When movies are no escape

The feeling I have now is most similar to the feeling I had after 9/11.

Not in terms of the tragedy of the event, exactly. I mean, you could argue it both ways, that an incident in which thousands of people died is both more and less tragic than the election of Donald Trump. Less tragic because the election of any president does not directly lead to people's deaths (except when it does, and with Trump's finger on the button, it might), but more tragic because more people may be adversely affected in the long run. And because there's no common enemy to rally against, like there was with Osama bin Laden. The common enemy is ourselves.

But what I'm really referring to is that there's no escape from the sorrow, as there wasn't when the planes hit back in September of 2001.

Much was made back then about how soon was too soon to enjoy entertainment again -- specifically comedy, but more generally, any kind of entertainment. It was a fatal disconnect to imagine seeking out something that gave you pleasure, even as a distraction. Being able to extract pleasure from anything was anathema to how we felt. Sitting and staring at walls felt more appropriate.

And that's how I'm feeling right now.

I've watched parts of three movies since the election was called for Trump yesterday -- one in its entirety, one finishing off a viewing that had begun the night before, and a third in an (unsuccessful) attempt to combat insomnia during a sleepless night. Predictably, none has given me any pleasure, and it's not only because Mascots is an unfunny attempt by Christopher Guest to return to his old mockumentary stomping grounds, Borderline is a movie about borderline personality disorder that ends on a fatalistic note, and I Saw the Light (not yet finished) is a standard biopic about a musician I don't know much about (Hank Williams). It's because right now, it is impossible for me to derive pleasure from the source that can usually provide it for me, against all odds and under most circumstances, even when I'm at my lowest.

I'm not sure how long this will last, but my viewing schedule is nothing if not breakneck, and tonight, following a night when I slept for about 90 minutes, I'm supposed to be seeing Arrival, which under other circumstances might be a candidate for one of my favorite movies of the year. Now, I'll be lucky not to sleep through it.

I don't want to spoil my Arrival viewing, but life goes on. I've got to review it for the site almost immediately after the screening, then talk about it on a podcast three delays later. In short, I can't delay it to mourn.

But mourning I am, and mourning I shall be, and mourning will one day end, but I have no idea when.

And for now, movies are no escape from this grief.

A movie metaphor for election day

Hillary Clinton wants to create a world where elephants, donkeys, iguanas, parrots, whales, tse tse flies, giraffes, squirrels, tarantulas, kangaroos, storks, sharks, leopards, water buffalo, centipedes, seagulls, possums, lions, salamanders, emus, jaguars, moles, starfish, turtles, antelopes, ants, anacondas, chimpanzees, sloths, tuna, lobsters, cows, pigs, horses, dogs, cats, rabbits and foxes can live together in harmony.

Donald Trump wants to create a world where the elephants trample over everybody.

Don't just vote Tuesday.

Vote for the right zookeeper.

Amy Adams owns this Thursday

It's not often that an actress has herself as her primary competition, but that's what will happen this Thursday in Australia, when The Arrival and Nocturnal Animals open.

Amy Adams is the star of both.

They don't necessarily appeal to the same demographics, but there's enough crossover in their appeal, and little enough else opening this week, that viewers will indeed likely be confronted with the "Amy or Amy" decision when going to the movies this weekend.

Of course, in the U.S., neither opens on November 10th. The Arrival must wait an additional day until the 11th (in accordance with U.S. Friday release dates) while Nocturnal Animals bows a week after that in New York and Los Angeles, increasing to a "limited" release (though less limited than those two cities, I guess) on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving before a wide release on December 9th.

Both movies have been all over the trailers I've gotten before the last few movies I've seen, but my approach to them has been very different.

With Nocturnal Animals, I reluctantly watched the trailer, and then of course didn't bother to avert my eyes when it came up again. Which has been at least twice, possibly three more times.

With The Arrival, though -- directed by a favorite of mine, Denis Villeneuve -- I've been quick to cover my ears and close my eyes, so as to let as little about this movie seep into my consciousness as possible. I've still only managed to see the very beginning shots of the trailer (enough to alert me what movie it was) and a few isolated stills.

I won't be quick on to Nocturnal Animals, and not only because I now feel like I have a pretty good idea what I'll be getting from this movie. I'll see it in the theater. Probably.

The Arrival, though, I'll scoop up on the first night, and not only because we'll be discussing it on a podcast three nights later. No, this one truly feels in my wheelhouse.

It remains to be seen how much of a factor Adams herself will be, whether she will help each film or hurt it.

A couple years ago, the answer to that question would have been obvious. Adams' fresh face was a boon to whatever project she participated in, and I several times toyed with the idea of writing a post about how inherently sympathetic she was. In short, I thought it was impossible not to like her. And she was doing good work, too.

Her essential ability to associate herself with good projects remains unchanged (a few Superman movies notwithstanding), but some part of my enthusiasm for her has been lost. I think I may have breached an Amy Adams saturation point of some kind. She no longer feels fresh and she no longer is reason enough for me to be excited about a project. However, that alone probably doesn't mean she'll detract from it either.

We'll find out with The Arrival on Thursday night, and Nocturnal Animals probably about ten days later.

Insert requisite Cubs World Series post here

I am a baseball fan.

I am a movie fan.

So the day after the Chicago Cubs won the World Series -- a feat they had not accomplished in a by-now household knowledge 108 years -- I should be able to figure out a way to incorporate my love of baseball with my love of movies to honor Chicago's long-suffering team and their fans.

But the truth of the matter is, I'm drawing a blank.

I could call this post The Chicago Cubs' Century Off, a nod to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I could call it Rookie of the Century, and reference one of the Cubs' great young players as well as the movie Rookie of the Year. I could even call it The Future Is Now and make a Back to the Future II reference.

But the fact is, I'm not feeling particularly clever this morning.

And the Cubs' win transcends movies. It transcends culture in general.

There was a thread in my Flickcharters Facebook group last night (well, it was day in Australia) in which people were chiming in with game updates -- their exquisite joys, their moments of temporary heartbreak, their sheer excitement about the spectacle they were watching. Meanwhile, others were continuing to post movie-related threads, seemingly oblivious to the historic and ridiculously exciting extra-inning game that was unfolding in Cleveland.

