thirty minutes in, I was enjoying this movie so much that I went to check Wikipedia on my phone. I figured, if the release were just in the last week or so, I could actually write up a review -- possibly as soon as tomorrow morning. (Otherwise, this would be a full work week bereft of reviews. I did actually write a review for Better Man, but that's not coming out until December 26th, so I won't post it yet.)

So imagine my disappointment when the first thing I saw on Wikipedia was that Corner Office was listed as a 2022 movie. Not even 2023, but 2022. 

That was when it first appeared at Tribeca, anyway. I quickly checked just to be sure it hadn't had a circuitous route to rear its head for the next time on Amazon Prime, but no, it was released in the U.S. August of last year. 

Just to confirm a second time, I checked my friend Don's 2023 movie list, and there Corner Office was, ranked at #242. (That may sound like a particularly bad rating, but Don ranked 436 movies last year. He didn't like it as much as I did, in any case.)

Darn.

It's always a good experience when you see a movie you like. But in the month of December, I've gone from ahead of my previous pace to -- well, not quite behind it, but struggling to keep up with my ever-growing watchlist, and conscious of the days ticking away. Yesterday was the 12th day of December and yet I have seen only four films in December that qualify for 2024. (And don't forget, I still have to watch that Survivor finale.)

Amazon has gotten me this way before -- or, I should say, nearly gotten me until I avoided calamity at the last moment.

There's a certain subjectivity to their release years. They're not so deranged that they list the release year as the year it first streamed on Amazon Prime, though in the case of Corner Office, those would be one in the same. Really what I think it is is that the release years are at least, to some degree, customized by country, and I believe it's an Australian version of Amazon Prime I'm getting. (Even though rentals I purchase through Prime are charged to me through iTunes, somehow, because that's where my Apple TV is, and I have a U.S. Apple TV. At least I believe that's how it works.) It seems likely that the actual Australian debut of Corner Office was in 2024, and that's the explanation for the year. That doesn't help me in terms of my year-end rankings, though, since I go by U.S. release year.

It does resolve one problem for me, though -- a problem that has been accentuated by Don's middling ranking of the movie. As I was watching, I was having a hard time deciding just how good the movie was, but it was somewhere between really good and great. Because at this time of the year, I'm always willing to give a new movie a chance to blow up my current top ten, I was trying to decide if Corner Office was that good. Now, I don't have to worry about that. 

It is, however, the third movie I've watched this year in which Hamm's history playing Don Draper was somehow invoked. You may recall from this post that back in May, I saw two movies in one weekend in which both Hamm and John Slattery appeared, one not invoking Mad Men in any explicit way other than the pairing, the other featuring a direct riff on their characters from that show. Corner Office was a bit more like the latter, as the premise is that Hamm's character, a socially awkward office drone, discovers an unused room in his dystopian high rise that resembles the best corner office that series might have ever created, with perfectly appointed mid-century furniture and other luxurious details, which helps his character become more focused and get ahead at work. 

It certainly shouldn't surprise us to see someone like Hamm excelling in that environment, given the hours he toiled in such an environment as Don Draper. 

Technically accurate but semantically dishonest

Which of these "award-winning movies" is not like the other?

Awards for Past Lives, according to Wikipedia:

Best Woman Screenwriter - Alliance of Women Film Journalists
Top Ten Films of the Year - American Film Institute Awards
Best Director - Asia Pacific Screen Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Casting - Artios Awards
Best First Feature - Astra Film and Creative Arts Awards
Best Original Screenplay, Best First Film - Austin Film Critics Awards

And that's only the A's. Point proven, I will stop there.

Awards for Prey, according to Wikipedia:

Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series or Anthology, Movie or Special - Primetime Emmy Awards
Best Streaming Film Premiere, Best Costume Design, Best Creature FX - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing - Non-Theatrical Feature - Golden Reel Awards
Best Original Score - Streamed Live Action Film (No Theatrical Release) - Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Awards for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, according to Wikipedia:

Feature Big Budget - Comedy - Artios Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Critics Choice Movie Awards
Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Original Poster - Golden Trailer Awards
Best Supporting Actress - National Society of Film Critics Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Online Film Critics Society Awards
Best Adapted Screenplay - Writers Guild of America

Awards for Movie 43, according to Wikipedia:

Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay - Golden Raspberry Awards

Now, some of these awards may be a bit fringe, but at least you would write home about them.

