Random rewatch: Time Bandits

It's not entirely accurate to refer to my Saturday night rewatch of Time Bandits as random.

First there was the fact that someone recently got the movie assigned from my Flickchart in the Facebook group Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, where each month you are assigned to watch the highest ranked movie you haven't seen from another member's chart. The person really liked it -- I suspected she would from her tastes -- and the comments section engendered a bit of a discussion about the movie's ending, which multiple people found troubling. (It's a head scratcher to be sure, but I've never had a problem with it.)

Then there was Friday night's viewing of Jabberwocky, and yesterday's writing on The Audient about that disappointing viewing, which whetted my appetite for another Time Bandits viewing as a point of contrast and a bit of a palate cleanser to rid myself of the bad taste of Jabberwocky.

But the clinching reason I watched Time Bandits Saturday night was that I have a very periodic series on this blog called Random Rewatch, in which I use a random number generator to choose a movie on my Flickchart to rewatch, and once I've watched it, I do it again. 

Sometimes it takes years for me to watch the next movie. This time, it took a little under a year. Last June I rewatched Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, and drew Time Bandits as the next movie. A very favorable draw, since the movie currently ranks 29th on my chart, but because I'd only last rewatched it in 2020, I was not in a hurry to put it on my schedule straight away.

But the confluence of recent events promoted it to the top of my viewing queue, and now, at the end of me writing this post, the next movie in the series can be selected.

Because I've written about Time Bandits a lot over the years -- including most recently yesterday -- I thought I would just give you a few takeaways from this viewing, even if they are thoughts I may have expressed in the past.

1) Yesterday I talked about how Jabberwocky was missing a good appearance by John Cleese, which Time Bandits does have. In fact, the appearance is so good -- even if it is over inside of five minutes -- that Cleese actually gets top billing in the movie. In fact, his name is the very first image of any kind against a screen of black when the movie starts. Either Cleese demanded it to do this favor for his friend Terry Gilliam, the co-writer and director, or Gilliam just thinks that highly of this brief contribution.

2) The actor who should actually be first-billed, if we were going only by the main character of the movie, is Craig Warnock as Kevin. Two things about this. One, I find it interesting that I had to wait for the closing credits to learn/remember his name. I am fairly likely to know the names of kid actors from formative movies for me in the 1980s. For example, I could tell you the name of every actor or actress in The Goonies. But for some reason, Craig Warnock is never a name I committed to memory -- and that could certainly be because Warnock never had much of a career after this, while Goonies like Corey Feldman and Sean Astin did. The other thing about this character is that Amazon's synopsis for the movie -- I rented it on Amazon as a convenience instead of having to hook up my old computer to watch it on DVD -- shows his name spelled as "Keven." Fortunately, I checked other resources and this seems to be just a typo.

3) Speaking of Gilliam as a co-writer, want to know his other co-writer? Michael Palin. That appears to be a course correction from Jabberwocky, which Gilliam wrote with some person named Charles Alverson. No wonder this is an infinitely better script. Alverson is listed in IMDB as an uncredited writer for Brazil, though nothing after that. Maybe that's why I don't love Brazil.

4) Speaking of Palin, I laughed the most during the two exchanges between him and Shelley Duvall, one in the Middle Ages and one aboard the Titanic. That's not news. But I did have a new takeaway about this, which is that the rule of three would have ordinarily meant they placed these two actors, with their various embarrassing physical issues (she's got "an enormous --" and we never hear what), in one more scene, either in the Battle of Castiglione scene with Napoleon or in the Ancient Greece scene. They didn't, and I think that's to the movie's benefit. They have priceless comedic timing and chemistry and one more might have ruined it.

5) I'm pretty sure the best comedic performance in the entire movie, though, belongs to David Warner as the Evil One. I relished it this time as much as I ever do. I don't have anything specific to say about that, but I thought five takeaways was a good round number.

You know I love Time Bandits. Let's let that be it for today.

But there's one more piece of business, which is to choose the next movie in this series.

There are currently 6477 movies on my Flickchart, so that's the number I am plugging into the random number generator as we speak. Let's see if I get something more challenging than my top 30 movies of all time.

Ooo, much more so. I got 6012, so this is going to be a movie I really don't like. And that movie is ...

The animated movie Doogal from 2005, which is based on a property my wife watched as a child.

I don't see anything to be gained from watching Doogal again, but rules are rules. I'll put it on the schedule sometime between now and 2030.

