Like old times

Ever since I got my critics card last July, sneaking into second halves of illegal double features has become a thing of the past.

That tradition was revived last night in a scenario borne of necessity.

At 6:45 I attended a critics screening of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which only just opens here on Thursday. I call it a "critics screening" to make it sound a bit fancier than it actually was. I was there because I'm a critic and had been invited for that reason, but for most of the others it was simply an advanced screening. As such, we got free popcorn and a soda. (Score.)

This was a perfectly timed screening as it would allow me to emerge from the 144-minute movie just in time for a 9 o'clock showing of How to Be Single, another movie I would be reviewing. In fact, depending on when you read this, links to my thoughts on both 13 Hours and Single should appear in the column to the right.

I had intended to use my AFCA card to secure a ticket to Single, as Monday is one of two nights (along with Wednesday) when the card is actually accepted at the Hoyts chain after 5 p.m. But as I spent enough time eating a couple of slices of pizza at the food court downstairs -- a dinner that seemed a bit superfluous once I realized there would be popcorn -- I forgot to go to the box office to pick up that ticket.

I thought I'd still have time to go pick one up, but when I powered on my phone after 13 Hours, it was already 9:13 p.m. I knew Single would still be in trailers or possibly even ads, but I also knew that descending an escalator and potentially waiting in line for my turn at the window would endanger the start of the movie. I never like to risk that, but when I'm reviewing something it seems like even less of an inviting proposition.

So I called on my old school instincts and began the hunt to find what screen it was playing on, since they don't post the movie titles outside. In fact, so concerned was I about missing the start that I didn't even use the bathroom -- despite having a lingering need to relieve myself that dated back to even before the start of 13 Hours.

Naturally, Single was the last one I tried. (Well of course it was the last one I tried, since I stopped looking after I found it, but it was also the last choice.) Before that I walked in on two foreign movies in the middle of their running times (Hoyts is devoted exclusively to blockbusters -- and to movies from Bollywood and Asian cinema), two empty screening rooms, and another movie that was about to start that turned out not to be How to Be Single. When I asked a guy in there if I'd indeed arrived at the right movie, he said, "I don't think so, no." Of course, he didn't tell me where I had actually ended up, so that will remain a mystery.

And naturally -- to anyone familiar with the elongated advertising block before your typical multiplex movie -- I still had two full trailers and part of a third to watch before the movie actually started. Fortunately, my bladder obliged me until the end without too much difficulty.

I felt a bit funny having to resort to my old criminal ways, those that were designed to let me see as many movies as possible in the theater without overly taxing my wallet. I mean, I'm legit now -- movie don't cost me anything without having to cheat the system. But then again, for that very reason, it wasn't really a criminal act after all. I wasn't going to pay for How to Be Single anyway; Hoyts was never going to collect and entry fee for me. The only difference is that now, there's no paper trail of my attendance in the form of a signed voucher.

But as funny as I felt, there was also something enjoyable about it. I used to love the comparatively victimless crime of a free second movie in a double feature, always assuaging whatever guilt arose by the knowledge that they'd be showing the movie whether I was sitting in one of the many empty seats or not. And I liked the minimal level of cleverness it required -- locating where the movie was playing without looking like that's what I was doing, walking confidently past various theater employees while secretly wondering if they identified me as a guy whose paid ticket had been ripped two hours earlier, and so on. It felt like a perfected trade skill, a professional necessity for the modern, unpaid film critic.

And one day I won't live here anymore, won't be able to flash a critics card to get me into movies for free.

Gotta keep those skills fresh, don't I?

I finally saw: [REC]

In the fall of 2008 I saw and loved Quarantine, which made 2008 kind of a watershed year in terms of imaginative new ways to use found footage. That's because Cloverfield kicked off 2008. That movie blew my mind enough that I saw it twice in the theater and ended up ranking it in my top ten for the year.

Of course, both of those films were indebted to the Spanish horror film [REC] from 2007 -- one minorly, one majorly in the sense that it was actually a remake of [REC].

As sometimes happens, though, I never circled back to watch [REC], perhaps because I worried that by having seen its remake, Quarantine, I didn't expect much about it to surprise me. So even though I figured it was probably the superior film, I didn't make the time for it until last night.

