Remembering Rob Reiner: LBJ

This is the third in my 2026 bi-monthly series Remembering Rob Reiner, in which I'm watching the six movies of the director's I haven't seen. Not to be confused with the other bi-monthly 2026 series, also called Remembering Rob Reiner, which runs in the other bi-monthly months and involves revisiting six Reiner favorites.

The thing that made Rob Reiner so interesting as a dominant force in Hollywood, at least for a good 15 to 20 years there, was that you couldn't really pin him down to one kind of movie. Even when you thought his thing was comedies, he'd make complicated comedies, or comedies that crossed over with other genres. But then sometimes he wouldn't make comedies at all. Sometimes he would make horrors, or thrillers, or love stories.

So there was not really a pattern, but there were sometimes familiar interests revisited. His 2016 film LBJ is kind of like the revisitation of two movies he made back-to-back in the mid-1990s, which otherwise will not appear in either of my bi-monthly series, and it reflects an interest on Reiner's part in both presidential politics and civil rights. 

The first of those films is 1995's The American President, the fully fictitious story of a widower president (Michael Douglas) who begins dating an environmental lobbyist (Annette Bening). I think of it in the same category as Ivan Reitman's Dave, a film I can very easily see Reiner having directed, though I hold that film in higher esteem. 

The second came the very next year in 1996, Ghosts of Mississippi, which was sort of the beginning of the end of Reiner's charmed existence as a director. (North in 1994 ended his run of great films, but he got back on track for at least one more with The American President. Though I personally love 1999's The Story of Us, some people think Reiner never made a really good film again after The American President.) Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, this is the true story of the trial of a white supremacist accused of assassinating civil rights activist Medgar Evers. James Woods plays the white supremacist, and at the time we probably had no idea how good of a fit that was for the right-wing Woods. 

In LBJ you kind of get both things coming together. You get a peek behind the closed doors of the highest corridors of power in the U.S., and you also get the civil rights struggle in the form of the 1964 bill that new president Lyndon Baines Johnson reluctantly championed after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. (So I guess you also get an assassination in this film, another connection with Mississippi.)

And you know what? I thought it was really good.

I was almost tempted to go all the way up to four stars on LBJ, but cooler heads prevailed and I settled on a 3.5. But it was a generous 3.5, the kind that makes me remind you: this too is a good star rating. 

I did end up paying for the movie on AppleTV -- just a rental, not a purchase -- when I forgot I'd written this post, which talked about its availability on Kanopy. Lo and behold, eight years later, it was still available on Kanopy, if only I'd done the usual search of all my streamers before renting it. Fortunately, I'm glad to say that I don't mind having spent my hard-earned cash on LBJ, because I liked it.

The first thing that relieved me was to see a presidential biopic come in at only 98 minutes. Make all the jokes you want about what that says about Johnson and his presidency, but I think it just reflects a different time when the flab was cut from a movie rather than left in. Now granted, this man was president for three years longer than Johnson, but the Ronald Reagan biopic from a couple years ago, which I haven't seen yet, was 141 minutes. At this rate, I can't imagine how long the eventual biopic of Donald Trump will be. 

The second thing was that Woody Harrelson did not, in fact, seem ridiculous in all his LBJ makeup. I can see now, having discovered the previous post linked above, that I thought this makeup was quite bad and that it would make the whole movie laughable. Maybe I'm more grown up now than I was eight years ago, because I didn't balk at the makeup at all. (I did wonder if it was necessary to give Jennifer Jason Leigh's Ladybird Johnson a bigger nose, but she's not in it all that much anyway.)

No, this is just a tight little movie that intercuts the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination with events that came before and after it in the life of Johnson, focusing mostly on the civil rights act Kennedy wanted to push through before he was killed, but also dealing with issues like Johnson's own political ambitions, and his desire to create a legacy that was not tarnished by his previous opposition to civil rights measures in his capacity as a congressman and senator. 

The casting is good here, with a pair of good actors doing impersonations of Kennedy brothers (Jeffrey Donovan and Michael Stahl-David) and Bill Pullman and Richard Jenkins playing other senators. 

One of the things I liked about this was that Reiner was committed to showing the complications in Johnson the man. Even though it's clear Reiner greatly respects the man and what he both accomplished and tried to accomplish, he has no illusions about Johnson being an easy man to get along with, or always on the right side of history. A lot of the moments we see here of Johnson are profane, with the man dropping f-bombs and hanging up the phone on people, both before and after he became president. Ultimately, though, Reiner appears to have believed that Johnson became clear-eyed in his support of the civil rights movement, and there are some really good lines of dialogue and speeches reflecting the man's late-arriving sense of empathy. 

It was wise of the film not really to delve into Vietnam, which was Johnson's undoing as president, and the thing that prevented him from running for the presidency a second time in 1968. (You're allowed to complete the term where you started as the vice president and then still run again twice more, as long as you served less than two years as president, I believe. So although he was reelected by a landslide in 1964, he opted out of 1968.) Reiner never really made a war movie, and he wasn't going to start with getting into that part of LBJ's presidency and life. 

Reiner did not of course write LBJ, so some of the credit I'm about to give should go to screenwriter Joey Hartstone. But Reiner at his best didn't need a huge amount of celluloid to tell a story that feels pretty in depth. I learned a lot I didn't know about LBJ in this film, and that's a credit to the sort of filmmaker Reiner was at his best. 

One final comment about the final thing in LBJ, and this was the second straight movie I watched where watching to the end of the credits revealed something funny I wanted to mention here.

At the end of the credits there was something you see regularly in films, but it was not a message I expected to see in this film:

"The persons and events in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional."

Really? Fictitious? In a film based on historical events and people?

I assume this is one of those situations where you include such a disclaimer because it costs you nothing to do so and because it protects you from the frivolous litigiousness of any wronged party. No one can say "Lyndon Johnson never said that!" because you can just say "It's not Lyndon Johnson. I already told you that. If you think it is, that was unintentional."

But on the face of it, it seems very silly, and on the most basic level seems to suggest that the history being presented here is a lie. I would probably favor:

"Although the people and events in this film are based on real historical people and events, some dramatic license has been taken with the depiction of these people and events." Though the lawyers probably wouldn't be happy with that one. 

Reiner's last overtly political film, 2017's Shock and Awe, will be on tap for me in July. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: When Harry Met Sally ...

This is the second in one of two intertwining bi-monthly 2026 series with the same name. The movies in February, April, June, August, October and December involve revisiting my six favorite Rob Reiner films, except for my favorite, This is Spinal Tap, which I rewatched in conjunction with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues before the series started. 

When I was considering the Rob Reiner movies I'd be revisiting in 2026, I of course came to When Harry Met Sally and thought "Yeah, might as well. I've seen it fairly recently, but it's been a minute so I should see it again."

Nope. It's been more than a minute. In fact, it has been more than 20 years.

I had to double check both of the places I keep track of rewatches, on Letterboxd and in a Microsoft Word document, and true enough, I could not find it in either. I started keeping track of rewatches in July of 2006, so that means that unless I watched this in the immediate few months before I started keeping track, it's been more than 20 years since my last viewing of When Harry Met Sally.

It could not be. It simply could not be.

I feel like I definitely watched it with my wife, and we only started dating at the start of 2005. So probably in that first year together we watched it. But it clearly has not come up for viewing again since then, unless I'm derelict in my records, and I'm rarely derelict. 

I'm reminded again that certain movies are so familiar to you -- this would definitely be double digit viewings for the movie overall -- that you feel like you've seen them recently, even when you haven't. Maybe I just couldn't believe that I feel like I clearly remember my last viewing, or at least that such a viewing had taken place, and yet that was at least two decades ago now. Nor could I believe that I wouldn't have been inspired to watch it again in those two decades, just for old times sake.

Well, high time for a viewing of my #26 movie on Flickchart, which has spent a significant amount of time within my top 20. It's crazy to think that I haven't even seen When Harry Met Sally since I started using Flickchart in 2009. 

