Plot as template

I was doing my due diligence the other day by reviewing all the options for 2024 movies available on my streamers, to see if any were the least bit enticing options to fill out the remainder of my viewing before finalizing my rankings. At a time when I'm spending a lot of money on iTunes rentals, free is good.

There were a lot of titles that would have indeed enticed me earlier in the year, when the new movie release year was exciting in and of itself because it meant I could start building my new list. Those same titles I now reject because there are more important priorities, and at this point, who wants to watch a movie that has no better hope than landing in my bottom 50 films of the year? Unless it's a glorious misfire, which has its own delights -- but for the most these are just milquetoast movies I will forget 15 minutes after watching them.

One such milquetoast movie I clicked into on Wikipedia, a Netflix original, was called Lonely Planet, an interesting enough title to bait me into the extra click. Seeing that it starred recent Oscar winner Laura Dern, I began to wonder if it might break out and claim one of my final available viewing spots for this year. 

Until I read the plot synopsis:

"The plot centers around a successful female novelist who finds love with an unlikely person in an exotic place."

Please excuse me while I stifle my giggles.

I know what you're thinking, and you're right: Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced website, and not everything you see on there is completely ready for its close-up. While that is correct in a certain sense, it is far common to find entries that are surprisingly detailed and consistently styled, even if the thing in question could not have been on Wikipedia for more than a couple weeks. The site remains, quietly and unobtrusively, one of the most miraculous miracles on the internet.

The point, though, is not who wrote the plot synopsis for Lonely Planet and what their intentions were. Clearly it is some sort of placeholder until someone who has actually seen the movie can come along and give us an actual description of what happens in this movie, with actual character names.

The point is that this is a hilariously succinct and hilariously generic template for, essentially, every romantic fantasy ever committed to film.

I do quibble, though, with how unlikely a person Liam Hemsworth is for Laura Dern. Yes he's 23 years younger than she is, and the alleged unlikelihood certainly stems from that. (Which does not make it very dissimilar to 2024 films like The Idea of You and A Family Affair, both of which I did see because they came out earlier in the year, thereby proving my personal proclivity vis-a-vis new releases that I mentioned earlier.) Still, far more interesting if the unlikely person were a 78-year-old nun or a 22-year-old Ethiopian skateboarder, if such people exist. (Now those are movies I would watch.)

The thing is, nobody will ever make a movie in which Laura Dern is paired up with those people. The people Lonely Planet is being sold to have very specific expectations for the sort of film they will click on, and they don't include habits or skateboards. 

They do, however, include female novelists, love, and exotic places. 

I'm almost inclined to watch Lonely Planet just to see if this plot synopsis accurately distills the extreme laziness behind this movie's creative impulse, or if it's actually something worth watching. After all, you'll find The Idea of You a lot higher on my 2024 rankings than you might expect. 

And who knows, maybe I could remove the placeholder and write the long-term plot synopsis myself. 

The nepo siblings who exceeded their siblings

A Real Pain is a film about the fraught relationship between cousins, whose dynamic is colored by mutual envies and resentments.

However, there's good reason to believe the material might have some real-world resonance for one of the co-leads, Kieran Culkin, with regards to not his real cousin, but his real older brother.

Without really parsing the finer details of the history I can't say this for sure, but I suspect there is no way Kieran Culkin has a career if not for the path in Hollywood paved by his older brother Macaulay, two years his senior and the breakout star of Home Alone in 1990, the year Macaulay was turning 10 and Kieran 8. They're now 44 and 42. 

Now, this may not be an entirely fair theory because Kieran was also in Home Alone. However, while that was Kieran's first role, it was Macaulay's seventh, including the prominent films Uncle Buck and Jacob's Ladder. There's little doubt that Macaulay was, initially, the star, and Kieran rode his coattails.

Nowadays, when we see Macaulay, we look at him with the sort of pity we reserve for a person whose career never really took off the way we expected it to, and whose life featured some hardships we would not wish on him. We probably shouldn't really pity him, as he has indeed continued to have professional work (though you might be hard-pressed to name it) and has also been in relationships with beautiful actresses (once Mila Kunis and now Brenda Song). Not that we should judge the success of a person's life by the attractiveness of his partners, but if we are already using the fairly superficial standard of the prominence of his professional work, that assessment is in the same qualitative boat.

Kieran? Well he's just one of the most respected actors of his age group working today, star of Succession and a number of high-profile films (including A Real Pain) that have earned him an endless number of breathless and deserved accolades from critics. And if we're remaining shallow, he's also married to a beautiful woman, she just doesn't happen to be otherwise famous.

I have to wonder what the nature is of Kieran's and Macaulay's relationship, though it might not be a simple binary dynamic since their acting family also includes the considerably younger Rory Culkin, who's only 35 and has had a successful career in his own right. I have to wonder if Macaulay is jealous of Kieran's success and is always thinking "You wouldn't be here without me," or if there are even jealousies in the other direction, in that Kieran may never have a role as iconic as Kevin McAllister no many how many awards he may one day win. 

It mirrors the shifting relationship between David and Benji Kaplan in A Real Pain, where we are never sure which one has more reason to be jealous of the other, or which one is the real "pain" referenced in a title that is already playing double duty in that it's also alluding to the exploration of their Jewish heritage in Poland, including a visit to a concentration camp. It's one of the most successful aspects of a movie that surely did not work as well for me as it did for some people.

In the title of this post I referred to "nebo siblings," plural, and sure enough, I've got more where this came from.

A few years after Macaulay Culkin's prime, one of the next biggest child stars -- in other words, child stars whose names we knew beyond "that kid from that movie" --- was Dakota Fanning, whose big breakout was harder to pinpoint, though she was everywhere in the mid-2000s. I always think of her as showcasing her abilities most memorably in War of the Worlds in 2005. 

Today? The Fanning you want to talk about is Elle, four years her sister's junior, whose craft is respected far and wide, and who seems to make only good decisions about the roles she takes. Meanwhile, Dakota is left with dubious crap like The Watchers, in which the abilities she once showed in a film with some thematic similarities, the aforementioned War of the Worlds, seem to have abandoned her entirely. 

