The demise of movie advertising, all in one handy Bond puzzle

I had a very diligent Secret Santa last year -- or Kris Kringle, as they insist on calling it down here.

When we do Kris Kringle with my larger work team of a couple dozen people, you get randomly assigned a person to give presents to, and weirdly, you never actually tell them it was you. I suppose if you're only giving one gift, that makes sense, but I prefer it to be like a handful of small gifts over the course of December, and then at the end you say "It was me!" Without that, it's this very odd sort of secretive affair, though I admit, it does prevent you from having to own up to your shitty gift if you missed the mark. And since we are scattered around the state, only all coming together a couple times a year, multiple gifts over a couple weeks isn't practical anyway. 

To help prevent your giver from missing the mark, you are invited to give hints about things you would like. For a couple years now I have been suggesting that someone give me a copy of the latest book they've read, as it will allow me to branch out to things I might not have considered, but no one takes me up on that. Since they don't, this year I included chocolate as an option, and I may have mentioned I like puzzles -- or this person just knew it from having talked to me. 

In any case, she got me all three things, in a true case of going above and beyond the $20 limit. I say "she" because I am quite certain I know who it was, based on her interests. The "book" she got me was a Star Wars comic book featuring Princess Leia, and I happen to know this person is into Star Wars. She gave me the actual copy, rather than buying me a copy, and since people don't seem to be able to interpret this suggestion correctly, I think I will stop making it next year.

For chocolate, she got me Cadbury Favourites, which come in a distinct purple box and contain miniature versions of their offerings. This alone was at least half of the $20 limit.

Then the puzzle was a James Bond puzzle, featuring posters from all 25 movies in existence at the end of Daniel Craig's tenure. It was quite well chosen, as I had just posted on Facebook about going to that James Bond Marathon at the Sun Theatre that I wrote about on this blog a couple times last year. So that limited the potential Kris Kringles to one of my Facebook friends, which narrowed it down to about eight people. The Star Wars fan is one of those eight. 

(I actually didn't want to become friends with any work people on Facebook, and have had a policy of not doing so until I no longer work with the person. That way, I can say whatever outrageous things I want to say without feeling self-conscious. But once my boss sent me a friend request, and her boss sent me a friend request, the floodgates opened and I had to take pretty much anyone who asked. I say "pretty much" as there is still one woman I find objectionable whose request I have not accepted, but I never see her and have never actually met her in person, so I thought this might give her a hint without it being awkward.)

Okay that's a lot of preamble. I am ready to get to the point of this piece now.

My wife and I have been working on the Bond puzzle, one poster of which you see above, and the rest of which I will be providing in snippets across the rest of this piece. The posters go chronologically through the Bonds from the upper left hand corner to the lower right, proceeding more or less in the shape of a Z, and I recently realized that they get increasingly worse as you go trace that route.

Because we haven't quite finished the puzzle yet -- less than 100 of the thousand remaining -- the pictures are from the fold-out picture that comes with it that you use as a reference point. (Or at least, some people do. In a conversation about puzzles with my Kris Kringle, I learned that she and her family do not believe it is fair to check the picture, and you must form the puzzle from the pieces alone. That's insane.)

Let's start with the lovely upper left:

Ah the films of Sean Connery. How delightfully 60s they were. (They were all from that decade except for 1971's Diamonds Are Forever.) They aren't all kinetic, but that Goldfinger one sure is. It should be out of a Batman comic (also from the 1960s) and the word THWACK! should appear in giant letters. The first two on the left are fairly staid in terms of action, but just look at the warm and rich colors. Especially the last two capture the zany spirit of the movies, with Diamonds kind of functioning as the first of the sort of posters made famous in Star Wars movies, with the characters grouping around in poses. Anyway, it's glorious stuff.

As we move to the right and to my Bond, Roger Moore -- with a groovy diversion for one George Lazenby movie, half of whose slogans you can see in the previous shot -- there isn't much dropoff. We get to a lot more storytelling in the poster, as fully half the events of The Man With the Golden Gun are depicted in this poster, and The Spy Who Loved Me looks like something out of an art deco sci-fi movie. Even the simplest of these, For Your Eyes Only, has the clever through the legs shot (while getting in some more female flesh, which was a Bond calling card, and a Moore calling card in particular). The posters aren't afraid to have life and be cheeky, and interestingly, the one my wife called out specifically for positive reasons -- my favorite, Octopussy -- can't even be seen in this quadrant. (We'll get to it in the next.) She said instead of having all 25 movies, she'd rather just have a full puzzle of the Octopussy poster, for example.