Not so for the "accolades" for Movie 43.

So I am trying to figure out Amazon's angle here. 

They are promoting four random movies to us that all are considered "award winners" -- a technically true statement. The thing that separates them from being completely random, I would guess, is that perhaps they are all new to the service within the past few weeks, or at least returned to the service after a temporary departure.

But wait -- Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was an Amazon original movie. It debuted there. There would be no conceivable reason it would have ever left, because where would it go? Streamer originals are on the service forever and ever after, amen. 

So that doesn't explain the pairing of these four movies. And surely, if they just wanted four awards winners, they'd have literally hundreds of other movies on the site that would qualify, especially given the number of existing bodies that lavish formal praise on movies that are never going to get an Oscar nomination. (I mean, even the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards exist.) 

What possible incentive could Amazon have for elevating Movie 43 alongside these other films, all of which were critical favorites in one way or another, with maybe only a few detractors for Borat and essentially none for the other two? 

The movie was an all-time turkey, and any of their customers who watch Movie 43 will surely know this right away. They may then investigate why Amazon promoted it to them as such, and find out the technical accuracy of the term "award" -- while still grumbling at the deception.

Because technical accuracy only matters in the legalese that comes at the end of an ad for a new erectile dysfunction drug, or a bargain basement attorney. It only matters if you are trying to indemnify yourself against an angry customer who wants to sue you because something happened with your product that you didn't tell them was going to happen. So you tell them what could happen, and wash your hands of it, and basically live with the fact that you may end up burning some of your future customers, because that's the nature of your particular industry. There are enough potential future customers to compensate for the loss. 

There is no good reason to burn a potential steaming customer, given the comparatively small value of encouraging them to watch any individual thing on your service. Streaming content is inherently a crapshoot, and any streaming customer knows that. The streamer's job is to make the content available, to suggest that you might like it if you liked something similar to it, and to give it a certain visibility in accordance with the streamer's own belief in the content, its own advertising philosophy and perhaps its own agreement with whoever leased the content to give it a certain amount of prominence for a certain amount of days. The rest is just caveat emptor.

But then if you go out of your way to label garbage like Movie 43 as an award winner -- and place it next to three other movies that won awards for legitimate reasons -- you are engaging in actual dishonesty toward your customer that could damage your brand. 

And for what? What do you gain if an additional ten thousand people stream Movie 43? (Answer in the comments, if you know. I really want to know.) That is not an exaggeration given the way ads like these tend to flood our devices, likely going to millions of us, if not billions. (Okay, not billions.) 

You're more likely to lose those ten thousand people as customers than to get them to watch another movie that might be recommended according to their interest in Movie 43, or whatever the flimsy value is that Amazon might get out of this. 

They won't leave because they didn't like this one movie. That can happen any time you click play.

They'll leave because you told them they would like this movie because it was an award winner, when the only awards it won were named after that universal gesture you make with your mouth and tongue, expelling breath outward and creating that farting sound that unmistakeably indicates your disgust.

Leave technical accuracy to the pharmaceutical companies.  

Hiding Sydney Sweeney

You know how when you've got a guilty conscience about something, something always seems to come along to thrust that thing into the forefront of your thoughts?

I've got a little thing for Sydney Sweeney. I don't mind admitting it to you, dear reader. I might not like to admit it to my wife, but she is not one of my readers so we can just discuss it among ourselves. 

It's nothing to be ashamed about, really. To consume popular entertainment is to come into regular contact with people you find attractive, none of whom are realistic romantic partners for you because a) you will never meet them, and you are probably 20 years older than they are and far less attractive than they are, so they would never go for you anyway; b) they may not even be compatible with your sexual identification. I identify as heterosexual but that doesn't mean I dont also have a thing for Ryan Gosling.

So yeah, Sydney Sweeney has turned my head the past few years. I can't deny it.

The thing is, I don't really want it to be obvious to the people who share the same streaming accounts. And that's just what feels like has been happening by the refusal of Sweeney's movie Reality to leave the front page of our Amazon Prime account.