I pitied those who could not be part of the moment. I pitied those uninterested enough in sports that they didn't have a little room in their hearts or attention spans for being a part of history.

Me, I was maintaining four chats at once while also watching as much of the game as I could -- while also working.

Movies? I wasn't thinking about them much last night.

I was thinking about the Cubs, their fans, and how we all witnessed a sweet and long-overdue moment that will mean so much to so many.

Congratulations, Cubs. Chicagoans, take the next week off from work.

You deserve this.

Awash in self regard

The Neon Demon is a film about psychotic narcissism.

Which makes it a pretty good topic for Nicolas Winding Refn. Write what you know, they say. And Refn knows all about narcissism. I'm sure his house is full of mirrors -- metaphorical or otherwise.

Nicolas Winding Refn is pretty impressed with himself. He thinks he's pretty hot shit. The way he drapes his name all over his latest movie is proof positive of that.

I'm sure you saw this movie months ago -- it opened in the U.S. in July -- but we only just got it in Australia two weeks ago. In fact, I wasn't really in the mood to see it on Wednesday night, coming off a very busy week that included a music festival, a camping trip, Halloween, a public holiday on Tuesday, and the end of the six-month hiatus of my podcast on Tuesday night, in which we drank some celebratory whiskey. Wednesday night had all the makings of a quiet night in.

But Wednesday night was also my last chance to see The Neon Demon in the theater for free. The only theater where it's playing here in Melbourne is Cinema Nova in Carlton, and Nova only allows you to use your critics cards to see a movie in the first two weeks of its run. Today, Thursday, marks the end of those two weeks.

Well, I'm glad I went. I was lukewarm on Drive and I hated Only God Forgives, ranking it my least favorite movie of that year. I do like Bronson and Valhalla Rising, but those feel like older versions or Refn. Not the Refn we have now.

Not the Refn who loves himself so much.

But I'll get to that in a minute. First, the positives. The Neon Demon is clearly my favorite Refn movie so far, the most fully realized encapsulation of what is taking shape as his vision of the world. This despite some incredible miscalculations in the third act -- not on where the movie should go, necessarily, but on how it goes where it goes. In other words, I did want an off the rails finale that attempted to provoke, but I didn't like this particular off the rails finale that attempted to provoke. The rest of it, though, made up for the ending. Those triangles. THOSE TRIANGLES!

And now, the narcissism.

As far as I can tell, Nicolas Winding Refn's name appears six times in the credits of this movie. Six. Two before, four after. As far as I recall, they are as follows:

1) Listing himself as one of the people who "present" the movie, along with the various production companies that funded it.

2) Listing himself as the director prior to the reveal of the title.

And after:

3) Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

4) Story by Nicolas Winding Refn

5) Screenplay by Nicolas Winding Refn and either Mary Laws or Polly Stenham (there were only two screenwriters listed on screen, though Wikipedia lists three)

Those are the first three credits that roll. Then, after some other credits have rolled:

6) A Nicolas Winding Refn film

Really? You don't say.

Oh wait, you said it like 30 times.

But if just the navel-gazing love of how his three names sound together were all there was, I probably wouldn't have written this post. The kicker was his initials.

If you've been reading my posts on D.W. Griffith movies I've watched for my No Audio Audient series -- I've watched Intolerance and Broken Blossoms -- you'll know that Griffith displays one little bit of egocentrism that really irks me. For reasons known perhaps only to him, Griffith would include his initials, D.G., on the dialogue cards in his movies. (No W., though.) As there can be no semantic argument for their existence, they can be attributed only to his own massive sense of self appreciation.

But at least Griffith's commitment to his own personal glory can be written off as a product of a different time. Who knows, maybe there were even other directors who did it, enough that it was something of a convention.

The same cannot be said for Refn, who includes his initials NWR -- pointing down at an angle to the right -- each time the film's title is on the screen, which is at least twice. And perhaps also as the actor's names were appearing on screen, as well. Here, like this:

What a twat.

So even though I really liked this film -- loved 2/3 of it -- I still leave the experience with no better of an impression of its director. He has always struck me, maybe subconsciously before now, as a person full of himself, who thinks his cinematic vision is innately praiseworthy. He's a bit like Lars von Trier in terms of being an enfant terrible whose overconfidence is supposed to read as a sign of personal strength rather than his own immodesty. If you don't like his persona, you can just fuck off.

And it really does give him something in common with his characters. "Beauty isn't everything, it's the only thing," says a mysteriously uncredited Alessandro Nivola -- mysteriously because he appears in at least three different scenes and has plenty of dialogue. Refn sees his own vision as a thing of beauty, and it's really "the only thing" in a way -- he doesn't care if his story is full of holes (they usually are) or if some elements are downright disagreeable. In this way he would relate directly with the lead character played by Elle Fanning, the only character who sees herself as flawless. "No one likes how they look," a fellow model says to her. "I like how I look," she responds, with perhaps feigned innocence.

Refn likes how he looks, how his films look, how his name looks. And he's not afraid to show it.

As I was leaving the movie and fully in the midst of processing it -- wishing, though, that the first 80 minutes were the most recent impression I was mulling, rather than the last 40 -- I came across a truly disturbing sight downstairs from the theater. It was this one:

And then also this one:

The first one is the more disturbing, I think you will agree.

The two images were on the shade that gets lowered over the entrance of a fancy women's clothing store that was of course closed, it being 11:30 at night. At first I had no idea why the googly eyes were there, which made it all the more frightening. I later determined it was probably a prank played by someone for Halloween, or perhaps even something the store did itself in honor of the holiday (even though the holiday isn't nearly as big in Australia as it is in the U.S.). But at the time, the total lack of a reason for it, coupled with just having seen a movie about psychotic models with crazy eyes, chilled me to the bone. (For crazy eyes in the movie, see: Abbey Lee.)

That's all I have for now, but ...

