Welcome to the PCU (Perfume Cinematic Universe)

If you've been reading this blog you likely know my affection for Tom Tykwer's 2006 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. This will be the eighth time I've tagged the movie on this blog, which is pretty high for a movie that isn't Star Wars or some other cultural touchstone that comes up for discussion on a regular basis.

So when I heard that Netflix was streaming another take on Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel that was adapted into Tykwer's film, of course I had to make it a priority.

If this poster is accurate, it actually came to Netflix more than two months ago, but I only just heard about it this week, it being a German language film and not highly promoted. A friend on Facebook had posted about seeing it, and about how much she had loved Tykwer's film -- which gave me all the feels, since I was the one who first recommended it to her as part of a movie challenge.

Well I can see why Netflix didn't promote it. It wasn't very good.

But I'm not here today to talk about the quality of The Perfumier (or Dar Parfumeur). Rather, I want to talk about the brand that Suskind seems to have unwittingly introduced into our world.

The Perfumier is not an adaptation of Suskind's novel, which was set in 18th century France. Rather, the film is billed as "Based on thematic elements of the novel Perfume by Patrick Suskind."

True enough, if you were familiar with the novel, you could not watch this movie and escape noticing that the ideas discussed -- murdering women to extract their scent, creating perfumes that overpower people into loving other people, people who have no sense of smell or give off no smell -- are straight out of Suskind's novel. To not credit him would have probably resulted in a lawsuit. 

However, the story is really pretty different from that in the novel. It's not just a 21st century update set in Germany and in the world of a police procedural. The protagonist is a cop rather than the perfumer (or perfumier), there are other sorts of olfactory potions that Suskind never wrote about, and the perfumer has an accomplice who makes no appearance in Suskind's text. Enough is different that they might almost have gotten away with not crediting Suskind. (Making that more difficult would have been the line of voiceover at the beginning that drives home not only the similarity the novel, but to Tykwer's film, as the narrator says "This is also the story of a murderer.")

Given that he clearly has an intellectual ownership over this material on some level -- and that this film clearly shows the potentially widespread application of that material's themes -- it made me wonder if it wouldn't be possible to construct an entire cinematic universe out of Suskind's IP.

Just think about the sort of other movies you could make:

1) A gifted scent maker who concocts specific smells to use as weapons. If he's being chased by someone, for example, he throws a capsule that releases an overpowering shit or vomit smell at their feet, and they double over wretching. It would be kind of like that character in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Orgazmo who has a gun that makes people instantly ejaculate when they are hit with it, only far less pleasant. 

2) The story of a mute man and his blind father, where a con man kills and captures the scent of the mute man, dousing himself with it to fool the blind father into thinking it's his son, then proceeding to bilk him out of all his money. (I guess it wouldn't really work to have a mute son and a blind father. Communicating only by touch is difficult. Maybe the con man would have to also get plastic surgery to really pull it off.)

3) A horse breeder who captures the smell of a superior horse and sprays it on an inferior horse in order to get an actual superior horse to breed with it.

Okay it's clear I don't have all the ideas. I'm not a screenwriter.

But the point is that there's a high concept here that has multiple potential applications. Maybe it would work better with short films, like The Animatrix, that anthology film that came out a month after The Matrix Reloaded and whetted our appetites for The Matrix Revolutions.

Or I could be making entirely too much out of a random filmmaker who had a single variation on Suskind's novel, and not a very good one at that.

Then again, why does The Audient exist if not to make too much out of things?

The movie was better

One of the oldest adages, if you want to call it that, regarding film adaptations of popular books is that "the book was better." And even as much of a cinema loyalist as I am, I get that, and often believe it myself.

But what happens when you're only getting around to reading the book after you've seen the film SIX TIMES?

I suppose that doesn't happen all that often, although maybe it does. If you've discovered you love a movie this much, you've probably also discovered you want to consume everything there is related to it, be that books, graphic novels, soundtracks, action figures or lunch boxes.

And so it was with me and Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, whose filmed version I have seen once each in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2018, and now 2020, having watched the movie Friday night after finishing the novel last weekend. 

The existence of, and high quality of, the novel is something I have known about throughout my 13-year-love affair with this movie -- almost exactly 13 years, as my original viewing of Tom Tykwer's 2006 film was on December 7, 2007. (No, didn't get to rank it in the year of its original release, to my great regret.) In fact, when I tried to sell a friend on its virtues very early on, he snootily insisted it would be impossible to film that great novel and that he would not even deign to watch such an attempt.

It took until my family and I were on a little book-buying spree while out of town in July -- to help a local bookstore that we imagined to be suffering under the ravages of the pandemic -- that I finally picked up Suskind's novel to read myself. 

It actually took longer to read this little slip of a book than I was expecting it would. It's a scant 260 pages, but it took me more than six weeks to finish it -- which is actually reasonably fast by my previous standards, but slow by my new 2020/pandemic standards, especially when I imagined from the first 40 pages that I might gobble it up in a week's time.

The eventual delay in completing it informs what I want to write about today, which is that the longer the story went on, the more I questioned Suskind's choices in how to tell it. Which is absurd, as the book was the original object, and the film I love so much only a filmmaker's attempt to honor its spirit. But just as you see deleted scenes from a movie and feel very glad they were not in the finished product, it's possible to see an adaptation of a book and realize just how shrewd the decisions were on what to include and what to excise. And that can't help but make the book seem like a bit of a shaggy dog, replete with passages it should not have included -- even when it is only 260 pages. 

Especially when you've seen the film six times.

So today -- hoping that I can get a good structure for this -- I want to discuss the core differences between the film and the text, and why I think that in almost every instance, the film made the better choice.

If you haven't either seen the movie or read the book, consider this your SPOILER WARNING. In truth, this post is probably best suited for people who know at least one of these pretty well, though by all means, read on, even if this does not describe you.

Note: I started writing this on Saturday, and I am only just now getting around to finishing it. Part of that was feeling a bit daunted about structuring this in an effective way, as it can be difficult to parse differences between two versions of the same "text" in anything other than a list. So instead of continuing to fuss about it, I just decided to make a list.

1) The first inkling the book gave me that I might not love it was its pacing, which is very inconsistent. In this case, the complaint about pacing goes hand in hand with a complaint about perspective. I'll try to explain. The book starts out like a house on fire, racing through its opening chapters and the opening chapters of antihero Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's life. (That's Ben Whishaw in the film.) That racing I consider to be a good thing. Suskind's elegant prose has a way of weaving together the broad strokes of Grenouille's early life without getting bogged down in the details, except as they are particularly illuminating of a broader idea -- a feat duplicated by John Hurt's narration in the film. We learn what we need to learn with an economy of phrasing and a knack for linguistic cleverness, and it's an exquisite read.

