The My Dearest franchise is not something you need to be aware of

This is a snapshot from the Wikipedia page devoted to Netflix original films. 

If you saw a little more of the snapshot, you'd see that the first is Spanish and the second is Thai. So, no relation.

I do think it's funny that Netflix should have randomly acquired, and decided to release, two such similarly titled films in such close succession. It does, however, appear just to be random.

But I wouldn't put it past Netflix to imply a relationship, maybe even a recommendation. "If you liked My Dearest Senorita, you're sure to like My Dearest Assassin."

Maybe I'll watch both of them just to find out.

Watching old Netflix films

What exactly is an old Netflix film?

It's a Netflix original that you somehow missed at the time it was released, but you end up watching at a later date. 

I say "somehow" because I have pretty complete coverage of the Netflix original films I ever wanted to see. 

Watching one belatedly almost never happens, but it happened when I watched the 2017 film The Ritual on Wednesday night.

Why does this almost never happen? I should clarify, it almost never happens to me, but it could happen to others. Still, I don't think it happens much to them either.

Netflix movies, more so than most movies that debut on streamers, seem to exist for the exact two-week period after they were released. Sure, they will remain on Netflix likely forever, but watching them ten years after their release seems anachronistic. They were meant to be one-and-done in that first fortnight. After that, they're no longer promoted, and if you didn't catch the exact name when they were being promoted, good luck to you in trying to find them again. 

This may not be uniquely the case for Netflix as opposed to the other streamers, but since Netflix was the first streamer to release a notable quantity of content branded with its name, it kind of created the template for this. 

Why did I miss The Ritual in 2017? I shouldn't have. It's a genre film with plenty of apparent genre goodies. It stars Rafe Spall, an actor I have always liked. And if I needed further incentive, it's only 94 minutes long, the perfect length not to think twice about it and just press play.

I guess I'd have to say it was early enough in the Netflix original films era that maybe I didn't have the same sort of coverage I have today, when I'm running a review website and often reviewing a lot of Netflix movies in that capacity. I didn't get that responsibility until early 2020, in fact just a few weeks before the start of the pandemic. 

Still, even back then you'd think I would have been scouring the streamer for movies to add to my annual rankings. But I guess I'm not appreciating how long ago this really was, and how little I'd established standard practices when it comes to things like this. 

But then I looked in the Wikipedia pages devoted to Netflix original films, which I use surprisingly often. I'm mostly on the page for the current year, because I want to see if there's anything out now, or coming out soon, that I can review. But sometimes I go into the old ones too.

And I couldn't find it.

It appears the movie is not a "Netflix original" the way some other films are. It premiered at TIFF in 2017, where its international rights were purchased by Netflix. I guess because it was released theatrically in England by a company called eOne Films, it didn't qualify -- at that time -- as a "Netflix original." Since then, I think they've relaxed that stance, and take "ownership" over whatever they see fit to claim as their own. 

I'm not sure how useful this post was, and maybe if I had realized earlier that The Ritual wasn't on the Wikipedia pages of Netflix original films, it might have skewered the premise of the post before I even started writing.

Also, the very idea that The Ritual has a short shelf life is sort of belied by the fact that I hadn't heard of it before I went on Netflix to browse Wednesday night, but it was placed before my eyes during a fairly shallow browsing session. If it weren't being promoted at all, well, I just never would have found it. 

But then it also makes me wonder: Why did it pop now? Why do I never remember seeing it any time previously in the more than eight years since it appeared on Netflix in early 2018? 

So it's an old Netflix film for sure, whatever path it took to get there. 

The annual Netflix movie I'm blocked from streaming

Tonight I am going to an advanced screening of Nouvelle Vague.

Why, you ask, should I have to go to an advanced screening of a movie that's already available on Netflix? In fact, why should I be seeing a movie that's going to be available on Netflix in the theater at all, given the other priority decisions I must make for theater viewings at this time of year?

Ah, because Richard Linklater's latest movie is not available on Netflix -- in Australia.

We tend to get a "one world" idea of Netflix, like if a movie is available in any location, it's available in all locations. I may not have taken the time out of my schedule to complain about it in past years, but I know this not to be true.

Oh it might be true for their small buys, or the films that are fully branded as Netflix from the ground up, like Rian Johnson's Knives Out sequels -- one of which I could see tonight in the theater after Nouvelle Vague, which would be quite the unusual double feature considering that I've only ever seen one other movie that would soon be available to me on Netflix (David Fincher's The Killer) in the theater. 

But each of the past three years, there has been a prestige release that simply wasn't going to be available on Netflix in Australia -- possibly ever. In fact, I'm still not sure if the other two have ever made their Australian Netflix streaming debuts.

In 2023 it was May December, which made my top ten that year, but only because I got wind of its imminent lack of availability on Netflix and went to an advanced screening like this one. 

Last year it was Emilia Perez, which also made my top ten even higher than May December, which I was able to see in that case because I was in the U.S. at Christmas, making it available to me. In fact, I think there were two like this last year, as Maria was also available there, but I did not prioritize seeing it and still have not seen it. 

I'd be able to get Nouvelle Vague on my list this year because it's coming to Australian theaters on January 8th. But I'd rather spend those January theater hours on movies I can only get in the theater, in any part of the world, than be reminded that I can't see this movie otherwise because of Netflix's capricious distribution strategies.

Look, I know this whole thing is more complicated than I'm making it out to be. I'd rather just whinge (Australian word) about the unfairness of it than to look into why it's done this way. There are different deals for different markets. I know this.

But maybe I'm just feeling a bit sensitive to these exclusive arrangements these days. Just this morning I was reminded of the fact that Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother, which is getting some of the year's best notices, is a MUBI exclusive -- but that even if I were subscribed to MUBI, I still probably wouldn't get it in Australia, because that's what happened a few years ago when I was subscribed, but I still had to find another way to watch Ira Sachs' Passages.

I also feel like it should be possible to predict these things better. I understand all the cheapo buddy comedies going to Netflix simultaneously around the world, and would expect nothing less. But if the restriction is only on prestige films, why was I able to watch Train Dreams this week? (Speaking of Netflix movies that might make my top ten.) And what will happen with Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly, which is also available in Australian cinemas right now? I haven't even looked into when/whether that one will be coming to my local Netflix.

As for Linklater, seeing Nouvelle Vague tonight will mean I get at least one of his 2025 films in my 2025 rankings. Blue Moon, which does not hit Australian cinemas until the end of January, may just go by the boards. 

Ranking ten years of Happy Madison on Netflix

In writing my review of Happy Gilmore 2, which will be up tomorrow, I thought I'd mention the approximately decade-long deal Adam Sandler has had with Netflix. And then when I looked it up, I discovered it isn't approximately ten years, it's almost exactly ten years, give or take a couple months. 