Derek Scott Armstrong presents

A Derek Scott Armstrong post

Written by Derek Scott Armstrong

Conceived by Derek Scott Armstrong

Typed by Derek Scott Armstrong

Last two photographs taken by Derek Scott Armstrong

Derek Scott Armstrong is Great

Halloween 1921, or No Audio Audient: The Phantom Carriage

For Halloween this year, I traveled 95 years into the past, viewing both a movie about how they saw themselves then, and a movie about how we see them now.

The movie I knew would be from 1921 was The Phantom Carriage, my monthly viewing from my silent movie series No Audio Audient, which I almost didn't manage to get in during the month of October.

The movie I didn't know would have anything to do with 1921 was The Awakening, a 2011 period horror starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, which I chose as our Halloween night viewing.

Since only the first one was much good, and since the one that wasn't very good is kind of hijacking the other's spot on the blog, I'll spend most of my discussion on the silent Swedish film.

I'd tried to start The Phantom Carriage on October 30th at around 10:30 -- an ironic time to start watching it for a number of reasons, not least of which was that just last week, someone in my Flickcharters Facebook group specifically warned against starting a silent movie, and this silent movie in particular, at 10:30 at night. In a follow-up comment in that thread, anticipating my own upcoming viewing, I vowed to start it at 10:29 or earlier -- and lived up to that vow just barely, starting it at 10:28. In part because my previous night's sleep was fitful and almost nonexistent while camping, I was more compromised than usual in an attempt to start that late, and adding a final nail into my coffin was that neither version I found on YouTube had a score with it. It's kind of a miracle I made it the 40 minutes I did. With many silent films, that would have gotten me pretty close to the end, but this one was 106 minutes, leaving me well short. (I guess the last irony was that it was 10:30 on 10/30, which I'm only just now realizing.)

The lack of a score did help in my attempt to surreptitiously watch the rest of it the next day, Halloween day, a workday. It figured to be a slower day, a single workday sandwiched between a Sunday and a Tuesday holiday, and after lunch it finally became one. I ended up wrapping up the viewing at five minutes after five, and then headed straight home to take my kids out trick-or-treating. May not have been the ideal way to watch an atmospheric proto-horror movie, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Actually, The Phantom Carriage isn't much of a horror movie at all -- which is not a bad thing. Sure, the basic premise is well within horror's broader wheelhouse, but if you're looking to tie this one in with a holiday, Halloween is not the first one you'd think of. In fact, Halloween might only be the third most relevant holiday with which to tie it in. I'll explain.

The story revolves around a legend (a real legend? not sure) that says that the last person to die in a calendar year is rewarded with/saddled with the responsibility of driving Death's carriage for the following year. I suppose it's actually the last sinner to die, since in the course of the story we see another December 31st death involving a godly person who is not a candidate for this task. But as this newly departed soul takes on the guise of Death, complete with shroud and scythe, he basically becomes the Grim Reaper for a year. The carriage is his mode of transportation. As the events of this story surround two consecutive New Year's Eves, New Year's Eve might be the most appropriately themed holiday.

But the story actually made me think of Christmas, as it very closely follows the themes and even story elements of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The main character in the movie is David Holm, played by Victor Sjostrom, the film's director. David is a drunkard who has fallen out with his wife and two children, who spends his time in ill repute with his friends. When we catch up with him he's drinking in a graveyard on New Year's Eve, regaling his friends with the legend of the phantom carriage, a story another friend had told him the previous New Year's Eve. That friend coincidentally died that night, and little does David know at the time, but his friend has been driving Death's carriage during the intervening year. David's about to find out, though. During a fight that breaks out with his friends when they try to take him to see a dying Salvation Army nurse who cared for him the year before -- and contracted consumption from him, an injury added to the insult of his ingratitude to her -- David is killed. When his soul leaves his body, he meets his friend from the previous year, who tells him he will drive Death's carriage for the next year. But first he must atone for the terrible life he has led, and travel with this apparition to visit and look in on others he has hurt, including the nurse who has asked for him on her death bed, and his wife and kids. Without spoiling the ending, I can tell you that it too is very Dickensian and Carolian. (Hint: David may not be dead dead, after all.)

But Halloween comes in third, and there are certainly some creepy things in among a story that soon takes the form of a morality play. At the time the film was lauded for its use of special effects, namely, the ability to overlay film such that the characters who are dead appear as transparent, ghostly images. It was actually a double exposure of the same film in the camera, and it was pretty revolutionary at the time. The effects are seamless and also creepy. When we first see this ghostly carriage arrive with Death as its driver, you do get a chill, even 95 years after the movie was made. Tod Browning's Dracula is pretty scary only ten years later, and I'm sure there are other examples of early scary movies, but this is probably the oldest movie that has actually "scared" me. I wasn't quaking in my boots or anything, but the appearance of that carriage was the equivalent of a ghostly caress of a finger along my spine. I think the lateness of the hour (at least I got to see the carriage for the first time when it was nighttime) and the lack of a score only contributed to the sense of sepulchral dread.

The film goes on to use those special effects quite profoundly, allowing David and his companion to drift through walls as they go about looking in on the living. The single "scariest" moment is probably when the carriage drives over the crashing waves of the coastline, creating an additional sense of the impossible that is one of the very reasons we go to see movies. I don't know why I found that image as effective as I did in terms of being scary, but I did.

The movie does abandon being scary pretty early on, though, so the portion I watched at work was more like the other silent movies I've watched for this series, which don't benefit from a nighttime viewing. And though I did use the Wikipedia plot synopsis as a crutch in being sure I knew everything that was going on -- the movie uses several flashbacks as well, though does not always delineate them from the thrust of the present-tense story, leading to the sense that you weren't paying proper attention or had missed a title card -- I did get quite engrossed in this man's story of attempted redemption. You can really see why this film is also credited as being an inspiration to Sjostrom's fellow countryman, Ingmar Bergman. Most obvious among these inspirations are the religious themes The Phantom Carriage shares with Bergman's work, but even that crashing waves scene I mentioned earlier made me think of the similar setting for Antonius' chess game with Death in The Seventh Seal. I got a lot out of watching another Swedish director who influenced Bergman (Carl Theodor Dreyer) and I'd say I got a lot out of this as well.

