Bad guys who fight fair

As I was watching The Raid: Redemption (or just The Raid) last night, I found myself disappointed as the inevitable moment approached when one of the villain's key henchmen was about to be dispatched.

That's because until this point, the guy had been just about the most gentlemanly combatant you could hope for.

And although it's not much of a spoiler to let you know that a villain's key henchman will be dispatched in an action movie, let this be your SPOILER WARNING about The Raid, Redemption or otherwise.

This Indonesian action flick is about a police raid on a tenement run by Tama (Ray Sahetapy), a vicious drug lord, and it has the satisfying narrative momentum of moving up through the floors to the boss on the top level. Tama, meanwhile, sends his people down toward the invading cops, whose raid is off the books, meaning they can't call for backup. One such "people" is Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian), whose long hair reminded me a little of 1980s henchman actor Al Leong. Seeming almost like a Zelig, appearing in every action movie you could imagine, Leong become sort of a cult figure among my high school friends.

Mad Dog may be mad -- as in he's got mad skills -- but he's not the type of shameless psycho who would normally be his boss' #2. In most movies, not only is that character physically gifted, as Mad Dog is, but he's willing to use whatever sinister leverage he can to defeat the hero. If there's an opportunity to "cheat" in any way -- to the extent that cheating is possible in their particular scenario -- he will take advantage of that opportunity and then some. See, the hero needs to overcome not only being overmatched physically, but also the dirty tricks of someone who will stop at nothing to kill him.

Not Mad Dog. Mad Dog is all about giving you second chances, and then even third chances.

The first time we see Mad Dog in combat, he gets the drop on the lieutenant, Jaka (Joe Taslim). They're involved in hand-to-hand combat in a hallway, and Mad Dog pulls out a gun. Typical villain behavior, right?

Nope. Mad Dog motions the barrel of the gun in the direction he wants Jaka to walk. They end up inside one of the apartments, where Mad Dog puts down his gun and explains to Jaka that "pulling a trigger is like ordering takeout." If he's going to defeat an enemy, he wants it to be through fair, hand-to-hand combat. Apparently, he just wants some privacy so the purity of their fight will not be diluted.

Because Mad Dog is awesome, he eventually does defeat Jaka in this fashion, after a spectacular couple minutes of fisticuffs and, uh, legicuffs. When he finally snaps Jaka's neck, he seems to almost regret having the fight come to an end. It's the sorrow of having to put an end to a worthy opponent.

Later, he's engaging in typical henchman behavior by torturing a traitor from among his boss' men, Andi (Donny Alamsyah). This is the brother of the hero, Rama (Iko Uwais), who has been working closely with Tama unbeknownst to his law-abiding brother. When Tama discovers the relationship between the two and that Andi missed an opportunity to either kill or capture his brother, he turns him over to Mad Dog for a beatdown. Mad Dog strings him up like a side of beef and administers a series of punches and kicks to his midsection. Rama comes upon this scene and attempts to save his brother from it.

Mad Dog should just leave Andi strung up and fight Rama one on one. That would be more than fair and more than fulfill his obligation to his own personal code. No one could ask any more of him.

Instead, Mad Dog allows Rama to free his brother so that they can both fight Mad Dog. You wouldn't think either of them would be up to the task after the events of the day -- Rama having been beaten and bloodied by a dozen other assailants, and Andi getting beaten repeatedly by Mad Dog just now -- but both seem to be at or near 100%. (Hey, it's an action movie, what do you want.) And they proceed to take on Mad Dog, their two barely being an equivalent to his one.

And in fact, they really aren't his equal. Mad Dog leaves one brother bloodied and panting and is about to snap the neck of the other, as he did to Jaka. But the free brother manages to grab a length of broken fluorescent light bulb and shove it into Mad Dog's neck.

Because Mad Dog is awesome, this only slows him down a little bit. He still fights the brothers for another minute or so before they finally get him down and use the length of bulb jutting out of his neck to slit his throat.

The movie invites us to celebrate this as a victory for our heroes, and I guess it's a credit to the way the movie has established the characters that we do see it that way. Rama is very likeable and is about to become a father, and his brother is someone who presumably went wayward and can still be redeemed (is that the meaning of the title?). But it's kind of sad that it has to come at the expense of Mad Dog, whose combat chivalry knew no bounds. If he just wanted to clean up a mess and be done with it, he might still be henching to this day.

I had originally intended this post to be a discussion of a number of other villains who fight fair, but in truth, the movie villain as an archetype is usually such a dirty fighter that examples did not immediately spring to mind. If the villain or the villain's henchman does sacrifice an advantage over the hero, it's because of pride -- because he wants to taunt the hero or unveil his whole master plan. It has nothing to do with creating the conditions for a fair fight.

So rest in peace, Mad Dog. You were too good for this world ... even if you were the muscle for a cruel Indonesian drug lord.

What's in a name?

There should be no greater sign of creative surrender than naming a movie after one of its characters, right?

If you can't find just the right turn of phrase, variation on a familiar cliche, or particularly striking image or theme from the movie, you could see someone giving up and saying "Oh fuck it ... let's just name it after the protagonist."

"The protagonist has a boring name? Okay, let's change the name so it's not boring."

Having said that, though, some of my favorite movies subscribe to this naming convention. In fact, one such movie has residence in my Flickchart top 20 of all time, as we shall soon see.

So the question really is: If a movie has been named after the main character (or one of the other characters), is that actually a sign of creative deficiency? And if so, should we be able to see that in my rankings of all movies named after a character?

Logically, if all else is equal, movies named after a character should be spread equally among my rankings. If the title really is no sign of a problem with the movie, they should be sprinkled from top to bottom about equally. So in this post, I'm interested in finding out if that's really true.

(And thanks, John Wick, for bringing the question to mind when I watched you this week.)

First I need to talk about what movies I'm actually looking at, or rather, which ones I'm not looking at.

1) No movies named after just the character's first or last name. No Joe or Parker or Greenberg or Frank. Those may have their own kinds of problems, but at least there's something abstract about a title like Joe that can't be claimed if you give Joe a last name.

2) No movies where the character has a particularly flashy name or nickname instead of a given name. So, no Crocodile Dundee, Johnny Dangerously, Joe Dirt, Hudson Hawk or Edward Scissorhands. If the movie had been called Mick Dundee, it would qualify.

3) No movies where there are other words in the title as well. So, no Ace Ventura: Pet Detective or Agent Cody Banks. Those other words add something to the title that gives it additional meaning and/or context. (And in both cases are great titles, says me.)

