Audient Outliers: Primer

This is the final in my 2024 bi-monthly series Audient Outliers, in which I've rewatched a film I didn't like by a director whose work I otherwise love.

In a series that has already involved a lot of cheating on the rules -- out of only six films, mind you -- I'm finishing with perhaps the biggest cheat yet. 

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Shane Carruth's Primer (2004) was one of the films I had in mind when I first considered this series, only I couldn't find it streaming anywhere all year, until it finally popped up on Kanopy a couple months ago.

Why such a cheat for Primer?

Well, Shane Carruth has one film I like a lot, one film I don't particularly care for ... and no more films.

How can a single film you don't like possibly be an outlier from the majority of films you do like, when there is only one other film?

Answer: It cannot.

However, here's an interesting counterargument: When I think up these series, the underlying goal is to give myself a reason to watch particular films, whether that's for the first time or a revisit. And ever since loving Carruth's Upstream Colour, I have wondered whether I needed to give Primer another chance. 

And if I didn't understand it a second time, at least this time I'd have a Wikipedia plot synopsis there to help me -- something that probably was not yet part of my regular routine with movies I didn't quite grok back when I saw this the first time in 2006. 

And at least it's incredibly short, lasting only 77 minutes, which is great for this time of year. In fact, I watched this as the third consecutive night of knocking out my "obligations" -- two films I had to watch for series on this blog, and one for a series external to this blog -- before setting my sights on 2024 films from now until the end of January.

Let's start with the history.

My then girlfriend, now wife and I watched Primer together in September of 2006, back in the days when she used to watch a couple movies a week with me. Now it's more like a couple movies a year. That's okay and irrelevant to this.

But it's movies like Primer that might have steadily eroded her support of movies in general, short though it was. We were both befuddled by this movie, me angrily so. Although I did give it 2 stars -- a bad rating, to be sure, but not the kind of rating I give a movie I hated -- it has still become a go-to rant movie for me, one that easily comes to mind as an example of a film that received a lot of hype but that I thought was pretty unsuccessful.

The reason Primer was/is so unsuccessful is something I can expound on better now that I've freshly watched it again. It's a time travel movie whose details are described in such shorthand that it's like you are watching two people who know their own technology inside and out and so do not need to give even a whiff of expository dialogue about it. They discuss it with such a melding of their two minds that they are almost completing each other's sentences, and therefore, no explaining is required. It's as though you were a fly on the wall for two people discussing something like, I don't know, cold fusion, or a microchip. They know what they're talking about, but you don't. And while that is an incredible case of "realism," it is not an incredible case of filmmaking, since (most) films require the audience to follow what's going on. I'd say especially films about time travel.

It is easy to have a surface-level appreciation of what Carruth is doing here as an exercise in asking a lot from an audience in pursuit of that so-called "realism." Almost every time travel movie you've ever seen has laboriously laid out everything you need to know about it, preferring to err on the side of dialogue that is purely for the audience, even if it would be entirely superfluous for the experts involved in the conversation. This sort of spoon-feeding is an essential component of most cinema. We need to understand the world these characters are in, even if they already understand it. 

Primer makes absolutely zero concessions to audience understanding. On this viewing I'd say I had a marginally better idea of what was going on in the plot in this movie, up to a point, at which point I felt my mind giving up again. The part I understood better was how the characters discover that the other technology they are trying to develop in order to get venture capital funding -- which I wasn't totally sure about either -- had a strange offshoot that allowed them to accidentally build a time machine. What I still didn't understand was the part of the story where they start to use the time machine, how it works, how and where the second versions of their characters are supposed to be, and the actual plot that involves an angry ex-boyfriend (who we never see) bringing a shotgun to a party and threatening his ex. There's one point where Carruth's character says "I'm hungry, I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." While that's a great line of dialogue, it comes out of left field in terms of my own subjective experience of what's going on, because I'm already too confused to know if it makes sense in context. 

I believe that Carruth understands what's going on in his movie, and if we could understand it, it probably holds together great and might have the sort of "Whoa" Keanu Reeves mind-blowing that I discuss in this post, the last time I talked about Primer on this blog. The thing is, he lacks either the skill or the desire to explain it coherently, and that is the film's fatal flaw.

Now, I should tell you that Upstream Colour is far from a coherent film. However, I believe that film is designed to be incoherent, and it's all about colors and moods and character relationships. If we don't understand the science in that film -- something about pig genes and mind control -- it doesn't matter because that stuff is really secondary to the film's vibe, which I love.

Time travel films should be held to a much higher standard for coherence. As I said in the post linked above, we need to understand if something that's supposed to blow our minds is actually cool, or if instead it makes absolutely zero sense within the context of the world they're presenting.

It is impossible to determine this in Primer. It might be amazing. It might be total nonsense. And the fact that we don't know the difference is a problem.

I secretly think that the people who loved Primer did so because they were impressed by the balls of Carruth to make something so incomprehensible, yet with a clear sense of intention that is admirable. They probably thought that if they didn't get it, that was on them. And therefore, they awarded the effort more than the result. Apparently, I cannot do the same thing.

I said I would use the Wikipedia plot synopsis to try to understand Primer a little bit better this time. And so now, already at this point of the writing, I will read that synopsis and tell you if it changes my opinion at all on what Carruth is doing here. 

Okay I'm back. That was a good plot synopsis. Whoever wrote it is either very smart, or watched the film about 20 times. Maybe I should have read the synopsis before I watched it, considering that I had already seen it before so I would not, technically, be spoiling anything. 

As I've said a couple times, I think this script is probably watertight, which is why some cinephiles really ate up this movie. They either watched it in slow motion or with the patience to sort it out. Two times now I have not done that, and there may not be another. 