The Ridiculous 6 -- which was the first movie in the deal between Netflix and Sandler's production company, Happy Madison -- hit the streamer on December 11, 2015. Since then, many if not most of Sandler's obligations have been Netflix-related, even if he himself hasn't appeared in all the movies. 

Yes he's gotten time out to do things like act for the Safdie brothers in Uncut Gems, and Benny Safdie returns the favor by appearing in HG 2. The Hotel Transylvania movies are also not related. 

For the most part, though, Sandler has been Netflix's bitch for ten years now, being involved in some way, shape or form with 16 movies released by his production company and distributed by Netflix.

Now typically, if I were going to rank a certain type of movie based on some sort of milestone -- I've most often done this with directors, but there have been other ways of lumping like things together -- the following two criteria would usually be met:

1) That I'm a completist on the movies that fit the description of whatever I'm ranking;

2) That the movies I'm ranking are, for the most part, good.

The Happy Madison movies with Netflix do not satisfy either criterion. However, I decided to write this post anyway.

But not before I took Saturday night to see where it all began.

Apparently, I was highly suspicious of these films, as I did not see any of the first five of them. Those are, including release dates:

The Ridiculous 6 - December 11, 2015
The Do-Over - May 27, 2016
Sandy Wexler - April 14, 2017
The Week Of - April 27, 2018
Father of the Year - July 20, 2018

Strangely, after whiffing on these first five, I have then seen every other movie the company has subsequently released to Netflix, 11 in total, up to and including Happy Gilmore 2. 

I figured, might as well make it an even dozen and see just how bad The Ridiculous 6 really is -- the film famously received a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, one of only a few films to do so -- which is what I did on Saturday night, having watched Happy 2 on Friday. 

I won't specifically set aside a section of this post to tell you my thoughts on that movie. Instead, I thought I would just touch on it during its blurb within my rankings, which are below.

I thought of going worst to best, to build toward the big reveal, but you know what? With these movies, which are not widely known for their quality, the thing you're building toward is really the worst one, not the best, am I right? 

So here they are, listed in order from best to 12th best: 

1. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023, Sammi Cohen) - Nepotism has been a major element of the Happy Madison movie, and usually a limiting part of the Happy Madison movie, ever since Sandler first cast his wife Jackie in The Benchwarmers in 2006, which appears to be her first role after they married in 2003. (The first role where she appeared as Jackie Sandler rather than Jackie Titone). So I was not expecting that a movie where all the major stars were his own family would be the best of these movies. YASNITMBM makes such good use of Sandler's daughter Sunny in the lead role that I was genuinely surprised when her role in Happy Gilmore 2 amounted to almost nothing, while her older sister has the larger role as Happy's AA sponsor. Anyway, Sunny Sandler is great in this smartly observed and executed coming of age story that made my top 30 of 2023, and I hope she'll get another chance to shine in one of the company's upcoming projects -- or even better, someone else's project.

2. Murder Mystery (2019, Kyle Newacheck) - It might have only been being on vacation in Hawaii that made watching this movie so intoxicating for my wife and me, but we were charmed as hell by Sandler and Jennifer Aniston -- and watching it on the lanai in the place were staying in Maui certainly did not hurt. I don't need to try to match the word count from my previous entry on this one. I'll just say that this movie really works for what it's trying to do and is fun and funny. 

3. Happy Gilmore 2 (2025, Kyle Newacheck) - This might be better than the other Kyle Newacheck film I just wrote about, but I'll push back against recency bias and give the nod to Murdery Mystery. In my not-yet-posted review I said that this repeats the shaggy charm of the original, and that's a good place for this movie to be. An old Happy Gilmore beaten down by life works for the ethos of what is now, I suppose, a franchise, and I'd more than welcome a Happy Gilmore 3. The cameos from real golfers are some of the funniest bits, and Scottie Scheffler might have a future in this business if he ever gets tired of being the best golfer in the world. 

4. Hustle (2022, Jeremiah Zagar) - The only Happy Madison film with Netflix (that I've seen anyway) that does not really profile as a comedy. This is a fairly mid sports movie as far as I'm concerned, but it's made well and has good performances, which easily elevates it above most of the rest of the crap I am about to talk about. 

5. The Ridiculous 6 (2015, Frank Coraci) - So if I had been a critic whose work is tabulated on Rotten Tomatoes and I had seen this in 2015, I would have broken its perfectly imperfect 0% score. Or maybe it takes being ten years removed in order to appreciate The Ridiculous 6. This is a very silly move, and that's the point. It's right there in the title. Ridiculous 6 gives me Mel Brooks vibes, and it's way better than the similarly themed A Million Ways to Die in the West. My star rating of three is the lowest you can give a movie and still recommend it, but it makes the cut. I'll be damned if I wasn't grinning through the whole scene where John Turturro as Abner Doubleday is making up the rules of baseball as he plays with our heroes, arbitrarily making choices because they benefit him in the moment, and Vanilla Ice as Mark Twain is oddly inspired. The movie has about two dozen funny people you like, even respectable ones like Will Forte, Steve Zahn and Terry Crews, and I just can't understand why a whole critical community was breathlessly offended by this movie.

6. Leo (2023, Robert Smigel, Robert Marianetti & David Wachtenheim) - Sandler's Hotel Transylvania movies don't have anything to do with Happy Madison, but the company has dabbled in animation, which is this film about a lizard and a turtle (voiced by Sandler and Bill Burr) who are the pets in an elementary school classroom. I had high hopes for this one but it just didn't work for me. It's not bad but it didn't give me all that much. The rest of the movies I'm going to discuss are actually bad. 

I should pause here to acknowledge the huge, huge dropoff in quality between #6 and #7. I pretty much hate the second half of this list.

7. Home Team (2022, Charles & Daniel Kinnane) - When a movie that lets former NFL coach Sean Payton off the hook for his participation in a real-world scheme to injure opposing players, and then even saves room for a tone-deaf cameo from him, is the best of the final six movies we're talking about, you know this is a bad group. There isn't much at all positive I can say about Home Team, only that I gave this movie a 3/10 when I reviewed it, and would not have been that kind to any of the remaining five -- and was not, for those that I actually did review.

8. The Wrong Missy (2022, Tyler Spindel) - What's the next least bad out of this truly rotten bunch? I guess the winner is The Wrong Missy, but that's primarily because I know a few people who like it and whatever brief words of praise they may have given it have rubbed off on me in some infinitesimal way. But I was really put off by both the way this movie makes the ancient David Spade the object of about three different attractive women's interests, and especially put off by the over-the-top performance of Lauren Lapkus. 

9. Kinda Pregnant (2025, Tyler Spindel) - I suppose there's a chance that Kinda Pregnant -- which also features Will Forte -- is better than The Wrong Missy. During the last third of this movie, I started to try to tell myself that it might be okay, or more okay than I was giving it credit for. I tend to give Amy Schumer the benefit of the doubt whenever I can. But when I think about this film now, I think "No, I don't like it." But it is definitely better than the last three I have yet to mention. 