4) No movies where the name is a famous brand name, or the name of the original source material. That rules out the likes of Robin Hood, Aeon Flux, Dick Tracy, Jane Eyre, Julius Caesar, Billy Budd and Flash Gordon.

5) No movies where it's not the complete name. Sorry, Frances Ha.

6) No movies named after famous people. Goodbye Michael Collins, Ed Wood, Marie Antoinette and Wyatt Earp. (I actually haven't seen Michael Collins, but it's one I immediately thought of.)

The other movie you won't see on this list is John Wick, but not because it doesn't qualify. I've just seen it too recently to rank it on Flickchart. I have a personal policy of waiting 30 days to rank a movie. That gives me a "cool down period" so I can get a better sense of how I really feel about it, before giving it a ranking that will have an impact on all other movies that come up against it.

However, I will say that John Wick is a particularly poor title for this movie. Yeah, everyone's afraid of this lethal killer and his name makes their blood run cold, but that alone doesn't seem justification for naming a movie after him. (I guess it would be like giving the title Keyser Soze to The Usual Suspects.) Especially since this seems like a prime example of modifying the character name so it would make a good title. (Don't light his wick, he's got a short fuse!)

That's plenty of ado -- shall we begin? I'll show you them in order of ranking, and then include a brief comment on whether the name works as the title or not. I've found more than 30 titles that qualify, so I'll try to be brief. Ranking listed is out of 4120 movies ranked.

1) Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly)
Flickchart ranking: #15
Does the title work? Given my love for the movie, I have a hard time saying that anything about the movie doesn't work. But in truth, it's a bit lazy, relying on alliteration to sound more clever.

2) Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)
Flickchart ranking: #99
Does the title work? It does, because the character is a fictitious creation, and the name has been designed to exemplify traits she has been given by her creator.

3) Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)
Flickchart ranking: #174
Does the title work? Again, it's such a great movie that I can't think of it as having any other title. But is there really a reason it needs to be named after her? No. Incidentally, this is Woody Allen's only film that uses this naming convention -- and it's also considered by many to be his best.

4) Billy Madison (1995, Tamra Davis)
Flickchart ranking: #357
Does the title work? I can justify this one based on the fact that it's about a fully grown man who returns to elementary school. I believe he's called Billy even in his everyday life (haven't seen this favorite in something like 15 years), but him going to class with third graders makes the name "Billy" all the more evocative.

5) Erin Brockovich (2000, Steven Soderbergh)
Flickchart ranking: #410
Does the title work? This is a questionable inclusion because it's the name of a real person, but since it's not a particularly famous real person, you can't make the argument that the film was titled that way to sell a brand to us. I suppose it works, but primarily because her last name is colorful. If her name had been Erin Smith, that would not have been the name of her movie.

6) Donnie Brasco (1997, Mike Newell)
Flickchart ranking: #424
Does the title work? This one works well, because it's the name of a fake identity, a bit like in Ruby Sparks. Like Johnny Depp's character himself, the name is designed to give the ring of truth without raising any suspicions among the mafia Depp's character is infiltrating. The name indicates "Italianness."

7) Jerry Maguire (1996, Cameron Crowe)
Flickchart ranking: #467
Does the title work? Again I feel blinded by liking the movie so much. But why does a movie about a sports agent need to bear that agent's name? Answer: It don't.

8) Napoleon Dynamite (2004, Jared Hess)
Flickchart ranking: #648
Does the title work? You could argue that this should be set aside in the Edward Scissorhands category, but this is the character's actual name in the albeit very quirky world this movie presents. It's evocative and fun and it totally works. It is pretty much exclusively a portrait of him, and therefore should be titled as such.

9) Happy Gilmore (1996, Dennis Dugan)
Flickchart ranking: #951
Does the title work? After his first two starring vehicles, it seemed like this would be Adam Sandler's thing ... and then he never did it again. (Despite being involved with Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star and Paul Blart: Mall Cop.) Happy Gilmore straddles the line between silly name and real name. It makes less sense as a title here than in Billy Madison.

10) Barton Fink (1991, Joel & Ethan Coen)
Flickchart ranking: #1054
Does the title work? As far as I can tell there is no reason this needs to be the name of this movie. It's just a clever-sounding character name.

11) Charlie Bartlett (2007, Jon Poll)
Flickchart ranking: #1541
Does the title work? I've actually talked about this title on The Audient before, and dissed it because I know they just liked the sound the words made when characters spoke them. The trailers for this featured a succession of characters in a row saying "Charlie Bartlett," making it obnoxiously clear how clever the screenwriters thought they were. The movie is okay, though.

12) Bob Roberts (1992, Tim Robbins)
Flickchart ranking: #1568
Does the title work? This one works better than most because the titular politician has been constructed to seem like an everyman that voters would like to elect. His name is both bland and punchy, like a catchy pop tune. It's a pretty great title.

13) Rocky Balboa (2006, Sylvester Stallone)
Flickchart ranking: #1586
Does the title work? This one deserves its own unique category: character name of a character made famous by the series the movie appears in. While it is a brand name of sorts, it has the useful function of attempting to show us a change in the tenor of the series, a shift to something more realistic. (Or maybe, a return to something more realistic, as the first Rocky is gritty as hell.)

14) Ellie Parker (2005, Scott Coffey)
Flickchart ranking: #1640
Does the title work? In the sense that it is a portrait of one particular struggling Hollywood actress, it makes a certain sense, but it stinks of them having no better options for a title.

15) Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)
Flickchart ranking: #1716
Does the title work? I hate this title, mostly because the title of the book it was adapted from is so vivid and has such impact: Rum Punch. Why QT didn't stick with that title, I'll never know.

16) Michael Clayton (2007, Tony Gilroy)
Flickchart ranking: #1955
Does the title work? This one seems especially useless, because isn't George Clooney's title a bit of a cipher in his own movie? It seems like it's more "about" either Tom Wilkinson's character or Tilda Swinton's character. But I don't remember it all that well and was not all that impressed with it.

17) Albert Nobbs (2011, Rodrigo Garcia)
Flickchart ranking: #2181
Does the title work? Another false identity here. It's a great-sounding name for a butler. I say, it works.

18) Shirley Valentine (1989, Lewis Gilbert)
Flickchart ranking: #2217
Does the title work? It's from the one-character play of the same name, so I can hardly blame them. And since it's just the one character, it makes a certain amount of sense. But it's not particularly memorable, and I'm sure other titles would have served the story equally well if not better.