That is, until we meet Giuseppe Baldini, the perfumer played in the film by Dustin Hoffman. It is here that not only does the pace screech to a halt, but it leaves Grenouille's subjectivity in order to jump inside Baldini's head for like five straight chapters. Where Suskind relies on an economy of words earlier, here he seems to luxuriate in the inner thoughts of Baldini, spending as many words on several hours of mental deliberation by Baldini as he does on the first 15 years of Grenouille's life. We get some of this in the movie -- I think the scene where he tries to ascertain the ingredients of Amor and Psyche is great -- but we are still looking at Baldini as an outsider would, as Grenouille would if he were in the room with him. 

2) Because we spend so many consecutive chapters in his head in a way that really starts to feel redundant, we learn things about Baldini that it is not necessary to learn, that indeed we never learn in the film. We learn, for example, that Baldini feels he's at the end of the road as a perfumer and is thinking of selling his shop. We also learn that he was never a great perfumer, but made his fortune on two perfumes that were essentially pilfered from others without anyone knowing. I like the film's choice in this regard, which it states openly in the narration, much better. The film version of Baldini is, in fact, a genuine talent who has lost his one-time inspiration, leaving him over the hill. I like that better as a character detail for him than someone who was always a fraud. He can still be a stuffed shirt and a bit of a fool, but he also carries the tragedy we all carry as we age, where we can no longer do what we once could. In fact, the twinkle Baldini gets in his eye when he talks about his formative days in Grasse indicates a genuine love of the art, not a conman's sense of how to profit at any cost.

3) The middle portion of the book, after Grenouille leaves Baldini to head to Grasse, really made me scratch my head. In both versions he gets diverted by following his nose to a place devoid of smells, which is a cave in a mountainous area far away from all villages. As I watched the film, I noted that we do not learn how long he stays in this cave, appreciating the lack of olfactory stimulation, only that his hair and beard grow long. I think the only reference Hurt makes to the amount of time he spends there is "a while." Judging from the hair and beard growth, it seems to be a couple months.

In the book, Grenouille stays in this cave for seven years. Let that sink in a moment. We know Grenouille is an eccentric, but the book wants us to think that he is such an eccentric that he will literally hide in a cave for the better part of a decade, spending all his time perusing a mental library of the smells he has shelved away there. The book talks about how he survives by eating grubs and dead bats and the like. This goes on for seven years. Obviously, Tom Tykwer and his fellow screenwriters, Andrew Birkin and Bernd Eichinger, thought this was a ridiculous duration of time. Especially when Grenouille had had, up until recently, a burning passion to reach Grasse in order to learn what Baldini calls "the mysterious art of enfleurage," which he intends to use to capture the smell of living beings. (Make that, recently living beings.) Even someone as eccentric as Grenouille couldn't get distracted from that goal for more than a couple months.

4) When Grenouille returns to society in the book, he's so outlandish looking that he has to come up with a story to explain his appearance. He explains that he was kidnapped by bandits and imprisoned in the cave for seven years, fed by an unseen sympathetic person. He comes into contact with a marquis in the city of Montpelier, who has a theory about the impact of "fluidal energies" on human vitality, using Grenouille as his prime example of the theory. During this time Grenouille concocts a "normal human" scent for himself to wear as a perfume to convince people he is human, and not someone they should overlook due to his innate lack of scent. He becomes further disdainful toward people before finally moving along to Grasse.

None of this occurs in the film, including the entire character of the marquis. If Tykwer et al didn't think he could be distracted from Grasse for seven years, they certainly also didn't think he would make this needless diversion to Montpelier. They are right, of course.

5) The rest of the narrative more or less lines up, but I did think there was an important difference to how the end of the movie plays out that seems purely the creation of Tykwer and his collaborators. In both versions Grenouille works on a perfume that will combine the smells of multiple virginal young women, to create a scent so powerful he can make people instantly fall in love with him with just a drop of it. The movie, though, has technical details of this process that the book does not. Tykwer and company introduce the notion of the three parts of a perfume, the head, the heart and the base, which each have their own lengths of time after the perfumed is applied that they can still be perceived. Baldini explains this to Grenouille in the film but not the book. Baldini also talks about 12 individual chords that comprise the perfume, plus a 13th that rings out and dominates all the others. This becomes the basis for Grenouille setting up 13 little stoppered perfume vials that he eventually fills with the scents he extracts and distills from the women.

It's hard to believe that what seems like such a crucial part of the film's third act is entirely an invention of the film. This is not to say it is not based in scientific reality; I have no idea if it is or not. But it works dramatically, while also keeping us inside Grenouille's head for his entire spree killing the young women of Grasse, as this great montage of murder comes complete with shots of the vials being steadily filled, one by one. In the book, Suskind makes the curious decision not only not to talk very much about Grenouille's method, but to actually step away from his subjectivity entirely, as the murders are discussed almost as though a disinterested third party, a news reporter perhaps, is presenting them to us -- almost as though just as ignorant of the murderer's identity as the people of Grasse are.

6) Similarly, the film lays the groundwork for the possible power of the perfume Grenouille creates through a story from Baldini, which he calls a legend. He talks about the opening of a pharaoh's tomb, revealing a scent so ancient and so beautiful that "for one single moment, every person on earth thought they were in paradise." It's only because we are told about this at the beginning of the film that we believe the people's reaction to such a scent at the end. The book does not include this story either.

7) There is also a crucial difference between how the book perceives Grenouille and how the movie perceives him. The book considers Grenouille to be an intentional psychopath, the movie an accidental one. While this may be a concession to a film's greater need for audience sympathy for its characters, I also think it works better. In the book, Grenouille intentionally strangles the fruit seller in Paris as a means of possessing her scent. In the film, he covers her mouth after she cries out, not wanting to attract the attention of a couple young lovers descending the stairs nearby. He's such an id and so unacquainted with empathy that he does not realize he's suffocating the girl until she's already dead, and is at first horrified by what he's done. No such complex emotions exist in the book.

The film doubles back on this in a way that I also find very effective. In Grenouille's climactic moment of triumph, when he has enslaved the people of Grasse and reduced them into an orgy of carnal chaos, he can't live in that moment of victory because the sexual activity reminds him of his first sense of love or lust for the fruit seller. He becomes overwhelmed by melancholy and in that moment realizes that the entire direction of his life has been a mistake. He imagines the fruit seller welcoming his attentions and them entwined in a tender romantic interaction. We seem to know, in that moment, that he realizes that the other way to possess a scent is to love the bearer of that scent, and to earn her love in return.