10. Murder Mystery 2 (2023, Jeremy Garelick) - How do I know Murder Mystery 2 is better than the last two of the 12 Happy Madison Netflix movies I've seen? Because it finished only fifth from the bottom in my year-end rankings, while each of the other two finished dead last in their respective years. Since that is not perfectly an apples-to-apples comparison, it did give me pause for a moment. But then I realized that I still like the pairing of Sandler and Aniston enough that it earns the movie a few sympathy points just on that basis. Other than that, absolutely everything good about Murder Mystery gets frittered away here, rather quickly.

11. The Out-Laws (2022, Tyler Spindel). Ugh this movie. Ugh Tyler Spindel, who directed three of the last four movies I've mentioned, and would have been a lot lower in my director rankings in this post if I could have already tallied Kinda Pregnant as part of his total. Ugh also to Adam DeVine, who I adored in Modern Family, and then have pretty much hated ever since because he's been in so many movies like this one. (Dishonorable mentions: Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates and Game Over, Man!, also a last-place finisher back in 2018.) DeVine robs a bank dressed in a Shrek costume in this movie. Need I say more?

12. Hubie Halloween (2020, Steven Brill) - Is Hubie Halloween really as bad as all this? It couldn't possibly be, I tell myself. Like The Ridiculous 6, it boasts a huge ensemble cast of funny people I basically like. But I'm just so dead-set against Sandler playing a simpleton, as he does in another of my least favorite Sandler movies, The Waterboy. Nothing about the conception or execution of this movie works in the slightest, and I felt terrible for all those members of that ensemble cast. A miss is a miss, a turd is a turd, and Hubie Halloween is both. 

So I've spent some time here shitting on some movies that starred Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider and Jackie Sandler. And some others that didn't feature any of them. Some pot shots were definitely taken.

But you know what?

The good news about this is that I have just finished a weekend in which I watched two Happy Madison Netflix movies that I liked. In fact, I liked them enough that I am inspired to catch up with the other four, all from 2016 to 2018, that I haven't seen.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in 2025. But when I've just watched the one that, by all statistical measures, should have been the worst, and actually liked it, well then, what right do I have to prejudge The Do-Over, Sandy Wexler, The Week Of or Father of the Year?

After all, completism is completism. And I do likes me some completism. 

I may even come back and tell you what I think once I've watched them.

Netflix documentaries, mid and otherwise

Desperate to add a documentary to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- there was only one out of 32 movies seen, and that was a music documentary, which is in its own category -- I reluctantly threw on the Netflix documentary Con Mum on Tuesday night.

Reluctantly? Yes. I am wary of Netflix documentaries.

The ones with colons in the title, I pretty much universally avoid. You know what I'm talking about. Just taking two at random that are being spruiked when I go on Netflix right now, how about Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case. 

See, rather than Netflix creating a platform for documentaries that would otherwise have no outlet to our eyeballs, I feel like it is creating documentaries that would not otherwise exist. While this is also, on the surface, a good thing, it's not a good thing when they are Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.

But Con Mum had no colon, so I went for it.

Mid.

I'm not going to say Nick Green's film is bad, but it's very mid, in a perfectly Netflix way.

What do I mean by that?

A lot of talking heads, shot straight on. A lot of archival footage, much of it repeated, sometimes more than once. A subject that is interesting enough to warrant a movie, only just, but might have just as easily never been filmed. 

Past examples of this? Sure, I've got 'em. And it doesn't mean I disliked these films. In fact, I was reasonably appreciative each of them:

Longest Third Date
The Tinder Swindler
Our Father
The Social Dilemma

Not a colon in there, but maybe there should be.

Speaking of colons, I am avoiding anything in this relatively recent Netflix Untold series, where everything is Untold:, and then something that, well, hasn't been told, and that I don't want to have told.

I get it. I am not your typical Netflix viewer. I don't gravitate toward true crime. Things that exist for purely salacious reasons don't particularly fascinate me (though don't get me wrong, I can get into the salacious when it's done correctly). I don't want what I'm watching to go in one of my ears and out the other.

But Con Mum did. 

Look it's an interesting enough story. A woman gets in touch with her son after 45 years and then starts to con him out of his money, claiming she is the illegitimate daughter of the Sultan of Brunei. She builds a convincing enough facade, as all good scammers are capable of doing, that he doesn't seem like an idiot for falling for a story that seems very much adjacent to the letters you get from a Nigerian price offering you a big financial inheritance if you just send some small amount of money for processing fees.

But I don't know, aren't these true crime stories a dime a dozen? And hasn't Netflix, with its relentless content fire hose approach, made us intimately aware of just how cheap and disposable and interchangeable they are?

The very next night, though, this perspective slightly shifted.

Perhaps wanting to get my lagging documentary content up overall, whether it helped me with my 2025 rankings or not, I put on another documentary that was playing on Netflix, from 2024, not perhaps realizing, when I first heard about it, that Netflix was also a distributor of this documentary, not just a service that happened to be streaming it.

Why didn't I make this connection, you ask, especially when I was so attuned to the mid quality of the Netflix documentary? And not just because there was no colon?

Maybe because I heard The Remarkable Life of Ibelin discussed briefly on Filmspotting, one of the oldest film podcasts and one I have been listening to and trusting since 2011. Their discussion of a film gives it a certain imprimatur, or at least distinctiveness beyond the sea of non-fiction content Netflix make available to us all. I think it's fair to say they have never mentioned a Netflix documentary that had a colon in it. 

What's more, I remembered that Ibelin was directed by Benjamin Ree, a filmmaker whose previous effort, 2020's The Painter and the Thief, was one of Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar's favorite films of that year. Which seemed to remove it from the realm of the director-for-hire projects I am considering Netflix guilty of today. 

Well, it was a lot more than mid.

I'm not sure the subject matter of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin exceeds our most cynical expectations of a documentary, as it is quite sentimental in remembering a young man who succumbed to complications from muscular dystrophy. But the execution is what makes a film clearly surpass its own potential limitations, and Ree's film has that big time.

For one, it put me in mind of one of my favorite movies of last year, which wasn't available to most people until this year, though I got out ahead of them by seeing it at MIFF. That's Grand Theft Hamlet, the documentary that takes place entirely inside Grand Theft Auto as the avatars stage Hamlet during COVID. That movie mixes its comedy with profundity, while this one is much more skewed toward the profundity side. But like that movie, a lot of this takes place inside a video game, or at least, the animators' rendition of that video game, as Mats Steen, the young man at the center of the movie, escaped the limitations of his body by existing in a World of Warcraft game community that came to consist of very real friendships, even though they had not met IRL. There's something about watching video game characters engage in activities involving real pathos that really gets me.