Even last night, though, I carried in the same concerns. It's that worry you get about feeling like you cannot properly assess the quality of something whose tricks you have already seen copied ad infinitum. We live in an era in which the found footage horror has gotten pretty devalued, and even though I have been pleasantly surprised by more recent entries than I have disliked, it's still a genre with a lot of baggage. Even one of the granddaddies of that genre felt like it might not offer anything fresh, through no fault of its own.

But [REC] is only just over 75 minutes long, so committing to finally seeing it was ultimately a pretty easy decision.

And I'm certainly glad I did.

Although it's true that I was not surprised by any of the developments in the movie, Quarantine having copied those developments pretty much exactly (even down to using most of the same shots), I was glad to see that I was able to let my critical mind go free, and put myself in the shoes of audiences who saw this for the first time nine years ago. At the time, it had been eight years since The Blair Witch Project put found footage on the map, and the genre had yet to be used in a truly interesting way since then. It was easy for me to imagine last night the thrill of seeing something like [REC] roll off the screen at me, even if I wasn't experiencing those thrills with quite the same sense of freshness as those audiences did.

The trouble was how to provide this movie a star rating.

The experience I had watching it was probably a four. I can't deny that knowing how things were going to turn out dissipated some of the shock scares that the movie relies on. But in this case I felt like I had to award it an extra half star for the sheer ingenuity it demonstrated, not to mention its impact on future movies in the same genre. I have no doubt that the 2007 version of me would have given either 4.5 stars, or the five stars I gave Cloverfield.

But here's something interesting. As I check Letterboxd to ensure that I did give Cloverfield five stars, I see that I didn't. I see that I didn't even give if 4.5 stars. I see that I gave Cloverfield "only" four stars. Four stars to a film I saw twice in the theater.

Now of course, that was not a 2008 star rating. That was a retroactive star rating assigned sometime in 2012, when I first got started on Letterboxd. This provides an interesting window into how much my idea of how to provide star ratings has changed in just four years. It seems inconceivable to me that a film that I ranked in my top ten for a year could have gotten less than 4.5 stars from me. Perhaps in 2012 I was undergoing a slight lull in my appreciation of Cloverfield. As a matter of fact, looking back now, I saw Cloverfield for the third time in May of 2011, within a year of when I would have been providing that star rating. And I do remember being slightly less enthralled with it.

Well, it's definitely a different me now. Chalk up yet another 4.5-star review on Letterboxd. I'm hopeless.

But at least this means I'm seeing a bunch of good movies these days. And making up for the fact that I should have seen some of them long ago.

Mission accomplished

I scratched an old itch tonight.

When I finally watched The Mission, it was the fulfillment of an intention to view that was nearly eight years old.

About now, eight years ago, it was the home stretch before my April 12th wedding. My regular flow of rented discs through the mail had proceeded pretty much unabated to that point, but eventually something had to give.

That something was The Mission.

It had made it to the top of my queue out of a general desire to see it, rather than a specific time-sensitive need to sit down and watch it. And as the date of our wedding approached, it became clear that The Mission was not a part of our current mission. I couldn't imagine the scenario that would allow me to sit down and watch a 125-minute movie about Jesuit priests trying to convert native South Americans to Christianity while fending off the advances of the Portuguese.

So instead of just sitting on it until after the honeymoon, I returned it unwatched, enabling me to secure one of two movies that seemed more honeymoon-friendly: The Brothers Solomon and Death at a Funeral. Light comedies was what I was looking for, but I couldn't have guessed how bad they would also both be.

Since sending The Mission back to Blockbuster (yes, it was those days) without watching it, I've always sort of felt I needed to get back in front of it sooner rather than later. It took nearly the entire Barack Obama administration (which had not yet begun at that point), but I finally converted on that mission.

Was it worth the wait?

Yes and no.

It's a well-made and impressive film, but as it turned out, I could only give it half my attention. See, my Thursday night was also spent finalizing my wife's birthday present, which involved cutting and pasting and coloring. (The present came out pretty well, though.)

So was it the right way to finally watch The Mission? Probably not. But I did give it four stars on Letterboxd. So there's that.

But when Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, uttered the now-famous phrase that serves as the subject for this post, he too was premature in declaring an achieved outcome.

Oh well. I guess someday I can make up for the o-Mission.

Valentine's Days with Daniel Radcliffe

If you're getting a sense of deja vu from this post -- and, let's be honest, you're probably not -- then it might be because I wrote a post this time last year called "Valentine's Days with Zoe Kazan."