8) Grenouille has a melancholy epiphany of sorts in the book as well, but nothing about the forgotten fruit seller is suggested. In fact, I can't remember if anything about Grenouille's interior life is suggested in that scene at all. The scene reaches its climax when Antoine Richis (Alan Rickman in the film) pushes through the orgy to try to attack Grenouille, ultimately succumbing to the same overwhelming feelings of love as the other characters, even though he has the greatest reason to hate Grenouille.  Grenouille killed his daughter -- Laure (in the book), Laura (in the film, where she is played by Rachel Hurd-Wood) -- yet he is powerless to exact revenge. This is the same in both the film and the book, and when Richis begs for forgiveness in the film, he calls Grenouille "my son." In the book, though, Grenouille faints, only to awaken later in a bed at Richis' house. Here, Richis proposes in a more literal fashion that he would like to serve as a father to Grenouille.

There are a couple reasons this doesn't work for me. First, "my son" is all you really need -- anything else puts too fine a point on it. The bigger problem, though, is that Richis' affection for him extends beyond an indefinite period of unconsciousness by Grenouille, as well as a change of location. I much prefer the scent, even as powerful as it is, to be a temporary spell cast over those who smell it, and when they awaken from it -- as the Grasse citizens do after their orgy -- they are mystified by the power it had over them. I also prefer Grenouille maintaining his upper hand in that scene, walking out of the city of Grasse under his own power, rather than having to be nursed, however temporarily, at Richis' house.

I know this is getting quite long but I have to mention a few other smaller things:

9) In the film, we are introduced to a teenage boy and girl in Grasse, who flirt in the fields and then have an abortive sexual encounter in a barn. At first, when I was watching the film, I forgot what their plot function was. It turns out she's Grenouille's first victim, and I think it's useful to introduce her to us, however briefly, as a way of setting the stakes. We don't meet any of Grenouille's other victims in the book.

10) Perhaps needing a scene of tension that is uniquely cinematic, Tykwer et al created a set piece related to this girl that is also not in the book. Before he has mastered his technique about how to distill the smells of these girls, he puts this girl's whole body in a big tank of water that is meant to boil down the essence of things like flowers. During this experiment he is nearly discovered by another townswoman as well as the woman who employs him and her brutish assistant. The tension in the scene works, and it has no antecedent in the novel.

11) The film also has a scene of hide and seek in a hedge maze, that recalls similar scenes from both Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Shining. This is also in the interest of dramatizing the disappearance of some of Grenouille's other victims, in this case a pair of sisters in one fell swoop. It may not be strictly necessary, but it helps establish the opulence of upper class society in Grasse. Again, not in the book.

12) I'll mention one last difference between the book and the film that comes from going into another character's subjectivity, when it would be much better off staying with Grenouille. In the book, we learn more than we do in the film about Richis, Laure/Laura's father. We learn more about his industry, his wealth -- and his feelings about his daughter. In fact, we learn that he shares an inclination toward incest with Donald Trump, as the novel discusses the woozy feeling he sometimes gets in the presence of his daughter, and his actual wish that he were just another man rather than her father so he could be her lover. As with Baldini, I don't know why we need to undercut this man in this way. It seems preferable that Richis is just a proper, God-fearing man who tries to do right by his daughter by going to great lengths to protect her from a murderer -- and despite doing everything right, still loses her. 

I should close by saying that my reaction to the novel was something I could have easily predicted. I have a theory that the first version of something you consume is the version you like best, which I most often apply to songs. If you hear the original first and fall in love with it, the remix doesn't stand a chance, but if it's the remix you hear first, the original won't hold a candle to it.

But so it is also with books and movies. I remember listening to the audio book of The Hunger Games back when I had about a 45-minute commute in Los Angeles traffic to and from work. This was after I had seen the film -- twice, I think. And I had the same reaction. There were parts of the book that the filmmakers left on the cutting room floor, or never filmed in the first place. And almost without exception those seemed like the right choices to me.

It'll never be possible to test this sort of thing, as it's not possible to un-read or un-see something in order to recreate an experience of consuming the other first. But I do think you can say, without too much bias, that a certain section of a book really didn't do anything for the book, like the part where Grenouille goes to Montpelier before he gets to Grasse. I'd like to think that even as I was reading that, had I been reading it first, I would have been able to look back after I finished and determined that it was not an essential passage.

Which is what Tom Tykwer and company decided as they were adapting it, which is why they are very smart men. 

In the final analysis, I regret that this post will have the effect of casting aspersions of Patrick Suskind's novel. It's a wickedly entertaining novel and I very much enjoyed reading it. It's just the movie set such high expectations that I was never going to be able to enjoy it as much as I wanted to enjoy it, which is why I couldn't sustain the fast pace I started out with. 

What can you say? Sometimes the movie really is better. Or, at the very least, just so damn good that it blinds you to any strengths of the source material that may have the audacity to differ from the way it was adapted for the screen. 

Taking new things for spins

It's been a weekend of trying new things on the movie home viewing front.

Originally this post was going to be entitled "Taking our new TV for a spin," but then a second "new" type of experience presented itself, even though it's of a more superficial nature.

But let's start with the big one.

We got a new TV this past week. It was something of a surprise, as in, we didn't even really talk about it. In fact, it was all transacted in a couple emails while I was at work one day.

We've had a pretty modestly sized 30" TV since moving to Australia, even replacing it with the same 30" make and model when the first one died after about two-and-a-half years. The price was right so we hoped it wouldn't have the same mechanical failure this time, and it hasn't so far. But some additional stability in our finances (I got some new security in my job) and end of financial year sales tempted my wife to check out the possibilities for an upgrade. A scant few days later, a 43" TV arrived on our doorstop.

I guess that means it's nearly 50% larger, and the difference is significant.

We originally expected it last Friday, and in fact, my wife made sure she didn't stray far from the house or for very long, in order to be around for their ridiculous 12-hour delivery window. It didn't come that day, meaning I couldn't revisit a visually dynamic favorite movie from my collection last weekend as anticipated. That was the way I wanted to symbolically break the thing in. But it did arrive the following Monday, meaning I ultimately had to make my first movie on it ... High Plains Drifter, which you know I really didn't like if you read this post.

But I knew another weekend, a three-day weekend, was on tap in just a few short days. We celebrate the queen's birthday here in Australia, so no one is working on Monday. Even though the queen's actual birthday is in April. But we have like four other holidays in April and none in June. (In fact, without the queen's birthday celebrated in June, we wouldn't have a single public holiday between the end of April and the middle of September. And that September holiday was just introduced since I've moved here, meaning the drought formerly lasted until November.)

So this past Friday night I planned the real debut of the new TV after its previous "soft open." And that was ... Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Perfume is one of a dozen "new favorites" that I watch every couple years ... "new" being defined as "post 2000" I guess. And since I do watch these movies pretty frequently, I was kind of surprised to see it had been more than three years since my last Perfume viewing. I originally planned to involve my wife in this viewing, since she had stated a desire to watch the movie again herself, having seen it only once. But she was too tired on Friday night, for any movie let alone a 140-minute one. I imagine she saw the disappointment in my eyes, and never wanting to hold up one of my own viewings for her schedule, she urged me to continue with it anyway. (She'll probably be content to wait another two years for her second viewing, at which point I'll be ready for my seventh.)