In that same post above, I said I'd like to give Primer another shot after loving Upstream Colour. I have now done that, and I'm not mad I did it. Sometimes it's good to know that the version of you 18 years ago was not crazy. 

I do find myself bemoaning the fact that Carruth has not made/has not gotten to make another movie after Upstream Colour. One thing I'll say for sure is that he has a singular vision, and it's a shame when the cinematic landscape is deprived of that, largely for economic reasons. Though at least we do see his spirit live on in people like his contemporary Darren Aronofsky, and in the works of Something in the Dirt directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.

And twice in two days I am wrapping one of my 2024 series, the last one. I'll be back with another bi-monthly series in 2025, probably returning to finishing off the final six films of a renowned director, if I can find one who fits perfectly for that project. 

Audient Outliers: Somewhere

This is the fifth and penultimate film in my 2024 bi-monthly series rewatching a single film I didn't care for from a filmmaker I otherwise love.

This Audient Outliers series required fudging of the rules right from the very start, when I chose Jonathan Glazer's filmography for February -- even though I had not yet seen The Zone of Interest, so I couldn't truly know if Sexy Beast was the only of his films I didn't like. The loose interpretation of the rules has continued throughout, as re-examining Frank Darabont's The Mist required not only factoring in his TV show The Walking Dead as a point in the win column for him, but having not seen one of his films either, The Majestic.

So it wasn't a perfectly conceived series. So what. I am not trying to please some outside body that judges my adherence to the rules. I'm trying to create a reason for revisiting films that gave me pause.

And so in October I have now watched Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, even though it is conceivably only my third least favorite Coppola film.

If Somewhere and Priscilla came up side-by-side in a duel on Flickchart, I'd probably pick Priscilla -- or would have before I rewatched Somewhere, but I won't reveal yet whether that viewing changed my choice in this duel. 

But if that duel were between Somewhere and On the Rocks, there is no doubt that Somewhere would win hands down -- before that viewing, after that viewing, and always. 

So why, you might ask, did I not choose On the Rocks if I wanted to finally break my string of four straight white male directors to start this series?

Simple: I knew there were no hidden depths to On the Rocks that would be revealed from a second viewing. Beyond featuring Bill Murray and the music of her husband Thomas Mars, On the Rocks is so little like what we would expect from a Coppola film that I suspect it will always seem like the outlier in her filmography -- objectively for us all, not just subjectively for me -- even after she has made her final film, which hopefully won't be for another 30 years.

Somewhere is probably nothing but hidden depths.

But how would they play for me on this viewing?

First a little background on Somewhere. In my family, it is most remembered for the funny circumstances of our original viewing.

When my wife and I first watched it in January 2011, our first child was only about five months old. So we weren't going to the movies together much, if at all. This was the closest we came, but it took some humorous logistics.

Basically, I went to the first showing of Somewhere at a theater relatively near our house. After it ended, my wife met me in the parking lot with our son, who was asleep in his stroller, while she went to the very next showing. I transitioned him back to my car and drove home while she went to the movie. So he went to sleep with mummy and woke up with daddy. I can't remember whether or not the expression on his face was particularly reflective of that surprise.

I wish the whimsical circumstances of this viewing had made me more favorably disposed to the movie, but they did not. (Maybe if I'd been the second viewer, rather than the first. At that point, I hadn't yet done the whimsical exchange of our child.) I recognized the filmmaking skills of the director, on a personal hot streak with me after she scored my #1 spot in 2003 with Lost in Translation and a big favorite with Marie Antoinette in 2007, which I did not see until 2008 so I couldn't rank it to determine where it would have landed in my year-end rankings. I just didn't vibe with what she was trying to accomplish.

The movie felt like 97 minutes of repeating the message that celebrity has hollow comforts and hollows out your sense of humanity. Stephen Dorff's Johnny Marco puts a rather fine point on this very near the climax of the movie, on the phone with his ex, when he says he is "not even a person." While each little vignette demonstrating this hollowness is compelling its own right, their collection adds up to less than the sum of the parts.

I still basically feel this way about the movie after my second viewing. I see on Letterboxd I retroactively gave this movie 2.5 stars (I added all my movies to Letterboxd around 2013), and that would probably get bumped up to three today. But that could also be because I am becoming a softie in my old age and I hand out three stars to movies as long as they did not offend me. (A little bit of an exaggeration, but maybe not as much of an exaggeration as I would like.)

Although the movie is fundamentally "boring" -- in other words, that's sort of by design -- I did not specifically feel bored while watching it. However, this might be a good time to mention the funny coincidence to this viewing. When I had not yet decided what I was watching on Wednesday night, tossing up a couple options including Somewhere, our family watched an episode of The Simpsons from 2011 over dinner, in which Lisa creates a social media service called Springface. (Probably not the show's only riff on The Social Network, but definitely the first.) In this episode, Homer talks about how he can use the site -- I can't really remember the relevance in the context of the episode -- to watch a Sofia Coppola movie on double speed, so it seems like a normal movie. 

Homer's comment was almost certainly intended in relation to Somewhere, which came out the same autumn as The Social Network, meaning the Simpsons writers had just enough time to write it up and animate it for air about a year later. That's the sort of "universe telling you what to do" moment that pushed me toward Somewhere as my viewing that evening.

