Theatrical releases never looked so shabby

A movie I never heard of when it was released in the U.S. on July 29th was Equity, directed by a woman I'd never heard of named Meera Menon.

Not having heard of the movie or its director was far less of a consideration in my shock over its theatrical release than the poster you see here.

Simply put, how could this be anything other than a straight-to-streaming reject?

When I saw the poster up on the wall at Cinema Nova in the upcoming releases area, I was sure a mistake had been made. Somehow, a movie from a 1998 Blockbuster new release shelf had jumped in a time machine and arrived in 2016, where it surreptitiously tried to pass itself off as something new.

How else to explain the terrible font? How else to explain the monochromatic green color that makes everyone look vaguely seasick? How else to explain a cast where the leads were B-list even at their peak? (Sorry, Anna Gunn -- your contributions to Breaking Bad were invaluable, but they did not make you a star.)

And yet this is a real movie that really got released. In fact, it's a real movie that people really liked it. Its 81 on Rotten Tomatoes and 68 on Metacritic speak for themselves.

So I guess I must conclude instead that it is the worst job of advertising ever.

The poster seems to be trying to ride the 17-year-old coattails of The Matrix, yet it is also a movie about Wall Street, which that incredibly lame and un-clever tagline at the top tells us. (ON WALL STREET, ALL PLAYERS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL)

And then the faces of the actors are blown out in these unnatural tones, making it somehow all the worse that you only recognize one of them. James Purefoy (heard of him, sort of) seems to be the lucky one in that he has almost crept completely off the side.

Anna Gunn fares particularly poorly here. God bless them for allowing a not-very-famous 48-year-old woman to be the star of their movie, but the makeup department didn't do her any favors. At least the other women look a bit gussied up. (And if this comment sounds a bit Trumpian, I am only expressing surprise in the sense that posters usually tend to glamourize their stars, even if it's not suited to the movie. This movie has failed to do that, utterly.)

Well, things start to make a bit more sense in terms of the strange phenomenon that is this film when I look at its box office haul. It made only $1.5 million in the U.S., a truly paltry sum. So yes, it's not like the world has just gone crazy and now this is considered a useful advertising strategy in getting people to go to a movie.

However, I should note that the film has been open at Cinema Nova since September 29th, which means it has survived not only one new release Thursday but two. I suspect it'll disappear this week, but three weeks is not terrible.

Means at least a couple Austrlians must have been intrigued by the idea of a nauseated Skyler White about to lose her lunch over the side of a boat.

Baroque-en

If you're a writer, you're probably conscious of any number of words whose definition you basically know, but which you don't quite feel comfortable using in your own writing because there's that small part of you that doubts your nuanced understanding of the word.

One recent example of that for me is "glib." When I hear the word in context I basically know what it means, and it's a word I tend to like. However, when the opportunity arises to use it myself, I shy away, because of some lingering uncertainty that I'll be using it correctly. Well, I kind of got over it this week when I used the word in my review of Cafe Society, perhaps because I used it in a broader sense and talked about something that was not glib rather than something that was. If you're interested to see if I actually used it correctly, check out my review here, but either way, it felt like something of a watershed moment for me. (So, keep it to yourself! Heh.)

I may not have been as conscious of my lack of comfort with the word "baroque," but as soon as I heard it in a podcast on Friday, I mentally added it to that list. Great word; sort of know what it means; unsure about using it myself.

After watching Crimson Peak on Saturday night, I think I'm good with baroque now too.

It was my first "horror movie" for October, about two weeks out from Halloween. I put "horror movie" in quotes because those who defend the movie claim that we were misled by what it was supposed to be, and it's more like a gothic romance than a horror. After watching it, though, I don't really understand anything about the perspective of "those who defend the movie."

The dictionary definition of "baroque" is as follows:

"Relating to or denoting a style of European architecture, music, and art of the 17th and 18th centuries that followed Mannerism and is characterized by ornate detail. In architecture the period is exemplified by the palace of Versailles and by the work of Wren in England. Major composers include Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel; Caravaggio and Rubens are important baroque artists."

Definitions like this drive me a bit crazy. I'm a guy who likes to follow recipes to a T when I am cooking, so similarly, I worry about using a word like "baroque" unless I can be 100% sure that the criteria outlined in this word's "recipe," so to speak, are being met. But the word does cast a fairly wide net in what it can relate to, and it's the "characterized by ornate detail" part of the word that speaks to the way we should use it in a general sense. Though I think art that evokes that period was the way the guy was using it in the podcast (about a movie that I would not otherwise characterize as baroque -- maybe he was using it wrong?).

Crimson Peak is strangled by its use of the baroque. This movie has ornateness upon ornateness, but it's shot by Dan Laustsen in such a stagy way (with such oddly poor lighting) that it dies up there on the screen. It feels two-dimensional, digital. Perhaps some of the baroque central mansion, with its hole in the roof letting a constant snowfall through, is actually digital, which is why it looks so bad. Actually, no -- Guillermo del Toro built a mansion just for the occasion, I'm reading.

What's especially strange about the strained and stilted atmosphere of this movie is that I normally love baroque movies. I tend to gravitate toward period pieces, and I've even given my own name to movies featuring the type of production design we find in Crimson Peak -- I call them "wax stamp movies." The name is inspired by the appearance of a letter sealed by a wax stamp, and one such letter does indeed appear in Crimson Peak. That gave me hope, but the hope was soon dashed.

"Baroque" would probably extend to the much-criticized overblown acting style of Jessica Chastain in the movie, as well. And though someone really should have reined her in, Mia Wasikowska is also pretty bad here too. Her lack of agency seemed really disturbing and made it impossible to cheer on her character. But before you think I only have a problem with the women in this movie, I'll say that del Toro really needs to stop throwing work to the bland Charlie Hunnam. Tom Hiddleston probably acquits himself best in the cast, as you might expect.

Before this post just devolves into a spray gun approach to random criticisms of the movie -- of which there are many -- I'll try to get myself back on track.

If this were just a boring, over-long ghost story it might be one thing. But the rococo stylings of this movie just bludgeon you, making what could have been a neutral experience actively negative. It manages to be both overwrought and flat at the same time. Some achievement.

When I was a radio DJ back in college, we played a series of public service announcements about seatbelt safety that consisted of comedic repartees between two crash test dummies. I still remember that in one of them, there was an exchange about architecture where one of them says "Is it baroque?" And the other says "I don't know, did you ba-reak it?"

Crimson Peak is baroque-en indeed.

Measures of duality

On Friday night I was reading my six-year-old from his series of books about Zac Power, the 12-year-old super spy, as we are wont to do. I've noticed the phenomenon I'm about to tell you about plenty of times before, but had occasion to contemplate it anew during the reading of the book Sand Storm, in which one of Zac's chief rivals appears.