That post was to acknowledge the funny "trend" that saw me watching a movie starring Zoe Kazan on two straight Valentine's Days. In 2014 it was Ruby Sparks (for my third time) and last year it was What If.

If we can stay in the suspect arena of flimsy trends, this year Kazan is handing the baton off to her What If co-star, Daniel Radcliffe. This year we dropped the romance theme for our February 14th viewing, but we still scheduled a viewing, and it was the 2012 horror The Woman in Black -- which also stars Radcliffe.

The romance theme was abandoned, though Woman in Black does cover matters of the heart, in that it deals with Radcliffe's character pining over the death of his wife in childbirth (though it was a good six or seven years earlier), as well as other characters broken hearted over the wrenching loss of family members. But speaking of flimsy, that's a pretty flimsy connection to Valentine's Day. What can I say. It's not always that interesting to be predictable in your choices. (In fact, if you put it that way, it never is.)

Interestingly, though, its release was more or less timed to Valentine's Day, on February 3rd of 2012 in the U.S., and a week later in the U.K.

Even more interesting is the character the then 22-year-old Radcliffe was playing.

I said earlier that Radcliffe's character now has a six- or seven-year-old son as a byproduct of his wife's death, which would have made him, oh, 15 or 16 when he got her pregnant. That would have been unusual even in the early 20th century, when the story takes place.

But what makes it all the more unusual is that Radcliffe came of age playing one of the most famous boys of 21st century cinema, Harry Potter. In fact, he'd only just finished playing Potter seven months earlier when the final installment of that series was released. The choice to cast him as the father of a not-very-young boy seems odd given that history, unless Radcliffe just wanted to do whatever possible to distance himself from Potter as quickly as possible. Which, to be fair, is something we've definitely seen with kids who grew up playing a signature role.

It's the first but not nearly the only bad decision in The Woman in Black. Although I will cop to getting the chills from this movie from time to time, they were the cheapest type of chills imaginable, ones that left me feeling guilty even as I could not deny their physical actuality. This is about as boringly straightforward as horror movies get, though I refer primarily to the scare mechanisms and general milieu of the story. The plot itself was pretty convoluted, which serves only as a further detractor from the proceedings.

If I want to keep this baton-handing trend going next year, I guess I'll have to see something with one of Radcliffe's Woman in Black co-stars. I don't know, Ciaran Hinds?

The folly of remaking something unique

I'm away for the weekend and supposed to be taking a small break from blogging, but the wifi is strong where I'm staying, and I've got a moment alone with my computer and my morning coffee on a balcony, so ... instinct took over.

Last night at this resort where we're staying near Phillip Island (about 120 k from Melbourne), I finally got started on some personal viewing at around 11 p.m., so I sought out the shortest thing I'd brought with me -- which happened to be the original 1973 version of The Wicker Man, borrowed from the library. It clocked in at a brisk 84 minutes, so it was easily the winner.

Having seen the Nicolas Cage/Neil Labute remake almost exactly eight years ago -- to honor the 366th day of 2008, February 29th, with something notably awful -- I'd always harbored a curiosity about the original, and whether the seeds for what went so wrong in the Cage/Labute version were visible there.

They were, but not in the ways I had expected.

It wasn't that the original was so deliciously campy and that Labute had either deliberately or accidentally brought the same tone to his remake. Rather, what was wrong was the decision to remake it in the first place.

I was riveted by this odd movie, directed by a guy I'd never heard of named Robin Hardy. I'd never heard of him because he didn't make another movie for 13 years after The Wicker Man, and then it was 25 more years before his next (and most recent) directorial effort ... though he's still going at age 86, and has a project on wikipedia whose release date is listed as TBA.

Well, if I'd been a film industry person who'd seen The Wicker Man in 1973 (which would have been tricky as I was being born that year), I would have given Hardy his next job right away. It's strange and mysterious and discomfiting, while also being kitschy in just the right ways -- and while also sort of being a musical.

A musical? Yes, there are about five different songs in this movie, sung by the actors. They're front-loaded, as that kind of thing drops away in the second half, but they are honest-to-goodness songs, some sung diagetically, some sung as apparent commentaries on the action. Some are gloriously cheeky early 70s flower children songs, and some are gloriously cheeky early 70s flower children songs with a sinister undertone. All work perfectly in terms of orienting us in the film's time period and all make the action a bit more chilling than it would be on its own.

The action? It's like the plot of Labute's remake in many ways, if I remember correctly, which is certainly to be expected. But so different from it in key ways.