Random rewatch: Sucker Punch

Projects are never abandoned on The Audient. They just go on really, really long hiatus.

If you recognize the named Random Rewatch in the context of my blog, well, you've been reading my blog for a long time. 

In August of 2011 -- the same year the movie to the right hit theaters -- I introduced to you the idea of randomly rewatching movies using their current ranking on my Flickchart and running them through a random number generator.  

It took me nearly four years, until March of 2015, to watch the first film drawn in that series, Full Metal Jacket. 

I was much faster on the uptake with the next movie, even though it was considerably less interesting of a rewatch than the Kubrick film. The following June I watched Hollywoodland -- feeling, I suppose, I had regained some sort of momentum on this initiative.

Uh uh.

Two weeks shy of seven years later, I've finally watched Random Rewatch #3.

You might be able to understand why I wasn't super eager to take up Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, the 2011 film that did almost no box office and got almost universally poor critical notices. But on Saturday night, I was doing a CineNerdle puzzle (super fun if you've never done it) and Sucker Punch came up in a row of four Snyder movies. It's not the only time I've seen Sucker Punch appear on CineNerdle (it seems to be a go-to in the regular category of Zack Snyder movies), and on this particular occasion, I used it as inspiration to return to a promise I made so long ago, that if I'd shattered a mirror on the same night, my string of bad luck would already be over.

There's an argument to be made that Snyder movies are particularly worth revisiting, regardless of what you thought of them the first time, because they are undeniably visually interesting, if sometimes for the wrong reasons, and because they give you a bit more insight into mind of the director who has given us some of the most reviled movies in the DCEU.

Sucker Punch, it turns out, lives up -- or down -- to the reputation it had at the time: male gaze fetishism disguised as female empowerment.

Which is not to say I think it's worthless or that I didn't enjoy watching it on some level.

In revisiting a post I wrote in 2011 in which I focused on the scene of a baby dragon's throat being slit, I see I also compared it Inception. That's apt, since it does contain fantasies within fantasies, though that comparison didn't occur to me this time. I did briefly think about Pan's Labyrinth, which I also touched on 12 years ago, because there are multiple situations where a good character fails to take their opportunity to kill a bad character. (Real people murder being bad, fantasy dragon murder being okay.)

This time the similarities for me were more stylistic, which perhaps indicates the steady erosion of my ability to analyze themes in favor of making more obvious surface comparisons. The movies I was reminded of this time were movies that do similar things visually, particularly Robert Rodriguez' Sin City and Kerry Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. (I revisited the former last year, and may be due for a reappraisal of the latter, which I didn't like very much the first time.)

It occurs to me that there are a couple interesting links that encourage the Sin City comparison in particular. Both Snyder and Rodriguez directed an adaptation of a Frank Miller comic book, Sin City in Rodriguez' case and 300 in Snyder's. Carla Cugino is also a connection, appearing in both Sucker Punch and Sin City, and being a regular collaborator of Rodriguez'. (Miller also wrote some Batman comics, and of course we know Snyder has a relationship with that character as well.)

It was interesting to note Oscar Isaac in this film, playing the villain, because this was also just at the beginnings of my awareness of him. His role -- breakout role? -- in Drive was the same year, and since then he's become inescapable. (Good inescapable, of course.) I guess he had been in Agora, which I'd seen and loved two years before that, but most people wouldn't have that as a frame of reference. 

But it all comes back to those women in those skimpy outfits.

I don't necessarily think you can accuse Snyder's camera of ogling its female characters the way Michael Bay's camera does, but there's no doubt that this film was made with titillation in mind, and that it probably could not be made today. 

Even when the five female stars are kicking ass and taking names, they're doing it in a variety of bustiers and garters, or in the steampunk version thereof. They're the kind of costumes that female superhero stars like Scarlett Johansson and Elizabeth Olsen have made headlines for objecting to, and with good reason. Today I don't think you'd have the skimpy outfits nor the bordello setting. 

I this a terrible film, though? No it is not.

For one I thought the green screens and fantasy settings all looked pretty good. I'm not saying 12 years ago is the dawn of time in terms of visual effects -- far from it. I mean Avatar was two years before that. But I did expect it to look a bit chintzy by today's standards, and it didn't. It's a pretty cool realization of a somewhat flawed, somewhat problematic concept. Even Zack Snyder's worst films are really interesting to look at, and he was just coming off his best one, Watchmen, so I should not be surprised this has visual intrigue to spare.