Now, when I saw Reality in December in order to rank it for 2023, I had to rent it from Amazon, because it never popped up on iTunes. I don't have a preference for one place to spend $4.99 over another place to spend $4.99, but I do generally consider iTunes to be my first port of call. Perhaps HBO, which produced Reality, has a friendship with Amazon that it does not have with Apple, because I checked just now and it is still not on iTunes.

I can assure you that I watched the whole movie. It's only 82 minutes long. I don't specifically remember how it ends, but that was a busy time of my viewing calendar. I wouldn't necessarily remember all the details of even movies I liked more than Reality -- which ended up ranked 34th out of the 168 movies I ranked in 2023 -- because some of that late-game viewing period is always a blur.

Amazon, however, does not think I finished watching. And therefore, Reality has stayed in my Continue Watching queue ever since, the big accusing eyes of Sydney Sweeney staring out at me every time I come on the service. 

I may have switched devices halfway through the movie, which is the only explanation I can think of for this state of permanent paralysis that resulted. I've definitely started watching a movie on, let's say, Netflix on one device, and finished it on another. When I return to the first device, Netflix will still think I should resume the movie from where I stopped on that device -- even though it already resumed it from the correct spot on the other device. This usually clears itself up over time, but with Reality on Amazon, it was not doing so.

This would be an annoyance with any movie. With Reality, it was an actual problem -- or so my guilty conscience told me.

And the problem is this: There was no way to clear the movie from Continue Watching.

You can't click in to it try to play out whatever part of the movie it thinks you haven't watched. This was a rental, so if I wanted to try to do that, I'd have to pay the rental price again. And though Reality was my 34th favorite movie of 2023, I'm not in a hurry to see it again, especially not this soon. My conscience isn't guilty enough to pay the rental price just to clear it.

After a couple months it became clear that this movie was going to still be on my Continue Watching on into the next decade, so I looked up online how you can clear something from this queue. And there is a way that's easy enough, so the next time I logged into Amazon on our TV, I did as instructed: I did a long-press on the play button on our AppleTV remote, and was presented with three options of what to do with this movie, one of which was to hide it.

That worked. 

But now I am "hiding" Sydney Sweeney, which is even more damning, perhaps, if it is ever discovered. Amazon tells you that the title will no longer appear in Continue Watching, but you can still find it by searching for it.

So, it'll probably never come up.

But one day, years from now, Amazon will offer an easy way to show you everything you've been hiding, and my wife will stumble into that area, only to see the single title that my secret shame forced me to consign there.

Maybe I ought to hide a Ryan Gosling movie as well, just to be on the safe side. 

You'd have to be a fool

I noticed as I was cueing up Fool's Paradise, my 157th 2023 movie with just about a week to go before I finalize, that Amazon Prime gives you three options of how to watch it.

One was to stream it for free as part of Prime. 

Then in a second tile, you could rent or buy it.

Only the rent option is truly ridiculous, and should be suppressed in some way when it's available to stream for free as part of your service. Both of them are just temporary access to the film, though one costs you $2.99 AUD while the other doesn't.

Purchasing it? You could, but I think many people are rightly hesitant to buy something where you essentially have visitation rights for the time it's streaming for free. Streaming arrangements are not indefinite, but you'd have to like the film an awful lot to buy the cow when the milk is free for the foreseeable future.

Clearly this is primarily due to an overlap that you don't see to the same degree in many other services. Prime functions as both a full streamer, in competition with the likes of Netflix, and as a full rental outlet, in competition with the likes of iTunes. Almost every title will come up on Prime as long as you can either rent or stream it somewhere, whereas the former doesn't come up on Netflix and the latter doesn't come up on iTunes/AppleTV+. (It occurs to me that AppleTV+ may have expanded its free movie options, though I tend to think of it more like a Disney+, offering its own content and not a lot else.)

But clearly there is some acknowledgement of either the streaming arrangement or the low quality of Fool's Paradise as a movie, because that $2.99 AUD is quite low for a movie that has only just recently become available for rental. To the extent that Charlie Day's film had a theatrical release, it was in May. The $2.99 price is even lower when you considered that this converts to closer to $2 in American dollars. And while iTunes has, or at least used to have, limited time pricing, such as its dearly departed, week-long 99 cent rentals of some new releases, I don't believe the same model exists on Amazon.

