Keeping tabs on my opposite

As a movie guy, I'm naturally interested in what other people are watching on planes, especially on the long flights between the U.S. and Australia. With the people sitting around me, I always get to know what sorts of movies are calling out to them over the course of the flight. 

Sometimes, of course, it's not movies at all. The woman whose screen I could see in the crack between the seats to my right was only interested in the Sex in the City sequel series And Just Like That, as any time I looked over, there was something going on with Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and the new characters in their lives. Given the unending sameness, I quickly lose interest in what such people are watching. 

The woman through the crack on the left, on the other hand, was doing me better than I do me, only with a a certain opposite quality. 

Not opposite because of the quality of what she was watching, but because of the vintage. But also because of the quality. 

Me, I always jam pack a fight with releases from the current year. That's especially the case in December, when my current year is starting to wrap up, and it's crunch time in terms of getting a lot of middling movies available on the plane -- where I won't care so much about their quality -- onto my list before I close things out for the year. 

That sometimes leaves me a bit jealous of the people who aren't doing that.

Before we even left the ground, this woman had started in on Galaxy Quest. I think I might have watched more of Galaxy Quest than the thing that was on my own screen, Tig Notaro's Am I OK?, which she co-directed with Stephanie Allynne. That's an exaggeration, of course, but Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite comedies of the last -- well, can't say quarter century now because it came out just more than 25 years ago. Though maybe I don't need to qualify that comment at all, as it is just one of my favorite comedies, full stop.

Am I OK? is not destined to become one of my favorite comedies of any time period. It isn't bad per se, but it is just so middling -- so perfectly representative of the sort of film I would/should watch on a plane -- that it was easy to very quickly stop watching every moment to glean its finer details. Being from Notaro, I would expect it to be about the main character's sexual identity, which it is. I would also expect it to be funnier, which it is not. 

After Galaxy Quest, she didn't make a perfect second decision, but then again, neither did I. While she spent her next segment of the flight on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, which got only 2.5 stars from me as a retroactive rating on Letterboxd, I was slogging my way through Annie Baker's Janet Planet, which ultimately got only 1.5 stars from me. In fact, this was the most tedious time I had with any of the five movies I watched on the flight, even when the mere task of watching another movie was starting to feel burdensome. Fortunately, I also chose this time to address a bunch of Christmas cards I was planning to mail after we landed, which made the experience far more tolerable. 

Before I finished Janet Planet, she got herself back on track in a major way with her third movie, which really made me jealous: Crazy Rich Asians. I've already seen CRA three times within the relatively short six years of its existence, and it would have been four, except I was geo-blocked from streaming it when we were in Singapore in October. That's right, it was on an Australian streaming service (Stan) which I am unable to watch when I'm not in Australia. It was funny enough to me at the time that I was going write a whole post about it, but never ended up doing so.

Crazy Rich Asians was the movie that primed me to want to visit Singapore in the first place, and to do some of the things we ultimately did on our trip, like go to the Marina Bay Sands hotel (the one with the rooftop pool on the 57th floor) and to the food hawkers place that the movie makes look like a culinary paradise, Newton Food Centre. (Never mind that at the actual Newton Food Centre, my stomach started doing somersaults and I had to use the facilities twice in only 90 minutes -- and not for #1.)

I'd wanted to watch the movie while on our trip both to point out places I'd already been and to remind myself of any new ones we hadn't done yet before we ran out of time, so watching to the left through the seat cracks gave me a chance to do a little bit of that. I was mostly curious to see how Newton Food Centre was depicted, since the real one ended up seeming more grubby to me than the one I remembered from the movie -- but indeed, they used the real one in the movie as well, and I had just romanticized it because that movie is an example of the expertise of romanticizing a city on film. I watched that scene through entirely, and only got little snippets of the rest of the film.

Meanwhile, on my own screen, I was watching what ended up being the first of three consecutive musician biopics, though I didn't realize the middle one qualified as such until I'd started watching it. That first was the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black. Ho hum. The musician biopic is the very definition of the sort of middling mainstream fare that a guy ranking all the movies he sees in a given year should watch, but little more than that. 