One big criticism about his style, though -- and which may be a factor more in this than in some of his other films -- is how much it looks like a music video. As music videos are not as central to the culture as they once were, this is not a complaint you hear as much anymore. But Snyder did get his start in videos, and you can really tell in the semi- slow-mo montages that accompany some songs used in this film that play out almost in their entirety. It's not that these sequences are any less interesting to look at, but they seem cheapened by the fact that the images in music videos tend to have a lower standard for thematic significance/obviousness. It's easy to level this same charge at the movie on the whole.

Okay, let's see what movie I'm going to watch the next time I do this, which will hopefully be before 2030.

There are currently 6273 movies in my Flickchart, which is about 150 fewer than my actual number seen. (After almost totally catching up, I've gotten behind in adding them again.)

If we go to random.org and plug in the range from 1 to 6273, the number it gives us is ...

28. 

Which is ...

Time Bandits.

A pretty softball draw there, since anything in my top 500 is an easy rewatch, anything in my top 100 is a really easy rewatch and anything in my top 50 is a slam dunk. I did watch this as recently as 2020, but it's the kind of movie I would rewatch anytime.

Which unfortunately does not make it a great entry in this series, since the point is to dig up something truly random that I might not otherwise have considered. It might not make for a very interesting post either, since I've already tagged Time Bandits thrice on the blog and mentioned it a number of other times. (The exact quantity is unclear since the search returns some false positives.) I may have already written whatever I wanted to write about it. 

But I do have to follow the rules of the series, and at least I can probably get in this particular rewatch sooner than seven years from now. 

Random rewatch: Hollywoodland

It took more than three-and-a-half years to complete the first movie in a periodic (very periodic) series I proposed back in 2011.

I'm doing a bit better now. The second movie took just over 15 months.

The series was/is called Random Rewatch, and my intention was to revisit movies I've seen by choosing them from my Flickchart using a random number generator. Really, I think I just wanted to play around with the random number generator.

Back on the 17th of March last year, I finally watched the first movie I drew back in 2011, which was Full Metal Jacket, then #672 on a chart of 3282. As my next choice I drew Hollywoodland, #2838/4098, not having any idea when the occasion to watch it might arise.

And it might not have for a while longer but for three factors conspiring to prioritize it on my schedule:

1) As I wrote about in this post, I've been listening to Karina Longworth's podcast You Must Remember This, which last year ran a series on MGM. One episode was devoted to MGM "fixer" Eddie Mannix and his possible involvement in the death of George Reeves, which was ruled a suicide. Reeves was having an affair with Mannix' wife -- one he knew about and supposedly condoned -- and as Mannix could get away with nearly anything, it was theorized that he had Reeves killed either because of jealousy or because Reeves became engaged to another woman and his wife was actually hurt by that. Either way, listening to that episode whet my appetite to revisit Hollywoodland, which is about this very scandal.

2) I've been doing a bit of RNG-determined random rewatching lately for other reasons. I am running a challenge among the members of my Flickcharters Facebook group in which they sign up for a week sometime in 2016 and watch a movie randomly selected from my chart. Why would they want to do this, you ask? Well, my original inspiration for the series was to take the piss out of the numerous viewing challenges proliferating in that group, in which the person running the challenge receives suggestions from other people. I didn't really want to do that kind of challenge, so I chose one that would be a lot less time-consuming because it would not actually involve me watching any movies. As I said, I did it as kind of a joke, but enough people signed up and were curious about it that it kind of took off. However, at this point in the year, the pool of guinea pigs is starting to dry up, so I decided to insert myself into the weekly schedule. I've already randomly rewatched Serpico, and I have a random rewatch of Wonder Boys coming up this week. (Both highly ranked movies for me, in my top 600.) It felt like I owed it to Hollywoodland to complete the rewatch that has actually been on the table for more than a year.

3) But perhaps the most important reason has to do with the archives of the Filmspotting podcast. I started listening to Filmspotting in 2011, meaning there were six years of podcasts I never caught. As I've been making my way slowly through the archives, I've taken down all of 2005 and gotten up to September of 2006. For a couple weeks now the next podcast has been the one in which they reviewed Hollywoodland, and I decided this was the sign I needed to finally watch it. It'd be a lot more satisfying to listen to that episode if I'd just recently completed my viewing.

Whew. On to the actual movie, shall we?

