Exhibit F in the movie/TV debate

As the pandemic continues onward and as entertainment content becomes more and more difficult to pin down, those of us who care about such categorizations continue to wrestle with the distinction between what constitutes a movie and what constitutes TV.

The new Fear Street series on Netflix -- all three of which I have now seen -- certainly profiles as a series of movies in most respects. On a purely objective level, the shortest of the three is 107 minutes, well past the longest single episodes of what gets categorized as television.

But ...

The three movies -- Part One: 1994, Part Two: 1978 and Part Three: 1666 -- were released at one-week intervals since the start of July, every Friday, much like a streaming service waiting to spring the next episode of one of it most popular TV shows. Such as Loki, a very cinematic TV show, which we also just finished.

And more convincingly ... 

Each of the final two movies begins with a recap of what has happened so far, with the damning words:

"Previously on Fear Street ..."

There are two things about this that are troubling from a categorization perspective:

1) The preposition. Things happen in a movie. They happen on a TV show.

2) Movies generally don't recap what happened in the movie before them, even if they are part of long-running series. They assume either you saw that movie or you did your homework to prepare yourself for this viewing.

This doesn't make me reconsider whether Fear Street is a trilogy of movies or a limited television series. For one, Netflix itself refers to it as a trilogy. (A "film trilogy event," as you can see on this poster.) "Trilogy" is movie terminology, not TV terminology. Then there's the convincing piece of circumstantial evidence, which is that the three movies all have the typical end-credit slow crawl that you only see on movies, not on TV shows.

What the slight ambiguity does do, though, is make me think about others that have ended up on the other side of the categorization debate after I completed my analysis.

And that gives me a chance to tell you that I still cannot watch Steve McQueen's Small Axe [movies/TV shows] to be sure my analysis holds water.

If you recall this post from December, you'll remember that I decided that the five "movies" in the series that ran on the BBC and then were carried on Amazon did not qualify as such and I would not be watching them in order to rank them with my 2020 films. 

There were a number of reasons I cited, one of which was their length (some of them barely cracked the hour mark) and one of which was the place they originally ran (the BBC, a television station). 

But the reason that seemed to convince me the most was that I didn't think it was possible for a director to direct five movies in one year. 

After Fear Street, I'm starting to reconsider that.

Fear Street director Leigh Janiak has, demonstrably, directed three movies in one year. Sure, they could have been shot at different times and all released consecutively as a kind of gimmick, but I doubt it -- since some of the cast appeared in all three movies, it would make no sense to scatter them to the winds only to bring them back together again.

Plus, the combined running time of the three Fear Street movies (330 minutes) actually would exceed the combined running time of the five Small Axe "movies" (406 minutes) if not for the extraordinary length of Mangrove, which is 127 minutes. If someone can direct 330 minutes of movies in one year, why not 406? (Increasing the difficulty factor is that McQueen had five different casts and five different settings, but maybe that doesn't increase the difficulty as much as I'm suggesting.)

But I still can't watch Small Axe to see if they "feel" like movies. Know why?

They are not available on Amazon internationally. 

This would have been the biggest reason I couldn't watch them for my 2020 year-end, if I'd bothered to check. 

I determined one night earlier this year, when I needed something short, to watch Lovers Rock, by the far the most acclaimed of McQueen's pieces. Neither that title nor Small Axe came up when I searched on Amazon.

Thinking it might have been an aberration limited to that particular night, I checked again recently, at which point I discovered that they just aren't on Amazon in Australia. If I want to watch them here, I have to do a deal with the devil with Rupert Murdoch's Foxtel, and I just ain't going to do it.

So they are stuck in the TV ghetto until some future point where Murdoch get his grubby mitts off of them. (I can't even rent them on iTunes.) Then, and only then, can I possibly renege on my initial conclusion about them. 

As for Fear Street, it was a project that got significantly better for me as it progressed. I actually disliked the first one. Got much better after that. Full review here. 

My first Slamdance, and reconsidering feature length

The virtual Slamdance is wrapping up today, and I've "attended" for the first time this year.

Unlike some film festivals that have limited their audiences to the region (MIFF being one), Slamdance 2021 was available for anyone who wanted to subscribe. My wife did so for her work, and I reaped the benefits.

The reaping was fairly limited, though. I only watched two proper feature length films, Darragh Carey and Bertrand Desrochers' A Brixton Tale, which had some promise but ultimately did not fully come together, and Agnieszka Polska's Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!, in which I never really got my bearings. I don't have anything further to say about either at the moment.