The rival in question is a 12-year-old girl named Caz. Get it? Caz? Zac? Zac? Caz? Zac works for the good spy agency called GIB, while Caz works for the bad spy agency called BIG. Get it? BIG? GIB? GIB? BIG?

But you haven't heard all of it yet. Caz' last name is Rewop. That's right. Rewop. Power. Power. Rewop. Zac Power. Caz Rewop.

It'll go right over most kids' heads -- my son hasn't commented on it yet, anyway -- but for adults, it's a stupidly obvious application of the notion that the hero and villain are two sides of the same being. They're not opposites -- the opposite of the name Zac Power would not be Caz Rewop, but, I don't know, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Rather, they are mirror images of each other, having more in common than they have different. In fact, in extreme instances, you might argue that the only thing they don't share in common is their respective morality. Even then, though, the creator of these characters likes to emphasize the bad in the good character and the good in the bad.

It was interesting timing, then, that the movie I was watching that night also engages in a sort of literal exploration of the hero-villain duality.

Last Days in the Desert is the latest film from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, and it couldn't portray a more symbolic struggle between good and evil if it tried. In the film Ewan McGregor plays both Jesus Christ and the Devil, who tempted him during his 40 days in the desert. Garcia makes the things they have in common manifest by having the same actor play both roles. If the side of Jesus that tempts him is personified as the Devil, I suppose to balance things out we'd also need to see the just side of the Devil as portrayed here. That complicates the duality a bit but I think the principle of the thing still holds.

If this were a children's story about super spies, I suppose his name would be Susej Tsirhc rather than the Devil, but I digress.

Garcia's rather on-the-nose choice is meant to allow one actor to explore both sides of a characterization, and theoretically give us something profound. McGregor is reasonably good in the film without quite attaining that level of achievement. So the film is worth watching but nothing extraordinary. McGregor might as well have a mini angel McGregor on one shoulder and a mini devil McGregor on the other, both advising him on what to do.

Perhaps the biggest "disappointment" about it, if you want to look at it that way, was the fact that it was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki and does not actually look mind-blowingly good. It looks good, but not mind-blowingly.

An interesting thing happened while I was watching it, though, that makes the thoughts I was already having about Zac Power and Jesus Christ and writing this post all the more eerie.

At about the halfway point of the film, I was getting really sleepy and I decided it was time for a bit of a sugar wake-me-up in the form of ice cream.

Not "about" the halfway point, though. At the halfway point.

Going over to my computer, which was tethered to the television via an HDMI cable, to press pause on iTunes, I then discovered that I had paused on exactly the halfway point of the film. There had been 49:51 that had already elapsed and there was 49:51 left to go. You could say I planned it, but when you're watching something in iTunes, the time remaining only displays when you run your cursor over the progress bar. There's no alternate method to track the minutes ticking away -- or none that I know of, anyway.

So I managed to split the movie right down the middle, into a duality of its own running time.

Even stranger was what happened about five minutes after that midway point. Another character who fancies riddles says to Jesus, "How far can a man walk into the desert? Only halfway. After that he's walking out." Probably just another way the movie is conscious of its own duality. But it had a special coincidental significance for me, given how I had just paused after walking exactly halfway into the movie, after which I was walking out of it.

I thought I'd leave you with five other explicit considerations of the duality between hero and villain, good and evil. Listed in the order I thought of them.

1) Oh God, You Devil! (1984, Paul Bogart) - The third in George Burns' series of Oh God! movies features Burns as both God and the Devil, much like in Friday night's movie. Though I don't think anything other than Borscht Belt comedy was being explored here.

2) Superman III (1983, Richard Lester) - Even at the best of times, Superman has a dual personality that includes another side of himself -- the Clark Kent side. Usually, both sides are good. In the third Superman movie, though, they explored an evil Superman, one corrupted by kryptonite -- and one who actually fights Clark Kent. I don't remember how they managed to get them into separate corporeal bodies -- I think there was a bit more suspension of disbelief than usual on that one -- but I do remember their extremely bizarre junkyard battle for control of their soul.

3) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson) - There's also a struggle for the soul of the man once known as Smeagol, now the twisted troll called Gollum. To emphasize this, Jackson uses a technique whereby the two sides of the character -- one kind and one cruel -- have a conversation with one another on how to handle the two travelers Gollum has just met. Although only one being is actually present, Jackson gives a standard shot-reverse shot setup as though there are two conversing.

4) The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) - Back to superhero movies, one of the most commonly referenced instances of hero-villain duality is between Batman and the Joker, though in this case they look nothing like each other. However, there's a direct symbol of the two sides of a character's personality within The Dark Knight, and that's the very brief appearance of Two Face, known as Harvey Dent before he is disfigured and corrupted. The coin flip that is part of his MO -- which usually decides the fate of a prospective victim -- could also decide which version of him you're getting. But truly, the Dent side isn't there anymore, only symbolically represented by the failure to kill somebody instead of killing them.

5) Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze) - And though I should end with something from Hitchcock, I couldn't find anything that literalized the theme in the way I'm going for here. So let's finish with a movie I alluded to on this blog only yesterday -- giving us one final coincidence with the Zac Power reading/viewing of Last Days in the Desert. In order to literally explore the dormant half of his personality, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (appearing as a character here, played by Nicolas Cage) introduces a brother character named Donald, who is everything he isn't -- gregarious, mainstream, moronic, successful. In this case it's not really good and evil Kaufman is exploring, though -- he intermingles aspects of both in each personality, and toys with his own perception of which is which.

For more examples, check out, oh, the rest of western literature and cinema.

Quotidian solipsism is no longer my thing

Logically, I recognize that my year-end rankings from the 20 years I've kept such rankings constitute a snapshot of me and my tastes from a particular moment. Somewhat less logically, I actually think the contrary -- that my tastes haven't changed too much over the years. Once good taste, always good taste, right?

Well, taste that once was good might no longer be, and every once in a while I get a pretty clear indication that I'm not the same viewer I once was.

This year, it's been the realization that quotidian solipsism is no longer my thing.

What do I mean by "quotidian solipsism?" I mean the kind of thing that Steven Soderbergh peddles in Full Frontal, a movie most people never liked. I liked it quite a bit back in 2002, when I ranked it #13 (of 80) for the year. "Quotidian" meaning "commonplace" or "workaday," "solipsism" meaning "an excessive inward focus on the self." (Those aren't dicitionary definitions, but they are pretty much correct.)

I watched Full Frontal for the first time in 14 years last night and I didn't really dig it at all. I didn't hate it, and recognized some moments that certainly drew the 29-year-old version of me to it, but I'd be ranking it closer to 13 from the bottom of 80 films than 13 from the top these days.

