No problem money can't solve

In Anora, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) has a problem. Despite having access to riches beyond anyone's wildest dreams, he's got a finite visa that will prevent his preferred indefinite stay in New York. He's got to go back to Russia unless he can solve this problem.

Also in Anora, Ani (Mikey Madison) has a problem. She lives in a squalid apartment with a disagreeable roommate, and only sex work in a nearby strip club can afford her even this meager existence. Since the strip club does not provide her health insurance and a 401K, she'll have to keep working there under a work schedule of their choosing unless she can solve this problem.

A certain sum of money can solve both their problems. For Vanya, it's the amount of money necessary to make Ani his girlfriend for a week, which includes enough lavish living to tempt her into a marriage that can get him a green card. For Ani it's the same amount of money, but really, it's never having to think about money again after she's the wife of the son of a Russian oligarch -- and certainly never having to work at the strip club again.

I also had a problem I needed to solve, and money -- a much smaller amount of money -- was also the solution.

I'm looking at less than three weeks to see about 20 more movies I want to/expect to see before I close off my 2024 rankings. Some of these are movies I can scrounge up on rental, streaming or the plane ride back to Melbourne. Most are not.

In fact, my list of unseen "important" end of year awards contenders just released or not yet released in either the US or Australia includes, or up until recently included, the following, listed alphabetically:

Anora
The Brutalist 
A Complete Unknown 
Conclave
The Nickel Boys
Nightbitch 
Nosferatu 
Queer 
A Real Pain 
Sing Sing

Possibly all of these movies will be available in theaters in Los Angeles. I can't say for sure and will be able to check with a clearer head when I get there later today. But even so I will get to see at most two of them before we leave on Saturday night.

Then some others will be available in Australian cinemas after I return, but again, I'll only be able to prioritize three at most in what will then be 11 days before my deadline.

So on Sunday night, our second and final night staying outside San Jose with hosts who go to bed early, I needed to fit in one of these titles available on iTunes -- even if it meant I had to throw money at the problem to make it go away.

The choices were Conclave and Anora, both of which would cost me $19.99 to own. No option to rent, though I would have happily paid that same price to do so. 

As you know from this post, I don't like to buy movies via digital purchase -- even ones I know and love, but especially those I've never seen. But I also like to make problems go away, especially at this time of year.

Conclave had the benefit of being 18 minutes shorter, and as the movie I thought I might like less, I was less worried about the less optimal viewing environment of the child's bedroom we've overtaken the last two nights while we've been staying here. (It's actually the guest bedroom, but she's informally moved into it because she no longer wants to share a room with her eight-year-old brother, three years her junior.)

However, I was also taking the long view here, a logical approach when it comes to permanent ownership. Sean Baker has made two movies that made my year-end top ten, while Edward Berger has only made a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front to which I was rather indifferent (that I've seen, anyway).

The clincher for Anora, though, was that there was no future rental date visible for this movie on iTunes, while Conclave will be available to rent on January 10th, a full week before my deadline -- possibly even at the lower rental price of $5.99 or $6.99. And while both will be available in Australian cinemas when I return, I shouldn't be watching either that way given that there will be other titles on the above list where I'll only have the theatrical, not the iTunes, option.

So for the second time this week I added a movie I haven't seen to my permanent iTunes library. Hey, it's that time of year.

Repeat viewings of Anora will probably be somewhat unlikely, but that's all I'll say about it until I post my rankings -- though there will also likely be a review posted in the next few days, linked to the right, if you want to know my thoughts. That was another problem I solved by buying Anora -- the movie, not the person like Vanya did -- which is that I wanted to write and post one more review before returning to Australia, and it needed to be a movie already released there. Anora qualified in that regard as well.

I've heard the phrase "mo money mo problems," but never any musical contemplation of the problems the small sum of $19.99 can solve.

When buying is cheaper than renting

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is one of a handful of really long movies I am still trying to watch by January 17th. 

A lot of my regular movie-watching scenarios do not afford a good chance to watch long movies. I either have to start really early in the evening, thereby reducing my role in winding down our children and our house for the night, or I have to block out a window of time on a weekend afternoon, which has some of the same complications. Simply put, I will not have many more opportunities to do this for the 2 hour and 43-minute Radu Jude movie before my deadline for releasing my 2024 rankings from first to worst.

Fortunately, my time before then involves several irregular movie-watching scenarios, including two plane trips that perfectly accommodate that length of movie. 

The trouble is, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is not the sort of movie that is usually available on a commercial flight. 

Of course, nowadays it doesn't need to be. We can watch whatever we want on our own devices, assuming it's not, like, porn or something.

The trouble then is my own device.

I'm typing this post on a laptop that is now more than four years old, and though it's doing okay for being that age, it's not strong in a couple of key areas -- including its battery life. But I vastly prefer this as an option for watching a movie on my own device, in part because I don't even have a tablet with me, in part because my phone is too small, and in part because this is where I have iTunes set up, and iTunes remains one of my primary sources for renting movies. I'm not talking about the streaming version, I'm talking about opening the iTunes software on my computer, going into the Apple store, and renting a movie. And because I need to watch it without internet, downloading it is also part of that process.

But my laptop will run out of battery way before 2 hours and 43 minutes have elapsed.

So the likely scenario for me actually watching DNETMFTEOTW on our flight to San Francisco Saturday morning is if the plane has a way for me to charge my laptop in flight. I'm pretty sure I saw the familiar three prongs of a charger symbol on one of the flights we took last week, I just don't know if it was the international one or the domestic one. 

But if I've got that charge, I'm watching that movie. If I don't, I'll watch it when I get back to Melbourne. After all, I've got 30 days from the date of rental.

Then again, this is not a rental, and that leads to the thing I actually want to talk about today.

So as it turned out, I had just been discussing with my sister how I have a funny attitude toward renting movies vs. buying movies. Because I have a collector's mentality and don't want to buy something unless it is a purposeful addition to my collection -- in other words, a movie I have vetted and know I love -- I would much rather rent something than buy something, even if they are the same price. The logic is a bit fuzzy, especially when you have an unlimited amount of cloud storage for these purchases. (It may not actually be unlimited, but it seems that way, at least when you haven't bought a lot of movies this way.) But I think about having had to buy Black Adam for my kids to have something exciting to watch on New Year's Eve a few years ago, because it was only available for purchase at the time. It still pops up in the collection of movies I own on iTunes, and I still have not watched it.

When I was looking at movies I needed to watch, especially those I might be able to review before I can get back to Australia to watch them, I looked at the critically acclaimed Anora from Sean Baker. I might have been willing to rent it for the premium $19.99 rental price, but when I saw it was only available for purchase at that price, I balked. Silly logic, maybe -- but fortunately, logic that only holds up to that certain somewhat arbitrary point of being the same price.

Because what do I do if the purchase price is less than the rental price?

Well then I buy the movie.

That's what happened with DNETMFTEOTW. When it came to the option of watching the movie one time for $5.99 or unlimited times for $4.99 -- but in all likelihood, still only one time -- I had to buy it. I may have funny rules, but I'm not the kind of guy who will throw away a dollar for no reason.

I do wonder how that particular set of circumstances arises, and the only thing I can think is that the two prices are governed by two sets of considerations and do not check each other for internal consistency. A rental price for a movie is likely established as a result of some certain amount of time since it has played in movie theaters, whereas a sale price is likely looking at how many units are moving -- in terms of actual purchases -- and a desire to get more of them moving to turn more of a profit on that side of the docket. There is probably no one who checks that these two prices are in logical conversation with one another.

