Amazon/Netflix 11th hour discoveries/catchup weekend

On Friday I watched two movies on Amazon. On Saturday I watched two movies on Netflix. And on Sunday I watched one on each.

Four of these six movies had been on my radar for less than two weeks.

Yep, just because it's almost time to stop watching movies for 2023, it doesn't mean there aren't still movies forcing their way onto your watchlist.

I was actually going to have even one more, but the second movie I cued up on Friday night, and watched about one minute of before discovering this information, actually meets my criteria for a 2022 movie, as it had a limited U.S. release in November of '22 (despite the 2023 release date that show on Prime). So I abandoned Next Exit, before it had the chance to make my list of movies to watch before January 23rd even longer.

What I did end up watching was:

Swallowed and Robots on Friday night.

Society of the Snow and Fast X on Saturday afternoon/evening.

And Good Grief/The Burial on Sunday afternoon/evening.

And did I mention these were all on the projector in my garage?

Only Fast X and The Burial had been on my watchlist prior to a few weeks ago, when Society of the Snow reared its head based on the (it turns out very justified) ravings of a friend. 

Fast X was one I was going to leave on the cutting room floor this year, but like John Wick: Chapter 4 before it, it turned up for free on a streaming service so I decided to just go for it. I've seen every other Fast & Furious movie. Why stop now? (And I liked this one better than the ninth installment, I'm glad to report.)

If it looks like I'm cramming, that both is and isn't true.

Yes I was happy not to be on the pace to break my record of 175 from last year, and I am still well on that pace. But a certain FOMO also sets in at this time of year, at the same time, paradoxically, that I am also just feeling so done with it all. Movies don't really get a fair shake in this big lead-up to finalizing my rankings, yet I don't see another way to go about it. At whatever point you cut off your list, you'll probably be cramming it all in before that anyway, and any individual film might feel rode hard, put away wet, and forgotten almost immediately.

Then there's the fact that you lose your ability to parse differences between movies. Seeing as many really good movies, right up until the end, as I'm seeing this year, I can't decide if a movie should make my top ten or not even make my top 25. The struggle is real.

So while I did cram a little bit this weekend, I also didn't, because I anticipate having a few fruitless days at the end of this week, and I'm really just trying to make up for them in advance.

We're going to a friend's beach house this weekend -- remember, summer here in Australia -- and it's possible I won't watch a movie Friday, Saturday or Sunday night. (It's not certain whether we're going down on Friday night or Saturday morning.) Although it would be possible to jam in a movie, it's also a little tacky when it's a social weekend away, and the adults will likely remain in each other's company until bedtime.

So I'm at 152 for the year now, and still hope to only be in the mid to high 160s by January 23rd -- just getting there through a slightly different route. 

And who knows, maybe I will just take an actual night off sometime as well. You know, rest my eyeballs, without social impropriety even being a consideration. 

Charlie Kaufman movies that don't involve Charlie Kaufman

When you saw the trailer for Dream Scenario, your first thought may have been "Oh, this must be Charlie Kaufman's latest." The presence of Nicolas Cage, star of the Kaufman-written Adaptation, might have cemented that impression.

Of course, if you follow Kaufman with any degree of closeness, you'd know that Dream Scenario could only represent an earlier incarnation of the writer-turned-director. His 2020 film I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- which was my #1 of that year -- certainly indicates that he's on to much less accessible fare.

In his film about a man who suddenly starts entering everyone's dreams, even the people who don't know him, Dream Scenario director Kristoffer Borgli is certainly successful in the homage he's paying to this earlier version of Kaufman. If you want to know how successfully, you'll have to wait until my rankings are up on January 23rd. (Or, wait a few days until I write my review, which will be linked to the right.)

What I can write about today, without spoiling my impression of the film, is that it reminded me that we have a whole subgenre of films that seem as though they should have been written or directed (or both) by Kaufman -- and that Dream Scenario feels like the first we've gotten in a while. Just as soon as I venture the idea that these sorts of mindbinders might be approaching extinction, though, I think of a second one from this very year, in addition to Dream Scenario.

Here are the ones that immediately came to mind, in no particular order. In order to narrow things down a bit, I'll limit this to the time period Kaufman was actually working. 

Stranger Than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster) - Will Ferrell can hear the woman who is narrating his life as she speaks. An existential conceit straight out of the Kaufman playbook, released during the peak period of Kaufman's influence on popular films.

Cold Souls (2009, Sophie Barthes) - Is it possible Paul Giamatti has never actually appeared in a Kaufman film? He's Kaufman's perfect schlub. Here he plays an actor trying to disentangle his emotions from the emotions of his characters, who pays for a service to have his soul placed in cold storage. I can only remember this being a bit disappointing. Anyway, shades of Synecdoche, New York all over this. 

Fingernails (2023, Christos Nikou) - Here's that one from this year. People in relationships have the ability to test whether they love each other by having a fingernail torn out and analyzed. The low-fi analog technology in this film is very reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as is the theme of star-crossed romance.

Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe) - I think the cold storage of Cold Souls got me thinking about the ending of this film, which I won't spoil even though the movie is now 23 years old. It's just the sort of intricate script with high concept elements about identity that Kaufman would have dreamed up, though I actually have this ranked higher than any Kaufman film on my Flickchart, so kudos to Crowe for that.

The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir) - This is a bit of a cheat in that it came out a year before Being John Malkovich. Kaufman was working in television but he had not yet made a movie. But the premise is similar to Dream Scenario in that the world revolves around a single ordinary man, so if Dream Scenario is like a Kaufman film, so is this. 