Homer is right, of course, that Coppola's pace is purposefully slower. That doesn't bother me in films like Translation, Antoinette, The Bling Ring or The Beguiled, which are my four favorite Coppola films. It bothers me a little here because there is something inherently navel gazey about following a movie star who attracts the attention of every woman who crosses his path and has landed for a long-term stay at the Chateau Marmont hotel, almost by accident because it represents both the freedoms and the indulgences afforded by his position in the world. It is clear from the first moment of the movie -- the rather metaphorically obvious scene where Johnny drives his Ferrari in a circle in the desert -- that we are not meant to find this lifestyle as appealing as it would seem on the surface. But the fact that Coppola errs on the side of presenting, rather than commenting on, Johnny's life certainly does allow a viewer to dream themselves away into it, if they wanted.

In reality, Somewhere would be a weaker film if it damned Johnny's life choices in no uncertain terms, or if it showed him being truly neglectful of his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning, great even from this early age). Johnny is actually a pretty good parent when he's around. But he's also prone to sneaking in a quickie with a random woman in the hope that Cleo doesn't notice. 

There is probably a core truth to the depictions of the layabout movie star, though the actual truth, from Coppola's own life, is her perspective on being the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, and traveling with him to movie premieres. (The section of Somewhere set in Italy is probably my favorite.) The star's behavior is something she could easily glean from being in that world, and perhaps Johnny Marco is also a continued processing of the character based on her former partner, Spike Jonze, who exists in the form of the cameraman played by Giovanni Ribisi in Lost in Translation. 

So none of this rings false, and it does look like a peek behind the curtain at eccentric things that seem apocryphal, which only makes them more likely to have happened: the male masseuse who strips naked while massaging Johnny, because it's part of his process; the nearly twin dancers performing for Johnny on portable stripper poles they bring to his hotel room; playing Guitar Hero in the Chateau Marmont room that has become essentially permanently his, room #59.

I think we don't realize the full strength of what Coppola is doing here until the end, when Johnny has left Cleo at camp, and we realize just how comparatively empty his life is once the spark she brings is no longer there. That father-daughter bond is retroactively reinforced in the final ten minutes of the movie, when we are left with only Johnny, and see what a lonely place that is.

So am I talking myself into liking Somewhere a little more than I did previously? Maybe even a little more than boosting its rating by a half-star, which I already said is a sort of inflation, based on my changing temperament as a critic?

Maybe I am. But I can tell I am not that interested in watching Somewhere a third time. I still think it is a little less than the sum of its parts, still missing something that would steer it more firmly toward ... something.

It occurs to me that it is very hard to define what keeps a Coppola movie on the right side of this line between consequentiality and inconsequentiality. Lost in Translation is the clearest example of getting this ineffable balance right, even as it has some moments that feel like dead spots -- clearly more by design in that case, representing the vicissitudes of this connection between Bob and Charlotte. Marie Antoinette, my second favorite, gets huge points for the production design and the way Coppola uses modern music in a manner that was quite new back in 2007.

I can see that Somewhere would land on the right side of this line for some people. It doesn't quite for me, but that hardly makes it without virtues.

Okay, I will wrap up this series in December with an as-yet determined final title. All I can tell you for sure is that if it doesn't involve another cheat, I will be surprised. 

Audient Outliers: Great Expectations

This is the fourth in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I revisit the one film I don't care for in the filmography of a director I love.

Until his productivity kind of dwindled away there -- how else to describe just a single feature film in a ten-year period? -- Alfonso Cuaron was just about my gold standard for visionary directors who take big swings, and almost always hit.

Children of Men is, of course, the gold standard of that gold standard, having taken my #1 movie of 2006 and, perhaps more tellingly, my #2 movie of that entire decade. 

Harry Potter and the Prisoner Azkaban, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Gravity are all excellent movies, and even when I'm not totally sold on something Cuaron makes -- such as the only movie we've gotten from him since 2013, Roma -- I recognize its artistry, and probably think it's a "me thing" and that I should take another look.

I went back this month for another look at his 1998 film, Great Expectations, even though I never thought not liking it was a "me thing." (And to clarify more fully, I think Roma is a very good movie, I just don't think it quite warranted all the praise it got.)

I'm pretty sure I saw Great Expectations before I saw Y Tu Mama Tambien in Cuaron's filmography, but it would be hard to confirm that because I didn't keep track of the order in which I watched films until early 2002, the year after Y Tu Mama came out. And I definitely don't remember watching it as a result of loving Y Tu Mama, though I suppose that could have happened. So let's just say Great Expectations was my first introduction to Cuaron.

If so, it didn't leave me with very great expectations.

Now I should say it's possible I wouldn't particularly care for any film version of Charles Dickens' novel, which I haven't read, and which I have never seen adapted into a period appropriate film. This rewatch confirms that this story is not of particular interest to me, even though I consider myself a romantic who is ready and eager to swoon over such material, if it is presented just so.

In fact, I couldn't help but think of Titanic, which came out the year before Great Expectations, as I watched this. I went in hook, line and sinker for Titanic -- if you'll allow the marine metaphor -- so you'd think that would leave me particularly susceptible to the way Cuaron et al try to conjure a similarly intoxicating romance between Ethan Hawke's Finn and Gwyneth Paltrow's Stella. I'm sure this is straight from the novel so I'm not trying to accuse Cuaron of ripping Titanic off, but there's even a scene where the young man draws/paints the young woman in the nude.

Suffice it to say I was not intoxicated.

And there are materials here with which to intoxicate a person. Specifically, Paltrow. I'll confess that Gwyneth Paltrow of this period does make me swoon just a bit with that perfectly coquettish partial parting of her lips. Both the actress and the character are keenly aware of the power they may have over men, and use it mercilessly. 

The problem is, I don't feel any energy between her and Hawke, an actor I have always liked very much, but perhaps slightly more so in the 21st century than the 20th. I feel there is a lot of play-acting of an almost fairytale style romance, what with the mouldering Florida mansion where the young versions of the characters first meet and share that ten-year-old kiss at the fountain they are both drinking from -- a moment I do admit works, and that I remembered well from my previous viewing. I just don't feel like the film gets beyond play-acting.