And so it is that Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is now the fifth in a very slowly growing gallery of movies I own on iTunes, which also include the following:

Black Adam (as discussed)
Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (believe this was only available for purchase the year I needed to rank it; still have only watched that one time)
Duane Hopwood (only available for purchase when I watched it for a movie challenge some five years ago; I liked it a fair amount and could potentially watch it again)
Major League (an all-time favorite, though I still think it only joined my collection because there was no way to watch it for free at the time I wanted to watch it, sometime within the last decade. It has subsequently become available on streaming)

What will be the long-term fate of DNETMFTEOTW in terms of potential rewatches vs. just taking up (cloud) space? I hope to find this out in about 24 hours, and you'll know more when I release my rankings.

For what it's worth, in the same purchase session I was willing to spend $9.99 on a rental of We Live in Time, which will arrive in Australian cinemas only just before my deadline, so getting to it now was important. Or would have been, if I had ended up liking it as much as I usually like movies featuring Florence Pugh.

iTunes brain lapse

There's a first time for everything, and the first time for forgetting I'd rented a movie and then letting its 30-day rental period expire was on Tuesday night.

Or, some unknown time before that, but Tuesday was when I discovered it.

I'd gone on iTunes to rent Celtic Pride -- which I wrote about yesterday -- only to get the message "The rental period for 'La Chimera' has expired."

I'd forgotten I'd even rented La Chimera.

It looks like I just missed it, as the receipt I received to my email for the rental came in on May 19th. This was June 18th. So it had expired within the last 24 hours, maybe less than that.

I doubt I would have watched it if I'd discovered this the night before, as coming home from 90 minutes of tennis, after a day I'd been in the office (and a night I'd not slept well), was not my ideal viewing circumstances for this acclaimed but likely challenging film. A film that's been on my radar for so long I think I was hearing about it in 2022, yet it still qualifies as a 2024 release.

Having blown this rental, I'm not sure how keen I am to rent it again right away. 

Maybe I can just let its release year ambiguity -- I guess it's really only been a year on my radar as it debuted at Cannes in 2023 -- take it out of contention for this year, and I'll just watch it when it shows up on Kanopy or something in a year or two.

Or maybe it'll be so good that it's worth double the rental fee.

In any case, I feel dumb about this, especially as it has never actually happened to me before. I may have run out of time on a rental due to unforeseen circumstances after leaving it too late, but never have I entirely forgotten I'd rented the movie in the first place.

The onset of Alzheimer's? Or maybe just too distracted by the NBA Finals?

At this point, given the glorious outcome of that event, it doesn't really matter to me, any more than to just write this post and move on. 

Apple has dumb ideas about the name of Gran Turismo

Last night I got through a little more than half of Neill Blomkamp's Gran Turismo. That's been a bit of a pattern the last few weekends. Exhausted from the day, start watching a movie at close to ten o'clock and then take a loooong nap in the middle. Then wake up around 1 and have the good sense not to try to watch the remaining hour of the movie before going to bed. I mean, the next day is going to involve more buying of presents.

I haven't watched enough of the movie to tell you what I ultimately thought of it, but I have watched enough of the movie to laugh about what Apple thinks this movie is called.

On my iTunes rental, I noticed the full title was Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.

Oh brother.

Is this an Apple thing? The last time I wrote a post about the silly titles Apple gives movies was when I told you I refused to call the Michael J. Fox documentary by its complete title Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. I'm still at Still on that one.

Not all instances of title lengthening are ones I disregard. I was all in on Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. It was just weird enough that I allowed it.

But the Based on a True Story part of Gran Turismo is come by dishonestly.

When the title flashes up on screen, it's only Gran Turismo. About five seconds later, you get in block letters: "BASED ON A TRUE STORY." Which is a pretty standard disclaimer -- is disclaimer the right word? -- at the start of a movie.

Why someone decided to incorporate this into the proper title, I have no idea. To distinguish the movie from the Playstation game on which it was based, I guess? But even in the poster above, you can see it is a tagline more than part of the title. 

As usual in these cases, I go to IMDB and Letterboxd to get a final ruling. Fortunately, they're both with me on this one. No Based on a True Story to be found in either title. 

They do both go with the longer title of Still, so I guess maybe I need to re-think that one.

Spoiler alert: I won't be ranking the $19.99 rentals

I've come down to the final ten days before I finalize my 2022 film rankings, and I've needed to go beyond the list I scratched out on a piece of paper of movies I definitely realistically planned to see by January 24th. 

There are only six of those titles left that I feel I am certain to see, which are Moonage Daydream, Till, Aftersun, God's Creatures, Is That Black Enough For You? and Babylon. On the list but unavailable by then is Women Talking, the latest from Sarah Polley. Also on that list, but movies I talked about possibly watching with my wife (and others in our family), are My Father's Dragon and Black Adam, neither of which may get watched in time. I only want to force my wife to watch one movie in the next ten days and that's Moonage Daydream, since she's a big Bowie fan.

Then there are two movies on the list that are only available as a $19.99 rental, and when it comes down to it, that's going to be a reason for me not to watch them, given how many choices I have.

The first, as you have guessed, is Spoiler Alert, which I only just learned about for the first time in the past few weeks. This has been a good year for gay characters at the movies between Bros and Fire Island and The Whale, but the movie isn't available in Australian cinemas, so my only choice is the premium rental fee. Sorry, Spoiler Alert.

The second is Bones and All, from a director who made one of the most beloved movies about gay characters in recent years, that being Call Me By Your Name. I point that out only as a coincidence, since I don't believe there are any gay themes in this film (though there is Timothee Chalamet). In this case I did have access to see this, and I could probably still find it in Australian cinemas -- so it's possible this will get watched, if I have time to get out to see it. But not by $19.99 rental.

Then you have some others in the larger list that I could watch at an inflated rental price, like The Inspection, which I only just learned existed with the Golden Globe nominations. Sorry, Inspection.

Seriously Red is actually not available for rental via U.S. iTunes at any price, but I could rent it through Amazon Prime in Australia -- for $24.99 AUD. Considering that I didn't prioritize this either when it was in theaters, that's a big no.

The thing that could challenge this approach to finishing my list is that I actually don't know what the rental prices will be for Aftersun and Till. iTunes advises me that both are becoming available for rental on January 17th, as both are currently only available for $19.99 purchase. Becoming available for rental after a period where only purchase was possible often means a semi-premium rental price, like $6.99, though it could be the full $19.99. I don't know if I will rent Till at the full $19.99 price, if that's what it is, but I will have to do it with Aftersun, since there's a consensus that this is one of the best films of the year.

I had hoped not to be concerned about rental price as I reached my deadline, but my house in California is still not fully sold. There has been a delay in our latest attempt to sell it (the first sale fell through) that could push the closing past my ranking deadline. With that kind of uncertainty hanging over our heads, it's best if I make smart choices and not toss away $20 US on movies I will watch one time.

But one of the other reasons I can use rental price to guide my remaining choices is that I still have so many of them from my larger watchlist. I am steadily whittling it down, but it still has a formidable 85 titles, including those already mentioned as well as at least ten that are not coming out until 2023. 

For anywhere from free on one of my streamers to no more than a $6.99 rental, I can still watch the following:

Athena
Margrete: Queen of the North
Warriors of the Future
Emily
Call Jane
Meet Cute
Love, Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Chef Charlie Trotter
Bad Axe
Dead for a Dollar
Speak No Evil
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
Mr. Harrigan's Phone
Breaking
Slumberland
Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul.
I Came By
Goodnight Mommy
Sharp Stick
Inu-Oh
Mad God
Paris, 13th District
Benediction
Something in the Dirt
The Pez Outlaw
Incredible But True
Vengeance
Playground
Mothering Sunday
A Chiara
The Forgiven
Both Sides of the Blade
The Deer King
Belle 
The 355

So yeah, I have plenty to choose from. (And if you want to put in a vote for any of these over any of the others, would love it if you would leave a comment.)