I still like it more, I think, than Igby Goes Down, a similarly self-indulgent, navel-gazing look at self-absorbed people and their concerns about their personal selves. (And yes, the use of three different variations on the word "self" in the previous sentence is intentional.) I ranked Igby at #10 in 2002, three higher than Full Frontal, and when I watched that earlier this year for the first time since then, it dropped by more than 1,200 spots on my Flickchart.

I won't be forcing a re-rank of Full Frontal to get it off its elevated spot of #631/4343 -- not nearly as elevated as Igby's former ranking of #392 -- but I do have some complaints I want to make about it here, and explain a little more what I mean by "quotidian solipsism."

"Solipsism" is almost always a negative term, but I suppose there are certain people about whose selves we would really like to learn. They don't even have to be people we like. Donald Trump is a good example. Especially in the past week, I am addicted to news about Donald Trump. It's all so I can experience schadenfreude regarding his spectacular collapse, but that doesn't change the fact that I am soaking up everything and anything about The Donald. He's larger than life, and, let's admit it, he's interesting, even if for the wrong reasons.

The solipsism in Full Frontal and Igby Goes Down is about people who are not especially interesting. In Igby it's about a Holden Caulfield-type kid in New York and his group of insufferable associates. Here, it's about a group of people who are sort of appendages of the film industry -- some actual actors and other stars, but then also low-level writers, playwrights, even a masseuse to the stars.

The thing is, Soderbergh's film treats them as though they are inherently interesting. Part of his experimental form -- yes, this is one of his "experimental" films -- is to include snippets of dialogue over images of them going about their lives. But it's not narration -- it's responses to questions from a hypothetical interviewer, who asks them questions about themselves, what they were feeling at the moment in question, how their lives brought them to this particular point, etc. The film compliments itself that its characters are interesting enough that a person should want to interview them, even if no person actually would. More charitably, the film suggests that we are all interesting enough to tell our stories to a hypothetical interviewer.

But it's not that the film places such stock in the charisma of its characters, which I guess is something we would hope all movies would do -- why tell a story about characters if they are not interesting? It's the way that Soderbergh is gazing at his own navel here that makes things a bit more distracting.

One thing that kind of annoyed me -- though I don't think it would have annoyed me in 2002 -- was that in the scene where Julia Roberts is interviewing Blair Underwood on the plane, the camera takes a moment to look a few rows behind and see Terence Stamp as his character in Soderbergh's The Limey. It's meant to be just a wink to Soderbergh's fans, and today we might fawn over it as his attempt to create a cinematic universe. But I'm tired of cinematic universes and I am also tired of meta winks to the audience. Back in 2002, meta was still new. It wouldn't have felt hopelessly self-congratulatory, as it does now.

Then there's the more overriding meta aspect of the structure of this film. There are films within films within films in Full Frontal, frequently distinguished by two or even possibly three different film stocks. Soderbergh loves pulling a fast one on us, making us think one layer of reality is actually reality, only to pull out and show a movie crew shooting the characters in question. The film eventually assumes so many layers that it resembles a Russian nesting doll. And we don't care which one is the real one.

Self indulgence is certainly a subdivision of solipsism, even though Soderbergh would probably argue that the narrative tricks he's playing with are just an artistic endeavor and have nothing to do with his own selfhood. However, the mere willingness to pat yourself on the back for purported cleverness is what makes it a celebration of his own self.

I don't want to go too hard on the movie because I would still say I like it. I just can't fathom why it had such an impact on me back in 2002.

Unless, you know, I just wasn't the same self I am now.

The funny thing is that my #1 movie of that year was a movie that probably fits into the same category. It's Spike Jonze's Adaptation, and it's a movie about a person going down his own rabbit hole into his own neurotic soul. In a way it is the very definition of solipsism. And having revisited it about four years ago, I know I still love it. In fact, it's in my top 50 on Flickchart, just barely, at #49.

I think the difference is that Nicolas Cage's Charlie Kaufman -- playing the movie's screenwriter himself, how could you get any more self-involved -- is not interested in self-regard for its own sake. He's more about self-loathing. And he's not trying to convince himself or anyone else that he's interesting. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. He is repulsed by how uninteresting he thinks he is.

This is probably both an oversimplification and a rationalization. The better conclusion to reach might be that quotidian solipsism is compelling in the right hands, and banal in the wrong ones. And even someone as generally great as Steven Soderbergh can sometimes have the wrong hands.

Retirement of a movie character

David Ortiz is the reason I don't like sports movies.

He has to be seen to be believed. He has to be real to be believed.

If someone wrote a movie in which David Ortiz was a fictitious character, I would call bullshit on that movie. He wouldn't seem real.

But David Ortiz is real, making the crazy things he's done all the more wonderful.

For those of you a few steps behind here, David Ortiz is the long-time designated hitter of the Boston Red Sox, my favorite sports team. He began his Red Sox career back in 2003, when he almost vaulted his team into the World Series with an amazing second half and playoff run. He took that not one but two steps further the next year, when the Ortiz-led Red Sox won the World Series, ending an 86-year drought that began in 1918 with the ominous portent of trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees so the Sox owner could dump money into a failing Broadway show. Ortiz didn't care about curses. He helped the Sox win again in 2007 and 2013. And every two years when his contract was up, he signed a team-friendly two-year extension, one that paid him handsomely but nowhere near what he was worth to a team and a city.

We all hoped Ortiz, nicknamed Big Papi, would be able to bring one last ring to the Boston faithful in 2016, as he used perhaps the best statistical season of his career to bring his team back from a last-place finish in 2015 to a division title in 2016. "One last ring" because before the season even started, Ortiz announced that at age 40, this would be his final season as a player.

But the Red Sox had an ignominous finish to an otherwise positive season when they were swept by the Cleveland Indians on Monday. It happened at home, and after the game's final out -- at the urging of a crowd that refused to leave the stadium -- Ortiz came out to the pitcher's mound for a final acknowledgement of his fans, doffing his cap and wiping tears from his eyes.

If it all sounds too good to be true -- all except that ignominious finish, of course -- then that just makes David Ortiz seem all the more like some hack's idea of an epic movie character. That's an insult to that screenwriter, but of course, a compliment to David Ortiz.

He did things no one thought he would do, he could do. He had no fewer than 37 clutch hits that saved games for the Red Sox in the postseason alone. Okay, it was a bit fewer than 37, but Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 ALCS against the Yankees both ended on hits by Ortiz (when the Sox were facing elimination), and Game 2 of what was looking like a lost series against Detroit in 2013 was salvaged when Ortiz somehow hit an 8th inning grand slam to tie up the game. Playoff heroics aside, this was a man who announced he was done and then went on to have the greatest final season in the history of baseball, hitting 38 home runs, leading the league in RBIs, leading the league in OPS, batting well over .300, and giving himself perhaps his best shot ever to win a league MVP trophy, something that is utterly unheard of for a designated hitter and in fact has never happened before. In his last season.