As that ranking would indicate -- only 31% on my chart at the time -- I didn't think much of Allen Coulter's film at the time I saw it. I seem to recall its chief virtue was being better than the similarly themed Brian De Palma film The Black Dahlia, which hit theaters just a week later and is awful. However, I also remember liking it more than I thought I was going to like it, so the comparatively low ranking seemed curious.

It seemed especially curious as I watched the movie this time around and enjoyed it quite a bit. Perhaps the recently elevated interest in MGM had something to do with it, but I found the mystery so much more captivating this time. In consulting the review I wrote for AllMovie, the word "boring" actually came up in reference to that mystery. Neither do I find the mystery boring now, nor do I find the way the movie addresses the mystery boring.

The movie is constructed as parallel narratives, one following Reeves (Ben Affleck) at various important junctures in the decade prior to his death, the other following a private investigator (Adrien Brody) who is being paid by Reeves' mother to determine if there was an explanation for his death other than suicide. When I first saw the movie, I enjoyed most of the Reeves stuff and very little of the Louis Simo (Brody) stuff. But this time I enjoyed the Simo stuff too, particularly appreciating both the look and the performance of Brody, an actor I find sort of hit-and-miss. I liked the noir trappings of his character and how this movie speaks to other, more successful L.A. noirs that came before it -- movies that are not as much more successful than Hollywoodland as I may have once thought.

It was an interesting time to watch Hollywoodland for another reason. I'd just watched the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead on Monday, and one of my main problems with it was its quantity of fictitious material. Whole characters are created, as well as seriously ridiculous events involving Davis in shootouts and the like. I considered that not only a poor choice, but irresponsible in some way. Seeing Hollywoodland, in which Simo's character has been invented (something I didn't know when I reviewed it, to my chagrin), made me realize two things: 1) Inventing a character is not a cardinal sin, and can sometimes be a useful way to get at the verifiable, non-fiction elements of the story, but 2) The purpose of creating that character has to be clear, and it has to be used in a way that clearly enhances the story. The Simo character is good as a viewer surrogate, someone trying (and ultimately failing) to piece together a mystery that eludes us to this day, and leaves plenty of us plenty curious.

And there's no doubt that Reeves interested me more this time, indeed probably because I know more about MGM than I did then ... and find it a lot juicier. His is a tragic story of an actor whose career is essentially ruined by the role that defined him and made him famous, that of TV's Superman. Although the outcome is not usually so dramatic, this is a common narrative trajectory for actors who were made famous by a role and then shackled to that role for the rest of their careers. Reeves was both helped by and hurt by being in with the Mannixes -- gaining certain things he couldn't have gained otherwise, and having other doors closed to him to keep him in his place. A fascinating dynamic existed between them, especially if Mannix really did have him killed just for making his wife sad.

Something also occurred to me for the first time: This means Ben Affleck has played both Superman and Batman, possibly making him the only person ever to do that. Someone ought to make a video on Youtube in which Affleck's current incarnation of Batman fights his George Reeves from Hollywoodland. I'd watch it.

And what will I watch next?

Let's consult the RNG ...

It comes out as 2911/4298, only 73 spots off my last draw (out of exactly 200 more films I've added to Flickchart since then). That's Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch (2011), another film I was mixed on (to put it mildly) but might find interesting to revisit for various reasons. That's a funny coincidence, as Snyder was the one who directed Affleck in Batman v. Superman -- a fact I alluded to only moments before drawing my random number.

I'd like to say it might happen soon, but I've got other random rewatches as part of my current Facebook challenge, so maybe we'll be looking at sometime in early 2017.

Then again, you never can tell when opportunity or coincidence will change that priority.

Revival of a nearly four-year-old vow

When you run a blog, sometimes you end up making empty promises.

One of those on this blog was a planned series called Random Rewatch, which was going to involve me choosing a movie randomly from all the movies I've seen, and rewatching it. Then choosing another, and so on. I'd use a random number generator, and the number would correspond to my ranking of that movie on Flickchart. So if I got #533, I'd randomly rewatch the movie I had ranked #533 on Flickchart.

On August 26, 2011, that random number was #672, which corresponded to Full Metal Jacket at the time. (It's now #844.)

On March 17, 2015, I finally rewatched Full Metal Jacket.