Okay, now for a few words on the other half of our 1921 double feature, The Awakening.

This is a fairly typical setup for a ghost story. Rebecca Hall plays a woman who debunks ghost sightings in post-World War I England (1921 to be exact, as listed in a title that appears on screen), though of course she has her own haunted backstory that the events of the story start to tease out. She is hired to try to either locate definitive evidence of or disprove the existence of the ghost of a child who died in a boarding school for boys. Events that initially seem to have nothing to do with her are ultimately entwined with her own history. There are startle scares and ghostly images of boys in photographs. That kind of thing.

It wasn't completely unworthy, and I do admit to having a weakness for ghostly images of boys in photographs. But it was far more valuable to me as a coincidental viewing to incorporate into this blog post than as an effective way to scare myself on Halloween night.

But hey, at least it disproves my recently expressed concern that I am scared by even the lesser entries in the horror genre.

Hope you've got some good scares in your North American Halloween night viewing, which should still be ahead of you as I type this.

Oh, and for the November installment of No Audio Audient, the penultimate installment, I'm looking at Erich von Stroheim's Greed, if I can fit its epic running time into my schedule.

Not only Shocktober, but also Choctober

As we busy ourselves each October with viewings designed to scare us, we tend to forget that Halloween also means candy.

Lots and lots of candy.

That might explain the choice of movie for the so-called "Sleeping Bag Cinema" at the Lost Lands Festival, a two-day family-friendly music festival in nearby Werribee at which attendees can camp out Saturday night (Sunday night too, since Monday is a single workday squeezed in before a holiday, meaning many people are taking it off). Not only can they, but we did, so my six-year-old and I decided to go to the movie, despite its 9:30 start time and despite the fact that we had both already seen Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory within the past year. He'd actually seen it twice, I think.

I don't worry so much about his repeat viewings, because he's a kid and they tend to obsess over things they like, but my own repeat viewings rarely need to involve seeing a movie I've already seen twice in the same year. If it's something new that I've just discovered and I can't wait to see it again, that's one thing. But if it's at least the second and third viewing of a particular movie, it often feels like overkill -- even something you love.

And I don't love Willy Wonka. I like it a lot, but it was not among the movies I watched regularly as a child -- in fact, I don't think I first saw it until I was an adult. That means I have no sentimental attachment to it, and judge it merely on the basis of its effectiveness as a movie. About which I have sort of mixed feelings, as you remember from this post, which I wrote only two days after last seeing it -- just seven months ago on March 29th.

So I was dragging my feet a little bit on actually attending, especially after a long day in the sun in which I had spread three-and-a-half beers over six hours. (So, really only enough to make me tired.) But the novelty of watching a movie in my sleeping bag under the stars -- with my son, no less -- won out.

As soon as the conveyor belts of chocolate over the opening credits came on screen, I knew we'd made the right choice. My son and I were not actually eating chocolate -- we'd opted for a $5 bag of hot buttered popcorn that someone enterprising entrepreneur had whipped up for us -- but the amount on the screen was enough to sustain us.

Unfortunately, not for the whole movie. He got scared by the boat scene, which indeed had thrown him for a loop last time but had not prevented him from finishing the viewing. Then again, that viewing was at home on our coach and easy to finish. This one was pushing past 10:30 and quickly becoming one of the latest times he'd ever stayed awake. Besides, he had to go to the bathroom.

His old man was perfectly fine with that. Despite some Coke to pep me up, I remained unpepped enough to doze off not once but twice, cozy there in my sleeping bag.

So I don't get to log it as an official repeat viewing. We heard Violet Beauregard turning into a blueberry from farther and farther away as we crossed the road back to the campsite and used the portable toilets. In fact, the sound from the movie was almost enough that we could have kept listening to it from our tents, but thankfully, sleep overtook us soon after we returned.

Not for long, as you might expect from camping. The kids actually did great, but my wife and I felt lucky to steal 45 minutes here and there, and it was the kind of sleep that was so unsatisfying that you couldn't have sworn for sure that it actually happened. I greeted the arrival of 5:30 with exquisite relief, as I could actually get up and start doing things and not keep pretending to try to sleep.

But that's another story. The story I want to tell you today is how my son and I bonded over chocolate, popcorn, Halloween, a past-your-bedtime movie under the stars, sticking the Scotch tape I found in my backpack on each others' faces, and hopefully, a dawning love of cinema.

And now I've just told it.

A horrifying trend?

It's the just prerogative of a cynical cinephile to talk about how dumb a particular horror movie was and how little it scared them.

For this particular cynical cinephile, though, it's becoming increasingly less common.

And I can't tell if that's due to a decrease in my cynicism, or an increase in the quality of horror movies.

Or maybe I'm just becoming a wuss.

Anyway, the raw materials of this discussion is that I've noticed myself becoming increasingly receptive to horror movies, even the ones most people think are terrible. That probably requires some rephrasing. I've always been receptive to horror movies, as being scared is one of my favorite emotions to experience during a movie. But I've frequently been disappointed by horror movies' actual ability to do that.

Not lately, though. I'm not sure how far back this goes, but a couple prominent examples in recent months were what prompted me to start writing.

The first was Dark Skies, which I watched back on August 14th and ended up writing about here. I had known this one was not particularly well received, but I watched it out of a general curiosity and a specific appreciation for the work of Keri Russell. I ended up getting the willies scared out of me, in part because of the influence of another horror movie I watched last Halloween, The Nightmare (as discussed in more detail in that post). I gave Dark Skies four stars on Letterboxd, grading on the general quality of the film (it was good!) but particularly on the quality of the fear it generated in me. That was at least two stars more than anyone else gave it.