As we look at Moore's last two posters, which are striking for different and opposite reasons -- one busy, one sparse -- we get a crucial line of demarcation here. Once we switch over to Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, the hand-drawn art is retired. Not immediately -- Dalton's first, The Living Daylights, seems to be drawn, and works in a similar way to how For Your Eyes Only worked. But from License to Kill onward, photographs of the actors become the norm, for the worse. At least we're still getting story, though. In each Brosnan movie -- Die Another Day is slightly off screen here -- you get not only Bond but his co-stars, plus some visual information that tells you what the movie is about, with plenty of vehicles still making appearances. They're still good.

They're not good anymore. This may be what we thought we wanted in 2006 when the series had probably its sharpest reboot to date, to bring it into more modern times. But fully four of these five posters have only a single person on them, Daniel Craig, and not a single one gives any clue what the movie is about. (Okay, I guess you could argue that he's gambling in Casino Royale, but that title is somewhat self-explanatory anyway.) These are cold, clinical, lifeless. Taken in combination, they sort of make Daniel Craig look like the world's biggest narcissist, when I doubt that actually describes him. Only in Quantum of Solace is any of the real estate ceded to another character/actor. 

Unsurprisingly, this is the least fun quadrant of the puzzle to complete. My wife and I each get a little depressed when we try to work at it. Just a bunch of generic whites, blacks and golds. Ho hum.

You don't often think about the long history of movie advertising until you can see a single idea go through multiple transformations as it does here. And here it is obvious that somewhere along the way we lost the sense of fun. We lost the sense of things being larger than life. We lost the sense of someone creating a design that was as much an impressionistic interpretation of the movie as it was an accurate depiction of the contents of the package. And yet some of them were also that, much more than they are now.

And this, of course, is not specifically an issue with the Bond movies, but rather, a larger design trend. Remember when every new poster was blue and orange with some random ignited sparks somewhere in the frame, whether the movie featured sparks or not? That may have been the nadir of this sad loss of inventiveness. 

We can only hope that the arrival of a new James Bond heralds a new way to imagine a Bond poster, perhaps one that harkens back to these joyous works of art from the 1960s and 1970s. 

And that may happen. The posters that seem to resonate most with us nowadays are the intentional throwbacks, the ones that mimic the design, for example, of famed Star Wars poster artist Drew Struzan. Nothing makes us geek out more, for example, than to see the kids from Stranger Things oriented as they would be in a Star Wars sequel, with ephemera from the show surrounding them on all sides.

Let's hope the next Bond puzzle, released 15 years from now with the retirement of the next Bond, has a fifth quadrant -- if you will -- that makes us forget the mistakes of the fourth. 

Metacritic has fallen on hard times

Ever since I first became aware of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, which I think was about the same time, I have been steadfastly a Metacritic supporter. That's even though Rotten Tomatoes is by far the better known and more culturally referenced method of compiling critic and user reviews to reach a single score that represents the value of a cultural item.

It wasn't a methodology thing. In the past I have looked into how Metacritic does things and how RT does things, and if anything, Metacritic utilizes the more mysterious, inscrutable means of producing its scores. I believe they have even come under fire for being less strictly data driven or less accountable to explaining their procedures.

Really, it came down to what it comes down to in a lot of these situations for me: Presentation.

I always liked how Metacritic looked -- its fonts, its layout, its whole gestalt. Meanwhile, I thought Rotten Tomatoes looked like it had been made by a child who had mastered web design -- a very competent child, but nonetheless, one who liked childish things. Like I have never gotten into the tomato splats. They just look like something you'd see on Nickelodeon's official website.

I'm not saying I feel any more favorably toward Rotten Tomatoes than I once did. I almost never visit the site.

But neither do I almost ever visit Metacritic, which has become a shadow of its former self.