Then you have perhaps the most prominent example of this, where the younger sibling is on the A list and her older sisters are on the D or D- list. Twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen took the world by storm as the cute youngest daughter on Full House, a role they shared because that was a smart way to ensure you had one small child who was giving you usable material on any given day you were trying to shoot. (And something about child labor laws as well.) They became some of the first influencers as we now think of them, as well as tabloid mainstays. However, their own careers in TV and movies quickly petered out, and there to replace them was younger sister Elizabeth, three years their junior, who has morphed into one of the most recognizable actresses working in Hollywood with her role in the MCU and other high-profile projects. What's more, whereas they always seemed shallow and insipid, Elizabeth is the epitome of the kind of style and grace and glamour that they surely would have aspired to for themselves.

Then you have examples of actors who have achieved similar levels of fame, but the younger one is just so much more respected, at least as an actor, than the sibling whose work gave him the chance. Ben Affleck was appearing on screen for seven years before his younger brother Casey had his first role, and though it would be difficult to say that Casey has eclipsed him in terms of fame -- that's surely not the case -- Casey is far more lauded than his older brother as an actor. And though Ben has to be happy with all he's accomplished both in front of and behind the camera -- don't forget that a film he directed won best picture -- you know he wanted Casey's accolades as a performer, which include his own statue for best actor. Ben may have actually won this one, at least in the short term, as the #metoo related accusations against Casey have relegated him to less prominent roles in recent years, despite his evident ability. He's a bit of a James Franco in that way. (Though it hasn't stopped him from appearing in two of my #1 movies in the last decade.)

If this were the sort of post where I just kept on listing all the examples I could think of, I could probably come up with more. But I think four is a good place to stop for today.

The larger topic to chew on is just what it means for these people who have been eclipsed, for their psyche as actors and for their role as a supportive family member to their sibling. I think specifically here of Dakota Fanning, who was not just a famous face (like the older Culkin and the older Olsens) but actually considered sort of a phenom for her abilities as an actor, more like a Haley Joel Osment than a Culkin or Olsens. (And Osment might be an interesting inclusion in this post if there were any evidence to suggest his younger sister Emily -- the first siblings here to cross gender lines -- had actually eclipsed him in a meaningful way.) I have to think that Dakota feels an especial resentment toward the more talented Elle, because she appears to have done less than just tread water while her sibling swam ahead, if we are looking only at her abilities within the field that made her famous. She appears to have actually lost ground -- or started drowning, if we want to keep our metaphors in the water.

All this said, all the eclipsed siblings listed here are still working in some way. Even the Olsens, who officially retired from acting nearly 15 years ago, are still successful American businesswomen in the fashion industry, not has-beens living in a ramshackle apartment in Reseda, pining away for the fame and glory that once was.

If even someone as dubious as Pamela Anderson can be getting acting accolades from the critical community, don't count out any of these older siblings from one day rising up again and re-surpassing their younger nepo siblings. 

Acting is reacting

I have appreciated the merits of Ayo Edebiri as a performer before, though it was largely in the context of the unique comedic sensibility she brought to movies like Bottoms. (I was going to say "Bottoms and [another movie title], but going back through her IMDB, I'm surprised at how few movies I've actually seen her in. I feel like she's been everywhere lately, and rightly so. To be fair, I have not yet watched any of The Bear.) 

Bernardo Britto's Omni Loop, yet another movie where characters experience the same events over and over again throughout the narrative, showed me definitively what she can do as a dramatic actress, even though it is not a traditional "dramatic" role. 

Of course, dramatic interpretations are possible in movies with heavy genre associations, like the time travel/time loop movie. What I really mean, though, is that her role supporting another good lead turn from Mary-Louise Parker could have been just a cypher who existed purely for plot function. Instead, Edebiri injects it with ten times more nuance than the part requires. Because she is such a good actress, that nuance doesn't call attention to itself. Nuance shouldn't, if accurately described as such.

I suppose there's something of an irony that Edebiri's work did call attention to itself in some way, in that I have chosen to write a post about her during an extremely busy time of my movie watching year, where the posts are stacking up on each other as they await their turn to be my one single post for the day. But we should take notice when a practitioner of the craft does it as well as Edebiri does here, the same way we should notice when a minor league baseball player gets a cup of coffee with the big league team at the end of the season and makes the most of his dozen at-bats. Of course, Edebiri is no minor leaguer -- or won't be for much longer if she ever was.

I started to notice the effectiveness of her technique during a scene that's probably more than halfway through the movie, where Parker's character gets a faraway look in her eyes after something Edebiri's character has said. The director prevents Parker's faraway look from resolving into dialogue for something on the order of five to ten seconds, and during that time, Edebiri changes the micro expressions on her face about a dozen times. Just through her eyes, her eyebrows and some slight scrunching of the facial muscles, Edebiri's Paula indicates multiple things simultaneously: 1) "What the hell is this look in your eyes?" 2) "I'm waiting to receive your next comment." 3) "This is weird, even for you." You'd have to see the scene to fully appreciate it, and I hope you do -- though I suspect you aren't likely to pick this out from the standard level of her technique in all the other scenes, which I was not specifically noticing before this one. 

You better bet I was noticing it from there. There's one moment when Paula gives more of her back story -- this has largely been the story of Parker's Zoya to this point -- and it's a long, unbroken take held on Edebiri's face. Because the things she's telling Zoya are so hard for her, involving admissions she's never made out loud and the dredging up of traumatizing childhood memories, Paula only gets going in fits and starts, her face squinting into little frowns as she has to push the words out of her mouth through sheer force of will. In even describing this the way I am, I probably make it sound like the mechanics of her performance are way too visible. Really, I just want to describe the best I can the instincts that come so easily and so naturally to this actress.

I see lots of good performances in lots of good movies, and Edebiri's is probably not so exceptional in that regard. The reason I'm writing about it is that good movies and good performances remind us of things we already knew but sometimes take for granted. Because of her function in the film, Edebiri's role as an actor is to play off the lead, and that requires a lot of reacting. And once I started noticing the choices Edebiri was making in her reactions, I couldn't take my eyes off her, even when she was not the focal point of the scene -- in fact, especially then.

Maybe it's time for me to finally watch The Bear.

The flaming wreckage of Los Angeles

It's hard to believe I was in Los Angeles less than 96 hours ago. Since then, it is has turned into a
smoking ruin. 