Then earlier this month I watched Sinister, another film I talked about (here) because of its generic adjectival name, which was a trend back in 2012. Sinister also threw me a loop. It features pretty standard ingredients for a modern horror movie, especially one produced by Jason Blum -- scary kids, old movie footage and a demon insinuating himself into those videos, the minds of the scary kids, and the hallways of the protagonist's house. Yet I watched this movie with what seemed like a constant chill. Again I gave this film four stars, and again that was an outlier in terms of the average critical take. Then again, the Blum-produced The Gallows really creeped me out last year, and someone I greatly respect selected it as his worst movie of the year. (Maybe it's because both films feature footage of someone being hanged on tape or in 8mm. Maybe that's one of my triggers.)

Then last Saturday night we started V/H/S, and I finished it in the wee hours of this Saturday morning. (And I'm talking really wee -- after I fell asleep on the couch from about 10:30 to about 2, I finished it between 2:30 and 3:30, which certainly improved the scare factor. Starting to have too many scary movies to watch before Halloween, and too few nights to do it.) I suppose the general critical reception for V/H/S is a bit better than to either of the previous two films I've discussed, but V/H/S has also seemed to get kind of lost in the recent trend of found footage and horror anthology movies (like The ABCs of Death, which in general I did not like -- which did not prevent me from laboriously ranking the 26 short films in this post. Meanwhile, the current post quickly becomes an anthology of my previous posts.) The quality varied very little in the five (or six, if you count the framing story) short films contained here, and each had something about it that I found pretty disturbing. This time I reined myself in and gave it only 3.5 stars.

Oddly, it was the prestigious horror movie I saw this month -- Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak -- that did very little for me. (And again, here's a link if you want it.) Though I did think it had a few scary moments in terms of the sheer effectiveness of the ghost character design.

So do I scare more easily than I once did? Or am I just more forgiving about films in general?

I've discussed a number of times how much more likely I am to give out ratings in the three- to five-star range than I am to give out ratings in the one- to three-star range. Part of that is, of course, self-selection. You never intend to watch bad movies -- except when you do, of course -- and I think the more movies you watch, the better you are at determining which ones will reward the decision to watch them. Most movie fans surely like more movies than they dislike, because curating your viewing experience is more likely to occur among people who are not critics and who are paying for every movie they see.

But horror movies have often been a genre where I opt in, even if I think there's a good chance the movie will disappoint me. So I should be seeing as many bad ones as good ones. Lately, though, it seems I'm seeing only good ones. And it's worth wondering if this is just a good period of selection for me, or a lowering of the bar for what I consider a good movie.

I suppose I require further research on the topic. Which means I'll have to keep seeing plenty of horror movies, even when it's not October.

I guess it's a good thing that I'm actually getting scares from the few horror movies I've seen in an October where I've ended up having a variety of non-horror demands on my viewing schedule. If I'm only going to see a few, best that it's a scary few.

Quit "probably butchering" things

This is a pet peeve of mine about society in general, but it seems to appear most regularly in discussions of films. Specifically, films by foreign directors ... or non-foreign directors who have foreign-sounding names.

Namely, I hate it when people -- my film podcasters, mostly -- say they are "probably butchering" a name, right before making a suitably game effort to pronounce it correctly.

On the surface this is a laudable instinct, an attempt to be respectful and deferential to another culture. But I find there to be something insidious about it, especially in situations where the name is really not that hard to pronounce.

Take the inspiration for this post, heard on a podcast this morning that was several months old, but I'd been saving for after I'd watched the film they discussed in depth. I won't go into detail about what podcast it was, because the point here isn't to point fingers at people. It's to point fingers at a bad habit.

The podcaster said she was "probably butchering" the name Rick Famuyiwa, the director of Dope. Which was not actually the film that was being discussed, but it came up in a later segment.

Now, far be it from me to tell people which combination of consonants and vowels should give them difficulty. That's a personal thing, and that's not really my point either.

But this name, in my opinion, is not that hard to say. Famuyiwa is a Nigerian-American director, which is news to me -- not the American part, but the Nigerian part. I thought his last name had a Japanese origin, and in fact, that he was a Japanese-American. But if you break it down into syllables, it's really not that hard: Fa. Mu. Yi. Wa. Each syllable sounds the same as it looks, and saying them together is not that hard. Plus, the guy has directed five films dating back to 1999 (including one that was made after Dope), so the podcaster should have had plenty of time to familiarize herself with him. Famuyiwa has also been selected as the director of 2018's The Flash, the DC Justice League movie, so we'll certainly be hearing more about him.

But my point, again, is not to get caught up on whether "Famuyiwa" is a hard name to say or not. It's to suggest alternatives.

1) Listen to the pronunciation online. Many directors whose names are difficult to pronounce have little videos on YouTube that are solely dedicated to the correct pronunciation of their name. If not that, you should be able to find some video where someone else speaks the name in the context of an interview or some such, and you can probably safely assume they did the homework you don't want to do. Or there's also ...

2) DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Even if you can't find an audio pronunciation, you can often find a phonetic spelling. It's not that hard. Or even just ask someone you think might know.

3) Just say the name the best you can. Even if you did not get it quite right, you tried, and you didn't just treat this person as "other."

And now we're getting to my problem with this. This is a way of "othering" somebody. To say that you are "probably butchering" his/her name suggests that the name is so outlandish and so anathema to the rules of the English language that it would almost not be possible to pronounce it correctly. I suppose there is an element of self-deprecation in it, like you are hopeless with pronouncing names and this is a flaw particular to you. But especially if you are a person who otherwise does your research -- and most podcasters are -- then it makes this failure to pronounce the name correctly seem like a deviation from your own normal level of preparedness. And then makes us wonder about the reasons for that deviation, even going so far as to assume things like racism or xenophobia even if that doesn't describe you at all.

Really, it's probably the result of an over-application of political correctness. You are so petrified of possibly offending someone by saying their name incorrectly that you have to include these two words to stipulate the likelihood of a mistake and thereby relieve yourself of the moral responsibility for that mistake. I get it, and it's completely well-intentioned.

But there comes a point when you have heard the same podcaster state that they are "probably butchering" a foreign name ten times in the space of three months when it just seems like there's a better way.