Since I've never written at length about this movie on the blog, I should tell you that I've long considered it to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time. Actually, in the couple times I've written about Reiner himself, I have expressed that opinion. So I don't need to go on at length about it now. (And each time I do express this opinion, I also mention that I understand I am excluding many of the romantic comedies from earlier golden ages of cinema. What can I say, I grew up with When Harry Met Sally -- it came out when I was 15 -- and I didn't grow up with those other movies.)

The other thing I should put on record is that it is also one of my favorite New York movies. I had already been to New York at least once, maybe exactly once, before the movie came out, but this was the movie that likely cemented my impression of Manhattan as an idealized, romantic locale. Actually living there disabused me of some of that notion, but there's still a perfect version of the city that exists within the tight 96 minutes of When Harry Met Sally. 

I don't need to spend a lot of time on why the movie works so well, but it's a mixture of the sharp dialogue, the witty performers, the funny scenarios, the keen and sometimes uncompromising wisdoms about relationships between men and women, and the mood-setting jazz piano and crooner music that serves as wallpaper.

I'm willing to bet, though, that the little detail that had the greatest impact on my affection for the movie is the interviews with the old married couples placed sporadically throughout the runtime. I doubt this was actually an innovation by Reiner or by screenwriter Nora Ephron, but it could have been, and it is certainly something that's been imitated since. If I'm connecting Reiner movies, it's a bit of a documentary touch that points back to This Is Spinal Tap, and lends an extra bit of authenticity to everything we're seeing. (And looking forward, Reiner used this tactic in the most recent Reiner movie that I've added to my favorites, The Story of Us.)

Because I know this film so well, I was worried I wouldn't have a lot of new observations on this viewing, so I forced myself to jot down some notes. And as it turned out, there were a handful of things I wanted to mention when writing this post:

1) Did you know this was shot by Barry Sonnenfeld? I did not. 

2) I noticed that this movie uses an Ella Fitzgerald song, just as another favorite New York romantic comedy, Kissing Jessica Stein, would do in what I assume was a fairly explicit attempt to remind us of its forbear. Incidentally, I have seen Kissing Jessica Stein three times since the last time I saw When Harry Met Sally. 

3) When Billy Crysal is alone, depressed, sitting on the floor in his empty apartment, he's playing a little game of tossing playing cards into a bowl that's about five feet away from him. I never remember noticing this previously, but at one point he lands about five in a row -- a pretty impressive feat.

4) I know that some of Meg Ryan's reactions to Crystal's antics are genuine, and you can really tell when they occur. When he's speaking in his funny voice ("pecan piiiieee"), she gives a real laugh at one point and utters "Oh no." Such a genuine reaction because, well, it was.

5) I really like the scene where Harry and Sally are dancing cheek to cheek on New Year's Eve, and they are spinning around. It's a very clever way for the camera to capture what they are both thinking in that moment, at a moment when they know the other person cannot see their face, and in this case it's a moment of fear about the physical contact prompting them to do something they fear they will regret. The movie is full of these little mirrored moments, such as when they both make an awkward expression during the social gathering where they play Pictionary, upon seeing the other kiss their current paramour. 

6) I noticed there's a scene where Sally puts on a pith helmet, I believe it's while they're at the Sharper Image, about to be encountered by Helen and Ira. Reiner would also use a pith helmet for Michelle Pfeiffer's character in The Story of Us.

7) Speaking of the Pictionary scene, there are a lot of great lines in that scene, including anything related to the phrase "baby fish mouth." However, I was reminded how much I love Bruno Kirby's frustrated line "Draw something resembling anything!"

8) Speaking of mirrored moments, what I will call the "duelling telephone calls" scene is a masterpiece of execution. It's when Kirby's Jess and Carrie Fisher's Marie are asleep, and for some reason each has their own distinct telephone line on their bedside tables. (Will share a house but not a phone number?) Harry calls Jess at the same time Sally calls Marie, and it's the morning after Harry and Sally slept together. The overlapping dialogue in this scene is terrific, as both conversations go forward naturally while being able to interact with each other, as Jess and Marie realize they are having the same call about the same thing, and that they both invited the other to come over for breakfast at the same time -- an invitation they are relieved to find the other has rejected. It's some real Robert Altman stuff in terms of complexity of dialogue.

9) I always remember, when thinking about moments of romantic bliss in my own life -- when you are most keenly aware of its potential opposite -- the lovely exchange afterward between Jess and Marie: "Tell me I will never have to be out there again," she says. "You will never have to be out there again," he returns. It feels especially touching when you consider that both Kirby and Fisher are now gone. 

10) Random: I noticed the telephone number on the awning where Sally struggles to buy the Christmas tree by herself, without Harry's help. It's 662-4402. Why is this notable? They almost never put phone numbers in movies that didn't begin with 555. Just another touch of this film's effortless sense of realism.

11) If I want to make a really strange connection, between the great Reiner movie I saw this month and the not-great Reiner movie I saw last month for the other bi-monthly Reiner series, it's the ending lines that are meant to serve as a form of reconciliation between characters. When I wrote last month about Being Charlie, the drug addiction movie about and written by Nick Reiner, I noted that one of the few choices I really liked was the character's decision to end by saying to his father "I don't hate you, Dad" -- the closest that character could come to saying "I love you." Well, this movie ends in a somewhat similar fashion, with Sally saying to Harry "I hate you, I really hate you." Which is also a substitute for "I love you."

12) I noticed in the credits there are songs both by Rodgers and Hart (several) and Rodgers and Hammerstein ("Surrey with the Fringe On Top," from Oklahoma!, which Harry and Sally sing in the Sharper Image). I thought that was an interesting thing to see, fresh off last year's movie that featured all three of these characters, Blue Moon. 

These were the only notes I took in the movie, but afterward, when I was looking up other times I mentioned When Harry Met Sally on this blog, I came across this post, and I need to correct the record from it. 

In case you don't want to click, it was a post about the poor realism of the way batting cages are depicted in the Pete Davidson movie Big Time Adolescence. In that post I drew a contrast to how batting cages are depicted in When Harry Met Sally, but I didn't get it completely right.

While it's true that there is nothing that occurs in WHMS that is an actual defiance of the way batting cages work, in that post I stated that the pitching machine continues to pitch balls to Jess and Harry even after they have turned to speak to each other. On this viewing, I noted that's not the case. 

However, it doesn't necessarily undermine the realism of the movie. In fact, it just means that Jess and Harry took the opportunity of no longer being pitched to to turn and talk to each other. These guys are not cheapskates, but they do value a quarter, and they need to keep shovelling them in to get more pitches. (As Harry says to the young kid when they argue about whose turn it is.) They'd hardly let a bunch of pitches go by just to talk face to face about that time Harry made a woman meow.

Okay, if there could ever be enough When Harry Met Sally, we've reached that point for today. 

Next up in this bi-monthly series in June is the current #132 on my Flickchart, Stand by Me -- and it's been a lot more like 30 or even 35 years since I've seen this one. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: Being Charlie

My two 2026 bi-monthly series have the same name but different focuses. On the other alternating months, I'm watching six favorite Rob Reiner films. On these alternating months, I'm watching the six I haven't seen.

Being Charlie is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start.

But it is a fascinating document of Rob Reiner's relationship with the son who murdered him.

I was anticipating with some trepidation the viewing of the film that Reiner directed in what would seem like a favor to his son, Nick, who co-wrote this screenplay as a reflection on his own struggles in and out of rehab and living on the street. I mean, it's possible Reiner himself wanted to tell Nick's story, but without delving into the details, I'm assuming he thought having a screenwriting credit could help launch Nick in some unspecified way -- which was never going to happen in any other way. Plus perhaps unburdening himself might be therapeutic.

But you can tell this film did not get the A version of Reiner, or of anyone else. Let's start with the cast.

Nick Robinson is a legitimate actor. In the same year Being Charlie came out, he was also in Jurassic World. He's since been in such films as Love, Simon and Damsel. They got a credible lead to play the Nick Reiner character. That's not to say Robinson is great in this role, but he's credible.

