Straddling years

I was straddling quite a bit this late December-early January. In this post, I'll let you know about each instance of that -- and also exactly what I mean by "straddling." (Sounds pretty dirty.)

Paddington

I know the storybook Paddington has British origins and is big with British little boys and girls, but it was something that got read in my American household as well. I think there are a lot of other American households of the late 1970s and early 1980s who could say the same.

Yet the release of the Paddington movie is straddling a regrettable line between 2014 and 2015. In the U.K. and Australia, it was released as a holiday family movie, way back on December 11th. In the U.S., though, it won't come out for another two weeks, making it part of the studios' January dumping grounds.

It's unfortunate, because Paddington might have done well during the U.S. Christmas season -- from what I saw of the movie, anyway.

See, Paddington also straddles an unfortunate line between little kid movie and big kid movie. We went to it on December 30th when it was raining in Hobart (Tasmania), scuttling or at least delaying a bunch of our plans. The theater was not set up for the big crowds, apparently, as we barely made it in to the movie on time despite arriving a half-hour early.

My four-year-old sat rapt the entire time, never saying a word and only asking me for an atypically small amount of the Pods (chocolate cookie treat) we had purchased at the concession stand. Then, with no preview whatsoever of his mounting horror, he told me that the movie was too scary and that he wanted to go home. The big finale was already on and the movie would be over in ten more minutes, but he had to go now. And I knew that this is what parents sometimes had to do, so reluctantly, I left a movie before it was over for the first time in as long as I can remember. Is it possible it was the first time ever?

In truth, a pretty charming movie had started to sour on me by that point, and it didn't much matter that I missed the ending because by then it was easy to predict how it would finish. (What movie isn't, you could argue.)

Where it made its biggest mistake -- other than having Nicole Kidman as a murderous taxidermist, that is -- was the false advertising of the poster you see above. Paddington most definitely should have been set at Christmastime, in the snowy London on that poster. In fact, shouldn't every movie set in London be filmed in the winter, making everything look all the more magical? But it's not. In fact, this is how Paddington is being advertised in the U.S.:

What's oddest about this, when juxtaposed with the Australian poster, is that it looks like a summer movie to Americans and a winter movie to Australians. While it is actually summer in Australia and winter in America.

Had they actually set it at Christmas, the studio would have been compelled to release it in December in the U.S., positioning it as a prestige holiday family release and getting the tons of bucks that go along with that. Instead, it's coming out Martin Luther King Day weekend -- the best January release date, to be sure, but still a January release date. Maybe they thought the holiday season competition from Annie and Night at the Museum 3 would just be too stiff.

The real problem for me, with this release date, was that I was unsure whether I should even bother to see it in the theater. Based on interest alone, we'd see it, since we've read the Paddington book to my son upwards of 20 times. It's one of our only stories, in fact, where I've bothered to perfect voices for all the characters. But at a time of the year when I'm packing in viewings for my year-end list, I didn't know if I should properly count it for 2014, since most American critics (with whom I compare and contrast my year-end lists) will be counting it as a 2015 movie.

The decision was taken out of my hands, however, when my wife and mother-in-law worked up a momentum to have me take my son to the movie when the rains started falling. Big Hero 6 was also an available option, but before I knew it a showtime had been identified and a plan was in place. Maybe he would have actually sat through the entirety of that one.

The Trip to Italy

I engaged in a different kind of straddling on New Year's Eve. My wife had made it clear, earlier in the day, that she did not expect to still be up at midnight. This was certainly a first in our ten years of knowing each other ... but it was also the first New Year's we've had two children. (In fact, last New Year's Eve we spent in the hospital, ready to give birth to the second just hours later. Happy birthday, D!)

Having two children has taken its toll on my wife, and since we were out of town and none of our friends were around anyway, she saw it as just another opportunity to catch up on sleep. I'm glad to say that she did awaken for the midnight fireworks, having still been awake for the 9:30 edition, and we watched those together from my mother-in-law's porch, overlooking the harbor. It was pretty magnificent.

So if this were going to be just another night for her, I decided to make it just another night for me -- and queued up a movie on Netflix.

I didn't figure to finish The Trip to Italy before the clock struck midnight, but by starting it around 10:15, I would make it pretty close. Alas, two beers at dinner did their work on me, and I engaged in a nap of maybe 30-40 minutes when the movie was about 20 minutes old. Awakening at around 11:15, I knew that there was no chance I would finish the movie in 2014.

As my New Year's Eve plans have always been more lively than this, I had never previously faced a situation where I didn't know whether to credit a viewing for one year or another. That kind of thing doesn't matter in the slightest to your average person, but to listmakers and their ilk, it can take on greater significance. I keep track of the total number of movies I see each month and each year, and just for the purposes of record keeping, I needed to know whether to file Michael Winterbottom's film under 2014 or 2015.