19) John Carter (2012, Andrew Stanton)
Flickchart ranking: #2737
Does the title work? Leave "of Mars" on the title, and they may have had a hit. Actually, I'm sure the title only had a little to do with the box office failure of John Carter, but the name by itself tells you absolutely nothing about, well, anything. John Carter of Mars? Now you're cooking.

20) Charlotte Gray (2001, Gillian Armstrong)
Flickchart ranking: #2983
Does the title work? As with Shirley Valentine, the original book was also named this. As that's not a property I know, I'm including it here anyway. Big "so what?" here. Didn't like this movie, didn't find the character interesting enough to get a movie named after her.

21) Billy Elliot (2000, Stephen Daldry)
Flickchart ranking: #3074
Does the title work? Billy Elliot will probably never overcome the fact that I saw it on a day when I felt particularly depressed, but I like to think that I wouldn't have liked it even on my best day. No idea why this story of a boy who wants to dance needs to be named after him.

22) Nacho Libre (2006, Jared Hess)
Flickchart ranking: #3119
Does the title work? And Jared Hess makes the list again, with a title/character name just as marginally legitimate as Napoleon Dynamite. (And a movie that's far less legitimate in terms of quality.) Because this is, again, a stylized world, I say, why not?

23) Fred Claus (2007, David Dobkin)
Flickchart ranking: #3278
Does the title work? Easily one of my favorite titles on this list. It perfectly establishes the concept of Santa Claus having an ordinary slacker brother. It's just too bad the movie isn't a bit better after a promising start.

24) Simon Birch (1998, Mark Steven Johnson)
Flickchart ranking: #3422
Does the title work? Like Jackie Brown, they changed the name of the book on this for no reason I can think of. A Prayer for Owen Meany would have been a perfectly fine title. And maybe then it wouldn't have seemed quite so precious and maudlin.

25) Patch Adams (1998, Tom Shadyac)
Flickchart ranking: #3504
Does the title work? He's a doctor named "Patch." Get it? (The character's name is actually Hunter, so this kind of violates my rules. But I'm leaving it in, just to give myself the opportunity to shit on this movie.)

26) Dolores Claiborne (1995, Taylor Hackford)
Flickchart ranking: #3559
Does the title work? Also the name of Stephen King's novel. I have absolutely no idea what this movie was/is about. But I assume the title is not very important.

27) Jack Reacher (2012, Christopher McQuarrie)
Flickchart ranking: #3612
Does the title work? The most similar in function to John Wick. Not a good movie. At least in this case I think the title is an improvement from the source material, which is called One Shot.

28) Larry Crowne (2011, Tom Hanks)
Flickchart ranking: #3668
Does the title work? Larry Crowne, he's a simple fellow.

29) Julian Po (1997, Alan Wade)
Flickchart ranking: #3669
Does the title work? This movie is like a character exercise more than a movie. Christian Slater plays Julian Po, a depressed man who comes to a town and wants to kill himself, but whose life is changed for the better by the townspeople. Or something.

30) Alex Cross (2012, Rob Cohen)
Flickchart ranking: #3858
Does the title work? I debated about whether to include this one, because it probably falls into the brand name category. However, the series of books starring Detective Alex Cross don't actually bear his name. Having a reboot of the Alex Cross movies called Alex Cross has a bit of the same function as calling Rocky VI Rocky Balboa. And it works there so I guess it works here too.

31) Jonah Hex (2010, Jimmy Hayward)
Flickchart ranking: #3893
Does the title work? Yeah yeah, it's based on a comic book character. But I'd never heard of that character before. Whatever. Am I still doing this?

32) Dom Hemingway (2013, Richard Shepard)
Flickchart ranking: #3987
Does the title work? I HATE DOM HEMINGWAY AND I HATE HIS ASS FACE.

So one thing I noticed is that surprisingly few of these are out-and-out terrible. There's a decent number that are actually quite good. Let's see if the average Flickchart ranking bears this out ...

The combined rankings of the 32 movies equal 67,366, which divided by 32 equals 2105. The dead middle of my chart would be 2060, so this is very close, and proves ... nothing. Well, it proves that whether a movie is named after one of its characters has next to no bearing on its quality.

But hey, we had a fun discussion, didn't we?

Audient Auscars: Cavalcade

This is the third in my monthly series Audient Auscars, in which I'm watching all the remaining best picture winners I haven't seen, in chronological order.

Remember in February when I said I went into the 1931 best picture winner, Cimarron, with trepidation, because I had been told it was a real chore?

Well, I realized soon after posting that this warning had actually been directed at the 1933 best picture winner, Cavalcade, so I promptly shifted that trepidation forward a month to March.

In fact, I carried so much trepidation into the viewing that I didn't start it until the final 24 hours of its 30-day iTunes rental period, and didn't finish until its final 90 minutes. I carried things right down to the wire with Cavalcade, and thought I might miss seeing the ending after the movie crapped out with twentysome minutes remaining because part of it had been copied to my iPod. I had actually wanted to copy the whole thing, but it would never complete the copy. The part that was successfully copied was inaccessible through iTunes on my PC, and iTunes warned me that if I deleted it from my iPod I'd have to rent it again. Fortunately, that did not prove to be the case.

And it was fortunate, actually, because Cavalcade was not as bad as I was warned. In fact, I ended up liking it, if recognizing it as a little bit dull.

It actually makes a good next movie to have watched after Cimarron, because the movies are structurally similar. Both span at least three decades during a period of great change in their respective countries' histories, though that would be the United States for Cimarron and England for Cavalcade. In fact, the title is an explicit reference to the "cavalcade" of change visited upon England starting in 1899, and carrying through to what was then the present day. (One could argue that any 30-year period is a period of great change for a country, but I digress.)

A second point of comparison might actually be Downtown Abbey. Not only are some of the same historical events covered -- the sinking of the Titanic and World War I -- but the central characters are an upper class English family and their servants. The aristocrats (Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook) have two young boys who play with the young daughter of their servants (Herbert Mundin and Una O'Connor). The action opens with Brook's Robert Marryot and Mundin's Alfred Bridges going off to the Boer War, leaving their anxious spouses and children at home. They both return from the war to different fortunes, as the Marryot's can no longer afford servants and the Bridges come up in the world to buy a pub. However, war has had its lasting effects on the men, especially Alfred Bridges, who indulges in a rather disastrous drinking habit. Their lives progress through the decades as the children grow older and fond of each other, and the adults navigate an awkwardly shifting social landscape in which they become equals of sorts. Tragedies befall them, as do happy times. Etc. etc. etc.