Click (2006, Frank Coraci) - If it were someone other than Adam Sandler in the title role here, I think this story about a man who literally fast forwards through his life would strike us as more of a Kaufman high concept mindbender. As is even with Sandler, it's pretty poignant and potent at certain parts.

Vivarium (2019, Lorcan Finnegan) - Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are trapped in an apparently empty neighborhood of identical houses from which there is no escape. The title suggests they are being watched for their reaction. Very Kaufman, and Eisenberg is another who should play a Kaufman surrogate at some point.

Her (2013, Spike Jonze) - It feels like a technicality that Kaufman is not actually involved with this. Jonze directed two of Kaufman's films, so this is sort of a cheat. And while we're cheating anyway ...

The Science of Sleep (2006, Michel Gondry) - If I'm going to list the future work of one Kaufman collaborator, I should list the future work of another. 

Swiss Army Man (2016, Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan) - A buddy comedy between a suicidal man and the talking corpse that helps him find a reason to live? Yep, Kaufman could have written this.

Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - While we're already on Paul Dano, this is another one in the Stranger Than Fiction/Adaptation neighborhood, where a written character comes to life and tries to make a Kaufman-like schlub with writer's block happy. 

Moon (2009, Duncan Jones) - I'll let this stand in for a whole category of films featuring clones, as a clone gets at the existential concepts in which Kaufman always dabbles. 

It's becoming clear I could go on for quite a while listing films that narrowly qualify, with diminishing returns. But instead I'll wrap it up with the thought "You get the idea."

One thing I'll say, though, is that even when they fail, they fail in interesting ways. If someone wants to try to make a Charlie Kaufman movie, I'm always game for it -- and I don't want us collectively to forget how to do it, especially now that Kaufman himself doesn't want to be quite so on brand as to have a whole genre unto himself. 

Black Composer Week on The Audient

As I cross into the final three weeks before I close off my 2023 film rankings, I've entered into a game of chicken with the movies I still have to see. 

There are a fair number of movies on my watchlist that came out at the start of the year, meaning they've been available for rental for ages. 

But I want to do one better than that. I want to watch them for free.

So I figured, the longer I wait to cross these movies off my list -- I'm looking at you, Palm Trees and Power Lines -- the greater chance there is of them finally arriving on one of my streaming services.

This is especially the case with my white whale, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I know will be streaming for free on AppleTV+, I just don't know when. That represents a $20 difference from the current rental price.

So I've started out 2024 trying to clean up movies that are already available to me, in the hopes of saving a few measly bucks here and there. 

Hey, having just spent several paychecks on Christmas presents (or it feels like that anyway), I need to save as many measly bucks as I can.

And so I've started out 2024 with two movies about Black composers, one available on Disney+ and one available on Netflix. (And this just a short time after watching Maestro, another film about a composer/conductor.)

The first on Tuesday night was Chevalier, the story of 18th century composer and virtuoso violinist Joseph Bologne, the bastard son of a French slaveowner in Guadeloupe, who is brought to France as a child after his father dies. (I'm not entirely clear why he was not allowed to stay with his mother, if his father didn't recognize him.) Raised in aristocratic society into becoming a brilliant musician, he gains the notice of Marie Antoinette and is considered a candidate to lead the prestigious Paris Opera. However, his race provides an obstacle at every turn, as we would expect in a society far more white 250 years ago than it is today.

Kelvin Harrison Jr.'s performance in the title role is a curious one, as it resists the possible impulse to make him saintly. Not wanting to make him a needy character who would cower at the feet of this society, eager to accept whatever bread crumbs they will throw his way, director Stephen Williams takes him a bit in the other direction, meaning he is less sympathetic than he should be. He reacts to his life's various disappointments with a sense of entitlement that verges on petulance, and while I suppose this is preferable to groveling, it doesn't particularly ingratiate you to him. This might well be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, but the character also has an affair with a married woman and is seen publicly dressing down royalty, so his behavior is a bit brutish no matter who he is or what his background is.

I actually thought the movie was going to be a comedy at the start, since the opening scene involves him going up on stage during a concert by none other than Mozart, challenging Mozart to a violin duel almost as though it were a rap battle. (That's how we would see it in modern times, anyway.) When he wins the crowd over and Mozart storms off stage, Mozart shouts at someone "Who the fuck is that?" I thought this was actually a great start to the film if it was going to take a non-traditional approach to depicting this time period and this subject matter, but that instinct is immediately abandoned, to the film's detriment. 

I did note that the film makes an interesting companion piece to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, as it ends on the verge of Marie Antoinette's execution, which is where Scott's film begins. Napoleon is even mentioned in a post script, where I learned that Napoleon reinstituted slavery in the French colonies in 1802. Boo to that.

I followed that up the next night with American Symphony, the latest documentary in Barack and Michelle Obama's deal with Netflix, which is starting to seem Adam Sandler-esque in its duration. This focuses on musician Jon Batiste, who my wife and I came to know as the band leader on Stephen Colbert's show, where we immediately fell in love with him. Batiste's career has soared since then, as he composed the jazz score for Soul, was nominated for 11 Grammys in a single year and conducted the titular symphony at Carnegie Hall, a magnum opus with all sorts of musicians representing all sorts of musical styles and cultural perspectives. 