I normally have a fairly straightforward system for determining on which day I've seen a movie. If I start it before midnight but finish it after, the movie will be credited to whichever day I watched more of the movie. If it's too close to tell, I give preference to the first day. The one clear exception to this is that if I start a movie one day, but then don't finish it until another day and have watched another complete movie in the interim, the movie is always credited to the day I finished it -- even if there are just five minutes remaining. It's not a perfect system but it's the one I'm comfortable with.

Because of checking Facebook and preparing for the countdown to midnight, to the extent that I did so (I watched the seconds tick off for the final minute), I ended up watching less than half of The Trip to Italy before midnight. Yet I wanted very definitely for it to become my 212th new movie of 2014, rather than my first new movie of 2015, because a) it would break the tie with 2005, which also featured 211 new movies, and b) it would tend to deemphasize the fact that, yes indeed, I spent my New Year's Eve watching a movie and doing little else.

But I ended up having more than an hour of the 108-minute movie remaining, and I ultimately had to acknowledge that I'd need to settle for 211 movies in 2014 and get myself going on 2015.

And this is now far, far more than you ever cared to know about how my mind works.

3D hits January

There may be no greater sign of both the ubiquity of 3D, and the improving profile of January as a release month, than that there is now a high-profile 3D movie being released in January.

The Green Hornet is not the first movie in the recent 3D craze to be released in January. That honor goes to the execrable My Bloody Valentine 3D, which was released on January 16, 2009. But that film doesn't really exemplify the "new 3D" -- it's more of a throwback to the old days, when schlocky horror movies, such as Friday the 13th Part 3 and Jaws 3, were the most likely home for 3D.

The "new 3D" is superhero movies with big stars. Such as The Green Hornet. (Incidentally, I find it funny that the film's biggest star -- or at least best-known name -- is Cameron Diaz, and she's barely seen in the ads.)

In the past, a movie like The Green Hornet would have come out sometime between April and August, maybe not quite blockbuster enough to hold down a key summer release date, but certainly enough to come out during summer's early or late fringes. Nowadays, the calendar has gotten so packed, the studios have gotten so savvy about how to capture the available dollars, and 3D has become so prevalent, that this 3D superhero movie hits theaters on the second available release date of the new year.

The rehabilitation of the month of January may have truly begun in 2008, when, to my surprise, one of the most buzzed about films of the previous six months was released on January 18th. Yep, that's when Cloverfield dropped, and a week later, with a lot less fanfare but plenty of name recognition, came Rambo. The year 2009 reverted more or less to the status quo, with the third Underworld movie not really having the same sizzle as a Cloverfield. But that January produced two really big hits, Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken, reminding studio execs why January is not a month just to be sloughed off.

You really saw the difference in 2010, when three rather large-scale post apocalyptic effects movies were released on consecutive Fridays: Daybreakers, The Book of Eli and Legion. (For a longer discussion of that, see here.) None of them fared particularly well.

But The Green Hornet seems like a different kind of step forward. Not only is it 3D, but it's a superhero movie. And not even a superhero movie like Kick-Ass, which had little previous name recognition. No, most of us had at least heard of The Green Hornet, if only because we'd confused it with The Green Lantern. Just wait for that character's upcoming 3D incarnation this summer, arriving on a more traditional release date for such a film: June 17th.

I don't have a lot more to say about The Green Hornet, except that my initial disinterest has now evolved into moderate anticipation. I'm not likely to see it for a couple weeks, since I'm still focused on catching a couple more 2010 films in the theater before they leave. But I'm a lot likelier to prioritize a theatrical screening than I was a few months ago. Of course, the reviews could certainly dampen my enthusiasm if they're negative.

One thing I do want to comment on is this poster I chose above. It's pretty abstract, but with a clear view of it you can certainly tell what's going on.

A clear view of this image is not what's provided on the south face of a building on the 405 freeway, which I see as I'm driving north on my way home from work. (I thought I had a picture of it, but I see that the picture I tried to take on my phone was obstructed by one of those structures that holds the signs out over the highway). For a month now, I've been trying to puzzle out what the image was -- it just looked like a bunch of murky shapes, especially since the exterior of the building has an uneven surface, with raised edges running vertically down the side, which only serve to further obscure and distort the image. In fact, you would scarcely know it was even a Green Hornet poster if the east face of the same building didn't have the clearer ad featuring their car busting through a wall.

Maybe they chose that wall with the ridges because of its third dimension.

A verdict on the January apocalypse movies

Three movies were released on consecutive Fridays last January that had a couple things in common: 1) they all dealt in some way with an apocalypse, either imminent or in the distant past; 2) none of them seemed like a movie that would usually be released in January, the month when the schlockiest films on the calendar are typically unleashed on the world.