It'll get me well over 170, and will be a new record. It's finally sort of almost time to reveal the list.

I can now watch iTunes rentals on my projector - sort of*

You may recall that I met a weird outcome when I tried to watch an iTunes rental on my projector last year -- I wrote about it in this post.

Namely, there was something about the technology that kept movies played through iTunes from being visible when a projector was connected to that computer. Not all projectors, I think, just older ones -- or maybe cheaper ones. My projector was new at the end of 2020, but some projectors run in excess of $10,000 and mine was a mere fraction of that. It's much better than any projector I've owned previously, but apparently it does have its limitations.

Something has changed since September 2021, though, and now I can play them -- or maybe I misdiagnosed the problem in the first place. 

Now I can play them -- with an asterisk.

I made the discovery on Saturday night, when I had planned to use the projector in our garage to watch Kwaidan, the 1964 Japanese film by Masaki Kobayashi that presents four ghost stories over a three-hour running time. That's my draw in this month's Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. The projector was still set up from when my 12-year-old and I watched a Celtics game earlier that afternoon, and my wife was going out for dinner, so I knew I'd get an early enough start to fit in all three hours. (I ended up finishing at 2:45 a.m. after multiple long "naps," which ended up leading to significant narrative confusion -- I thought there were only three stories, so I was having a really difficult time figuring out how the second half of the third story related to its first half.)

I knew as a backup I could watch this on our normal TV through AppleTV. In fact, I expected that's what would happen, given my previous difficulties with iTunes rentals on this projector. Try as I might, I could not find Kwaidan streaming through another source, not even for rental on Amazon, which makes a good option in cases like this because it's under no such technical limitations with regard to my projector.

Since I'd be starting the 48-hour viewing window regardless, on one device or the other, it made for a unique opportunity to test the iTunes problem on my projector one more time. Lo and behold, this time the movie played -- though it was clear straight away there were still weird software issues going on. 

The biggest issue was that I could not go full screen. I'd play the movie and then try various maximize options, but it never got bigger than most of the screen, always leaving a blank space on the bottom, not to mention my taskbar. I just can't watch a movie with the taskbar visible at the bottom. Too distracting.

I also tried to move the window to fill the screen better, pulling out its corners to actually alter its dimensions, but here was where the weirdest thing happened. Any attempt to move or adjust the window led to duplicating it, so there was one window playing the movie behind the other window -- and not even at the same spot in the movie. There was like a five-second difference between the two. 

There was one point where I thought I had the window in only one iteration, and it filled most of the screen in a tolerable way. But then iTunes sensed something unstable about that situation and automatically contracted it back to the original dimensions that were its preferred means of presentation. 

The solution I finally landed on was to block out part of the projector.

That's right, I got a viewing scenario that iTunes was happy with that filled the entire top of the screen, leaving a big white patch at the bottom that was the default white background of the iTunes software. Then of course the taskbar was visible at the bottom because I could never do anything about that. So I found a carboard box in my garage that was just tall enough so that if I fussed with it, I got it to sit in front of the lens in such a way as to block out all the white and the taskbar at the bottom. 

This created a small part on the lower left side of the screen that was a bit blotchy and fuzzy, but it was a very minor inconvenience and I pressed on forward through the rest of the viewing this way.

The consequence of this arrangement, though, was that the cardboard box was reflecting the projector's light onto the back wall and off to the side where I was sitting. I couldn't do anything about the back wall, but it basically just meant that the room was not as fully dark as it usually was. I got used to it pretty quickly.

I wasn't going to get used to the part reflecting out of the side and directly into my eyes. So what I did was place a ping pong paddle so it was leaning against the edge of the box and the side of my projector, blocking out the most piercing of the light.

Not ideal, but it worked in a pinch.

Since I've got you, I thought I would share my review of Kwaidan in Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, as I have been doing these past few months, especially since it also contains a short narrative of the confusion that resulted from not knowing the correct number of stories in the movie:

I had a funny experience watching [Redacted]'s #2, Kwaidan (1964), that stems entirely from getting it into my head that it was comprised of three horror stories over three hours rather than four. Yes, I'd actually asked Wade earlier in the month if I could watch the four stories over multiple nights, but sometime between then and now, my mind converted that to three. And then I found an occasion to watch the whole movie in one night, as is my preference.

I watched the first two stories, "The Black Hair" and "The Woman in the Snow," with great interest and affection. I loved the simplicity of the storytelling combined with a great visual design that blended real scenery with painted backdrops in a compelling way. The eye painted in the sky in "The Woman in the Snow" is chilling, and the titular black hair gave me a good indication of where later J-horror, such as The Grudge, was born. I was really digging this and it was really reminding me of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, which surely also took inspiration from Masaki Kobayashi's film.

But when "The Woman in the Snow" ended and the intermission came up, I got worried. How would "Hoichi the Earless," what I understood to be the final story, possibly run for the remaining more than 90 minutes? If you are going to combine a couple different stories like this, I vastly prefer they all be about the same length. Helps considerably with the pacing.

Of course at this point it was also getting late at night, meaning my head was not as clear and I was starting to have the occasional small head rolls. Suffice it to say that I missed the moment when "Hoichi the Earless" transitioned into "In a Cup of Tea," probably in part because I was a bit out of it but in part because I had no expectation that there was a fourth story coming. So then I really had a hard time figuring out how the second half of "Hoichi the Earless" related to the first half, especially since "In a Cup of Tea" also contains a story within a story, making things all the more confusing. I blamed it on bad storytelling and began mentally preparing a review talking about how much I liked the first two stories but that the third was interminable.

Of course, this morning when I looked on Wikipedia to try to get a sense of why the plot had taken such a weird turn in "Hoichi the Earless," I realized there were actually four stories. So I rewatched "In a Cup of Tea" and now I feel a lot better about the movie on the whole.

Without getting into the plots of the individual stories, I found each a mysterious delight in its own way. While I don't think any of the four stories really hit me solidly with its conclusion, I enjoyed the experience of watching immensely. Maybe it's a bit too Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Amazing Stories to expect each story to hit you with a big ironic twist at the end, and at least one of these stories does try to do that. I guess none of them stuck the landing in exactly the way I wanted them to, but it's a pretty minor complaint, and this was a really interesting watch -- and clearly a big influencer on future Japanese cinema. However, for me it pales in comparison to Kobayashi's Harakiri, which is my #139 (and was also found in this group -- thanks [Redacted]).

Here's how it entered my chart:

Kwaidan > Strike a Pose

Kwaidan > A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

Kwaidan < Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Kwaidan > Fantasia

Kwaidan > The Emperor's Club

Kwaidan < The Sea Beast

Kwaidan > Newlyweds

Kwaidan < Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Kwaidan < Topsy-Turvy

Kwaidan < Tomorrow Never Dies

Kwaidan < Gaslight

Kwaidan > The Terminator

891/6182 (86%)

Thanks [Redacted]! Despite some minor complaints and confusion, obviously I got a lot out of this.

Reviewing a purchase or reviewing a movie?

For a number of reasons, including slight differences in their offerings, I have started to rent more movies through Amazon than through my old standby, iTunes. One big issue with iTunes is that movies I rent there won't play through my projector, assuming I am using the iTunes software itself to view them, for some technical reason that I still don't understand. I watch a relatively small percentage of the movies I see through my projector, but it's definitely become a factor in my vendor preferences. I'm sure there's a way to watch them through the Apple TV website that circumvents this, but let's just say it's felt like a bridge too far.

In the case of The Kid Detective, the movie I watched in October for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, it was a difference in what was available that was the deciding factor. These are pretty rare. While iTunes only has this movie available for $12.99 purchase, it was rentable via Amazon. Typically the availability is determined at a higher level and not customized on a vendor level, or so I have always assumed, but this was the exception.