It usually takes a war or a tragic school shooting or something similar for me to break from my normal format and talk about non-movie events on this blog. But Los Angeles is where I lived for 12 years, and it's also the movie capital of the world, so the tie-in isn't even that strained in this case.

I don't know that what I'm writing on Thursday afternoon (Melbourne time) for a Friday morning posting (I only post once per day and I've already posted today) will already have aged into distant memory within a few days -- not because the fires will have stopped, but because what I'm writing about here will be just so much more apocalyptic by that point. Maybe I need to save "The flaming wreckage of Los Angeles" as a post title for a few days from now.

But as of right now, I'm hearing friends in the usually fire-safe San Fernando Valley, where I lived for the majority of those 12 years, talk about how the fire could in theory reach them. A few minutes ago, a friend even said, possibly without hyperbole (though he is sometimes guilty of hyperbole), that it could burn down to Hollywood Boulevard.

Makes my pursuit of finalizing my 2024 film rankings seem pretty piddly by comparison.

At this writing, only five people have died. Five people is of course too many, but given the devastation to buildings (some of them iconic, like the Will Rogers Estate, where I used to hike), it seems like a small number. Thank goodness everyone knows what's going on and few of them are so stubborn as to stay in their homes with their arms wrapped around their armoires. 

But the Los Angeles landscape -- also one of the most likely to be seen in the movies, even when the movies are not set there -- is going to look vastly different after this, with the entire psyche of the region taking a huge hit. 

And even the home I used to live in, and sold two years ago, could theoretically be in danger. 

Stay safe, everyone. Those words mean more today than they usually do.

Preventing the ossification of my top ten

The end of the calendar year does not represent the end of my movie watching from the previous year, as I allow myself until the Oscar nominations are announced (January 17th this year) before finalizing my rankings of movies from that year. But it does have a symbolic value, in that it seems to be the point where I am starting to get very comfortable with my top ten as it is. 

Too comfortable.

Based only on movies I've seen since Christmas, I have already had to kick two movies out of my top ten that I had thought (and hoped) would be there at the end of the year. (I'm not going to tell you what they are, nor the movies that replaced them.) This is not a final placement, of course, as I am still likely to shuffle movies from where I initially placed them in my in-progress list. 

But having this system of placing them as I go means that they are hardening -- ossifying, if you will -- into a certain place of elevated entitlement, before all is said and done. 

And what does this mean for all the contenders I haven't yet watched?

It's a problem. And if I suggested from the title of this post that I knew the answer, well that's not correct.

I'm including the poster for Juror #2 with this post not because it necessarily makes for an example of the problem. It's mostly because I'm writing this post today and this is what I watched last night. 

I'll divulge one spoiler by saying that Juror #2 is not going to make my top ten of 2024. However, I did have the conversation again with myself last night as I was watching it and really liking it. (Reminding myself, speaking of top tens, that the National Board of Review saw it fit to include Clint Eastwood's 117th film as one of their top ten.) 

Especially during the first half, I asked myself "Okay, how can I possibly fit Juror #2 into my top ten?"

Cooler heads prevailed by the end of the movie, and though the movie will get a quite respectable ranking on my list, it won't be in the range of this most august partition of the rankings.

The trouble is, by already knowing quite clearly what it's up against, Juror #2 -- and the approximately ten more movies I will watch before next Friday -- doesn't necessarily get the fair shake it should if it were just being watched in a vacuum.

There is an obvious solution to this, which is not to make a draft of my list at all until a day or two before my ranking deadline. That's what my friend who does this with me does, though his task is herculean compared to what mine would be, as he will rank close to 500 movies this year. And I used to do it, too, though I think only that first or second year. I know for sure I did it in 1996, not having even gotten the idea to rank my movies until the end of the year, but by 1997 I may have already switched to my current system.

I am tempted to try that one year, but I just don't think I can do it. My brain is now too old in this respect to be rewired. If I were watching movies only with a star rating in mind -- which is another thing I can't help -- I might be so accustomed to, addicted to, my usual way of doing things that I would give up the experiment by February, March at the latest.

So the real only solution I can think of is to be honest with myself. To look at the movie currently at #10 and say "Is this movie I just watched better than this?" And if it is, well, I'll do the same thing with movie #9, and so on, until I find the right spot. It's a Flickchart-style dueling method that is informally how I handle this task.

The good news is, great movies make arguments for themselves quite easily. If I love a movie, it should mean I want to elevate it relative to another movie I might not like quite as much. If I can't imagine my top ten without Movie A, it should be even harder to imagine my top ten without Movie B, which I have determined I like better. And if I don't like Movie B better than Movie A, well there's the answer there too.

I guess the answer to this is really that the movie-ranking season is long. I mean, it is as long as it can possibly be, considering that I will start ranking 2025 movies before the end of January. But it's really the endgame I'm talking about here that's long. By the end of the calendar year, I am ready to be done with this and pack it away for the year. In fact, so is my friend I mentioned earlier, who is planning on closing his list a week earlier than I do this year -- and may still get his record of 500 movies.

In short, I guess the system works, or works as well as any system would work. But it doesn't mean it doesn't cause me these quandaries that eat away at me and prompt me to write blog posts about them.

In the end, my top ten list is what I want to present to the world about the movies I loved in the previous year. I can make it do whatever I want it to do, for whatever reason I want it to do it. If I want a movie no one liked to make my top five, because I loved it and I think they're crazy for not loving it, then that is an important part of it for me. If I want to squeeze in a beloved movie that I may not love as much as its most ardent supporters, that's what my #9 and #10 spots might be for -- depending on the year.

Because though the whole list matters -- a list that will be close to, if not more than, 175 movies this year -- we all know there's something special about that top ten. It's the standard all other critics use in sharing their own thoughts about the movie year. And in my own year-end post, each of the top ten titles gets a special write-up from me, just to honor the way it was able to bring movie magic into my heart.

In just eight days, I'll know for sure which movies I'll be writing about in that way for 2024.

And if movies I haven't yet seen, but expect to see -- like A Real Pain, Conclave and A Complete Unknown -- don't end up making my top ten, you'll know that the system doesn't work ... or maybe that I just didn't care for them all that much. 

Understanding editing in 2025

Okay, let's start off with some definitions of our terms here. 