And so it was that I came to consider Daybreakers (January 8th), The Book of Eli (January 15th) and Legion (January 22nd) to be an informal triumvirate of end-of-the-world movies with ass-end-of-the-schedule release dates. (It's technically the beginning of the schedule, but it's the ass end in terms of desirability).

As of Thursday night, I have now seen all three.

I wrote about two of them -- Daybreakers and Legion -- before I ever saw them, so I thought it was definitely time to double back and reconsider them after a viewing of them and their brother Eli.

And even though this will be a very brief set of rankings, why not rank them?

1) Daybreakers (2010, Peter and Michael Spierig). Not only is this the best finished film of the three, but it has the best high-concept conceit also. I can't believe no one had previously made a film that followed the logical progression of infection that is always the threat in zombie movies -- if a vampire epidemic took over, eventually the whole world would become vampires. The nice advantage a vampire has over a zombie is that it can be intelligent, refined and seductive, and so the world presented in Daybreakers is a lot like ours -- only your average citizens rely on blood rather than food for sustenance, and their eyes have a yellow tinge to them. (Plus that whole "avoiding sunlight" thing.) But what happens when humans are hunted to extinction, and none of their blood remains?

It's a delicious idea, and the Spierig brothers -- whose Undead I now want to see -- realize it to perfection. The details of their vampiric world are exquisite, and the story arcs they've chosen to follow are satisfying and in some cases tragic. To say that the concept is executed perfectly is not the same thing as saying it's a perfect movie. There may be some questionable choices in the third act, and it's possible it drags a little bit in the middle. However, I enjoyed all the performances (especially Sam Neill's) and I thought it was a wonderful creation of a specific world. To give an indication of how much I enjoyed it, I did a thing that's rare for me -- I watched an entire "making of" bonus feature on the DVD that was nearly as long as the film. This showed the Australian directors' ingenuity in making the most of relatively modest resources, and I got a lot of out of it.

Glad to see the Spierigs recognized for this film (and Undead), even if it was not a huge box office champ and is only thought of middlingly by most critics -- they're directing the next Dark Crystal movie and a remake of Captain Blood.

2) The Book of Eli (2010, Allen and Albert Hughes). Didn't recognize until now another thing two of these movies have in common -- they're directed by a pair of brothers. The Hughes brothers have been around a lot longer, but I was shocked to see that it had been nine years since their last feature, From Hell. But I knew that if they brought some of that film's outside-the-box quality to this one, it would at the very least be an interesting watch with some good technique.

I actually felt slightly more strongly about The Book of Eli than that, even though it too was pretty much dismissed by critics. In fact, its critical dismissal led us to have it out from Netflix for a good three weeks before it finally got watched, and it only finally got watched because my wife decided she didn't need to see it and I should just watch it by myself. The Hughes brothers' apocalypse is farthest in the past -- in fact, the film takes place in the desolate wastelands of America, 30 years after an apocalyptic war that left only Mad Max-style marauders roaming the countryside. The filter they use gives everything a gray, washed-out look that is also crisp enough to jump off the screen, if that's not a contradiction in terms. I knew Denzel Washington played a loner on some kind of mission, though I didn't know what it was -- it turns out he's trying to deliver the only known bible in existence into safe hands, even though most people don't believe there's actually still an enclave of higher learning that exists out there, trying to rebuild the human race.

I thought the fight scenes were pretty good -- shot in silhouette with a minimum of frenetic cuts -- and as with Daybreakers, I enjoyed the little details of the world they created. The film actually reminded me of Children of Men in a couple of thematic ways, even though Alfonso Cuaron's masterpiece is leagues better than this film. But this film ain't half bad, and I saw those outside-the-box decisions that made From Hell so interesting in terms of camera setups, etc. There was one scene that stuck out in particular in this regard, in which the "camera" (I assume it was done digitally) follows bullets back out through the holes they left in a wall, out to the gatling gun that's firing the rounds about 50 feet away, and then swinging back around to look at the house that's rapidly becoming Swiss cheese. Good stuff. There's something of a "twist" at the end that some viewers may find hard to swallow, but it worked well enough for me, especially as a thematic extension of the purpose of Eli's mission.

3) Legion (2010, Scott Stewart). Legion is ranked third in these rankings, but that's only because there aren't more movies to rank. If there were seven pre- or post-apocalyptic films released this January, Legion would probably rank seventh on that list. It's that bad.

And since I already gave some ink to how bad I thought it was here, I'll give it less ink now. Simply put, this is one of those movies where the only interesting images are the ones they put front and center in the trailers, and literally everything else is a boring talking scene that slows the pacing to downright turgid. I thought the idea was somewhat interesting -- an extermination of the human race conducted by angels, repurposed into killing machines by God after he becomes displeased with humanity (think Noah's Ark). But it was handled in the most stupid and haphazard way possible, with humans inexplicably turned into demonic zombies and descending on what may or may not be our last outpost of human survivors, holed up in a diner/gas station in the middle of nowhere. The reason this is the place everyone's interested in is because some thoroughly unlikable waitress in the diner is carrying humanity's savior in her stomach. Why this baby is the key to everything is never revealed. My thinking is that this movie was a collection of what they thought would be interested set pieces -- a grandmother going crazy, biting people and climbing on the ceiling of the diner -- fashioned into some kind of undercooked story. In fact, the story is so undercooked that it would give you salmonella if you tried to take a bite out of it.

