Categorization crisis: What is a "Television Movie"?

One of my favorite movies of 2024 so far has just been nominated for an Emmy, and it has knocked me for a loop.

You see, movies are not supposed to be nominated for Emmys. They are supposed to be nominated for Oscars. You're not new here. You know how it works.

But a Facebook friend had an Emmys reaction post that name-dropped Unfrosted, the Jerry Seinfeld-directed Netflix movie that has given me so much joy that I have already seen it twice, even though it was only released on May 3rd.

Investigating further, I discovered that Unfrosted has been nominated for best "Television Movie."

Uh oh.

Now I'm wondering whether Unfrosted is a proper part of my year-end list and all that. It's an existential threat, in a way. 

In a streaming era in which so much skips theatrical release that there must be literally hundreds of these movies that would qualify, Unfrosted has made the cut for the final five nominees. This despite the fact that many people I know think I am a fool for liking it as much as I do, or really for liking it at all. My sister and wife liked it when they watched it with me, but not nearly as much as I liked it. (And to be fair to myself, I did not like it the second time as much as I liked it the first time.) Everyone else I've spoken to about it was lukewarm at best.

Its nomination means one of two things:

1) It really is among the best of all the streaming movies that might also have qualified, which would presumably include any movie released straight to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, AppleTV+, Disney+ and what have you. 

2) It is not a proper movie in some essential sense of the word.

There was a time when a "Television Movie" had a clear definition that I understood. Although there were many other examples, the one I think of, when confronted with this question, is Recount, which starred Kevin Spacey and was about the 2000 presidential election. 

I saw Recount, but never entered it on one of my movie lists. The reasons were evident to me at the time. It debuted on HBO in 2008, and this was at a time when there was no such thing as Netflix, or if there was, it was only sending you DVDs through the mail. 

A movie that did not have a theatrical run -- or at least a straight-to-video release -- was not a movie, as I defined it. If it premiered on television, it was a TV Movie. 

The designation for Recount on IMDB states as much, as you can see here:

In addition to the scarlet letter T they give this movie -- or maybe the scarlet letter TV -- there is also the damning television rating of TV-MA.

Doing a comparison with what IMDB says for Unfrosted in that same area gives me some relief:

Okay no dreaded scarlet TV here, and that PG-13 is a bonafide movie rating.

But I'm still a bit unsure, still a bit knocked for a loop. Maybe I need to compare it to the other nominees, to see what I think of those "movies." 

The first is Mr. Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie.

Uh oh.

A movie associated with a TV show. The kiss of death. A "TV Movie" if ever there was one.

Then again, Mr. Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie is 97 minutes long and it is not described as a "TV Movie" on IMDB. It does have a TV rating though: TV-PG.

Let's check out the next one: Quiz Lady.

Okay, I recognize this as a movie I wanted to fit in in 2023 except it was released on Hulu so I didn't think I could see it, before I realized that most Hulu movies are released on Disney+ here.

The last two are Red, White & Royal Blue, an Amazon movie that slipped past me last year (though it interests me because of its subject matter: a love affair between the U.S. president's son and a prince!) and Scoop, another Netflix movie that I have already been including on this year's list.

Okay my fears are mostly assuaged, but I did think it would be interesting to see the films that have won this category in recent years, just to get a better idea of what they're going for. 

Last year's winner was Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which has never for a moment seemed to me like anything other than a bonafide movie. The Roku Channel's finest. One of my top ten movies of 2022, Prey, was also nominated (remember, this award straddles two years), giving me further comfort. Hocus Pocus 2 and Fire Island, both of which I ranked, were also nominated. The only sketchy sounding one, in terms of my categorization parameters, was Dolly Parton's Magic Mountain Christmas. I guess there's one in every bunch.  

Other recent winners have included Chip 'N Dale: Rescue Rangers (movie), Bad Education (movie?) and Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (um ... er ... see here for a discussion). That was the third of three straight Black Mirror "movies" to win. And then in 2021 (going non-chronologically within this paragraph) you have Dolly Parton's Christmas on the Square. The Emmys like Dolly Parton. 

It is clear that this is the category where "movies" that don't quite conform to my definition are honored. However, it's also clear that movies that debut on streaming are presenting a bit of confusion for Emmy voters, and they have only really been a big thing for maybe five to seven years.

I think it would be hard to say that there is anything intrinsically "TV" about Unfrosted, though it's interesting that this was following a year after Weird, because both are effectively bogus biopics, only Unfrosted is a biopic of a breakfast treat. However, there's nothing intrinsically "TV" about a biopic, in fact, quite the opposite. Biopics are typically the domain of genuine movies.