I don't know. Something to write about on a Tuesday. 

Amazon/Netflix 11th hour discoveries/catchup weekend

On Friday I watched two movies on Amazon. On Saturday I watched two movies on Netflix. And on Sunday I watched one on each.

Four of these six movies had been on my radar for less than two weeks.

Yep, just because it's almost time to stop watching movies for 2023, it doesn't mean there aren't still movies forcing their way onto your watchlist.

I was actually going to have even one more, but the second movie I cued up on Friday night, and watched about one minute of before discovering this information, actually meets my criteria for a 2022 movie, as it had a limited U.S. release in November of '22 (despite the 2023 release date that show on Prime). So I abandoned Next Exit, before it had the chance to make my list of movies to watch before January 23rd even longer.

What I did end up watching was:

Swallowed and Robots on Friday night.

Society of the Snow and Fast X on Saturday afternoon/evening.

And Good Grief/The Burial on Sunday afternoon/evening.

And did I mention these were all on the projector in my garage?

Only Fast X and The Burial had been on my watchlist prior to a few weeks ago, when Society of the Snow reared its head based on the (it turns out very justified) ravings of a friend. 

Fast X was one I was going to leave on the cutting room floor this year, but like John Wick: Chapter 4 before it, it turned up for free on a streaming service so I decided to just go for it. I've seen every other Fast & Furious movie. Why stop now? (And I liked this one better than the ninth installment, I'm glad to report.)

If it looks like I'm cramming, that both is and isn't true.

Yes I was happy not to be on the pace to break my record of 175 from last year, and I am still well on that pace. But a certain FOMO also sets in at this time of year, at the same time, paradoxically, that I am also just feeling so done with it all. Movies don't really get a fair shake in this big lead-up to finalizing my rankings, yet I don't see another way to go about it. At whatever point you cut off your list, you'll probably be cramming it all in before that anyway, and any individual film might feel rode hard, put away wet, and forgotten almost immediately.

Then there's the fact that you lose your ability to parse differences between movies. Seeing as many really good movies, right up until the end, as I'm seeing this year, I can't decide if a movie should make my top ten or not even make my top 25. The struggle is real.

So while I did cram a little bit this weekend, I also didn't, because I anticipate having a few fruitless days at the end of this week, and I'm really just trying to make up for them in advance.

We're going to a friend's beach house this weekend -- remember, summer here in Australia -- and it's possible I won't watch a movie Friday, Saturday or Sunday night. (It's not certain whether we're going down on Friday night or Saturday morning.) Although it would be possible to jam in a movie, it's also a little tacky when it's a social weekend away, and the adults will likely remain in each other's company until bedtime.

So I'm at 152 for the year now, and still hope to only be in the mid to high 160s by January 23rd -- just getting there through a slightly different route. 

And who knows, maybe I will just take an actual night off sometime as well. You know, rest my eyeballs, without social impropriety even being a consideration. 

The Amazon day/night Air/Plane double feature

As soon as I saw that Amazon was carrying both Air and Plane, and in fact advertising them right next to each other on their home page, two words came to mind:

"Double feature."

Now, I'm too sleepy these days to pull off a classic double feature, where you watch the movies more or less consecutively, with 20 minutes or less between them. I usually fall asleep at some point during even one movie that I watch after dinner. (Thursday night was the extreme example: I fell asleep in the middle of Ridley Scott's 94-minute Legend (1985) for such a long time that I actually had to finish it on Friday night. That was no commentary on the movie, which I found even more enthralling on my second viewing than my first.)

It being a Saturday, though, I could watch one movie during "quiet time" (the pre-dinner screen time for my kids) and one in the post-dinner time slot. And because my younger son has unofficial domain over the living room during quiet time, the garage on the projector was my chosen viewing location.

Movies about sports are better than sports movies

It may not surprise you to learn that Ben Affleck's Air feels reminiscent of Bennett Miller's Moneyball, considering that both are more about the business of sports than a sport itself. Both feature off-field dealings between eccentric characters who are happy enough to berate each other with foul language if it will help sell their point. 

And both, it turns out, are really terrific.