The first problem I noticed a couple years ago was that the site was absolutely crippled by ads. On any page you tried to reach, there would be at least one video and usually a couple other Java-powered ads scrambling around to get your attention. Sometimes you'd have to close ads just to get to your content, but the ads themselves would contain false icons that made you think you were closing the ad when really you were clicking to learn more information about the product. Or there would be multiple ads for the same item with the content sandwiched in the middle, in a reading area that was truncated from its previous real estate.

I can be frustrated when a thing like this happens, but I also understand it. The reality is, it takes revenue to run a website. If you don't have other streams of income, you have to rely on advertising more and more. And the advertisers knew what they were doing, making their ads increasingly pernicious and increasingly debilitating to the usability of the site. (According to me, they did not know what they were doing, because any ad you perceive as pernicious should not be effectively selling the product. But it must have worked with some people because you still see these sorts of ads.)

I don't notice Metacritic being destroyed by ads these days as much as I once did. Maybe the advertisers wised up, or maybe Metacritic wised up. Now, it's an issue of functionality that has nothing to do with the effect of the ads. 

When I liked No Time to Die but was curious to see whether I liked it more or less than other critics, I went to Metacritic to get a sampling of their opinions. And this is what I found when I tried to search for it:

One of the biggest movies of 2021 cannot be found on a site dedicated to reviews of culture, through a normal search of its title.

Now, I know No Time to Die has a page on Metacritic because I googled it. That took me to the page and allowed me to see that the movie has a 68 score, which is almost exactly aligned with my own 7/10 (3.5 star) rating I gave it on ReelGood. In fact, I hesitated a little between 6 and 7, never seriously considering 6, but knowing I had enough qualms that a 7/10 was not a slam dunk. That uncertainty on my part computes to a 68 Metascore almost exactly.

Now why couldn't I have just found this by searching the site?

I suspect it has something to do with the lack of distinctiveness of the four words in the title. Those four words would appear in countless other titles, and it's possible that they just don't bring up the film when taken in combination with each other. A major malfunctioning of the site's core search architecture, to be sure, but one that at least has some sort of explanation.

But let's conduct the search from the very page itself, something that does not change the way the search performs, but just looks funny in context.

Sorry, that's a bit small, but maybe you can zoom in, or just wait for me to explain what we're seeing in the next paragraph. 

In this particular instance it does give some results, as it is searching all of Metacritic, rather than the focused movie search I did previously. The titles it does produce are not only significantly more obscure than the movie I'm searching, but they also feature common words that would appear in multiple titles. If my previous explanation for the failed search holds water, then why is the 2014 iOS game "No one dies" able to be found? Those words are certainly no more common in frequency in the database than "No time to die."

My goal today is not to roast and lambast Metacritic. It's actually far more solemn than that. It's to mourn the solid product I used to love and to visit on a weekly basis. Nowadays, I might go months between trying to use this as a resource to gauge critical consensus on a movie, and the latest James Bond movie is a reminder why.

The sad thing is that I'm not going to RT either. I'm just not looking up these critical consensuses, something I used to dearly enjoy and consider a key aspect of my engagement with the movies. 

Our relationship with any form of culture evolves over time, but when that change is forced by an external failure like this one, rather than something essential about our own changing perspectives, it's disappointing indeed.

No time to run out of gummy snakes

You'll see shortly why I chose a No Time to Die poster featuring Ben Whishaw's Q.

Although I had expected to see the latest James Bond movie on Sunday night, as per my last post, it took until Wednesday due to the ever-popular "abundance of caution" related to COVID. My younger son is actually quarantining for two weeks because someone in his class got COVID, and one or two others have subsequently tested positive. Although I never rant about COVID protocols, because I am a strong supporter of the progressive-minded caution that gives birth to them, I do think it's weird that we quarantine kids for two weeks after we've basically given up trying to contain the virus. Isn't it likely that a kid in every class out there has COVID and we just have to deal with that?

But by Tuesday our whole family had already gotten two negative COVID tests back since Friday, so it was time for me to venture out for only my third movie in the theater since theaters opened again three weeks ago. For some people, one movie a week might be a lot -- for me, it means I'm falling terribly far behind at the wrong time of year to do so.

