Too much good stuff

Or, "The Breakdown of my Personal Star Rating System."

If I look at my month of July so far on Letterboxd, it is nearly collapsing from the weight of all the stars.

I've seen seven movies in the young month, and only two of them have received a rating of lower than 4 stars (out of 5). In fact, the number that have received 4.5 stars, which was once reserved for movies that reached my personal cinematic stratosphere, exceeds the number that received 3 or 3.5 stars (three to two). And the one I gave 3.5 stars -- in other words, the second-worst of the month -- is one I'm still thinking about three days after I saw it.

This is good. It means I'm spending my time on good movies.

But this is also bad. It means I'm losing my grasp on which movies get which star ratings.

Take Mistaken for Strangers, a very good documentary that I saw last night. Is it a great documentary? It might be. But I'm not sure about that. I have to think about it a bit longer.

I gave it 4.5 stars, not necessarily as a sign of its absolute quality, but to differentiate it from the heap of movies I've been giving 4 stars.

And this is where my true crisis lies: the loss of my understanding of what makes a 4-star movie.

Let's go back a few months.

When I came out of Nebraska and gave it a 4-star rating on Letterboxd, a friend of mine wondered what my problem was with it. "Problem?" I thought. "I gave the movie 4 stars!"

The same has happened with a couple other movies, with the same friend (I'm not picking on him, it's just that I talk movies with him a lot), to the point that I started to think of 4 stars as some sort of "insult" to a great movie. The rating I used to give to a movie that did a lot right, but not everything, was 3.5 stars. Three-point-five indicated that I thought a movie did quite a good job, but it wasn't a personal favorite.

So -- are you sitting? -- when I finally saw 12 Years a Slave a few weeks ago, and was underwhelmed by it relative to what I was expecting, I felt the only "responsible" star rating to give it was 4 stars. Three-point-five would be like some sort of slap in its face. So even though my primary instinct after seeing 12 Years was to pick at the things I thought it could have done better, there I was giving it a ranking of 4 stars on Letterboxd.

And if I gave this movie that I found somewhat problematic 4 stars, then how could I give the same rating to Mistaken for Strangers, which I may have loved?

Four stars is a tricky rating. On its own it looks quite impressive, all those stars lining up together in support of a movie. But it's still two notches below the maximum. It still means there's something wrong with the movie, flaws you can clearly pick out -- or maybe just that it wasn't in your wheelhouse, so it had a maximum potential enjoyment factor just based on its subject matter.

I don't mind being the type of cinematic optimist that's implied by giving out so many high ratings. I mean, clearly I love movies, so I would rather enjoy watching them and shower them with praise than to spend all my time grumbling about how they could have been better. I'm comfortable with the fact that on Letterboxd, I've given 174 films the highest possible rating (5 stars) and only 20 the lowest possible (1/2 star).

But I don't want one of my most reliable ratings -- 3.5 stars -- to become too weak for me to employ it without worrying that it means I don't really care for the film. Four stars is really creeping up on 3.5, with 653 movies that now hold a 4-star rating on Letterboxd and only 804 ranked 3.5. You'd think that 3 stars should be the highest represented, because that's the midway point between the lowest and the highest rating. But it's only second at 730.

And if damage has been done to the 3.5-star rating, just think how much damage has been done to 3. Three stars means I barely liked it. Some people use 2.5 to indicate that, but I use 3. If I give that out less and less, then what kind of terrible sins does a movie have to commit in order to get 2.5 and lower? There are a whole five star ratings down there that need to get their share of the love.

I do have to consider the possibility that 2014 has just been a really good year for movies. I've seen 18 films this year, and only one of those have I disliked -- and even then only mildly (2.5 stars). Only seven of those 18 films (including the 2.5-star Veronica Mars) have been given a rating under 4 stars, in part because I used the above logic to inflate the 3.5-star Lego Movie to 4. To counterbalance that, though, I'm wondering if I might have given 4 stars to both Frank and Blue Ruin, if at the time I ranked them I didn't already feel I'd been giving out 4 stars too much.

See? I don't know what anything is anymore.

And at this point, I feel almost desperate to see something that is just unambiguously god-awful.