What really interests me about these three films is that in many years, they would be positioned for a summer release, either because they have big stars (Denzel Washington), big ideas (all three) and big special effects (all three to varying degrees). Or if not summer, at least in March sometime, when the studios are trying to whet your appetite for the upcoming summer season. The fact that they came in January, which is usually considered to be the dumping grounds for misfires, indicates how the old release rules just don't apply as much as they once did. Even if they thought these movies would be tough sells, or that they did not turn out quite as originally envisioned, they're each juicy enough to potentially earn someone's summer moviegoing dollars. And even though I haven't seen many of the potential tentpole movies that were released this summer, such as The A-Team or Prince of Persia, I have to think that Daybreakers and Eli are better than they are. Maybe it just goes to show: Just as the TV networks are no longer content to take a season off, neither are the studios, and a movie ticket costs the same whether you buy it in January or June. If you can lead a weekend in January when there's no other competition, it's a lot better than trying to fight off June's high-profile releases.

Well, now that I know that two-thirds of the apocalypse movies dumped in January 2010 were pretty good, it gives me some hope for January 2011, when the next film from Michel Gondry (The Green Hornet) is being "dumped" on January 14th. Then again, if the last film from Michel Gondry (Be Kind Rewind) is any indication, maybe that's where The Green Hornet will truly belong.

Best first?

The first release date of the calendar year has a special stigma attached to it. Films released on that date are the ones for which the studios have the lowest expectations. It's the earliest release date that doesn't qualify for the previous year's Oscars, and those movies are also expected to lose viewers to the ones that were specifically released with Oscar in mind. In that way, they're kind of like the ultimate anti-Oscar movies.

Well, I'm not saying Daybreakers is going to be nominated for any Oscars, much less win one. But I am saying it may be the first film released on the first Friday that I will actually see in the theater. (Last Friday doesn't count -- although it was the first Friday of 2010, it was also January 1st, and I'm not sure if there's ever been a film released on New Year's Day.)

Yep, I'm currently making plans to go with a friend, possibly one of the weeknights next week. And this is especially tough for a person like me, who tries to focus all his January viewing efforts on movies from the previous year, in time to close off his year-end list on Oscar nomination morning (February 2nd). My viewing time is even more limited this January, as I'm also trying to re-watch some favorites from the last decade in order to compile a definitive "best of the decade" list by the same deadline.

Daybreakers' prospective feat is more unusual in the fact that the entire month of January, let alone the first week, is usually a cinematic wasteland, at least in terms of my own interest in getting out to the theater for a newly released film. It's often not until February, in fact, that I see something released in the new calendar year. There was the famous exception of Cloverfield a couple years ago, which I believe I actually saw twice before the calendar switched to February. (That was kind of a fluke -- the same friend with whom I may see Daybreakers wanted to see a movie, and I told him I'd go to Cloverfield again even though it was only five days after I'd seen it the first time.) But Cloverfield wasn't released until January 18th, or the third Friday of the year.

So what is it about Daybreakers?

You've seen the trailers. You know that this seems like -- are you seated? -- an original idea for a vampire movie. You also know it stars Ethan Hawke, who has been heretofore quite selective in his film roles. Whether or not that translates to hope for you is another question. It does for me.

Like Zombieland last year, Daybreakers imagines a world where almost everybody on the planet is a monster -- there zombies, here vampires. (And for a discussion about the essential similarity between those two kinds of creatures, check here.) Unlike Zombieland, this is not a comedy, and the vampires are smart. Vampirism is simply the rule of the day -- almost everyone sucks blood, a logical end result of this kind of communicable disease, and because it's the norm, the blood supply is running dangerously low. The solution? To farm the remaining humans for their blood (see the above Matrix-inspired poster), while simultaneously trying to develop a sustainable form of synthetic blood. Go without blood for too long, and you turn into ... well, a worse kind of vampire.

There is a good possibility that this movie could suck. After all, January was also the month in which at least the last two Underworld movies came out. And though I did not see those two Underworld movies, in the first movie I saw enough blue and black hues, and enough gothic undead throwing enough doors open, for three movies. What's more, the fact that it is being released on January 8th demonstrates that Lionsgate doesn't have very much confidence in it. There's gotta be a fatal flaw, right?

Well, I may just get the chance to find out myself next week. And that alone is a significant accomplishment for Daybreakers.