If this were a movie, I'd be heckling the screen.

But I lived through David Ortiz. He was real. He is real. (He's still alive, and long live Papi.)

It's why I'll always love sports a lot more than I'll ever love sports movies. Sports movies -- the fictitious ones, anyway -- can't have David Ortizes in them. A David Ortiz in your sports movie is almost like having a deus ex machina in your regular movie. You don't believe a single character can save the day time and time again, yet that's what David Ortiz did. Or maybe you do believe that, but if you do, you know you are willfully suspending disbelief, believing in Harry Potter or Ethan Hunt or Superman or James Bond, someone who is always going to win and that's okay because you've bought into that.

But they don't make series of sports movies with recurring heroes, like David Ortiz, because it just doesn't have the ring of truth to it. Athletes fail more often than they succeed, in almost every venture but especially in baseball, where a successful hitter still only succeeds 30% of the time. Even if they made a really good movie about a fictitious athlete with the touch of gold, you'd be tired of him by the second movie. You'd think "Screenwriters ... what will they think of next?"

We Red Sox fans were lucky to be treated not only to a great first movie in which David Ortiz didn't quite win, but its very satisfying sequel in which he did, and then 12 more sequels of varying quality but always filled with smiles and heroic moments. We would keep watching those movies until Ortiz turned 50, and with the way he hit this year, he might still provide heroic moments for movies to come.

But the best movie series are the ones that quit before you get tired of them, not after. So I'm glad that David Ortiz hasn't decided to give us a bunch of subpar sequels as his skills deteriorate but we love him so much we continue to let him play. Big Papi is leaving baseball as a hero -- not a conquering hero in this case, but the type of hero who won our hearts.

And sure, retirement doesn't always stick. Sean Connery mocked his own supposedly final retirement from the aforementioned role of James Bond by appearing in a movie called Never Say Never Again. To say nothing of how Bruce Willis, who I have enjoyed trudging on this week, has continued sleepwalking through Die Hard movies into his 60s.

But that's not Ortiz. (At least, I hope it isn't -- check back with me next spring.) He knows when to quit. He knows when the feeling is right. Even if the feeling of never playing baseball again is probably so, so wrong. Even if it hurts.

David Ortiz has the memories, and those will sustain him through the peaks and valleys of retirement as he looks longingly out at that field and thinks of saving the day one last time.

I'm so glad he wasn't a figment of some screenwriter's imagination.

A poor man's Jennifer Lawrence, and other Girl on the Train thoughts

I thought Jennifer Lawrence was in both The Girl on the Train and The Magnificent Seven.

Turns out, she's in neither.

Turns out, it's some person named Haley Bennett.

Haley Bennett is not just "some person," you might say. You might say she's putting together a little bit of career momentum here, also appearing in this year's (poorly received) Hardcore Henry, in 2014's The Equalizer, and even in some older well-regarded films like Music & Lyrics and Marley & Me.

But that doesn't change the fact that she looks almost exactly like Jennifer Lawrence, and that's (presumably) why people are casting her now.

Here, consider it. Someone on the interwebs has done me the favor of putting them next to each other:

When you look at them side by side, you can (probably) tell which is which. But when you see only Bennett by herself in a movie trailer, you think "Is that Jennifer Lawrence?"

And then, "If that's Jennifer Lawrence, why isn't her name on the poster?"

This was a big flaw in my theory about Lawrence being in The Girl on the Train. As you can see from the poster above, only Emily Blunt was deemed famous enough to appear on the poster. Lawrence is more famous than Blunt, so that theory didn't work.

But it still took me looking at her a couple times on screen before I said "Oh yeah, that's not J-Law. That's that woman I've seen in that Magnificent Seven trailer about seven times."

I wonder if it occurs to Bennett that her resemblance to Lawrence is probably a boon to her career. I mean, she's pretty, so she probably would have succeeded anyway. And Girl on the Train demonstrates that she has at least some acting talent (though nowhere near Lawrence's class). But part of her has got to think "Well, they wanted a Jennifer Lawrence type, and I was cheap so they got me." I suppose there are worse people than a four-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner to be likened to.

Lawrence is actually the youngest actress ever to accrue four Oscar nominations, as she only turned 26 two months ago. That means she was born in 1990, and that creates an interesting (though surely coincidental) relationship to Bennett as well. But the following is a SPOILER ALERT for Girl on the Train, so if you haven't seen it yet (and care), stop reading.

The movie has occasion to show a tombstone for Bennett's character, and the inscription shows that that character, too, was born in 1990. Bennett herself was born two years earlier than that, in 1988. I only wish I'd had the foresight to check out the exact date on the tombstone, because choosing Lawrence's August 15th birthday would have been a cheeky inside joke about the similarity of the two actresses.

And forgive me for a little bit of the vulgar Donald Trump coming out here, but I couldn't help wondering if some kind of wish fulfillment related to Lawrence was a reason we see so much of Bennett's skin in this movie. The only traditionally defined nudity we get of Bennett is to see her bare bottom, but in a shower scene and some other scenes, we come pretty damn close to seeing everything else. Part of me wonders if the apparent fixation on the amount of skin she revealed was an attempt by the filmmakers to cater to our most prurient interests regarding Lawrence -- to kind of make us think we were seeing Lawrence in the buff. (Then again, actual nude pictures of Lawrence are available from one of those Snapchat hacks or whatever it was, so perhaps we didn't really need to fantasize about Lawrence via Bennett in the first place.)

And on to some other thoughts ...

Oh Emily

Emily Blunt is one of my favorite working actresses today. Period. Exclamation point.

But boy did she let me down here.

What was she thinking in that first half of the movie?

She gets better, as does the whole movie, as it approaches its climax. But I'll be much quicker to blame Tate Taylor, the director, for how she performs her scenes of drunkenness in its first half. Because I just can't think of Emily Blunt as an actress who makes bad choices. No, not even appearing in Into the Woods.

But if I'm being honest with myself, Blunt at least shares the blame for her performance in this film.

Playing a drunk is not an enviable task. Many actors and actresses have tackled it numerous times, so not only are you competing with a pretty thorough history in the annals of acting, but even the best of those performances usually seem mannered in some way. There is almost always something too big by half about playing drunk. It's kind of like when people play being stoned or sniffing cocaine -- they almost always exaggerate the effects. (Whereas taking cocaine can really look as subdued as Trump looked during the second debate. Sorry, I'm taking every occasion I can to slam The Donald these days.)

So Blunt is not immune to those traps. She does a lot of unfocusing of her eyes and blurring of her speech and ranting and raving. There are choices she makes within her choices that ring true, but the overall effect is somewhat less than natural. And Taylor makes it worse by holding her in extreme close-up for many of these scenes.