And yeah, it looked pretty effing great on the new TV.

This is going to be fun.

I should also mention it is, of course, a smart TV, but I couldn't have anticipated the ways in which that intelligence would present itself. Without even pairing them, the TV now has dominion over our BluRay player. That's right, its remote control allows us to control the BluRay player controls. Which is no small thing, because our BluRay remote has been dead for at least two years and we've been using an app on our phones to control it. That app relies on the WiFi, so if we are having internet problems, we can't use it. BluRays or DVDs are a good alternative to Netflix if we are having internet issues ... but not if we can't play them. (There are certain things you can control with buttons on the front, but certain things you can't, and some of those things are insurmountable.) So yeah, this is big, and though I suppose it also relies on the internet in some way, it's possible it does not. Hey, I don't profess to fully understand all this stuff.

The second night of the three-day weekend didn't involve another visual feast on the order of Perfume, but it did feature my second "new" type of viewing experience of the weekend.

Namely, I've got a new supplier for my movie kiosk needs.

Even though the rest of the world has moved away from physical media, I still like going to a kiosk and renting a movie ... even if it usually involves going out of my way on the second day to return it. It's the last vestige of the experience of going to a proper video store, which is now well and truly dead.

Kiosk rentals looked to be dead too, as I have witnessed and written about the steady demise of the Hoyts kiosks I've been using since moving here. They may be entirely gone now; I'm not going to their possibly former website at this moment to find out, as it's too depressing.

But in a sign of some optimism for the delivery method if not for Hoyts in particular, the last Hoyts kiosk I used, at the Woolworth's in Moonee Ponds, has actually been replaced with a different brand of kiosk. In all previous other instances I'd witnessed of a Hoyt kiosk vanishing, it disappeared from the location without a successor. But the Moonee Ponds Woolworth's now has a Video Ezy kiosk where the Hoyts one formerly stood.

Pretty much the same deal, except I think the movies are $4 rather than $3.50. That, of course, is not a deal breaker for me. The time and gas required to get to and from the store probably cost me twice that much.

That's not my closest Woolworth's, but I was going that way Saturday morning anyway because I needed to pick up my bike from the bike shop, where it had undergone some repairs. I had gotten a glimpse of the new Video Ezy kiosk on a previous occasion, and this time I planned to use it.

And fortunately, the first movie that came up when I browsed was one my wife and I both wanted to see: Game Night.

Alas, she ended up skipping out on this viewing too. We were over at a friend's house for dinner last night, and though I thought we might return around 8:30, it was nearly 10 o'clock when we got home. I will of course watch a movie starting after 10, especially a short one like Game Night. Not so with my wife, who was ready to retire to the bedroom with the TV shows that she watches that I don't.

Unfortunately, the drawbacks of the single-night rental experience were underscored by Saturday night's example. If I'd had my druthers, I might have put off my viewing of Game Night for a time when a) my wife could also watch and b) I myself was not so tired. But if $4 won't break the bank for me, $8 might, so I couldn't/wouldn't extend my rental of the movie a second night.

And so I can barely tell you what happened in Game Night, as I slept several times during it. I paused it each time and rewound when I noticed I'd slept through some actual content, but the whole thing is a bit of a mishmash in my memory. I do know that I marginally enjoyed it.

And also that it looked pretty effing great on our new TV.

A Perfume for rats

Ratatouille wasn't what I had hoped to come home with from the library on Tuesday. I had a different Pixar in mind to watch with my four-year-old, who still hasn't seen The Incredibles despite his love of superheroes. Getting a plate and bowl set emblazoned with Mr. Incredible and family seemed like just the nudge I needed to go track down a copy.

Although you can usually find plenty of Pixar on the library shelves, The Incredibles was nowhere to be seen. So I grabbed Ratatouille, Frozen and The Jungle Book, figuring that we'd get to watch either a movie I wanted to rewatch, a movie I probably needed to rewatch, or one I'd never seen, respectively, during my younger son's nap on Wednesday morning.

Suspecting he'd choose his fourth viewing of Frozen if given the chance -- and that my feelings toward it probably wouldn't improve significantly on a second viewing -- I ended up leaving that out of the options. He picked Ratatouille over The Jungle Book.

Given that Ratatouille is not "kid-friendly Pixar" -- a strange statement to make, but I think you get what I mean -- I immediately had my doubts about his ability to watch the whole thing. Its length was one of the (minor) complaints I had about this movie back when I saw it in 2007, so it surprised me that it turned out to be less than 100 minutes before the credits rolled (with a total running time of 111, including credits). It also surprised me that he actually mostly paid attention, only becoming distracted by his toys a couple times, but then snapping back to attention when something unexpected or startling happened. If he'd been paying full attention he might have had fewer follow-up questions, but then again, he's at an inquisitive age. There are enough things going on in this movie that would go over the head of a child that I'm kind of surprised he didn't ask more.

Of course, at his young age, I'm not quite as interested by what my son might get out of it as I am about my own takeaways. And I had a rather funny one with my second viewing of Ratatouille: It bears a rather striking resemblance to one of my favorite movies of 2006, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

Consider:

1) Both films have to do with a character known for his freakish sense of smell. Remy, however, is recognized as a prodigy (he can save his rat brethren from eating poisoned food) while Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is just an unnerving outcast.

2) Both characters aspire to greatness. Remy wants to be an outstanding chef, while Jean-Baptiste wants to become a great perfumier.

3) Both characters lack the means to demonstrate their greatness, so they do it through an intermediary. Remy uses his skills to make Linguini seem like Paris' greatest new chef, while Jean-Baptiste props up the sagging perfume business of Giuseppe Baldini by becoming his behind-the-scenes new talent.

4) Both characters are animals, in a way. Remy is, of course, a rat, and Jean-Baptiste's last name is the French word for "frog" -- though this is more likely a reference to him being a "frog," as in a Frenchman. (The character is supposed to be sort of a cypher, and so his name is essentially John the Baptist Frenchman -- which gets the religious allegory in there as well.)

5) Both characters are constantly being hunted. Every human Remy comes across wants to kill him, while the authorities of Grasse are desperately seeking a serial-killing Grenouille -- though they don't know he is the one they're looking for until very near the end.

6) Both characters murder young girls in order to distill their scents. Okay, wait, Remy doesn't do that.

7) Both movies spend a good chunk of time in Paris.

Not quite as profound as my comparison of Whiplash and Birdman, but enough for a blog post, anyway.