If we are going for modern points of comparison like Downtown Abbey, let's throw in another: Forrest Gump. It's part of the joke of Forrest Gump that its title character gets involved in nearly every major news event from the 1960s to the 1990s, but that's kind of what happens unironically here. This is surely a function of the type of irony we've become accustomed to, but you have to kind of laugh when two characters are standing on a boat, talking about the great futures ahead of them, and they step away to reveal a life preserver that reads "RMS Titanic." Groan. The visual gag might have worked a little better if a title card before the scene didn't list the date as "April 14, 1912," which everyone whose anyone knows is the date the Titanic sunk. That's probably a pretty good indicator of this movie's tendency to lay everything out on a platter.

Here's another: When one character goes off to serve in World War I, he has no fewer than three farewell scenes that are pregnant with meaning, giving a completely unambiguous type of foreshadowing that he's destined to die in the war. Only adding to the "irony" is that he arrives with only weeks before the armistice ... but he still dies.

Of course, in this situation one must be mindful of the fact that much of this stuff was not cliche yet in 1933. That doesn't make watching it in 2015 considerably more profound, however.

Still, this movie does a lot of things right, and is certainly a grandiose achievement in terms of its production. A scene of soldiers leaving on a ship to Africa seems especially large-scale and accomplished. Something that was a big spectacle spanning many decades, yet also spared time for some intimate character moments, had a real good shot at winning an Oscar in the early 1930s. (And really, still does today.) So Cavalcade's win should have come as no surprise.

Another thing I liked is that each new time period was introduced with a musical number that kind of set the stage for the new chapter in England and in the world. This could have been hokey, but the musical numbers are incorporated into the action, rather than being the types you'd see in a Hollywood musical. It was a useful form of narration, and relieved me from the drudgery when the plot did sometimes take a particularly long time to progress.

I was surprised to learn that this movie is nowadays considered with great scorn. Very popular in its day, the movie was apparently unable to be seen for many years, and when it emerged from that period, it was not with kindness. Seeing it now without knowing that baggage, I found it just to be a handsomely mounted, stately epic. Not memorable, perhaps, but far from the worst movie that has ever won the top Oscar. I'm not even sure it would be in my bottom ten.

Okay, one last best picture winner in the 1930s, then we jump ahead all the way to the end of the 1940s in May. But first up in April: The Life of Emile Zola, the 1937 winner.

1. Going out of business 2. Can't spell

They've got a couple problems over at Network Video on Queensberry Street in North Melbourne, but the inability to spell is probably the least of them.

They're an April Fool this year in ways that are both laughable and lamentable.

It would appear that this location is following in the footsteps of its brother over in Flemington. That makes a certain amount of sense, as video stores are finally revealing their lack of viability here in Australia, after bucking the trend for longer than in most first-world countries. But I thought that the former Video Ezy in Flemington -- which is closing its doors for good this weekend -- may have succumbed to some kind of lease issue, as the owners had already posted who the next tenants would be (a law office).

Now I know it's not just an isolated occurrence. Video stores, as an institution, may be facing extinction altogether here in Melbourne.

I'd gone by this location yesterday as a second option, now that the Flemington store was about to close. Although this store does not actually say it's going out of business, it does say that it's closed from "Staurday (sic) to Thursday." (Click on the picture to get a better view of the misspelling, if you care to do so.) A business open only for four hours on a Friday afternoon/evening -- which is having a major sale on all inventory -- is not long for this world, even if this place does claim to still be renting videos instead of just ridding itself of its stock.

Losing one random video store was one thing. Losing the only other one in the area I knew of is another.

I've still got the Hoyts kiosks, but they tend to be more oriented toward popular movies than arthouse ones, and they only carry movies from about the past year. Anything older than that, or more obscure than that, should be the domain of the video store.

But now that the video store is going bye bye, I'm guessing it will become almost impossible to get my hands on a physical copy of older or more obscure movies, unless I get it for free from the library. But the library is a crap shoot. You can't go to the library expecting to pick up a specific movie.

So we are now entering an era in which the only way to get certain movies will be online.

And I guess, really, that's just the world we live in, and I have to stop writing about it is as though it's something newsworthy. It's not the end of the world, is it?

Even the video store that's closing doesn't seem that worried about it. As the misspelled poster adorning the shop window advises, I guess I just need to chillax.

Meeting my fans

I had an experience I've never had yesterday. I met some fans.

Writers -- at least writers who work in general anonymity, like I do -- are not supposed to have fans. We toil away, day after day, and for the lucky ones of us, it's a labor of love. But we don't expect to be recognized other than an editor complimenting us on a well-written piece, the occasional comment on a blog post, or our parents telling us we did a good job.

But yesterday, at the ReelGood Film Festival here in Melbourne, some complete strangers told me they loved my work. I barely even knew I had "work."

And I have to say, it was a surprisingly discomfiting experience.

But let me back up a step to set the stage for you.

ReelGood.com is the website that has been sending me to free screenings (well, three so far) and publishing my reviews since last October. The guy who runs the site held a festival of short films yesterday here in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. I wasn't sure of the general stature of this website prior to this event, but having seen what he put together, and the fact that he may have attracted in the neighborhood of 150 people over the course of the day, I came away pretty impressed. This is more than just a guy with a website who's good at social media.

I had never met John, who runs the website, in person, so I was pleased when he recognized me as soon as I walked through the door. He did know my picture from Facebook and from a random snapshot of myself I submitted for a group year-end piece, but people often look different in person, so I was pleased that he immediately knew who I was.

What I didn't expect was when his brother found me after the end of the first session of shorts.

"Are you Derek Armstrong?" he asked.

Why yes. Yes I am.

I followed him over to meet two other women and another guy. It was unclear to what extent they knew who I was, but they also seemed impressed with me.

The guy's brother -- God love me, I can't remember his name -- told me that my writing was really good, but not in that forced delivery that's required when you realize the situation calls for someone's ego to be stroked. It was with a genuine sense of awe in his voice. He then proceed to describe me as the "star" of the site.

Not only did I blush, but I think I actually kind of shriveled up inside myself.

I thanked them for the compliment, and then proceeded to sort of hold court with them for the next 15 minutes, but in the most awkward way imaginable. They seemed to be hanging on my every word, even when what I was saying felt incredibly banal to me. The more I tried to fulfill what I perceived their expectations of me to be, the more banal I felt. However, they were the ones who seemed oddly nervous. Like, they were in the presence of greatness or something.

Eventually I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and the next session of shorts started. I didn't cross paths with any of them again.