I do have thoughts on something I watched that was not proper feature length, but is making me reconsider how exactly I define that. 

Background: I am a strict adherer to perceived rules -- when it comes to how I define and classify cinema, anyway. I've written about it before and I suspect you are at least somewhat familiar with my stance on the subject.

My most recent writings about it related to Steve McQueen's Small Axe film series last year, which won huge amounts of critical praise, but bent a lot of us out of shape in determining how to categorize to it. For one, it was made for television, which typically disqualifies a series of "movies" from discussions about the year's best "films." The more salient trait for today's post, though, is that most of those "films" are barely over 60 minutes, making them dubious candidates as feature films on length alone. I ultimately didn't watch them in time for last year's rankings, and am sorry to say I still have not.

But the issue has come up for me more recently than that. A few weeks ago I got contacted to review a documentary called The Astrology of Pandemics, whose title really piqued my interests. I was all set to request a screener link when I saw the movie is only 42 minutes long. Recoiling at this oddball length, I had to tell the publicist, "I'm not sure how to say this without sounding snooty or arbitrary, but we usually stick to feature length films for reviews."

So that brings us to Slamdance. A couple nights ago my wife told me about a film called Taipei Suicide Story, directed by someone with the single moniker KEFF, that she'd watched and loved while out of town. She texted me "You probably have a million things to watch right now [for once that's not true] but I just watched Taipei Suicide Story and it's great -- only 46 minutes."

Only? 

That's not a selling point actually. It's a point of great consternation for a slave to categorization like me.

A point of consternation that wouldn't have mattered to me if I hadn't actually watched it.

I hadn't been planning to. But when the kids and I joined my wife out of town on Wednesday night, I needed something shortish to watch after feeling exhausted from a long and busy day of packing, working, and driving 90 minutes to meet her down in a coastal area on the Mornington Peninsula.

My first choice would have been just an episode of TV, something like Snowpiercer, the first season of which I am still slogging my way through, and the only show I'm watching that she isn't. But she reminded me of Taipei Suicide Story and its 46-minute run time, and I decided "Fuck it. Categorization be damned."

Now, this was not a snap reconsideration of my ideas of what qualifies a movie for inclusion on my lists. Rather, it was a snap decision not to worry about if I watched something without being able to add it to those lists. 

This is a surprisingly strong motivator for me. I have enough of a collector mentality that I shy away from things that I can't "collect" via inclusion on my lists. This doesn't apply to TV, obviously -- I don't have a list of the TV shows I've watched (yet, though I am thinking about starting one). But with movies, it does, and it's been a big factor in why I have not watched many short films over the years. The lack of access to them combined with their incompatibility with my lists has made it easy for me just to give them a miss, to use the Australian lingo. 

Taipei Suicide Story is not a short film. I think we would agree that 46 minutes is too long for a short -- though I note that IMDB lists The Astrology of Pandemics as a short at 42 minutes. IMDB does not give TSS that same designation, but that could just be inconsistency in their approach.

However, there could be something to that 45-minute line of demarcation. When once struggling with the length of the Buster Keaton classic Sherlock Jr., I decided that as long as a silent film was at least 45 minutes it could earn inclusion on my lists. Length standards were different back then, and I didn't want to categorically dismiss films made before 1930. The new freedom enabled me to add Sherlock Jr. to my lists and to give it the full five stars it so richly deserves.

There is a similar potential motivating factor behind Taipei Suicide Story. See, it is by far the best thing I've seen so far in 2021. 

Just to give you a little plot, it has to do with a clerk who works at a Taipei suicide hotel, where guests check in and they never check out. Or sometimes they do check out, if staring into the void causes them to reconsider their course of action. But each morning cleaning teams move from room to room, hauling out bodies and wiping down blood spatters, wearing full PPE. Except in one room where a woman has been in a state of uncertainty all week, having hung a maintenance sign on her door to dry to draw out her limbo until she can make a decision either way.

As my wife pointed out, upon my grumbling about the category confusion, it doesn't need to be any longer than it is, for what it is. And she's absolutely right. It tells the story it needs to tell in the exact amount of time it needs to tell it, which allows it to invest us in the characters, and all other things a good feature film does well. If it had stayed another 25 minutes to push it into clear feature length territory, maybe it wouldn't seem like such a tight little bit of melancholy loveliness. 

So if I were ranking Taipei Suicide Story, it would go straight to the top of the list of 12 titles I've seen so far this year. It would be an easy call.