The film's main draw, from an emotional standpoint, is the cancer of his wife Suleika Jaouad, who was diagnosed with leukemia as a young twentysomething and had it return with a vengeance ten years later, when all these amazing things were happening in her husband's career. The film provides a really compelling balance between such highs as Batiste winning five of those 11 Grammys and such lows as Jaouad's return to the hospital for a second bone marrow transplant, and learning that she may have to continue doing chemotherapy indefinitely to keep the cancer away. 

Overall it's a really engaging portrait of this relationship, characterized by its touching devotion and mutual support, and of the man's attempt to carve out his place in a musical landscape that predefines what he can and can't do. The film depicts how Batiste is scoffed at for being nominated in a classical category because, apparently, Black people don't make classical music. Then there are hurtful comments after his Grammy wins, when he defeated artists more widely listened to by the mainstream, about how he seems to have come straight out of Pharrell Williams' "Happy" video, and that most people were unfamiliar with his work. 

Hopefully this film will make more people familiar with this man faithfully doing his share to make the world a nicer place, and to expand people's conception of what Black musicians are capable. It's a role he understands has been thrust upon him as it is on any Black person, and he's fighting the good fight the whole way. 

Now, Killers of the Flower Moon, end this madness and show up on AppleTV+ already. 

Identifying the outliers in 2024

I'm going to ease up on my cinematic commitments in 2024. That's not to reduce my overall viewing of movies, but to give myself more flexibility, rather than three or sometimes four movies I'm compelled to watch each month for different reasons.

I'll continue my monthly Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta viewings, which pair me randomly with another person in the group and give me that person's highest ranked film I haven't seen to watch. That's separate from this blog and it's something I enjoy.

But in six of the 12 months last year, I had two other movies to watch for two of my three bi-monthly series, as well as one to watch for my monthly series. Because two of the three bi-monthly series were rewatches, as was the monthly series, that's 24 movies I rewatched rather than watching something new. Which is not a problem, since I love revisiting favorites, but it does almost exclusively explain why my 2023 new viewings dropped from 282 in 2022 to 259 in 2023.

So only one bi-monthly series this year and one monthly series, and today I'm here to tell you about the former, which will begin in February.

There'll be no "finish up the filmography" bi-monthly series in 2024, as there has been each of the past three years when I polished off Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese and the tag team partnership of Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion. I'll probably resume that in 2025.

Instead in 2024, my bi-monthly series will be a rewatch series, and I'll be figuring out what it is about one particular movie I don't love by a director whose other work has been a hit with me.

I'm calling it Audient Outliers, and basically, I'll take six directors whose work I love and rewatch the one of their movies that doesn't work for me. 

The series was supposed to be inspired by the release of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, one of 2023's most praised films that I will likely not have a chance to see before my list closes. With how I've felt about Glazer's last two films, Birth and Under the Skin, I thought Zone had a decent shot at my #1.

Thinking about the three films -- the two I love and the one I was anticipating watching -- it brought my mind to the one of his four that I really dislike, also the first I ever saw, Sexy Beast. A friend and I went to see it in L.A. and we both though it was sort of laughable, when it wasn't too boring by half.

Deciding Sexy Beast was worth a revisit within the context of the other films he's made, I decided to find five other films that fit this criteria of serving as an outlier relative to the rest of the filmmaker's work. I actually found 16 others that fit the description in one way or another, though none as perfectly as Sexy Beast -- either because there isn't only a single film in the filmography I don't like, or because the director has made too few films for the concept of an outlier to make sense. 

Nonetheless, I will choose five more from these 16, and watch and write about them every other month from February onward. I won't reveal them in advance because I'm enough of a big boy to know that you won't watch them along with me in order to get the most out of my blog. I wouldn't expect you to, but that's the only purpose served by revealing them in advance. 

I will indeed start with Sexy Beast in February. And now the question is whether I will try to wait until after the February 22nd Australian release of The Zone of Interest before I watch Beast ... at which point, it conceivably might not even be an outlier as the only Glazer film I don't love.

Well, I guess we'll see how flawed a premise for a series it is as we go. 

I'm looking forward to it, anyway. 

Next Year Starts, for the world and for my son

January 1st 2024 is my younger son's tenth birthday.

No single-digit children in my family anymore. A fitting milestone to go with my 50th birthday two-and-a-half months ago.

So while most people were celebrating New Year's, we were celebrating the night ten years ago when we didn't know whether our son would be born in 2013 or 2014. It was about two hours into 2014, it turned out -- which means his American relatives learned about it on New Year's Eve, and I would not be surprised if they think of him as a December 31st baby. They can have that if they want. There must be some tax benefit of this we can work to our favor.

January 1st 2024 was also the Australian release date of Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi's latest, which has been getting negative reviews that, after seeing it, I just cannot fathom.

Yesterday, while lying on the beach and listening to the three-hour best of the year podcast on Filmspotting -- on which Next Goal Wins did not appear -- I put two and two together:

My son is a soccer fan + today is his tenth birthday = let's go spend his birthday watching the soccer movie released on his birthday.

I immediately texted my wife, thinking she would try to see through it as a chance to tick a 2023 movie off my list while incorporating it into a family activity. It was only partially that. I like to think it was more fuelled by genuine inspiration.

She texted back with a thumbs up and "that could be fun!"

There was still a chance she would ultimately balk at the idea, since she backtracked her initial positivity last night, turning it into more of a "let's see how the day goes" thing. The prelude to a full cancellation, I was sure.

But this morning she was talking about times to see the movie, and we went at 2:20.