The plot of the movie turns on a lot of twists related to her being blacked out, so no doubt Taylor is trying to capture that with his camerawork and editing choices. But it just doesn't work very well. And Blunt -- even if she is the blameless victim I want her to be -- pays the price.

Gone Girl on the Train

The similarities of this movie to Gone Girl are obvious, and I think, intentional. I won't list them here. Instead, I will draw attention to the one that I thought was the most shameless.

No less of a hall of fame film composer than Danny Elfman seems to have totally ripped off Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

The Nine Inch Nails frontman and his frequent collaborator worked with David Fincher to create a memorable and indelible score for Gone Girl. Then Elfman seems to have parroted it almost exactly.

People who know more about music than I do will surely point out important differences, but I noticed at least two points of near total correlation.

The beginning passages of both films deal with the lives of the couples in question pre-incident, when there's some possibility they're okay despite obvious foreboding to the contrary. In both films I noticed a sort of warm synthesized blooping on the soundtrack. (See, I told you I don't know much about music.) There's a melancholy to the music in these scenes, but also an optimism that things might turn out okay. The music is, as I say, warm, and it does, as I say, contain "blooping." You'll just have to try to imagine what I mean because I can't do any better than this, apparently.

As things go to shit and the more sinister elements of the plot are revealed later on, the score develops a sense of electronic rot, an ominous kind of scraping sound that increases in intensity as the physical and emotional violence of a scene intensifies. GONE GIRL SPOILERS. I'm thinking of the scene in Gone Girl where Rosamund Pike slits Neil Patrick Harris' throat and kind of writhes around on top of his body as the blood and life run out of him. I don't know if you remember it, but Reznor and Ross' score becomes unbearably rotten and scrapy during that scene. (Sorry, I'm doing my best.)

I'm not sure if there is an exact corresponding moment in The Girl on the Train -- I mean, there's a moment that involves a man bleeding from his neck that could well have that part of the score, but I didn't notice it there. I did notice it in the closing credits, and thought "That sounds almost exactly like that signature moment from the Gone Girl score."

Maybe we should just be happy Elfman isn't giving us another one of those Tim Burton-sounding scores with the angelic singing voices.

Chameleon

There's one woman at the center of the plot that I have yet to mention, and that's Rebecca Ferguson as the new wife of Emily Blunt's character's ex.

As I was watching the movie, I thought, "That woman looks sort of familiar, but I can't quite place her." The closing credits clarified for me. Ferguson was the woman who got so much praise in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.

Even knowing that, though, she still looked only sort of familiar.

It's clearly the same woman playing both roles, but her physicality is so different in the two roles, and they're such different roles, that I couldn't make the connection in my mind.

I'll dispense with the side-by-side photos here, because when I look them up on Google Images, they do look fairly similar. I mean, it's the same actress, so obviously they look similar. She's not wearing prosthetics or anything in either role. Her hair color does seem to be different, but that's only one minor reason she seems so different.

Really, she seems different because actors are supposed to seem different when they play different types of roles. Why do you think Vincent D'Onofrio looks different every time you see him? Because he really climbs inside the skin of the characters she's playing. He's a true chameleon. And from what I've seen of these two roles, Ferguson may be one too.

Not really enough for me to recommend you to go see the movie, though.

Movies as farts

I'm sorry if being greeted by the word "fart" on my blog offends you. Let's just say it's not the most offensive dirty word you'll be encountering with regularity this weekend. (Thank you, Donald Trump, for committing political suicide 11 years ago -- and then doubling down on your political suicide through two callous non-apologies.)

But I wanted to tell you about an epic thread in my Flickcharters Facebook group, and it's about farts.

This may be a meme going on elsewhere -- in fact, I'm pretty sure it is -- but the thread is 24 hours old and counting in our Flickcharters group, and still yielding creative and hilarious results.

The assignment is simple: "Describe your last fart using only a movie title."

This set us off quickly to work, and we haven't stopped. In fact, I may continue adding on to this post as long as the thread keeps going. We'll have to see. But I've got the time to write it now, so I won't wait until it finishes, which would ordinarily be the best idea.

Because there are so many, I will just give them to you in a large information dump, in the order they were presented, rather than ranking them or otherwise presenting them separated by quality. However, I will use a code to show you my thoughts on them. If I bold a title, I consider it a really good one. If I put a title in italics, I consider it to be lame. The other ones will be in the middle. To show you which ones I submitted, I will bold those and put an asterisk after them. Yes, I am going to imply that the ones I submitted are all "really good ones" (even though they probably aren't) just for the purposes of this system of classification. Lastly, I'll leave out the ones that were repeated, but I will tell you up front that three different people (who obviously hadn't read the thread very closely, but at a certain point that becomes increasingly impossible) offered up the icky title There Will Be Blood. (Icky but oh so great.)

Shall we start?

A Mighty Wind
Breathless
Sweet Smell of Success
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
The Wild One
Bustin' Loose *
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Autumn Sonata
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs * (my favorite of mine - got eight likes and two comments)
The King's Speech
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
The Wind Will Carry Us
Something Wicked This Way Comes *
An Inconvenient Truth
Magnum Force
Blowup
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (my favorite that somebody else did)
Pillow Talk
Gone With the Wind
The Saddest Music in the World
Duck Soup
The 400 Blows 
A History of Violence
Don't Look Back
Fire Down Below *
Backdraft
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Burssels * (leave it to me to do one that just makes a joke of the premise)
The Filth and the Fury
Splash
Sicko
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
Death Blow
The Dark Knight Rises
Air Force One (this was an unusually good stretch)
The Wind Rises
Scent of a Woman
There Will Be Blood
The Sting *
Don't Look Now
A Monster Calls
The Sound of Music
The Great Escape
Tremors
It Follows
Of Mice and Men
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
Run Silent Run Deep
Don't Breathe
Blow Out
The Day the Earth Stood Still
It Happened One Night
Unforgiven
From Russia With Love
Rebel Without a Cause
Some Like It Hot
Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
Bringing Down the House
Deep Impact
Killing Them Softly
The Accused
Poison
The Fast and the Furious *
Louder Than Bombs *
The Stink of Flesh
The Force Awakens
Steel Magnolias
Tootsie
All Quiet on the Western Front
Despicable Me
Silence of the Lambs
Dawn of the Dead
Black Beauty
Deathgasm
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
The Fugitive
Slither
Very Bad Things
The Dirty Dozen
The Big One
The Big Heat
Bringing Out the Dead
True Grit
Up in the Air
Hard Boiled
Force Majeure
Everybody Wants Some!!
John Dies at the End
Hellraiser
The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
Oliver! (there was a context for this)
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
The Fog
Black Cauldron
Joyful Noise
Breakin'
Dante's Inferno
The Parent Trap
The Mist
Mystic Pizza
Chariots of Fire
Earthquake
Nightmare on Elm Street
The Shining
Inside Out
Look Who's Talking
WarGames
Hard Rain
Bring It On
Cruel Intentions
Coffee and Cigarettes
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
The Happening
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
Groundhog Day
Magnificent Seven
The Nightmare Before Christmas
It's a Wonderful Life
What Lies Beneath
Serenity
Hot Fuzz
The Horse Whisperer
Lethal Weapon
Superbad
Once Upon a Time in the West
As Above, So Below
Look Out Below!
Blazing Saddles
Return of the King
Doom
The Sum of All Fears
Wind Talkers
The Music Man
The Equalizer
Death to Smoochy
Fear
Shooter
The Departed
13 Hours
Nutty Professor
Children of the Corn
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
I Saw the Devil
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Big Short
The Purge
The Enemy Below
K-13: The Widowmaker
Heat
Non-Stop
Rear Window
Hostel
Chocolat
Kazaam
The Hateful Eight
The Prestige
The Illusionist
Oblivion
Event Horizon
To Kill a Mockingbird
Wet Hot American Summer