One difference that I found unaccountable, and even more damning of Labute's project once I know about it, is that Labute chose to make the central pagan group (religious sect? cult?) into an entirely distaff affair. This key choice to have it an organization composed entirely of women is simply not present in Hardy's film. There are certainly powerful women who appear here, but no more centrally then some powerful men, notably Christopher Lee as the group's leader (called Lord Summerisle, named after the very beautiful Scottish isle on which this movie was shot). There's also one chilling scene where a female teacher is instructing a class of entirely girls on the phallic symbolism of the maypole, a scene that was recreated in the remake (as I was reminded by watching an awesome five-minute "best (worst?) moments of The Wicker Man" video on youtube). There's definitely something provocative about the fact that they are all female in that class. But Hardy's movie does not go on to suggest that the women have a dominant position in this society, and that makes Labute's choice to extrapolate that reading all the more problematic ... especially when their ungodly sacrificial tendencies are so feral, so unambiguously evil. This also majorly complicates the gender dynamics in any scene where Cage is forced to punch one of them out (this happens multiple times) and even, in one case, fell one with a karate kick. These scenes are simultaneously comical, which gets at exactly the moral complexity of what goes wrong in Labute's film, which certainly invites charges of misogyny when taken in comparison to the original.

The other thing that humorously weighs Labute down is his decision to fixate on bees. Some of the moments of greatest humor from that five-minute youtube video involve Cage's reaction to having a mesh chamber that resembles a fencing helmet placed over his head, and having bees poured into that helmet, which attack Cage's face and inspire some of his most outrageous acting. (Though I'll be damned if I remember that actually appearing in the film version -- I wonder if it was a deleted scene.) Labute incorporates bee imagery into some other allegedly disturbing images he includes in his film. That's not in the original either. Although this pagan group wants to make a sacrifice to return its harvest to its former glory, it's a harvest of produce, particularly apples. Maybe Labute just thought Hardy would have made his movie about bees if it were possible to create digital bees in 1973.

Another thing I found particularly striking about the original is that Edward Woodward's police detective is a man of strong Christian faith, which sets him up in opposition to the pagans (and makes him an ideal candidate for sacrifice in their view). That may have been present in Labute's film as well (eight years and more than two thousand films has a way of clouding the memory), but it didn't register much to me at the time, or if it did it was also in that realm of the unintentionally comical that suffuses the whole movie. Woodward seems like a true believer, which lends extra conviction to everything and makes the contrast all the more powerful.

In a way, it was a stroke of cinematic good taste for someone to have seen a film like Hardy's The Wicker Man and imagined that its eerie goodness should be brought to a modern audience. But especially with the film's indispensable flower child quality, it isn't really translatable to 2006 without losing a good portion of the mood that gives it its power. Also, it should have been perfectly evident to this person of good taste that this is a singular movie, one that maybe never should have existed in the first place, and certainly shouldn't exist twice. The same good taste that served them in recognizing the greatness of Hardy's movie abandoned them in informing their judgment about a possible remake.

As I am trying to be a bit more measured in my praise of films in terms of their star ratings, I gave The Wicker Man four stars on Letterboxd, though I toyed with that additional half star. It's a treat for anyone who likes those niche horrors that seemed to have jumped out of the 1970s and escaped our universe altogether. That sense of being untethered from what we know and have seen before is absolutely a good thing.

And absolutely something they never could have captured in a remake.

Though I probably shouldn't close this piece without acknowledging that Labute did give us something completely out there, in the sense that his Wicker Man has become something of a modern classic in terms of movies that are so bad they're good. I shouldn't close this piece without acknowledging that there's some value in having done that -- in fact, great value. I'm glad I live in a world where this awful version of The Wicker Man exists, a version we can all laugh about together.

And without that awful version, I might never have discovered the chilling original.

Everything is awesome/everything is boring

Wednesday was a day of two movie-watching extremes for me, even though the two movies had a deceptive amount in common.

And even though I only watched one of the movies.

I'll explain.

That afternoon my kids watched The Lego Movie when we got home from our day's activities early (because daddy left his wallet on the kitchen counter). I didn't watch it, but of course certain familiar parts seeped into my consciousness through osmosis as it was playing in the background. First and foremost the main song, which my older son was then singing for the rest of the night.

Then that night I went to see Anomalisa, which was just released here last Thursday.