I was initially concerned that the PG-13 rating would contain things that even a child who is double digit years old would blush at. My youngest errs on the side of being young for his age, in terms of his exposure to the world's harsh realities, even if his intellect is advanced for his age (he beats me more often in chess than I beat him). But aside from a handful of "shit"s and one "asshole," Next Goal Wins was clean. I myself blushed more in the trailer for Mean Girls than in anything this movie offered up.

And what this movie offered up was: heart, soul, exciting soccer action and that inimitable Kiwi humor that Waititi has been giving us for well over a decade.

Even my older son, who barely registers enthusiasm for anything these days, pumped his fist during a couple of the movie's climactic moments.

As for my younger son ... well, for a kid who got a new soccer goal, new soccer "boots" as they are called here, two different books on soccer and a framed poster of Lionel Messi for Christmas ... yeah obviously he loved it. It was almost like the movie was made for him, even containing Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which he discovered last year and has been playing regularly. 

I won't read the film's negative reviews before I write my own very positive review. I can't imagine what they focus on as the film's primary weaknesses. It's conventional? Sure. Name a sports movie that isn't. 

And ... that's all I can think of.

If your beef is "Taika Waititi shouldn't make an inspirational sports movie," then I think you are misunderstanding him as a director. He brings his own touch to the movies he makes, but it's not like he's redefining those movies or the genres they are in. He's just delivering the whole thing from the perspective of his Maori upbringing, in which line deliveries are hilarious without even trying to be, and everything feels sweet without suffocating you with that sweetness.

What sports movie couldn't benefit from that?

And so 2024 is here, as is my son's 11th year on this planet.

I can't wait to see what both of them bring. 

The year there was a writer's strike and I turned 50 and I didn't write about either

You could say that me not writing about the people who were not writing scripts was a sign of solidarity with their act of not writing.

Really, I probably should have been writing about them all the more, to bring attention to the way the studios -- specifically the streamers -- were trying to take as much advantage of them as possible.

So why didn't I write more, really at all, about the writer's strike in 2023, even though it went on for months and forced a number of high profile releases forward to 2024?

One reason was surely that it would have required more research than I really wanted to do to make sure I got all my facts rights. Although I do consider myself reasonably well informed about what the stakes were -- in part due to hearing one of the writer's guild's chief negotiators, writer David Goodman, appear three times on one of my podcasts -- the minute details were not something I could have had at my command without looking them up.

Then I'd need a clear perspective other than "The writers are getting screwed!," which is a fairly boring and obvious thing to say.

And if I'd gone on and on about how I wouldn't be seeing the second Dune movie until 2024 due to the strike, it would have sounded like I was blaming the writers for holding the normal mechanics of Hollywood hostage. The point was to hold those mechanics hostage and to make it hurt for studios, which they eventually did. Besides, the year-end slate got plenty busy without the second Dune, and prevented Timothee Chalamet from duking it out with himself in Wonka. 

The thing I find it a little more shocking not to have discussed this year, though, is the fact that I turned 50 in October. 

Oh I made references to it in certain posts, like this one. But given the way I like to capitalize on almost any personal milestone out there -- a certain number of films watched, a certain number of reviews written, a certain number of posts on this blog -- you'd think turning the half century mark would have prompted me to create some sort of series on my blog, or to look back at the films of 1973. In fact, the only 1973 film I rewatched in 2023 was the one in the post mentioned above. I did see two new 1973 movies, Day for Night and Live and Let Die, but neither was watched specifically for the purpose of recognizing my birthday. 

I don't think it was denial. Turning 50 did not make me feel any angst, or a sense that I was now on the back nine of my life. (Although obviously I've been on the back nine for a while, unless I plan to live past 100.) But neither did I necessarily want to celebrate it.

I remember at the actual time it occurred, thinking about how I should write something. But I don't usually write things on this blog because I should. I write them because I get an idea about something I want to say that I feel like I can't not write. Even things that are extremely trivial, I feel the need to share. 

It helped that on my actual birthday I was in Sydney, having flown there the night before, so I didn't have any excess time to ponder the occasion. I do think it's funny that this was what I posted on my birthday, having already written it the day before. It just really has nothing to do with the actual thing that was happening in my life. 

But the actual thing that did happen in Sydney made a great way to celebrate my birthday, even if it had nothing to do with movies.

For ages I had wanted to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge, ever since I first came to Sydney in 2009 and learned that this was a thing. It's a three-hour trip and you are attached by cables to the bridge and it's stepping rather than climbing, with only one area where you have to go on ladders. Really, there is no danger. But it looks scary from the ground level, and a seeker of thrills like me was always into the idea. 

My wife got a climb for me as a birthday present. She didn't join me -- she's afraid of heights -- but she sent me on my way with a big smile on my face.

As a funny coincidence, this year marked exactly 25 years since they started doing these climbs -- so, exactly half my life. But there was a measure of the entire length of my life that I got to share time with, by virtue of doing this climb.

At your peak parts of the climb, they take pictures of you in front of the Sydney Opera House down below. And the Sydney Opera House is exactly as old as I am.

We discovered this on a trip to Sydney back in 2021 to see Hamilton. We came across a plaque that said the iconic landmark had been dedicated by the queen on October 20, 1973, which is my birthday. Mind = blown.

So I actually got to spend my 50th with the opera house on its 50th, though we didn't get to see the big light show they put on that night because our dinner in a revolving restaurant took nearly three hours from start to finish. (Yes, my wife took really good care of me on my birthday.)

It was a special birthday I'll never forget, but no, it didn't have to do with the movies. Not everything does. 