I've been reviewing movies for more than 25 years and considered myself a cinephile for the better part of a decade before that, so I don't want you to think that I don't "understand" editing. I know what's involved in editing, I know what function it serves for the film, and I can quickly and instinctively identify when the craft is done well and when it is done poorly.

What I maybe don't understand as well? What makes editing good enough that it deserves to have an Academy Award bestowed on it, especially since editing can take different forms that impress other editors -- the ones who nominate each other -- for different reasons. 

And so for my monthly series in 2025, I am going to watch 12 films that won the Oscar for best film editing, with a specific focus on the editing and what I believe distinguished it from the rest of the competition that year. (Maybe just generally and not taking into consideration the specific other nominees, but we'll see as we go.) This series will be called Understanding Editing and it will kick off later this month. 

This series will also contain a first for this blog: It'll be my first time doing a series where the films are neither all new to me nor all rewatches. I've done both of those things separately, but this time I figured I'd combine them. So that means I'll watch six movies I've already seen, and six movies I haven't seen. 

I figure this hybrid approach has benefits in terms of the improvement of my appreciation of the craft. Some movies will be movies that are brand new to me, and I can try to see if I notice right away that the editing is superlative. However, then I'll also get to see movies I already know (and love? more on that in a minute), looking at them specifically through the lens of how they were cut together.

And right now I've got another first: The first time I will list all the films I intend to watch before I start watching them. I may have done this in a bi-monthly series before, but not yet in a monthly series.

I'll go chronologically from the early days of the Oscars, alternating between movies I've seen and movies I haven't seen. And here's what it will look like:

January - Lost Horizon (1937) (unseen)
February - The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (seen previously)
March - Sergeant York (1941) (unseen)
April - The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) (seen previously)
May - King Solomon's Mines (1950) (unseen)
June - From Here to Eternity (1953) (seen previously)
July - How the West Was Won (1962) (unseen)
August - The French Connection (1971) (seen previously)
September - The Right Stuff (1983) (unseen)
October - Saving Private Ryan (1998) (seen previously)
November - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) (unseen)
December - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (seen previously)

The only thing I didn't check was whether all these are easily accessible for rental or streaming, so it's possible I'll have to switch out some titles if I can't find them.

The films I haven't seen include some titles I've been meaning to watch for ages (particularly The Right Stuff), while the films I have seen are all films I've seen only once, though they are not all personal favorites. If I selected them it means I thought there was something specifically well known about the editing that I wanted to interrogate, though some of them were more because they fit in chronologically to the schedule and because they were just movies I feel I should have seen multiple times already.

Because the films span almost exactly 75 years of Hollywood history, they will also feature significant changes in what's possible to accomplish via editing and what's considered merely very good functional editing vs. editing that calls attention to itself.

In any case, I'm looking forward to it ... which means the two other ideas I have for year-long series will have to again wait their turn, either for 2026 or for 2027.

Do not expect too much from the start of jet lag

The day we get home from America, usually disembarking the plane well before noon (it was 9:30 this time), is typically a free day in which barely anything is required of you, either physically or intellectually. You are allowed even not to unpack your bag if you don't want to, and as proof of that, at just after 6 a.m. the next morning, my bag is still sitting on our upstairs landing where I reluctantly dragged all 50 pounds of it yesterday. I mean, you at least have to get it out of the front entryway. 

My wife rarely opts for this approach. Her own method of fighting off the effects of jet lag is to do a million little jobs that seem to me like Day 3 or Day 4 jobs, but to each their own. The goal is really not to nap too much (an hour or two at the most) and then go to bed at a normal time (or as close to it as you can manage).

I decided the best way to kill some of that afternoon time was to watch Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Which was clearly expecting too much from myself. 

As you may recall if you read this post, I secured myself a copy of this movie via iTunes in the hopes of watching it on the plane from Boston to San Francisco on December 28th. Because buying it was cheaper than renting it, I now own the movie. 

I had hoped to charge my laptop during the flight in order to sustain enough battery life to watch the 163-minute movie, only maybe 37 minutes of which I could watch without the battery going dead on that four-year-old device. And there was indeed an outlet at my seat, it just didn't bring the charge symbol up on my laptop when I plugged it in. I shut the laptop off right quick, wanting to make sure that if the issue were related to the laptop itself, I'd have enough battery left to give the thing its last rites when I arrived. But of course it charged fine again in California, meaning plane charging was probably only up to snuff for smaller items like phones and tablets.

I made no other attempt to watch DNETMFTEOTW (still love this abbreviation) while in California, and now returning to Australia, suddenly I am down to my final 11 days before my rankings close. That means if I want a window of time to watch the whole thing in one sitting, I'd have to start early one weekday night, carve out some time on a weekend afternoon, or -- lightbulb going off -- watch it right now on the rule-free Return to Australia Day.

The good news was that from starting it at around 5 p.m., in the hope of finishing it before dinner, I was really giving myself the entire rest of the day before I went to bed to watch the whole thing. The bad news was that I required that entire time, meaning a hypothetical viewing of the new Wallace & Gromit movie at night would need to wait for another day. The worse news was that this is not the sort of action-packed, plot-driven movie that provides an effective defense against the body's desire to succumb to sleep, and the even worse news is that it is in Romanian. 

So without doing an in-depth analysis of this film and its merits, let's just say it was probably an even poorer decision to try to watch this while staving off delirium than it was to try to watch RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys starting at nearly 11 p.m. the other night after margaritas. And the outcome was significantly worse. 

From that 5 p.m. start time to when I picked myself up off my garage couch at about 7:30 to start making dinner for my kids, I watched about an hour and 40 minutes of the movie, and very little of it at a high quality of absorption. The first 45 minutes were probably the best, as I also ate a bag of Gardetto's Snack Mix that was intended for the plane but never got eaten. Can't return to my diet on Return to Australia Day. That's definitely a Day 2 job.

Once that snack was gone, I started taking the little ten-minute naps I take when I start watching a movie too late at night. I set a ten-minute timer on my phone and then fall deeply to sleep for a very short amount of time. Each time the timer goes off, I decide whether I can return to the movie or if I need another ten minutes. And of course every time yesterday I needed another ten minutes, though I knew what the goal was so I mostly returned to watching the movie, with the sort of poor quality absorption I mentioned earlier. 