Look, there are those names that beat the best of us. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (spelled that without looking it up!) goes by the nickname "Joe" specifically because he knows people won't pronounce his name correctly. Even if they make the effort to break it down by syllables, some of the syllables aren't pronounced the way you think they would be. But one of my podcasters has made the effort to learn how to say his name, and even if it doesn't actually sound like he's saying it correctly, I admire the commitment to just choosing a pronunciation and going with it, rather than making a big deal of how foreign and difficult it is every time you say it.

Butchering should be left for serial killers, dictators and working with meat.

Which reminds me, it's October, and I need to start watching more movies where people are butchering each other.

Whoa! Avy Kaufman is a woman

When I saw Avy Kaufman's name in the credits of The Family Fang on Sunday night, I thought it was finally time to check IMDB and see how many credits this guy actually has. I told my wife it was surely the most number of credits anyone has on IMDB.

I may be right about that -- Avy Kaufman has 223 credits.

But I was wrong about Avy Kaufman being a guy.

I don't know why I assumed "Avy" was a guy's name. It can be a bit hard to tell with traditionally Jewish first names, unless you a) are Jewish or b) already know somebody else who has that name. I think I found it similar to another Jewish man's name, Ari, and just made my assumptions from there. Or maybe I was thinking Alvy Singer from Annie Hall.

But no, Avy Kaufman is a [??]-year-old woman (neither Wikipedia nor IMDB divulges her age) who looks like this:

Avy Kaufman is a casting director, which is part of the reason she's able to work so much. I don't know what a casting director does top to bottom, but I have to assume that his or her role is limited to pre-production. Once a movie starts shooting, the job is over -- unless of course a new part is written on the fly, in which case he/she clocks back in for maybe another week. 

At some point, for no good reason, I started to notice every time I saw Avy Kaufman's name in the credits of a movie I was watching. And because the casting director tends to have prominent placement in the credits, and I do tend to watch at least the start of the credits, it didn't take any special effort. She isn't getting lost in the long scroll at the end. She gets her own name on the screen, by itself, in the opening credits of any film that has them, and near the top of the closing credits if there are no opening credits. She's the be-all and end-all of casting directors, so I imagine her credit placement is a standard part of her contract, maybe even something dictated by a union. Is there a casting director's union? Hey, why not?

But does anyone other than Avy Kaufman even work in the industry? It's gotten to the point where it's more unusual to see a movie that wasn't cast by her than one that was. She's the Edith Head of casting directors. (Actually, Edith Head had almost exactly double her number of credits, with 444 -- so that means I was wrong in both of my two original statements about Kaufman to my wife.)

The little blurb about her at the top of her page on IMDB makes me laugh: "Avy Kaufman is known for her work on The Sixth Sense (1999), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Life of Pi (2012)."

Several things about that are funny. For one, does a casting director have a "signature?" A signature that would allow her to be, say, "known" for something? She might argue that a casting director does, but she'd be having that conversation only with the seven or eight other casting directors who also work regularly (though a single other one I could not name). Only they really know the ins and outs of the profession well enough to recognize each others' work, and not think that any way to recognize the exact nature of their impact on a film isn't complete and total bullshit. (Which is not to say that you can't have good and bad casting directors -- obviously, Kaufman is a very good one. I just can't imagine someone watching a movie and saying "Uh huh, yeah. This looks like an Avy Kaufman cast.")

I was going to say that the other funny thing is that Avy Kaufman was also the casting director on The Bourne Identity, yet they emphasized one of the sequels instead in her blurb. But nope, that one slipped by her. That one was cast by some guy named Joseph Middleton. (See? No idea who that is.) Middleton has a mere 89 credits, the slacker. Though he did also cast Donnie Darko, so good on him. 

Making those 223 credits all the more jaw-dropping is that Kaufman has accumulated them in only 27 years. Well, 29 years, actually -- her first credit was in 1989, but she has credits on into 2018 on IMDB, which is not surprising for a person who is involved with pre-production. In fact, 2017 is set to be one of her biggest years on record, with a staggering 14 projects set for release next year. The 223 credits over 29 years comes out to an average of 7.7 per year, which is good but well short of the ubiquity I'm suggesting she has. Then again, when you consider that she had only six credits total in her first five years on the job, and didn't really pick up the pace until the 21st century, you start to really appreciate how prolific she's been recently.

To get some sense of the depth and breadth of her career, I'll start with the year in which she started casting multiple films per year and never looked back -- 1995 -- and give you her total for each year as well as my favorite film she cast that year.

1995 (3) - Home for the Holidays (dir. Jodie Foster). I actually don't like Home for the Holidays, but I haven't seen her other two films that year.

1996 (4) - Walking and Talking (dir. Nicole Holofcener). A female casting director working with the female directors! Love Walking and Talking.

1997 (5) - The Ice Storm (dir. Ang Lee). Steadily stepping up her output by one title each year.

1998 (6) - Monument Ave. (dir. Ted Demme). Kind of amazing how she is adding a project every year, isn't it?

1999 (7) - The Sixth Sense (dir. M. Night Shyamalan). And the steady march toward dominance contnues. 

2000 (3) - Dancer in the Dark (dir. Lars von Trier). And she falls off a cliff, down to only three films. What, did she have a baby that year or something? - D. Trump

2001 (9) - A.I. Artificial Intelligence (dir. Steven Spielberg). Baby is with the nanny and she's back in action.

2002 (5) - Moonlight Mile (dir. Brad Silberling). Terrible two's? I don't know.

2003 (5) - The Human Stain (dir. Robert Benton). Maybe we are starting to see a Kaufman signature after all. She cast Nicole Kidman in both The Human Stain and Dogville in 2003 ... and also in The Family Fang in 2016.

2004 (12) - Birth (dir. Jonathan Glazer). First double digit year and another Kidman movie in Birth.

2005 (12) - Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee). Another dozen, led by the should-have-been best picture winner. She's also Ang Lee's personal casting director as she worked with him on Hulk in addition to the aforementioned The Ice Storm (and aforementioned but not yet reached chronologically Life of Pi). Interesting, IMDB notes that in 2005, she was credited as "Amy Kaufmann" on Syriana. Would love to know the story behind that, unless it was just a spelling error in the credits -- in which case someone must have lost a job over that. That would have left me little doubt about her gender.