Air doesn't rise to the level of Moneyball, to be sure, and it's also considerably less of a sports movie, seeing as how its only game images are real archival footage of Michael Jordan. But boy was it a joy to watch. It's got a great cast, exceptional dialogue and enviable economy of storytelling. And it's just plain fun.

Unlike most sports movies.

That's right, I said it: Movies about sports are better than sports movies.

I love being in the world of sports, but I really don't care that much for a sporting event, or a series of sporting events, to be carried out on screen in front of me. Oh, there are certainly the exceptions -- Major League, for example, is one of the movies it would offend me least to watch once a week for the rest of my life. Generally speaking, though, give me a movie in the world of sports rather than a sports movie any day of the week.

The reasons are pretty clear, and I've gone through them before. For movies that are fiction, I simply don't believe that the crazy comeback that screenwriter concocted would actually happen. Real sports comebacks are amazing precisely because they did happen. For non-fiction films, sometimes that recreation can be cool to watch, but I'd usually just rather watch a tape of the actual game.

But I can rub elbows with sports in a movie like Air or Moneyball without having to suspend disbelief and judge a screenwriter's success at writing some buzzer beater that I don't believe really happened. 

And what a bunch of fun sports adjacent characters to rub elbows with. Affleck as Phil Knight, Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, Jason Bateman as the lesser known marketing guy, Chris Tucker as another guy at the company -- no I really don't think it's relevant for me to look up their names or titles right now -- they were just a great bunch to spend two hours with. To say nothing of Viola Davis as Jordan's mother Deloris.

What I thought was really impressive is that they got such good dialogue and such a good script without having to have an Aaron Sorkin in their corner. Air was written by a guy named Alex Convery, and this is his very first credit.

Gerard Butler can be in good movies, too

I was all ready to throw Plane on the pile of terrible Gerard Butler misfires, of which there are so many that it becomes impossible even to count them. I mean, the title alone suggests some sort of surrender by the studio and/or screenwriters.

But then I kind of enjoyed the hell out of it.

Things I really liked:

1) The plane losing altitude (not a spoiler, because come on) and trying to land was harrowing. I'm sure I've seen 200 plane crashes in movies, but this one put me into the moment better than most. Kudos, Jean-Francois Richet -- an actual good director, I am reminded as I now see that he directed Blood Father, which I really liked. 

2) Butler behaves like a pilot, not an action hero. If you've seen the trailer you know Butler et al mix it up with some bad men in this movie, and yes, Butler carries multiple guns at different points. But the movie remembers that this is an airline pilot, not a commando. He does have an intense physical struggle, but I'm willing to believe a fit 50-year-old man could indeed prevail in such a situation. I don't believe he could pick up a gun for the first time and start picking off foes with it, and to its credit, this movie avoids him having to do that -- almost entirely I think.

3) I actually believed from moment to moment where the story went. It's a wild story to be sure, but I never doubted that the latest twist would/could happen. 

Given that Butler is coming off truly terrible movies like Geostorm and Last Seen Alive, and I was not the fan of Greenland that some people were, this has to be seen as a real mini-comeback for him.

Air was an easy four-star rating for me on Letterboxd, as it has again jumped to the front of the line of the films I've seen in the weak-so-far year of 2023. My initial instinct was to give Plane the same -- I know, I know. But in fact, the "I know, I know" is my guilt talking, my idea that Butler is irredeemably terrible and if I really liked one of his films, it must be a mistake on my part. 

Who wants guilt to be a factor in the experience you had watching a movie? So instead of 3.5 stars, I gave this one four stars as well.

And that's a pretty damn good double feature. 

Strong skills of deception

When I started to watch the new Amazon movie Somebody I Used to Know on Saturday night, from the description of the trigger warning I thought it might be the streamer's next The Voyeurs.

The movie allegedly contained "Strong nudity, strong crude sexual jokes, strong sex scenes."

Not quite.

I'd take them in order except that I'm not even sure I remember any of the strong crude sexual jokes. So let's start with the other two.

Strong nudity?

That was certainly the promise to the single male Amazon viewer trawling for flesh, because the movie stars Alison Brie, often considered to be quite the attraction to such a demographic. 