I suppose this is a logical progression for Cuaron after his debut English language feature, 1995's A Little Princess, which is one of those movies I went back and watched after I'd already been floored by his work. I really liked that one and it does indicate the sort of fantasy world where Cuaron finds himself in Great Expectations. (I should note here that I thought myself a Cuaron completist, but it turns out I haven't seen 1991's Love in the Time of Hysteria, a Spanish language film, so I probably ought to rectify that at some point.)

But I think it's pretty telling how Cuaron thought Great Expectations went that he immediately scrambled back to something smaller and more culturally specific to his experiences, with a cast of no-names, two of whom went on to become big stars. Y Tu Mama Tambien feels like a reaction to having "sold out" to make a big movie starring big movie stars and not having it go well, and I think we can say pretty definitively that it enabled him to have this legendary career.

So what's actually wrong with Great Expectations?

It's hard to encapsulate it through concrete examples. It just doesn't feel very true. As I was watching it Wednesday night, I was initially critical of how I didn't think it was very visually inventive, even with long-time collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki serving as the DP. But I did notice, as the movie went on, things that I thought were at least attempts by Cuaron to showcase that sort of creativity. They just lack impact.

One thing I felt is that it hasn't aged very well, or probably more accurately, it was not made at the time with an eye for how it would age. A moment that particularly stood out to me is that an early romantic scene between our leads, which is meant to take place in the late 1980s, is scored to a Soundgarden song. Chris Cornell's voice feels like it situates this very exactly in the early 1990s, which is neither the era that is being depicted in this movie -- there was definitely no grunge before 1991 -- nor the era that the film was actually made, when grunge was already on its way out. (Not all the music had this effect on me, as I was pleased to hear the voice of personal favorite Tori Amos at one point, in a song I didn't previously know -- though I think her music transcends the specific period of its creation a lot more than Cornell's does.)

To show you how little I remembered the details of this movie, I was surprised to see Robert De Niro's role as the criminal Finn helps escape, back when he's still a child, who is ultimately revealed to be his benefactor. I sort of remembered it as I saw it happening, but if you had asked me beforehand if Robert De Niro was in this movie, I would have told you surely not. 

Without a real acquaintance with the original novel, I couldn't get a grasp on what themes were meant to be explored here, specifically through that character but just generally. What is it supposed to mean that Finn saved this gruff character -- albeit very much against his will -- from certain capture by the police, and that this man secretly funded his rise in the art world over the next 20 years? Is that supposed to mean Finn didn't really make it on his own? And is this supposed to be a defeat for the character? If that's the idea, it isn't explored very conclusively.

Rather, it seems that what this movie is really "about" is that Finn falls in love with a coquettish woman who parts her lips just so, and she basically toys with his emotions, and that's mean. The false way these characters have been developed really reveals itself in a scene after a big art opening Finn has in New York, where he's swigging a bottle of booze and walking through the rain to (what he believes is) Estella's apartment. He then shouts up at her window about how he has attained fame and fortune and success in the art world and it's still not enough for her. The fact that this moment feels so abrupt within the narrative is a sure sign that the proper work hasn't been done. Why is he so mad? Is it such an epic betrayal to tease someone?

Then when he realizes it's not Estella obscured up in that window, but rather, the eccentric old woman who owned the mouldering Florida mansion -- Mrs. Dinsmoor, played by Anne Bancroft -- he has to have it out with her as though she bears a significant responsibility for Estella breaking his heart. It's not at all convincing that this might be the case -- she even told him the girl would break his heart, many years ago -- and yet the scene culminates in tortured grandeur as Dinsmoor cries in agony "What have I done???" while Finn storms down the stairs and out of the building.

I think in the end I have to say that this is like the Calvin Klein jeans ad version of Great Expectations. There's a lot of shots of people looking sort of pretty and sort of tortured and generally dressed in dynamite clothing. There's scenes of wild rain and leaves blowing around as if staged by a set designer. And then of course there is the grand mansion, overgrown with ivy and other plant life, sort of like Gatsby's mansion if it had been left to seed.

In fact, the evocation of Gatsby got me thinking about what Baz Luhrmann would have done with this material. Not only would he have made it grander by making it more of an obvious caricature, by outsizing its romance until it blew off the canvas entirely, but he would have made it fun. There isn't a single thing fun about Great Expectations, and that could be why it's so hard to care about any of its characters.

I wouldn't say that a sense of humor ever became Cuaron's strong suit. But he didn't need one in the movies he would make later. (And you're wrong if you think Children of Men doesn't have any funny moments.) All he needed was the vision he found along the way, which may not conform to the sorts of commonalities between works we ascribe to an auteur, but was consistently characterized by being ambitious -- ambitious in a way that failed him in Great Expectations.

But we should also be incredibly thankful for Great Expectations.

Let's say his vision for this movie had been very well received, had even resulted in Oscar nominations -- hell, for the sake of argument, let's even say it won best picture. Those things happen and there's almost a zero percent chance we get Y Tu Mama Tambien, or the best Harry Potter movie, or the craziest post-apocalyptic movie about mass sterility that contains some of the most technically challenging scenes ever filmed, or an absolute game-changer in the making of outer space films.

And how much poorer would we be for that. 

Audient Outliers: The Mist

This is the third in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I rewatch a movie I was cool on, from a director whose other work I like.

I knew there was going to be some cheating in this series.

I had hoped to have each of the six movies fit perfectly into the formula of a movie I disliked from a director whose other work I not only liked, but whose other work I had seen the entirety of.