I had indeed already had the nap you are allowed to take, and thank goodness for my job-doing wife, who capped it at two hours for me. I was very disoriented and thought it had only been one hour. But that meant that every little sleep I did now was, in theory, the sort of thing that might wreck my full night's sleep. So I had to fight it even if watching DNETMFTEOTW were not the goal. 

After our dinner and an episode of Futurama, in which my focus shifted to trying to keep my older son from ruining his night's sleep, I returned to the same comfortable couch in the garage to watch the final hour of the movie. A significantly large chunk of this hour is a single shot of a family being interviewed for a workplace safety video. Although I may have taken some of the ten-minute naps in which I pause the movie -- I can't really remember at this point -- I was more likely to just be nodding off, and each time I awoke, being surprised to see that the same shot was still going on. 

At this point, this was just a confirmation that the whole thrust of the movie was not really working for me. The reason I'd tried to find a good window of time to watch this movie, ultimately failing utterly in that regard, is that it shared things in common with two previous #1 movies for me. In length and in featuring a single working woman as its protagonist, the movie reminded me of 2016 #1 Toni Erdmann. In country of origin (and I guess also in length), the film reminded me of 2013 #1 Beyond the Hills. 

DNETMFTEOTW did not, unfortunately, work for me the way those movies did. In an excerpt from his review included in the film's Wikipedia entry, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw describes it as a "freewheeling essay-movie-slash-black-comedy," and indeed that's a good encapsulation. Sometimes a movie with that description would work for me, but in this case it did not.

In the same Wikipedia entry, I noted that the acclaim for the movie is nearly universal, meaning I'm the idiot who didn't love it the way everyone else did. However, I think I would have been that idiot even if I'd watched it wide awake in one uninterrupted sitting, so I'm not beating myself up too much for the jet lag viewing. 

We finish with two more bits of good news. One is that my long nap and my shorter naps did not impact my sleep in the slightest. I slept straight through from 10:30 until I had to relieve myself at about 3 a.m., and then slept through again until I had to relieve myself again at about 5:30. I almost never get up to go to the bathroom once during the night, let alone twice, but the sleep around that was pure and sound.

I guess the second bit of good news is sort of related to the first, which is that the "start" of jet lag referenced in the subject of this post may also be its end. Although it's too early to tell how my body will react to an first entire day back in Australia, and I do still feel the remaining vestiges of yesterday's delirium, the first hurdle of the first night's sleep has been cleared with flying colors, and that's what always worries me the most. Being awake at 2 a.m. with no feelings of realistic hope about getting back to sleep is what I fear the most from jet lag, and if it didn't happen on the first night, it doesn't seem particularly likely that it will start on the second. And hopefully that means that whatever I watch tonight will be watched with greater focus and a greater potential to be satisfying. (Will probably be my first trip to the theater to see one of the new releases I need to fit in before my deadline. Maybe Nosferatu.) 

There's also a piece of good news related to the movie itself. Since I own DNETMFTEOTW, there is every easy opportunity for me to go back and try to watch it again in the future, to see if it works better for me, to see if its long-term reputation can improve for me despite a 2024 ranking that will not be particularly elevated. In the movie, the main character played by Ilina Manolache is herself suffering from sleep deprivation as she works 16-hour days for her job collecting interview subjects for the safety video. Although that should have totally put me on her wavelength yesterday, maybe I'll be more on it when I can see things more clearly.

An aide for people with hopeless time management skills

Back in Melbourne now, and sure enough, another topic for the blog was provided for me on the flight that just landed about three hours ago.

Because I was quite out of it at the start of my first movie of the flight, I went back to watch the very beginning of it again at the end of the flight. Mostly I wanted to get more context for some of the events that followed, because I hadn't paid sufficient attention to the setup. That movie was Mothers' Instinct, and it was followed by the 2024 movies Summer Camp, Turtles All the Way Down and Lee.

I had no intention to rewatch any more than the first 15 minutes, and in fact, I forwarded through most of that to get to the inciting incident. But of course United Airlines didn't know that. And so, when the remaining flight time decreased to below the remaining time in the movie, the following message appeared on the screen when I paused it:

And it is very clear to me that some people need this.

Because I consider the watching of a movie from beginning to end to be a sacrosanct activity -- especially if it's a movie you've never watched before -- it always leaves me perplexed and nonplussed when I see someone starting a new movie while the plane is starting its initial descent. Even if you have to taxi to the gate and then wait for a bunch of people ahead of you to get off the plane, I'm sorry, that's just not enough time to watch a movie.

And yet I see people do this all the time. Perhaps some of them are giving themselves just a taste of a movie they already like, or maybe even rewatching part of a movie they saw earlier on the same flight, as I did today. More often than not, though, I think it's a case of people just not caring how much of a movie they see, or having a poor ability with basic timekeeping skills. 

Well, United has taken that problem out of their hands. What's more, they've created a separate menu in the movie area (not pictured) that groups movies by their length, so you know which movies will kill a greater percentage of your flight, and which to watch when that percentage has already dwindled to its last 10%, meaning you need something short. (Yes, on the long flights from Melbourne to LA or vice versa, 10% of the flight is almost enough to watch a movie.) 

I didn't like United's system thinking I was one of those bozos who starts watching a 94-minute movie with about 20 minutes left in the fight, but then again, United's system would know that the same movie had already been watched on this flight in this very seat.

At worst, United's system probably just thinks my taste in movies is poor enough to want to watch this messy and problematic film a second time.

Taking advantage of both morning and evening showtime novelties

My second (and final) movie in the theater in Los Angeles before we return to Melbourne was RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys. Like my first, Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, it will not be available in Australia before my ranking deadline. In fact, it seems like the kind of movie that might not come out until March, though IMDB does not currently have an Australian release date listed. 

Like my first, I wanted to see it at a time where it would not impact the rest of my family. That was only a partial success for The Brutalist, since I wasn't able to rejoin the other three until nearly 2 p.m. ... and have ended up paying for that in minor ways since the morning of the 31st when I saw it. 

I was hesitant to ask for a second pass to see a movie, but I knew this one would really and truly impact only me and only a single night of my sleep. So when I did ask my wife, I requested that if she vetoed it, to please veto it without malice. This phrasing made her laugh and I knew she would not veto it.