While in a way, this seems like the realization of a dream -- to be held in high esteem for the thing you love to do -- I must say that I felt incredibly unnerved by the whole experience. I imagine that it's a very small version of what celebrities feel once they are recognized in a certain environment. Prior to that they may have been enjoying a sense of anonymity, but once someone has told them they love their work, now they are concious of being on display in some way. Now they are living up to somebody's expectations of them, rather than just existing.

To even compare myself to a celebrity is, of course, ludicrous. But in that one moment, I got a small dose of what it must feel like.

Removed from the actual moment, I feel a significant amount of pride in it. We all want to be acknowledged as good at what we do. For all the times you feel like a nobody, it's good to sometimes be recognized as Somebody.

I finally saw: This is 40

This is 40 was too regrettably symbolic a film for me to have missed for this long.

When it came out in December of 2012, it caught me in the last ten months of my thirties. So if I'd stuck to my plan to watch it in the theater, I wouldn't yet have been 40 when I saw it, but the number would have been looming enough for the movie's themes to really resonate with me.

But then I heard that it was essentially two hours of arguing between Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann. The memory of Funny People's extremely distended 146-minute running time, which took the story through all sorts of narrative branches and circumlocutions, was still fresh with me, so I felt particularly wary of a bloated Judd Apatow arguefest. I decided to give that theatrical viewing of This is 40 a pass. Besides, it was December and I had to focus on Oscar contenders before my list closed in January.

It would have been clever of me to watch it when I was actually 40, or even for something like my 40th birthday, if it hadn't figured to ruin that birthday for me. (The Internship, apparently, proved a much more worthy candidate.) But by October of 2013 it was sort of off my radar. Not that I'd forgotten about it, but that it wasn't leaping to mind with any regularity, asserting its need to be seen.

Now I'm about five months into age 41, and I finally saw it on Tuesday, the result of picking it up at the library. My wife showed no flicker of interest when seeing it in the stack of new rentals, so I ended up watching it by myself.

Hey, I liked it.

It's not Apatow's best -- he'll probably never top The 40-Year-Old Virgin -- but it kicks Funny People's ass, I'll tell you that.

First, let's address that "two hours of arguing" charge. Not true, really. Rudd's and Mann's characters have fights, to be sure, but they have an almost equal number of delightful exchanges, in which we're privy to a private lingo that demonstrates how much compatibility they've built up over 15 years of marriage. In fact, anyone who would claim that the amount of fighting they do is excessive a) hasn't been married, or b) is projecting something of their own scenario onto that relationship. Mann and Rudd fight about things that are reasonable to fight about, but also make genuine attempts to hear and love each other. I was concerned that this would be a tone-deaf succession of shouting matches that were supposed to play as funny, but that would reveal the true ugliness of anyone who thought they were funny. That's not what we're getting here at all.

And their interactions did play as funny. The hardest I laughed was when Mann is giving Rudd shit (pun intended) for having spent the past 30 minutes in the bathroom. As an indication of their comfort level, Rudd is actually trying to pretend that he's just engaged in a really long bowel movement, when in reality, he's playing Scrabble on his iPad. I'd be the other way around -- I'd rather my wife think I had stolen away to play internet Scrabble than that I was taking a shit for 30 minutes. But the laugh line is this: "Who takes a shit for 30 minutes?" Mann asks. Without missing a beat, Rudd answers "John Goodman."

All I had to do was think back to that line later in the movie if I wanted to bust out laughing again.

The leads get great support from the likes of Chris O'Dowd as Rudd's colleague at his record label (all of O'Dowd's lines are good) and Albert Brooks as Rudd's father (I'll take this version of Brooks over the one we get in Drive any day). Lending decidedly unexpected support is Megan Fox, who is actually funny in this movie, possibly for the first time ever. (This is 40 did not improve my opinion of another of its co-stars, Charlyne Yi, who is reprising her role from Knocked Up. I still haven't gotten over the terribleness of Paper Heart, I guess.)

Some of the conflicts in This is 40 get wrapped up too easily, or don't get wrapped up at all. But given that this is the reverse problem of what I thought it would have -- I was preparing for 12 rounds of truly reprehensible behavior -- I'll gladly accept that. Ultimately, Apatow, Rudd and Mann -- presumably the film's most important three collaborators -- have a good sense of the wrinkles in a real relationship, and how those might play out in ways that are challenging without actually bumming us out. It's a tone that works.

And I'd like to pause for a moment to make special recognition of the treasure we have in Mann. She has never attained the stardom of some of her peers or become a household name, but she's got absolutely dynamite comic timing and is never anything less than totally believable in her dramatic scenes. The movie on which she met her husband, Judd Apatow, is one of my favorites of all time -- that being The Cable Guy. And while that's more of a straight role, she showed her fitness for especially physical comedy the next year with the surprisingly delightful George of the Jungle, and has been routinely pleasing us ever since. She's been dynamite with Apatow (Virgin, Knocked Up) and without (The Bling Ring). I'm always happy when Leslie Mann pops up in a movie, and I think I might have to see last year's certainly-terrible The Other Woman, just because she was in it.

Besides, she was born only a year-and-a-half before I was, and we fortysomethings have to stick together.

Funnily enough, I am publishing this on Mann's 43rd birthday -- her 43rd birthday in Australia, anyway. Happy birthday, Leslie. If this is fortysomething, you make it look good.

Free, plus a cab charge

So much for my free screening of Shaun the Sheep Movie actually being free.

The latest movie I'm reviewing for ReelGood.com, whose title sounds like something Borat would say, had an unexpected surcharge when I had to take a taxi to get to the Sunday morning screening, due to public transit being all screwed up by both a charity run and a festival. It's not a weekend day in Melbourne if there's not a charity run and a festival.

If I were just seeing the movie for my own purposes, I would have of course skipped it. But since I both had to review it, and wanted to make my four-year-old son happy, a taxi it was.

We knew we were taking matters a bit too lightly when we left with only an hour and ten minutes to get to the 10:30 showing. Not only was this a theater I had never been to -- the Village Cinemas in South Yarra -- but it was also an area of town I didn't know. In fact, by 9 a.m. I was only just barely figuring out how to get there by tram. We'd have to switch trams, and the journey was predicted to take us 47 minutes, according to the handy dandy trip planner provided by the public transit website.

The website also warned us of possible delays and route changes due to a festival, but at this point I didn't have time to worry about that. We had to get moving.

The 55 tram arrived at 9:33 as expected. No issues there. Well, there was one issue. Instead of reading Domain Interchange as its ultimate terminus, the tram read "Flinders Street." And instead of reading 55 as its route number, it read 55a. Something was amiss, but again, it was too far along to do anything differently at that point.