Why did it take so long? I have no idea. For two years (almost exactly) after that post, I still had a Netflix disc-through-the-mail account, which would have allowed me to order up the movie any old time. But I'm not sure I even added it to my queue. Perhaps I expected to stumble across it randomly, and that never happened.

Well, never say never. It did finally happen this past weekend, when I picked up Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film at the new Melbourne library branch at the Docklands.

This was almost certainly not the only time I've seen Full Metal Jacket available at the library, especially since I used to cruise Los Angeles libraries for movies as well. But it's the first time where when I saw the movie on the shelf, I thought "You know, I told my readers I was going to rewatch that, way back when." This time, I decided to convert that old promise to a reality.

It's not like it was a bad movie to have randomly gotten through the number generator. A "bad" movie, for the purposes of this particular exercise, would be something I hated and had no intention of ever watching again, or something I'd watch again without being forced to do so. The best outcome is something like Full Metal Jacket, where I thought something clear could be gained from a second viewing, but I probably wouldn't otherwise have prioritized it. In the case of Full Metal Jacket, I had only seen it once, and had unresolved feelings about whether the first 45 minutes were really that much better than the next 75. (It's really kind of two different movies.)

So, what did I discover from my second Jacket viewing? (Spoilers to follow.)

The second "half" (really more like two-thirds) has more of substance than I thought it did. I remember thinking that it meandered and was more arthouse in nature, having few in the way of real plot developments. I now recognize that it's a series of effective vignettes that each demonstrate various aspects of the notion that "war is hell." Taken individually, they may not have as much impact as similar scenes in other movies, but they are more powerful than I remembered them being, and worked pretty well as a collection. The death of Cowboy seemed particular poignant this time out, as did the sniper baiting the battalion by continue to put (non-fatal) bullets into the two fallen troops on the battlefield. Kubrick's use of slow-mo in that scene particularly struck me.

However, some of it feels a bit on the nose. The interviews the soldiers give to the Stars and Stripes camera felt a little obvious in terms of a soldier's standard complaints about serving in a war in which the U.S. is meddling and the locals aren't appreciative. Then again, this was 1987 and I suppose some of that stuff was being said in that way for the first time on film. One scene that I thought was supposed to really wallop me, but didn't, was the soldiers standing over the mortally wounded Vietnamese sniper, who turns out to have been a young(ish) girl. They seem really torn by the fact that it's a girl they've killed (or are in the process of killing). Since she's such a lethal weapon, having taken out nearly a half dozen of the American soldiers, the amount of time they lingered on her seemed disproportionately regretful.

One thing that's for certain is that the opening is, indeed, the more effective portion of the film. It too has on-the-nose moments, and I noted this time thinking "Hey, Private Pyle made it -- why does he still want to kill his drill instructor and himself?" But whether Pyle's actions have a totally believable psychological reality or not, it certainly is an effective portrait of how a man's sanity and will to live can be broken down by someone using such extreme means to make him a more effective soldier. I had forgotten how many truly terrific lines of dialogue R. Lee Ermey has as he chews out his soldiers -- if I were Pyle, I'd have a hard time stifling my grin as well.

Other quick observations:

Matthew Modine's superior at Stars and Stripes is played by the same guy who played Jack's father on Lost, John Terry. Of course, when I first saw him I thought it was the guy from Seinfeld whose favorite song was "Desperado," who is obsessed with the Karl Farbman furniture.

For some reason I thought the scene that 2 Live Crew quoted in their notorious song "Me So Horny" comes at the end of the movie. In fact, it comes right at the start of the "second half."

Okay, having fulfilled my promise, I would now like to return to this series with semi-regularity. Really!

Of course, that will depend on my ability to find the movie that's ranked #2843 (of 4098) on my Flickchart. The random number generator has not been quite so kind to me this time.

And #2843 corresponds to ...

... Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter in 2006.

I'm not sure how much more I have to discover about Hollywoodland, but discovering it or not discovering it I will be, at some point. I may lack some of the options I used to have of getting hold of random movie titles, but I see that this one is available for rent on iTunes.

So now I really have no excuse.

The random rewatch

Hello everybody ...

I've been sick this week -- I still have that sore throat I mentioned in my last post, which makes it a week now -- so I haven't had the stamina for any of my bigger topics I usually like to delve into on The Audient. Okay, maybe not "bigger" -- longer? wordier? Something like that.