I had been dreading this one a bit. The two hour and 43-minute running time figured to be quite the challenge for me, as I have been falling asleep at home during movies less than half that length. Despite really liking the latest movie in my noir series, 1945's Detour (post to come), I actually fell asleep during its 67-minute running time. (I always have the presence of mind to pause in this scenario to avoid missing anything.)

So I came equipped with two cans of Pepsi Max and an extra-large bag of gummy snakes. 

(I can't just throw out the Pepsi Max reference and leave it without comment. I am historically a Coke man. For some reason I decided I liked the taste of Pepsi Max better than the taste of No Sugar Coke. I'm still wrestling with it.)

In past 163-minute movies, that bag of gummy snakes would have been just the starting point. I'd throw some chocolate in there too as a different sort of sweet that might give me a little jolt when I needed it most. But I'm also trying to lose some weight right now. I could fall off the wagon a bag of gummy snakes' worth in order to not let No Time to Die beat me, but I wasn't willing to fritter away any recent dieting gains more than that.

But how to make an open bag of gummy snakes last?

I'm one of those people who will eat and eat a movie snack until it is gone. I can't set aside some for later. I can make a drink last, but not food. It's just not how I'm programmed.

Well I decided I needed to change my programming for this one. So I had to come up with a method.

The first part of that method was to hold off on starting them as long as possible. But after a very long pre-credits sequence that effectively involves two cold opens, I found myself tearing the bag. So time for strategy #2.

And I thought, let's make a drinking game out of this.

I would allow myself five gummy snakes at a time, each to be eaten in segments, but I would wait for another particular milestone in the movie to pass before I got my next five. Just as how someone might watch Austin Powers and drink every time he says "Yeah baby!", I decided to eat every time ... well, not every time the same thing happened, but every time the next new thing I'd chosen happened.

The opening sequence had involved only two actors I knew, Daniel Craig and Lea Seydoux -- and also Rami Malek behind a mask, though it was only my knowledge that it was Malek that helped me determine that. So my first milestone was to wait until an actor I could name appeared on screen. 

Not too long after the credits Naomie Harris became that person. Five more snakes.

The next one took a little longer. I decided I would wait for a gun to appear on screen. Shouldn't take that long in a Bond movie, but in this case, it was about 15 minutes. Ana de Armas was the one to draw a gun in the scene in Cuba. And while on the one hand I was desperate for my next portion of snakes, on the other hand I was pleased that this was working.

The next one also took a little while. I decided I was going to wait until a character we had been introduced to dies. I won't tell you who came through for me on that to avoid spoilers, but the risk paid off as I again waited about 15 minutes.

I thought I'd chosen too hard of a choice for my next one. I decided to wait until Seydoux's character appeared again. But then I panicked and thought "What if she doesn't reappear until the third act as a twist?" So I switched to the next time "007" was uttered. But I had to cheat a little here, because right on queue Seydoux did appear. I allowed that to count and took five more snakes.

Other milestones included the next time I saw fire on screen (I ended up allowing the burst of flame from a gun barrel to count), the next time I saw a "Bond gadget" (Q gave Bond his special watch only a few minutes later), and the next time I saw a flying object (bird or plane would have sufficed, but I went with an airborne car, which came only moments before a helicopter). There may have been one other in there. 

The last one -- the next time there were subtitles on screen, as two characters are French -- never arrived. But by then it was nearly the end of the movie and I had only one gummy snake left. At this point it made no sense to deny myself the last snake, so I ate it.

As for the Pepsi Max, I drank one and a quarter cans.

If you came to this post to figure out what I thought about the movie, well, I'm sorry to make you wait so long. I enjoyed it. Maybe because of my little game, or maybe just because of the successful pacing of the movie, this did not feel as long as I knew it was. That's a good thing of course. Means I was enjoying myself.

I kind of want to talk spoilers but I'm not going to do that today. Maybe in a couple days, with sufficient warnings, if I'm still thinking about it.

Oh, why did I choose Ben Whishaw's Q? 

Well, you may not have noticed this when you were watching, but I certainly did. Q actually eats gummy snakes/worms in this movie! As he is trying to crack some code on his computer, he picks from a modest bowl of gummies that contains about seven of the sugary reptiles. 