I got through the first two installments of the series following that concept pretty closely. But knowing that there were a lot of square pegs fit into round holes in the movies I identified and added to my Letterboxd list, which I created specifically to keep track of these movies, I knew I'd have to deviate from it somewhat. And that first instance is Frank Darabont.

For one, I have not seen every movie Frank Darabont has directed. There's only one I've missed, but when you've only directed four feature films, that's a pretty significant percentage. The Majestic (2001) escaped me -- which is unusual given how much I also like Jim Carrey -- but I wasn't going to go throw it on my watch schedule and hope I liked it, just so I could do a Frank Darabont movie this month. 

Actually, I'd been even further from Darabont completism up until recently, as I only just saw The Green Mile in 2018, a full 19 years after it was released. I did like it quite a bit, though, which is a bit surprising, because that isn't necessarily the sort of movie that ages well.

So the second way I'm cheating is that in using a preponderance of evidence to determine that Darabont is a director I really like, making the one movie of his I didn't like an outlier, I am throwing in a TV show. Darabont, you may remember, was the creator of The Walking Dead, which actually seems like a natural offshoot of this one movie I don't like that I haven't mentioned yet. I used to love The Walking Dead and still think of some of the shocking deaths in it today, even though it's been a couple years since I finally broke down and paid to rent whatever season I had gotten up to when I lost access to it. (It went to one of the streamers I don't have, I think, and I may still have as many as three seasons to catch up on, to say nothing of the multiple spinoff series.)

With the cheats thrown in, I do think The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead are enough to tell me I think Frank Darabont is capable of great things, and usually delivers them. (Shawshank, which has gone unmentioned until now, is currently #27 on my Flickchart, and I don't think my affection for it requires any further elaboration.)

But my goodness did I hate The Mist.

If you asked me to name a movie that made me spitting mad when I saw it, The Mist is one of the first I'd think of. I wrote a pretty epic takedown of it in the very first year of this blog, which you can read here if you want to. (The "Lord Vader" referenced in the opening line was another blogger whose stuff I read at the time, back when we all used to read each others' stuff, and when other bloggers actually, you know, existed.)

If you read that piece I just linked, you'll note that I focused the lion's share of my negative energies on the character played by Marcia Gay Harden, the religious nut job who doesn't show an ounce of kindness to anyone, even when they are overtly trying to be kind to her. I still have problems with this character -- would it have killed them to give her a little nuance? -- but I think I appreciated it more this time as the actress just deciding she was going to chew the scenery and going for it. 

Oh, in order not to bury the lede, I will say clearly: I don't hate The Mist anymore. 

Before I started to watch it on Saturday night, I did momentarily ask myself what the point was. One of the things about being a cinephile is that you think your opinion of a movie is correct. That makes you hesitant to rewatch a movie you didn't like, because you feel like you had a pretty good handle on it the first time and there's little chance your opinion is going to be changed.

Little does not mean none.

Although I came away from the first two movie in this series, Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast and James Cameron's True Lies, feeling very similarly to how I felt about them the first time, The Mist did improve significantly for me on this viewing. I must have had something in my craw that night I first watched it in 2009.

Before I get into the substance of my reappraisal, I wanted to mention that it was interesting to watch this movie in the context of already having watched The Walking Dead. No fewer than three speaking roles in this film were essayed by actors who would go on to appear in the first season of The Walking Dead, though I won't spoil how long they may have survived on that show. Melissa McBride had the biggest role on The Walking Dead -- Carol, who found herself at the center of many dramas -- but the smallest of the three roles here. The two bigger roles were Jeffrey DeMunn and Laurie Holden, who played Dale and Andrea, respectively, on the zombie show. (I'm going to list all of them in past tense because the series is over now, not because I'm tell you which ones died.) (Incidentally, both of those actors also appeared on The X-Files -- Holden memorably as Marita Covarrubius -- which is interesting, because it does not appear Darabont had any involvement with that.)

Okay I am getting sidetracked.

I think The Walking Dead helps with context for The Mist because it clearly shows Darabont's interest in investigating how people behave in a crisis. The Mist can be seen as a rough draft for The Walking Dead, in a very real way. Inside that Maine grocery store where the patrons are trapped, trying to hide from oversized bugs from another dimension, a Lord of the Flies type scenario plays out that is at the core of Darabont's interest of the breakdown of society under duress. In both cases, the external threat -- zombies, oversized bugs from another dimension -- is secondary to the internal threat, which is what humans will do to each other when there are no rules. In fact, the shocking deaths I continue to think about from The Walking Dead are not those perpetrated by zombies, but by humans against each other.

Led by Marcia Gay Harden's religious fanatic, I had thought these characters were a bit overdetermined, as Darabont wanted to hit us over the head with his ideas. I also thought there was a weird miscalculation by the director to make all the heroes be of a very liberal mindset, leaving all the country folk to be weak-minded bigots. 

This stuff didn't bother me as much this time, and there's a contradiction to one of my assumptions about the film's political perspective that I will get to a bit later.

Anyway, in 2009 I thought the creature effects were bad and I did not feel very scared by them. I'm softer in this complaint this time as well. Of course, it's hard to put yourself back in the necessary 2007 mindset to remember how good or not good these effects looked 17 years ago. But even if they were not all totally on point or up to the current standards, what these bugs get up to is pretty scary. The spider web that burns your flesh. The tiny spiders that burst out of your body. The way your face bloats until you die when bitten by one of the oversized mosquitos. It was grim in the right ways. 

I do have some fresh complaints as well though.

Although I don't remember focusing on this at the time, I do think it's funny how there are basically an unlimited number of people in the grocery store. Even after we've already lost as many as a dozen, due either to death or departure, there might be as many as a hundred others still in the store. Even with people stocking up after a storm that had just come through, I have a hard time believing this store was so chocked to the gills with customers. 