And that's a lesson I bring with me into 2024, as I finish the year having seen about 25 fewer new movies in 2023 than I did in 2022. Life isn't always about the next movie you need to see, even for a cinephile. As I head into my second half-century, that's a good thing to remember. 

Happy New Year. 

King Darren: The Whale

This concludes my 2023 bi-monthly series rewatching six films from Darren Aronofsky, in the year after the film I'm watching this month, The Whale, made him the first director to top my year-end list on two different occasions.

My second viewing of The Whale was both the viewing in this series I was looking forward to most and the one that worried me most. 

The trepidation resulted from the fact that the praise for this film was by no means unanimous. Yes Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for this role, but many critics disliked it, for reasons ranging from it being fatphobic (I disagree with that) to it being too tied to its origins as a play (I can see that) to it being highly melodramatic (I can see that too, but in the best sense of that word).

On a personal level, I wondered if my emotional reaction to watching the movie last December -- I cried on four or five different occasions -- had crippled my critical faculties, and boosted this movie beyond the level of adoration that was warranted. 

It was actually a rather cut-and-dried case, in that moment. Darren Aronofsky's primary competition was Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling, a film that had even more detractors than Aronofsky's film. Despite my also being enthralled by that movie, the haters had more time to get under my skin since I saw it two months earlier. The films in my third and fourth positions (Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once) had no real shot at leap-frogging these two.

But whether I had justly chosen The Whale as my #1 movie of 2022 or not, I knew there were red flags about it, including the notion that some people found it fatphobic. When a movie may be biased against an entire demographic group, and I still name it my #1, I have to ask myself if I am failing to recognize a core insensitivity that makes people in that demographic group actively hate it.

There was also a bit of pressure on this second viewing. Way back at the start of the year, when I was watching Pi or Requiem for a Dream and it came up with my wife that I intended to finish with The Whale, she said she would watch it with me. Since I always like to show my wife my favorite movie of the year, I was sort of looking forward to this all year.

But then when December actually rolled around, she found the weight of all the end-of-year activities too exhausting, and it seemed likely that she would opt out of his verbal commitment. My wife is down to maybe only ten to 20 movies a year as it is, and spending nearly two hours with a man who is eating himself to death probably did not seem like her idea of how to spend the holidays. 

We're down in Tasmania right now visiting my mother-in-law, and I calculated that Wednesday night was the best time for me to watch it, to make sure I did actually get it in before the calendar ticked over to January. As it happened, not three minutes into the movie, she saw I was watching it and settled herself on the couch of the place we're staying, not knowing how much she would fit in but willing to give it the old college try.

This hadn't worked during our last high-pressure (for me anyway) viewing, which was Skinamarink at Halloween time. As that movie is one of my favorites of 2023, and as it is scary as hell, I had hoped my wife would find it a good Halloween-themed viewing. Instead, she gave up after about 45 minutes -- which is more than some people would give that movie.

I'm glad to say my wife made it the whole way through The Whale, and got a little teary at the end. However, she couldn't give it her full endorsement, saying she wasn't sure exactly what she had thought of it. I guess that's better than the people who hated it outright.

For me, I could tell the viewing wasn't going as well for me this time as the first time. I felt being stuck in Charlie's apartment more than I had the first time, which is kind of the point of the movie but also something that can exhaust a viewer for the wrong reasons. My viewing circumstances were decidedly different this time: on holiday, after a few beers, whereas a year ago I'd attended a morning screening. 

The other pressure was self-inflicted. When I revisit a movie where I cried the first time, I'm always curious to see if the reaction will be the same the second time. In a way, tears are like laughter, as both result from being taken off guard by something the movie is doing, for very different reasons. Just as I don't expect to laugh as hard at a movie on my second time watching it, I don't expect to cry as hard. But if I didn't cry at all during The Whale, what would I be left with?

Although the tears did not flow freely, I did get moist on a couple occasions, which maybe was as much as I could have reasonably hoped. The Whale had a tough act to follow, as my previous year's #1, the cancer family drama Our Friend, actually caused me to cry more on the second viewing than the first. That's basically unprecedented, and unfair to The Whale.

The scene that still got me the most was between Charlie and his ex, played by Samantha Morton. The script prepares you for her to be a boozy asshole, so on both viewings I was utterly taken aback by her emotional generosity in her one powerhouse scene. Like every character in this movie, she's a real person, not a one-dimensional sinner or saint. And the way she refers to the man who stole Charlie away from her, calling him "your friend" with this touch of sentiment and possibly even love, just broke my heart. 

There were scenes that I felt were a little stagey, a little on-the-nose, where I was wrapped up enough in everything not to notice those aspects the first time. Overall, though, if I'd had it to do again, I still would have slotted this ahead of Don't Worry Darling last year. It's still a powerhouse movie with an incredible central performance, and excellent performances around it.

And on the subject of its fatphobia or lack thereof ... I ultimately come down to this conclusion: If you are ever going to make a movie about a morbidly obese man, you are going to get accusations that the film is repulsed by him. So either the choice is never to make a movie about such a character, or to go beneath the knee jerk reaction and decide to grapple with what the film is actually doing. The film is obviously concerned for Charlie, but not because he "looks gross." It's because the condition of his body is most likely going to kill him, and because it's a reaction to a depression that results both from things he could control and things he could not control. I said it at the time and I say it still: This is a movie about a person, not a body. 

Interestingly, though, it may be no better than my third or fourth favorite Aronofsky movie. I'd definitely place Requiem for a Dream and mother! ahead of it, the latter benefitting from repeat viewings after finishing at #15 in 2017, and the former remaining a singular nightmarish vision of addiction that finished at #13 in 2000. And then don't forget the film that actually won Aronofsky his coveted #1 ranking in 2008, The Wrestler, which remains steady in my appraisals each time I watch it.