Presumably the task he was involved in carried no risk of putting him to sleep. 

Movies that last an eternity

As you know I've been on catch-up duty since the movie theaters reopened 16 days ago, though I haven't been fulfilling that duty with very much alacrity. Of course there are other things going on in my life right now, like the purchase of a new house, but even still, seeing only two movies in those 16 days is a pretty paltry pace -- especially when I'm trying to make up for lost viewings.

So I'm trying to go tonight, though I haven't mentioned it to my wife yet. But the options available, the ones I most need to watch to stay current on the film conversation, aren't very enticing, especially for a 9 o'clock viewing.

It's not their content, though I have to admit that the latest James Bond is feeling more like a duty than a pleasure to me right now. It's their length.

I've chosen Eternals for the artwork of this post as it perfectly exemplifies the phenomenon I'm talking about today (and goes well with my title for the post), though it's not a serious candidate for tonight's viewing, since I know it's coming to Disney+ before Christmas, and can pick it off then. 

I'm a bit Marveled out at the moment, but the really onerous thing about Eternals is its length: 157 minutes. If Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, my first return to the cinema, wore me out with 25 minutes' less girth, just imagine what the poorly reviewed Eternals will do to me with an extra half-hour of run time tacked on. 

Two other must-haves are better options, given that if I don't get them in the theater I may not get them at all before my deadline for closing off my 2021 list: the aforementioned No Time to Die, and Ridley Scott's latest, starring Adam Driver and Matt Damon, The Last Duel. (Side note: Isn't every duel somebody's "last duel"?)

When would those movies movies get me back out of my seat again, you ask?

No Time to Die: 163 minutes later.

The Last Duel: 153 minutes later.

Oy.

James Bond will probably win out, if only for reasons of practicality. I have a website to think about, and my ReelGood readers -- diminished in number though they may be -- will probably be most interested in a Bond review. It's something we have to do if we are going to be a "website of record" (kind of like The New York Times is a "paper of record"). Besides, the clicks help in whatever nebulous goal I'm trying to achieve.

But damn, that's the longest of the three movies I've mentioned so far, just 17 minutes shy of three hours. I can't even imagine what sort of artificial stimulants I might need to keep me awake for the whole movie, especially since I already know how early I've gotten up this morning (7:30, which is actually late for me), not to mention how poorly I've been napping in the afternoons.

The other options aren't significantly better. Jane Campion's first proper feature since 2009, The Power of the Dog, is a good contender, and has a regional interest to our audience as the director hails from New Zealand. That film's 126 minutes are downright modest compared to the others, but the film still keeps you in your seat for more than two hours. I've already decided to wait until video for a second Adam Driver movie in theaters, Annette, but that one is 139 minutes as well.

In fact, I can't find a single movie playing right now that meets either a reviewing need or a year-end list need that is under two hours.

Does it get any better from here? Not really. Dune, which releases December 2nd, and West Side Story are both 156 minutes. Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley is 139 minutes. Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, clocks in at a typically Andersonian 133 minutes. Even Ghostbusters: Afterlife is over two hours at 125 minutes. And though Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections don't have listed running times yet, 140 minutes would figure to be on the modest side for those two.

The only "big movie" still coming out this year that is reasonable in length is Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which has already opened in the U.S. but opens here in a few weeks. Somehow they brought this one in at only 97 minutes. Hallelujah. Too bad I didn't like the first one and may give this one a miss, to use the Australian phrasing.

Just so you aren't confused by why I'm writing this post today, this does not qualify as some sort of shocking revelation. I know movies are long these days. Studios once told directors to cut 20 minutes from a movie because they were worried that audiences would be scared off by the length. Now, following the "more is more" logic used by Netflix on their TV series (for example), studios are happy with that 20 minutes and might even prefer an additional 20 if you've got 'em lying around.

It's just that it feels like all the movies are long. There's no way to find something shorter unless you are going for a genre that has traditionally run shorter, such as comedy or horror, but even those movies run longer than they once did.