See, my Nickel Boys showing was at 10:40 p.m. on Thursday night -- and that's really only the time the trailers started. The movie itself would not start until almost 11, and would not end until 1:20 a.m. In fact, such a percentage of the movie finished after midnight that I assigned the viewing date as Friday morning the 3rd rather than Thursday night the 2nd on Letterboxd. 

This is a thing that never happens in Australia. 

There is one theater, the one at the casino in Melbourne, that sometimes has a 10 p.m. showing. But outside of premieres of Star Wars movies and the like, Melbourne cinemas are trying to get the last screening of the night up before 9:30 p.m., and 8:45 is preferable. 

LA is a different story. Though Nickel Boys is long (2 hours and 20 minutes), it was not nearly the longest movie being undertaken at the AMC 16 in Burbank at that time of Thursday night. There was a showing of The Brutalist starting even ten minutes later than that. And if my respectable attendance for Nickel Boys (about ten other people) was any indication, the 3 hour and 35 minute Brutalist probably had plenty of people resigned to staying at the AMC 16 until 2:45 in the morning, once you factor in trailers.

As it was, my showing was late enough. Because of a road closure that I wouldn't have known about if I were just feeling my way back based on my memory of these streets -- I've left my phone connected to the network since my return from The Brutalist in order to get GPS and, you know, properly communicate with people -- the normally 15-minute drive took me 22 minutes, even at well after 1 a.m., and I didn't get home until about 1:45. 

And true enough, only I was affected, as I was still the first one up the next morning.

No substantive commentary on Nickel Boys right now, but I will say that it's the sort of movie with enough experimental components -- I don't want to call the whole thing experimental because that makes it sound inaccessible -- that watching it at such a late hour was probably not my best bet, and I was certainly asleep for a minute or two here and there. One small can of Pepsi Max and a single 3 Musketeers bar (another American novelty) were not enough to help me fight off the desires of my body.

But if faced with the choice of seeing the movie under these less-than-optimal circumstances or likely not seeing it in the theater at all, and only prioritizing it on video at some unknown future date, I'm glad I went with this choice.

Now just think how many more movies I could see guilt-free in Australia if they had start times like this. 

A flop that remains a Universal Studios institution

When Kevin Reynolds' Waterworld tanked at the box office in 1995, and was generally reviled by
critics as well, it seemed that the only future life it would have was as a punchline for cautionary tales about Hollywood excess, and as a miscalculation by Kevin Costner based on the size of his ego and his inflated sense of self regard. 

Instead, a stunt show based on the movie is still going strong at Universal Studios, 30 years after the movie itself was such a disappointment.

Is this in some way the equivalent of a film that finds a cult audience after failing with critics and viewers on its original run?

The answer might seem like an easy "yes" except that it is still not the film version of Waterworld that is beloved, though I think there has been some minor reassessment of its virtues in the intervening three decades. Regardless of what you think about the movie, the brand still has ongoing relevance, as the Universal Studios show is still full for every performance, as we experienced during our own viewing -- about the fourth overall for me -- on New Year's Day, which was also my son's 11th birthday.

I actually thought about writing this post after my third viewing in August of 2019, but travel and a lack of time to blog left that idea on the back burner. I'm enjoying a quiet morning at our Air BnB so I decided to put pen to paper, metaphorically, after my fourth viewing. 

I might have said "fourth (and final?) viewing," because a) it's always possible they could switch this out for a different sort of stunt show, or b) we might not go to Universal Studios again at a time when both of my kids are still definitely kids, which means we might not go at all. The older one is 14, and if our pattern of alternating theme parks holds true, it'll be Disneyland's turn for a visit on our next time through LA. 

However, option A certainly does not seem likely at this stage. For one, the stadium where the Waterworld show occurs is based around water, so if you wanted to re-use the same space, you'd have to find another water-based stunt show that has ties to Universal. Perhaps something like an Avatar show would work, except Avatar is not Universal. 

But then there's also the fact that this show has been surviving for 30 years, as it actually did come out in the same year as the movie. (There was a lot of optimism about that movie that went unrealized.) Not only surviving, but thriving. The same attraction has been opened in three more Universal Studios around the world, those in Japan (2001), Singapore (2010) and Beijing (2021). That means it was most recently greenlit for permanence only four years ago, and don't tell me building that set is cheap, because it ain't. 

And Universal does switch things out. One of my favorite attractions the first time I went, way back in the 1990s, was the Back to the Future ride, which hasn't been around for at least 20 years now. (And I still sort of miss it each time I go.) But there is no similar financial incentive to scuttle Waterworld. 

(Actually my first Universal trip was on a family vacation in 1989, but I honestly don't remember if the Back to the Future ride existed then. I know the Waterworld stunt show did not exist because the movie did not exist.)

I won't go into too much detail about what the show is about, though I could probably synopsize it in one sentence. Basically, there are a bunch of "good" characters (friends of the Mariner, who was played by Costner in the film) who man a floating outpost that they are trying to keep out of the clutches of the man who leads a group of bandits called the Smokers. That's the Deacon, who was played by Dennis Hopper in the movie. There are multiple stunts involving boats, jet skis, waterskiing, flames, explosions, guns, fisticuffs, and even a plane that comes crashing into the arena near the climax, which you see in the poster above and which is still a moment of absolute exhilaration for me, even on my fourth time seeing it. 

Here are a few photos I took to give you an idea of what it looks like:

They're not great -- I took them very arbitrarily, because I've taken similar photos on three previous occasions that I likely have saved somewhere. 

In any case, to return to the main point, I have to think that anyone involved with Waterworld, who might have otherwise seen the movie as a blight on their resume, must reflect at least a little bit fondly on it, considering that the (indirect) fruits of their labors still bring joy to thousands of people every day at four Universal Studios worldwide. It may not have made for a great movie, but it makes for a spectacular stunt show.

And I think this may be a good time for me to reconsider the merits of the actual movie. In a few weeks I will finally be free of watching 2024 films, and I think I'll make Waterworld one of my first viewings undertaken merely for the pleasure of watching the movie, not for ranking it. 

Nabbing novelties left and right

I'm trying to fulfill that perfect happy spot between movies that are on my Letterboxd watchlist but also not equally available to me in the U.S. as they will be when I get back home on Monday the 6th. That initiative led to killing more than half the day on The Brutalist on New Year's Eve, the sort of activity I don't intend to repeat unless the movie is a lot shorter than that one was.  