The rest of the cast? Common acquits himself best, but Cary Elwes -- undoubtedly doing Reiner a favor from their Princess Bride days, and in need of some juice in his career in 2015 -- never seems any better than uncomfortable in the role of a California gubernatorial candidate who is also Charlie's father. (He's an actor who became famous for a series of pirate movies -- think if Johnny Depp had run for governor but had been a lot more straight-laced than he is -- which is an interesting nod to Elwes' own career, since he was technically a pirate in Princess Bride.)

Everyone else in the cast? A few faces I'd seen here and there, but otherwise, unknowns. No one willing to add any star wattage to the project. Any potential stars probably looked at this and said "Thanks, but no thanks."

On the surface, you'd think the worst this movie could be is generic. The sad reality of addiction is that addiction stories follow a series of very predictable patterns, because the character arc of an addict is very predictable. And Nick Reiner was an especially predictable version of an addict. Still is, other than the killing his father part, though that is just an extreme version of the familiar addict spiral.

You'd figure that with a successful veteran like Reiner at the helm, this movie would at least look professional. It does not. The lighting is shoddy. The editing is questionable. The cinematography is indifferent. Even the credits look like they were made on the machine my friend bought from the store back when we made a short film in 1990, and returned after we were done. (A story for another time.)

Before I get into the interesting part of the film, I'll give you a little bit of the plot.

So Charlie is an aspiring stand-up comedian who has sobriety issues. I mean, major sobriety issues. He's been sent to rehab multiple times (like Nick) and released himself of his own recognisance (like Nick, I'm sure). And he has a contentious relationship with his famous father, like Nick. 

Let me stop here for a minute to talk about the dimensions of Rob Reiner's generosity in making this film. I watched part of an interview with the two Reiner men that occurred around the release of this film. You probably know which one I'm talking about, it was making the rounds.

You can call it the polish of a man who has spent 40 years in the spotlight if you want to, but Rob Reiner seems sincere as he discusses this project and the struggles their family had had. And what I found really interesting is that the film makes zero attempts to let the father, David Mills, off the hook for prioritizing the wrong things in his relationship with his son -- his career and perceptions in the media rather than what's best for his son. I don't know that Reiner would have been in a similarly vulnerable period of his own career where he thought Nick's troubles would have a measurable impact on him, because Reiner's biggest run of success was before Nick was born. But Reiner's willingness to let the Elwes character look like a shit -- for most of the movie, anyway -- was quite generous.

And then there's the tragedy of Michele Reiner. If you consider the mother character here, played by Susan Misner, to be an accurate stand-in for Nick's mother, then that just makes his decision to kill her all the more heartbreaking. As you might expect from a mother, especially compared to a father, Charlie's mother repeatedly takes the approach that is more directly focused on showing her son love. Charlie's father claims also to love him, but he says it's tough love and he says that was a conscious choice. His mother is more about nurturing love, and if that was Nick's impression of her, one wonders how far gone he must have been to have killed her.

I said I was giving a plot synopsis, but the components of Being Charlie are so standard that I needn't even provide much more on that front. Charlie meets people in rehab. Charlie has a friend who has a negative influence on him. Charlie falls for a girl in rehab who also has a negative influence on him. Charlie has short-term successes and falls off the wagon. There is some sort of tragedy along the way, but I won't tell you what. The film ends on a positive note.

So I think I can now transition into the ways the film is interesting, both in and of itself and as a reflection of a relationship that turned fatal.

In the inevitable reconciliation scene at the end between father and son, it's crucial how Charlie characterizes the nature of that reconciliation. There are three words you might expect Charlie to speak to his father in that scene: "I love you." Instead, this is what Charlie says:

"I don't hate you, Dad. I don't hate you."

That's a really smart way to say "I love you" without being trite, but it also reveals their true dynamic that never got resolved by the time Nick killed Rob ten years later. 

Maybe the most Nick could ever say about his father was that he didn't hate him. But maybe he really did.

Certainly that's what's been alleged, that he hated his father despite what we would think of as olive branches offered by his father, such as Being Charlie. However, you can also imagine a version of this from Nick's perspective in which his dad really is some version of an ogre.

We have a tendency to think generally about how it's hard to grow up in the shadow of a famous person, but Rob Reiner in particular makes a strange version of that narrative. As discussed earlier, his biggest career successes were long before Nick was sentient, and although he was certainly a recognizable public figure, it's not like there were paparazzi snapping pictures of him wherever he went. Yes, Rob's success could have engendered an overdeveloped sense in Nick of needing to measure up, but how much of that was inspired by pressure coming directly from Rob, we don't know.

Still, you can imagine a version where Rob Reiner is that ogre. Where he talks to his son while poking him in the chest with an index finger. "You're doing this movie, you're getting yourself back up on your feet, and I don't want to hear another word about it." After all, we know that at least that character played by Cary Elwes was envisioned as a practitioner of tough love.

There are a lot of interesting insights buried in the generic surface of Being Charlie, insights that would not have been interesting ten years ago -- just another Hollywood rehab story -- but have become a lot more interesting in the past four months. Does that make this a good movie?

Well, no. I said at the start it wasn't. 

But I was thinking about giving it one or 1.5 stars on Letterboxd for most of the time. By the end, I landed on two stars. Which is just shy of what I think of for 2.5 star movies, which is "interesting failure."

And even though this is not any sort of example of the craft of Rob Reiner as a filmmaker, I do remain touched by his decision to make the movie, and of course think about that decision in its best possible light. I don't really believe in the above image of Rob pointing his finger into Nick's sternum and telling him to shape up or ship out, though I'm sure some version of that conversation happened between them on more occasions than they could count. (And also that Rob poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into rehab, which might understandably raise a person's frustration level -- especially when the person in that rehab had all the advantages any child could ever hope for.)

And even if Rob was a bad parent to Nick, didn't manage those responsibilities as well as he could have, was learning on the job like we all are, I do think the olive branch of Being Charlie means something, if only that he continued trying to fix his son in any way he could. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Princess Bride

This is the first installment of the second of two bi-monthly 2026 series that have the same name. Every other month starting with January, I'm watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't seen yet. Every other month starting with February, I'm watching my six favorite Reiner films other than This Is Spinal Tap, which I watched before the series started. I know, it's a little bit complicated.

My intention with this version of my 2026 intertwining bi-monthly series, the one where I watch six Rob Reiner favorites, was to go chronologically. I had a special viewing of This is Spinal Tap (1984), my favorite Reiner film, before we even started, watching it as a double feature with Spinal Tap II: The End Continues last month. Next up would have been The Sure Thing (1985), technically my seventh favorite Reiner film, but we're excluding my favorite for the purposes of this series since I already just watched it. And I was really looking forward to this one, because my records say I have not watched The Sure Thing at any point since I started keeping track of my rewatches, nearly 20 years ago. 

But you know what? I can't find The Sure Thing anywhere.

This surprised me, especially in the wake of the loss of Reiner. I know that the passing of a beloved personality does not necessarily change the availability of his or her films, because that has to do with contracts and rights and all that stuff. But you do sometimes see films surface because there is a hunger for watching them at a particular time.

Not The Sure Thing. Not where I've looked, anyway. 

I won't get into where I looked and whether I missed somewhere obvious. I don't think I did, because Google AI tells me:

As of early 2026, The Sure Thing (1985) is generally not available on major subscription streaming services, but it is available to rent or purchase. It can be found on digital platforms such as Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and sometimes YouTube.

Yeah, well, I looked in all three of those areas, and no go.

I'm not giving up on watching The Sure Thing. I'll find it somewhere this year even if I have to buy it online as a DVD and have it shipped to me from America. But I will have to give up on ordering this bi-monthly series chronologically, so instead I'll use the order these films are ranked on my Flickchart. (And I can't build toward a climax by going in reverse order, in case you were wondering, because reverse order would also dictate that The Sure Thing was up next.)