When the tram dumped us well short of Domain Interchange at about 10 of 10, and I didn't know where to go to get the second tram, I knew we were in trouble.

So I hoisted my son up on my shoulders in order to gain faster mobility, and continued south.

We crossed the Yarra River, at which point we saw the run that was bisecting the city this morning. It was so densely packed at the point we wanted to cross that we actually had to risk colliding with a runner in order to get through. Fortunately, he corrected his course to avoid the father frantically crossing traffic with a child on his shoulders.

As I plunged into the area of the city called Southbank, and noted that streets were closed off this way and that, and it was creeping up on 10 a.m., I started trying to hail a cab. The third one I tried could take us, but it was pointed in the wrong direction, and coming up on another thicket of closed off streets.

When he finally got himself turned around, making a few semi-intelligible protestations about the likelihood of getting anywhere in this traffic, we were stuck in a slow-moving procession of cars, about three of which seemed to be getting through each time the light changed. My son started to look at me and his eyes seemed to question whether we would make the movie on time. Then, so did his mouth.

I reassured him that we would. Probably.

However, we almost certainly wouldn't have had the cab driver not made a command decision that turned out to be extremely fortuitous. Disliking the devil he knew, he chose to radically change his route, a gamble that could have been disastrous. Instead, we started moving quickly along thoroughfares that were not quite so choked with cars. A mere 10 minutes later I could tell that we were only blocks away, and indeed, we were disgorged with eight minutes to spare before the movie started.

I didn't realize until we were almost there that coming by cab involved an additional hazard beyond the mere financial. See, my son sometimes gets car sick. And with the way the cab was swerving and stopping short to make the 10:30 deadline of which I'd already advised him, we could have had a whole different mess, a literal mess, on our hands. My son reminded me of his potential for car sickness when we were, thankfully, only a block or two away from the cinema. He told me somewhat uncertainly that his stomach felt hungry, not sick. Fortunately, that's all it was. I gave him some mango slices not long after we got out of the cab.

You don't usually tip cabbies in Australia, but I was so pleased with this one's on-time delivery that I found a $2 coin to give him -- and would have dug out a second one except that I couldn't find one in a timely fashion.

So yeah, it cost $23 rather tan the mere $3.76 it should have cost for my son's round trip tram fare (I was on a weekly pass, so my costs were more abstract). But we got there. And hey, that's still cheaper, a lot cheaper, than it would have cost if we'd both been paying for our movie tickets.

Of course, the movie didn't actually start until nearly 11, a reality I realized as soon as we got to the lobby and saw that it was bursting with other children, none of whom had obviously been let in yet. Oh, did I mention that this was a special free family event? So everyone was getting free tickets. Mine were just arranged by the studio specifically for me to review the movie, rather than won through some web raffle or whatever the case may have been for the others.

We also got free popcorn and water upon entering the theater. Unfortunately, that was not effectively advertised, so I'd already purchased a water and M&M's that somehow came out to a whopping $11.70.

So yeah, free is never really free. But when the movie ends up being a charming family entertainment from one of the world's most reliable purveyors of charming family entertainment, Aardman Animation, you can't complain too much about any additional costs incurred along the way.

Picking over the bones of another video store

When I first arrived in Australia, I described it to a friend back home as "kind of like the U.S. in the 1990s."

This is not to say that most things are backward or particularly behind here. In fact, certain things -- like the ease of paying for goods, where you can sometimes just tap your card against a screen -- are a bit ahead of the U.S. Rather, what's old-fashioned is the quaint ongoing viability of certain things that have long since fallen by the wayside in the U.S.

Pay telephones, for example. It's easy to find a pay telephone here in Melbourne. They are few and far between in the U.S., but they are still plentiful here, still a resource that provides a useful service to the public.

Book stores? Don't get me started. You can't go a city block in almost any part of the city without tripping over a book store. And the price people will pay for books -- even used books -- is absurd. I'm sure people have their kindles and their iPads, but by and large, they still love reading a good old paperback or hardcover book.

And video stores?

Well, it looks like the times are finally catching up with Australia in some respects.

Until recently, I had two video stores that were equidistant from my house. The one I regularly frequented -- well, on $2 new release Tuesdays, anyway -- was called Video Ezy, and then Network Video. The other I've never even set foot inside, because a phone called told me they didn't have any equivalent to $2 Tuesdays.

Well, I'm going to have to learn what deals they do have, because Video Ezy/Network Video is no more.

My wife broke the news to me about a week back. She'd received a text, apparently, that they were going out of business and that everything was on sale. Why I didn't receive this same text, I don't know -- they texted me once when they thought I didn't return a movie on time, which turned out to be their error. Since then, they must have lost my number.

So I planned to go there on Wednesday, to pay my last respects.

Except it was closed on Wednesday. From now until April 2nd, when it shutters for good, it will only be open Thursday through Sunday. Which I can certainly understand, since they're not renting anything anymore, only clearing out the remaining unsold inventory.

I made sure to return this past Saturday, this time with only the older of my two sons in tow.

And I guess my purpose was not so much to thank Video Ezy for all the good times -- it had always been a pretty lame video store, if I'm being honest -- but rather, to figure out which movies I could buy on the cheap.

So though I do still recognize the passing of each remaining video store that closes with a bit of sadness, now the inevitability of the event has adjusted my perspective. This new version of me doesn't dwell on the sadness. Instead, apparently, this new me tries to dig in and find deals.

I instinctively avoided the new release wall, because a) those movies were selling for $7 instead of $3, and b) I don't necessarily want to buy movies that have just come out on video, since they aren't the kind of old favorites I typically add to my collection. (The good titles had been picked pretty clean by Saturday, anyway.)

It's an interesting challenge, to choose titles from a whole video store that's separated out by genre, and know that pretty much everything is affordable. There were still a couple thousand titles available, so it wasn't like I was down to just the dregs. My idea was to look extra hard at the comedies, because those tend to be the ones with the most repeat watchability (and the ones my wife is most likely to repeat watch with me). I gave cursory looks at the other sections as well, but came away with more comedies than anything else.

Having not bought a movie in more than year, I thought I could go a little hog wild. So after circling the store for about 20 minutes, coming up with an initial pile of purchases about twice this size, and driving my son to the brink of boredom-inspired insanity, I came away with the following seven titles:

Seen this twice, but the second viewing was probably four years ago. My wife likes it too, so we'll probably throw it in within six months.

Really liked this one and have only seen it once. Also, I don't know if my wife has seen it yet, and it's right up her alley.

Comments for Cedar Rapids are pretty much ditto for this.