So I just have a quick one today ... but it does involve the following preamble:

I used to define being an obsessive film fan as voraciously adding as many new titles as possible to my collection of movies seen. However, I ultimately recognized this as a pretty narrow view of film fandom. Sure, seeing as much as possible is part of it. But if you don't revisit films -- films you love, classic films you want to love better, films that left you feeling ambivalent, or even films you may have hated for the wrong reasons -- you're not really deepening your appreciation of cinema as an art form. Besides, if you don't watch a movie multiple times, how are you supposed to be able to quote it?

Since I started keeping track of the movies I revisited, about six years ago, I've had one period of as long as six months when I didn't rewatch a single film I had already seen. So I decided this simply couldn't stand. And on my blog last year, I came up with two weekly series to help deepen my appreciation of films I'd already seen. One was called Second Chances, where I rewatched movies that I liked less than the average person, to see whether I was wrong, or they were. The series that followed was called Double Jeopardy, where I rewatched movies that qualified as guilty pleasures for me, to see if they still occupied that role, or were indeed the schlock other people found them to be.

These series were fun for me, but they became hard to keep up with, since I was holding myself to a standard of writing one new post each week -- meaning I had to manage the logistical feat of both securing and finding the time to watch one of these movies every week. In fact, I abandoned Double Jeopardy right around this time last year. Today is my son's first birthday, and I know that my final Double Jeopardy post -- about the movie The Story of Us -- posted on the morning of the day we went to the hospital.

Of course, I've kept revisiting films in the past year, even without my blog mandating that I do so. Now that it's something I think of as a parallel focus, with equivalent value to watching new movies, I don't let it fall by the wayside like I used to.

But recently I've been longing to have that mandate back -- to rewatch movies according to some kind of plan, and not just because I feel like it, or because the movie is in my collection at home.

Even when the plan is "no plan."

See, I don't want these revisited movies to be just favorites, classics I need to love better, movies that left me feeling ambivalent, or movies I might have hated for the wrong reasons. I want these revisited movies to be any movie I've ever seen.

Yes, that's right, a truly random rewatch. Cinematic chaos theory at work.

Ah, but how will I do that? Simple. I've found a website that generates random numbers. I'm sure there are many, but this one is called Random.org. You just create a number range, and it will choose a number randomly from within that range.

My own number range will come from the movies I've ranked in Flickchart, which right now stands at 3,282. #1 will be my favorite movie (currently Raiders of the Lost Ark, as discussed on Monday). #3,282 will be my least favorite movie (the execrable Twentynine Palms). So I will put my range from 1 to 3,282, and whatever number it chooses for me, I will commit to rewatching the film with that ranking.

Even if I hated it. Even if I never want to see it again. Even if it's really hard to get on DVD. Even if I just watched it a week ago.

You may wonder what the value of this will be. Well, I think it's always useful to reconsider movies -- we may see something in them we didn't see the first time, or we may realize we were seeing something that simply isn't there. As mentioned above, I have already done this in the past, but I've been targeting the movies myself.

Now, I'm letting a random number generator do it for me. I think there's value to taking the decision out of my own hands. It'll allow me to watch movies again even if I don't think I want to, or need to. It'll allow me to see how and whether my feelings have changed, even if I might not consciously recognize that my feelings are unsettled on that particular film.

Sure, I'm hoping I'll get some movies that I actually want to watch again, for one reason or another. Movies that I'd need an excuse to rewatch. This would be my excuse.

But I like the uncertain nature of it, and I like binding myself to the results. If #3,282 comes up as the random number, Lord help me, I will sit through Twentynine Palms again.

But because I sometimes feel like a prisoner to the schedules I set for myself about what I need to watch, when, I'm going to leave this series open-ended. Once I've had my movie chosen for me, it's up to me when I get the chance to watch it. I thought about doing one per month -- I could probably keep up with that schedule -- but I like the idea of not putting deadlines on myself. That way, I could actually watch more than one in a particular month, if that worked out for me, and in a particularly busy month I could just let it slide altogether. Each time I watch one, I'll write the corresponding post, then randomly select the next one up to bat.

Yep, that was quite the preamble. And, no one's definition of "quick."

Deep breath ... let's go to the random number generator and get this thing worked out.

Okay, my first movie is the movie I have ranked #672 on Flickchart. A nice softball start, as this movie is in the top 20% of movies I've seen. Now, to see what it is ...

Well well well. Full Metal Jacket. We have a date.

This actually works out well ... for reasons I will refrain from telling you about until I write my first Random Rewatch post.

Until then ...