In other words, four of Aronofsky's eight feature films are movies I absolutely cherish, with Black Swan and Pi both staking a strong claim to my affections. 

That makes Darren a king in this or any year. 

Sarah Silverman has been "upgraded" to Margot Robbie

I never really think that my little blog has any influence on the larger world, but sometimes I wonder. 

I've written a handful of posts with enough traction that they still get comments even sometimes a decade after I've written them. For some reason, these posts almost all seem to focus on a particular actress -- and not always in ways I'd like to have as part of my legacy, delving into some negative aspect of the actress in question. I don't regularly dwell on negative aspects of actresses, but over the course of 3,121 published posts, I'm bound to do it from time to time -- and these are the posts that seem to catch on with the internet. (Possibly a discussion for another day.)

If this current post "goes viral" within my own ability to do that, it could be for the same reason. But I can't help point things out like this when they happen.

Only two weeks ago, I wrote about how Sarah Silverman was an unlikely poster girl for a video repeatedly advertised to me on YouTube about the 50 most paused movie moments. Not only was I surprised at how frequently this comes up for me (the search term "trailer" has been enough to do so), but by the fact that they chose a picture of Silverman not looking very sexual suggestive as the enticement to click on the link.

Well, either someone read me or they came to the conclusion on their own that they needed someone more traditionally sexy in a more traditionally alluring pose, because the image you see above is now what comes along with this video.

And unlike with the picture of Silverman, I can tell which Margot Robbie movie this is from: The Wolf of Wall Street.

Where indeed, famously, Robbie appears fully nude from the front angle. 

There seems likely to be a little capitalizing on Barbie here as well, given that this is a pink outfit Robbie is wearing and that her appearance in Greta Gerwig's film has made her all the more famous than she was previously. Who wouldn't, I'm sure the thinking goes, want to see Barbie with her clothes removed in a movie they may not be aware of from ten years ago?

The market inefficiency has been corrected, as it always is. 

Incidentally this realization, attained while I was searching up the trailer for Rebel Moon (full review here), comes only a day after I saw Silverman in Maestro. Maybe appearing as Leonard Bernstein's sister was the thing that finally did her in as a spokesmodel for stolen glances at the exposed flesh of actresses? 

Pondering religion in Christmas Day viewings

Religion played an unexpected role in our Christmas Day viewings, for a family that does not associate ourselves with any particular religion.

First it was A Charlie Brown Christmas, which we showed the kids for the first time as a better option for our dinner viewing than another Christmas-themed episode of The Simpsons. My wife made plates of leftovers from lunch, while we finally got to eating at close to 9 o'clock.

Best possible outcome: My wife and I revelled in the nostalgia of our own childhood viewings, while the kids made no comments about it being old or lame. 

One thing my wife, the notable atheist, did comment on was that she had forgotten how religious it was. She seemed only a tad put off by this because it does have that place in her own childhood, but as you will recall, Linus teaches us all a lesson on the true meaning of Christmas by quoting from the Bible. 

I wouldn't say this is unambiguously a message of support for the Christian origins of the holiday, and in the context of the special, it is presented more as an antidote to Charlie Brown's concerns about the holiday's increased commercialism and materialism. Don't forget, the thing that ultimately "saves" Christmas is the kids decorating Charlie's woeful little tree, the one so skinny that its back is broken by a single bauble. Still, the traditional nativity story is never even mildly repudiated, which would happen if A Charlie Brown Christmas were made today -- or likely they wouldn't even go there in the first place.

It did prompt me to comment that I thought the nativity story and all the bells and whistles of Christmas were inseparable. I don't feel you could have one without the other. As basically devoid of religion as my wife is -- though I was raised as a Unitarian, and my lone tattoo is actually Unitarian themed -- I still could not give up the nativity story. As a child, I loved hearing this story read during the annual Christmas Eve service, as the church became steadily more lit by candlelight. Without it, the gift-giving frenzy and all the decorations would just be too garish. That said, that part is the most present in my life, so I'd never be able to sustain my holiday season on just candlelight and wise men and frankincense and myrrh.

My religious pondering was put to a further test in my chosen viewing for the evening, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I'm conscious of a desire to watch something wholesome on Christmas night, but something that nonetheless has the possibility of being one of my favorites of the year. Last year it was Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, which didn't exactly rise to the heights I hoped it would -- was sure it would. With a little less pressure but probably similar acclaim, Margaret did rise to those heights.

I must have not read the Judy Blume book, though, because I forgot it was primarily about a girl's attempt to incorporate a religious outlook into her life. I knew she talked to God -- it's hard to escape that conclusion when you've got a title like that -- but I thought these conversations were mostly about her first bra, her first kiss, and getting her period. I didn't remember, or possibly didn't know, that she is the child of a Jewish father and a fallen devout Christian mother, whose parents effectively disowned her when she married her husband. And she samples Judaism and about four different Christian denominations throughout the narrative, none of them giving her a sense of the presence of God.

It's easy to watch Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and have your experience be entirely about the nostalgia easily recreated by Kelly Fremon Craig, including the aforementioned significant benchmarks in the life of a girl who's just turned 12. But Craig clearly cares about the struggle to find God within the character's life, considering it more than just a necessarily evil to adapting this novel. The film is earnest in every aspect, and its conclusions about feeling the influence of the divine in our lives, even in ways that would otherwise seem perfectly secular, was an enriching takeaway of a Christmas Day viewing indeed. 