One guy did about 75 of the last 100, and managed to effectively kill the thread.

Okay, enough of that.

Pulp Fiction has-beens

Move over, Nicolas Cage. You've got company.

Once the undisputed king of random straight-to-video movies you might stumble over at the Hoyts kiosk (think Redbox for you North American readers), Cage has since ceded his throne. Or, at least, scooched over his butt cheeks to make room for a couple more pairs.

And as it happens, they both appeared in one of the greatest films ever made (so says me): Pulp Fiction.

I've been following the freefall in selectivity by Bruce Willis and John Travolta for some time now, and thought it was finally time to write about it.

The inciting incident, to use a screenwriting term, was my decision to stop at the Hoyts kiosk on Friday night.

I didn't come away with anything to rent -- two phone calls to my wife went unanswered, and I decided that either selecting something she'd like or renting something for myself to watch when I was this tired, and she and I might watch something else together anyway, were both too great of a risk. But it did give me the chance to scroll through not one, not two, but three movies apiece by Mr. Travolta and Mr. Willis that I'd never heard of. Or really, that I'd heard of only because I'd scrolled through many of these Hoyts kiosk choices on other occasions.

Look, I'm not saying Willis and Travolta should be in the primes of their careers. The former is 61, the latter 62. I am saying they should be going more gently into that cinematic night with choices that are better than these:

Most legitimate element: Director Chuck Russell also directed such comparatively respectable films as The Mask and Eraser, though he hadn't directed a feature in 14 years, since The Scorpion King in 2002.

Least legitimate element: It steals its IMDB tagline from Pulp Fiction! "I lay my vengeance upon them." If only Samuel L. could be there to deliver it.

Verdict: Terrible.

Most legitimate element: It had a plum December 18th release date, meaning its producers surely thought it had a chance to pick up some Oscars. Plus, Gina Carano can actually fight and stuff.

Least legitimate element: I think Kellan Lutz was a guy once, maybe.

Verdict: Awful.

Most legitimate element: Jackie Earle Haley (The Bad News Bears (original), A Nightmare on Elm Street (remake)) directed this. Interesting. Though Dan Stevens' decision to leave Downton Abbey early is looking worse and worse by the year.

Least legitimate element: The script was written by a guy named Robert Lowell, who died 38 years before the film was made. (Look it up! The guy linked in IMDB could be the wrong Robert Lowell, I suppose. But still.)

Verdict: Unwise.

Most legitimate element: It co-stars Dave Bautista. After Guardians of the Galaxy, its upcoming sequel and Spectre, his career has got real heat.

Least legitimate element: This was directed by the same guy who directed Extraction.

Verdict: Not good.

Most legitimate element: At least there isn't a gun in the poster.

Least legitimate element: That beard is just ridiculous.

Verdict: Ill-advised.

Most legitimate element: None.

Least legitimate element: I understand Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Claire Forlani were once people. Plus, this was written and directed by the guy who wrote Extraction. Not the guy who directed Extraction -- he directed Marauders -- but the guy who wrote it. Are we clear?

Verdict: Why??

Of note: Christopher Meloni also appears in both Marauders and I Am Wrath. Maybe Nicolas Cage needs to gives those buttocks one additional squeeze tighter.

Yes, it's really true that you can walk up to any Hoyts kiosk in Melbourne and walk away with any of these six movies. But I wouldn't recommend it.

But before I paint too dire a picture of these men's fortunes, we should pause to recognize that John Travolta just won an Emmy for his work as producer on the terrific The People vs. O.J. Simpson, and was also nominated for his acting as Robert Shapiro, which may have been my favorite performance in the whole series.

Willis?

Well, there's a rumor they're making Die Hard 6.

Sting weekend

You know how I like reporting movie-related coincidences I experience. Well, here's another.

I hadn't been thinking much about Sting recently. In fact, I can't remember the last time I devoted some portion of my brain to him, but it could have been more than a year ago. That's how long it's been since I had a Sting-related incident of any kind.

This past weekend, I had three.

The first was when the former Police lead singer did a handful of songs before the AFL (Australian Football League) grand final. I didn't know what Sting's connection to Australia was, but then again, Bryan Adams had no connection to Australia when he fulfilled a similar role last year. It's a big enough event to woo A-list talent, albeit A-list talent past their prime.

But is Sting really past his prime?

I marveled not only at how fit he looked, but how good his voice sounded. The high notes are not a problem for him or anything, and he's still trim with impressive muscles. Looks more like a 45-year-old than a 65-year-old (his milestone birthday was also this past weekend). I'll hope to look that good when I turn 45 in two years, and will surely fail.

The second Sting event was not really an event at all, but pondered me to first consider the coincidence. It was seeing his name among my trending topics on Facebook. The reason he was trending had to do with some viral video on Jimmy Fallon. I didn't watch the video, but I did wonder how he managed to get to Jimmy Fallon so soon after being in Melbourne on Saturday. (He must have been in New York first and come to Melbourne after that, unless maybe he did it remotely.)

It was by Sunday night that I started to wonder if someone was punking me.

Sting has something a bit larger than a cameo in Zoolander 2, which I watched Sunday night. It's important to emphasize this because there are about 173 others who have what would more legitimately be described as a cameo. Sting appears in the movie twice, in a consequential role, so he almost reaches the level of, like, a co-star. It was nice to see him on screen again. He was funny.

And you know what? Zoolander 2 was funny. I may have just lost all credibility with you, but the movie was so much funnier than I had any reason to believe it would be. The word of mouth about this movie has been awful, and even as a fan of most Ben Stiller movies, I figured I'd be in synch with those opinions.