Now, to decide whether I should actually do that.

Having so recently argued against Small Axe -- more passionately on the grounds of it being TV than it being too short -- I find myself flirting with hypocrisy by talking about Taipei Suicide Story (which is shorter than all the Small Axe movies by 15 minutes) as a movie I want to rank for 2021. The difference, of course, is that I was making that Small Axe argument in the abstract, not having seen those movies, while the more tangible nature of my current situation allows me to make the opposite argument. The same thing probably would have happened with Small Axe. No one who watched them decided not to make them eligible for ten best lists, and fearing I would do the same, I just decided not to watch them in time.

But with my wife's urgings and my own need for something short on Wednesday night, not to mention a closing window of opportunity to watch it before the Slamdance movies went offline, I have indeed seen this movie, and now I've got a Big Question on my hands.

I can tell you that in the short run, I have not added it to any lists. Then again, I have not updated my lists since about Tuesday, meaning they do not yet show my earlier viewing of The Lady from Shanghai (speaking of things with references to China in the title) either. Until I have actually omitted TSS from a running list that includes movies I saw after it, I haven't really made up my mind, I guess.

Not to say that doing that will make up my mind either. I can go back and add it later. But will I?

If I'm trying to rationalize in favor of adding the movie to my lists, including my 2021 running rankings, I could say the following: "A film has to be one of two things: a short or a feature film. If it's not one, it has to be the other." And there's a certain logic to that. We don't have a third way of categorizing films, and I think we've agreed that a 46-minute film ceases to be a short. So in this scenario it would have to be a feature.

But maybe Taipei Suicide Story just breaks the mold, and forces us to consider whether a third category is necessary -- and whether these categories will even mean anything ten years from now when fewer and fewer films appear in the theater. That's the big argument in the other direction, which is that this movie has no good venue for playing to the public. Forty-six-minute films just don't play in cinemas, at least not unless they are packaged with another 46-minute film, though the odds that two such odd ducks would be thematically compatible with one another are pretty slim. Simply put, people don't make 46-minute films because they want to have some prospect for recouping their investment. When a theatrical screening is not an option for that, it means you may have a highly unprofitable film. 

But as all movies go increasingly to streaming venues, it may start to matter less how long they are, just how good they are. How many features have you seen, even shorter features, that had 20 minutes more content than they needed to reach their maximum potential impact? Instead of padding itself out with B plots or drawing out interactions to a point where they become banal rather than poignant, Taipei Suicide Story just embraces the shorter running time. Should we punish it for that?

Maybe KEFF, whoever he or she is, just has a more enlightened view on all of this than the rest of us do. And as I was looking at KEFF's credits on IMDB, I noticed one other directing credit: 2019's Secret Lives of Asians at Night. Which is listed as a short, whereas TSS is not.

If it's good enough for IMDB, maybe it's good enough for me? Maybe?

I suspect I will continue thinking about this for a while.

Hey, at least it's not TV. *shudder*

Steve McQueen cannot direct five movies in one year

There are currently 73 titles in my Letterboxd watchlist, which tracks the current year film titles I still hope to catch before I close off my rankings the second week of January. 

That may seem like a lot, but it's about typical for this time of year. There are always plenty of movies I can't get to, either because they're on a service I don't subscribe to, or I missed them in the theater and they have not yet become available for rental, or simply because they were once forecast to come out this year but never did. That last is obviously happening a lot in 2020, as titles like Dune and Black Widow are still in my watchlist, mostly because at the end of each year, I roll over the leftovers, as long as their release dates are still in the future.

A series of 2020 (films? TV shows? let's talk about it) I do have access to is challenging whether that list should really be 77 titles long, or maybe only 72.

And this seemingly trivial decision could end up being a landmark moment in the erosion of what we call cinema. 

A while back I added to my watchlist Lovers Rock, a new Steve McQueen movie I'd heard good buzz about. At the time I added it, I noticed the poster also made reference to something called Small Axe, but I didn't know what that meant until later. I just knew McQueen was a filmmaker who demanded my attention, as I've never disliked one of his films and they always engender plenty of discussion.

Small Axe, as it turns out, is a series of five "films" McQueen has directed for Amazon Prime. That service is certainly promoting them as films, as that continues to be the more prestigious moniker, at least for the time being. However, they are not all what we would consider to be feature length. 