A week of judgment comes to a close

This past week I participated in a fun activity organized by Hannah Keefer on her blog Hannah and Her Movies. It was actually more organized on Facebook, with her blog playing a co-sponsorship role.

Hannah decided to do something really ambitious this year: She's watching one movie per day. That in itself is not the part that takes a lot of coordination. She's leaving 71% of the movies she watches (each of the weekday movies) up to her friends. Or in my case, acquaintances she met through the Flickchart discussion group. (You could call us friends, because we have quite a friendly interaction, but I have never met her in person.)

So she put the call out for interested parties to claim a week, and each person would then give her one title for each weeknight of that week. The initial response was overwhelming, so I didn't even have one of the 52 spots at first. However, someone dropped out, so this alternate became a full-fledged curator. I was assigned the week of February 10th to 14th, and had her a list of five within minutes.

(Do I sound like a guy who sits around, just waiting for the opportunity to recommend movies to people? Nah.)

Hannah's been calling this Hannah's Movie Challenge Adventure 2014, and she has a Facebook group set up to join together the people who are participating, and as kind of a home base for the project. That's where we have most of the discussion about the movies she's seeing, but she does also write about each on Hannah and Her Movies. And yes, I do consider it a shame that people seem to be more interested in having lively film discussions through Facebook groups than through the comments sections of blogs. :-)

Here are the movies I chose, and here were her responses to them:

Monday, February 10th: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Well, dang. This was a good start to Vance's week. A crazy, almost fantasy-esque serial killer movie with an incredible soundtrack and a great story. I loved it, though I had to think about it for a little while after it ended to decide whether I did or not."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4.5

My comment: I was riding high at this point. Perfume is one of my favorite movies to share with people. No one I've recommended it to hasn't liked it.

Tuesday, February 11th: Agora (2009, Alejandro Amenabar)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Another movie I knew almost nothing about and ended up really enjoying. It had kind of unusual subject matter, like Perfume did yesterday -- I'm not sure I can think of another movie I've seen about a female philosopher. Nice pick."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: Pretty pleased with that, especially since Agora has not been a hit with everyone to whom I recommended it. It does feel a bit more like my movie than Perfume, since it's significantly more obscure. 

Wednesday, February 12th: What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)

See what I've written about this movie here and here. 

What Hannah said on Facebook: "The movies this week appear to be losing a half a rating every day... From 4.5 to 4 to 3.5. Hmm. But I still liked this one. The interactions in the movie felt very real, even if it was sometimes difficult to watch because of that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 3.5

My comment: It didn't occur to me that yeah, not everyone wants to watch warring exes yell at each other about what they want to do -- or not do -- with their daughter. Glad Hannah liked it enough to give it a half-star higher than merely thumbs up.

Thursday, February 13th: Bound (1996, Larry & Andy Wachowski)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Unfortunately, this one broke Vance's streak of movies I really enjoyed. It's tough for me to really care about crime movies, though I did enjoy the characters and watching them interact."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 2

My comment: That's a shame. Bound is another personal favorite to recommend, and no one's ever turned their nose up at it to this extent. However, if she doesn't like the genre, she doesn't like the genre. Not a lot a person can do about that.

Friday, February 14th: Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nick Stoller)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "And my final movie of the week, which I found both funny and heartwarming. I'm glad Vance picked this one, as I'd been meaning to get around to it for a really long time. I had a bunch more written here, but then I realized it was pretty much just all the same thing I said in the review, so if you want to know more, you can read that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: I figured this would end the week on a winning note. For the record, I didn't intentionally pick this for Hannah and her husband to watch on Valentine's Day, but I'm glad it worked out that way.

                                    ************************

Note: You may notice that many of my picks are recent. In fact, four of the five came out in the last eight years. Well, Hannah is in her twenties, and I gambled on her liking new things better. That said, I also know she's a fan of musicals, and those had their heyday decades ago. 

It's funny that I ended up dwelling on her dislike of Bound, because really, four out of five is pretty darn good. The five movies had an average of 3.6 stars for her, which means I certainly didn't waste her time this week. And yet we tend to be so sure that the movies we love are great, that it can be an oddly personal kind of blow when someone doesn't like even one of them.

The competitor in me was a tad disappointed, too, since Hannah is keeping track of who has made the best picks for her by computing the average Flickchart position of the new movies she's ranked. One guy (another from the Flickchart Facebook discussion group) already has me beat with a slightly higher average, and it's only February. Oh well, I'll shoot for finishing in the top ten.

Overall, this was incredibly fun. I really looked forward to Hannah's daily posts (which would arrive in my inbox around 4:15 p.m. my time), with her latest assessment of a movie I'd suggested. I guess it felt kind of like when someone asks you to make them a mix. "What? You want me to show you what I think is awesome? Sure!"

And the truth is, Hannah thought most of the things I thought were awesome, were awesome, too.

Cool.

If Neo and Lola had a baby

Three directors.

Two men and one former man who now identifies as female.

Two siblings (once brothers) and one who isn't related to them.

Two Americans and one German.

The directors of two of the best films of 1999 (The Matrix and Run Lola Run).

Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski, as they are credited. Always in that order. (Ladies first I guess.)

However you slice it, Cloud Atlas is going to be interesting.

But will it be good?

Cloud Atlas looks like the classic example of a love-it-or-hate-it movie, and so far, the hate-its seem to be winning. You could say that its 52 Metascore means that those two opposing sentiments are averaging out almost perfectly, but if you were translating that score into a letter grade, it would be an F, not the C you would expect for a love-it-or-hate-it movie. (Then again, a straight translation doesn't work -- whereas a score of 59 or lower is an F in school, you're really probably looking at a Metascore of 25 or lower for the equivalent of an F. So I guess 52 probably really is a C, since it is described as "Mixed or Average Reviews.")

Yeah, I probably could have reconfigured that last paragraph to remove my faulty initial assumption altogether.

In any case, Cloud Atlas looks very much like the next installment in my series of movies that are "Too Shebulba," as described in this post. To refresh your memory, the term was inspired by Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, in which the characters appear in several different time periods and the futuristic version of Hugh Jackman is left whispering the word "Shebulba!" at a tree floating through outer space. One of my commenters corrected my spelling of the term, explaining that the character is referring to the Mayan underworld Xibalba. However, the term was born as "Shebulba," and that's how it will stay for my purposes.

In fact, if Cloud Atlas most closely resembles one single movie, I'd say The Fountain is it. Especially as it seems to focus on a man and a woman whose love affair stretches out over generations and in different incarnations of themselves -- here Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, there Jackman and Rachel Wiesz. And if it does really resemble The Fountain, that's bad news for me, since I found that movie to be an interesting failure at best.