That means that after #9 This is Spinal Tap, up next is #11 The Princess Bride (1987), which is actually skipping over two movies in the chronology after Tap. 

It had been almost eight years since my last Bride viewing, which was when I showed it to my kids one time when my wife wasn't there -- a decision that I regretted when she told me how much she would have liked to be present for their first Princess Bride viewing. There has not been one since, and though my younger son might still be into it, the 15-year-old definitely would not be. Like the boat boarded by Vizzini, Inigo, Fezzik and Buttercup, that ship has sailed.

The 2018 viewing, my first since before 2006 (as far back as my rewatch records go), also reminded me how much I cherish the movie. The next time it came up in a Flickchart duel, it jumped from 29th to 11th (yes, I keep a record of these things as well), which is where it has stayed to this day. 

Although this series is designed to sing the praises of Reiner, we also know that Reiner was not a director with a signature style. He had signature touches and collaborators -- watching this reminded me that he re-teamed with Christopher Guest after Tap, and would use Billy Crystal again in When Harry Met Sally -- but otherwise none of these three films is directly comparable to one another. Reiner presided over them, but as I was watching The Princess Bride this time, it made me realize that the person I probably really wanted to praise in this post is William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his own book. We lost Goldman in 2018, only a few months after my last Bride viewing.

This is not to say there will be no Reiner in this post. But as I was watching, I decided to start jotting down quotes, and those quotes can be attributed to Goldman, not Reiner.

You see, when I got to the Princess Bride portion of my in memoriam post to Reiner in December, I wrote "You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions."

Impulsively, I decided to see whether that was hyperbole or really true. 

So the following is a list of quotes I wrote down, mostly as they occurred, but a few out of order because I only realized I wanted to do this about ten minutes into the movie. So I went back and added a few I knew I had missed. I'll write them here in the order I wrote them down. 

Did I stack the deck in favor of getting as close to 60 as I could, to prove my previous casual hypothesis correct? You can be the judge of that. I had a hard time drawing distinctions between lines that I thought might actually be repeated by people -- repurposed for use in their daily lives, as we do with the movie lines we love the most -- and just good lines of dialogue that I remembered because I've seen the movie a half-dozen times. It may not have been perfect, but I will tell you that there were some where I decided they definitnely did not belong as quotable lines -- so I was not always erring in my own favor.

Also, although most of them are jokes or funny lines, a few aren't. 

Okay, presented mostly without context, because quotable lines should allow you to bring up the context in your head automatically:

1) "Unemployed! In Greenland!"

2) "As you wish."

3) "No more rhymes, and I mean it! Anybody want a peanut?"

4) "The Cliffs of Insanity!"

5) "Is this a kissing book?" (Incidentally, the only quote from the Fred Savage-Peter Falk portion of the film.)

6) "Inconceivable!"

7) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

8) "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

9) "I am not left-handed."

10) "No one of consequence."

11) "Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."

12) "And find out who is right, and who is dead."

13) "You'd like to think that wouldn't you!"

14) "Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

15) "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

16) "I am no one to be trifled with."

17) "I spent the last few years building up an immunity to Iocane."

18) "Life is pain highness. Anyone who says different is selling something."

19) "I died that day!"

20) "Death cannot stop true love."

21) "Good night Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."

22) "Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist."

23) "The Pit of Despair. Don't even -- (clears throat) -- Don't even think of trying to escape."

24) "Boo! Boo!"

25) " ... my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped."

26) "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."

27) "There will be blood tonight!"

28) "I would not say such things if I were you!"

29) "You are the brute squad."

30) "I've seen worse."

31) "Your friend here is only mostly dead."

32) "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife! But after what you just said, I'm not even sure I want to be that anymore!"

33) "Have fun storming the castle!"

34) "Mawage. Mawage is what brings us together today."

35) "Wuv. Twoo wuv."

36) "Oh you mean this gate key."

37) "I think that's the worst thing I've ever heard."

38) "Stop saying that!"

39) "I want my father back you son of a bitch."

40) "I killed you too quickly last time."

41) "Hello lady!"

42) "Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head."

A few stretches there maybe, but I got to 30 pretty easily even if you take out a dozen stretches. And the stretches and the ones I didn't write down can certainly qualify as the "30 honorable mentions."

So yeah, this script is amazing -- incredibly paced in addition to the priceless writing of dialogue. Goldman was a true master, except when he wasn't. (Did you see Year of the Comet? Yeah, don't.)

But without the actors, scripts are just words on a page. And that's where Reiner comes in. Without the line deliveries of these actors -- for which I think we can credit them and him equally -- Goldman's great lines don't stand a chance of committing themselves to permanence. 

Just think of the performance of Wallace Shawn, instantly iconic, but who before this was primarily known for stuff like My Dinner With Andre. Not the same sort of material at all, but Reiner found the comedic genius within him and brought it out.

Or -- speaking of Andre -- there was Andre the Giant, who was not an actor at all. Even with his heavily accented English, the wrestler is responsible for -- *stops to count* -- well, only three of those lines. But he is also responsible for inserting himself forever into our hearts, such that on this viewing, when he'd already been gone for more than 32 years, I got a little choked up on his line "Hello lady!"

To say nothing of how this made stars of Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, though Wright famously turned down a half-dozen ensuing rules that would have made her a lot more famous than she ever became. 

The script is great, but Reiner's touch with actors and with material -- whether we can fully quantify it or not -- makes The Princess Bride what it is. Which is my 11th favorite movie of all time.

I could probably dig for a number of other things I got out of this viewing, but The Princess Bride is not exactly new territory in terms of movies about which to rhapsodize. So I won't even bother.

But I did want to ask one thing: What's with all the weird Christmas stuff in the grandson's bedroom? (I only just now realized Savage's character doesn't have a name.)

What weird Christmas stuff, you ask? You never noticed it either?

Well I'll show you.

How about this crazy, angry homemade Santa?

Or the snowman over his shoulder here?

Or the long-bearded, European-style Santa whose long beard and red coat you can see in the middle of the picture here?

There's absolutely zero indication that this movie is supposed to be set at Christmas. Nor was it released at Christmas, having come out in September of 1987.

I'm not looking on the internet. I know the internet will have an explanation. I don't want it. I'd rather just speculate. 

More than anything I like how it gives this kid's bedroom a real, lived in quality. No, you might not actually decorate your own room with Christmas stuff, but I like that there is nothing remotely choreographed about the items in his bedroom. (I keep wanting to call him Kevin after his Wonder Years character.) Our bedrooms -- I would have been 13 when this came out, so maybe a little older than this kid -- defied a set dresser's perfect idea of what a bedroom should look like, and whoever dressed this set honored that truth and then some.

Going by order on Flickchart, my April viewing will be my #3 Reiner film, at #26 on my Flickchart, When Harry Met Sally. And that one should not be hard to find. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Magic of Belle Isle

This is the first in intertwining 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different focuses. Starting bi-monthly in January, I'll be watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't previously seen. The other bi-monthly slot, starting in February, will focus on revisiting six of my Reiner favorites.

Focusing on previously unseen films by Rob Reiner that he directed entirely after 2012 always promised to be rough at times. But at least we've started off with a film that is merely innocuous.

From what I remember of Flipped, The Magic of Belle Isle is probably most similar in Reiner's filmography to that 2010 film, in that both films feature a young girl as their protagonist, and both are set in a summery setting that prompts a nostalgia in viewers for simpler times, even if they never actually experienced that setting or those simpler times in their own lives. Both films also feature the young actress Madeline Carroll -- or, she was young then -- even though in only two years she's aged out of being the protagonist to being the protagonist's older sister. 

Knowing what I now know about Reiner's family, I wonder if these movies weren't both made as love letters to his (biological) daughter Romy, who would have been 13 and 15 at the time those two movies were released. 

The protagonist, Finnegan, is played by newcomer Emma Fuhrmann, and I list her as a newcomer because the film gives her the "and introducing" credit at the beginning. She didn't ultimately stick, not having a credit on IMDB in the last five years, but she did appear in the Adam Sandler movie Blended and in Avengers: Endgame, so there was a little juice there for a while -- and she gives a really good performance here.