Superficially, they couldn't be more dissimilar. One movie is a colorful celebration aimed at children. The other is a dour meditation with profanity and puppet sex. However, mechanically, they are very similar. Both use stop motion animation, even if for very different purposes.

Then there's the big contrast in their world views, which has a rather literal component to it.

The Oscar-nominated song from The Lego Movie was of course Tegan & Sara's "Everything is Awesome." The outlook on the world of Michael Stone, Anomalisa's main character, is "everything is boring," as quoted in an exact line of dialogue. One movie bursts with color, one movie has almost literally had the color drained out of it. (As a prime example of that, please note how the poster above blends almost perfectly into the gray background of my blog.)

And yet there are other themes these two films share. The Lego Movie concerns itself with the idea of conformity, of becoming indistinguishable from your neighbor as you consume your way to a kind of anesthetized bliss. There is a literal element of conformity to Anomalisa, as Stone sees and hears (almost) all the other people in his world as only slight variations of each other. Their voices are exactly the same, and their faces have an eerie doppelganger quality even as they have surface differences, accounting for gender and hairstyle. (Actually, not even really accounting for gender.)

This would be the part of this post where I take my specific observations and provide you a more profound, generalized view of how these films relate to each other and what they're Saying with a capital S. However, in reality, this is the part of the post where I need to wrap things up to get ready to go out of town for the weekend. And yes, that means I'm leaving you without my assessment of the successes and failures of the latest from Charlie Kaufman, one of my favorite creative talents in the movies -- in part because I am still trying to figure out exactly what I do think of Anomalisa.

So, without any further ado ... wrapping up this post riiiiiight ... now.

Audient Auscars Extended: Gandhi

When I announced in December that I was extending my Audient Auscars series for three more months to get in the last three best picture winners I hadn't seen, I fully expected I would watch Gandhi in January.

And I did start to watch it. I watched 25 minutes of it, in fact.

The other 158 did not come until yesterday.

What can I say -- it was a busy month.

And though I'm usually pretty anal about sticking to the schedules I establish on my blog, we're a bit outside the box here, extending a series by just three months. So I let the other priorities of my life dictate when I could get back to watching this three-hour movie. (In fact, I probably would have put it off even longer if it weren't due back at the library today.) I often skip January in my movie series anyway, just because it's so busy with other viewing priorities (like wrapping up the previous viewing year) that I don't have the time. I suppose that was more true when my viewing series used to involve multiple movies a month.

Anyway.

The 1982 best picture winner was what I expected in a lot of ways. It was not what I expected in some other, smaller ways. Like, who would have thought John Ratzenberger -- Cliff from Cheers, and the guy who has loaned his voice to nearly every Pixar film -- would show up here? (And that he wouldn't use his own voice for some reason? Martin Sheen, who also appears in the movie, dubbed Ratzenberger's voice.)

What was legitimately unexpected was learning about the key events in Mohandas Gandhi's fight to kick the British out of India -- though I use the word "fight" very loosely. Gandhi was of course opposed to violence in any form (even philosophically debating whether violence would work against Hitler), and believed that civil resistance was most effective when it provoked using persistence and public displays, not guns and swords. One of my favorite moments in the movie comes near the beginning, when some South African troops charge a group of Gandhi's protesters on horseback. They're seeking not to be treated like third-class citizens, including needing to be fingerprinted and the like. Instead of standing their ground, where they'll be beaten and cut down, or scattering to the winds, where they'll also be beaten and cut down, the protesters simply lie down on the ground, at Gandhi's behest. It's a brilliant tactic, as the horses are unwilling to trample the supine protesters, even if their riders show no such reluctance. So the horses rear up and the troops are forced to retreat. What's most brilliant is that Gandhi seems to have gotten this idea in the moment -- a reflection of his nearly preternatural ability to imagine the most productive method of effecting change in any given scenario.

Productive? How about convincing his followers who had strayed from his principles to abandon violence by going on hunger strikes? Not once, but twice? The people came to love him so much that they would rather eschew their violent impulses -- in other words, to calm a nearly unquenchable rage -- in order not to see him die for their human frailties. As frail as he was in stature, in all other aspects Gandhi seems to have been one of the strongest men who walked the earth in the 20th century.