If you were really stretching, you could say that the fact that it was directed by Jerry Seinfeld, and he's a TV personality, might have given it a nudge in that direction. But he's also made genuine theatrical releases, like Bee Movie.

All we can really say for sure is that these are eligible for Emmys, while some other Netflix and AppleTV+ movies aren't, because these movies debuted on TV and some of those movies didn't. Because Netflix probably also doesn't think much of the idea of winning an Emmy -- unless for its scripted television shows, of course -- the leading streamer is sure to debut most of its most prestigious content on the big screen, to make it Oscar eligible. We all know Oscars are where it's really at.

And if there happens to be an award for some of the movies that don't get that theatrical release, well, I'm certainly not opposed to more people getting exposed to a movie like Unfrosted, watching it, and potentially enjoying it as much as I did.

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 ... 

Why Bandersnatch isn't a movie

When I published my year-end movie list, I got a couple people asking me why I hadn’t included Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on it. 

The most pertinent answer was that I hadn’t seen it yet.

Now that I have seen it, the answer I would have/could have given was “It’s not a movie.”

What makes a movie a movie is a semantic argument that could twist someone into knots, and Bandersnatch could be Exhibit A of that particular debate. But the more of it I watched, the more certain I was that it doesn’t belong in any list that is purely recognizing feature films.

In case you don’t know anything about Bandersnatch, it’s an “episode” of Black Mirror airing exclusively on Netflix that involves a video game programmer trying to program an adventure game based on a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy novel. This “episode” is also a choose-your-own-adventure for the viewer, as there are choices that pop up on the screen throughout, and you must use your remote control (or mouse if you watch on a computer) to select a particular option, which guides where the narrative goes next.

I put “episode” in quotes because calling it that commits it to being a regular hour-long installment of the show. In truth, there’s probably no “regular” installment of Black Mirror. While most of the shows have been in that typical 45-60 minute range, some have been shorter and some have been longer. Installments have been released in free-standing form as well, not directly tied in to the release of the rest of the season. In a way, Black Mirror is the prototype for the way streaming TV has relaxed our strict parameters on the old-school definition of a TV show.

But because it does have that name, Black Mirror, attached to it, categorizing Bandersnatch as something within the realm of TV is probably the easiest way to go.

The most direct point of comparison might be the December 2017 episode of Black Mirror, U.S.S. Callister. It’s one of the longer ones at 76 minutes, and though it was released alongside the rest of the fourth season, it generated plenty of discussion independent of those other episodes. However, it was not branded as anything other than an episode of the show, and I never once considered adding it to my various movie lists.

Self-classification seems to be the biggest difference with Bandersnatch, and of course the choose-your-own-path gimmick. Bandersnatch is described as an “interactive film” rather than an episode of the show. Its possible running time is variable. Depending on the path you choose, it could be full feature length, 90 minutes or longer. However, the quickest path gets you through the story in only 40 minutes, or so I have read. If you watched that version of Bandersnatch, I hardly think you’d feel compelled to compare it on an equal playing field with other 90-minute features. (Though I should note that even Netflix is not really sure how to categorize it, as the poster above describes it as an "event.")

But let’s set aside how Netflix wants us to think of it, because in truth, Netflix probably doesn’t care what you call it as long as you watch it. It’s like my wife that way. When I tried to get into a discussion of its categorization, she wasn’t interested in that. I can’t blame her, as she’s not agonizing over these things like I do.

The reason I don’t think Bandersnatch is a movie is because you can’t discuss it with someone else with any certainty that you’ve both had the same experience. In fact, there would be almost no way to have the same exact experience as someone else, unless you watched it with them, given that you must make around 30 different decisions at some point or other over the course of the narrative.

Now, you can say that viewers always have a different “experience” of a film. Personal, real-world factors – such as life experience, preference for a particular genre, mood on a given day – always factor in to how we “see” a movie. “You didn’t see the same movie I did,” you might say to a person with whom you disagreed about a particular film.

But that’s never meant literally. Usually you saw the same film, you just didn’t “see it the same way.” Unless you saw a different cut of a particular film – and I’ve got my problems as well with multiple edits of the same film – you literally saw the same images and heard the same dialogue. You just interpreted them differently based on your own biases.

The Bandersnatch text is not the same for every viewer. In fact, there are whole parts of the film (ha, I just noticed I called it a “film”) that may have been key to one person’s enjoyment or dislike of the film, that another person may not have seen at all. I read that there are 150 minutes of distinct, unique footage, only about 90 of which I saw. How could I miss an hour of footage and properly know whether I liked it or not? I liked what I saw, but what if there were grave missteps made in those other 60 minutes that would seriously undermine the movie for me if I saw them? (Yep, just called it a “movie.”)