But then I return to the directors themselves, and consider some of the boundary-pushing movies they've made over the years. I mentioned The Matrix and Run Lola Run, but each director or directing pair has a second movie that I absolutely love -- in the case of the Wachowskis, even more than The Matrix, and in the case of Tom Tykwer, slightly less than Run Lola Run. The Wachowskis' Bound is among my 30 favorite films of all time, and Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is probably among my top 50. Both movies mesmerize me, and both demonstrate that these directors or directing teams have the kind of range that could make them perfect choices for an ambitious opus like Cloud Atlas.

I will probably find out Sunday night. Until then, I will continue to marinate in a sense of wary anticipation about what kind of weird and potentially brilliant oddity lies ahead of me.

I'm projecting? Damn right I am!

Thursday was my birthday.

It's okay if you didn't remember. You can make it up to me by sending presents to the following address:

Vance Tastic
P.O. Box THX 1138
Hollywoodland, CA 90036

But I don't really need any more presents, because the best one I got was the ability to spend Friday night in a hotel. A damn seedy hotel (my choosing) near my work. It wasn't the seediest one I could have picked -- that would have been the one down the street that was advertising rooms for $44 a night. Seeing that this one had wifi, I opted for it at a price of $73 including tax. Still pretty good for a hotel that's within three miles of LAX.

My wife has done this twice as a treat -- staying over at a hotel in your own city, to get some time to yourself and sleep in. This was my first time, and I chose a seedy hotel in order to save money. I didn't need to be pampered at this hotel -- I just needed it to be a different place to spend Friday afternoon, Friday evening and Saturday morning, a place that would allow me to sleep in without a young boy getting me up at 6:30 on a weekend morning.

Oh, and I needed it to be a place where I could watch movies.

See, when I have time to myself with no other responsibilities, I binge on movies. I look forward to few things more than an uninterrupted stream of whatever movies I want to watch: marathons of my own choosing. And since it has happened so rarely in the days since I've been a) a husband and b) a father, the need to binge is even stronger. So during these times, I barely pause to do anything else.

A key to a movie marathon, however, is that you get to watch the movies you want to watch. You don't want to leave it up to circumstance. So I knew my hotel TV would be playing no role in this marathon. I'd be watching movies on my laptop, either streamed (depending on the strength of the wifi) or on DVD. That was the only way to curate the marathon for myself. (I'd intended to re-watch Trainspotting on Netflix streaming, but had to give up after 30 seconds because it continued buffering. This ruled out streaming as an option for the rest of the evening.)

But watching a movie on a laptop is somewhat less than ideal. The real way to go is to make it special in some way, and about ten days ago, the idea how to do that struck me:

A projector.

Not the kind you see in the photo above, but the kind you see in the photo here:

It's the kind of projector you can hook up to a laptop. People in the business world use it most often for Powerpoint projections and the like, but you don't have to use it that way. It'll project whatever's on the screen.

A movie, for example.

And I knew I had access to a projector like this. Two, actually. My company has two of them, and since I'm a member of the IT department, it's my department that takes custody of them.

The thing is, they're not cheap. If they were, more of us would probably own them, since watching a movie on a projector is gooooood. But I believe both of the ones we have cost over a grand -- possibly over two grand.

My boss would still probably let me borrow one of them. That was my guess, anyway. Especially if I told him it was for "bringing the movies home" -- a treat for my birthday in which my wife and I, who can barely ever go to the movies together anymore, would watch a movie projected on our own wall at home. (Which turned out not to be a lie, as I will get to later.)

However, I thought of the old adage that it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. I know where my boss keeps the projector and there'd be little chance he'd come looking for it from Friday until Monday. I seriously considered just snatching it, because this way there'd be no way he could deny me. If I asked and he said "No," then the jig was up.

Ultimately, I decided to give my conscience a break and just ask him for it. He agreed immediately, and only asked why I needed it as a way of making conversation. I told him I'd be very careful with it, though he did not even seem to require that assurance.

Score.

Combine this score with my wife's insistence that I report straight to the hotel after work on Friday, and by about 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon, I was already setting it up in a seedy hotel on Imperial Highway in Hawthorne.

How seedy? When I went next door to the liquor store to pick up some drinks shortly after checking in, I was stopped by a guy on a bike who wanted to sell me a watch. Fortunately, I extricated myself from that situation without incident, and before no time, I was watching movies.

Movie #1: The Girl Next Door (2004, Luke Greenfield)

I had a couple candidates for the first slot on Friday afternoon, but ultimately settled on this movie from my own collection -- which I'd watched thrice before -- as a nice guilty pleasure to usher me into the marathon. I actually consider The Girl Next Door to be better than a guilty pleasure, but if you are judging it only by the poster, you might need to know that it would work on the level of a guilty pleasure for you, if that's what it takes to convince you to see it. (If you're a Timothy Olyphant fan, this is actually my favorite of his roles.) I also thought it would be interesting to see it while fresh off a viewing of Risky Business, because it's basically a modern update of that film. I could write a post about that, probably -- we'll see.

I also wanted to make sure my first movie was something I'd seen, because the hotel presented me with an unanticipated problem:

The walls were not white.

My entire theory of projecting movies on my hotel wall was predicated on the idea that the walls would be pattern-free. But this being a pretty seedy hotel, it had wallpaper, and the wallpaper was interrupted at regular intervals by little gray fleur-de-lises. Not such a distraction that you couldn't watch the movie, but enough of a distraction that the movie needed to be something I was already pretty familiar with.

I considered hanging the sheet from my bed on the wall, but there was no obvious way to hang it. I'd already taken a mirror off the wall to allow me a clean projection surface, and was worried about trying to jerry-rig a system that would put me further down the road toward potentially damaging the room.

Thank goodness I was texting my friend Don at the time, because he came up with the winning solution: thumb tacks. "The holes would never be detected," he texted. "Downside - you probably don't carry thumb tacks around with you."

"No, but I could go out and get them," I texted back.

Which is exactly what I did after the first movie ended, around 6:45.

Movie #2: Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008, Kevin Smith)

Not knowing the area super well (despite its relative proximity to the neighborhood where I work), I did one of those optimistic drives down a main road, where you assume you will eventually hit a larger shopping complex. It didn't happen as quickly as I was expecting, but I did eventually come across a CVS, which was sure to satisfy my push pin needs. (I decided on push pins rather than thumb tacks because push pins are easier to pull out. They don't require finger nails.)

It also satisfied my breakfast needs (a mango smoothie drink, a sleeve of donuts, and a milk to go with the coffee maker in the room) and my needs for the rest of my night (a Mountain Dew, a pint of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream, and, remembered at the last moment, a box of plastic spoons that would allow me to eat said ice cream).

Pinning a sheet to the wall made all the difference. This is the movie experience I had in mind, and I settled in to enjoy Zack and Miri, which I'd picked up at the library on my lunch break.