She was still a bit ahead of me -- I think I paused to sleep a little bit at some point, though not very long -- and she started her fourth before I started my fourth as well. Perhaps primed by seeing Michelle Yeoh in CRA, she then transitioned into Everything Everywhere All at Once, which I loved (it was my #4 of 2022) but which I haven't yet rewatched. Aside from one little detour into mediocre Tim Burton fare, this woman was making all the right moves, and my eye was especially caught by this movie with its constant quirkiness and visual invention. (Though I was also reminded how long it is, which is perhaps one of the reasons I have not yet revisited it.)

Me? At least I was now watching my best movie of the trip so far, Kneecap, which is the story of three Irish-language rappers that feels a little bit like a spiritual successor to Trainspotting. (Yes, I know that Ireland and Scotland are not the same, though I sometimes forget which accent is from which country.) The really interesting thing about Kneecap is that the real-life rappers play themselves, which was an especially strange revelation for me from the credits, since I thought I recognized two of the three of them from other movies and spent a considerable amount of time wracking my brain to remember which ones. They are supported by people obviously not playing themselves, such as Michael Fassbender.

Her fifth -- and as it turns out, final -- movie was another animated misstep. Hey, nobody's perfect. Letterboxd tells me I gave Vivo (2021) three stars, but as I was catching little bits of it, it felt more to me like the 2.5-star equivalent of Corpse Bride, with the latter certainly having more claim to endurance in the culture. 

After Vivo, she went to sleep -- for the remainder of the flight, it would appear. Which was another source of major jealousy for me. 

Watching five movies and still getting to sleep for a good four hours? She did me far better than I can ever do me. 

I also watched five movies -- more on the fifth in a moment -- but it was with less than an hour of sleep. Which, really, is not so surprising, given that our plane lifted off at 11:30 a.m., meaning I wouldn't naturally feel inclined to sleep until just when we were landing in LA. But you need more sleep than that on an international flight, if at all possible. 

The time I spent not watching movies was this sort of jagged, in-between period where I distracted myself with things like two episodes of Saturday Night Live, which I never get to watch now that I live in Australia but which my wife and I watched religiously for about the first five years of our relationship. These were consolidated 55-minute episodes that did not include the musical numbers, but did include a fair amount of mediocrity as well as a widespread failure to stifle laughter by both the guests and the regular players. 

My fifth movie felt like a grim endeavor indeed, but when else would I make the time to watch Bob Marley: One Love?

Don't get me wrong, I love Marley's music, but even if I were to watch a biopic of my favorite musician of all time (Trent Reznor) I would probably find it at least something of a chore. Then again, I hope Trent Reznor would not allow a biopic of himself to be made without some interesting artistic choices. Then again again, biopic subjects rarely get to decide how their own lives are portrayed on film, since it's more likely for them to be dead (Marley and Winehouse) than alive (Kneecap and Robbie Williams, in the brand new biopic that I really liked, Better Man). 

I gave One Love a milquetoast three stars, same as Back to Black, which seems to be reserved for movies where there is nothing really wrong, except that the musician biopic form itself tends to be very limiting. We'll see if I get a chance to see, or ultimately prioritize, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown before 2024 is out.

What I found myself wondering about this other woman was if she has good taste (60% good taste anyway) or whether she just stumbled into some very good movies. Because then the question comes up, if she had not seen these movies already, what does that say about her actual taste? Or if she was revisiting them, what does it say about her wanting to revisit Corpse Bride and Vivo? 

Maybe it was a hybrid approach, where she had already seen the three greats and was revisiting them just for her pleasure, while she wanted to hear what all the hype was about (there was no hype) for the other two animated movies.

But then again, if she was watching half new movies and half old ones -- new to her, old to the rest of the world -- then she isn't properly my opposite, now is she? 

Galaxy Quest and its most direct source of inspiration

It was Australian Father's Day on Sunday, meaning Daddy gets to choose.

We did some other Daddy-chosen activities throughout the weekend -- a bonfire in our new backyard fire pit on Saturday night, including s'mores, and lunch out at a place called Grazeland that has about 40 food trucks on Sunday afternoon. But I also took advantage of the chance to guide our Sunday night viewing priorities, as I did last year when I pushed Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the family for a viewing on the projector in our garage. 

I thought the kids might want to get a bit more aspirational this year, with a movie aimed a little more at older viewers, and my wife and I had talked before about exposing them to one of our favorite comedies. I'd hoped a viewing of Galaxy Quest would accomplish both things. 

Well, my older son laughed one time. It was when Sam Rockwell said "There's a red thingy going toward the green thingy. I think we're the green thingy."