Let’s take the whole section where Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) and Colin (Will Poulter) trip on LSD. It was one of Bandersnatch’s most interesting sequences for me, and yet I have to think many viewers wouldn’t have even seen it. You have to make one decision correctly just to get Stefan back to Colin’s apartment, where he offers him the drug. Then you have to choose to have him take the drug. We did both of those things so we saw the part where Colin tells Stefan that one of the two of them must jump off the balcony, at least 15 stories to the ground. While it seemed that a lot of our subsequent story stemmed from having taken this path, I guess I ultimately don’t think this can be considered a central structural element to the story, since some viewers would never even get there. Does it even have a central structural element?

I don’t even know how you properly talk about Bandersnatch with another person. You’d have to say “Did you get to the part where …?” If they did, they can talk about it with you. If they didn’t, maybe you’re spoiling something for a subsequent viewing of Bandersnatch that they plan to undertake.

If you want to get really cynical, Bandersnatch almost seems like a ploy by Netflix to force repeat viewings, and thereby goose its viewing numbers even further. Of course, since Netflix chooses to report its viewing numbers to us and there’s no way for us to verify them, it hardly seems necessary to artificially inflate those numbers. I do think they’re probably interested in seeing how many repeat viewings they get of Bandersnatch on the same account, to determine if people really will go down all the rabbit holes and watch the thing like seven or eight times. Which will probably help them decide whether to make more Bandersnatches.

To its credit, Bandersnatch does give you a window into decisions you didn’t make by taking you back to the most recent decision you made to see if you want to do it over. But usually you only go one step back, and usually only if the step you chose brings the narrative to a close. There are branches you can’t get back to because they are far too early, like the opening choice of cereals, or the choice of which music to listen to on Stefan’s walkman. You have to start all over again if you want to do those differently.

Ultimately, I think this is an incredibly exciting project that demonstrates a real ambition in storytelling and programming. But I can’t say I didn’t find it stressful to watch. With each choice we made, I felt myself walking away from parts of this “film” that I couldn’t see – that I would only be able to see if I watched it again, and again, and again. And despite the way it plays with notions of time, reality and free will in provocative ways, Bandersnatch is not an experience I want to keep having in order to unlock all its Easter eggs.

If I need a final crowning reason for not considering this a film, let’s go back to my year-end list of film rankings, which I mentioned to start out this piece. Movie lists are not only about comparing all the films you saw in a given year with each other, but they’re about comparing those viewings to the viewings undertaken by other cinephiles. I’m not only considering BlacKkKlansman in comparison to all the other films I saw in 2018, but in comparison to where you placed BlacKkKlansman on your list. To do that second one with any degree of usefulness, I have to be sure that you and I both saw the same BlacKkKlansman. You and I definitely did not see the same Bandersnatch, so we cannot make that comparison.

And yet I should acknowledge that throughout this piece, I have been repeatedly inclined to refer to it as a "film" or a "movie." Sometimes, I've left those references in, just to give you an indication of how real this debate is. I’m landing clearly on one side of the debate, in the end, but getting there was only the result of choosing between different paths of logic in my own mind and following them to their natural conclusion. And if Bandersnatch does indeed become some kind of bellweather for the future of movies, it’s a debate I’ll certainly have to revisit in the future.

Netflix is already disrupting every aspect of the movie industry, but I’m going to hold off a while longer before I allow it to disrupt my personal notion of what constitutes a film.

Breaking up the pair

Quentin Tarantino just can't seem to keep things simple when it comes to whether his movies are parts, or wholes.

First it was Kill Bill. He wrote such a long script and had so much good material -- at least, according to him -- that he had to divide the movie in two. Kill Bill Vol 1. came out in October of 2003, then Kill Bill Vol. 2 followed six months later.

While this was a little ungainly, it was manageable. The films had two distinct release dates and were quite clearly two different movies. Even the tone was markedly different between the two volumes. Steven Soderbergh used the same trick again last year with Che.

But then Grindhouse came along to really muck things up. Grindhouse was always completely up front about the fact that Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez each directed one half of the material in this intentionally z-grade celebration of exploitation movies, while providing secondary input on each other's work. It was a double feature, to be sure. In fact, fake movie trailers, directed by some of the directors' disciples/colleagues, provided a buffer in the middle. But unlike most double features, it wasn't possible to see one movie by itself, at least not in American theaters. For a single admission price you got both movies, plus all the fake trailers, at least one of which actually proceeded the first feature. Together they made one "film" called Grindhouse.