I liked the movie. I'll include my FFFF review below. But what I'm writing about today is the follow-up emails Amazon has been sending me, asking me to rate my purchase. 

I find this strange, because I think Amazon wants me to tell them how much I liked the movie. But in most other cases, Amazon wants me to tell them whether I got the thing I bought in a timely manner, whether it came in the same condition they said it would come in, all that stuff. If I'd hated The Kid Detective and rated it one star, wouldn't that look the same as if I told them that a pair of headphones came damaged, or a book arrived two months late?

Books are probably the valid point of comparison here. I feel like when you receive a book from Amazon, you are clearly meant to tell them whether it was physically undamaged when it arrived. You aren't meant to read the whole book and then subject it to a rating of its quality from one to five stars. Especially since in this case, they ask you to rate the purchase only a few days later, and you can't have been expected to finish the book and assess its quality by that point. You might not even have started it.

With a digitally rented movie, there is no chance for it to come damaged, at least not physically. If for some reason you couldn't play the movie, you would contact customer support and they would either issue you a refund or get you to a link that actually worked. There would be no shipping involved in returning the faulty item. In fact, I don't think you'd necessarily even feel inclined to negatively rate the experience, unless customer service just totally dropped the ball. You'd always know it would be resolved easily enough.

So even though Amazon has asked me twice now to rate The Kid Detective, I have not complied. When it comes to other purchases I make online, I do usually do stuff like this and do not want to make them beg. I know that reviews are a big part of increasing consumer confidence in the thing in question.

But I'm not that interested in contributing to Amazon's dialogue surrounding The Kid Detective and whether someone else should rent it based on its merits as a movie. I don't rate movies I watch on Netflix. That seems like the most similar thing to what Amazon is asking me here.

Okay here's that write-up on FFFF:

I watched [Redacted]'s #50, The Kid Detective (2020), about a week ago, and unfortunately, failed to strike while the iron was hot to write this review. So this may not end up being my usual length, but I will give it the old college try.

I quite enjoyed the movie. The basic setup is that the main character, Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody), is a bit of a prodigy who successfully solved a missing persons case (if memory serves) when he was a kid, and was celebrated by the whole town. Instead of this just being a one-off thing, he continues as an underage detective, and has success solving crimes. Now at 32, though, the life has lost some of its luster and he's not so much celebrated as pitied by the townspeople. His parents still parent him like he's 13.

The story is about his new case, and what I really liked about this movie is that it follows the same structure as your typical noir but in this small-town setting and with largely younger characters, including a teenage femme fatale played by Sophie Nelisse. (She serves that function in the story but is a total innocent, unlike most fatales.) I expected it to be cutesy and sort of a comedy, but it's a lot more contemplative and adult-oriented than you might expect from a film with that title. There is humor in it but it's all deadpan. In fact, I don't think I laughed once, though I was consistently amused by everything that was happening on screen -- without that amusement crossing over into taking the project less seriously. It gets that balance just right.

In fact, it's plenty adult in its approach, with (again if memory serves) profanity in addition to drug use and violence. Abe might not get knocked around to the same extent as other noir heroes but he definitely exposes himself to danger and has the sort of narrative arc through the movie you would expect from a detective beaten down by time.

In a way this film is doing something similar to Rian Johnson's Brick, but I like this film better. I'm not a big fan of Brick because I think the dialogue is annoyingly stylized and Johnson is a bit too cutesy with all his camera tricks and other noise. I enjoyed the straightforward approach of director Evan Morgan and especially Brody's performance as Abe, which gets a really satisfying final moment on screen.

I'm not sure if this was one of the intended themes but the film functions as an interesting analogy for child actors growing into adults, which is sort of a reality for Brody (he got started acting when he was 19, it would appear). Child actors are rarely able to convert the charm of their younger years into becoming appealing adult actors, with a few notable exceptions, and so we see the same is true for Abe as a young detective.

Let's see how it enters my chart:

The Kid Detective > Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl

The Kid Detective < In the Heat of the Night

The Kid Detective < Dave Made a Maze

The Kid Detective > The Brothers Grimsby

The Kid Detective > Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The Kid Detective < Tommy Boy

The Kid Detective > All the King's Men (1949)

The Kid Detective < Queen of Katwe

The Kid Detective < Incident at Oglala

The Kid Detective < City Island

The Kid Detective > Swing Vote

The Kid Detective > The X-Files: Fight the Future

The Kid Detective > Bronson

2449/6160 (60%)

Thanks [Redacted]!

99 cents: Too much for a movie I've never heard of

It used to be that I would check iTunes every single week to see what movie they were renting for 99 cents. I'd get so impatient for the week's new movie to be revealed that I'd get actively frustrated if it was already Monday in America and there was no new title.

It was a good way for me to clean up movies that I'd meant to see earlier in the year, but never gotten around to. It felt like a cinephile life hack. These movies would ordinarily rent for around $4.99, but on these special weeks of the year, I could knock them out for $4 less than that.

Over time, I adjusted a bit so that even if I hadn't heard of the movie in question, I'd rent it as long as I recognized some of the stars or the director. I figured, also a good way to learn about movies that hadn't been on my radar, but maybe should have been.

That's changed.

I came to this realization last night while watching On the Count of Three, a movie starring Christopher Abbott and Jerrod Carmichael, and directed by Carmichael. I know Abbott's work, of course, and Carmichael's was a face I recognized. (As it turns out, it's produced by none other than legendary TV producer Tom Werner, who I've actually met, though this was only something I discovered in the end credits and not a factor in my purchase.)

The movie was okay. Actually, I liked it less than okay, but even sort of okay was a good place for it to have reached after I started out hating it. It redeemed itself in the second half, a bit. And there are some big name actors who each have one scene, most notably Tiffany Haddish, but also JB Smoove and Henry Winkler.

But there is no doubt that I did not need to see this movie, and that 99 cents no longer seems like a bargain.

It is reasonable to make the argument that it might be worth spending 99 cents on any movie. But when you decide to watch a movie, you are not just spending those 99 cents -- you are also spending the two hours of your life. On the Count of Three was, fortunately, only 86 minutes, but given pauses and naps -- yes, I was pretty sleepy on Monday night -- it actually took more like two-and-a-half hours for me to watch it.

Another reasonable argument is that because I'm a person who assembles a year-end list of movies and ranks them from best to worst, there's a value to seeing movies that are going to end up on the "worst" end of the spectrum. Because I like to get good coverage, I don't only watch movies I think I'll like. I want some real stinkers to find their way in there as well.

But On the Count of Three was less a stinker and more of a "so what?" movie. And that's not because it was frivolous. Actually quite the contrary. The two main characters have a suicide pact. They begin the movie aiming guns at each other's faces, hoping to simultaneously pull the trigger so they will succeed in killing each other, but at the last minute decide to take one more day. This is the story of that day. And on this day, one of the guys considers killing the therapist who molested him when he was a kid.

But even with the heavy themes, it didn't feel like a film that I "needed" to see. In fact, I just sat there wondering why I had allowed its 99 cent price tag to convince me to rent it, when there are dozens of films just on the streaming services I subscribe to that I should probably see, that will actually be free. To say nothing of the streaming services where I don't currently have a subscription.

I think I actually came to this conclusion after I'd rented On the Count of Three but before I'd watched it. The following week's 99 cent movie on iTunes was Infinite Storm, starring Naomi Watts. My finger hovered over the button to rent this one as well, but I hesitated and ultimately aborted. I should rather watch a movie starring Naomi Watts, a bigger name than any of the actors mentioned so far, but I'd already crossed over an imaginary line in my head.