The consequence of this is that I have watched a bunch of movies lately where I needed to re-read the plot synopsis afterward to be sure I didn't miss anything. The last movie I saw in the theater, The Many Saints of Newark, was right on two hours exactly, but I started it at 9:15 after a long day, and that meant there were moments I missed as I nodded off. Given that it tackles more than a dozen characters and is trying to scratch an itch that has been building up in fans since The Sopranos ended in 2007, that's probably one that could reasonably have been even longer.

It's continued this weekend even with home viewings. The past two evenings I struggled through viewings of Titane (108 minutes) and Red Notice (117 minutes). Neither of those movies is too long in and of themselves, but life's cumulative exhaustion has left me less equipped to tackle them. And the longer movies I've watched have contributed to that. Even the ones I haven't watched yet are contributing to it in advance out of sheer anticipation.

Solutions? Stop watching movies I guess?

I just have to plow through. But complaining about it here helps, I guess. 

Buried under an avalanche of unavailable new movies

 As the release of No Time to Die comes and goes in the U.S., I am again reminded of how much work I'll have to do once this damn lockdown lifts.

It has now been more than two months since I last saw a film in the theater. It was Nine Days, Edson Oda's interesting existential experiment about souls jockeying for a chance to be born, which is a lot better than that description might sound. I watched it on August 4th without any knowledge, according to my recollection, that cinemas were about to enter a lengthy shutdown. We'd had a number of little week-long lockdowns which arrived and ended with equal suddenness. The one we're in now arrived that suddenly, but hasn't entered nearly so quickly.

The goal is no longer to get down to zero cases, which was actually something we've been able to do here in Victoria for the majority of this pandemic. The goal is now to reach a certain vaccination rate, 80% for those eligible to receive them, which I believe we've already done. Nonetheless, retail stores and cinemas are still set to remain closed for the rest of this month, if I'm understanding the current timeline correctly. 

Honestly, I've kind of given up paying attention to the little changes at this point. When my kids start to go back to school maybe I'll snap back to it. Until then, I know that catching the cavalcade of new releases in the U.S. is just a pipe dream.

This wasn't a problem last year. Last year, movies weren't coming out anywhere. In fact, our cinemas were open here a lot of the time that they weren't open in the U.S. That didn't necessarily mean we were getting new releases -- if they weren't coming out in the U.S., they certainly weren't coming out here -- but there were things trickling in that qualified as "new to us." That was enough.

This year, it's completely different.

Here is a list of things that I haven't had any access to seeing, but really feel like I would/should see before the year comes to a close:

No Time to Die

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

The Suicide Squad

The Many Saints of Newark

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

Candyman

Reminiscence

The Card Counter

Dear Evan Hansen

and less essential but still

The Addams Family 2

It's not uncommon for there to be a delay between the U.S. release of more independent films and awards contenders and their Australian release, but the blockbusters are usually within a day of each other -- and that day usually favors Australia as movies actually release on Thursdays here.

One film that's maybe already gone from cinemas in the U.S., but still hasn't been available here, is Free Guy, the film whose advanced screening I was scheduled to attend the following week when the last lockdown started. As an indication of how long it's been since we've been able to go to the movies, Free Guy is already available for streaming on Disney+. The family and I are likely to watch it this weekend, at which point I can finally review something that's not just another new mediocre Netflix or Amazon movie.

It's probably no coincidence that I'm now just feeling kind of deflated about movies in general. At the end of each month, I take stock of the best and worst movie I saw that month, something I record for posterity in a special area of my Microsoft Word document in which I record my new viewings. The best movie I saw in September was a documentary called Tim's Vermeer, which I finally watched after being unable to get it in time for the end of my 2014 movie year (as discussed in this post). It was one of only two September movies I gave four stars on Letterboxd, the other also part of my Documentary Alternate Tuesdays series, that being Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary. To give you some sense of how this feels like a reduction in my normal level of enthusiasm, usually I'm choosing between at least two movies I gave 4.5 stars. Of course, it could also just be a mediocre month, which does happen as well. 

The choices for worst? They were plentiful, but none better than Sweet Girl, a truly awful and truly idiotic Netflix thriller with a super dumb twist. 

It's not that I think the latest MCU movie, the latest Bond movie or a Sopranos prequel is likely to provide better candidates, and in fact, if the first Venom is any indication, a Venom sequel would be a better bet for my monthly worst. But The Card Counter is directed by Paul Schrader, the guy who made my #1 movie of 2018 (First Reformed).