This whole discussion just lends further weight to my appreciation of the Flickchart model, which duels movies against each other to create a customized list of favorite to least favorite. The Flickchart guys have identified the weaknesses in star ratings, and their mission statement can be summarized in this slogan that appears atop the site: "If they're all 5-star movies, which is the best?"

If I keep going in the direction I've been going, pretty much all the movies I see will be 5-star movies.

A nice problem for a cinephile to have, I guess.

Review: Nebraska

 
As part of my so-called "Movie Diet" (see here for a fuller explanation), I have vowed to review all new films I see between now and April 27th.

For the past several weeks, I have been obsessively scanning the ground for money.

Not loose change, though I've actually found some of that. No, actual dollar bills. Or, I should say, $5 and up, because Australia no longer has any bills that are under $5.

I've had success finding money before -- for example, I've found two different $50 bills in my life. Never when I was actively looking for them, of course, but over the years, I have indeed found between $200 and $300 cash just lying on the ground. It's more than most people have found, I'd venture.

Looking for money started as kind of a joke, an ironic commentary on my inability to find work here in Australia. The only way I would be able to bring in money for my family, the joke went, was if I literally found it lying on the ground.

But then it became kind of an obsession, and now, everywhere I walk, I visually scour the underbrush for the right shades of pink, red, blue, yellow and green that would indicate Australian paper currency. I wouldn't be surprised if there was something of the crazy old man about me.

And so I felt a kinship toward the main character in Alexander Payne's Nebraska, a black-and-white-and-bleak look at disappointed rural Americans and their quest for the cure-all of an illusory fiscal treasure. I've got 30 years to go before I'm really in his shoes, but my current inability to find a job -- after only seven weeks of looking, I should point out -- has already gotten me melodramatically wondering about the ultimate financial output of my so-called "career."

So yeah, I guess you could say I was in the perfect state of mind to be meeting Woody Grant.

Grant (Bruce Dern) is a scraggly old SOB who lives in Billings, Montana with his irascible wife Kate (June Squibb) and within shouting distance of his two hangdog sons (Will Forte and Bob Odenkirk). It's a much bigger distance than shouting he wants to cover when he sets off for Lincoln, Nebraska one morning -- on foot, since he's no longer allowed to drive, and doesn't have a functioning vehicle even if he could. A state trooper scoops him up in the breakdown lane on the interstate, at which point his son David (Forte) learns that Woody aims to claim a million dollar prize promised to him by a company trying to sell magazine subscriptions.

Despite everyone in Woody's immediate family trying to explain that the million dollars does not exist, Woody persists in the idea that this is his ticket to buying a few meager items he's currently lacking: a new pickup truck (which he wouldn't be eligible to drive anyway) and an air compressor to replace the one his friend Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) "borrowed" from him back in the early 1970s. When Woody makes several more attempts to limp his way to Nebraska, David decides that humoring him is the best way to put the subject to rest once and for all. What harm could be done by a couple days of an old codger's fantasy, followed by the definitive repudiation of that fantasy?

Here's the harm: By indulging his father, David inadvertently lends credence to the notion that his father may actually be a rich man -- and it isn't long before all manner of family members and other tenuous acquaintances want a piece of Woody's non-existent pie.

Payne has never been known for cooking up exercises in sentiment, and in fact, he's been accused of displaying a certain contempt for his characters over the years. Similar charges have dogged the Coen brothers, among others. But Payne gets the characterization of Woody just right. He's such a stubborn coot, with such little regard for the people he supposedly loves, that it's darn near impossible to feel any sympathy for him. Nor does Payne make him the fool. Sure, Woody is foolish, but he's also possibly struggling with the beginning stages of Alzheimer's. In any case, he's neither to be pitied nor to be indicted for his behavior. He's just an old man trying to find some solace in a life that he didn't really live to its fullest. It isn't necessary for him to have a moment of enlightenment or change ... which doesn't mean Payne may not have some version of that in store for him.

The sadder character may be Forte's David, whose life isn't going a lot better than his dad's despite being a demonstrably kinder, better person. When David tells his father he can't just up and drive him to Nebraska, Woody shoots back, tellingly, "Why? What you got going on?" The answer, they both realize, is not a lot.