It's appropriate I was seeing it for the second time in a hotel room, because that's where I saw it the first time as well, when my wife and I stayed in a local hotel to celebrate our first anniversary. (Full story here.) I ended up liking it just as much the second time -- in fact, I think it could be my favorite Kevin Smith film, though Clerks and Dogma are also up there.

Watching Zack and Miri on my newly unobstructed screen did make me realize, however, that I should watch something visually dynamic for my next film. Projection this good should not go wasted on a film whose visuals are essentially secondary to the writing.

Movie #3: Hostel Part II (2007, Eli Roth)

I wasn't sure about the visuals of Hostel Part II, but by this point in the marathon, it was definitely time to watch something I hadn't already seen. If there were any kind of a theme to this marathon going in, it was that I'd try to watch things I wouldn't ordinarily watch at home -- either because my wife didn't really love the movie (The Girl Next Door) or because it involved a subject she might not dig (women being tortured, for example). I'd always meant to see Hostel Part II, but hadn't gotten the chance yet because of my wife's perceived aversion to it. (Which is actually based on nothing but an assumption on my part. She and I actually saw the first Hostel together, and I remember that she liked it.) So I lined it up to arrive from Netflix and received it mid-week.

During Hostel Part II, my pizza arrived. I'd ordered from Domino's -- first time ever ordering delivery from a hotel, if I'm not mistaken, and I was concerned about the logistics. The room key actually had a Domino's advertisement on it, which was perfect -- I'd already wanted to order Domino's after loving the artisan flatbread pizza I ordered from them a couple weeks ago, and the room key gave me the phone number without even having to look it up. I did have to scurry and look up the address online -- for some reason, I thought they'd have the address as long as I gave them the hotel name, given that the ad was printed on the key.

And this is where having a second laptop came in handy. I'd been planning to use my own laptop for the projection, but discovered only that morning that it didn't have a port to hook up an external monitor (the port the projector uses). So I brought my work laptop for the projection, and used my personal laptop for internetting. This allowed me to look up the hotel address without even having to disturb my projector setup.

The Italian salami artisan pizza was mmm mmm good once again. The movie was pretty good as well, though I had a couple issues with it. Still, better than I thought it would be. And for the record, Roth goes to great lengths to avoid accusations of misogyny. Even though it's women being tortured rather than men this time, the most sadistic torturing is performed by a woman as well.

Movie #4: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer)

It was nearly midnight by the time I was ready to start my fourth movie. Perfume, from my own collection, hadn't necessarily been part of the plan going in -- I had it along as sort of insurance. But when I realized just how good the projection looked, I added it to the agenda for my late-night screening due to its amazing visuals. Even though it was over two hours in length, and the beers I'd consumed threatened to put me down for the count long before it was finished.

As it turned out, I fell asleep only in the last 15 minutes or so. Too bad, because one of my favorite scenes in the movie is its climax. But this too was a movie I've already seen three other times, and I own it, so I can watch that scene by itself any old time I like.

Movie #5: The Cable Guy (1996, Ben Stiller)

Think the movie watching was done just because the night was over? Think again my friend.

Despite my stated anticipation of sleeping in, my body had other thoughts. It woke me up at ten past 7, the bastard. Fortunately, I was able to get myself back to sleep eventually, and slept until ten past 9. With a checkout time of 11, I had time to squeeze in one more movie -- if it was something I knew really well, and could clean up the room while watching.

Enter The Cable Guy, which I have seen about seven or eight times (but not in about five years) and is one of my all-time personal favorites.

The perfect comfort food to watch in the morning, alongside the comfort food of coffee and donuts.

Because I had to shower and had to start breaking down the room well in advance of 11, I only watched about an hour of its 95 minutes, and even then I was racing around to get the room back to its former shape by checkout time. I didn't want to take the risk with one of these seedy hotels that they might try to charge me for an extra day if I missed the checkout time by even a minute. (They called me around 10:40 to ask if I was going to stay an extra night).

Unlike the ending of Perfume, I did get to see the ending of The Cable Guy later. And that brings us to the next chapter of my projection weekend ...

Movie #6: Mars Needs Moms (2011, Simon Wells)

What I haven't told you so far is that I'd prepared my wife for a surprise on Saturday night. If my boss was going to loan me the projector for the weekend, might as well take advantage of it. The walls in my living room are white, so I just had to move a few things and get the projector set up, and we'd have that very movie night at home that I'd used as my excuse to borrow the projector in the first place.

Having been the sole caretaker of our son since I left for work Friday morning, my wife was well deserving of a little time off once I got home, so she went out to see The Ides of March. I immediately went to work setting up my surprise, and making sure I had a workable system for both the projector and the laptop that wouldn't jeopardize the safety of either of them -- since both were company property. This was to say nothing of the safety of our own stuff. I temporarily broke a lamp in our living room while trying to move it out of the way of the intended projecting area, but was able to fix it later on.

Once I had the thing set up -- using a breakfast-in-bed table as the platform for the projector, whose feet I wedged between the back of the couch and the wall, and propping up the laptop on one of the arms of the couch -- I figured I might as well take advantage of the fact that my wife would be gone for the next couple hours, and watch another movie.

I said a little bit about Mars Needs Moms in yesterday's post, so I don't need to talk more about it here. I will say that it was one of the movie's I'd picked up from the library the day before, and that although it looked very good when projected, it would have looked even better if the colors weren't all muddied and washed out -- a part of the movie's design. In fact, it was then that I started to realize that the best thing to watch in this format would be something with a lot of color, where the edges of the screen were well-defined -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.

And oh yeah, I finished The Cable Guy after Mars Needs Moms. It really helped that my son went down for an unusual hour-and-forty-minute nap.

Movie #7: Reign of Fire (2002, Rob Bowman)

Now that I'd watched two of three movies I'd borrowed from the library, leaving only The Next Three Days unwatched, I decided it was time to replenish our supply -- to give my wife a whole new set of options for her big surprise. So when she returned from the movie, less than ten minutes after I'd hurriedly broken down the projector, I took my son back out with me to the library, to quickly pick up three more choices before closing.

All three were movies we'd recently talked about: Magnolia (which she loves and wants to see again), Poltergeist (which we both want to see again, especially now that it's Halloween time), and Reign of Fire (which she hadn't seen but I'd recommended).

Unfortunately, a difficult previous night with our son meant that she had to go do something she usually never does: She went to lie down for a nap at 7 p.m. I used the time to get set up again, but when she awoke, she was a tad too groggy to fully appreciate my surprise -- and might have even preferred just to watch some TV that night. She was a good sport, however, and could see the seeds of disappointment in my eyes. She selected Reign of Fire as the shortest of the three options, which would allow us to watch some television after it was done.