My younger son didn't laugh, but I'm not sure he has the same instincts for comedy that his older brother has. I ultimately didn't really get an assessment of the movie from either of them as we just hurried them off to bed when it was over. Which was fine. At least my wife enjoyed it, as she always does.

After it ended, I did something I almost never do. I took the recommendation by the streaming service (Stan) of another movie to watch if I enjoyed Galaxy Quest.

That movie was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I've heard of it.

That's a joke of course. Star Trek II is the movie that single-handedly salvaged the prospects of me liking Star Trek after I was left so cold by Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a kid. Watching it again now, I am surprised I found it such an action-packed adventure, comparatively speaking, since it really is just a giant chess match between Kirk and Khan. But the nine-year-old me was apparently pretty sophisticated in this tastes, and a love affair with that other major science fiction franchise was born. The only Star Wars movie I have ahead of it on my Flickchart, in fact, is the original Star Wars. It's sitting in the august spot of #23 on my chart, and after another viewing, I've again confirmed Wrath of Khan is worth every little bit of that ranking.

It was especially interesting to watch it in the context of having just seen Galaxy Quest, since I'm now formally convinced of something I probably kind of subconsciously assumed in the past: While Galaxy Quest is certainly a spoof of everything Star Trek, it gets more material from Wrath of Khan than anywhere else.

Consider:

1) Both movies contain an extremely powerful device with the power to destroy worlds. In Khan that is Genesis, a technology that can create a vibrant world on a dead planet -- or will destroy and recreate on a planet that is not dead. In Quest, it's the Omega 13, which happens to be a device that rearranges matter to allow a time shift of 13 seconds -- though for most of the movie they don't know what it is, and worry it could destroy all matter in the universe. In either case it serves as a MacGuffin that that rival captain wants.

2) And let's talk about that rival captain. As epic as Khan is in the pantheon of villains, I'd argue that Quest's Sarris is a well-drawn character who has earned his own high level of cult appreciation. Speaking of chess matches, both Khan and Sarris engage in battles of the wills and intellects with the man who is either Captain Kirk himself or a direct spoof of Kirk, Jason Nesmith's Peter Quincy Taggert. Because this is the dominant technological mode, these tete-a-tete battles are carried out via the big control room screens where they one can see the other -- though one difference between them is that Sarris and Taggert (actually Nesmith) do share the same space at one point, whereas Kirk and Khan never do. (A surprising decision, one would say, that ends up never diminishing the chemistry between the two archrivals.)

3) Both films feature a scene where an inexperienced captain and/or pilot steers a starship out of a docking port. The scene is played hilariously for comedy in Quest, where Laredo -- actually the grown child actor Tommy Webber -- attempts something he has no business doing and scrapes the side of the ship against the port wall, accompanied by an eternal screeching sound and all the other passengers twisting their head sideways in agony. The comedy is there but more muted in Khan, where Kirk displays his obvious nerves over the fact that Lt. Saavik will be supervising for the first time as her crew pilots the ship out of port. That one goes much more smoothly. (Some dialogue I jotted down. Kirk says to Sulu "I'm glad to have you at the helm for two weeks. I don't think these kids can steer." Well, Laredo is literally a kid -- a grown kid, but a kid on the original show -- and all evidence suggests that he cannot really steer.)

4) In Wrath of Khan, Kirk talks about reprogramming the simulation test Kobayashi Maru that presents a no-win situation for prospective captains, because "I don't like to lose." In Quest, Taggart's motto is "Never give up, never surrender."

5) This might be a little more of a stretch, but both movies contain a scene where a character holds a dying man in his arms and says he will avenge him. It's Alexander Dane's Dr. Lazarus cradling Quellek after Quellek has been shot, when Dane finally is genuinely moved to produce his much-loathed catchphrase: "By Grabthar's Hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged." It's actually the villain in Khan, as Khan promises "I will avenge you" to Joachim, whose name I just had to look up, but is listed on Wikipedia as "Khan's chief henchman." Joachim certainly deserves to be avenged, as he's constantly giving Khan good advice that Khan ignores, and it gest him nothing but a large chunk of the Starship Reliant dropped on his midsection.