And I do still have a problem with the ending. 

At the time, I thought this ending was a sick joke. Maybe I still do. We see Frank Darabont consciously transition from a man who stared into the bleakness but found hope, as he did in his two Stephen King adaptations from the 1990s, to a man who stared at the bleakness and just saw bleakness. What the main character, played by Thomas Jane, does at the end of this movie is just so out of scope with the actual desperation of their situation, at least in terms of how much time they have been living with that level of desperation, which was not nearly enough to have resorted to what he does. And then to experience an immediate reversal is almost more of a punishment by the filmmaker than the comeuppance delivered to Harden's zealot.

And yet Jane's character, a man of action whose decisions thus far have demonstrated both courage and kindness, is the one traditionally drawn as a liberal. He's a visual artist who does not seem to originate from here, and has a career painting movie posters. (Interestingly, I saw in the credits that his posters were painted by Star Wars poster artist Drew Struzan. I may have forgotten this when I first saw it, but the painting themselves are clearly for already famous properties, such as The Thing and King's own The Dark Tower.)

So what are we to make of Darabont reserving his most twisted last gasp for this man who has been our hero the whole movie? Which is not, I should say, the way King's novella ends?

I don't know, but I do know that not knowing makes this movie more interesting to me.

Darabont has not directed a feature film since The Mist, which I find very interesting. His reasons probably don't have to do with a lack of opportunity, but rather, a different direction for his interests. The old me, who felt the way about The Mist that I used to feel, would have said this was his just desserts for making such a piece of crap.

But I don't know. The bleak Darabont who sees nothing but bleakness has a certain appeal to him, and I might like to see another movie from that guy. 

Audient Outliers: True Lies

This is the second in a 2024 bi-monthly movies reconsidering a single outlier in the career of a director whose work I otherwise champion.

I may not love every James Cameron movie I've ever seen, but they all would receive at least 3.5 stars from me on Letterboxd -- with one exception. (Emphasis on "I've ever seen," as I am not a Cameron completist. I have not seen Piranha II: The Spawning.)

That exception is True Lies, which I laughed and groaned through during my single viewing in the summer of 1994.

One of those sounds positive, but I was laughing for the wrong reasons. (Actually, there's one really legitimately funny joke in the movie, which a friend of mine and I would quote back and forth. When Bill Paxton puts Jamie Lee Curtis' head in his lap while he's driving his convertible, and a surveilling Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold notice this, Tom Arnold quips "Maybe she's sleepy." For some reason we always thought his line delivery there was hilarious.)

The fact that the best joke in this movie is one about implied blow jobs really gives you an idea of how the tone is off in True Lies. And that's the problem I still have with the movie today. 

In case you need reminding, this is a film where Schwarzenegger's spy character spends the majority of the movie -- I think it's fair to say that -- spying on his own wife to see if she is cheating on him. It's pretty gross and it really goes against the good guy persona Schwarzenegger had been cultivating in his last few movies, especially the delightful Kindergarten Cop. 

The thing is, True Lies actually sees him as a good guy rather than a jealous creep, and that's part of the problem.

If he were just obsessed with the possible adultery as a result of being an insecure fool, that would be one thing. But he becomes kind of a creepy perv -- there's that word "creep" again -- when he concocts a ridiculous and logistically improbable scenario where he's going to sit in a darkened hotel room as she strips down to the sexy lingerie he asked her to wear, all while using a series of pre-recorded phrases on a tape recorder so she won't know it's him. 

Set aside for a moment that this is twisted and needlessly perverse for a mainstream movie. What I want to know is, how the hell did Harry Tasker think this would even work? Any movie that relies on someone using pre-recorded dialogue on a tape recorder strains all credibility for me -- yes, even the bit in Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- but this just takes that way over the top. You get the sense that it's really important that Helen does not identify that it's Harry there in that room, yet he takes all sorts of risks, like trailing a flower down her face after he's told her to keep her eyes closed, while relying on a highly flimsy setup with very little chance of succeeding. Given how bizarre it also is on a character level, that scene should have just been pulled altogether.

Though in 1994, I wasn't really liking True Lies even before that. The cold open is competently executed and I have fairly fond memories of Schwarzenegger riding his horse on an elevator as he pursues the Arab terrorists who are the villains in this film. (One element that dates it, as Arab terrorists as villains in a movie today would just promote unhelpful anti-Islamic sentiments.) But I remember finding the setup to be lacking, the set pieces not doing enough to make up for it, and then the whole thing being sexist and gross.

If you are considering similar sorts of filmmakers being on a continuum from prestige to hack, you'd ordinarily put James Cameron on the prestige side (maybe with Christopher Nolan even above him) and Michael Bay on the hack side, with maybe Zack Snyder in between them. In True Lies, though, it's like Cameron's inner Bay came out. (It would have to be pre-Bay, though, since Bay had not yet made his first film in 1994.) The focus on the body of Jamie Lee Curtis in this movie is fairly shameless, not only in the stripping scene, but elsewhere. You get a clear view of her cleavage for most of the last 30 minutes of the movie, and what's worse, she's acting a bit like Kate Capshaw acts in the second half of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, always complaining and screaming and requiring saving.

I feel like this movie was a misstep for both Schwarzenegger and Cameron, and yet I feel like it is basically seen as of a piece with the other star vehicles for the former and films for the latter. Sure, True Lies had stiff competition from other Cameron movies in the 1990s, as this movie was bookended by the stone-cold classics Terminator 2: Judgment Day on one side and Titanic on the other. Tough to compete with that. Most people, though, would probably consider True Lies the equal of a film like The Abyss, when I really think that's being unfair to The Abyss.