It was my third time seeing Reign of Fire, first since 2002, and I definitely did not like it quite as much this time. There was also a nagging problem that I hadn't noticed on any of my other projections, which was that the image tended to pixelate in spots at this level of projection. Nothing that would be a major distraction, but enough that I tried to refocus the lens in our favor.

On the plus side, my wife seemed to genuinely enjoy the movie and the specialness of the situation I'd tried to create. I'd also bought us some creme brulee, which we enjoyed before she retired to bed.

Movie #8: Waking Life (2001, Richard Linklater)

So my big realization in Mars Needs Moms and again in Reign of Fire was that I wanted to watch one final film that was very light (in brightness, not necessarily in subject matter) and colorful. Neither the Mars setting nor the dragon-scorched post-apocalyptic landscape qualified in this respect, and the darkness was constantly bleeding into the side of the frame, leaving the frame itself as very indistinct from the darkness in the room around it.

I had a couple candidates in my collection that I knew would satisfy this need for bursts of color. The three that jumped to mind were Waking Life, Tangled and Paprika. But I'd seen Tangled for the second time only about six months ago, and I don't love Paprika (but have already seen it twice nonetheless). I'd seen Waking Life at the beginning of 2010, but it's a film I love revisiting for its dense philosophical ruminations combined with an absolutely beautiful color palette. I discuss my love of Waking Life in some level of detail here, if you want to read it. (And I also mentioned it in yesterday's post as well.)

It looked as great as I'd hoped -- but somewhere in the middle of the movie, I experienced projector burnout. Not literal burnout, though I'd feared that I would kill the bulb at some point during the weekend, and have a lot of 'splaining to do to my boss. Fortunately, I was pretty good about giving the projector rests of 20 to 30 minutes here and there, when possible, while still managing to keep up my breakneck pace.

No, I just got tired. Tired of watching eight movies in about 32 hours. Hey, watching movies can be exhausting, even for people who would prefer nothing more.

So I didn't set up the projector one last time on Sunday night, even though it might have meant two more movies at full size. It was time to attack some priorities on the DVR ... and for me, time to catch up on some sleep. I was in bed before 9:30.

If you've reached the end of this much-longer-than-anticipated blog post, thank you -- I appreciate it. And now you can finally stop reading.

Just the reaction I'd hoped for

Even though recommending movies is one of my favorite things to do, it does sometimes cause some low-level anxiety.

Namely, if you end up steering the person wrong, your judgment may suffer in his/her eyes.

This is especially a problem for me, because I'm guilty of overselling movies I like. Talking about movies gets me so excited that I tend to exaggerate how good they are, or how bad other ones are. "Exaggerating" is not really the right word, because my feelings are genuine. It's just that I use such breathless terminology to describe them, I'm setting them up to fail.

It's also a problem for me because I want people to trust my recommendations. In fact, my work is predicated on that assumption.

And so it was that I was really pleased when I had my breathless terminology echoed on a recent loaner from my collection, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

First, a bit on the film. I believe this is the last new movie I chose to add to my collection, though there have been gift additions since then. This is significant, because I've been on a trend toward owning fewer movies, just for reasons of frugality. This one crossed that magic "need to own" threshold on the basis of its absolute cinematic uniqueness: It's a film about the sense of smell. I had never heard of such a thing.

The reason there haven't been more films made about smell is that it's hard to visualize the olfactory sense. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. In fact, Stanley Kubrick, who was once considered to direct an adaptation of Patrick Suskind's novel, Das Parfum, called it "unfilmable." He was just one of a dizzying array of directors who have been attached to this project, including Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Tim Burton, Milos Forman and Ridley Scott.

But Tom Tykwer didn't let that worry him. He used his unique narrative gifts to impart indelible images to the smells in the film, as well as paint a lush picture of 18th century France that's both appropriately grimy (the fish-strewn marketplaces) and appropriately opulent (the palatial mansions). The story's anti-hero is a gifted orphan who develops the world's most finely-tuned sniffer, and spends his life overwhelmed by scents, until it turns him into a murderer bent on cultivating the essence of woman as a perfume. It just plain works, and it's totally captivating. (The film also shows how perfume is made, in what I believe is another cinematic first).

A couple months ago, we had one of my wife's friends over for dinner -- he's my friend too, but I know him through my wife -- and since he's also a big film buff, I sent him on his way with Perfume. It was around this time that I also got another friend to take my copies of a second Tykwer film, Run Lola Run, and Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men. I worried less about these two than I did Perfume, considering them both to be slam dunks, while Perfume got mixed reviews.

Time passed. I waited for feedback. Oh, I did other things in the meantime, but there was always a small percentage of my brain devoted to wondering when I'd hear back from these two guys on how they liked the movies.

This past Saturday night, at a friend's birthday drinks, I finally decided to ask the second friend about Run Lola Run and Children of Men. He had yet to watch either of them, but laughed while he said it -- as though I were trying to foist two turds off on him, and it would be a real chore to watch them. (To be fair, he hadn't requested these films -- he told me he hadn't seen them, so I brought them the next time we got together). What's worse is that since this guy and I have differed on several films in the past, he's got this running joke that my taste in movies is bad. For a guy who writes film reviews for a living, this is a shot to the heart, though I always laugh it off. In order to keep the joke going, he conveniently forgets the movies we've both loved, as well as those we've both hated. He just remembers when we differ.

I tried to "Oh come on" him -- I mean, we're talking about two of the best films of the last ten years (there -- more hyperbole for you). He grudgingly acknowledged that Run Lola Run was probably good, but said he'd heard mixed things about Children of Men. I immediately demanded to know the names of the people who told him this, and their addresses. Okay, I didn't, but I wanted to.

I wouldn't say this exchange really got me down. I mean, I do expect him to eventually watch them, and would honestly be surprised if he didn't enjoy them.

But it was still pretty well-timed when the other friend contacted my wife the next day to tell her how much he liked Perfume. I didn't read what he actually wrote or hear what he actually said (I can't remember what medium he used to contact her), but she conveyed me the message that he "loved it." This put a little smile on my face.

Then he repeated the praise directly to me yesterday. He posted the following on my facebook wall:

"dude - thank you for Perfume. I loved it. Very original and provocative. Only lame thing? Dustin Hoffman's superbad Italian accent."

Yeah, he's got a point there. Dustin Hoffman doesn't belong in a period piece, especially one set in France. And he does take you out of the movie -- just a little. But as you can see from his comment, it doesn't crucially damage a person's overall perspective on the film. (Plus, he's in it for 20 minutes or less).

This may be a lot of words to devote to a simple everyday social transaction -- a person liking or not liking a recommendation -- but hey, welcome to The Audient. More than anything, I hope this post will encourage my readers to check out Perfume, one of the great treasures I've discovered in the last couple years, especially if you like art direction and production design. You might even say I'm "recommending it."

Thereby putting my cinematic reputation at risk once again ...