As my true awareness of Small Axe has only dawned on me in the past couple weeks, it has presented me with quite a dilemma. When you're already focusing down your choices at the end of the year, and even starting to informally slot your remaining movies into available viewing slots, it throws quite a spanner in the works, to use the Australian phrase, to suddenly be presented with five new movies you hadn't been planning for. 

Of course, part of this dilemma involves actually deciding whether these are movies.

The easiest way to decide is just to go with how they are being marketed, which is as films. If Small Axe had come out earlier in the year, I likely would have just gone with that categorization, and sprinkled my viewing of them throughout the year, as I did with the Amazon-only Jason Blum series Welcome to the Blumhouse, which featured four films of its own. 

But facing the end of the year -- and the prospect of not being able to include these for consideration in my year-end rankings -- I'm forcing myself into the position of really examining their bonafides as genuine pieces of cinema, and not just an anthology TV show, like we get so many of these days.

For one, right at the start of the Wikipedia description, it refers to the series as "an anthology film series." That description contains conflicting terminology, if we are to think of an anthology as primarily a television term. But the weekly release dates of these "films," starting on November 20th and finishing on December 18th, lend more credence to the notion that it is a limited television series with regularly recurring drop dates. 

Then you've got the running times. The first release, Mangrove, is 128 minutes, leaving no doubt as to its appropriate designation as a film. But from there things get more dicey. Lovers Rock, the one I first heard about and the second release in the series, is barely half that length at 68 minutes. Then you've got Red, White and Blue (80 minutes), Alex Wheatle (66 minutes) and Education (63 minutes). 

Only two of those "films" meet the standard definition of a feature film, and at 80 minutes, Red, White and Blue is only barely squeaking in. (I draw an imaginary line of demarcation around 75 minutes.)

Maybe this would seem more clear cut in favor of labeling these as films if we didn't have so many examples of streaming television shows that have very long individual episodes. Many series that are clearly defined as television shows have no trouble issuing single episodes that exceed feature length, or at least my stated 75-minute lower end of that range. Some of those shows are even anthology shows, in that the episodes don't share any characters or plots in common. The most obvious example is something like Black Mirror, which has isolated long episodes among mostly ones that are under an hour.

I'm not sure why McQueen gets a classification exemption. And if Mangrove weren't as long as it is, maybe he would not. If you are promoting five different units of filmed entertainment that are all between 65 and 75 minutes long, are you still calling them films?

Given that many of my arguments are rationalizations enabling me to avoid watching all five of these different units of filmed entertainment by January 12th -- because I feel like I need to watch all of them or none of them -- there's one final argument that truly convinces me, which I have already alluded to in the title for this post. 

I can't think of another example in history where the same director has made five films in one single year. Two, for sure; probably three or maybe even four back in the golden age of Hollywood, when films were made in like ten days and the director's role was limited to the period he was actually on set yelling "Action!" or "Cut!" But five? No director can direct five films in one year, especially in this day and age.

You know what one person can direct five of in a single year? A TV show.

It may seem like a meaningless distinction, but at this time of year, I'm trying to find meaning in meaningless distinctions.

It's generally easier for a director to direct multiple episodes of a TV show, even if some of those episodes reach feature length, because they tend to rely on the same sets and the same assemblage of talent. Maybe the best example here is something like True Detective, whose first season was directed entirely by Cary Joji Fukunaga. And those were certainly cinematic episodes, sprawling in nature and ambitious in technique. It may have been harder for Fukunaga to direct eight episodes of True Detective even than for another director to direct two films in one calendar year. But there is still no doubt that this is a TV show, not a series of related movies.

I suppose there's a degree of difficulty introduced to McQueen's feat in that he changed casts between each project, as well as, presumably, locations, though I have not seen these so I can't state that for sure. I also reckon Small Axe is probably not as technically ambitious as True Detective, though again, I am only speculating.

However I arrive at my conclusion, and even if making decisions according to precedent is a faulty process, it's a conclusion I can rest easy with for now. Then, sometime in 2021, I can watch Small Axe at my own pace, and take in their undeniable pleasures without it feeling like a cram session.

The question I'll have to tackle then, though, will be whether I add them to my various film lists or leave them off. And that's the part of this that gives me long-term categorization fears. There are so many signs of the way movies are ceasing to be considered a vital entity, or collapsing into the mechanics of television if not yet their label as a distinct art form. If something like Small Axe further blurs and starts to erase the line between movies and television, well, at the very least it will throw cinematic loyalists and list-makers like myself into a tizzy.

A question for another day ...