My opinion of the movie did not change this time around. I will say, however, that it has some moments that I think are pretty iconic, such as:

1) The shot of Arnold as he swims under water while there is an explosion going over him. I doubt Cameron was the first person to do that shot, but I feel like that shot gets used a lot in montages or Oscar clips. 

2) The limo falling away as Arnold grabs on to Jamie Lee's arm from the helicopter.

3) The fight atop the harrier jet. It's ridiculous, but in a good way. 

4) This exchange of dialogue while Arnold is on truth serum, which may actually qualify as the film's second good joke:

Helen: "So have you ever killed anyone?"

Harry: "Yeah but they were all bad."

True Lies is not bad. It's misguided, but it's not bad. 

I don't really think it's good either, though. 

Probably the most interesting thing about it is it's weird existence as a series of questionable choices shoved into a really expensive action movie package, and its dated gender politics and Islamophobia. 

And speaking of that Islamophobia ... one thing I discovered on this viewing, and I'm glad to have discovered it so I can stop making this mistake, is that I thought Kiwi Cliff Curtis played the lead villain, Salim Abu Aziz. I've always thought that and I've mentioned it to people on occasion.

He's actually played by Art Malik. You'll have to let me know if you think the two are similar enough for me to have made this mistake legitimately, or if I was just an idiot.

Here's Art:

And here's Cliff:

There's definitely a similarity. And the fact that Curtis appears in Avatar: The Way of Water makes me think Cameron sees the similarity too. 

Audient Outliers: Sexy Beast

This is the first in my 2024 bi-monthly series in which I'm revisiting a single film I didn't like by a director whose work is otherwise a hit with me.

When I went to look up to see whether Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast was available on any of my streaming services, I came up with a funny result on Netflix.

(I'll waste some space here so when I paste the picture in, it will steer clear of the proper Sexy Beast poster and will not create a layout headache for me. You can't post a second picture too close to the first picture or else the text doesn't look right. Just trust me as I continue to type nonsense here that you can either read or not read, as you see fit. Discuss amongst yourselves. Here, I'll give you a topic: the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman.)

When you put that search term in Netflix, you get this amusing result:

What looks like an alien saying "Oh behave!" left me curious, for sure. But when I saw it was a TV show rather than a movie, I passed on the longer commitment and just satisfied myself with posting the picture here.

However, I did think there was about as much chance of me liking a TV show about naughty aliens as there was of me liking Glazer's 2001 feature debut, which stands out in stark contrast to Birth and Under the Skin, both of which I adore. I suspect I will also at least greatly respect, if not love (can you really love a film about the Holocaust?), The Zone of Interest, which doesn't release here until the 22nd of this month. In fact, I had considered holding this viewing back until after I'd seen it, but I decided to watch Sexy Beast first for two reasons: 1) February was ticking along and I needed to start watching movies for this, for Blaxploitaudient and for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, and 2) If I watched Zone of Interest and didn't like it, well then, Sexy Beast isn't really an outlier anymore because then I don't like half of the man's feature films.

(By the way, I looked up Sexy Beasts and it's a reality dating show where people don elaborate makeup to prevent appearances from being a major factor in determining their chemistry when they are on a first date. Interesting idea. Maybe I'll watch it after all. Rob Delaney is involved, which helps.)

Well, if the intention of this series is hopefully to find something in these films that I didn't find the first time, we're 0-1 so far.

The problem with Sexy Beast is what it was back in 2001: Don Logan.

It's a name that's supposed to strike fear into the hearts of men, and their women. In fact, that's what happens when Jackie (Julianne White) and Aitch (Cavan Kendall) show up at dinner with Gal (Ray Winstone) and Deedee (Amanda Redman), looking ashen, like presumably they've just had an argument about one of the many things couples argue about. Instead, it's that they got a call from London just before leaving their house, from someone wanting Gal to come back for "one last job."

So what? Gal seems to say. "I'm retired." Yep, we've already seen what Gal spends his time doing: baking in the Spanish sun as he lies, oiled up, by his pool. 

"It was Don Logan."

Record scratch.

Now Gal looks like he's about to throw up.

The problem, then, is that when Don Logan shows up to make the offer in person -- an offer Gal can't refuse, I suppose -- he's Ben Kingsley playing a petulant baby given to stomping his feet and throwing temper tantrums.

Now, I should pause here to say that there are lots of different ways a character who's supposed to be frightening can be frightening. The only truly menacing character in this film, Ian McShane as Teddy, comes by this by never blinking, and by letting the silences turn his conversational opponent into a quaking puddle of nerves. In fact, I'd like to have seen this movie with McShane as Don Logan.

Kingsley? He stomps his feet and throws temper tantrums like a petulant baby.

Not menacing. Never was.

And because of the odd structure of Glazer's film, we have to watch this behavior for about 50 minutes of an 88-minute movie. Or at least, up until the 50-minute mark, starting maybe at the 20-minute mark.

A menacing character should barely need to lift a finger to accomplish his goals. If there is a threat about what a character will do to you, you shouldn't be able to turn him down a dozen times, and actually force him to head to the airport without knowing whether you're actually going to do the job he wants you to do. And the fact that you look extremely scared while repeatedly rejecting him just makes it all the more of a disconnect. If you are scared of someone, you don't reject their request even once.