With the changes in the film landscape, there are enough movies I should see that I don't have time for, that I don't need to complicate my viewing schedule by picking up new movies that I don't even know about. Sometimes, they rent movies for 99 cents for a reason.

On the Count of Three is not, probably, the best example of this I could come up with. As I said, it was okay. But when I write posts is a function of when my brain gets the idea to write them, and I got that idea last night.

Besides, I don't really need an okay movie. Give me good or give me terrible. Otherwise you are just wasting my time.

There's always a "that said," so here it is: That said, my #1 movie of 2021 was a 99 cent rental. I can't remember now if I'd heard of Our Friend before I rented it, but given that it starred Jason Segal, Casey Affleck and Dakota Johnson, it easily met my standard of having stars I recognized. In that case I aslo recognized Gabriela Cowperthwaite as the director of the documentary Blackfish, and was curious about what she'd do with a feature film.

Maybe I don't need to be making absolute rules. Maybe I do want to find the next Our Friend, and since I had so little expectations for that when I watched it, maybe On the Count of Three could have been it. It wasn't, but do I really want to prevent myself from ever having that sort of wonderful surprise again?

I do know that in the current year, I don't yet have a film that I've seen that I feel is a real candidate to end the year as my #1. If my current #1 ends up there, so be it -- it's a great movie. But it doesn't feel like #1. 

Maybe Infinite Storm would have been it. 

The 11th hour change of my Father's Day movies

I watched four movies on Sunday, which was Australian Father's Day, but I had planned to watch a different four movies. 

Rather, I had planned to watch three different movies and a fourth that I did ultimately watch, but in a different format than I had planned to watch it.

I was all set to start with the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which would seem like a totally random selection for this mini Father's Day marathon except that I'd finished reading the book just the day before. In fact, I had planned to write here about my expected Benedict Cumberbatch double feature, as I was also going to watch this year's The Courier. No, Cumberbatch is not in Mansfield Park, though at 23 years old in 1999 he would have been the appropriate age to play one of the Bertram children. Actually, what happened was that when I was reading Mansfield Park, I pictured Cumberbatch in my mind for the character of Edmund Bertram. (The character is actually played by Johnny Lee Miller.)

I was also going to do this month's edition of my blog series I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things, that being Synecdoche, New York. 

The fourth movie was always going to be WarGames, and it still was -- actually the second movie, chronologically. This gets me into aforementioned format in which I had planned to watch it, which is really what I want to talk about today.

It turns out you can't watch iTunes movies through your projector. Not my projector, anyway.

I'm sure you are as surprised as I was. 

I kind of figured that as long as you had the projector hooked up to your computer, the projector would display whatever was on the computer screen. This is not the case. 

When I started Mansfield Park and could not see anything on screen, at first I attributed this to a very dim opening credits sequence. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon and the light was only imperfectly being blocked from getting in to our garage. Once the credits were over and the movie got into its unending succession of daytime scenes, I'd be fine. Or so I figured.

But I thought it was really curious that I could see absolutely nothing on screen, and when there was some daylight a minute later, the condition persisted.

Befuddled and more than a little bit annoyed, I googled it, and it appears that iTunes movies will not play on certain digital projectors. This flummoxed me. Certain older digital projectors, the article said. Mine is less than a year old but it is also not the most expensive version on the market (not by a long shot). Neither is it it the cheapest (not by a long shot). As hard as it was to believe that I had spent as much money on this projector as I had, in order for this to be one of its practical limitations, this was the only explanation that made any sense about why I couldn't see what I was expecting to see.

I can't even remember what the technical explanation for this was, and can't be bothered to google it again.

There was some lingering uncertainty about whether it might be just this one particular file having the issue, so just to be sure, I risked starting another. I say "risked" because once you start your rental, you are committing yourself to watching it within the next 48 hours if you don't want to let it expire. And since you paid for it, usually you don't. Through the Mansfield misstep, I'd already added a Monday night movie to my viewing schedule and I didn't want to add a second.

WarGames made the perfect sacrificial lamb.

My iTunes rental of WarGames represented what I believe is a personal first: Paying money to rent a movie that I already owned. Why would I do such a thing? Well I'll explain.

I had planned to have only my computer hooked up to the projector throughout the day, which also included five hours of baseball in the morning. Just seemed easier. I own WarGames on DVD, but it's an American DVD, meaning it requires a multi-regional DVD/BluRay player. Which we have, but it's the kind that's part of your home entertainment setup, not the kind that connects to a laptop. I do have such a USB DVD/BluRay player, but of course it is not region free. 

So even though we own WarGames, which I had already decided was my choice for a Father's Day family movie, I paid the $3.99 rental for the convenience of having it on iTunes. 

This of course also made it a good tester movie. Even if I started the 48-hour rental window, it didn't matter, because we own the movie anyway. 

Well, it didn't make a difference. The problem still existed.

Okay, time to call an audible. I did what I had previously considered such an inconvenience to do: brought my multi-regional DVD player out to the garage. Really, it was quite easy. Should have done it in the first place.

So three movies from my collection -- Wanderlust, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and This is Spinal Tap -- took the place of Mansfield Park, The Courier and Synecdoche, New York. It's just as well, as I had a half viewing of Star Trek IV about six years ago and it's nice to have made it all the way through this one. Plus I was surprised to note it had been more than eight years since my last Tap viewing -- quite a long time for a film in my top ten on Flickchart. Back then I watched it twice in two years, so I guess I still had a lingering impression that I'd seen it recently. (It had been only five years since my second viewing of Wanderlust. This was my third.)

Mansfield Park? It did get watched on Monday night. 

Disappointing. The book was much better. (Gee, what a surprise.) Having finished reading so recently, I was in a unique position to assess the changes they'd made in this adaptation, many of which had to do with tightening up a 470-page book. I get that you need to do that, but some of the choices really sacrificed the character depth, while certain characters that I thought were important had been excised entirely. Plus there were too many instances of taking something that might have been deep, deep subtext in Austen's book and turning it into text. I'd go into detail if I thought there were any chance you had read Mansfield Park, recently or ever.

Regarding the projector, it's really annoying to learn of these limitations, but I guess it's better to find out now than in a situation where it really matters: one of my Friday-to-Sunday marathons at a hotel, where I can't just pop over and get substitute DVDs from my collection. Last time I streamed most of the movies I watched, but what if the hotel WiFi is in the crapper? iTunes would have been my backup, and in that case, it would have been a poor backup indeed.

My last one of those was last November, and I usually do about one per year. I'd be due for another but the current lockdown is making that considerably less likely. 

So movies in my garage on Father's Day will have to do ... for now. 

Apple, meet my computer

If Apple wants to freak me out about someone hacking my account, they're doing a pretty good job.

At comically regular intervals, they tell me that I am renting a movie from iTunes using a device that has not been used before. It happened most recently on Saturday night, when I rented the movie What's Up, Doc? for viewing sometime before the end of July.

And truly: What is up, Doc?

(I should ask Bugs Bunny since I only just last week watched Space Jam: A New Legacy.)

I've had this computer since about November, and in that time, I have rented at least two dozen movies using it. Yet because I tend to save all my emails like the filthy hoarder that I am, I can tell you exactly how many times they've considered this to be a foreign device.

Going backward:

June 13th:

"Dear Vance,

Your AppleID, vance@vance.com, was just used to rent What Lies Below on a computer or device that has not previously been used."

January 24th:

"Dear Vance,

Your AppleID, vance@vance.com, was just used to rent 'Le Labo' by East Ave on a computer or device that has not previously been used."

(It's not only movies, it's music too.)

January 22nd:

"Dear Vance,

Your AppleID, vance@vance.com, was just used to rent Being John Malkovich on a computer or device that has not previously been used."

How could a device that was used two days before this message not previously have been used?