But don't get side-tracked, Vance, because this is the plot synopsis portion of this post. 

I'd say she's really the co-protagonist, because the movie's biggest name is Morgan Freeman, who plays Finnegan's cantankerous neighbor in the titular lakeside town in some unspecified location of what I would guess is the Atlantic coast. (The interwebs tell me it was filmed in Greenwood Lake, New York. But I here I am getting sidetracked again.) He's only temporarily housesitting for a rock musician on tour, looking after the dog and trying to drink his way into an early grave. He's in a wheelchair and is a writer who no longer writes due to sorrow over the loss of his wife, some six years in the past. 

Like many cantankerous neighbors in the movies, Freeman's Monte Wildhorn has something to teach young Finnegan, who wants to become a writer, and she has something to teach him about not giving up on life. The lesson sharing is also going to hit Finnegan's mother, played by Viriginia Madsen, who is currently divorcing Finnegan's absentee dad, and who gives Monte a figure on whom to have a chaste crush that is chastely reciprocated. (In other words, this movie is not actually going to give Morgan Freeman and Viriginia Madsen a romantic relationship, not a huge shock since they're separated in age by nearly a quarter century. Interestingly, though, I'm currently looking at a British poster for the movie in which it is called Once More, and the poster certainly seems to suggest more of a relationship movie than the American poster above. Sidetrack much?)

Just from this basic setup, you can probably tell that this is a pretty mid concept for a movie and that you've seen a hundred such "heartwarming" tales if you've seen one. The fact that it was made by Reiner means that it is competent and likeable enough, even if it is entirely lacking in what you would call originality. 

Indeed, it's possible to map out every single step of this script, a collaboration between Reiner, Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman. You know the early scenes where Freeman is in full-on cantankerous mode are going to be played for comedy, though Freeman's nephew, played by Kenan Thompson, is actually the straight man here, at least in the scenes where Monte is moving into the house. After Thompson goes back from whence he came, then the comedy comes in the form of interactions with the neighbors and the dog, all of which are grumpy, but in that superficial movie way that is obviously going to melt away the moment Monte is required to do the right thing.

Because the movie is so basic from a screenplay level and in terms of any compelling reason for its existence, I don't think I need to go on at length about it. Then again, there are a lot of movies that we find pass the time well enough even though they do not need to exist, and for me, The Magic of Belle Isle was one of those. It was the perfect sort of movie to watch in the morning, which I did this past weekend on Sunday. 

If I'm looking for hallmarks of the Reiner signature, which I probably should be doing in a series like this, I'm not finding them in terms of the movie being funny, unfortunately. It's pleasant, and Freeman has and delivers some good lines of dialogue, but actually funny in the way Reiner's earlier films are funny? Not really, though I suspect that wasn't at the forefront of his thoughts considering that he was seeing his daughter earnestly in the role played by Fuhrmann. When that kind of thing is close to your heart, you aren't thinking about great comedy set pieces.

Still, the supporting cast is a really nice group with which to spend this time, as it also includes our dearly departed treasure Fred Willard, and Kevin Pollack in one scene. 

The movie is trying to bite off a little more than it can chew, as it's not enough for Monte to have a special relationship with Finnegan. He's also got to have a special relationship with the mentally challenged son of another neighbor, that neighbor being played by Jessica Hecht of Friends fame. Because Monte's primary energies are directed on Finnegan, that plot ends up feeling just about as superfluous as it certainly is from a narrative perspective. It's almost as though Reiner just wanted to make sure there was no chance we'd see Monte as an actual misanthrope.

If looking for Reiner connections, we should also note that Freeman had worked with him previously on The Bucket List. 

If I'm going chronologically, which at this point I will assume I am, next up in March will be probably the most difficult to watch of these previously unseen films, the 2015 film Being Charlie, which Reiner wrote with the son who went on to murder him. 

Sorry to end on such a cheery note. 

Double Tap

No, I did not just revisit the sequel to Zombieland.

Yes, I did just confront my first Rob Reiner film since the director was killed last month. 

Two of them, actually.

As I mentioned in this post, in 2026 I am going to rewatch six of my favorite Reiner films and watch six previously unseen Reiner films for the first time, all part of intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner.

I also mentioned that I had a seventh of each type of movie that wouldn't directly fit into the series, so I'd watch them first as a double feature, before formally starting the first bi-monthly series later this month.

Those are, of course, This is Spinal Tap and its sequel, the 2025 new release Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. 

It's not every day you get a sequel to one of your top ten movies of all time, and that's what This is Spinal Tap is, currently my #9 on Flickchart. So why, you ask, didn't I rush out to see this when it was in theaters? Long before Reiner's sad demise? 

Well its September 12th release was smack dab in the middle of my trip to Europe. And though I did see two movies in the theater when I was in Europe, it wasn't playing at the Barcelona cinema within walking distance of my Air BnB when I saw The Conjuring: Last Rites on that exact day. As it turns out I didn't see another movie on the trip, but if I had, I was trying to catch One Battle After Another in Greece. 

I might have watched it earlier on video, but then came the sudden shocking news of Reiner's passing. I needed a few weeks to get over that. In fact, I might have taken longer, but now my ranking deadline is the end of next week, and I wanted to include The End Continues with my 2025 rankings.

Well, it was tremendous to watch this as a double feature, and each movie is so short that I think I watched them both in the time it took for the last battle to play out in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not only are these movies short, but they have such delicious comedic pacing that they feel even shorter than they actually are. 

Now clearly, that is more of an attribute of the 1984 original, which benefits from the actors being young and spry, and from shooting in a number of different locations around the U.S. (Or at least setting scenes in a number of locations, whether they were actually shot there or not.) There was never any question as to which of these movies was going to be better in that regard. To even suggests that there could have been a question is silly. 

However, I did really appreciate how well these actors remembered how to play their roles. The best in that regard is Christopher Guest, even though we'd ordinarily give more credit for their ongoing abilities to Michael McKean (recently in Better Call Saul) and Harry Shearer (in The Simpsons for nearly 40 years now). Perhaps without the distractions of other significant work, Guest was better able to home in on what made Nigel Tufnel Nigel Tufnel. Though they all provide credible incarnations of their earlier selves as those characters. 

If there was one I was disappointed with, it may have been Shearer, possibly because he just doesn't have enough to do. Derek Smalls is a low-key MVP of the original film, the "lukewarm water," as he describes himself, that allows him to function as glue for the group -- which has a fairly literal interpretation now, as we see Derek as the proprietor of a glue museum. I just didn't feel like the character got so many opportunities to shine in this low-key way -- never stealing the scenes, but sometimes being the funniest aspect of them anyway -- in the new movie.

Still, I liked The End Continues even a bit more than I expected to, which is why I'm giving it four stars on Letterboxd. Yeah, some of that may be nostalgia and my out-sized love for the original. If you were to try to argue with me that this is really more of a 3.5-star movie, I'd cede the point to you pretty quickly. 

But the minor miracle this movie pulls off is how similar it feels to the original. And part of that is Reiner's central role, both as a director and as a character. He's playing the same Marty DiBergi here as well, the same earnest filmmaker who allowed Spinal Tap to be who they were on camera, never for a moment doing anything less than being perfectly generous to them. 

That was something I appreciated about Reiner's performance this time when watching the original. He certainly questions the things the musicians say -- the most famous example, of course, being when he wonders why they couldn't just make 10 the highest volume setting on the amplifier when the volume units are arbitrary units of measure anyway. But he never questions them with the intention of embarrassing them, and it's this kind of kindness that make us love both him and them. They are able to show their foibles, their imperfect understandings of the way things work, and he just continues to encourage them, though not, you sense, because he thinks it's dynamite footage that is going to make his movie better. 

In fact I think the only thing that didn't totally work for me about Spinal Tap II was its very last image, which I think I can spoil, but if you don't want to know what it is, you can skip the next paragraph after this SPOILER ALERT. 