2006 (12) - 10 Items or Less (dir. Brad Silberling). She's establishing that she's comfortable with a one-movie-per-month pace. Weak year overall though in terms of quality. Another Silberling film after Moonlight Mile.

2007 (11) - American Gangster (dir. Ridley Scott). Another weak year -- I only decided I liked American Gangster at all upon a reappraisal. 

2008 (8) - Phoebe in Wonderland (dir. Daniel Barnz). Lowest output in five years ... a consequence of two years of not-great quality?

2009 (11) - State of Play (dir. Kevin Macdonald). Back in double digits again. 

2010 (11) - Let Me In (dir. Matt Reeves). Some stuff I haven't seen this year but the Let the Right One In remake is actually quite good.

2011 (7) - Shame (dir. Steve McQueen). I'm going to say she treated herself to a month-long vacation in the Maldives this year.

2012 (10) - What Maisie Knew (dir. Scott McGehee & David Siegel). Great year also includes Lincoln and Life of Pi, though I really consider Maisie a 2013 film.

2013 (12) - Europa Report (dir. Sebastian Cordero). Pickin's a little slim this year but Ain't Them Bodies Saints is also good.

2014 (19) - The Skeleton Twins (dir. Craig Johnson). And Kaufman goes crazy. Not only does she set a new high output for a year, but she also casts two of my top ten (Love is Strange along with Skeleton Twins) and two TV series, which seem like they might require more work. Interestingly, as I was watching The Family Fang I thought it had a bit of a Skeleton Twins vibe (so maybe more signs of a Kaufman signature?). 

2015 (10) - The End of the Tour (dir. James Ponsoldt). Numbers are reasonable again, although three of the films are actually ones I consider 2016 films (Green Room and A Bigger Splash along with Family Fang). 

2016 (13) - How to Be Single (dir. Christian Ditter). Second highest yearly total. Family Fang would beat this if IMDB counted it with 2016. 

Whew!

Was Kate Bush's song "This Woman's Work" written about Avy Kaufman?

Actually, that song's about pregnancy, so unless we're talking about the 2000 Avy Kaufman, then no. (Um, I have no idea if Avy Kaufman had a baby in 2000.)

Well that was fun, getting to know this woman whose name I'd seen so many times, who I thought was a man. I'm glad to give credit where credit is due ... and also to give gender where gender is due.

Dubiously niche

In a couple days the British Film Festival begins at the Palace theater chain here in Australia. It'll play in six cities with a very small staggering of start dates, running for about three weeks. In fact, the only reason for staggering the dates at all seems possibly so that the same person can speak on opening night in each city. Who that is, I don't know.

It's just the latest in a bewildering succession of regionally specific film festivals hosted at Palace cinemas, which have included a Spanish Film Festival and an Italian Film Festival, among probably fewer others than would justify the word "bewildering."

It also feels a bit superfluous.

Not quite to the same extent, of course, but isn't having a British Film Festival kind of akin to having an American Film Festival? Instead of giving it its own name, you could just call it "going to the movies."

I suppose the real answer is "No, it's not the same, because the British film industry is not what it once was, and perhaps never was what it once was." It's not the equivalent of rock n' roll, where most of the best stuff came from England. Big breakout British directors are comparatively few, perhaps because they get so quickly subsumed into Hollywood that their status as coming from elsewhere is quickly forgotten or rendered unimportant. An actual "British film" is pretty different from a film directed by a British director, of which there are many -- but they are often just known as "Hollywood films."

Still, especially in a country like Australia, with its excessive amount of anglophilia, it hardly seems like we need to cast a special spotlight on the films of England. People will probably be seeking them out anyway, and they don't need their own showcase. Rightly or wrongly, because they are filmed in the English language, they assume a privileged or mainstream status with English-speaking viewers.

The argument for it, though, can be found in the details. While the festival does feature new British films like The Light Between Oceans, A United Kingdom, A Monster Calls and Palme d'Or winner I, Daniel Blake (though only two of those four directors are actually British), it also includes a smattering of classics, such as A Room With a View, Goldfinger, Sid and Nancy and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Although I have yet to expend any of my precious allotment of viewing slots on a classic film at any festival I've attended, I came close at this year's MIFF, and I've come to think of classics as a vital component of any festival.

In fact, as much as I'm slagging off the idea behind this festival (to borrow a British term), now that I'm looking at the schedule I may try to attend some of these myself. A Monster Calls, for one, does not even have an Australian release date yet, and its US release is smack dab in the middle of the holiday season, suggesting its high quality, or at least its perceived candidacy for awards. (And here I always figured it was destined for an October release in order to capitalize on a tie-in with Halloween, though I suppose neither of the other movies I once compared it to in my mind -- The BFG and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them -- had Halloween releases).

So in the course of writing this post I've gone from mocking the festival to thinking I might be an attendee.

And they say blogging serves no purpose.

And now back to my future

Almost exactly a year after I wrote a post in which I explained why I hadn't watched my second favorite movie of all time in more than a decade, I finally ended that drought.

The occasion was my 43rd birthday, which passed on Thursday.

An appropriate time to be considering "the future," though I'd say it probably stops at that superficial level. Sure, Back to the Future has some angst about what a person will become in their own future, but the occasion of my 43rd birthday does not happen to be bringing such angst upon me myself. Maybe it should be, but it isn't.

This is a resumption of a tradition of watching a favorite movie on my birthday, which I wrote about here. The tradition had to be skipped last year when I had a meeting scheduled for the night of my birthday, after which I saw a movie in the theater (Black Mass, bad choice). However, this year I was home with the family, with a Mexican dinner and with margaritas, so the tradition was back on.

Pulp Fiction -- another favorite I have not seen in more than ten years, really more like 15 years -- was considered, but my wife vetoed it for reasons of length. (We'll watch it soon, though, she promises.) So Back to the Future, shorter by an hour (is Pulp Fiction really three hours??), won out.