I was very comfortable with this, and I enjoyed the "movie" overall. I vastly preferred Planet Terror, the Rodriguez zombie movie that kicked things off, to Tarantino's Death Proof, a car fetishist's fantasy about a murderous stunt man. Planet Terror put Death Proof on its back and carried it, translating to a fun three hours at the theater.

But things got a little fuzzy when the Siamese twins were surgically separated. For both the international and DVD releases of Grindhouse, one "film" became two, and Grindhouse itself sort of ceased to exist. I understand this was done for a number of reasons: 1) Most foreign countries don't understand the "grindhouse" concept (as if most regular Americans do); 2) Most foreign countries don't have the double feature tradition (this I didn't know); 3) The three-hour-plus running time was considered a box office deterrent and would further hamper sales on DVD; 4) Tarantino wanted his film to qualify for international film festivals as an independent entity (though I can no longer find verification of this rumor I heard at the time). Tarantino's film also received an additional 27 minutes of footage. I think Planet Terror was largely unchanged.

For most everyone, this amicable divorce was probably well and dandy. But for a person like me, who likes things in neat little boxes and doesn't know how to cope with changes to the very classification of a piece of art, it was troubling. I ranked Grindhouse as one movie on all my lists, and I have since refused to adjust that ranking on any of them. And I'd have liked that to be the end of it.

Except it has come up again, which is why I'm writing about it today, in case you're wondering.

When I first started with Flickchart, it classified Grindhouse as one film, the way it was originally released, the way I preferred it to be classified. In fact, I remember getting a little thrill that they had endorsed my perspective on the subject.

But a few days ago, I first noticed Death Proof come up for a separate ranking. Then Planet Terror. The administrators of the Flickchart website must have reevaluated their own stance on the issue. Instead of ranking a film I did not acknowledge to be a film, I exited the program and went back in.

The strange thing is that when these films come up for duels, I am in the midst of ranking only films that Flickchart knows I've seen. Surely, I've seen both of these "films," but never did I officially accept either of them onto the list. They just started coming up. Which leads me to believe that the site's programmers have determined that Death Proof and Planet Terror should be included in this category by default, since anyone who has seen Grindhouse has necessarily also seen Death Proof and Planet Terror.

I might have been forced to accept this new classification if they had just removed Grindhouse from the list. But they didn't. I can still find Grindhouse as a "film" in their database. In fact, for me, it's been in 63 separate duels, 55.56% of which it has won. Meanwhile, both Planet Terror and Death Proof are still officially listed as unseen films -- even though they are coming up for duel. When you go to their home pages, the link that says "Add to my Flickchart" is live.

So now I'm confronted with a situation where instead of one film, instead of two films, Grindhouse actually constitutes three separate films that I have supposedly seen. I can't say for sure that Grindhouse is still coming up randomly for further duels, but I believe it is.

Quite simply, I don't know what to do.

Death Proof came up again today, and I liked the other film better. Without thinking about it too much, I dropped my objection to ranking Death Proof and impulsively gave the win to the other film. This meant now that Death Proof had officially been added to my rankings, that it had been ranked exactly one time. Not knowing what to do, I removed it. But I feel like it will come up again. I feel like this issue needs to have some kind of resolution I can live with.

So what would you do, dear readers? Would you remove Grindhouse and banish it from existence, so you could rank the two films separately going forward? And if so, what about all those duels Grindhouse has already won/lost? What happens to them, to those rankings?

Or would you continue to work around having to rank Planet Terror and Death Proof? Continue to quit the program -- or really, just click to some other part of the site -- every time it comes up?

Or would you leave all three of them, on the theory that they really are three distinct viewing experiences with three distinct qualities? Keeping in mind that this could result in duels between them, where I would have to choose Planet Terror over Grindhouse because the inclusion of Death Proof hurts Grindhouse, or choose Grindhouse over Death Proof because the inclusion of Planet Terror helps Grindhouse?

I depend on you to help me see things clearly, dear reader. No pressure. Just keep in mind that my lists -- even my very understanding of how to classify my world -- hang on your response.

Up, up and ... away?

I've had the "Up" series of documentaries on my radar for quite some time. If it's not on your radar, let me explain a little something about it.