And in #4, I found my two unexpected bits of Father's Day resonance. In Quellek's death scene, he says to Dane/Lazarus, "And although we had never met, I always considered you as a father to me." Given their age difference and general relationship, you could think of Joachim as Khan's son, surrogate or otherwise. (In fact, it may have been otherwise -- there are certain places on the internet that flatly state that Joachim is Khan's son.)

Of course the most obvious instance of the father theme in Star Trek II is the fact that Kirk meets, for the first time ever it would appear, his own son, David Marcus, whose mother Carol never told him that his father was one of the most famous captains in the history of the federation. Kirk isn't just a deadbeat dad; Carol actually asked him to stay away. "You had your world and I had mine," she says. "And I wanted him in mine, not off gallivanting through the universe with his father."

There's no David death scene; not in this movie, anyway. (Yes, I may have to reckon with Star Trek III for the first time in forever after having my appetite whetted here.) But it was a really nice way to finish the night to see the two have a somewhat awkward but ultimately poignant hug as David formally acknowledges Kirk as his father and says he's proud to be his son. 

Desert hideaway

This is where my wife, son and I spent our Friday and Saturday nights.

Jealous? You should be. It was awesome.

It's a little getaway called Green Acres Ranch in Joshua Tree. This building and one other are the only two on the site, and there ain't nothing else around but the joshua trees and the scorpions. (Of which we saw none, but we knew they were there.)

We were getting away for my wife's birthday, which fell on Saturday this year. We might have been inclined to stay three nights instead of two, only my company doesn't give us President's Day as a paid holiday (or Martin Luther King Day, or the day after Thanksgiving -- I'm getting used to it).

Because this is a movie blog and not a "how I spent my shortened Presidents' Day weekend" blog, I'll talk about how our weekend relates to movies.

Usually in situations like this, we want to watch a movie each night. There's plenty to do in a place like this -- it has an outdoor fire pit, a hammock, a garden fountain with a fish pond, a horseshoe pit, even an outdoor shower, which I tried to use on the assumption that it would eventually warm up. (It did not.) But my wife and I love movies, so we generally want to wind down the evening with a good flick once all the daytime activities had been exhausted. (And it was too windy/rainy to use the outdoor fire pit anyway.)

We might have watched a movie both nights, but after a five-and-a-half hour drive out from Los Angeles on Friday afternoon/evening -- the deadly combination of rain, a Friday night, and a holiday weekend making it especially long and frustrating -- it was all we could do to make ourselves dinner and get our son situated. A week away from six months old, he was finally spending his first night under a different roof, and let's just say he was not particularly happy about it. We did enjoy some cocktails, but the episode of Twin Peaks we thought we might watch -- our compromise when a movie seemed too daunting -- never did get watched.

Saturday night was different. After a day of yummy meals (all of which we made in the kitchen there), a couple short walks away from the cabin, some reading, and various other birthday-related fun, we got our son settled enough to watch Galaxy Quest for the night of my wife's birthday. Even on the small screen of my portable DVD player, we were reminded just what a joy this movie is. Check out our setup: The house has an attached indoor/outdoor space that's about as big as the living area, and has the benefit of being far enough away from our son that we could make noise without him hearing it. We dragged in two chaise lounges from outside, got ourselves all "rugged up" (my wife's Australian term, that I'd never heard, for bundling up in cold weather), and watched most of the movie out there. After several breaks to go comfort him, we eventually had to come inside and finish up in the bed, with her holding him in her arms. At least he slept well after that -- we all did, on both nights, after the initial fussiness. As good a reason as any other to wish we could stay out there.

But I didn't really just want to write about watching Galaxy Quest. Because this cabin was outfitted with just about everything else -- done in a very rustic style, mind you -- it should be no surprise that it also had its own TV and DVD player on the premises. (We just couldn't use them, because it would have kept our son up.) There were a handful of DVDs available as well. Surely they're just things that have accumulated over time, one way or another, but I thought the list of available movies/watching material was rather odd. Check it out:

The Amityville Horror (the original)
The Hurricane
Planet of the Apes (the original)
Thirteen
Training Day
12 Monkeys
Wendy & Lucy
A Showtime Emmy screener pack
A USA Network Emmy screener pack

Sure glad we brought Galaxy Quest from home, because not a single other of these would have been what you would consider "light birthday viewing." The Amityville Horror might have been especially creepy, given that we were out in the middle of the desert with basically no one else around. (Or so we hoped, I guess you would say.) Perhaps that's why it's there as an option.