I've already seen this twice, but it's been more than three years since my last viewing. My wife doesn't like this as much as I do. Then again, I don't think anyone likes this as much as I do.

Okay, leaving the comedies behind now ...

Did I say "leaving the comedies behind"? I should have waited one more movie before saying that. The funniest Star Trek is in my top 100 of all time, and I haven't seen it in forever.

My favorite movie of 2005. I may not have a burning desire to see this again, having seen it again about five years ago, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to own one of my #1 ranked movies. This was the last to make the cut.

And finally ...

I've seen this movie three times already and it only came out in 2013. Obviously I love this movie and need to own it.

Some that didn't make the final cut: Private Parts, Go, Headhunters, Philadelphia, a few others I can't remember. These are movies I like or in some cases love, but I just couldn't quite pull the trigger, either for repeat watchability reasons (Philadelphia) or having just seen them recently reasons (again, Philadelphia). Besides, that was $21 worth of movies, and I still had to pay another $10 for two videos my son wanted -- which were priced at $5 apiece because they were brand new.

So while I'm sad that another chapter is closing in the way we watch movies, at least I can salve my wounds with seven nice new additions to my video collection.

The uncool favorite

The Shawshank Redemption is a problematic movie for me, and I imagine for many others as well.

It's gone through a rather strange evolution, from underdog at the time of its release (a clearly second-fiddle best picture nominee after Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction) to modern classic that regularly appears at or near the top of IMDB's top 250 (it's currently #1, actually). This evolution is credited to its regular appearance in the rotation of cable networks like TNT, where it has gotten the opportunity to ingratiate itself to viewers who are wiling away a lazy Sunday afternoon. 

So why should a person be ashamed of saying they love a movie that ranks #1 on some kind of theoretically reputable movie list?

Because more than any other movie, it seems like the movie that identifies you as a "new-school cinephile."

See, the same people who made The Shawshank Redemption #1 on IMDB are the people who have elevated such films as The Dark Knight and The Avengers through the rankings. Their latest project appears to be Interstellar, which is all the way up at #22 on IMDB. That's a pretty high ranking for a movie that was actively disliked by a significant percentage of the people who saw it.

So if new-school cinephiles like sci-fi and comic book movies so much, shouldn't Guardians of the Galaxy be #1 on IMDB? Or one of the aforementioned titles?

No, because even those guys know that although they may love those movies, those movies are not strictly speaking "reputable" movies. Those movies are not "serious" movies about "real" issues. 

When looking for such a movie, they go Shawshank.

"Real" cinephiles don't really talk about Shawshank much, because on some level they probably recognize that it is a really, really good movie. However, because of its popularity, they distrust it in a similar way to how they (more rightly) distrust the aforementioned Forrest Gump. They think the mere fact of its popularity means there is something objectionable about it. Any movie chosen to be #1 in a democratic system must be inferior, because Joe Blow does not know how to properly assess the quality of a movie.

I sort of agree with this thinking. In general, I would hope that my favorite movie of the year was not also the movie that made the most money at the box office. I pride myself on not being a snob, but you have to be at least somewhat snobbish or else you aren't going to display that kind of selectivity that inspires you to seek out hidden gems. You want a movie to speak to you in a way that is not just the most surface-level interpretation that can be attained by just anybody. If everybody loves a movie, there must be something too obvious about it by half. 

So that finally brings us to my Saturday afternoon viewing of The Shawshank Redemption, my first viewing of it since I started keeping track of repeat viewings back in 2006. I'd say I'd seen it three or four times all the way through before that, and countless bits here and there on TV. 

I haven't seen it yet in the era in which it has become such an unqualified beloved hit, in which it is actively troublesome for people who imagine themselves to be discriminating consumers of cinema.

It was with this sense of wariness that I threw it in the DVD player. I was kind of scared of both possible outcomes. I was scared of loving it, because it would align me with all those less-discriminating viewers who have elevated it to the top of the IMDB chart. But I was also scared of not loving it, because that would mean I have continued to champion something that really isn't as good as it's cracked up to be. It's still #25 on my Flickchart, though that's down from a high of around #18 or #19.

Well, I still loved it. In fact, I was surprised to find myself overwhelmed by emotion at a finale that I knew all too well. 

The experience of watching it was like getting back in touch with an old friend. I knew its rhythms, and I fell right back into them. I didn't need to watch every moment of it with undivided attentiveness, which I sensed, allowing me to select it as the movie to watch while disassembling my computer. (I'd gotten a disc stuck in there the night before.) I think this is why it became such a hit on TNT -- a lot of people watched it in the background of their lives as it played in their living rooms while they were doing other things. 

And is there something wrong with that? No, no there isn't. I love a movie that reveals a little bit more about itself on every new viewing, where visual easter eggs are hidden that can only be detected through multiple viewings. I love discovering unexpected themes running through films, and how the creative camera or editing choices highlight those themes. I love films that challenge and frustrate. But I also love a straightforward movie that just does what it does exceptionally well. The Shawshank Redemption is such a movie.

If that makes me uncool to "real" cinephiles, then I'm uncool.

Hey, Lester Bangs said it was okay.

Meek's, cut off

Poor Meek's Cutoff.

It is officially getting the runaround from me at this point.

I've already seen this movie once, back in its original release year of 2011, but I've been eager for a revisit ever since then, as it's a film that keeps growing in my retroactive estimation. I've borrowed the movie at least three times from the library, probably more like four, which you know is a no-no if you read this post. Multiple rentals are much more likely in Australia than they were in the U.S.; there, you could borrow only three at a time, but here, your rentals are limited only by your imagination, and the likelihood that you will be able to gather them all together to return them by the due date. (The actual restriction is 50 items at once.)

Meek's Cutoff has got to have felt like its turn for a rewatch was finally due, especially given my flurry of rewatch activity lately -- in March alone, I had already watched a dozen movies that I'd already seen.

And I did indeed pop it into the DVD player yesterday afternoon. I needed something that I'd already seen, and preferably something calm and methodical, to watch in the background while I worked on my computer. (A different DVD from the library -- another recent rewatch, Night of the Living Dead -- had gotten stuck in my computer's DVD player, and I was going to need to do surgery to extract it.) Meek's fit both descriptions.

Unfortunately, when the movie started playing, Meek's Cutoff was cut off.

There were black bands on the sides of the screen. Not the tops and bottoms, but the sides.

Tops and bottoms = good. That means you are getting a widescreen presentation.

Sides = bad. That means the damn thing is a pan & scan version of the movie, and therefore, an extremely hobbled version of itself.