Then there's the little details about how to handle the rest of it. Instead of every talking head interview being shot at brightly lit medium depth -- the kind of setup that engendered the dismissive term "talking head" in the first place -- I noted that some of these interviews were ata  side angle, and halfway across the room. If that seems like a superficial change for misguided reasons of artistry, or just intentionally breaking the mold of the typical talking head interview, that is not how I perceived it. Or even if that was Ree's thinking, then I congratulate him for it rather than faulting him for the choice.

Even lathering it on a little thick about its central character and his impact on others in the world despite the lack of likelihood that he would ever be in a position to do that, it's a really good film. 

So I guess I can't really prejudge the problematic subgenre of the Netflix documentary, even as I might like to -- which is probably a good thing, considering that Netflix is our only consistent source of access to documentaries out there.

Who knows, maybe I'll even watch one with a colon in the title. 

From feast to famine to Friends

In just under two weeks, I've gone from finishing a streak of 65 straight days posting something new on my blog, to having to force up a post just to break a five-day streak without a post.

When it rains, it pours -- or maybe I should say when it doesn't rain, it doesn't pour. Both, either, could be true in this case.

Actually, I'm not forcing this post as it's something I've been wanting to mention for a while.

Sometime last year -- it might be as long as a year ago -- I decided to undertake a rewatch of Friends. It isn't the most novel idea in the world, as it's something people who could be my -- grandchildren? yes I could technically have teenage grandchildren -- have already been doing for years now. In case you didn't get the memo, young people love Friends these days. I don't know that they've caught onto old sitcoms generally, but they've definitely caught onto this one specifically. 

My inspiration really came, though, from another cinephile, a guy only four months younger than me who I have known my whole life. He undertook this sort of rewatch maybe five years ago? ten years ago?

I couldn't believe it at the time, because this guy is also the most prolific watcher of movies I know. How could he fit in both and still be a dad, a mover and shaker in his career, and also as big a fan of baseball as I am? Especially since he has to watch baseball at night, whereas here in Australia, it's on for me during the day?

The answer: You have more 20-minute pockets of availability in your day than you might think. It's much easier to fit a Friends into the rest of your routine than it is to fit in a movie. It's only when you string four or five of them together that it actually begins to take up the same amount of time, but neither is it as onerous a commitment as a movie can be, because you are always re-upping for one more at your pleasure, and you can "quit any time." I suspect the snackability of the show is what makes it appeal to today's young people.

For the remaining ten days of this month, I'm going to test exactly how snackable.

See, a few weeks ago, I was greeted by a disappointing discovery: Friends is leaving Netflix on March 31st. I think it may already be gone in other parts of the world, but in Australia, it had still been here. I'm not sure if I subscribe to its new home, or even know what that new home is.

If I were almost done with that rewatch, this might be okay. But I was in the comparative infancy of the rewatch. I discovered the imminent departure near the beginning of the month, when I was only on the first episode of Season 3. 

There are ten seasons.

It seemed like folly to still pursue the full rewatch. And I'm quite sure it still is. After all, my intention with this rewatch was to slow-walk it, to fit it into my schedule, not to fit myself into the dwindling weeks of its availability. In fact, I was slow-walking it so much that there were months when I might watch only a single episode or two.

Now it looks like I'm going to try to watch all the episodes in one month.

To be clear, I'm not really trying to get through Friends before March 31st. Even with increasing the pace after learning the news, I still only just finished episode 14 of Season 4. We're right in the thick of Chandler's relationship with Kathy (Paget Brewster), and he and Joey just switched apartments with Monica and Rachel. There's still a loooooot of Friends to go.

But sometimes I string together four or five in a single day -- and realize I've got a grin from ear to ear as I do it -- and I think "May-be ..."

So I just looked it up, and there are 236 episodes of Friends. I've watched 87 of them. The math really doesn't work out in my favor. 

If I want to try to watch the whole series, I will need to watch an average of 14.9 episodes per day, from now until the end of the month, which is basically between five and six hours of Friends each day. Not gonna happen. 

Or is it?

I mean, it's probably not going to happen. But my wife and I have already talked about how we need to have a really quiet day this Sunday, especially as we are going out to a concert on Saturday night. I can watch waaaaay more than five to six hours of Friends on a really quiet day.

I don't need to watch the whole series before Friends leaves Netflix. I can just put a pause on my viewing and pick back up the next time it materializes on a streaming service I have. It's not like I'm never going to subscribe to a streaming service that has Friends on it again. I even considered how I could buy it, if I really wanted to. With that much content, there comes a certain point where you get a price break, and it's probably not even that expensive on a per-episode basis. 

Until then, though, it could be fun to give it a go, and see how far I get -- as long as it doesn't start to feel like a chore and ruin my experience of the show. But that's what bingeing it has taught me: I don't burn out on consecutive Friends ad infinitum. Which is one of the proofs of its greatness. Yes, I can binge Bing until the cows come home.

But not without a toll on movies, and that's the part that's really relevant to this blog, and also explains my sudden drop in my usual viewing vigor. There are a couple viewing obligations I still have for the remainder of this month, and there's always keeping up with new releases. But until March 31st comes and goes and Friends just goes, I might as well lift my foot off the pedal of my usual frenetic movie pace. It'll be there for me to resume in April.

So random weekend nights when I'd usually find something appropriately weekendy on one of my streamers? Random weekday nights when I'd usually stream something less weekendy? A short time slot in the morning when I'm drinking my coffee and eating my breakfast?

Friends will get those time slots for the next ten days, and we'll just see how far we get.

I will post here as the time and the inclination allows. 

Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch Eat Pray Love. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.

(*read on, there's more to this story)

Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).

I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.

In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."

My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference. 

So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.

Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked. 

Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier. 

There was no comparison.

Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face. 

So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:

I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.

Oh no.

Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens. 

On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.

If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.

Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.

There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.

Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.

I am now asking myself:

Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?

There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.

But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?

Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.

As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it. 

Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors. 

Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad. 

This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.

But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon. 

But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew. 

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.

And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show. 

Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that. 

But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan. 

I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.

But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection. 

The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.

So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.

Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.

They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.

My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.

Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied. 

A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.

Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this. 

So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed. 

Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV. 

We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.

Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams. 

Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.

And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.

I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch. 

And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too. 

So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.

The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.

The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet. 

You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew. 

However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here. 

And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ... 

Should trigger warnings contain spoiler warnings?

The other day I was watching the new Netflix movie The Sand Castle, whose dialogue is in Arabic but whose director (Matty Brown) certainly does not seem to be from that part of the world. It's part of a smart trend of directors shooting in other countries, even outside the language they comprehend, to get to make a movie they might not be able to make at home. (Who knows, maybe Matty Brown does speak Arabic.)

I noticed the usual trigger warnings we get at the starts of films these days, and one of those for The Sand Castle was "injury detail."

I should say "Spoiler alert! One of those was 'injury detail.'"

Now, you can't ordinarily glean much from these trigger warnings. Just knowing that a movie contains "violence, crude language, sexual situations, etc." is not enough to really tell you what's ahead. Though I suppose if you think a movie is one kind of movie, and the fact that it contains violence means it's another kind of movie, that too could be construed as a spoiler.