Christmas movies aren't really about Christmas

I saw three new Christmas movies in 2023. 

Three of the ... carry the one ... 278 new Christmas movies there were on various streaming services and what have you.

If the three I saw were any indication, they've cracked the code for a Christmas movie: Just make a regular movie and add some Christmas stuff into it.

Family Switch, which we watched with my family and my mother- and sister-in-law on Christmas Eve, was an example of that. We ultimately enjoyed it quite a bit (which I can't say for the other two on this list), laughing a lot and ending with grins on our faces. 

But did it need to be about Christmas? No it did not. (I mean, the poster doesn't even have any holly or a Santa hat in it.) 

It's basically Freaky Friday, except both the kids switch with both of their parents, matched on gender. And it's sort of the second such movie Jennifer Garner has starred in. They even name check her film 13 Going on 30 just to make sure we didn't miss it. 

And whenever it goes too long without having anything to do with Christmas, they sprinkle in a carol on the soundtrack just to remind us. 

Maybe it's a Netflix thing. Netflix also put out the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Genie this year. It's basically just a genie movie, with a few scenes set in the snow and a few Christmas songs popping up to remind us. (This one was terrible. This and Candy Cane Lane, which does intrinsically have to do with Christmas, can duke it out to see which was worse.)

I'd be cynical about this, but after having my spirits lifted by Family Switch -- which was directed by McG of all people -- I'm less inclined to go that way. 

And since it's my instinct to leave you with a Christmas post that lifts your spirts, I'll put forward this thought:

Christmas movies aren't really about Christmas, anyway.

Even in the best of times, with the best of Christmas movies, Christmas is really just a backdrop. Yes we love these movies in part because they engage with the tropes of the holiday season, and they increase our sense of holiday good cheer. But even terrible Christmas movies do the first and try to do the second. The ones that succeed are a success because of something else about them ... some essential understanding of the world and the people who live in it.

So whatever you watch on Christmas Eve, or Christmas Day, or even in the days after it and leading on into 2024, I hope it has that keen understanding of life -- because the rest, really, is just window dressing.

Merry Christmas. 

The time of year I get a little panicky

I've been slow-playing the end of my 2023 movie watching season for a while now -- watching movies for other series, watching TV shows, having nights where I don't watch anything at all.

But once you're a few days before Christmas, all it takes is a late-running Christmas party one night and a Survivor season finale the next night to throw you into a bit of a panic. 

That's two straight nights without watching a movie, and when all the year-end lists and Golden Globe nominations are coming in, that turns the slow play into a fast sprint.

It's just over a month until the Oscar nominations are announced, and that's when I close off my list -- with oh so much still to watch. I haven't even seen Killers of the Flower Moon yet!

I considered not watching the Survivor finale last night, after we got home too late Wednesday night for me to do anything but watch a 39-minute episode of The Crown, during which I still fell asleep. But in my Survivor pool I still had two of the final five contestants, meaning there was (hypothetically) a 40% chance I would win $200 on my $20 investment. Spoiler alert: I did not win. (Spoiler alert retracted: you have no idea which contestants I had.)

Whether I watched the movie in this poster last night or end up watching it tonight, it looks like some drastic action is called for.

The Holdovers is a movie I would usually wait on. It releases in Australia on January 11th, well before my deadline. 

The reasons I will probably watch it tonight, meaning I will need to spend $19.99 on a rental from iTunes, are twofold:

1) I have a feeling it will come up on the super-sized episode of Filmspotting in which the two hosts and two friends of the show will all reveal their top ten of the year. That episode drops in the next few days and I usually try to listen to it between Christmas and New Year's. I have never seen all the prestige films I hope to watch by the time I listen to this episode, but I do also like their choices to act as confirmation of my own rough draft of my list. The more movies I haven't seen that they like, the less there is of that -- and the more chance I have to be biased by what they've said, even if they don't delve into each movie with deep discussions.

2) If The Holdovers is going to contend for my top spot, I'll want to sit with it for a few weeks before enshrining it thus.

Because that's the other thing about 2023: Right now, my #1 is totally up for grabs. The movie I have slotted in there is a movie I love, of course -- you can't have seen 130+ movies in a given year and not love at least one of them -- but it is certainly not the movie I expected to be in this spot at this time of the year. If it finishes there, it will have earned it, but it needs to face off against some tough competition in the coming weeks. Such as:

Poor Things.

Priscilla. 

Dream Scenario.

Anatomy of a Fall.

And yes, Killers of the Flower Moon, which I will eventually carve out the four hours and 78 minutes to watch.

The Holdovers is a logical thing to keep an eye on. Alexander Payne has made my top ten three times as a director, most recently with About Schmidt, and people say it's one of his best. 

It grinds my gears to have to pay $19.99 for a rental, in part because we were trying to be a bit modest on Christmas spending this year (didn't happen) and in part because I just think that's a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a rental. Then again, the other option is not being available for home viewing at all, meaning I'd have to wait those additional 20 days until it hits Australian cinemas.

But I'm chucking $19.99 out the window on a regular basis during December, buying stocking stuffers with no idea whose stocking they'll be stuffed in, a "collect it all now and sort it out later" mentality that overtakes many of us this time of year. At least spending 20 bucks on The Holdovers accomplishes a tangible goal for me, even if I don't end up loving it. Knowing you don't love something is valuable information to have as well. 