Now, back at work, but still on a high from our weekend in the high desert. Here's hoping you're reading this from home, even if I'm not writing it from there. (Though I guess that would be pretty weird if I were writing my blog from your home.)

No such thing as partial credit

As I have become more and more of an obsessive eccentric regarding my film-watching habits, I've also developed some pretty eccentric rules.

One of which is: I don't want to see part of a movie, even if it's a movie I've already seen before.

I didn't use to have a problem with this. In fact, in 2004, when I moved out of an apartment I'd been sharing with a roommate for the first three years I lived in L.A., I used to have parts of movies on in the background at my new place all the time. It was a way to be reminded of what you liked about the movie without committing to giving it your whole attention, or watching the whole thing. I was probably getting some kind of introductory package of all the movie stations on cable at the time as well, which made this little hobby all the easier.

In the five years since then, I've gone completely in the other direction. And the reason is pretty simple: I now keep track not only of the new movies I see, but of the old movies I revisit. You certainly know this, as it's been a feature on the right side of my blog for the entire time I've been writing.

It's all a question of "counting."

For example, if I watch 85 minutes of a 110 minute movie, does it "count" as a viewing? What about 100 of 110 minutes? What about 109 of 110 minutes?

Since I don't like to ask myself these questions, I just try to avoid it altogether.

Which is why, when my wife had on The Sure Thing Saturday night when I returned from the movies, I specifically tuned out. She was about 20 minutes in when I got there. She had already watched the movie, which she got several weeks earlier from Netflix, but was re-watching in order to take notes about what plot developments occurred at what junctures of the script. It was research for a road movie she's working on herself.

Now, this was not easy. I love The Sure Thing. Catching even 15 minutes of it here and there should only improve my affection for it, should show me things I might not have caught on my last viewing, or remind me of the parts that I know and love. And what's the harm in that?

But here's my unusual viewpoint on it, which you'll admit has some merit: The more I watch of it now as a partial viewing, the less inclined I'll be to sit down and watch the whole thing anytime soon. Partial credit now will delay full credit later on.

I experienced this phenomenon with another comedy I truly and dearly love, Dean Parisot's Galaxy Guest. My old roommate and I both loved this movie, and it happened to be on cable all the time in the last year or so I lived with him. We'd catch snippets of it here and snippets of it there. Though I've probably only seen the film from start to finish three times -- two of which were on consecutive days in the theater in 1999 -- I've probably seen enough parts of it for six or seven total viewings. Around that time, I also found the DVD in the store at a good price, but thought, "You know, I've seen this enough lately." And so a movie that I should by rights own, given how much I love it, has never made it into my collection, and I have yet to see it again.

I know this standard is unreasonable. But I've nonetheless lived by it probably since the middle of 2006. That's when I started keeping track of films I revisited, and the date I revisited them. That's when everything started "counting." And maybe this has made my intimacy with the films I love necessarily shallower. Maybe I can't quote lines from movies like I once could, though I'd argue that's because there are fewer quotable lines these days -- a subject for another time. But we eccentrics hold to our rules especially tightly, and this is one of mine.

I do make an exception to this rule now and again. When I find myself over at a friend's house, and the decision of the group is to catch the second half of a movie we love, I'll acquiesce. And in that case, I don't count it as a legitimate revisiting of the movie. It just goes unrecorded altogether, and, you know, that's ... fine. Of course it is, it's ... okay.

However, if it's a movie I haven't seen at all, I will do my best to put the kibosh on that particular partial viewing. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

So on Saturday, I watched about 20 minutes of the movie with my wife. Nowhere near enough time to make me wonder whether it "counted" or not. And besides, part of these 20 minutes included the sing-a-long with Tim Robbins and his wife in the car, and then John Cusack trying to freak out the dirty old man who picks up a hitchhiking Daphne Zuniga. "A guy who would rip your heart out and eat it ... just for pleasure!" Gets me every time.

But then I calmly pulled away from The Sure Thing. I got my ipod headphones, plugged them into my laptop, and listened to first some Azure Ray, then some Coldplay on my itunes until the movie was over. Making sure you don't partially see the movie is only half the battle. The other half is not partially hearing it.

Like all rules a film lover has, these too may be relaxed at some point in the future. But for now, and for me, watching movies is an all-or-nothing experience.

It's just the system I'm "partial" to.