Injury detail, though, is a little different. It means a character in this movie is going to lose an arm or a leg, or at the very least get a very bloody wound. It turned out to be the latter in this case.

And though I can't say that actually felt like a true spoiler, it did put me on the lookout for a gruesome injury occurring in the story, which was not necessarily going to be the case just from knowing that the family in question is stranded on a deserted island with only a lighthouse to shelter them. 

It made me wonder: Should we get spoiler warnings for the trigger warnings? Or even be able to opt out of them altogether?

I think of myself as a person who does not get triggered by much. If you tell me that I'm going to see something in a movie I've never seen before, I will rush to it all the more quickly. In fact, this was one of the reasons The Coffee Table, which felt out of sync with all the other films in my top ten in terms of size and scope, was my #5 movie of 2024. It's a stance that benefits me as a critic, meaning I can watch truly anything that someone is happy to make, only turning my nose up at it in advance if I think it is going to be lame or tired.

So for me, the trigger warning does nothing, except possibly spoil what's to come.

I'd like an option on Netflix where I could choose "turn off trigger warnings." To be sure that this option does not already exist, I just googled it, and it does not.

If someone is going to lose an arm or a leg, or just get a very bloody wound, I'd really like to be surprised by that detail, not just wait to see in what form it's going to transpire. 

Martha Mary Maria Matilda

Had to take a funny picture of this search beginning with "Ma" on Netflix, as it reminded me of the title Martha Marcy May Marlene.

I was searching for Mary to make for the middle of three straight 2024 Christmas movies starting on December 23rd, which began with Hot Frosty and finished (on the morning of the 26th, horror of horrors!) with Our Little Secret, after I fell asleep watching it Christmas night. Although the other two did not come in with fabulous credentials, no better than Hallmark movies with a modicum of self awareness, DJ Caruso's film was easily the worst of the three. I'm not going to go into what makes Mary so bad right now, but let's just say it doesn't deserve an in-depth discussion. 

I thought this search result was telling, though, because I'm reminded just as I'm leaving New England to head out on the next portion of our trip that there are so many 2024 movies I have yet to see. Both Martha and Maria are new films, films I "should" probably watch, but may not. 

Matilda is old, and I don't know what Mafalda is, but that breaks the four-name theme anyway.  

Things that already meet each other

Last night I started, but only got halfway through, the new Netflix teen dystopia movie Uglies. I wasn't particularly enjoying the movie, but that's not why I got only halfway through it. It was because of our new diabolically comfortable living room couch, which I may see fit to write about at length at some point, due to the way it's eating into my same-night movie completion rate.

But I don't need to have finished Uglies to write about what I'm writing about today.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but Netflix has gotten into the habit of shorthanding the appeal of a movie by suggesting it is the love child of two other movies. At the same time, it is complimenting its viewers by considering them familiar with the old show biz pitch shorthand for what a studio exec might expect from a script they are considering buying.

"It's Star Wars meets Casablanca" goes the old pitch, and in theory, the exec's eyes light up with dreams of Oscars and box office dollars. (I don't know what movie that would be, but presumably there is one out there that meets that description.)

So in its descriptions for its movies -- not every movie, because it wouldn't work with every movie -- Netflix has taken to giving you, the viewer, the same sort of pitch, hoping you will watch.

Even when it's hilarious.

Now let me first say that the point of the "Movie A meets Movie B" template is that the two movies are distinctly different from one another. There may be some way they are complementary -- if they aren't in some way complementary, the movie will probably be a disaster -- but you do think of different things when you consider each movie in isolation. The way they blend gives the movie its sense of new vitality, a perfect combination of what a studio considers safe and what a studio considers a safe-ish risk.

So that's why I find the description for Uglies to be particularly hilarious:

"It's Divergent meets The Hunger Games."

Now, I haven't seen Divergent, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't Divergent itself The Hunger Games meets Divergent? And isn't The Hunger Games itself Divergent meets The Hunger Games?

Obviously Divergent and The Hunger Games are not the same movie. If memory serves, people in Divergent have some sort of mental powers. 

But saying that a new YA movie is like the love child of these two movies is kind of like saying that a new teen sex comedy is like American Pie meets Superbad. Or that a new sci-fi movie is like Star Wars meets Star Trek. Or that a new period piece about servants working in a fancy mansion is like Remains of the Day meets Downton Abbey.

I'm not suggesting Netflix is wrong to market movies using this convention. It's clever and efficient. And the average person -- the person who might actually be the target audience of Uglies -- is unlikely to parse the semantics of the recommendation like I am doing here. 

I do think there are ways to do it better though.

From the half of Uglies I've seen, I can tell you the movie is about a future society where all citizens are given cosmetic surgery at age 16 to make them beautiful. This makes everyone extremely shallow, except for the stalwart few who resist the mandatory surgery and stay their same "ugly" self. (I'm sorry, but it is not possible to make Joey King ugly.)

If I were trying to replace one of the two movies in the pitch for Uglies with another movie that would deliver us a more nuanced pitch, I might say that it's Divergent meets Gattaca. (While I have not gone out and watched Divergent since writing the above paragraph, this movie does seem to have more in common with Divergent than The Hunger Games.)

Gattaca, as I remember it, was also about beauty and genetic perfection. And it was also set in a world with tall futuristic buildings and young people. 

The trouble is, that same average viewer doesn't know Gattaca from Battlestar Galactica from Attica, the prison in New York. ("Attica! Attica!") 

And so it is, regrettably, far better for Netflix to say "Obvious thing you know and love #1 + obvious thing you know and love #2 = thing you will obviously love."

Amazon/Netflix 11th hour discoveries/catchup weekend

On Friday I watched two movies on Amazon. On Saturday I watched two movies on Netflix. And on Sunday I watched one on each.

Four of these six movies had been on my radar for less than two weeks.

Yep, just because it's almost time to stop watching movies for 2023, it doesn't mean there aren't still movies forcing their way onto your watchlist.

I was actually going to have even one more, but the second movie I cued up on Friday night, and watched about one minute of before discovering this information, actually meets my criteria for a 2022 movie, as it had a limited U.S. release in November of '22 (despite the 2023 release date that show on Prime). So I abandoned Next Exit, before it had the chance to make my list of movies to watch before January 23rd even longer.

What I did end up watching was:

Swallowed and Robots on Friday night.

Society of the Snow and Fast X on Saturday afternoon/evening.

And Good Grief/The Burial on Sunday afternoon/evening.

And did I mention these were all on the projector in my garage?

Only Fast X and The Burial had been on my watchlist prior to a few weeks ago, when Society of the Snow reared its head based on the (it turns out very justified) ravings of a friend. 

Fast X was one I was going to leave on the cutting room floor this year, but like John Wick: Chapter 4 before it, it turned up for free on a streaming service so I decided to just go for it. I've seen every other Fast & Furious movie. Why stop now? (And I liked this one better than the ninth installment, I'm glad to report.)