The movie doesn't lie about this -- parts of her naked body are seen twice -- but it's not in a sexual context at all. In fact, it's in the context of nudism. 

In the first situation, she streaks across a golf course. So does Kiersey Clemons. However, they're shot at least a hundred yards away, and it is not titillating in the least. 

The second is almost like a makeup call for the first. Brie's character is interviewing an actual nudist at the end of the story, who is seen fully from the waist up but is also in her 50s if not her 60s. The reverse angle shots of Brie are specifically shot in such a way to cover her up. Then at end of the interview, she does shift enough so that you are given a full view of her upper half -- almost as if the movie is saying "Okay, guys, here's finally what you came for, but ha -- you had to watch the whole movie first!" It's debatable that that's what they came for.

Strong sex scenes?

These don't involve Brie or Clemons. In fact, they involve Julie Hagerty, who'll be 68 in a couple months. 

In fact, they don't even involve any nudity from Hagerty herself. In one of the scenes you see the naked butt of her sexual partner, who I think is played by Leigh Guyer. In the other scene, you just see him under the covers pleasuring Hagerty, but that's more implied activity than anything visual. In either case, both scenes are played for comedy, like "Ha ha, old people don't have sex!"

Strong crude sexual jokes?

Did somebody pretend to fellate a bread roll at some point? I don't really remember.

In any case, the point of this piece is that while none of these descriptions may be technically inaccurate, the use of the word "strong" oversells them considerably -- and leaves you nowhere to go when you've got a movie that is really shocking sexually. 

Let's say someone was actually using these as a trigger warning, rather than a promise of goods contained within. Too many of these and it's a total boy who cried wolf situation, and suddenly you are watching Salo or Caligula and thinking "Oh my God what just happened."

However, in researching the artwork for this piece, I found at least Amazon has a totally honest alternative poster for Somebody I Used to Know -- honest in what they believe is the reason you're watching this movie, and honest in terms of what they're actually giving you. 

Behold:

X-Ray vision

Have you ever invented something in your mind, and then lo and behold, some weeks or months or years later, it appears before you?

I'm in the middle of watching this just-released Amazon original movie, Uncle Frank, and as this phenomenon has just occurred to me, I had to stop mid-viewing to write this post.

For ages I've thought it would be great if movies had a feature that would tell you the name of an actor that's currently on the screen, so you didn't miss five minutes of the movie scratching your head and thinking "Now where the hell do I know that guy from?" I imagined it being something like Pop-Up Video, though it would have to be something you could turn on and off for viewers who don't care about such things.

As I was watching Uncle Frank, I paused for a moment, and realized that when I did so, pictures of two actors popped up in the upper left corner. I thought nothing of it the first time, but the second time I paused, I noticed two different actors and thought "Now what is this all about?"

Then I realized it was the two actors in the scene I was currently watching, and started to get an idea what this was all about.

The movie moved on to the next scene, a scene with four actors, and sure enough, when I paused, those four actors appeared, now taking up the whole left side of the screen rather than just its upper corner. And sure enough, they were the actors on screen. I could see their names easily, and could click into them if I really wanted to know more.

Now how about that.

It's just one of the elements in an Amazon exclusive featured called X-Ray, I have now learned. You can also easily jump to other scenes in the movie based on a short description, you can look at the entire cast with a bunch of head shots, you can learn trivia, and you can even learn the names of songs playing in the film -- this last being another feature I would use all the time.

Awesome.

When you're done looking up whatever you want to look up, you just click the X in the upper right-hand corner and you're back to where you paused.

I'm going to use this all the time. It's just so handy. 

Apparently the feature has been around since at least this past summer, as I found some stories online talking about it back in July.

I'd guessed it would only work for Amazon originals, since it would take a lot of work to implement this feature on all the thousands of titles they may be streaming at any given moment. But I can see that at least some non-originals have it, as they're advertising the availability of this feature on Avengers: Endgame (which you would have to pay to rent). 

Pretty damn cool.

(And yes, I did notice the little play on words in my subject, though I can assure you it was unintentional: Paul Bettany stars in Uncle Frank, and he played a character called Vision -- in the aforementioned Avengers: Endgame, at that. Or, I guess, only in Avengers: Infinity War. Close enough. And, spoiler alert.)