For those who may not know what I'm talking about, I will spare a few words of explanation. "Pan & scan" is the derisive term to describe movies that have been formatted to fit the standard 4 by 3 dimensions of an old cathode ray tube TV. Average people seemed to like that format because it meant the image filled their entire screen, but purists always hated it because they knew that the sides of the image had to be cut off to make it fit. The term "pan & scan" comes from the fact that on occasion, an actual artificial shifting of the "camera" had to be introduced into the image so that crucial information form the side of the screen was not lost. I think most notably of one of the first times I recall seeing something in pan & scan, when I watched Pulp Fiction with a friend, and noticed that the "camera" was panning from side to side of the elevator in order to capture both Vincent and Jules' faces as they went up to shake down the three low-level criminals. In the original movie, of course, that is a static shot, but the actors are far enough to the sides of the screen that you'd lose half of each guy's body if you just did a straight chopping of the sides of the image.

Now that many TVs are more rectangular than square in shape, pan & scan movies look even more egregious because you get the empty space -- the very thing studios were trying to avoid when they initially conceived of pan & scan -- on either side of the screen. So not only is the image butchered, but the butchering is no longer "seamless" to the untrained (average moviegoer) eye. For that reason, pan & scan versions are much more rare these days, and I think not seen at all on BluRays, though I may be wrong about that.

Needless to say, I resist any scenario that will involve watching something in pan & scan, especially when the movie is thoughtfully composed. If it's a dumb comedy I will probably just watch it that way, but something like Meek's Cutoff? No way.

So I cut off Meek's Cutoff after less than 30 seconds, and put in my own copy of The Shawshank Redemption instead. (Full post to follow on my experience of watching Shawshank for the first time in more than a decade.)

It's not the first time in the past six months I've been forced to abort a viewing because it was a pan & scan version. I had been determined to watch The Shining for the first time in eons around Halloween, but discovered (to my horror) that the copy we owned was indeed in this dreaded format. I blame my wife. She's a good film fan, but it's not second nature to her to check the aspect ratio when she buys a movie. And this is one she bought ages ago.

The next time I see Meek's Cutoff at the library, I'll make sure it's on BluRay.

Alien vs. Aliens: Finally, an informed opinion

It's one of those cinematic discussions that seems to keep on circling back around. Every couple years, like clockwork, I seem to be around people having the following debate:

Which is better, Alien or Aliens?

They seem to find this debate especially interesting because, as they are fond of pointing out, Ridley Scott's seminal 1978 film and James Cameron's phenomenally successful 1986 sequel exist in two different genres. Alien, they point out, is a horror movie, or even more specifically, a haunted house movie. Aliens, on the other hand, is an action movie, even a war movie.

I don't mean to belittle this debate or suggest that the people who have it are not creative. I've probably initiated this discussion myself on occasion. I'm just kind of surprised by the legs it's got. People just can't get enough of comparing and contrasting the first two Alien movies.

As much as I have been involved in this debate, though, I've tended to take on the role of the curious onlooker. I mean, I've suspected where my preferences lay, but having only ever seen Aliens once, in the 1980s -- and having seen Alien all three of the times I've seen it since then, including twice in the past five years -- I didn't know if I could confidently choose the original over the sequel, without giving Aliens its due via another viewing.

And as there have been more and more years that have passed since I've seen Aliens, its mythology has grown accordingly. Having already had a sense of its greatness as an action movie, I have since decided that it probably exceeds the sometimes limiting confines of that genre. I mean, just think about the mythical badass that Sigourney Weaver is in this movie.

Until Sunday night, though, when I finally sat down with Aliens again.

The first thing that struck me was the withered, old-fashioned look of the 20th Century Fox logo as it popped up at the beginning of the movie. That's what the logo looked like in 1986, but that made me realize I had this weird persistent idea of Aliens as "new." It's nearly 30 years old, Vance. Some age is going to show on it.

I had forgotten that the movie began with Ripley being rescued from years of hypersleep -- 57 years, as a matter of fact. That figure chilled me when Paul Reiser revealed it to a groggy Ripley. Aliens was interstellaring us years before Interstellar.

The setup is great. In an Aliens appreciation piece I read recently, the writer noted that nearly nothing that can be described as conventionally exciting happens in the first hour of the movie. I was rather staggered to hear this. You could never get away with something like that in 2015, as an action movie would be almost contractually obligated to begin with a ten-minute action set piece, even if it then proceeded into a half-hour plus of laying the groundwork for the second half of the movie (but it probably wouldn't actually deprive viewers of explosions or fisticuffs for any half-hour period of its running time). Yet the opening hour of Aliens works exquisitely, slowly building tension until the creatures are unleased on us in all their fury around the 55-minute mark.

A surprising thing happened then, though. I actually sort of became less interested for the next 45 minutes or so.

Although this is the part where the marines realize how terribly overmatched they are, and it also contains Bill Paxton's most quotable lines, I found both the alien kills and the marines' responses to them less clever than I expected them. This is probably also the part of the evening when I started to get really tired, having gotten a later start on the 137-minute movie than we would have otherwise liked.

Of course, once the cast is pared down basically to just Ripley, Newt and Bishop, the movie really grabbed my attention again. Perhaps it was seeing Aliens for the first time as a father, but I got damn near emotional when Ripley appears in the power loader and spits out her epic line: "Get away from her you bitch!" I love that her fight in the loader takes on an almost slow-mo quality because the loader is so very big and deliberate in its motions. Anyway, the ending felt incredibly satisfying.

I think it's kind of funny that both of these movies end with the alien being shot out of an airlock. Now I'm curious to go back to Alien to see how similar that end scene is. I imagine it's different enough, but it's funny to consider the similarity since these two movies are otherwise thought of as so different in their tone and intention.

So my first viewing of Aliens in about 25 years did in fact convince me of the superiority of the original, which ranges from a slight superiority to a more significant one. Both are obviously first-rate films.

And in case you were wondering, I won't be widening my net to revisit Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection any time soon ... even if the directors of both of those films have gone on to have very interesting careers, and it would be useful to see how these films fit into them in retrospect.

Now I'm looking ahead to what Neill Blomkamp will do with an Alien reboot/sequel ... and after watching Chappie last night, I feel even more encouraged about his maturation as a director and his ability to pull it off. Given the robotics and mech suits he's used in his movies, a reappearance of the power loader in the next Alien film is almost a guarantee.

Revival of a nearly four-year-old vow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other quick observations:

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

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

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

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

And #2843 corresponds to ...

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

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

So now I really have no excuse.