If it looks like I'm cramming, that both is and isn't true.

Yes I was happy not to be on the pace to break my record of 175 from last year, and I am still well on that pace. But a certain FOMO also sets in at this time of year, at the same time, paradoxically, that I am also just feeling so done with it all. Movies don't really get a fair shake in this big lead-up to finalizing my rankings, yet I don't see another way to go about it. At whatever point you cut off your list, you'll probably be cramming it all in before that anyway, and any individual film might feel rode hard, put away wet, and forgotten almost immediately.

Then there's the fact that you lose your ability to parse differences between movies. Seeing as many really good movies, right up until the end, as I'm seeing this year, I can't decide if a movie should make my top ten or not even make my top 25. The struggle is real.

So while I did cram a little bit this weekend, I also didn't, because I anticipate having a few fruitless days at the end of this week, and I'm really just trying to make up for them in advance.

We're going to a friend's beach house this weekend -- remember, summer here in Australia -- and it's possible I won't watch a movie Friday, Saturday or Sunday night. (It's not certain whether we're going down on Friday night or Saturday morning.) Although it would be possible to jam in a movie, it's also a little tacky when it's a social weekend away, and the adults will likely remain in each other's company until bedtime.

So I'm at 152 for the year now, and still hope to only be in the mid to high 160s by January 23rd -- just getting there through a slightly different route. 

And who knows, maybe I will just take an actual night off sometime as well. You know, rest my eyeballs, without social impropriety even being a consideration. 

My first Netflix movie in the theater

Roma. Marriage Story. The Irishman. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Mank.

All these titles from acclaimed directors, and plenty others I don't want to look up, had their debuts in the cinema before streaming on Netflix, where the majority of people saw them. I have always been one of those majority.

In 2023, I'm finally seeing my first movie in the theater that I could have waited just two weeks to see on Netflix.

Unlike other people, though, I didn't have to pay for it. (Thank you, critics card.)

I wasn't actually planning to see David Fincher's The Killer this week. In fact, I didn't even know it was coming out this week. All my cinema-related yearnings had been geared toward another movie with "Killer" in the title, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I wanted to review this week to inject some life into the recently sluggish ReelGood website. It eluded me last weekend in Sydney when my wife suggested I go to a movie to pass the time on Saturday before our flight, then reneged the offer when she learned I wanted to see a three hour and 26 minute movie. With my mother-in-law in town from Sunday to Tuesday, and the movie never starting later than 7:30 on any given night, it just hasn't worked out.

Since I may now wait until my opportunity on AppleTV+ to see that one, it seemed appropriate that I jump the Netflix debut on The Killer. I mean, I can't have movies by Martin Scorsese and David Fincher come out in the same seven-day period, and wait until their streaming debuts weeks later to slake my readers' thirst on what I thought of them. (Said thirst is entirely hypothetical.) 

But until Wednesday, I didn't even know The Killer would be an option. That's when I saw it already listed on the marquee of the theater downstairs from where I work, a day before you could actually see it. I did end up seeing it the next day, and churned out the review that very night so I could get some new content up on the site before the weekend. (Here's the review if you want to read it.)

It may not have been the ideal movie to pop my Netflix/theater cherry. Although we do get some decent Fincher technique in this film, not to mention enough locations to make James Bond wonder why he never goes anywhere, I didn't think this was one of Fincher's most cinematic films. In fact, I am almost certain it's his least cinematic. Which is not to say it isn't cool to watch at certain points. It's just not a very interesting, original story, and the craft that is applied to that narrative skeleton doesn't stand out in a way that would justify revisiting this familiar territory. (I get into some particulars in the review if that interests you.)

More to the point, there isn't anything about it that I thought begged to be seen on a big screen. As I was watching it I kept thinking of a Steven Soderbergh movie that I found similarly underwhelming, Haywire, though I like this movie more than that one. As I also touch on in my review (I promise I will stop begging you to read my review), Soderbergh makes so many movies that you really don't care if one of them feels like a throwaway. (And it does seem to lessen the disappointment when three or four in a row feel like throwaways.) With Fincher, this is only his third feature since 2011, so if one doesn't land with you, it might be a long wait for the next.

Fincher is starting to have that in common with his most regular collaborator, Trent Reznor, though it would be more like their careers are trending in opposite directions. Reznor, as part of Nine Inch Nails, used to only put out an album every five years, only lately becoming so much more prolific and churning out about three musical scores a year. Meanwhile, it's almost unimaginable that Fincher had a five-year period that included Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He's now become the comparative recluse.

I did enjoy hearing the works of Reznor and his buddy Atticus Ross, as I always do -- if you don't remember, Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band. (There's actually a cheeky reference to nine-inch nails in the dialogue of The Killer, as the trio of writers do their best Tori Amos impersonation.) However, I don't plan to buy the score, something I've done for both Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, hoping they'd do something similar for me as what the Social Network score did. Much as I love the musical genius of Trent Reznor, he can't top his own work with that Social Network score -- not to mention the majority of the band's output.

The Social Network also seems to have been a peak for Fincher. Although I've admired each of the movies he's made since then, I haven't loved any of them, and The Killer will now be tussling with the likes of The Game to stay out of the bottom of my Fincher rankings. 

It may be no coincidence that he's started to shrink a bit, now two movies into his Netflix deal. Mank certainly didn't preview a receding of his ambitions, though I did wonder why he'd be willing to let the majority of people see that movie on such a small screen. So The Killer concerns me in that regard as well, because now he's making a movie that does not demand to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

I went to the cinema hoping I could urge it in that direction, but The Killer killed my aspirations. 

Because it was playing at the resort

Scrolling through the new movie offerings on Netflix should be a dream come true for a person who likes to watch as many movies as possible from the current year. It is a bounty of heretofore unknown movies with that magical release year that releases your endorphins: "2023."

Well, there's a reason they are heretofore unknown: They are unheralded movies from fledgling film industries the world over, bought on the cheap and dumped on the service for the unsuspecting cinephile to stumble over.

My problem with these movies is usually: They aren't "real" foreign films.

What the hell do I mean by that?

Well if we consider the goal of a cinephile watching new releases to be compiling approximately 150 movies to rank at the end of the year -- and while that's not every viewer's goal, it's certainly mine -- then those 150 movies should be chosen because you expect them to have crossover with the movies other cinephiles are watching and ranking. 

If you're me, these are largely comprised of American movies. Whether that means Hollywood movies or small independents, they tend to be movies that you'd expect a movie podcast might consider worthy of discussion. And then of course your standards selection of other American movies that wouldn't clear that bar, like the mainstream movies your kids might want to watch, or a dumb comedy, or a slasher movie. 