The one before that was in September, which I guess was probably on my old computer -- but that wouldn't have been nearly the first time I rented from that computer either. 

I'd get it if it would "forget" me every six months maybe. I'm not that memorable.

But it sent me this warning for What Lies Below, which was only a month ago. Come on, I don't blend into the scenery that much.

It's almost as though some sort of algorithm has been run on the titles that has alerted them to potential fraudulent behavior. "Warning! Warning! This same person would never rent Being John Malkovich, What Lies Below and What's Up, Doc. Truly: What is up, Doc?"

Each of these messages also advise that I could be getting this message because I had recently changed my password. But I damn sure know I didn't do that. I mean, part of my password is the numbers "2018."

I also know that you can have iTunes wiped from a computer and reinstalled, which resets some kind of code that Apple has to relate this computer to this iTunes account. But that didn't happen in this case either.

The best clue might lie in this sentence that appears in each email:

"This purchase was initiated from Australia."

Aye, there's the rub. They know this is a U.S. iTunes account but they know someone is accessing it from Australia. That's where the laptop stolen on vacation (as if people are vacationing internationally right now) sets off red flags for them. 

But this still doesn't totally explain it, because if they did any digging into the purchase history, they would know that purchases initiated from Australia are consistent with the activity history on this account, not divergent from it. 

So the mystery remains. We don't, in the end, know what is up, Doc. We don't know what lies below, but we do know it might just be an infinity of things that look the same failing to identify each other:

Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. 

Watching an iTunes movie at the touch of a button

Forgive me as I have another moment that many of you probably had months, even years, ago.

Earlier this week it was my first taste of Disney+, which you couldn't have had years ago, as it hasn't been around for a year yet. But tonight it was Apple TV, which has been around years, but in the format we know it now for only about three.

Yeah I used Apple TV earlier this week when I used Disney+, and yeah, one of its main expected values to us would be as a conduit to that streaming service. But I didn't realize the probably more useful value of it, to me and my own viewing habits, until tonight.

For any number of years now -- as few as eight or as many as a dozen -- I have been utilizing iTunes as a primary source for renting movies. Some small number of those I intended to watch on an Apple device -- an iPad, or when it worked, my old iPod. A slightly larger number were to be watched directly on my laptop, through the iTunes application itself.

But the vast majority have been intended to be watched with my computer plugged in to a proper TV by HDMI cable.

This has not always been a smooth arrangement. As I wrote about extensively most recently in this post, my HDMI setup has been plagued with difficulties over the years. If the HDMI connection itself is not acting up, then sometimes the streaming of the video is held captive by the pathetic processing speed of my computer. At the lowest level of inconvenience, there's making sure the laptop screen is pointing away from you, so you aren't seeing two screens at once -- the adjustment of which sometimes meddles with the HDMI connection. It's a tedious business.

No more.

As Apple TV connects directly to my iTunes account, anything I purchase on my computer is suddenly available on the TV itself. I know I sound like some kind of grandfather here, but the simplicity of it just blows my mind. Just press a couple buttons on the adorable little Apple remote (again with the grandfather tone) and you're watching that movie.

In fact, it was the appearance of Capone, the only movie I happen to have rented from iTunes right now, on my Apple TV menu that told me everything had worked as I'd hoped. Tom Hardy's ugly mug was beautiful to me in that moment.

Why mightn't it have worked?

Because I am still practicing a wee bit of chicanery when it comes to Apple -- chicanery they allow, but which feels like it could disappear at any moment, if any new devices becomes aware of the chicanery.

Namely, I still connect to my American version of iTunes. Have been doing so since moving here in 2013. Continue to do so with peril, with worry that it all may just go away at any moment.

The reason it's important for me to keep doing this is it allows me access to many movies way before they come to Australia. In fact, in the extreme case, I can get the movie for a 99-cent rental even before it's hit Australian cinemas. Not something I want to give up.

Yet every time I register a new device, as was the case here, I worry it'll all go belly up. I mean, I had to basically lie by saying my region was the U.S. rather than Australia. And that is the region of my iTunes account, so it's not really a lie. But by giving this device access to my wireless, I thought it might detect I was not in the U.S. and start sparking and smoking. I disallowed the activation of location services, which may have been the key to keeping my setup as it's always been.

Truth is, I'm not sure if Apple really cares if you are connecting to a different iTunes store from the country where you are currently located. Take the example of the diplomat who is sent overseas for a year. Is that person really meant to link up to iTunes in Saudi Arabia while he or she is there? Do they even have iTunes in Saudi Arabia?

So I guess setting up Apple TV confirmed what I thought I knew, though it was still an occasion for holding my breath.

Was Capone the perfect movie to test out this new functionality?

Hell no! It's really bad! Hardy's makeup is shitty and his performance is comical. He should get the award for most acting. Josh Trank, a director I do not like, who made a movie I do not like (Chronicle) and then got fired from a Star Wars movie (I haven't seen Fantastic Four), has made another turd. He's not talented.

But I don't care. I rent movies for 99 cents not because I expect them to be masterpieces, but because at worst, they fill out the bottom section of my annual rankings. Capone accomplishes that just fine.

And now, if I want to see a good or a terrible movie through iTunes, it's easy as clicking a button.

I just rented two more, and can't wait to watch the next.

Something I've Never seen before

I was listening to the most recent episode of Filmspotting and I heard something that was music to my ears: scenes from a trailer that was unmistakably a new movie.

I then found that indeed, my two favorite podcasters, stranded now without anything new to talk about for more than a month, would indeed be discussing a new film on their next podcast.

The Sundance favorite Never Rarely Sometimes Always had been moved from an expected theatrical release to a digital release in light of COVID-19. And because it's fun to have listened to the thing they talk about, I immediately went to iTunes to investigate.

As I was searching it up, I wondered how high I'd go on a rental price. I had the naivete to hope that it might be a $3.99 rental, though of course that wasn't likely to be the case. It was more likely to be $6.99, which is what I paid for Vivarium over the weekend.

It was very unlikely to be $19.99, but as you will see on the snippet to the right, that's what it was.

For a rental.

That $19.99 is what you expect if you're planning to buy a new movie, to be sure. But that new movie you'd be buying has already had its chance to get your $19.99 in the theater. Never Rarely Sometimes Always never got that chance.

So I'm writing this post not because I'm balking at the outrageous chutzpah of iTunes to charge us $20 for a movie we can only watch for 30 days, and only for 48 hours once we've started on it. I'm writing to recognize the desperation that may soon become commonplace in the movie industry, as studios/production companies/distributors try to figure out any strategy they can to recoup production costs.

And you know, I may just rent this movie.

I have until Friday to think about it, but then really, until any time after that, until I get too desperate myself to listen to the next Filmspotting. There are a lot of other things I'm not spending money on right now, and I'm one of the fortunate ones who is still making the same amount of money I was making a month ago. Maybe this is one of my ways to give back and support an industry that brings me so much joy, since I can afford to do so. And if enough of us do it, maybe they'll keep giving us new 2020 movies.

It's not something I might normally do. But COVID-19 is a never rarely sometimes always type of situation.

It's the most moneyful time of the year

("Moneyful" is not a word, but this was the only way I could make you think of both expenditure and that holiday earworm we all stopped hearing a few weeks ago.)

Watching movies is no longer a costly proposition for me. With the rare exception of a special event or a non-participating theater chain, all the movies I see in the theater are free as a result of my membership in the Australian Film Critics Association (AFCA). I pick up most of the rest on Netflix and when they come up for rental on iTunes for 99 cents.

There's one time of the year when this model does not suffice, though.

When it gets to the second half of December/first half of January, and I'm really starting to target the movies I still "need to see" (however I define that) before I close my list, I'll pretty much pay whatever they cost.