Besides, the fewer theatrical commitments I have in January, the better. My wife is pretty good about letting me get out to movies I need to see, even in periods of increased activity, but the permission isn't granted without a small roll of the eyes, which I'd always rather avoid.

So probably The Holdovers tonight, before I potentially shift into Christmas-themed viewings over the next couple days. (Oh yeah, and then there was the fact that I learned, only just yesterday, that The Holdovers is actually set during the holiday season, giving me all the more reason to bump it up my list.)

It's a panicky time of year anyway, all this not being sure you got enough or the right gifts for everyone, and that you have all the food ingredients you need for Christmas lunch. You just gotta jam it all in. 

Sydney Sweeney has it both ways

Rarely, in recent times anyway, have I seen a mainstream movie poster try more shamelessly to sell the delectable flesh of a young starlet than the poster you see to your right. (And this one is relatively modest, allowing her lower half to be obscured by the title. Some show the lower half as well.) Yes okay, we get some beefcake here too. 

And yet when I could have been at an advanced screening of Anyone But You on Monday night, instead I was at home watching Sydney Sweeney in a very different form.

This was just a coincidence.

As I get down to only about a month before I finalize my 2023 movie rankings, yesterday I did an inventory of the films remaining on my Letterboxd watchlist and whether I can acquire them on the various streaming services to which I already subscribe. And failing that, how much they cost to rent on iTunes. (And had some positive result of this. Rye Lane is available on Disney+, at least here in Australia. Who knew? I'll watch it tonight.)

Sweeney's movie Reality had been evading me for most of the year, either because it actually wasn't available, or because of its incredibly poor search engine optimization as a title. When you search for this in on any service, all the service does is offer you up its cornucopia of reality TV shows. (Until I decided to write about Anyone But You also, I was going to call this post "Worst search engine optimization ever," with the voice of the Comic Book Guy implied.)

Then during this inventory, it came up as available on Amazon for a pittance -- only $2.99 AUD as a rental, which is closer to $2 US. Considering that most of my recent rentals have been $5.99 USD or more, I jumped on it. What's more, the 1 hour 22 minute running time was music to my ears on a night I planned to go to bed early, after falling asleep during most of my movies over an exhausting weekend of shopping and other holiday business.

It was just a coincidence that this was also the night they were playing an advanced screening of Anyone But You before its release later this week. I considered going for half a second, until I remembered a) I had just used up some of my wife's screening-related good will Friday night to go to an advanced screening of May December, which isn't available on Netflix here and won't be coming to cinemas until February 1st, and b) Anyone But You is not going to move the needle on my year-end list, and is an easy miss despite two stars I find compelling.

I find it interesting that Sweeney is able to move easily between the two worlds presented in these two very different films, one a standard romantic comedy and one a formally daring, essentially real-time interview between two FBI agents and the real-life person they believed was an NSA whistleblower. One would assume it is the romantic comedy that makes use of her physical assets that is purchasing her ability to star in a no-budget drama/thriller in which her acting assets are fully on display. You know, kind of like how Steven Soderbergh and Francis Cord Coppola make the schlock in order to pursue their more eccentric interests.

It would have been easy for Sweeney to just sell her body in every single role. She is amply endowed, and has been unafraid to show it off, first in the decidedly sad context of a series like Euphoria, and then in the more traditional sexy context of an erotic thriller like The Voyeurs. There are also selfies and such of her sans clothing, but don't ask me how I know this.

A person who just wants to get as many Instagram followers as possible does not make a movie like Reality. Tina Satter's film features only four actors, only three of whom have many speaking lines, as the script is built from the real transcript of two agents cross examining a woman named Reality Winner who was suspected of intentionally releasing classified national security documents to the media. (I won't say what the documents were, because I didn't know myself when I started watching the movie and I thought that was better.) 

Because it is beholden to the real transcript, the film assumes a naturalism that places the actors' choices beyond any shadow of a doubt. That is not to say they don't make choices. They most assuredly do. But the choices relate more to what was happening in the room during recorded audio whose every inflection and tone of voice is a matter of public record. What they were saying and how they were saying it are indisputable. What their faces may have been doing is unknown to us.

And boy is Sweeney on point here. The real Reality Winner adopted a very interesting "not too innocent but not too guilty" attitude when the FBI agents arrived at her home on that day in June of 2017. Clearly she knew that protesting too much would get her in trouble -- Gertrude knew that as long ago as when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet -- but an innocent person should logically appear more surprised to be getting pinned in by FBI agents as she exits her vehicle carrying groceries. Winner plays it cool, a skill she undoubtedly adopted in the field as a soldier, and tries to suss out exactly how much these agents know before playing all her cards. 

Over the course of the interview, we see her steadily start to break, the lower half of her face puffing out as though she wants to start crying, but either knows this will give her away or considers herself too tough to collapse in this way. The gradual progression from her starting position to her position at the end of the film is astonishing to watch, as Sweeney never relies on anything that would be described as showy. Perhaps the real transcript had a beneficial restricting effect on her technique, but that's just a jumping off point. And there are not a lot of actors who could play this role the way Sweeney does.

Tellingly, this film has nothing to do with the assets on display in Anyone But You.

Oh she's in short jeans, but her men's dress shirt disguises anything else about her figure. And she has no makeup, able to make her eyes wide and vacant and eventually indistinguishable from a pauper on the street who knows all is lost.

I suspect we'll continue to see Sweeney in Anything But You and movies of that ilk for some time. Who knows, maybe she elevates that film beyond what we would expect from it.

But as long as she keeps making movies like Reality, her career will be one to follow indeed.