That was a big takeaway as I was watching this -- that we don't seem to get great human beings like Gandhi anymore. Or at least, great human beings don't capture the imagination of the whole world like Gandhi did. Paradoxically, in a world where worldwide communication has become all the easier through the internet, we are perhaps all the more pushed into our own little corners of that world, seeing only the things that most directly pertain to us. Maybe there's a Gandhi out there today -- maybe there are plenty of them. Surely there are. But we're not hearing about them to the same extent, and that's a shame.

Although the casting of a non-Indian actor to play the title role would have been too controversial today, it's hard to imagine anyone playing Gandhi other than Ben Kingsley. He's pretty phenomenal. It's not a showy performance, as you might imagine, as Gandhi was a fairly understated person. But its every detail feels true. I think especially of Kingsley's physicality as the Mahatma, particularly the positioning of his legs as he sits on the ground, sewing his own clothing (another thing I didn't know about Gandhi). Kingsley was not yet 40 when he played the role, yet his fragility as the older Gandhi is something that makes us easily forget that.

I also didn't know anything about the Amritsar massacre in Punjab, in which British soldiers opened fire on a massive gathering of peaceful demonstrators and kept firing until hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, Indians were killed. I was hoping to learn that the colonel who ordered the strike -- "They've already been warned," he told an underling -- was hanged for this callous display of might and disregard for life. But Reginald Dyer was only removed from duty, and in fact became a celebrated hero in certain sections of England. Any time you need a reminder of how awful men can be, this is a good example. At least Dyer only lived eight more years before a series of strokes felled him.

For a movie this long, Gandhi is actually fairly lean -- starvation pun intended. There weren't any sections that I thought begged to be removed, and Sir Richard Attenborough keeps the pace moving pretty quickly all told. In fact, Gandhi's first hunger strike -- being one of the events for which he is most famous -- seemed to be over in a flash. I guess this is just a sign of what a full life of consequence and wisdom he had, so much of which was worth telling us about.

Okay, only two left! I've got Platoon in March before finishing up with The Last Emperor in April.

Assuming I don't get too busy, of course.

Attention spans > seasonal appropriateness

A person in one of my film discussion groups on Facebook noted today that the February 23rd DVD release date for The Good Dinosaur seemed to serve as a particularly swift response to its underperformance at the box office. As you might imagine, the discussion that followed revealed that a three-month journey to video was pretty typical these days.

That led to the larger discussion of delays that violated that ever-shrinking three-month window, and I brought up Christmas movies. Last time I noted it, Christmas movies were still taking more like ten months to arrive on video, the thinking being that you want to have your big video unveiling at a time when people are actually thinking about watching Christmas movies.

That, too, seems to have changed.

I gave as my example the fact that I expected The Night Before not to release on DVD and BluRay until late October or early November. I had to provide an addendum to that comment when a quick internet search revealed March 1st as the date for its video/digital release.

It's a depressing concession to a reality we have willingly acknowledged elsewhere in our lives: Any particular phenomenon's window is extremely short-lived, and if you don't capitalize on that window, it will just disappear into the ephemera along with everything else we pause on for a moment before discarding.

Not that The Night Before is worthy of gaining a solid foothold in our cultural legacy. It was a disappointment. And even though some people in my audience were laughing, I don't see them collectively conferring the movie a new-classic status. Movies like Elf only come along infrequently. Elf was 13 years ago, and we're still waiting for something else like it to really captivate our hearts.

But I sort of liked the past scarcity of the Christmas movie. If you missed it one Christmas, you had to wait until the next one -- at least upon its initial release. It was like egg nog in that way.

Given what else I know about our society, I'm kind of surprised you can't actually get egg nog year round. Sure, it would make it less special, but what do its manufacturers care? If it meets a craving, people will buy it. And if that craving were being satisfied by something else, you'd think egg nog purveyors would take note and take corrective action.

I don't really have a point, I guess. If I sound disappointed by what I've learned today, it's probably a small case of devil's advocacy. More than anything it's just interesting to note that the thinking has changed on this topic. I don't usually follow these types of things, but I'll try to make a note of how The Night Before sells on video (physical and digital) when it releases on a date when most people symbolically start to think about spring -- which is actually the first day of autumn in Australia. (They change their seasons on the first of the month in the southern hemisphere -- Lord knows why.) More likely, I'll forget to do that.

More than anything, I just wanted to get a new post up so that Zac Efron and Robert DeNiro would not continue to greet the visitors to my blog.

Don't judge a movie by the poses of the characters on the poster

Actually, do, probably.