And since it's Thanksgiving on the calendar today -- here in Australia if not yet in America -- this makes a nice optimistic post for the day, a reason to give thanks.

Now let's see if the rest of this movie -- chock full of family themes and released just in time for Thanksgiving -- delivers more of the same. 

Prime time

Earlier this year, I considered writing a post entitled "Movies I can't access," which would have commented on the growing phenomenon of not being able to see specific movies unless you subscribed to the one service where they were available. Whereas in the past, you could either see them in the theater or wait for the video window, now there are certain films that you just can't see unless you subscribe. 

That's been true for several years in terms of Netflix, though it hadn't been affecting me because I was a Netflix subscriber. But earlier this year I really started to notice that I couldn't see all the movies people were talking about unless I ponied up for at least a few more subscriptions.

And though I hate the idea of subscribing to a hundred different individual streaming packages, yesterday I took another step toward that eventuality. 

That's right, following on the heels of recent additions of Disney+ and AppleTV+, I am now an Amazon Prime subscriber. 

It's my second time as an Amazon subscriber, I should say, but the first was a number of years ago, and totally unwitting on my part. I had accepted a free trial of Amazon Prime when I purchased something on Amazon, just in order to get free shipping I think. It was long enough ago that I hadn't really realized what such a subscription entailed, or what it could get me, and I never even watched any movies using the subscription. In fact, I even forgot entirely I had done it. It was only a year or so later, when I realized I'd been paying for it after my trial period ended, that I got wise and cancelled my membership.

I don't really need another service to look up old films, though I can't deny it will probably be helpful to me. But I do think it's time to remove my obstruction to certain new releases. 

The one I watched last night to celebrate the new service was Blow the Man Down, a small-town crime thriller that holds a special place in my heart because it's set in Maine, where my dad lives and where I went to college. I'd heard this discussed on two podcasts ages ago, probably back in March when it was first released, and had been wondering since then when I'd ever get the chance to watch it.

The answer was simple: Just plunk down $59 for the first year of an annual Amazon Prime membership.

There's a reason for this decision beyond just wanting to be a bigger part of the conversation about new releases on the podcasts I listen to. And that's so I'm no longer Netflix's bitch.

As you may recall, I am writing most of the reviews on ReelGood now that my former editor has departed to focus on other things. (He'll be back to write the occasional review, such as Mank and Tenet, when they both become available to us here in Australia.) During COVID, I've had to turn to streaming content to continue regularly posting new reviews. Unfortunately, that content is limited by the streaming subscriptions I actually have. 

When it was only Netflix, I was basically all Netflix, all the time. Now, of course, not all my reviews of Netflix movies were good, and in fact, I've slammed several of their 2020 releases with ratings of 2/10 or lower. But if your argument is "any press is good press," then indeed I have been doing Netflix's bidding this year. If not for screeners sent to me through my ReelGood contacts for other theatrical and VOD releases, my 2020 content might be Netflix or nothing at all.

Now, at least I can say I've got a second service to select from. I've also got Disney+ and AppleTV+, but they don't seem to release new movies as frequently. Whereas with Amazon Prime, there are a whole host of new Blumhouse movies coming out starting next week, as part of a new(ish) deal between Amazon and Jason Blum. 

I would normally hand off horror to my other writer on ReelGood, as that's his specialty, but I won't in this case as I want to put my new membership to work for me. 

There are still some movies I can't access. Like, I'm not sure when I'll finally get to see the Andy Samberg-Cristin Milioti vehicle Palm Springs, which remains stranded on Hulu, which is not a service you can get in Australia. I'm also still impeded from Seth Rogen's An American Pickle, which is the sole property of HBO. 

But before I figure out whether I'm going to make myself dependant on two more streaming services in order to get my much-desired full coverage, I'll appreciate Amazon for a bit, including Selah and the Spades, which was another movie I heard talked about earlier in the year. Not to mention all the low-budget horror Jason Blum can churn out, starting next week.

This has been a year about trying to figure out how we're going to access movies in general, with theaters closed. Considering that I'm at about my same number of total new movies seen as in previous years, it tells me that by hook or by crook or by an umpteenth new streaming service, I'm managing it.