Interviews play over the closing credits here just as they do in the original, another strong choice to remind us of that original. The final interview is with the band's current drummer, an enthusiastic young woman who happens to be gay, though that's not important right now. She's played by Valerie Franco, a real musician. The subject of this interview is of course her ability to survive her experience with the band without dying in a gardening accident, choking on vomit (hers or anyone else's) or spontaneously combusting. I could see the joke coming from a mile away, that she was then going to start choking on the piece of fruit she was eating, at which point DiBergi jumps in and starts to give her the Heimlich Maneuver. The movie ends on a mid-Heimlich freeze frame. I think it would have been stronger to end with one of the band members, preferably Nigel as in the original, and not on a freeze frame, which is a cinematic device that's beneath someone like Reiner. 

I could probably go on and on about both films, but I've seen This is Spinal Tap so many times that I'm not sure if I'm actually getting new things from it each time I see it. I did, however, want to delve into one thing that has always puzzled me but that I've never actually looked up before, so I just fed Google this prompt to see what AI would say:

"Why is Bruno Kirby listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap?"

You would reasonably say that Kirby has no bigger role in that movie than any other actor who has a cameo of a minute or less. Yet he gets the "And Bruno Kirby" credit at the end of the movie. Why?

Here's what AI says:

"Bruno Kirby is listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) because, despite having a relatively short on-screen role, his performance as Tommy Pischedda, the limo driver obsessed with Frank Sinatra, was a significant improvised contribution to the film's success."

Well that's dumb because they had to create the credits before they knew whether the movie would be a success. Wrong again, AI. 

I guess that one will remain a mystery. Maybe he was better known at the time than the others who made cameos. AI goes on to speculate that it has to do with his close relationship with Reiner, appearing in several of Reiner's movies, but that's another retroactive analysis, considering that this was Reiner's first film. 

As for the sequel, I did enjoy the bits that I thought some others may have had issue with, like the cameos by Paul McCartney and Elton John. But in terms of "Can they still do it," I was indeed impressed by the vocal and musical fortitude of these three actors in their late 70s and early 80s (Shearer is 82). Any staging they did of any song we knew was a pretty darn good version of that song, as far as I was concerned, especially the little studio bit they did of, I believe, "Give Me Some Money," which ends with them fading out into just quieter and quieter repititions of the chorus. Some great harmonica, which I assume was real, by McKean there, too. I also love their reaction to realizing they've just been in total harmony and knocked out of the park.

The great thing about both movies is that this kind of earnestness is embedded within a world defined by partying and showboating. They allow us to see the humans beneath the rock stars. And that's Reiner all over, earnest to a fault, earnest to the end. 

I don't know what the form will be of Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. For what it's worth, Reiner is not listed on IMDB as an actor in this movie, so it could just be a concert film, without a lot of jokes or great moments from characters we know and love. Maybe it was conceived just as a way to show us how much these men could really do as musicians.

I'll take any last little bit I can get, because it will, indeed, be the last. 

Remembering Rob Reiner in 2026

After ten days of thinking intensely about the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, I've managed to suppress it from the forefront of my thoughts in the next ten days. My regular life has been intervening in a big way since then, requiring most of my attention. In fact, after being up on every minute development of the story in those first ten days, I don't even know if there have been any new developments since then, such as a motive for the killings, beyond the sad reality of the mental instability of their son. 

While many people spent parts of that first week after his death revisiting favorites from his filmography, I did not. The pain was too fresh. 

I'm planning to make up for that in 2026, as I plan to devote significant time to thinking about the man I've recently called my favorite director, hoping only to occasionally dwell on the exact circumstances of him departing this earth, if I can help it.

As you would know from previous experiences with my blog, early January is when I usually tell you about my blogging series for the new calendar year. It's that lull between Christmas/the actual end of the previous year, and ramping up to reveal my film rankings later in January. During this time I devote one post each to telling you about my new monthly series and my new bi-monthly series.

I haven't told you about the new monthly series yet, though will probably post about that within the next week to ten days. It's an idea I came up with a while back, and has yet again pushed back two other pending ideas, which have been patiently waiting their turn for several years now. 

It was the bi-monthly series for 2026 that I had been stalled on. I had a flimsy idea, but I wasn't super excited about it. I won't tell you about that one because I may come back to it in 2027. 

Initially, though, the idea had been to return to the format of watching the final six movies I had not yet seen by a prominent director, which I have done previously with Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow/Jane Campion (three each). I did it initially with Spike Lee, though I didn't really do it right in that case, because there were nine films I hadn't seen and I watched only six of them. (The remaining three remain unwatched to this day.)

I had Hirokazu Kore-eda in mind for this, since this is a director I love and there are a number of movies of his that remain unseen by me. However, that number was more than six, and I do like my round numbers. (Which is why I watched an extra Kathryn Bigelow film the year before I started watching her final three. I don't want to repeat the Spike Lee mistake.) So I was going to watch one or two Kore-eda films in 2025 so I'd get down to the final six unseen. Suffice it to say, that did not happen, and it's also a bit of a dangerous undertaking, considering that I haven't figured out whether I can even source all of his old movies. When I was supposed to watch his film After Life for a movie challenge a couple years ago, I had to order a DVD copy from the U.S. just to be able to see it. And that's one of his more prominent ones. 

Then Rob Reiner died on December 14th, and I got an idea for not only one 2026 bi-monthly series, but two. Confusingly, they will have the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner. 

"Isn't that just one monthly series, then, Vance?"

You might think so, and you might be right. But I'm thinking of it conceptually as two, and I'll explain what I mean by that. 

First off, though, I want to say that having two criss-crossing bi-monthly series on this blog is not unprecedented. I did it in 2023 when I criss-crossed Baz Jazz Hands, the series where I rewatched Baz Luhrmann's six feature films in the year after Elvis, and King Darren, the series where I rewatched six of Darren Aronofksy's films the year after The Whale made him my first director to direct two of my #1 films. It felt a bit hectic but it was really only six extra viewings over the entire year. 

This year will be a bit more focused, as it will be all about Reiner, but it will be about two different kinds of Reiner.

In one bi-monthly slot, I will be watching the six Reiner films that I haven't seen, all of which are from the past 14 years. This is imperfect because there will soon be a seventh film. Reiner's final feature as a director, Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale, will be released this year. When I first thought of this idea, I wasn't considering the fact that I wouldn't be up for watching Spinal Tap II: The End Continues in 2025. I'll still watch it within the next few weeks before my ranking deadline, with some trepidation, but I may not formally consider it a part of this series. 

This bi-monthly slot will include one movie that will be very hard to watch: Being Charlie. I will struggle with that one when I come to it. At this point I'm not sure if I will be going chronologically or not. 

However, a series devoted only to what are probably some of Reiner's worst films does not feel like a very good way of really celebrating him. And so this is where the other bi-monthly slot comes into play. 

During those other months I will be rewatching my six favorite Reiner films, many of which are from that acknoweldged stretch of dominance starting in 1984, and one of which is not. This corresponds perfectly with the fact that I have six Reiner films in my top 200 on Flickchart, which is the very thing that led me to conclude I can and probably should consider him my favorite director. 

Now, there is a wrinkle to this one as well. My seventh favorite Reiner film is The Sure Thing, which is "only" #396 on my Flickchart. It, along with A Few Good Men, are the two films from this pre-North Reiner imperial period that I have not seen since I started keeping track of my rewatches in 2006. But A Few Good Men is not a realistic consideration for me because it's around the middle of my Flickchart, and I don't feel like I have a lot new to glean from it. (I would kind of like to catch up with my eighth favorite Reiner film, The American President, but I have to draw the line somewhere.)

So what I will probably do is exclude both This is Spinal Tap, my favorite Reiner film, and its sequel, and watch them as part of a special double feature in the next few weeks. Then that will give me Reiner films #2 through #7 to join with what will be six unseen Reiner films by the time his last remaining film gets released. Does that math make sense?