Payne is as sharp as ever with his observations of human foibles and frailties, yet also finds easy laughs in among his low-key pain. It's this small percentage of showing us the other side of the story that makes Nebraska an exercise in humanism rather than misanthropy. Take the Oscar-nominated Squibb as Woody's wife. She's so cantankerous -- aggressively so, to Woody's passive embodiment of that trait -- that it really seems she exists solely as one-dimensional comic relief. Until she gets not one, but two scenes that demonstrate just how hard she fights for those who apparently exasperate her. You can't just write Kate off as a shrew. She's a shrew with a heart of gold.

Phedon Papamichael's black and white photography makes this plain story even plainer, to great effect. Even though it was shot on video in color, the chiaroscuro outcome is that of the old greats. No one will mistake this for a misplaced artistic pretension on Payne's part. The black and white merely heighten the timelessness of regret.

Nebraska does have a few faults. There are some moments of stiff acting and excess exposition near the start, and the concluding ten minutes contain some choices that don't necessarily seem like logical offshoots of the most recent action. Woody gets to have at least one moment that it doesn't seem like he really needs.

If that end choice sticks out, however, it's because it seems to be a concession to conventional storytelling that Payne never otherwise makes. And that's most certainly a compliment.

That's three I won't be ranking this year

I haven't been worrying myself too much about Australia's new release latency. You know, that delay, sometimes lasting as long as three to five months, for some movies to open here. Until now, it hasn't had much practical impact on me, except forcing me to practice something I hate: being patient.

Until -- sob -- now.

Yesterday I discovered the third high-profile autumn release that I won't be seeing before my list closes on January 16th, with many, many more to come. If I'd been poking around more on the late-December release scheduled in the U.S., I'd probably already be aware of a number of other titles that will be denied me.

I was going to see Enough Said -- whose November 14th release date was delayed a modest two months from the U.S. -- when I saw an advertisement for Alexander Payne's new film Nebraska.

Then the release date:

February 20, 2014.

Sigh.

February 20th is more than a month after I close my rankings for 2013, which will be on January 16th this year. That's the morning the Oscar nominations are announced, which is my traditional deadline for finalizing the previous year's rankings.

Other victims of me being in Australia: 12 Years a Slave, which releases on something like January 30th, and Spike Jonze's new movie Her, which doesn't even get its U.S. wide release until mid-January. If I were in L.A., though, I would have been able to find Her open for a week for awards considerations, I'm sure of it.

This is significant, as Spike Jonze's most recent two films -- Where the Wild Things Are and Adaptation -- were my #2 of 2009 and my #1 of 2002. Let's just say I like the guy.

I knew there would be plenty of changes to accept by moving to Australia, many of which would relate to movies. But now that it's coming to brass tacks, I'm finding it very hard to accept that my 2013 film rankings won't be a thorough representation of the films released in the United States in 2013. And it won't get better in 2014, unless industry conditions suddenly take a major turn that causes the collapse of this three-month delay. Not anytime soon, I'm betting.

At least my whole holiday prestige picture season isn't going to be killed. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and August, Osage County are three counterexamples of films that will be released here within a week of their American release.

They'll be competing with Joe Swanberg's Drinking Buddies, which was released in the U.S. on August 23rd. Here? December 26th.

Australia ... it's a mixed bag. One I'm committed to at least until sometime in 2015. 

The challenge, then, is just to not worry about it. If I want to change my list so that it incorporates films released where I am in 2014, I can rank Nebraska or 12 Years a Slave or Her next year. Can't I? Can't I?

I can. Do I want to? No. May I someday want to? Maybe.

I want to do apples to apples comparisons with other friends and critics ranking this same year, and I'm not likely to want to give that up very soon. Maybe if I read some Australian critics I'd feel differently, but so far, I don't.

I still remember, at the end of 1995, talking with a friend's girlfriend about her favorite films of the previous year. She listed Pulp Fiction as her favorite film of that year, because she'd seen it in 1995 after its October 1994 release. I vowed never to subject myself to such imprecise and arbitrary criteria for making year-end lists.

Even the Australians got Pulp Fiction by November 24th of '94. So I guess there's some hope looking forward that more of the movies I want to see will be The Secret Life of Walter Mitty than Nebraska.

For now, though, I mourn Nebraska and its brethren ... who will just increase in number the deeper we get into the end of this year.