I do have my limits. As you read last month in this post, I was not willing to actually buy Glass in order to get it in my 2019 rankings. That was a bridge too far.

But whatever ridiculous price they want me to pay to rent something, I will.

Case in point. Thursday night I rented and watched Ma from iTunes. It never came up as the 99 cent rental, but I always intended to see it. So now, with just days left before I close my list, I'm shelling out the big bucks.

How big? Six dollars and 48 cents, including tax.

And that's American dollars. In Australia, using current exchange rates, that comes to $9.46, which is just a ridiculous price to rent a movie. It rivals -- nay, exceeds -- the $8 a rental store charged me to rent The Internship back in 2013, as discussed in this post. Though that was more than six years ago, that rental remains, in my mind, the high watermark for what I've ever paid to rent a movie, a financial outlay necessitated by the special circumstances of being out of town for my 40th birthday weekend. Well, I guess these are special circumstances, too, and now I have my new high watermark.

I don't think iTunes used to charge $5.99 before tax for a new rental, but I guess that's inflation for you. It's increasingly difficult to get people to spend money on movies in any form, so I guess when you do get a poor sap like me willing to do so, you need to take him for everything he's worth.

If it were just Ma I'd survive. Okay, I'll survive anyway. But I'll feel the pinch because of the many similar decisions I've made over the past month. Let's take a quick stroll down my iTunes rental history, excluding a couple 99 cent rentals, to get a better idea:

Ma - $6.48

Ash is Purest White - $5.40

Honeyland - $6.48

Fast Color - $5.99

Ready or Not - $5.99

Diane - $4.99

The Last Black Man in San Francisco - $4.99

Why some of those movies have tax and some do not, I could not tell you. A change in the way these transactions are taxed starting in 2020? I can tell you that that's $40.32 spent on seven rentals, an average of $5.76 per rental. Or $8.41 Australian.

Now granted, at least one of those movies is going to make my top 20 of the year, so you can easily argue it's worth it. But you can also easily argue that it pains me to do it, nonetheless.

You can play the world's tiniest violin for me if you want. I am also the guy who has seen 51 movies in the theater since my last renewal of my $75 AFCA membership, with a few more likely to come in the three weeks before the 2019 dues run out. That's $1.47 Australian per movie seen in the cinema, or only $1.01 American. In other words, it all balances out.

Besides, there's something I enjoy about the decadence of this period, about telling my New England Puritan to go stuff it for a few weeks. There's no kind of typical cost-benefit analysis in which I think Ma is worth nine-plus of my hard-earned Australian dollars. But at this time of year, I just throw all that out the window, and spend freely as needed. The only thing that matters to me is "Do I want to see Ma in time to rank it for 2019? Then this is what it costs."

I'll tell you that Ma is not the movie that is going to make my top 20. The name "Tate Taylor" as the director was probably a pretty good guarantee of that. But I will say that Juliette Lewis was great in it, and that Octavia Spencer is always great, even when she is not.

Would I pay $9.46 for that Juliette Lewis performance?

Probably not, but you can't put a price on completism.

Serenity resurrected

This gives the term “zombie movie” a whole new meaning.

About ten days ago, I watched one of the worst movies of the year, Serenity, on a 99-cent iTunes rental. About eight days ago, its 48-hour rental window expired.

About five days ago, it appeared among my iTunes rentals again, giving me another ten days to potentially watch it again before the original 30-day window expires.

It’s not the first time I’ve had a movie exist for my viewing beyond the 48-hour rental window. Last year, when I watched Mom and Dad, it simply never started counting down the 48-hour rental window, so I got to watch it again before the 30 days were up. It landed in my top ten for the year, so that was fortuitous.

But this is the first time I’ve had a movie start and finish that 48-hour window, disappear from my iTunes entirely, and then reappear for reasons unknown, sometime later within that 30-day window.

Probably speaks to my iTunes being several versions out of date, I would guess. 

In this case I have no desire to watch it again, as it was, as I said, one of the worst movies of the year. However, it might almost be worth watching again just for the “so bad it’s good” factor, if only there weren’t so many other demands on my viewing schedule at this time of the year.

Just for curiosity’s sake, I’m tempted to press play to see if it would, indeed, play again, or if it would realize its own paradoxical existence and burst into flames or something. Because I don’t want my computer to burst into flames, I haven’t done this yet.

Or maybe a zombified version of the characters would start to crawl out of the screen at me, The Ring-style.

If you haven’t seen or read any details on Steven Knight’s bizarre follow-up to Locke, you should. The story is wackadoodle, and so are the performances.

Not just strength, but complexity

I didn't notice until after I'd written my Captain Marvel post yesterday that there was a reason the
movie was released (in the U.S. anyway) on Friday, March 8th -- it's International Women's Day. (Still is, I guess, though I'm writing this on Saturday morning in Australia.)

The movie features what we traditionally think of as a "strong female character." But then again, so does almost every other movie released nowadays.

But iTunes is doing something today that gets at what we really went from the representation of female characters in movies, and what my colleague at ReelGood, John Roebuck, is always saying we should be looking for: complexity, not strength.

Any boob (we're talking men here) can write a female character who can lift cars and roundhouse kick three minions at the same time, who shows unwavering resolve and never a hint of fear in any situation.

But that, in its way, is as simplistic a representation of female characters as the ones where they need a man to save them.

I like how iTunes has recognized the quest for true equality in on-screen representation by highlighting the complexity of the female characters in the recent releases it's trying to get you to rent or buy.

The banners running across the site today are not even touting these characters' status as female, which I think is pretty shrewd, especially since we will obviously get that from seeing who they've selected. The banner I'm interested in is just calling them "Complex Characters," and features the likes of:

Joan Castleman, played by Glenn Close in The Wife
Kayla Day, played by Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade
Marlo, played by Charlize Theron in Tully
Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Janet Armstrong, played by Claire Foy in First Man
Lisa, played by Regina Hall in Support the Girls
Ellie Wagner and Lizzy Viara, played by Rose Byrne and Isabela Moner in Instant Family

Now I haven't seen The Wife and Instant Family, but I have to assume these were all curated because they were good, well-written characters, not just traditionally strong ones.

I don't think even your most extreme feminists, the types you'd lampoon if you were being cruel, want every female character to be punching out men left and right. They just want what has never been a problem when writing male characters: characters who may be flawed, but have strengths that balance their flaws, and an underlying competency and self-sufficiency that speaks well of their gender.

Now, before getting carried away with praising how nuanced iTunes is being in its progressiveness, I should note that this is not the only banner that appears on the site. There's also one called "Fearless Figures," which is a bit closer to the way Hollywood has reacted to its gender-related criticisms by creating one-dimensional superheroes. Then again, I cannot argue with the way some of these people approach actual superhero status. This list includes:

Elastigirl, played by Holly Hunter in Incredibles 2
Marie Colvin, played by Rosamund Pike in A Private War
Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg in The Hate U Give
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, played by herself in RBG
Colette, played by Kiera Knightley in Colette
Tish, played by Kiki Layne in If Beale Street Could Talk
Marina Vidal, played by Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman
Domino, played by Zazie Beetz in Deadpool 2

That's meant to underscore courage more than physical strength, though obviously there's plenty of physical strength to go around in these choices, considering that two of them come from actual superhero movies.