The bad taste of Charlotte Rampling

Charlotte Rampling has been leaving a bad taste in my mouth for a lot longer than her major PR blunder a few weeks back, when she made light of the Oscars' failure to nominate any actors of color. Which was obviously a dumb thing to say no matter what the circumstances, but even dumber under her particular circumstances. She suggested that maybe the black actors did not "deserve" to make the shortlist -- while she herself did make this list for the movie 45 Years.

So that experience was kind of gratifying for me, as it allowed me to attach a legitimate reason to the nebulous dislike I have always felt for her.

Not liking her has always been problematic for me, because I have never been able to pinpoint why I didn't like her.

Secretly, I was worried it was because I wasn't attracted to her, which would be a shallow reason indeed. I've never doubted her abilities as an actress. She's always good. But I always don't really like her, and I wondered if it was something about not liking her appearance.

And I've concluded that it is, but not in the way you might think.

My wife and I often talk about how we don't like someone's face. That's not to say they're ugly, or that they have an objectively disagreeable face. Just that we don't like it.

Her go-to example is Australian actress Melissa George. There is almost no doubt that Melissa George is objectively attractive. But my wife doesn't like her face, and her intangible logic has swayed me. Now, I don't like Melissa George's face either.

My same-gender go-to example is probably Eddie Redmayne. Never liked his face. Probably never will.

But Charlotte Rampling is one of a dozen or so I regularly think of when considering this issue of nebulous distaste. Now I can attach something concrete to it, with these casually racist comments from which she has tried her best to back away.

Because it's a quintessentially subjective thing, I'll probably have a hard time describing what it is about Rampling's face I don't like. But since it's probably worth more than just me wimping out on that challenge, let me try.

She has a schlumpy face. She's got a very pronounced pout, and as she usually plays characters who are at least somewhat disagreeable, her face spends a lot of time schlumping and pouting. You'll get some idea of what I'm talking about from that bathtub scene above.

She also always seems irritable. Her eyes drooping at the sides, mirroring her droopy mouth and ready to show her irritation with anyone who crosses her path.

So now is it ageism I'm guilty of? Rampling is 69. When you are knocking on the door of 70, things droop.

But no. See her here. Even when she was "objectively beautiful," she still had a droopy tendency on the sides that contributed to something about her face I don't like.

The funny thing about Rampling is that she's in a lot of films I love, making her a bit like the Andie MacDowell of her age group. (Andie MacDowell being another example of a person whose face I don't like. Actually, Rampling is only 12 years older than MacDowell.)

I haven't seen a single film she appeared in before 1982. But that 1982 film, The Verdict, is a classic. Others since then I cherish are Lemming, Melancholia and Never Let Me Go, and I really like Angel Heart, Swimming Pool, The Mill and the Cross and Young & Beautiful.

Well whatever. I don't like that droopy face and I don't like those comments she made, and somehow, I feel vindicated by all this.

The type of reporter I could never be

There's a moment in Spotlight, which I saw last night, when Rachel McAdams' Sacha Pfeiffer knocks on the door of a retired Boston priest, and seems a bit surprised to see the man himself actually answer the door.

When she confirms his identity, for a second a look flashes across her faces that seems to say, "Okay, this is happening" before she launches into her question:

"We have information that you molested kids while serving as a priest. Did you molest kids?"

That's not an exact quote -- unlike a good reporter, I don't take notes when I watch movies -- but it's along those lines, and it's that direct.

In fact, this moment illustrates perfectly why I could never fully give myself over to journalism as a career.

Oh I was on that path. I worked as the reporter and interim editor of a newspaper in Rhode Island from 1996 to 1998, and in 1999 I attended Columbia Journalism School, where the brightest journalism prospects in the country -- dare I say, even the world -- go to take the next steps in their careers. (As well as the ones who can fool them into thinking we fit that description, like me.)

But even before starting at Columbia, I think I knew I didn't have that killer instinct, that courage, that unwavering belief in what is right that distinguishes the kind of journalists we see in Spotlight.

It's not so much that I feared the moment of awkwardness that results from asking an interview subject the question that cuts to the core of their own innocence or guilt. It's rather that I feared the moment of rage at the gall I was displaying at even asking. How dare you ask a question like that? How dare you intrude on the inner sanctum of my own protective shell as a human being who wants to be treated with decency?

