Paying for random rewatches

I usually give my iTunes account a bit of a rest at the end of January. I've spent a fair amount on rentals in the previous four months, some at the premium rental price of $19.99 (though only one this past year), and it's time to watch movies I can see for free for a while, given that I'm suddenly without any sense of urgency in the movies I watch for another six months until I start ramping up for my next year's list.

And so it was unusual that I found myself paying for a random rewatch on Saturday night.

I'm not talking about a random rewatch in the sense of my periodic series on this blog, Random Rewatches, where I use a random number generator to find a movie anywhere in my Flickchart to watch again. Most recently I watched Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, and I haven't yet gotten to the next one I drew, Time Bandits -- a favorite I watched as recently as 2020.

No, this sort of random rewatch is when a movie pops into your head that you really want to see again, and then you see it again. 

Riley Stearns' Dual would fit the description pretty well. It's not totally random in that it was a movie I really liked -- #10 of 2022 -- but it's not an established favorite, the watching of which seems logical when you are finally cut loose from your end-of-year obligations and can watch whatever you want.

I can't remember exactly what caused Dual to elbow its way into my brain in the past few weeks, but I can tell you what caused it to stick there: its availability on Netflix. As soon as my 2023 ranking ended, I was going to pop this thing on, due to the convenience of its accessibility.

Or so I thought.

When I tried to watch Dual on Friday night, it wasn't on Netflix. Which made me remember that although I watched it on Netflix in the end of my 2022 ranking year -- in fact, it was the most recent movie I'd seen that made my top ten -- it was not a Netflix production, which made its availability on the streaming service ephemeral and subject to the whims of licensing agreements.

I pivoted to Orion and the Dark on Friday night, and Saturday morning I checked my other streaming services for Dual. 

Nope. Nowhere.

It was available to rent from iTunes for $3.99, but had my desire to see the movie reached enough of an intensity to supersede the convenience of its accessibility?

I discovered that it had.

This movie weekend didn't feel like it would be complete without Dual, and so I did indeed purchase a rental, even though I was at least unofficially on an iTunes spending freeze.

This occurrence is probably not worth its own post, but then again, you could say that about a lot of the things I write. When you've published more than 3,100 posts, they can't all be winners.

But I think I did write it mostly to say two things:

1) Dual was as good as I remembered it, maybe better, so if you haven't seen it, you should;

2) Pay the money for something you want to see. Life is short. Watch what you want.

A thing for movies about clones

I won't tell you how high Riley Stearns' Dual is going to end up in my year-end rankings -- I won't know myself for another two weeks.

I will tell you, though, that whatever stigma was once attached to movies about clones has long since vanished for me.

Spoiler alert for movies about clones you might not have known were about clones, so if you want to be overly cautious you can stop reading. However, only in a few cases are these movies secretly about clones, and if you are a reasonably accomplished cinephile you will likely have seen these anyway. I'm only going to mention five titles so it's not a huge risk. Though, as the newest, mild spoilers for Dual in any case. 

Making a movie about clones was once a guarantee that you had made a shit movie. Either the technology laughably disappointed, or the story did, or both. I think it was both in The 6th Day, my lowest ranked film of 2000. I didn't even bother to see Multiplicity, which came out a few years before that.

There are still plenty of bad ones I'm sure -- Gemini Man would be one example -- but the subject matter alone no longer leaves a stink on a film. In fact, I think the subject matter makes me more optimistic than it does pessimistic. Even some cloning movies that are legitimately mediocre, like the Keanu Reeves vehicle Replicas, have a certain charm for me. 

Maybe it all changed in 2009, when I named Moon my #1 movie of the year. Since this is the main spoiler choice here, I won't go too much into who is cloned and why or how. But come on, this great movie has now been out for 14 years, so if you haven't seen it, that's on you.

The next movie I'm going to mention in my trend was just from last year, so it might not seem like a very urgent trend -- but don't worry, Dual makes three, and every editor knows that three equals a trend. That was Swan Song, the one directed by Benjamin Cleary on AppleTV+ (as opposed to the one directed by Todd Stephens about an older gay man). I found that film's dealing with the existential issues related to cloning enormously moving, as the protagonist (played by Mahershala Ali) signs on to have a clone replace him without his family knowing when he contracts a terminal illness. Anyway, that movie was my #5 of the year. 

Dual -- streaming on Netflix as of last week -- has a similar premise, but does new and more comical things with it. Like Swan Song, the technology is used to replace the dying, but without fooling the family in this case. The family willingly takes on the clone as a way of softening the blow of losing the person, and may even come to like the clone as much as the original person and keep them around past the grieving phase. Of course, issues arise when the terminal patient is suddenly no longer terminal, and the clone has developed its own personhood, so the two must battle it out to the death to see which one continues the life in progress.

A ding against the movie standing tall on the strength of its clone themes is that my favorite thing about it is Stearns' deadpan sense of humor. The humor actually didn't work for me in his last film, The Art of Self-Defense, though I appreciated what he was trying to do. His film before that, which I did really like, was Faults, about a brain-washing cult -- and while there was certainly eccentricity in it, it was a lot more of a head trip movie than a comedy, deadly serious at times.

He's gotten both the head trippiness and the deadpan humor on the same page in Dual, and it's now my favorite of his three films. Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul both kill it with the absurd line deliveries, as does the rest of the cast. There's a definite artificiality in that dialogue and in the affect behind it, but in this case that's a good thing. 

And yes, it gives me interesting new things to consider about the point at which a bag of inexperienced meat resembling a person becomes that person, or at least an entity unto itself deserving of basic human rights. If you had practiced becoming a woman in order to ease the grieving for her family, and possibly live out the remainder of her natural life for her, but were then told after quite a long time that your services were no longer required, it wouldn't really be simple, now would it?

I won't spoil any more of Dual than I already have. 

But I did think it was worth spoiling as much as I have in order to give the movie a very strong recommendation to you, my dear readers, as well as to let you know that The Audient is open for business on movies about clones.