Hiding Sydney Sweeney

You know how when you've got a guilty conscience about something, something always seems to come along to thrust that thing into the forefront of your thoughts?

I've got a little thing for Sydney Sweeney. I don't mind admitting it to you, dear reader. I might not like to admit it to my wife, but she is not one of my readers so we can just discuss it among ourselves. 

It's nothing to be ashamed about, really. To consume popular entertainment is to come into regular contact with people you find attractive, none of whom are realistic romantic partners for you because a) you will never meet them, and you are probably 20 years older than they are and far less attractive than they are, so they would never go for you anyway; b) they may not even be compatible with your sexual identification. I identify as heterosexual but that doesn't mean I dont also have a thing for Ryan Gosling.

So yeah, Sydney Sweeney has turned my head the past few years. I can't deny it.

The thing is, I don't really want it to be obvious to the people who share the same streaming accounts. And that's just what feels like has been happening by the refusal of Sweeney's movie Reality to leave the front page of our Amazon Prime account.

Now, when I saw Reality in December in order to rank it for 2023, I had to rent it from Amazon, because it never popped up on iTunes. I don't have a preference for one place to spend $4.99 over another place to spend $4.99, but I do generally consider iTunes to be my first port of call. Perhaps HBO, which produced Reality, has a friendship with Amazon that it does not have with Apple, because I checked just now and it is still not on iTunes.

I can assure you that I watched the whole movie. It's only 82 minutes long. I don't specifically remember how it ends, but that was a busy time of my viewing calendar. I wouldn't necessarily remember all the details of even movies I liked more than Reality -- which ended up ranked 34th out of the 168 movies I ranked in 2023 -- because some of that late-game viewing period is always a blur.

Amazon, however, does not think I finished watching. And therefore, Reality has stayed in my Continue Watching queue ever since, the big accusing eyes of Sydney Sweeney staring out at me every time I come on the service. 

I may have switched devices halfway through the movie, which is the only explanation I can think of for this state of permanent paralysis that resulted. I've definitely started watching a movie on, let's say, Netflix on one device, and finished it on another. When I return to the first device, Netflix will still think I should resume the movie from where I stopped on that device -- even though it already resumed it from the correct spot on the other device. This usually clears itself up over time, but with Reality on Amazon, it was not doing so.

This would be an annoyance with any movie. With Reality, it was an actual problem -- or so my guilty conscience told me.

And the problem is this: There was no way to clear the movie from Continue Watching.

You can't click in to it try to play out whatever part of the movie it thinks you haven't watched. This was a rental, so if I wanted to try to do that, I'd have to pay the rental price again. And though Reality was my 34th favorite movie of 2023, I'm not in a hurry to see it again, especially not this soon. My conscience isn't guilty enough to pay the rental price just to clear it.

After a couple months it became clear that this movie was going to still be on my Continue Watching on into the next decade, so I looked up online how you can clear something from this queue. And there is a way that's easy enough, so the next time I logged into Amazon on our TV, I did as instructed: I did a long-press on the play button on our AppleTV remote, and was presented with three options of what to do with this movie, one of which was to hide it.

That worked. 

But now I am "hiding" Sydney Sweeney, which is even more damning, perhaps, if it is ever discovered. Amazon tells you that the title will no longer appear in Continue Watching, but you can still find it by searching for it.

So, it'll probably never come up.

But one day, years from now, Amazon will offer an easy way to show you everything you've been hiding, and my wife will stumble into that area, only to see the single title that my secret shame forced me to consign there.

Maybe I ought to hide a Ryan Gosling movie as well, just to be on the safe side. 

Sydney Sweeney has it both ways

Rarely, in recent times anyway, have I seen a mainstream movie poster try more shamelessly to sell the delectable flesh of a young starlet than the poster you see to your right. (And this one is relatively modest, allowing her lower half to be obscured by the title. Some show the lower half as well.) Yes okay, we get some beefcake here too. 

And yet when I could have been at an advanced screening of Anyone But You on Monday night, instead I was at home watching Sydney Sweeney in a very different form.

This was just a coincidence.

As I get down to only about a month before I finalize my 2023 movie rankings, yesterday I did an inventory of the films remaining on my Letterboxd watchlist and whether I can acquire them on the various streaming services to which I already subscribe. And failing that, how much they cost to rent on iTunes. (And had some positive result of this. Rye Lane is available on Disney+, at least here in Australia. Who knew? I'll watch it tonight.)