Of course, I never dealt with anyone as guilty and as downright despicable as the Catholic priests of the Boston archdiocese, who turned out to be just the first publicly reported among hundreds and thousands of priests the world over who displayed those tendencies. The biggest fish I had to fry were local politicians dancing around some of their own double speak. When I had a story about a police chief who had an unregistered car on his property, it nearly gave me fits.

So just imagine the courage necessary to take on the Catholic church, an institution that counts half of your readership as loyal followers, and accuse it of hiding evidence that priests sexually molested young boys.

I appreciate that kind of courage even more because of my past as a reporter, and it makes seeing a movie like Spotlight all the more rewarding for me. What Spotlight doesn't do is make me wistful for a career path I could have had if I'd made a couple decisions differently. I never had what it takes to stick a microphone in someone's face, either literally or metaphorically, and it was useful to realize that before I threw myself into an arena where I was destined to fail. I suppose it's better to succeed at what I do now, to the extent that I do succeed at it, than to have failed as a reporter.

But that doesn't change one bit my conviction that someone needs to stick those microphones in those faces, and movies that celebrate these proud professionals make me proud to watch them.

Tom Brady before Tom Brady was Tom Brady

It's been a bit of a melancholy ten days or so, as my Patriots did not make the Super Bowl, ending what might be Tom Brady's last, best shot at another ring. We don't need to debate Brady's ethics and personality for the moment, nor do we need to recognize that he won a nearly unprecedented fourth ring just last year, further cementing an already fully cemented hall of fame resume. For the purposes of my own melancholy, the only relevant factor is that I'm a sports fan and I like to see my teams win whenever possible, especially when they are this close to getting to the championship game.

So the timing of watching John Stockwell's Blue Crush for the first time since 2002 last night was interesting indeed, as this movie contains a character who is basically Tom Brady.

When Blue Crush came out, Tom Brady was already Tom Brady, but only just barely. When it was released on August 16th of 2002, that was less than eight months after Brady won his first Super Bowl for the Patriots, ending a highly improbable season in which starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe suffered a season-ending injury during the game that dropped the team to 0-2. That elevated no-name Tom Brady to starting QB status, a title he has yet to relinquish more than 14 years later.

So the character in the movie that resembles Brady -- Matthew Davis' Matt Tollman -- could not really have been based on him. It would have been too soon.

But consider the resemblance. Here's Brady:

And here's Davis:

Which probably just suggests that Brady has that "prototypical quarterback look," and the same sensibilities were used in casting Davis in the role of an NFL quarterback visiting Hawaii for the Pro Bowl. That's a place Brady has been quite a bit, as he has been selected to participate 11 times. In fact, he might have actually been in Hawaii for this year's Pro Bowl when I watched the movie, but he declined to participate -- probably since it's hard to get up for that type of exhibition event when you're still sulking over not making it to the Super Bowl.

That's the other thing -- someone quotes a date early in the movie, and it's Wednesday, February 3rd. I watched the movie on Tuesday, February 2nd, meaning that not only was it almost the exact same day on the calendar, but the days of the week were even lined up correctly.

All of this wouldn't be such a coincidence if I'd watched the movie last Tuesday, Australia Day, as I was initially expecting to do. But we ended up somehow deciding we had the stamina to watch The Wolf of Wall Street, even though we'd been to the beach that day. In fact, going to the beach was what put me in mind of finally rewatching Blue Crush.

I say "finally" rewatching Blue Crush because I've actually owned this DVD for more than two years. I didn't buy it, but rather, took it from a curbside, where a homeowner had left a bunch of stuff that had gotten water damaged either because their home had been flooded or because it had been left out in the rain, which was now "free to a good home." Sure, the paper lining for Blue Crush was waterlogged -- sort of appropriate, given the movie's surfing milieu -- but that had no effect whatsoever on its ability to properly play in a DVD player.

Anyway.

I remember loving this movie when I first saw it. In fact, it came in at a lofty 17th out of the 80 movies I ranked in 2002. And though I still saw its charms and it was perfect for the mellow mood I was seeking last night, the only thing I still felt very strongly about on this viewing was its cinematography, especially the surfing stuff. The rest of it was fluffy and agreeable but generally forgettable.

If they film Tom Brady's life story now, Davis could still play him -- at retirement age. Davis is actually only nine months younger than Brady, born in May of 1978 while Brady was born in August of '77.

Which means hey, Brady still has one whole NFL season where he'll be "only" 39.

Maybe he still has a ring or two left in him.