Of course, I can't think of anything more parochial than filling out a year-end list with just American releases. (Which is a funny thing to say, since I'm in Australia, meaning these movies are not "parochial" if we are using the definition "confined or restricted as within the borders of a parish"). I want at least 20 foreign films in there.

But how to determine those foreign films?

There are some that are easy. The latest release from a big international master -- your Bong Joon-ho's, your Asghar Farhadi's, your Gaspar Noe's -- are easy choices. Their past efforts have anointed them forever after worthy of consideration.

But how do new directors worth considering get added to their number?

Buzz has to do with it -- the right buzz. If, as I said, a film podcast has gotten their hands on it and discussed it, it fits the bill. If it gets a release in a local cinema, it fits the bill. It's a "you know it when you see it" sort of thing.

But the streamers take the semi-clarity of this process and throw it all out of focus. What is a person supposed to do when they go on Netflix and there are ten newly released movies that have not been vouched for by anyone in the know? Why would a person consider one worthy of their time over the other?

Because you can't see all of them. You wouldn't have the time, while still watching everything else you're supposed to see. And even if you did, what are you going to do, have these random foreign movies Netflix grabbed from some obscure European film festival and decided to pay some small amount of money to air on their service account for 70 of those 150 movies?

I was having this dilemma as I was searching for something to watch Wednesday night. I'll give you some indication of what I was up against. Here are the 2023 releases I considered and passed over, all of which I'd never heard of, followed by their countries of origin:

AKA (France)
The Matchmaker (Saudi Arabia)
Hunger (Thailand)
Kill Boksoon (South Korea)
Phenomena (Spain)
One More Time (Sweden)
Queens on the Run (Mexico)
Chokehold (Turkey)

And this is not even including the Bollywood movies, which I consider a proposition unto themselves. I need one to really break out (like RRR) if I am going to consider watching it in the year of its release and including it in my year-end rankings. (This year that movie might be Polite Society, though I believe that movie is in English so it may not fully qualify. In any case, it's playing in cinemas here right now.)

But then I came across the movie you see in the poster above -- and I recognized it.

Jung_E was playing on the screen by one of the pools on one of the nights we were at the resort in Vietnam last month. You know, the same venue where I watched the first hour of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, meaning to watch the whole thing but running into a very reasonable conflict involving my wife -- who, you know, thought it might be nicer to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. (Which was actually two nights before that, but certain circumstances prevented us from celebrating it then.)

I had seen it on the movie schedule, and thought, "What's that?" And then when we actually walked by while it was in progress, I noted how it would have been impossible to watch it even if we'd wanted to; the subtitles were in Vietnamese. (I hadn't known the spoken language was Korean, as I do now.)

Apparently, a movie being selected by some entertainment programmer at a resort -- playing in the time slot that had hosted Avatar: The Way of Water, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Black Adam on other nights -- meant it was a "real" foreign film.

I wasn't disappointed in my decision. Although Jung_E, a sci-fi film involving AI, was a little more contained in its locations and scope than I would have hoped, it does some interesting things with the ideas from movies like I, Robot and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. The robot designs were particularly compelling, reminding me a bit of I, Robot but going off in directions that were unique enough for you to count them among the things the film does well.

And I was hit with a bit of melancholy after it ended, not only because of what happens in the film, but because it was then I learned that the movie's star, Kang Soo-yeon, died after filming on Jung_E was completed but before it could premiere.

There are probably other Jung_E's on Netflix, maybe even among the titles listed above. I guess I just need a better method of figuring out which ones they may be.

I dropped Wild Things on someone else's Netflix viewing history

The AirBnB we stayed in this weekend has a couple smart TVs, a large one in the living room and one mounted on the wall near the ceiling in the bedroom. I used one each night, both to watch things on Netflix. (I was the only adult present, as I took the kids out of town for two nights to give my wife some alone time in our house for her birthday weekend. We went to Gumbuya World, an amusement park that has rides, waterslides and a zoo, though we only did the first two.)

The one in the living room appealed to me because of its size, but not its convenience. It's one of those TVs that has access to all the apps you could possibly want, with none of them logged in. That means you could either log in with your own information or not use them at all. So I did log in with our Netflix username and password in order to watch the romantic comedy The Incredible Jessica James, which was a perfect little slice of light, under-90-minute viewing for a Friday night.

It was on Saturday night that I realized I had a problem by having logged in with our details on the other TV. The TV is smart -- it's right there in the name -- so it remembers those preferences. It does not require us to keep logging in each time.

I figured this out, of course, because someone was indeed logged in on the TV in the bedroom, though it didn't seem like the owners' account. Or at the very least, if it did belong to the owners, they had been inconsistent with their application of their login, only putting it on one of the two TVs in the cottage.

In any case, the profiles on this Netflix account did not match what I knew to be the name of the guy I had been in touch with regarding the booking, Brian. These profiles belonged to Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon, the last two of which were children.

Though something was a bit goofy with the settings. You know how Netflix goes into screen saver mode and shows you a bunch of slides of current offerings? I tend to get mesmerized by this and might sit there just watching it for ten minutes, playing little games like trying to guess the title before it appears on screen. Well, this particular screen saver mode was showing everything from the Little Rascals movie, presumably a selection that would only come up on a kids profile, to Anaconda, a movie where people get eaten by a large South American snake. (Incidentally, the last day to watch The Little Rascals on Netflix is February 28th. I better get on that.)

Seeing this account logged in made me realize that we could be the next account still logged in when the next people who stay at this house get here, possibly as soon as Sunday night. So I better get us logged off the living room TV.

At first I was unsure how to do this. The app version on the smart TV does not include an option for logging out, or not one that I could easily see anyway. You can exit Netflix, but of course once you get back in, it's still you.

I did ultimately figure out how to remotely log out using the website, though at first it was ambiguous which session needed to be logged out, because its geographical location did not match the geographical location where we were. But before we left, our profiles were indeed safe from the next guests.

I cannot say the same for Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon.

Though it didn't occur to me until after I started watching Wild Things on Saturday night that I might be creating a problem for someone.

I think it was the Katherina profile I used to watch the steamy 1998 Florida noir, which has more double crosses than a whole convent of nuns. (When they make that sign in front of their chests, is it considered a "double cross"? It's a stretch.) But I'm not sure if that makes the situation better or worse.

In theory, I realized too late, Katherina or Steven would see the title appearing on their recently watched movies, and have no idea how it got there -- except that the other might have watched it surreptitiously and then later denied doing so. Just going on heteronormative assumptions here, Steven might have snuck in a peak at illicit Denise Richards boobs, but put it on his wife's profile to "hide" the "crime." Alternatively, if Katherina were have doubts about her sexuality and Steven suspected them, it might only push that conversation further into uncomfortable places.

I supposed I could delete the movie from their viewing history, but I think this is another thing that can only be done from a computer, not from an app. So Katherina and Steven (and Harrison and Nixon) may be stuck with my viewing of Wild Things. (And let's not dismiss the possibility that Harrison or Nixon are reaching an age when they are curious about the opposite sex, or well past that age, and it might look like they hacked into a parent's account to watch some illicit Denise Richards boobs.)