Sweeney's movie Reality had been evading me for most of the year, either because it actually wasn't available, or because of its incredibly poor search engine optimization as a title. When you search for this in on any service, all the service does is offer you up its cornucopia of reality TV shows. (Until I decided to write about Anyone But You also, I was going to call this post "Worst search engine optimization ever," with the voice of the Comic Book Guy implied.)

Then during this inventory, it came up as available on Amazon for a pittance -- only $2.99 AUD as a rental, which is closer to $2 US. Considering that most of my recent rentals have been $5.99 USD or more, I jumped on it. What's more, the 1 hour 22 minute running time was music to my ears on a night I planned to go to bed early, after falling asleep during most of my movies over an exhausting weekend of shopping and other holiday business.

It was just a coincidence that this was also the night they were playing an advanced screening of Anyone But You before its release later this week. I considered going for half a second, until I remembered a) I had just used up some of my wife's screening-related good will Friday night to go to an advanced screening of May December, which isn't available on Netflix here and won't be coming to cinemas until February 1st, and b) Anyone But You is not going to move the needle on my year-end list, and is an easy miss despite two stars I find compelling.

I find it interesting that Sweeney is able to move easily between the two worlds presented in these two very different films, one a standard romantic comedy and one a formally daring, essentially real-time interview between two FBI agents and the real-life person they believed was an NSA whistleblower. One would assume it is the romantic comedy that makes use of her physical assets that is purchasing her ability to star in a no-budget drama/thriller in which her acting assets are fully on display. You know, kind of like how Steven Soderbergh and Francis Cord Coppola make the schlock in order to pursue their more eccentric interests.

It would have been easy for Sweeney to just sell her body in every single role. She is amply endowed, and has been unafraid to show it off, first in the decidedly sad context of a series like Euphoria, and then in the more traditional sexy context of an erotic thriller like The Voyeurs. There are also selfies and such of her sans clothing, but don't ask me how I know this.

A person who just wants to get as many Instagram followers as possible does not make a movie like Reality. Tina Satter's film features only four actors, only three of whom have many speaking lines, as the script is built from the real transcript of two agents cross examining a woman named Reality Winner who was suspected of intentionally releasing classified national security documents to the media. (I won't say what the documents were, because I didn't know myself when I started watching the movie and I thought that was better.) 

Because it is beholden to the real transcript, the film assumes a naturalism that places the actors' choices beyond any shadow of a doubt. That is not to say they don't make choices. They most assuredly do. But the choices relate more to what was happening in the room during recorded audio whose every inflection and tone of voice is a matter of public record. What they were saying and how they were saying it are indisputable. What their faces may have been doing is unknown to us.

And boy is Sweeney on point here. The real Reality Winner adopted a very interesting "not too innocent but not too guilty" attitude when the FBI agents arrived at her home on that day in June of 2017. Clearly she knew that protesting too much would get her in trouble -- Gertrude knew that as long ago as when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet -- but an innocent person should logically appear more surprised to be getting pinned in by FBI agents as she exits her vehicle carrying groceries. Winner plays it cool, a skill she undoubtedly adopted in the field as a soldier, and tries to suss out exactly how much these agents know before playing all her cards. 

Over the course of the interview, we see her steadily start to break, the lower half of her face puffing out as though she wants to start crying, but either knows this will give her away or considers herself too tough to collapse in this way. The gradual progression from her starting position to her position at the end of the film is astonishing to watch, as Sweeney never relies on anything that would be described as showy. Perhaps the real transcript had a beneficial restricting effect on her technique, but that's just a jumping off point. And there are not a lot of actors who could play this role the way Sweeney does.

Tellingly, this film has nothing to do with the assets on display in Anyone But You.

Oh she's in short jeans, but her men's dress shirt disguises anything else about her figure. And she has no makeup, able to make her eyes wide and vacant and eventually indistinguishable from a pauper on the street who knows all is lost.

I suspect we'll continue to see Sweeney in Anything But You and movies of that ilk for some time. Who knows, maybe she elevates that film beyond what we would expect from it.

But as long as she keeps making movies like Reality, her career will be one to follow indeed.