Because of the way Kingsley plays Don Logan and the way Glazer asks him to play Don Logan, I immediately lose all my bearings of what Glazer wants to convey about this world. It would seem Glazer is showing us that a gangster can never really be retired, because there is always someone trying to pull you back in -- someone who holds something over you that compels you to be pulled back in. Glazer presents two different metaphors for this in the film, one a massive boulder that rolls down the side of the hill and lands in Gal's pool, nearly hitting him (which would have killed him), and one a six-foot rabbit-like creature that looks like it has been chewed up and spat out, who shows up in Gal's dreams as sort of a grim reaper figure with a gun. (In fact, I was thinking about how when this came out in 2001, it was the same year as the six-foot rabbit in Donnie Darko.)

His non-metaphorical version of the idea that you can never really retire? It's a petulant baby yelling "No no no no no no!," whose big transgressive act is to pee on Gal's carpeted bathroom floor.

There is what I would call a fairly useful 25-minute stretch at the end of Sexy Beast that features the job in question -- in which Gal does participate, but not under the conditions Logan would have wanted. It's got a lot of McShane, who is great, and it's an interesting set piece for a robbery, as it involves safety deposit boxes and men in scuba gear. There are also some techniques in here that preview some of the camera movements and editing we'd see later from Glazer, specifically in Under the Skin.

But even this portion of the film feels like a weird footnote, after Glazer had already chosen to spend way too much time on Don Logan, including an odd tangent where Logan refuses to put out his cigarette on a plane, is taken to be questioned, then accuses a male flight attendant of groping him. It's only because of this episode that he remains in Spain at all.

And even this portion contains some narrative bits that don't make any sense or are unexplained, like how they pull off a heist involving scuba gear while remaining essentially unnoticed, and like why Teddy does a certain thing he does to a certain character who hasn't come into the story before now. (Don't need to go into spoiler territory as such.)

One thing I appreciate about Birth and Under the Skin is how Glazer does not feel as though he needs to explain everything that's happening. But in the genres those films are in, that's much easier. In a film that is effectively a descendent of the Tarantino style -- a milieu in which Glazer probably doesn't naturally see himself -- plot and narrative connectivity are far more important. You might say a heist film, which this is for its last third, demands that sort of logistical clarity even more, just so we understand the stakes of the heist and have an idea what failure would look like.

I started this piece with a funny picture of a TV series with a similar title. As I was looking up Sexy Beast on IMDB to get some of the names of the actors, I found another TV series with the same title -- and based on the same characters. That's right, only two weeks ago, what would appear to be a prequel to the movie Sexy Beast began airing as a TV show, with the same characters as younger men.

I just don't understand this. Whatever any individual viewer may get out of this movie, I can hardly see how it can be viewed as a cohesive whole. Mileage may vary on the individual components -- I happen to not really like any of them -- but as a complete unit, Sexy Beast is a first film showing some promise in its very kindest interpretation. 

I just don't think Glazer thinks of himself as this kind of filmmaker. There's a reason he didn't try to become England's next Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn. He had bigger things on his mind, and I think he would consider this a career outlier too.

And now that I have seen Sexy Beast twice, I'm glad I don't ever have to see it again.

Identifying the outliers in 2024

I'm going to ease up on my cinematic commitments in 2024. That's not to reduce my overall viewing of movies, but to give myself more flexibility, rather than three or sometimes four movies I'm compelled to watch each month for different reasons.

I'll continue my monthly Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta viewings, which pair me randomly with another person in the group and give me that person's highest ranked film I haven't seen to watch. That's separate from this blog and it's something I enjoy.

But in six of the 12 months last year, I had two other movies to watch for two of my three bi-monthly series, as well as one to watch for my monthly series. Because two of the three bi-monthly series were rewatches, as was the monthly series, that's 24 movies I rewatched rather than watching something new. Which is not a problem, since I love revisiting favorites, but it does almost exclusively explain why my 2023 new viewings dropped from 282 in 2022 to 259 in 2023.

So only one bi-monthly series this year and one monthly series, and today I'm here to tell you about the former, which will begin in February.

There'll be no "finish up the filmography" bi-monthly series in 2024, as there has been each of the past three years when I polished off Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and the tag team partnership of Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion. I'll probably resume that in 2025.

Instead in 2024, my bi-monthly series will be a rewatch series, and I'll be figuring out what it is about one particular movie I don't love by a director whose other work has been a hit with me.

I'm calling it Audient Outliers, and basically, I'll take six directors whose work I love and rewatch the one of their movies that doesn't work for me. 

The series was supposed to be inspired by the release of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, one of 2023's most praised films that I will likely not have a chance to see before my list closes. With how I've felt about Glazer's last two films, Birth and Under the Skin, I thought Zone had a decent shot at my #1.

Thinking about the three films -- the two I love and the one I was anticipating watching -- it brought my mind to the one of his four that I really dislike, also the first I ever saw, Sexy Beast. A friend and I went to see it in L.A. and we both though it was sort of laughable, when it wasn't too boring by half.

Deciding Sexy Beast was worth a revisit within the context of the other films he's made, I decided to find five other films that fit this criteria of serving as an outlier relative to the rest of the filmmaker's work. I actually found 16 others that fit the description in one way or another, though none as perfectly as Sexy Beast -- either because there isn't only a single film in the filmography I don't like, or because the director has made too few films for the concept of an outlier to make sense. 

Nonetheless, I will choose five more from these 16, and watch and write about them every other month from February onward. I won't reveal them in advance because I'm enough of a big boy to know that you won't watch them along with me in order to get the most out of my blog. I wouldn't expect you to, but that's the only purpose served by revealing them in advance. 

I will indeed start with Sexy Beast in February. And now the question is whether I will try to wait until after the February 22nd Australian release of The Zone of Interest before I watch Beast ... at which point, it conceivably might not even be an outlier as the only Glazer film I don't love.

Well, I guess we'll see how flawed a premise for a series it is as we go. 

I'm looking forward to it, anyway.