In any case, it will be a fitting, and hopefully not too mournful, send-off for a director who meant so much to me when I was coming of age, like his characters in Stand by Me were coming of age. Actually, that's the other of these film #2 through #7, along with The Sure Thing, that I haven't seen in the last 20 years. 

And by the end of 2026, I will be a Reiner completist -- at which point maybe I'll go back and watch All in the Family if I haven't yet had my fill.

Mourning my favorite director

I debated about whether to hem and haw in the subject of this post about calling Rob Reiner my favorite director.

If you were measuring Reiner in terms of the yardsticks a cinephile would use to praise a director, you might not think of him as an obvious candidate for this honor. He wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks. He didn't have a signature style. His movies didn't make the Sight & Sound list. He wasn't a big mis-en-scene guy. 

But if measuring Reiner only on the pleasure his films brought me, it's no contest. 

I wouldn't maybe know I held Reiner in such high esteem except for Flickchart, which has revealed to me that I have three Rob Reiner movies in my top 30 of all time, and six in my top 200. Yes that's right, Reiner is responsible for 3% of my top 200 movies of all time. 

And today I learned he was stabbed to death, along with his wife, most likely by their son.

WTF?

I haven't even watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues yet. That is going to be one sorry viewing when it actually happens. 

There are lots of terrible things going on in the world. Two men fuelled by hatred just shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach. Another guy killed some Brown University students. And as it happens, I've got some pretty concerning health developments in my family right now. (Nothing in my immediate family of my wife and two sons. That's all I'll say.)

But because I'm a movie guy, the one I can't get out of my head is the image of Rob Reiner begging and pleading for his life when an assailant, most likely his son, was coming at him with a knife.

And losing that argument. 

Any death is bad. But when Rob Reiner's father, the great Carl Reiner, keeled over at age 98, you couldn't even really be sad. You knew it was his time. 

Rob Reiner was 78. He lived a good life. But it had such a terrible ending, and when I think of him, I will now always think of him in the same company as others who lost their lives in such devastating ways, like Phil Hartman. 

So while I want to give Reiner more of the typical, wistful send-off that I like to give our cinematic luminaries when they pass on to the great beyond, now I'm in such painful misery that I can't even type straight. 

But because I don't think I can write a series of pieces remembering Reiner, I'm going to give it a go now.

Rob Reiner became a target on shows like South Park for a sort of liberal piousness that Trey Parker and Matt Stone found grating. But for a liberal like me, that was part of why I liked Reiner. He believed in the causes I believed in. But that was just a happy bit of fortuitousness. I would have loved him even if he played on the other team. 

That's the thing about Reiner -- you could like the films he directed, but he also had a personality as a result of being an actor first and foremost. I can't say that I watched All in the Family -- in fact, it's possible I've never seen a single episode -- but Reiner's Meathead made millions into fans of his personality, a personality that earned him two Emmys. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing Reiner's persona. It was expansive. It was hilarious. In his comedy, it could be a bit naughty. On this weekend where we've lost some good and innocent Jewish Sydneysiders, Reiner embodied the lineage of great Jewish comedy, his kvetching always generous, his observations always shrewd. Simply put, he was funny as hell, and I also got a great sense of warmth from him. 

And the film that introduced him to the world as a director used that personality to good effect. My highest ranked Reiner film on Flickchart is his first, This Is Spinal Tap, my #9 film of all time. I said earlier that Reiner wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks, but how about new film genres? He and Tap star Christopher Guest might be the two men most responsible for the mockumentary, and we couldn't have gotten a better initial tour guide than Reiner's Marty DiBergi, who interviews David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. I can't believe I don't know what the first scene of this movie is, but if you told me it was DiBergi introducing himself to us, I'd say that's most likely right. Little did we know, Reiner was introducing us to his incorporable career, which gave him the best "imperial period" -- to borrow the music term -- of any director. What's more, it was his personality as the straight man playing off the Tap men that made it all work. Who else could have asked Nigel the innocent questions necessary for "This one goes to 11," and had it work so smashingly?

Reiner followed that up the very next year with The Sure Thing, which at #396 on my Flickchart is only my seventh favorite Reiner movie. I have friends for whom this might be top three. And it would be top three for me for many directors, but I have so many other films to talk about that I can't even linger on one of the films that really introduced us to John Cusack.

Stand by Me in 1986, #131 on my Flickchart, proved that we didn't know Reiner's only mode after two films. He could also make a Stephen King adaptation and a truly seminal coming-of-age story for Gen Xers -- though about their parents, so it worked for that generation too. Which also managed to be funny in spots. It had a huge impact on me. Heck, I was 12 when it came out. 

But then the very next year, again -- that's four movies in four years, if you're keeping track -- Reiner made my #11 favorite film of all time, The Princess Bride. Epic. Iconic. Also hilarious. You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions. I didn't even know how much I loved this until I rewatched it with my kids in the last decade, which is when it shot up from somewhere in my 20s or 30s on Flickchart all the way up to #11. If it weren't blocked by The Iron Giant, that would be two Reiner films in my top ten.

Rob Reiner didn't make a film in 1988. Everyone has to recharge sometimes.

But in 1989 he made what I consider to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time, and yes I know I am pissing off classic movie fans who'd rather Cary Grant star in their great romcoms than Billy Crystal. But what can I say, I was born in 1973, and When Harry Met Sally slayed me. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it makes me feel fonder about New York City than almost any film out there. For a long time this was ahead of The Princess Bride, fully in my top 20, but at the moment it's my #26 on Flickchart. 

And yet again Reiner made a movie in 1990, his second Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Which is also a stone-cold classic. Two-handers don't get more tense and exciting than this. He coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Kathy Bates that no one will soon forget, and brought James Caan back to relevance. Which is good enough for #150 on my Flickchart. 

Rob Reiner kept things going throughout the 1990s, with the exception of legendary flop North in 1994. (And even in a mode of excess generosity toward the man, no, I am not going to defend North.) I may not be as big a fan of A Few Good Men as some people (wow, I didn't realize it was all the way down at #3292), but I do respect it. The American President at #691 is more my style. Ghosts of Mississippi (#2125) is even pretty good.

But while many people are ready to write off Reiner's career at this point -- even with zeitgeisty movies like The Bucket List on his resume -- I am always left in a puddle of fresh tears over 1999's The Story of Us, which is all the way up to #167 on my Flickchart. This is possibly the only movie I can remember watching twice consecutively on the same day, just before my first son was born in 2010, for reasons I won't get into right now. I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember when or why. Then I went another 15 years without seeing it again, when I saw it this past February, my fourth time overall, and it inspired me to write this post. And then five days later, this post. 

I'm going to finish talking about this movie not because I don't think Reiner has made a good movie in the 21st century, but because it makes a good bookend with This is Spinal Tap. Why, you ask? What could these two movies possibly have in common? 

Answer: Rob Reiner the actor. Rob Reiner the personality.

In the film, Reiner plays the best friend of Bruce Willis' character, who is possibly separating from his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Reiner is married to Rita Wilson. Just likeable actors all around. 

Reiner doesn't have a huge number of scenes, but he has just enough to give us the flavor we like from his personality. And the part I love most is Reiner's disquisition about how the ass does not really exist. The ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. In reality, there is no ass. Believe me, it works in context, especially when it gets called back to later on.

Reiner was great in front of the camera, Reiner was great behind the camera, and Reiner was great in the sphere of progressive politics, even if Matt and Trey sometimes didn't like it. I can't believe I won't see him in front of or behind the camera again.

Is he my favorite director? God, now I have to use the past tense. Was he my favorite director?

It's something I've told people about before, this high success rate on my Flickchart, which corresponds to my real affection for the man and his movies. But I always feel a bit hesitant about it. If you go around telling everyone how much you love Rob Reiner, maybe they just focus on the fact that he didn't have a lot of hits in the last 25 years of his career, or maybe they think of Matt and Trey making fun of him. Maybe it's an embarrassment to say, especially in circles of serious cinephiles, how much you love the output of one of our great populist directors.