As I always am with these sacred cows, I was worried that I'd find something in Back to the Future this time around that just didn't sit well with me. Something that knocked it down a few pegs -- or more than a few pegs -- in my estimation. Yeah, I'm still a bit traumatized from my unexpectedly poor most recent viewing of The Empire Strikes Back.

Fortunately, Back to the Future was just as good as it ever is. In fact, it was so good that I spent the movie with my body in a constant state that can be described as somewhere between humming and chills. And I don't think it was just the margaritas.

Some isolated thoughts ...

Oh those rapey 1950s

My wife was only first introduced to Back to the Future by me in 2005, which was also my last viewing. She has never been a huge fan of it (for some reason she always compares it to Big, which I also introduced her to and which she likes much better), and so I probably shouldn't have been surprised that I'm never really going to bring her around to that opinion. Fishing for words of praise at the end got me some polite answers but no real enthusiasm. Fair enough. I can't recreate the experience I had of it, which was seeing it in 1985 when I was 11 and having my noodle fried.

One of the things she was most eager to discuss was Biff's assault of Lorraine in the car, and how gross it was. "So he was basically raping her," she pointed out, a bit discomfitted by the fact that the movie doesn't take it more seriously.

I'd probably dispute whether the movie makes light of it or not, but it is a curiously heavy -- to borrow a word that recurs in the movie -- development in the story. I mean, both of them are fully clothed, but do we really want to know what he was doing with those big meat hooks?

The moment I find stranger, however, is when the "Scram McFly, I'm cuttin' in" guy thinks nothing of some casual, open dance floor, Donald Trump-style rapey behavior. There are a couple odd things about this moment. For one, for no good reason, it almost entirely saps George McFly of all his confidence. You'd think that after just knocking out Biff and just being asked by Lorraine when he would kiss her, he'd have plenty of bluster. Yet instead he looks for a moment like all the gains he's just made have been lost, and all because he's obeying some outmoded form of dance floor gentlemanly protocol that requires you to relinquish the dance even when some totally creepy guy tries to cut in.

Then there's the absurdity of his behavior. He starts cackling like a supervillain as yet another man at this dance tries to breach Lorraine's inner sanctum. That's not sexy, man.

I think I excuse this on the grounds of the moment taking on a sense of surrealism and fantasy. The score becomes frenzied as Marty's hand begins to disappear up on stage, and the ridiculous cackling seems to be emblematic of how little hope there is that he won't straight up fade from existence right there. So, not quite as egregious.

I wonder what would have happened, though, if Marty had faded entirely from view, and then 15 minutes later George had gotten his nuts up and knocked that ginger out. (No offense to red-headed people, I'm just writing saucily at the moment.) Would he have been granted an abrupt physical reality once again? And would that still have been time enough to get to the clock tower?

I could go down a conundrum rabbit hole here but I won't.

Oh those murdery 1950s

The two consecutive attempted rapes may be one thing, but what about Biff actually trying to murder Marty?

Because that of course is what the outcome would be if you drive a human being on a skateboard into the back of a truck filled with manure.

Biff only describes it as "ramming" him, but "squashing/crushing" him would probably be more accurate.

Which sets up my next topic ...

The tremendous physicality

On this viewing I really appreciated how successful the physicality of this movie is -- both the physical comedy, but also just how the physical body is used as a dynamic object in general.

In that previous scene it would have been Marty stepping through the open convertible to emerge on the other side atop his skateboard, but the choreography in general is just magnificent in this film. I'll delineate it as thoroughly yet as briefly as I can:

- The great shot of Marty falling over while trying to pull up his pants

- Lorraine repeatedly turning toward the camera ("My God, it's my mother!" "Isn't he a dreamboat?")

- Doc's every spasmodic movement, but even his quieter moments, like slowly slumping down on the shrouded Delorean as he realizes their task to break Marty's spell on Lorraine will be ever more difficult than he guessed

- Marty's two incidents of bowling over spectators, first as he's leaving the diner and he dominoes Biff's henchmen, then a few minutes later when he skateboards into a couple professionals carrying and armload of papers

- Marty's tremendous stumble backwards into the barn after Old Man Peabody has taken a shotgun blast at him -- and the perfectly timed blasting of his mailbox a few moments later

- Doc's Harold Lloyd act as he tries to reconnect the downed lightning bolt conductor on the clock tower, specifically when that sharp bit hanging on his trouser leg tears the fabric and inches ever closer to falling, thereby ruining the whole enterprise

- And pretty much any moment involving Marty uncertainly running -- he is pretty much the king of uncertain running

Insufficient warning

"I've got a time machine, I've got all the time in the world! I can go back early and warn him. Ten minutes should be enough."

IN WHAT UNIVERSE WOULD TEN MINUTES EVER HAVE BEEN ENOUGH? (And actually, he randomly selects 11 minutes.)

Not the only funny bit involving the time circuit in the Delorean. At the start, Doc introduces it by saying "This is where you're going, this is where you are, and this is where you were." I may not have the order exactly correct there, but neither did they -- Doc lists which one is which incorrectly. As it of course didn't matter, they just left it -- if they even noticed it at the time of filming.

The teary moment

I've been finding when I go back and revisit these old favorites, I almost or actually cry in a moment where I had never noticed doing that before. (Raising Arizona is kind of my standard for that.) In this viewing it was the moment when George McFly punches Biff out and then delivers that quivering "Are you okay?" to Lorraine. She doesn't even need to answer.

What's your hurry?

At the end of the movie -- and this is probably a good time to wrap up this post -- it seems truly absurd that Marty, having just walked back from a near unsolvable time conundrum into a life that is a hundred times better than it was before, would be so eager to immediately leave that life and go jump into a time machine again. I mean, maybe at least take the truck out for that camping trip first?

Still love it though.

As the movie does give us that direct bridge into Back to the Future II, I wondered if I might put a viewing of II and III -- both of which I've seen only once -- on to my schedule.

But I think I'll hold off for now. I don't want to mess with the humming chills the movie gave me.

Though, I suppose, I could just drink some more margaritas.