In 1963, a director by the name of Paul Almond, as part of a British television show called World in Action, randomly chose 14 British private school children, all age 7, and interviewed them about their lives and backgrounds. This project was known as Seven Up, and it might have amounted to nothing more than a one-off curiosity if it hadn't been for Michael Apted. The young director had been an assistant to Almond on the original project, and seven years later, he decided to revisit these children to see how they were doing at age 14. The resulting 1970 film was called Seven Plus Seven, and a tradition was born. Apted continued visiting these children, soon to be adults, at seven-year intervals throughout their lives and his, resulting in 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1983), 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998) and 49 Up (2005). If you ask me, this most recent entry should have been called Seven Times Seven, as a little shout-out to the earlier history of the series.

I'd been fascinated by this ongoing project for years, since it's been made possible only by the continuing health and willingness of at least most of the participants, as well as the health and artistic viability of the director.

So I finally got it on my Blockbuster queue sometime last year, and a month or two back, I promoted it to the upper end, so it would come up for viewing in the near future. When I received the first installment in the mail, I mentioned its arrival to my wife, who had also always wanted to see it, and was excited to proceed on this journey with me.

Well, that was about a month ago. And it has not made it into our DVD player yet.

Yes, it's been a busy month, but that's not really the reason. You see, I've started to drag my heels on the whole thing. I have a very stupid reason for doing so, but if you know me and my stupid reasons, you also know that for me, it's legit.

Namely: I'm not sure if Seven Up is actually a movie.

(Of course it isn't, it's a soft drink, ha ha.)

It all started when I went back to look in my queue, to see when Seven Plus Seven was scheduled to come up. But I couldn't find it. I looked and I looked, and all I could see was 21 Up and then the rest. I didn't know if I wanted to start on this journey if I couldn't get my hands on Seven Plus Seven.

It was then that I realized I already had my hands on Seven Plus Seven. It had come with Seven Up. They had come together because Seven Up had a scant 30-minute running time.

Seven Plus Seven doubled that up to 60 minutes, but normally, neither a 30-minute program nor a 60-minute program would meet anyone's definition of what constitutes a "movie."

Okay, so, my mind shifted to no longer thinking of this as a conquest of a movie series, something I would be able to include on my many various film lists. That's fine, it's a TV show. A different experience, but no less valuable.

But the most recent five installments in the series are most definitely movies. 21 Up clocks in at 100 minutes, and then the next four are each over 120 minutes. And they all had theatrical releases.

So what exactly is the "Up Series"? I'd love to hear your opinion.

Assuming that I'd treat them all the same way, are none of them a movie ... or all of them? Or should I not treat them all the same way? Should only 21 Up and onward go on my lists, while I categorize the others as TV episodes?

What qualifies for my movie lists is an endless source of consternation for me. Of course it doesn't matter in the strictest sense of the word, but on some level, it does.

For example, if a movie originated on TV, is it really a movie? What if it's a miniseries? I have handled this in different ways over time, partly depending on my whims, partly depending on how I felt at the time, even if it's different from how I feel now. For some reason, I have included both Stephen King miniseries It and The Stand in my movie lists. In the case of The Stand, that may be because I actually reviewed it for the website. That has to make it qualify ... right? Yet I wouldn't have included The Shining miniseries that aired a couple years ago, even out of precedent, because I've changed my own rules since then. (While the others have stayed grandfathered in). The Shining was so terrible that I never finished watching it, so it was a moot point anyway.

HBO movies probably give me my greatest pause nowadays. For some reason, I have decided I should not include them. So when we saw (and loved) Recount, the story of the 2000 presidential election, it never made it on any list.

Yet if I were to review that same movie for my website, I'd have to reconsider my stance. My editor assigned me some "films" to review a few years back that included such titles as Sometimes in April and Lackwanna Blues, both of which premiered on HBO. I first became aware of them in the context of them being assigned to me, and it wasn't until I popped in the DVD and saw the familiar HBO emblem that I realized they premiered on cable. So in those cases, I added them to my movie list.

Well, why them, but not Recount? Because I'd already started to think of them as regular movies, and couldn't turn back, whereas I'd been aware of Recount's cable origins from the get-go?

Then the question is, if a movie does premiere on cable, why does that make it any less of a movie? I don't ask the same qualifying questions of straight-to-DVD movies. If the standard is whether a film had a cinematic release -- an Oscar-qualifying run, as it were -- then both cable movies and straight-to-DVD movies would fail on that account. So that standard is clearly too rigid. Why then should straight-to-DVD count, if a movie made by HBO, which is likely to be better made and far more cinematic in general, does not count?

I don't have the answers. Hey, I don't pretend to understand my own rules, I just try to interpret them.

And I'd love to hear what you think. Please, I really want to return Seven Up and Seven Plus Seven so I can get my next movie. And I'll make sure it's a genuine, no-questions-asked, certified, popcorn-and-darkened-theater movie this time ...