Streaming presents its own interesting challenges and opportunities in that regard. The TV in our AirBnB has some accounts that are logged in either to the homeowner or a past guest -- which reminds me, I think we left our Netflix logged in at the AirBnB back in Maine -- that might get me access to some things I can't access equally back in Melbourne. 

I say "challenges" in addition to opportunities because there is something weird going on with the remote control for this big TV in the living room. No back buttons on it seem to work, and there are certain apps where the TV allows you to get in to a certain point, but then not to retrace your steps. Turning the TV off and back on again seems to get you to a main menu again, but once you go back into the app, it remembers the place you left off, and the cycle starts all over again.

And so it is that I'm not sure if I actually have access to Marielle Heller's Nightbitch on the Hulu logged into our TV. Within the actual Hulu app, I have progressed to a point where I can't seem to get out of a certain screen of options and the search function isn't accessible. I did search for Nightbitch elsewhere, but I'm not sure it was actually checking Hulu when it did that search so it showed as unavailable. But Nightbitch is available on Hulu, which we don't have in Australia, isn't it? I have a few more days to figure this out.

I eventually abandoned Nightbitch for a different sort of American novelty, which is Max. The Max account was fully logged in and I could go through all the choices. We don't have Max in Australia, as the things that play on Max are on a streamer called Binge, which my wife can get on her laptop but I can't get on our TV. (A boring topic that it is not worth getting into today.)

In a moment of desperation, I almost started watching Joker: Folie a Deux. However, I had resolved not to watch it out of some vague protest of Todd Phillips and his vaguely right-wing rhetoric, and I didn't want desperation alone to cause me to crumble. (Plus the movie is available on the plane if I do get to that point.)

Instead I found something that is not actually accessible to me in any other way, but is on my watchlist: Gary Dauberman's Salem's Lot. As far as I am aware, this is fully a Max exclusive and it may not even be available for rental via iTunes, though I have not checked that. 

For context, Salem's Lot is one of my favorite Stephen King novels. The 1979 movie version of it is terrible, and on IMDB I am noticing there is also a 2004 version that I haven't seen. For being one of my favorites, though, I remember very little of the actual plot, only that I loved King's execution of it and that I cherished the book at the time I read it. Catching it before I finalize my 2024 rankings seemed like the best possible outcome of a night in America with my different viewing options, even though I would have preferred Nightbitch. And it was also not too mentally taxing a way to wind down from a day at Universal Studios for my younger son's 11th birthday. 

I didn't end up loving the movie, though I didn't end up hating it either. I'd heard it was pretty mid, and it was.

Though it's hard to tell if a second novelty played a significant role in my assessment of the movie or not. Allow me to elaborate.

As many TVs are out there in this world, this TV is on the high-def setting that does not make movies look very good. Actually, I should clarify. It makes them look extremely "good" if your idea of "good" is to see lines so crisp and details so defined that it almost creates the impression you are watching something on video, like the high-frame rate of Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies. I've discussed this before so I think you know what I'm talking about even though at this moment I am lacking the technical language to describe it more accurately.

I don't ever like to watch movies on this TV setting and rarely would be in a position to do so because my own TV is set up on cinema mode (or whatever it's called), which makes movies look like they are supposed to look. But given the challenges this remote control was already presenting me, I decided not to try to change the picture mode, in part because I am going to assume the guy who owns this place actually wants it to look like it does. (He's got surf movie posters up around the house and I think he might be involved in movie production in some way, so I am having to assume he made this choice intentionally.)

So I decided a second novelty would be to watch Salem's Lot on this setting that I never use on my own TV, and see if I could quantify any impact it had on my impression of the movie. Which turned out to be a tall task.

People talk about an uncanny valley when they discuss Robert Zemeckis' films -- boy do they talk about that, I really wish they would come up with a new perspective. For me this is more like the uncanny valley, watching these actors in high-def, feeling like the sets and (in this case) the monsters are hyper-real in some way that bothers me, rather than cinematic creations that are of a piece with the rest of the attractive looking environment we get when we watch films in the theater or on the right TV setting. It also gave me the impression they were making a television show, not a movie, but also not a television show from the prestige TV era. In the past I've likened it to something shot for the BBC in the 1980s and I stand by that description.

So that feeling alone takes me out of the idea that I am watching something that I should consider on par with all the other movies I'm watching in a particular year -- a consideration especially at a time of year that I am comparing those movies for the purposes of my list. And it dulls my ability to properly rate all the other elements of a typical movie, like script and performance and special effects. Once I've lost my like with like comparison, I'm lost for sure.

As I was watching Salem's Lot, I found myself wondering how I would fare with a movie I thought I had good reason to like -- Nightbitch, for example. There was never a great likelihood Salem's Lot would contend for even my top 100 of 2024, let alone my top 20. Heller, on the other hand, has already made one movie that landed in my top 20 (Diary of a Teenage Girl was my #19 of 2015) and one other that probably would have contended for the top 20 if I'd seen it in time to rank it (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). 

The question, of course, is whether I want to subject a movie I have a good chance of liking to this setting. What if I would have really liked the movie but watching it this way ruins it?

It remains to be seen whether that question will be answered with Nightbitch. If I do manage to pull it up on this TV, then I can decide whether I want to make my way into the TV settings and find the proper mode on which to view it. 

The last movie of 2024 was the brutalest

No, there's no typing error there, no failure on my part to contradict the autocorrect.

My last viewing of 2024 was indeed The Brutalist, but it was also the brutalest of all my viewings in the calendar year. 

That is not a comment on the film's quality in any way, shape or form. You will have to wait a couple weeks before you find out my thoughts on that.

No, it was merely a comment on its length.

In case you were not aware, The Brutalist is 3 hours and 35 minutes long. I don't know whether that includes the 15-minute intermission or not, and I'll explain in a minute why there was some intermission-related confusion related to the total running time. All I can tell you is that I entered the movie theater at just before 9 a.m. and left just after 1 p.m. That's a long amount of time to be in a single movie.

It was also brutal in terms of the impact I thought it wouldn't have, but totally did have, on the rest of my family. But I probably need to back up a few steps at this point.  