Then the final banner -- the one that's actually running along the very top -- is yet one step further toward typical reactionism. (Is that a word? You get what I mean.) It's called "Powerful Female Characters," and well, I guess the subtlety I gave them credit for is now kind of out the window. But this is an interesting list as well:

Atlanna & Mera, played by Nicole Kidman and Amber Heard in Aquaman
Queen Anne, Lady Sarah and Abigail, played by Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone in The Favourite
Gwen Stacey, played by Hailee Steinfeld in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Ally, played by Lady Gaga in A Star is Born
Rachel Chu and Eleanor Young, played by Constance Wu and Michelle Yeoh in Crazy Rich Asians
Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth I, played by Saiorse Ronan and Margot Robbie in Mary Queen of Scots
Vanellope, played by Sarah Silverman in Ralph Breaks the Internet
Hatsue Shibata, played by Kirin Kiki in Shoplifters
Holly Burns, played by Julia Roberts in Ben is Back

And finishing with a link to pre-order Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in Captain Marvel.

I might argue that some of these belong under other banners, but okay.

My takeaway from all this?

That there are 24 different movies hitting video at about the same time in which iTunes could isolate their female characters, with their various strengths and complexities, for praise, without serious concerns of someone scoffing at the way they've been hoodwinked into thinking a performance seems more progressive than it actually is.

It's heartening. Collectively, we are doing better at this.

And it should only keep getting better.

Thor: Ragna-broke

I thought I was going to blog every day in Indonesia. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case. You don't really want to blog every day on your vacation, do you?

There's been some stuff to blog about, though.

I could have told you about watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi for a second time on the plane, and liking it much better this time. That probably deserves more consideration at some point.

I could have told you about deciding not to go see a movie while I'm here. I could have told you about checking the local listings and seeing that A Quiet Place and Rampage both seemed to be some of the only movies playing in the two accessible locations, and deciding that A Quiet Place would be dub-proof, if it were dubbed rather than subtitled, because almost the whole movie is silent (or so I'm told), though it probably wouldn't have been as most people speak English here anyway (tourism). I could have then told you about learning that the theater was not actually very accessible, requiring either a 30-minute drive or a 90-minute walk, and being easily dissuaded out of doing it by my wife, which I agreed was the best course of action.

I could have told you about my movie-per-day pace nonetheless, and the movies I watched for the first time (Game Over, Man!, Murder on the Orient Express, I, Tonya and Colonia) or the movies I revisited (Grimsby and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets).

Instead I'll tell you about the movie we have not watched, despite considerable efforts to do so.

But first I need to give you some background.

I've been up to some shenanigans with my iTunes. It isn't something I've wanted to do. I've been happy being a loyal customer of the American iTunes store with the American account I've had for years. It gets new releases faster, much faster, and the rentals are generally less expensive (though the exchange rate is not 1-to-1).

But in the past six months I've received not one, but two iTunes gift cards, purchased in Australia and valid only in the Australian iTunes store. When I first got one of these years ago, sent by Australian relatives when I did not yet live in Australian, Apple had a different policy toward them. With some effort, I was able to convert them to be valid in American iTunes. Well, no more. They've decided to become isolationist. No more international cooperation between various branches of the same company.

So I reluctantly, with great angst and concern, connected to the iTunes store with an email address my wife uses in the Australian store. I was worried that I'd flag myself with Apple as someone who was trying to circumvent their rules, and it might do anything from disabling one of my accounts to deleting my whole iTunes library, music and all. But I had $80 to spend at the Australian iTunes store, and dammit, I wanted to spend it.

At first there were no issues. I could go back and forth between the two stores just fine. All I had to do was log in with a different email address. It would tell me that this account was only valid in a particular country's iTunes store, and it would just switch me to that store. No deleting of iTunes libraries to be seen. I purchased songs and rented movies with no apparent consequences. All seemed right.

But as I was loading up on rentals for this trip, something broke.

I'd rented Mom and Dad (which I actually ended up watching before the trip), I, Tonya and Murder on the Orient Express from the American store, because none of them was yet available for rent in Australia. Thor: Ragnarok was available, so I decided to deplete some of my gift card balance rather than shelling out more U.S. dollars on it. That's when the trouble began.

It processed the rental fine, reducing my balance by the $5.99 rental fee, but then it told me that this computer was already registered to a different iTunes account, and that if I wanted to switch authorizations, I could not switch back for 90 days. This froze me dead in my tracks.

Suddenly the movies I'd rented seemed vulnerable to deletion, and who knew what else. I also had a 99 cent rental of The Florida Project from the U.S. store, not particularly for the trip, but just because the movie was in my top ten of last year, I wanted to see it again, and it's only 99 cents for one week, so I had to act.

The poster for Thor never filled in on my rented movies on iTunes, leaving just a blank square with the title underneath, but I decided I'd deal with that later. We'd go on the trip, watch the other movies first, and then I would commit myself to 90 days exclusively in the Australian store. During which I would eat up all my remaining balance and not worry about that account again. If they needed to delete the movies I'd rented from the U.S., that wouldn't matter because we'd have already watched them.

But then funny things started to happen.

I watched Mom and Dad fine, but noticed some curious behavior with it. When I paused and tried to play again, it crashed iTunes. In fact, I had to restart my whole computer on that one, which is no short commitment as my computer seems to labor on startup, running through a variety of startup tasks. I could probably disable them -- I'm an IT professional, after all -- but with my own devices, sometimes I act more like a user than an IT guy.

I finished that movie without any more pauses, but then noticed another funny thing. The clock never started ticking. It told me that I'd have 48 hours to watch it once I started watching it, but when I finished, I noticed that it still said I had 27 days remaining to watch it, or whatever the actual day count was at the time.

This wasn't bothersome, of course, as it was only a benefit to me. I liked the movie enough that I might actually watch it again before the month was up, if I had such an easy opportunity to do so. We might even watch it on the trip. It did mean that I might have to actively delete it if I were running out of space -- I'm operating within a few gigs of my total allotment at any given time -- but that was a minor issue.

But it did concern me as an indication of something being wrong. And that continued in Indonesia.

Pauses during Orient Express and Tonya both also required restarting iTunes, though not restarting the computer at least. And when it was time to finally watch Thor, which was to have happened on Saturday night, and which was by far the movie my wife was most interested in, it wasn't possible to do so.

iTunes showed it was downloading Thor, but it said only that it was downloading it, not an estimated time remaining or a total bytes downloaded.

Well, downloading isn't the only option for viewing content on iTunes these days. You can also stream it. And when I was logged into the Australian account, it did show a poster for Thor. Concerning, however, was that it also showed the blank poster. So there were two Thors appearing in my rented movies, both at various stages of availability.

And neither of them actually available. When I clicked the play button on one to stream it, it showed only a black screen, one that never progressed forward. I could see the total time bar at the bottom, with 0:00 to 2:10 on either side, but it wouldn't move from 0:00 to 0:01 and onward. No errors, just not moving.

When I clicked the other one, without a poster, it showed only a time bar at the top of iTunes, like it was one very long song. Which also would not start.

I fidgeted with it for an hour, switching stores and trying whatever I could think of. If I at least got that message advising to switch stores for 90 days, that would be something. But that would not come. I thought about downloading it again from the American store, which would give me three Thors, and also about contacting customer support. But I decided either approach would draw undue attention to my situation, which might only make it worse.

So I watched Colonia that night and my wife watched a couple episodes of Jessica Jones.

It's too bad because Thor would have made the perfect "vacation movie." We tried to scratch that itch with Valerian, and it was partially scratched, as my wife commented that it made for a good "vacation movie." At the end, though, she also commented that she'd "liked parts of it," which is a fair assessment of Valerian.

Who knows what I have to look forward to in terms of future iTunes shenanigans. My next attempt to purchase something will give me some indication.

I don't think Apple wants to freeze me out as a customer. If I do need to contact customer support, I'll just plead ignorance and they'll help me right the ship. Their customer support has always been great in the past.

I just wish they'd drop all these restrictions on what can be used where, and by whom. The thing all the stores have in common is that they are getting my hard-earned dollar, or at least the hard-earned dollar of one of my relatives. That should be all that matters to them.