But if I can't proudly shout my love for Rob Reiner now, in the hours after his death, I don't know when I can. 

I might just shout until I cry. 

A realization about Rob Reiner

My friend Don, who was visiting for the weekend from Chicago, and I were leaving Amoeba Music in Hollywood on Sunday night when the conversation turned to Rob Reiner. It had actually started on Ron Howard, because I had just picked up a nice-looking (albeit used) collector's edition DVD of Apollo 13 for $5.99. (It was a space-themed evening -- I also finally bought Dean Parisot's Galaxy Quest.) For his part, Don bought Bram Stoker's Dracula on BluRay and some music.

The apparent similarities between Howard and Reiner -- both former TV stars who had gone on to careers as highly respected directors -- was what caused us to wander into Reiner territory. Our initial thesis was that Howard might be the greater director. After all, he'd won an Oscar, and he continues to release prestige films. Whereas Reiner's last decade has been kind of the opposite, composed of moderate misfires (Rumor Has It ...), major misfires (Alex & Emma) and popular schlock (The Bucket List).

But it was when we started to review Reiner's older work that it hit us like a smack in the forehead:

Rob Reiner may have had the greatest decade for any director of any era. And he did most of it in five years.

If you start with his directorial debut in 1984 -- This Is Spinal Tap, which could be one of the best first movies ever -- and go forward, Reiner was absolutely on fire for the next five to ten years. Not only that, but every movie he made could be described as one of the best versions of that movie ever made -- even still today.

Shall we take a look?

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) might be the best mockumentary ever made.

Argument: Hardcore film lovers may cite a dozen examples to the contrary, but you could even say that Rob Reiner invented the mockumentary. What's certainly true is that Christopher Guest's participation in this film inspired him to reshape his whole career as a series of increasingly less brilliant mockumentaries. Nothing is less than 100% brilliant in This Is Spinal Tap. In fact, it's so great that I don't need to go into an in-depth description of why it's so great, because you already know. But I will mention Don's interesting perspective on its greatness, which is that you can see the characters thinking. When Nigel Tufnel (Guest) makes one of his inane comments, he's not just reading his lines (in part because a bunch of this stuff was improvised). You can actually see the wheels turning in his head as he answers each question, and that's part of what makes it such a fully realized, spot-on satire.

The Sure Thing (1985) might be the best road movie ever made.

Argument: Or it might not. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't. But the rest of the movies after this fit the format, so go with me on this. The Sure Thing is definitely a really good road movie, and as a result of the age I was when I saw it (about 13 or 14), it sticks out to me as one of the first films I think of when you talk about road movies. It's full of classic scenes involving the various modes of transport John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga use to cross the country, like Cusack freaking out the pervert who picks up Zuniga hitchhiking, and Cusack clashing with the pair of show-tune singers (one of whom is Tim Robbins). It's especially nice as it had the function of serving as Cusack's breakout role.

Stand by Me (1986) might be the best coming-of-age movie ever made.

Argument: Who in my generation doesn't think of Stand by Me when they think of coming-of-age movies? I'd like to think that this extends outward to other generations, but I'd probably be wrong about that. After all, today's teens probably see Twilight as a coming-of-age movie. But in terms of purity of form, Stand by Me takes the cake. Few films deal so intensely with the transition between childhood and adulthood, as Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern are caught between the innocence of childhood play and the seriousness of death, which confronts them in the form of a corpse, older bullies who fight with knives, and a train that may flatten them like pancakes. It might also be one of the best period pieces ever made, with its great 50s soundtrack.

The Princess Bride (1987) might be the best storybook romance ever made.

Argument: Or should it be called a romantic fantasy? A fantasy comedy? A romantic storybook comedy? However you choose to categorize it, The Princess Bride hits every note perfectly. It introduced a slew of iconic characters, a boatload of quotable lines, and one of the most delightful forms of "damsel in distress" escapism you are likely to find on film. Do you remember how you felt after you first saw The Princess Bride? There you go. I'll leave it at that because there just isn't much more to say.

When Harry Met Sally ... (1989) might be the best romantic comedy ever made.

Argument: And here is the really big one. All the other genres I've discussed have relatively few entries compared to the number of movies that could be described as romantic comedies. And yet this movie could still be considered the best romantic comedy of all time -- I'm not even sure what the other top contenders would be, since there are few romantic comedies that everyone can agree are as perfect as this. Granted, this is again showing the bias of the era in which I came of age, which may be inescapable -- there are certainly classic romantic comedies by the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy that older viewers would probably consider their favorites. But When Harry Met Sally is almost certainly the king of modern romantic comedies, and you might even say its stamp is evident on many if not most of the romantic comedies that followed. Again, I don't need to tell you why.

Misery (1990) might be the best Stephen King adaptation ever made.

Argument: Okay, now I know I'm wrong -- especially since Reiner himself has made a better Stephen King adaptation (Stand by Me). However, the best film adaptations of King's novels tend to be either non-horrors (both Stand by Me and one of my favorite films of all time, The Shawshank Redemption) or horror adaptations in which the writer or director took liberties with King's work (The Shining). But could Misery be the best faithful adaptation of a horror by Stephen King? Perhaps.

A Few Good Men (1992) might be the best movie in which Jack Nicholson shouts "You can't handle the truth!" ever made.

Argument: Okay, now I'm kidding.

But this is a good place to leave off, because Reiner's next film was the infamous bomb North. He did follow that with the excellent The American President (best movie ever about the president? Nah) and the pretty-good Ghosts of Mississippi, but that's the last time Reiner has met with pretty much universal critical acclaim. (I absolutely love The Story of Us, but I know I'm in the minority.)

What's amazing about this period of 1984 to 1990 is not only how prolific he was during it, and not only how successful each film was, but how comfortably he shifted between genres. As is evident in the way I've structured this piece, talking about genres, Reiner never repeated himself during this period -- in fact, I don't know that you could say any two of the films are even somewhat similar to each other.

It's an interesting realization especially when compared and contrasted to yesterday's discussion of Danny Boyle, who is also constantly reinventing himself. If you lined up 20 film bloggers and asked them which one is the better director, Boyle or Reiner, you'd probably get 18 for Boyle and two for Reiner.

But I might be one of the two. I mean, just look at those titles. Granted, Reiner's films from the 1980s have had more of a chance to endure in the zeitgeist and stake their claims as classics, and his films are all accessible in a way that Boyle's films aren't even trying to be. But it's being uncharitable and just plain wrong to dismiss Reiner as simply a populist director. Making films for the masses that are also as smart as Reiner's films is a true challenge indeed. In a way, you could say that "anyone" can make an arsty film with a potentially narrow target audience -- and Boyle may be among the best at that, considering that his artistically credible films have also managed to find a pretty big audience. But making films that please both the studios and almost any film fans you ask, from the least discriminating to the most? That's a special talent. Because most of the time you are going to piss off serious fans by pandering to the masses. However, I don't think there are many serious film fans who would find fault with This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally or Misery. And This Is Spinal Tap, in its own way, might be more subversive than anything even Boyle has ever made.

I just think it's important not to let a "what have you done for me lately?" mentality cause us to forget or discount the kind of greatness that Rob Reiner demonstrated during those incredible 6+ years. Any director would be proud to have six titles as good as those on his CV. I'm not even sure if the best six films of Steven Spielberg of Martin Scorsese are as universally well-liked as those six films. Of course, I could also be getting carried away.

However, I think Reiner deserves a little excess enthusiasm. In recent years, the man has turned into something of a figure of ridicule, and not just because he's been on a losing streak in the director's chair. His most prominent recent appearance in pop culture may have been on South Park, where Trey Parker and Matt Stone eviscerated him, making him out to be a self-righteous liberal ideologue stuffing his face with food in every shot.

Well, that self-righteous liberal ideologue stuffing his face with food may just be one of the most influential directors of all time.

Or at the very least, a guy with an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.