We are in Los Angeles now, and any time we are in Los Angeles late in the year -- which has happened twice previously since we moved away from here in 2013 -- there is the opportunity for me to see something that not only isn't open in Australia, usually not by a long shot, but also isn't open anywhere else in the U.S. Brady Corbet's follow-up to Vox Lux is one such film, probably the best "get" out of the remaining contenders I'd like to see before closing my rankings, but thought I probably couldn't.

Only a few days ago, though, I first visited its IMDB page, where the sticker shock of the 215-minute running time first hit me. I might have actually swooned like a Georgia debutante on a hot summer day. 

So The Brutalist was out as something to watch in LA. Or was it?

I noticed that the AMC in Burbank, which I had never thought of as one of those theaters that shows year-end movies released in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify for the Oscars, had a daily 9 a.m. screening of the movie. If there was any way to see this movie without severely screwing up the trajectory of one whole day in Los Angeles for the rest of my family, one of only five short days we are here, this was it. 

But then my wife and I drank a bit too much on our first night in town during a gathering of a half-dozen close friends, which was an absolute blast, so my plan to do this on the morning of New Year's Eve seemed out the window. Even if I didn't think it would impact her and I didn't think she'd feel offended by the request, I was hesitant to spoil the good vibes of our drunkenness. Then there was the fact that I might feel too wrecked in the morning to make the attempt, even if it was approved.

Then I just decided to sucker up my courage and ask, and it turns out that decision was justified. She agreed immediately, without hesitation or even a small quantity of seeming miffed by the request. Perhaps I'd chosen the perfect moment after all.

I couldn't sleep past 7 a.m. this morning -- it's rare that I do, no matter what the previous night holds -- so I was up in plenty of time and it was all coming to plan. Since we've been very busy most days on our trip and everyone (but crazy old me) needed a bit of a rest today, I knew that no one else in my family would be put out by my not being there, even though I'd have the car in a city that requires them. 

The only small bit of concern was that my closest friend here had messaged me before going to bed, after he himself got home from the bar, about possibly doing lunch today. I told him about the Brutalist viewing but that I would likely be done by about 1, so a late lunch would work. (I tend to unrealistically estimate the endings of things that I think could go longer, when it's other people's time I'm infringing on. I think it makes me feel less guilty, though the opposite reaction would also be valid. I guess I feel like if I'm trying to squeeze in an absurd thing that no one else would try to squeeze in, the least I can do is give off the impression it will inconvenience them less than it actually might.)

So I left a note for my wife (who was still asleep) upon leaving that she should touch base with him and his wife mid-morning, knowing that I might actually be capable of doing that myself if the movie had the intermission I thought it might have. However, I'm also playing this game where I see how much I can do without actually connecting my phone to international roaming, which means I'm trying to hop from one free WiFi to another whenever possible. That factors into this story. So it was better for her to start to arrange things.

Because I was already a little bit concerned about the way my movie would be delaying the "start" to the day, I reacted with special annoyance at the number of trailers before the movie. Although I didn't see any actual ads for other products, which dominate the time before an Australian movie starts, there were at least seven and possibly as many as eight movie trailers. Each one felt like a specific delay of two minutes to my getting done with the movie. 

During the intermission, I did successfully connect to the AMC WiFi -- even though it had asked for my AMC Stubs membership details the first time I tried to connect -- so I got to see the status of their planning. And that started to worry me about how much I'd delay them getting lunch, especially when I've got a 14-year-old who doesn't take well to having his food delayed. And especially when plans were taking shape for them to walk more than a mile to his house because they had no car. 

Then there was the problem with the intermission that I alluded to earlier. 

I used the intermission to go get myself a popcorn and soda mid-movie, since I hadn't gotten one before the movie started. Yes, this viewing was just novelty upon novelty for me. Not only was this almost certainly the earliest ever showtime for me in a movie theater, but it was also the only time I'd gotten snacks mid-movie without missing any of the movie. (And the times I've done that I might be able to count on one finger.) 

I was worried about how quickly the intermission would elapse, though, so I hurried back to my seat in case they restarted the movie early. Only to find the screen completely blank, making me wonder if I were even in the right theater. There had been a picture of Adrien Brody and some of the other cast on the screen before I'd left.

I asked my neighbor why there was nothing on the screen. "Because it's intermission," he replied, his voice dripping with the word "Duh!" 

"Oh yeah I know but I thought ..." There didn't seem any point to finish the thought.

Less than a minute later, as if in response to my question, the slide with Adrien Brody came back up again ... and had a 15-minute clock that started to count down the remainder of the intermission. But was counting it down from the beginning again, as if ten minutes of that intermission had not already elapsed.

I hoped someone might realize this error and fast-forward it, but you can't really do that -- as soon as anyone might have used this countdown to determine how much time they had to run to the bathroom, you are committed to that being an accurate countdown. Better to go too long and make sure nobody misses anything than the alternative.

So in the end we had a 25-minute intermission rather than a 15-minute intermission, further delaying my arrival at the burger place -- and it was now unclear whether I was meeting them there or at my friend's house. Giving them an update on my situation, I told them I would leave as soon as the credits started.

Which I did, and just to make sure I did not lose the connection to the AMC WiFi, I put the phone on Do Not Disturb rather than turning the phone off. So I did ask for clarification on where I should go once I was able to use it again, but got no response before I needed to leave WiFi range. 

Which meant that by the time I had meandered back to their house, taking a less than optimal route to get there, I hadn't seen that they wanted me to meet them at the restaurant.

This officially signaled the end to my "How many days can you go without connecting to the cellular network?" game. They brought me back a burger, at least having had the good sense to go ahead and eat without me. And I got to catch up with their 20-year-old son, who I've known since he was a baby, so the mishap did have some fringe benefits. 

Anyway.

So a bit brutal on the trajectory of the day, but at least my wife and kids were in good spirts and I don't think I've lost any points with them.

Although this time stamp will say January 1st, there are still about eight hours to go in 2024 here on the west coast of the U.S. And though it's conceivable I could watch another movie in that time, I think it's best to use the excuse of having written this post not to do that. Two hundred eighty-seven new-to-me movies in 2024 seems like a good number -- perhaps even too high a number, since I haven't seen this many in a single year since 2016. Definitely no need for a 288th. 

Happy New Year to one and all.