But after 15 amusing minutes in which I didn't laugh much but appreciated what they were going for, I started bursting out laughing periodically, maybe once per five minutes. That's not bad at all in a 100-minute movie. It all started with the hilariously unexpected appearance of Benedict Cumberbatch as the androgynous transgender supermodel called "All" and it just went from there. (The only person I didn't really like, in fact, was a usual favorite, Kristen Wiig.)

Where will I see Sting next?

Wherever it is, it will be welcome.

Over-praised action movies

I like John Wick. John Wick is fine.

BUT MY GOD, IT IS NOT THE SECOND COMING, PEOPLE!

There is a second coming of John Wick, though. John Wick: Chapter Two is scheduled for release next February 10th, and people in my Flickcharters Facebook group can't stop jerking themselves off about it.

There are at least three or four people in the group who seem to define themselves cinematically by their love for John Wick. One guy who never shuts up about it listed movies he'd watch during a recent marathon weekend. John Wick made the list, and afterwards in parentheses he included the clarification "(Because of course I did.)"

Why of course? What's so great about this film?

Oh, it's definitely good. I'll give it that. But I think that's why people think it's great -- because it's good. Good action films are harder to come by these days than they once were, so people are eager to rally around any good action film and call it great.

I think this also explains the love for Jack Reacher, another favorite in that group that is getting a sequel, though that one's ready to hit theaters this month. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (terrible title) is coming out in the U.S. on October 21st, and in Australia a day before that, on my birthday.

Jack Reacher is not good. At least, I don't think it is. I was singularly disappointed by that film, especially since I usually like Tom Cruise movies. The best thing about it was an entertaining villain turn by Werner Herzog. Everything else was pretty much tied for the second best thing about it, which was also the worst thing about it. There might have been a clever set piece or two in there, I don't remember. Jack Reacher was not worth remembering.

Yet it comes up regularly in my Facebook group, and that must be a fairly mainstream opinion, else they wouldn't have consider the movie sequel worthy. "JACK REACHER YEAH!!!" Really? "YEAH"?!?

The consequence of Jack Reacher being considered a hit by individuals who are not very discerning is that its director, Christopher McQuarrie, was borrowed to make another over-praised action movie starring Tom Cruise: Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. In this case I was more conscious of tight set pieces and polished filmmaking. But I thought the movie overall was just lackluster. Maybe I've finally had enough of Ethan Hunt.

I wonder if this whole thing first started when other people saw a brilliant series of action movies in the Jason Bourne movies and I just didn't. I found them diverting, but nothing more. There have now been three in a row that I haven't seen, as discussed here.

There are two things I can conclude about being out of synch with the level of enthusiasm other people have about these movies:

1) I am just not as young as they are, or as in touch with my inner testosterone-infused teenager as they are;

2) I'm an old grump, which may be the same thing.

But I don't think I'm an old grump. One of Tom Cruise's other most recent action movies, Edge of Tomorrow, was in my top ten for the year it came out, and I gave it five stars. And I've got an action movie in this year's top ten as well: Captain America: Civil War. I don't expect it will finish the year in my top ten, but it's there now, and I've ranked more than 80 movies so far this year.

I think the real difference is that my need for action movies to be good differs from theirs, and differs from that of the average movie fan. The average movie fan earns the adjective "average" before his title (an "average movie fan" also seems to be a he) because action movies are part of his DNA. When all else is equal, he'd rather watch an action movie by a margin of two to one over any other type of movie. That's because even though he says he is, he is not really a cinephile. He is a fan of being entertained, and even though I'm making it sound like that's a bad thing, it's a totally fine reason to watch movies. One of the primary reasons, to be certain.

Well, that's not me, at least not anymore. That might have been me when I was an actual teenager, and not just channeling teenage desires as many of these people with whom I differ on John Wick, Jack Reacher and the latest Mission: Impossible movie seem to be doing. But the reason I know I'm really a cinephile is that I want any type of movie to be good, be it an action movie, a costume drama, a hard-hitting documentary or an abstract art film. The people who think John Wick is the best movie of the past five years are not even seeing those last three types of film.

Which is okay. I'm not here today to tell you how much better I am than they are, even though I know it sounds like I'm doing that.

Really, I'm here today to try to stop scratching my head about why these people love the movies they love, and I don't.

And through the writing of this, I've decided it's the opposite of someone who tries to break up with you gently:

It's not me, it's them.

The novelty of streaming The Force Awakens

It wasn't too long ago that I thought Star Wars and Netflix streaming were a very unlikely match.

In this post almost exactly five years ago, entitled "Searching for Star Wars on Netflix" and written on the occasion of the announced division of the company into a streaming service and a DVD-through-the-mail service called Qwikster (a plan that was quickly scuttled after a resounding public backlash), I wrote: "I don't expect a movie like Star Wars ever to be available on streaming. 'Ever' is a long time, but let's just put it this way: it's not going to happen anytime soon."

I guess five years was fairly soon after all.

No, the original Star Wars is not available for streaming. But a movie "like" Star Wars -- that's what I said, anyway -- is. In fact, it's so much "like" Star Wars that this was one of the reasons the people who didn't like it didn't like it. The new Star Wars movie is available on Netflix, as will every subsequent Star Wars that gets released, according to the recent (not that recent now) distribution deal between Disney and Netflix.

And so Friday night, almost purely for the sake of its seeming lack of likelihood, I watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Netflix.

There was really no need for me to see this movie for the third time in its first ten months of existence. In fact, you might argue that intense initial exposure to a movie has the chance to turn you against it. I mean, I still love Creed, but my third viewing of that back in June was probably too soon.

But there was no denying that every time I scrolled past it on Netflix, my salivary glands activated just a little bit. It was a physical reaction I couldn't deny. I wanted to see this movie again.

And, I'm glad to report, pretty much no change in my feeling about it after a third viewing. I still love it.

But it occurred to me that it does represent a bit of a watershed moment in our relationship with various delivery systems for our movies.

Five years ago, I discounted the possibility of Star Wars being available for streaming because it seemed to me, even if I didn't state it aloud or even consciously define my own perspective, that making something available for streaming reduces its sense of glamour. If you can just watch a movie any old time with a click of a button, its value takes a hit. It's no longer some elite commodity that you will want to buy in order to have it in your collection. By it streaming, it's in your collection without you even having to do anything.

Star Wars seemed unlikely to cross that line. As it has perennial resale value as a physical disc, Lucasfilm seemed likely to remain content to milk every last cent out of it in that format. Giving it to us for free -- with our monthly streaming subscription, that is -- seemed an admission of defeat for that particular revenue stream.

Has that defeat now been admitted? Or does Disney just have a different way of doing things?

Maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

One of the ways I knew I was excited to see The Force Awakens again, beyond the mere likelihood of watching Star Wars movies multiple times, was that I recently looked for it on the shelf at Target. Not to buy it -- DVD prices here are still outrageous. No, I just wanted to look at it. I just wanted to marvel over the fact that I could purchase this on DVD or BluRay, this Star Wars movie we had all been anticipating for so long. I still get a little excited by the possibility of owning a new movie that had excited me, even if I do it less and less these days.