I say it didn't occur to me until after the fact that I could be causing a problem for this other family, but I can't deny that I thought two other things simultaneously, failing only in putting two and two together. Those things were 1) being out of town is a perfect time to watch some illicit Denise Richards boobs, 2) it being someone else's Netflix account means there will be no record of it that will come back to bite me.

Of course, every time I confess something like this on my blog, it means I'm obviously not that interested in keeping it a secret. Anyone who wants to come here and read this will know that I watched some illicit Denise Richards boobs on Saturday night. But will I tell my wife what I watched on Saturday night, when she was watching Everything Everywhere All at Once back at our hourse? Probably not.

Though it didn't honestly occur to me until after the fact that my viewing might not be causing a problem for me, but it could be causing a problem for someone else.

Well, there wasn't any way around it assuming I wanted the novelty of watching a movie in bed, something I never do. If I couldn't log my own account out in the living room using the app, I certainly couldn't log out theirs. 

In truth, Wild Things is a lot more tame than I remembered. It only actually has two nudes scenes -- or only two female nude scenes anyway. The other female nude scene belongs to Theresa Russell in a rather explicit sex scene, but then you also get to see Kevin Bacon's schlong, which I remembered. So Katherina could have been watching not for secret lesbian reasons, but to get a two-second glimpse of Bacon dick. 

And I didn't actually watch it for prurient reasons, per se. It took a fair amount of scrolling before I finally found it. In fact, my first instinct was to watch The Flintstones, if you can believe it. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas was, like The Little Rascals, another movie disappearing from Netflix on February 28th, as the screen saver showed me. I thought "Hey, I never saw the first one of those, maybe this would be a good opportunity." But Netflix wasn't carrying it, and just jumping straight to the sequel somehow seemed wrong. I mean, I'd be totally lost.

But when Wild Things did come up, I confirmed it pretty quickly as the choice. For one, I've started 2023 with a number of repeat viewings of movies from that vintage (Pi, Orgazmo, The Sixth Sense). Nineteen ninety-eight is 25 years ago, which makes now a useful round number of years later to reconsider those films. Secondly, it was always considered rather "wild" -- it's right there in the title -- and I wanted to see how much that held up, given the way it got gums flapping back in the day. Being able to watch it without my wife walking into the living room and wondering aloud why I was watching it was only really the third consideration.

As for Katherina, Steven, Harrison and Nixon ... good luck sorting out the issues that illicit Denise Richards boobs may have caused you.

And if this is just the owners' account but with weird dummy names thrown in for misdirection, well, now they think I'm some perv I guess.

For example, do I have to watch The School for Good and Evil?

As you know because I've been discussing it, I'm trying to control the onslaught of 2022 films, which are coming faster and furiouser than I ever remember them coming before. It's to the point where each time I learn of a new movie that I "have" to watch, I start to get a bit squidgy.

I learned about The School for Good and Evil for the first time when they plastered the train station near my office with advertisements for Netflix, as discussed here. Each time I've passed the two or three spackled-up posters for it -- some of which have been torn away by cheeky escalator riders, or gotten eyes or teeth blacked out by Sharpies -- here is a sampling of my thoughts:

1) "God those women have annoyingly perfect cheek bones."

2) "Maybe it's a TV show so I can skip it."

3) "Oh nope, it's a movie."

4) "Maybe the annoyingly, generically perfect cheek bones means it's some crap for young people that I can just not watch."

And so that's kind of where I had landed.

Until The School for Good and Evil itself landed on Netlfix last night and they started promoting the hell out of it, meaning I discovered that the movie also stars Charlize Theron, Cate Blanchett, Kerry Washington (who I did recognize in the poster), Michelle Yeoh and Laurence Fishburne.

Dammit.

I still came to write this post without the following bit of knowledge, which I have just determined after downloading the poster: It's directed by Paul Feig.

Dammit.

The number of films from big directors or with big casts that are coming out this fall are starting to truly stagger me. It's gotten to the point where I have to fit in even streaming movies the moment they're available if I don't want them to get swept away into oblivion. It was for that reason that I watched the new Australian movie, The Stranger, starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, the first night it became available on Netflix last night -- which is also how I became acquainted with the cast of The School for Good and Evil.

I've already got such a backlog of kid-friendly Halloween movies that I'm planning an October 30th double feature of The Curse of Bridge Hollow and Hocus Pocus 2 for my family. Am I going to have to make this a triple feature?

It isn't even November and 2022 is already drowning me in movies. 

Netflix has taken over the train station near my office

When I got off the train this morning for work I noticed something different.

At first I thought it was some sort of new interior design choice. The metal slopes between the escalators had this color bar pattern against a black background, which I thought was a bit loud, but I shrugged and decided it was some person's idea of modern design.

Then I noticed that there was an N at the bottom, and that N looked sort of ... familiar.

It was only then that I looked up and noticed that the escalator walls were festooned with advertisements for new Netflix content.

I mean, totally chockablock. No room for any other advertising. Netflix decided it wanted to be the sole purveyor of sales pitches in the whole Parliament Station in downtown Melbourne. And possibly at other downtown stations as well.

I didn't start taking pictures early enough to show you the breadth of this, but the breadth was total. And I will say, in Netflix's defense, that I did become aware of some projects I hadn't known about -- even if they already do a pretty good job advertising future content on the site.

I did start taking pictures by the time I got to the top of the two sets of escalators, at the giant square emblem you see above.

As I continued down the hallway toward the exit to the open air, the posters continued, as well as more banners on the floor, as you see here:

It's sort of the equivalent of when a website is absolutely crippled by the wall-to-wall advertising for a particular company, so much so that it actually shrinks the available real estate for the site's normal content. Which, unfortunately for that blitzkrieg approach, is never a good thing.

And so I say that the wholesale takeover of Parliament Station by Netflix is not a good thing either. I'll be curious to see how long it lasts. 

If it lasts for only a short time, then it might be defensible as a short-term promotional stunt in association with some specific Netflix milestone or important date. Then again, if that were the case, it would seem that one particular program would be the focus, not a kaleidoscope of new Netflix content. Also that would be a pretty expensive promotional stunt.

Plus if it does go down after only a week, most of us won't assume it's because the window of time of the promotional stunt is over. Most of us would assume it was Netflix retracting in defeat after a resounding rejection of its campaign. 

Me, I'm pretty loyal to Netflix, generally speaking, so this does not impact me one way or another. If I need something new to review for ReelGood -- as I did yesterday when I reviewed Lou -- I'll still look to see what new film Netflix has before I'll look at any of my other streamers. It's still the granddaddy.

But too much more of this mentality will convince me that they are indeed in trouble, that they are indeed flailing around, making desperate attempts to retain the market share that they once enjoyed. And it will start to seem unseemly.