More generally, without this interplay of new theatrical releases and new streamer releases, the experience of consuming new movies has just left me feeling lethargic and indifferent. At a time of year when I have usually long since shifted to prioritizing new releases over older films, this October I'm doing a deep dive into the horror movies of the 1970s. Which has its own sort of excitement associated with it, but not the type I'm accustomed to as I get within three months of finalizing my year-end list.

The good news, I suppose, is that I do appear to be getting out of this movie jail in about three weeks, and at that point, it may never return. Reaching the desired vaccination percentage means that lockdowns will be a thing of the past, in theory, since we acknowledge we can no longer contain COVID. If people choose not to protect themselves from it, that's on them.

In the meantime, I do have some options for not falling completely off the map in terms of new releases. Candyman, for example, is available for $19.99 rental on iTunes, and as it makes a perfect movie for the month of October, I will probably avail myself of that option at some point. The latest Saw movie and a new Netflix movie called There's Someone Inside Your House will both help me celebrate the month of Halloween and move me closer to my usual total number of films seen before I close off my list.

But I can't deny there's been something lost in this whole experience. Not only am I behind on the movies, I'm behind on the conversation about the movies. The inability to see the new releases has also made me less likely to listen to my movie podcasts, which are essential in situating me within the movie zeitgeist. I don't feel like I'm able to live in the moment of the end of the 2021 movie year. We'll see if I have enough time to find my way back to that.

James Bond has coronavirus

Apparently, James Bond doesn't think April is a very good time to die.

November would be much better.

As you've surely heard by now, the release of Daniel Craig's "last" James Bond movie (didn't we hear that two movies ago?) has been postponed due to COVID-19. No Time to Die was supposed to come out in April, but now Cary Fukunaga's film will debut in November instead.

Maybe that would have been a better time anyway -- more consistent with the last few Bond releases -- but the reasons for it make me uncomfortable. It threatens to set a bad precedent and to screw up our whole movie year.

What if every studio thinks it's not going to make enough money on its movie by releasing it during a coronavirus panic? It'll be a pretty shit summer movie season, then. (Even more shit than it already appears to be, I should say.)

I get that financial considerations must be, er, considered when you are talking about a movie that has cost the studio at least $200 million in terms of both budget and advertising. Whether those are the actual figures for No Time to Die or not, they represent a good estimate for movies of that calibre, probably even on the conservative side.

But I kind of feel like earnings are relative, right? A movie studio has a lot of money, so in this day and age, a flop will rarely bankrupt it. The most important function of a flop, in practical terms, seems to be to determine whether this type of a movie is a hit with audiences, worth making again in the future. The actual box office total should be graded on a curve, relative to other movies released at the same time, not held out as some kind of absolute.

Which would work if all the studios just went ahead with their current release schedule.

But that's not going to happen, because UA/Universal/MGM have already balked. They've already messed up the playing field.

Let's talk about No Time to Die in comparison to April's other big action movie, which so far has not been postponed: Black Widow. If both movies came out in April and made $50 million less domestically than we might have expected, we'd still have a good idea of their success related to each other. We'd still be able to write think pieces, for example, on whether we're stuck in our old-world obsessions with male action heroes, or whether we can get behind female action heroes just as easily.

Now, though, the whole equation has been thrown off. If Black Widow flops, we won't know if it's because of coronavirus, or because audiences don't like female action heroes, or just because Cate Shortland is a bad filmmaker (my vote is for the last one).

No Time to Die, though, could be exchanging the devil it knows for the devil it doesn't know. What if we are even more afraid of each others' germs in November than we are now?

I hope studios don't start cancelling the movie season. And it won't just be the tentpole movies that get moved, in theory. Every movie is judged by its own expected success, and a movie that needs to earn $10 million at the U.S. box office to be considered a winner may be just as concerned about recouping its production costs as the latest James Bond -- just as concerned about proving to investors they have invested their money correctly.

I don't know how it's all going to shake out, but I don't like it.

Meanwhile, people in Melbourne are buying up all the available toilet paper. Seriously.