But you know what? I couldn't find it.

I figured I had just been looking in the wrong place. There was a Lego version of The Force Awakens, but not the one starring actual people. I shrugged and gave up, not thinking much more about it.

Until now.

Now I wonder if we've reached a point in the devaluation of physical media that they actually didn't have The Force Awakens at Target. Available on Netflix? Who needs a disc?

Because now the assumption is that we all have Netflix, and really, don't we?

I guess I'll take the glass is half full approach, though. The glass is half full approach meant that I got to watch this movie I wanted to see on Friday night without lifting a finger.

Correction: I lifted the finger necessary to press play on my remote.

Funny coincidences of Jersey Girl

No part of me intended to catch up with Jersey Girl anytime soon.

I've seen most of Kevin Smith's movies, so it was a movie I expected I'd see "one of these days." But the occasion would really have to present itself, and there would have to be no other better options.

Apparently, those circumstances arose when I saw it at the library recently, borrowed it with a shrug, then decided not to return it yesterday when I brought back a bunch of other items that were due back sooner. Jersey Girl wasn't due back until the 17th, so I held onto it, not realizing that my opportunity to watch it would occur just a few hours later on Friday -- a holiday here in the great state of Victoria. (It's a new public holiday, actually, to coincide with today's Aussie rules football grand final.)

And because my wife took my older son out Pokemon hunting while my younger son took a nap, leaving me with a block of time, I did indeed watch Jersey Girl on Friday afternoon. Or, 45 minutes of it, finishing up the remainder that night before going to bed. You know, seemed like a good afternoon movie, one I could pause when I drifted off into my own nap.

I'm glad I did watch it, not because I liked the movie -- though I did, more than I expected I would -- but because it presented a truly funny set of coincidences, both with my own life and with the careers of those involved in the movie. Watching it 12 years after its release, when the movie is not having a moment of any kind and has largely been forgotten, I was in a position to identify coincidences that probably no one else is -- especially since some of those relate only to me and my timing for watching the movie.

Such as:

1) Kevin Smith seems to have been inspired to make this movie by the birth of his own daughter, Harley Quinn, which occurred in June of 1999. (She actually makes an uncredited cameo in the movie as well, I later discovered, though I didn't catch it.) That's more than five years before Jersey Girl came out, but it stands to reason that his own experiences as a father played a big role in his decision to write such a movie. This year, he's made the second movie that seems to have been inspired, in a way, by Harley Quinn -- Yoga Hosers, which I saw just two weeks ago.

2) Jersey Girl stars Liv Tyler, who, like Harley Quinn Smith, became famous largely because she had a famous dad. (If you want to call Harley Quinn Smith "famous." She does have her own wikipedia page.) It remains to be seen whether Kevin Smith's daughter will have the same type of career as Steven Tyler's daughter, though it certainly seems unlikely.

3) Smith named his daughter Harley Quinn because he's a huge Batman fan. That's probably also why he included a throwaway line in Jersey Girl in which Affleck, driving a street sweeper, says to his now seven-year-old daughter "Welcome to the Batmobile." He calls back to it later on as well, making it not totally a throwaway, I guess. Smith couldn't have known, of course, that 12 years later, in 2016, Affleck would first appear as Batman, giving this line a wholly unintended additional resonance. (Reminds me a bit of that moment in Midnight Special when Michael Shannon talks about kryptonite, except he'd already appeared as Zod when that movie was made.)

4) In Jersey Girl, Affleck's character loses his job working in PR for musicians when he has a stressful moment in which he curses out Will Smith in front of a hot mic. (It's actually less accidental than that -- he just loses his cool and makes snarky comments about Smith to a room full of reporters at a press conference, as he considers Smith's attempt to start a movie career dubious at best, continually deriding him by calling him "The Fresh Prince." That part of the story takes place in the mid-1990s.) Again, Kevin Smith couldn't have known when writing this bit that Affleck would later appear as Batman opposite Will Smith in this year's Suicide Squad. When they have that confrontation in the alley, you might think that Deadshot has a whole different sort of vendetta against Batman than just the normal conflict between superhero and supervillain. Of course, Smith actually makes a completely charming cameo at the end of the movie in which he is totally awesome, ruling out any possibility of lingering bad blood (though he never does discover Affleck's character's identity when sitting and chatting with him in the waiting area of a publicity company).

5) I noticed in the opening credits that the movie was shot by the great Hungarian cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who was voted one of the ten most influential DPs of all time in a 2003 poll. I then immediately noticed how terrible the film looked. He was over 70 when he shot it, but come on. I couldn't immediately recall Zsigmond's other credits, but looking him up, I was reminded that he just died earlier this year -- the first day of this year, to be exact. Another coincidence is that he also shot McCabe & Mrs. Miller -- a film renowned for its distinct look, and also a film that I just returned to the library in the batch of films that did not end up including Jersey Girl. I'd seen it (and loved it) already but wanted to schedule a second viewing. I actually did find the time, but on that Sunday night I was particularly tired and made it through only 30 minutes before I had to stop and go to sleep. I tried to renew it yesterday so I could complete the viewing on a week-plus delay, but had to return it because someone had reserved it. So to summarize: I got to watch all of Jersey Girl, but not all of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Not an even trade there.

6) Affleck's character's daughter is fixated on seeing the musical Cats. I hadn't been thinking much about Cats at all in the past, say, ten years. But then a week or so ago, while half-watching an episode of Pokemon my son was watching, I heard the part where they go "Who's that Pokemon?" And then "It's Charmander!" (Or whoever.) As if from nowhere I was struck by the idea that Pokemon names are about equally nonsensical to the names of the characters in Cats. So I posted on Facebook that it would be fun to substitute one for the other. "Who's that Pokemon?" "It's Rum Tum Tugger!" "Who's that Pokemon?" "It's Skimbleshanks!" So having this movie bring up Cats as well was another coincidence.

7) Because Cats has closed on Broadway, Affleck and his daughter go to Sweeney Todd instead. Twice in the past week Tim Burton's movie version of that show has come up in conversations I've had, with the other person defending it as a quality film and me disagreeing with them. Maybe not entirely coincidental but worthy of note anyway, Burton's new movie, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, had just opened here in Melbourne the day before.

8) Although she's in it only at the beginning, Jennifer Lopez made flops with Affleck in consecutive years, first Gigli and then this. As it happens, I like both of these flops a fair bit more than most people seem to.

9) Mike Starr is in this movie, and I just thought about Dumb and Dumber, in which he also appears, the other day.

Okay, that last one was a joke to let you know I'm out of legitimate coincidences.